The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

That silenced me. The wheels of the carriage wound the road on to an invisible spool and I began to feel the effect of a strange heaviness exerted on me, a perverse, negative fascination exercised by the gaunt aristocrat who sat beside me, though a shudder went through me when I saw his curiously pointed teeth for they were exactly the fangs with which tradition credits vampires. All the same, he drew me. His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met – always excepting the Minister, of course. Yet, apart from his mind, which was a bruising heavy-weight, I think what made him so attractive to me was his irony, which withered every word before he spoke it. Everything about him was excessive, yet he tempered his vulgarity – for he was excessively vulgar in every respect – with a black, tragic humour of which he was only occasionally conscious himself. He was particularly extraordinary in this: he had a passionate conviction he was the only significant personage in the world. He was the emperor of inverted megalomaniacs but he had subjected his personality to a most rigorous discipline of stylization so that, when he struck postures as lurid as those of a bad actor, no matter how ludicrous they were, still they impelled admiration because of the abstract intensity of their unnaturalism. He had scarcely an element of realism and yet he was quite real. He could say nothing that was not grandiose. He claimed he lived only to negate the world.