A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp

Posted on: September 12, 2012

A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors

It is always a shock to me how many people - real readers! - have never read Angela Carter’s work. Nine novels, dozens of stories, so many essays, radio plays and reviews - and yet there remain so many readers unaware of her astute critiques, of the incredible fabulist worlds she created in her fiction. It may be because Carter was never considered for a major literary prize: she never, as it were, fit the canon - or even a single genre. Perhaps her work was just too fierce, just too unwieldy, just too Carter-esque to be pigeonholed safely. Even her demands of writing - whether it be hers or others - continued to be huge, more extravagant than any other critics. When she ‘roared “There must be more to life than this!”’ at reading realist work, her critics replied ‘There must be less to life than this’. But for Carter, less was never more - her writing is rich, seductive, enveloping. When Carter wrote in The Passion of New Eve, ‘Down, down, down into the dark, down into a soft, still, warm, inter-uterine, symmetrical place hung with curtains of crimson plush, into a curtained cabinet where there was a white bed’, it was almost as if she was writing about her own work. 

20 years after Carter’s death in 1992, her literary executor, friend and one time editor Susannah Clapp has put together an elegant, resonating little memoir of Carter and their friendship. A Card from Angela Carter is tribute as much as it is memoir - this slim collection of memories attached to postcards sent by Carter to Clapp over years of correspondence contains insights into Carter’s personality as well as into her work. Clapp describes Carter’s home (‘violet and marigold walls’; the study ‘not so much carnival as cranial’), her travels and stories shared by her in a book that slowly opens itself up to you, unfurling details about Carter. Clapp quotes Carter saying ‘I’m all for pretension’, and while Carter may have loved lavish phrases and writing, Clapp herself never indulges in over sentimentality, though her fondness for her friend is always clear. She admits that Carter was ‘impossible to second guess’, describing her voice as ‘piping, soft, with clipped vowels, at times Angela sounded like a parody of girlish gentility. At other times she skidded into casual south London. You never knew exactly where you were.’ 

Other than Clapp’s stories connected to the postcards she received, there are a great many occasions in the book where Clapp also shares conversations she had with Carter which offer up Carter’s own words about herself. She described herself once, as seen by a Japanese lover’s eyes, ‘ a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator’. It is descriptions like this that suggest how much of Carter’s own visions of herself (seen through another’s eyes, in this case) were really an integral part of her fabulist work. Stories shared by Carter’s friends add to a deeper understanding of the carnival nature of her writing: critic Lorna Sage describes Carter’s make up case as ‘some kind of actor’s or geisha’s kit, which was all slick purple, rusty carmine and green grease’. 

If there is one fault with this book it is that Carter’s postcards have only their fronts reproduced. Though Clapp describes the message on each card, there are no images of Carter’s handwritten words - the more’s the pity, since it is always such a revelation to see the handwriting of a writer whose millions of printed words you may have read. Nevertheless, this is a minor complaint - for anyone interested in Angela Carter, this little book continues to surprise you as a sweet, sad and sensitive understanding into the person behind the writing. 

Clapp tells short, concise little stories about Carter, each letting the reader a little closer to knowing who Carter really was. One story in particular stood out about Carter and her friend Salman Rushdie, who offered her advice on how to deal with blasphemy when she was working on a secular television documentary called The Holy Family Album.  ‘I don’t think,’ Clapp reports Carter as ‘gleefully’ retorting, ‘I need any help from you.’ Just the next year, surrounded by Special Branch men who were like the trees that ‘marched and dispelled, shaking themselves free of foliage’, Rushdie attended Carter’s funeral alongside her other friends. She died of lung cancer, at the age of 51. 

Perhaps its because I find choice of music such a vital insight into a writer’s personality that I found the most evocative of Clapp’s writing at the very end of A Postcard from Angela Carter, when she writes of Carter’s memorial service being ‘as expansive, inclusive and gaudy as the funeral had been small, plain and sober’. The service was based on the eight records Carter had picked for the BBCs Desert Island Discs - a show she never recorded. Carter’s chosen records ranged from Debussy and Schumann to the tortured Billie Holiday’s Willow, Weep for Me and Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry of which a strange, slowed down version that ‘wound through the place like treacle’ was played. From the music to the ‘tropical verdure’ on the stage, the shocking pink invitation with ‘curling black drawings’ of an owl, a parrot, a giraffe, a peacock, a ‘dive-bombing swallow and a leering goose…a spade, a bucket, a crescent moon, a shooting star’ created by illustrator Corinna Sargood, to the actress and writer Pauline Melville’s ‘graceful hallucination’ of a dance, the entire service in Clapp’s words takes on the surreal, magical dream-like quality of the best of Carter’s work. All that was needed to change this entirely into a scene from Carters work was a larger than life ‘splendid but battered’ woman on a trapeze shaking ‘tremendous red and purple pinions‘ out over the audience. A Card from Angela Carter may not be for those unfamiliar with Carter’s work, but as a fan of her work I have waited years to read what Susannah Clapp chose to write.