There Must Be More to an A-Z
By Anna Aslanyan.
A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp, Bloomsbury 2012
49 Bard Road is an address familiar to Angela Carter’s readers. She gave it to the Chance sisters, the protagonists of Wise Children, having in mind Shakespeare Road which, together with several streets named after Milton, Spenser, et al, forms the so-called Poets’ Corner in Brixton. More recent additions to local topography include Walt Whitman Close and, somewhat less appropriately, James Joyce Walk. If you look at an A-Z closely, it transpires that they put the inventor of Bard Road on the map too: according to her friend Susannah Clapp, she would have been pleased to see Angela Carter Close a few steps away from the Ritzy cinema, where her friends and relatives gathered 20 years ago to remember her. But would she? Or would she have found it too grand? Or not grand enough – after all, ‘close’ is not the kind of word you would use to celebrate Carter’s exuberance, on and off the page? Tales collected in Clapp’s passionate and witty tribute to the late writer, A Card from Angela Carter, appear to equally support all of the above.
Each story in this laconic book is tied in with a postcard from Clapp’s archive, its visual message sometimes contrasting the written one, sometimes echoing it. From these memories, Carter emerges as both morally strong and surprisingly vulnerable, a character with many foibles you wouldn’t expect to find in such an independent, free spirit. Once, serving as on the Booker panel, she was approached by a journalist who, clearly not recognising her, asked what she thought of the judges’ decision. That Carter, who was pregnant at the time, was rushed to hospital with high blood pressure the next morning is seen by Clapp as a sign of her distress at being overlooked by the literary establishment. Another possible indication of Carter’s susceptibility is a card she sent after a series of attacks on her piece published in the London Review of Books. The card bears a recipe, a picture of the dish, and a message: “Carter’s reply to her critics! Texas chili, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp… preferably through his back passage (I do think all that fuss was comic, though).” I would like to think that she really found the fuss (the critics were furious to see her berate a selection of books about food) more comic than annoying and chose her ironic answer merely as an apt joke.
Other anecdotes recorded by Clapp are more reassuring in their depiction of a person who could not care less about her opponents’ vitriol and was disarmingly honest when talking about herself. It feels like a breath of fresh air when the authors tells that Carter “half-disapproved of the genre in which she made her name. ‘I’m sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class.’” Reading about Carter’s teenage anorexia, you start rolling your eyes but the end of the chapter is rewarding: after putting the weight back on she doesn’t give a damn about it and settles the score with one of her trademark comments: “It made me think that inside every thin woman there’s a fat woman trying to get out.”
It is to Clapp’s credit that she refrains from any personal judgements, recalling her friend’s strengths and weaknesses, highs and lows tactfully, in such a way that you know: she could have probably said more but this is no place for it. Nor does she wastes any time on heaping superfluous praise, mentioning dryly that she has never considered Carter a neglected writer, as some would have it. Solo reviews her books got in the press, prizes and launch parties, her undeniable influence on other authors – all this means that there is no need to reiterate the obvious. Instead, Clapp creates a collage of rare vignettes, interweaving Carter’s words with her own commentary without saddling the reader with unnecessary speculations.
When she does choose to express her opinion Clapp can be very perceptive – for instance, nailing down Carter’s last novel in a single sentence: “What she did in Wise Children was fundamental and bold: she put the reins of her story into the hands of a working-class woman who tells it colloquially and with eloquence; she is not patronised – or matronised – by authorial comment.” Clapp the memoirist treats her subject in the same way. Another much-trodden theme she doesn’t overplay is Carter’s feminism, which, while not to everyone’s liking, manifested itself so lucidly in her works it would be inappropriate to start preaching about its qualities now. Clapp touches upon other feminists’ attitude towards Carter – they used to call her ‘Uncle Tom’, especially after The Sadeian Woman, where she portrayed Marquis de Sade as almost a forerunner of women’s rights activism – but takes this discussion no further, loath to pigeonhole the writer whose prose, at its best, soars above the battle of the sexes.
It is hard to decide which of the keywords – “working-class”, “woman”, “colloquially” – is the most significant in Clapp’s analysis of Carter’s masterpiece, but I would bet on the third. Language, especially demotic, was vital in all her writings, and Wise Children would have been a different book without its generous “lashings of lolly”. The chapter about Carter’s travels in the US contains a scene where she reads an American student’s story in which a London cabbie says to a passenger: “That’ll be fifteen bleedin’ quid, you miserable wanker.” Elated, she wants to “weep with nostalgia for the sheer rudeness […] of everyday life at home.”
In another American episode Carter visits Brown University and, upon encountering semiotics, the latest craze engulfing its English department, reports back on the Emperor’s new clothes: “I keep wondering just what Dérrida [sic] is up to &, if he’s so clever, why doesn’t he write a novel of his own?” Some may find Carter’s view naïve; I happily subscribe to it, along with the heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Marriage Plot, who, studying at Brown around the same time, in the early 80s, reads Of Grammatology and, like Carter, is unable to share everyone’s enthusiasm: “Since Derrida claimed that language, by its very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote, Madeleine wondered how Derrida expected her to get his meaning. Maybe he didn’t.”
I made two more important discoveries when reading Clapp’s memoir. First, that Carter’s humour, so fine-tuned and rehearsed in her books full of puns and wordplay, also had an impromptu side. To pick a random example, when asked by the Evening Standard why she supported Labour, Carter said: “The Labour party, it’s like an old sofa, you go on sitting on it even if it is Kinnock-stained.” The other detail that impressed me was the calmness with which she faced her illness (diagnosed with lung cancer at 50, she died a year later) and remained in control of her life, entertaining guests and making arrangements about her affairs and funeral. Where did she find that strength? Whether it came to her naturally, was a result of a conscious effort or even had something to do with the powers of magic realism, you cannot help admiring it. Clapp recalls an occasion when Carter, disappointed with “a contemporary’s meticulously realistic work, [...] roared: ‘There must be more to life than this.’ In response to which, the novelist and critic Francis Wyndham raised his head from one of Angela’s extravaganzas to murmur: ‘There must be less to life than this.’” The jury may still be out on who was right, but I know whom I’ll keep rereading over and over, until the time comes for some dead-end to be named after me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, February 17th, 2012.
