The author was in her literary prime when she died 20 years ago aged 51; since then her brilliantly exuberant novels have influenced a generation of writers. Her friend and literary executor has written an insightful memoir inspired by postcards Carter sent her – a paper trail through the novelist's life
Angela Carter at home in Clapham, south London, c.1985: 'She had no objections to her prose being turned into an extravaganza on ice: on the contrary. Her only stipulation was that Michael Winner should not get his hands on it.' Photograph: Mike Laye/ Corbis
Twenty years ago I went for the first time into Angela Carter's study. I knew the rest of her house in Clapham quite well. Downstairs was carnival: true, there was a serious kitchen, but there were also violet and marigold walls, and scarlet paintwork. A kite hung from the ceiling of the sitting room, the shelves supported menageries of wooden animals, books were piled on chairs. Birds – one of them looking like a ginger wig and called Carrot Top – were released from their cages to whirl through the air, balefully watched through the window by the household's salivating cats. "Free range," said Angela. Here Angela's husband Mark Pearce dreamed up the pursuits he went on to master: pottery, archery, kite-making, gunmanship, school-teaching; here friends streamed in and out for suppers; here their son, Alexander, was a much-hugged child
The study was unadorned, muted, more 50s than 60s. Not so much carnival as cranial. There was a small wooden desk by the window looking down to the street, The Chase: "SW4 0NR. It's very easy to remember. SW4. Oliver. North. Reagan." There was a grey filing cabinet, shabby, well organised and stuffed with papers. I knew some of what I would find in that cabinet – Angela had told me.
She had died a few weeks earlier, on 16 February 1992. She was 51 and had been suffering from lung cancer for over a year. Her early death sent her reputation soaring. Her name flew high, like the trapeze-artist heroine of Nights at the Circus: Fevvers, the "Cockney Venus". Three days after she died, Virago sold out of Angela's books. She became, in words from the two poles of her vocabulary, an aerialiste and a celeb.
Not that her fiction and her prose went unacknowledged while she was alive. She was not neglected and rarely had anything rejected; she was given solo reviews and launch parties; she went on television; she got cornered by fans. But she was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was 10 years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was 20 years too young to belong to what she considered the "alternative pantheon" of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the 40s.
We had talked about these things a year earlier, after her illness had been diagnosed and she had asked me to be her literary executor. We had met at the end of the 70s, when I was helping to set up the London Review of Books and was keen to get Angela to write for the paper. Liz Calder, who had published The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber at Gollancz, arranged an introduction and, swaddled in a big coat, Angela came into the small office, which had been carved out of the packing department in Dillons bookshop. She lit up the paper's pages for the next 12 years. And we became friends.
Her requirements for her estate were relaxed, if not exactly straightforward: I should do whatever was necessary to "make money for my boys", for Mark and Alexander. There was to be no holding back on grounds of good taste; she had no objections to her prose being turned into an extravaganza on ice: on the contrary. Her only stipulation was that Michael Winner should not get his hands on it.
I, of course, hoped to find in that filing cabinet a fragment from an abandoned novel or a clutch of unhatched short stories. And of course I knew I would not. For all her wild hair, Angela was careful. She was, as she put it, "both concentrated and random". In the depths of her illness she had drawn up a plan for a final book of short stories, writing down the number of words alongside each title, and hoping that "all together, these might make a slim, combined volume to be called 'American Ghosts and Old World Wonders'": they did. In one of her desk drawers there was a small red cashbook in which she wrote down her fees and expenses. No big fiction had been left unpublished. But there were surprises. I knew she had drawn but I had not realised how much. Tucked in among the files were richly coloured crayon pictures: of flowers with great tongue-like petals, of slinking cats, and of Alexander, whose baby face with its bugle cheeks, dark curls and big black eyes looked like that of the West Wind on ancient maps; his mother described his face as being like a pearl.
She had told me that she kept journals and described the shape they took. They were partly working notes and partly casual jottings, roughly arranged so that the two kinds of entry were on opposite pages. They were stacked in the study: lined exercise books in which she had started to write during the 60s and which covered nearly 30 years of her life. She decorated their covers as girls used to decorate their school books, with cut-out labels (the Player's cigarette sailor was one), paintings of cherubs and flowers and patterns of leaves.
Inside she described, in her clear, upright, not quite flowing hand "a smoked gold day" in 1966, and in the same year made a list of different kinds of monkeys: rhesus, capuchin and lion-tailed. She wrote of the "silver gilt light on Brandon Hill" in 1969, jotted down a recipe for soup using the balls of a cock and, in her later pages, took notes on Ellen Terry's lectures on Shakespeare. She made, again and again, lists of books and lists of films (Jean-Luc Godard featured frequently). She did not write down gossip (though she liked gossip), and wrote little about her friends. She specialised in lyrical natural description and in dark anecdote. She noted that the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had died of a burst bladder because he had not dared to get up from a banquet to have a pee. She observed that the pork pies favoured by her mother's family for wakes "possess a semiotic connection with the corpse in the coffin – the meat in the pastry", and added, referring to Beatrix Potter's most chilling tale of fluffy life: "Tell that to Tom Kitten." She wondered what smell Alexander would remember from his childhood home.
Full story at The Observer.
The study was unadorned, muted, more 50s than 60s. Not so much carnival as cranial. There was a small wooden desk by the window looking down to the street, The Chase: "SW4 0NR. It's very easy to remember. SW4. Oliver. North. Reagan." There was a grey filing cabinet, shabby, well organised and stuffed with papers. I knew some of what I would find in that cabinet – Angela had told me.She had died a few weeks earlier, on 16 February 1992. She was 51 and had been suffering from lung cancer for over a year. Her early death sent her reputation soaring. Her name flew high, like the trapeze-artist heroine of Nights at the Circus: Fevvers, the "Cockney Venus". Three days after she died, Virago sold out of Angela's books. She became, in words from the two poles of her vocabulary, an aerialiste and a celeb.
Not that her fiction and her prose went unacknowledged while she was alive. She was not neglected and rarely had anything rejected; she was given solo reviews and launch parties; she went on television; she got cornered by fans. But she was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was 10 years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was 20 years too young to belong to what she considered the "alternative pantheon" of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the 40s.
We had talked about these things a year earlier, after her illness had been diagnosed and she had asked me to be her literary executor. We had met at the end of the 70s, when I was helping to set up the London Review of Books and was keen to get Angela to write for the paper. Liz Calder, who had published The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber at Gollancz, arranged an introduction and, swaddled in a big coat, Angela came into the small office, which had been carved out of the packing department in Dillons bookshop. She lit up the paper's pages for the next 12 years. And we became friends.
Her requirements for her estate were relaxed, if not exactly straightforward: I should do whatever was necessary to "make money for my boys", for Mark and Alexander. There was to be no holding back on grounds of good taste; she had no objections to her prose being turned into an extravaganza on ice: on the contrary. Her only stipulation was that Michael Winner should not get his hands on it.
I, of course, hoped to find in that filing cabinet a fragment from an abandoned novel or a clutch of unhatched short stories. And of course I knew I would not. For all her wild hair, Angela was careful. She was, as she put it, "both concentrated and random". In the depths of her illness she had drawn up a plan for a final book of short stories, writing down the number of words alongside each title, and hoping that "all together, these might make a slim, combined volume to be called 'American Ghosts and Old World Wonders'": they did. In one of her desk drawers there was a small red cashbook in which she wrote down her fees and expenses. No big fiction had been left unpublished. But there were surprises. I knew she had drawn but I had not realised how much. Tucked in among the files were richly coloured crayon pictures: of flowers with great tongue-like petals, of slinking cats, and of Alexander, whose baby face with its bugle cheeks, dark curls and big black eyes looked like that of the West Wind on ancient maps; his mother described his face as being like a pearl.
She had told me that she kept journals and described the shape they took. They were partly working notes and partly casual jottings, roughly arranged so that the two kinds of entry were on opposite pages. They were stacked in the study: lined exercise books in which she had started to write during the 60s and which covered nearly 30 years of her life. She decorated their covers as girls used to decorate their school books, with cut-out labels (the Player's cigarette sailor was one), paintings of cherubs and flowers and patterns of leaves.
Inside she described, in her clear, upright, not quite flowing hand "a smoked gold day" in 1966, and in the same year made a list of different kinds of monkeys: rhesus, capuchin and lion-tailed. She wrote of the "silver gilt light on Brandon Hill" in 1969, jotted down a recipe for soup using the balls of a cock and, in her later pages, took notes on Ellen Terry's lectures on Shakespeare. She made, again and again, lists of books and lists of films (Jean-Luc Godard featured frequently). She did not write down gossip (though she liked gossip), and wrote little about her friends. She specialised in lyrical natural description and in dark anecdote. She noted that the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had died of a burst bladder because he had not dared to get up from a banquet to have a pee. She observed that the pork pies favoured by her mother's family for wakes "possess a semiotic connection with the corpse in the coffin – the meat in the pastry", and added, referring to Beatrix Potter's most chilling tale of fluffy life: "Tell that to Tom Kitten." She wondered what smell Alexander would remember from his childhood home.
Full story at The Observer.