DREAM WEAVER
Erica Wagner on the genius of Angela Carter
The period just after a writer’s death can be a perilous one for his or her reputation. There can be no more interviews, no prize nominations, no gossip; there is a wide gap between books that are discussed on Front Row and books that make it to the shelf marked ‘classic’. Very few writers skip straight across that tricky boundary: Angela Carter is one of them.
Astonishingly, it is almost a quarter of a century since her death from lung cancer at 51. Although I never knew her, it’s still a shock to me that she is gone, since she is a writer who has always been vividly present for me, a writer I turn to when I begin to hesitate, when I find myself walking down the safer, easier paths that lie ahead. Angela Carter was never one for the welllit way. She made her own light, and she walked in it all her life.
I’m ashamed to admit – but I must – that when she died in 1992, I didn’t think that 51 was cruelly young. I was very young myself, so perhaps that’s one excuse: but the other was that she had accomplished so much. The Magic Toyshop, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, The Bloody Chamber, The Sadeian Woman, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. I could keep going, but this would make too long a list. She was a novelist, a writer of short stories, a poet, a dramatist, a penetrating essayist (indeed, for this very publication) and a brilliant editor and translator. It is impossible not to dream about what she would have brought into the world had she lived longer.
Late in 2016, Edmund Gordon’s fine biography of Carter was published; it is not only insightful about her work, but also wise in its approach to presenting a portrait of her life. ‘Fantasy has a habit of corrupting memory,’ he writes of his research. ‘This is something that biographers – who invent their subjects out of various kinds of evidence, including testimony – need to bear in mind.’ And indeed his book is called The Invention of Angela Carter, even on its cover suggesting that the storytelling was central not only to her work but to her life. It traces the path she took from her early years in Eastbourne to her position of one of the most extraordinary writers of her generation, one whose work, right from the very beginning, went against the grain of English realism that still dominated literary culture. As Gordon notes, the year her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published, the books creating a buzz were Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown and Anthony Powell’s The Soldier’s Art – the eighth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Carter danced to a very different beat. ‘I always thought that she knew who she was,’ said her friend Salman Rushdie. ‘She knew she was Angela Carter. But she wouldn’t have minded a few other people knowing.’
Given the esteem in which she was held at the time of her death, Rushdie’s remark may seem strange. But he refers to a desire to label her talent, to lasso her to a cause or critical viewpoint, when the real power of her work is to resist any such labelling. Alongside Gordon’s book, Vintage has published a beautiful new edition of The Bloody Chamber (£12.99), Carter’s extraordinary collection built on a foundation of fairy tale. Carter herself was always careful as to how this book should be described. ‘My intention was not to do “versions”, or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, “adult” fairy tales,’ she once wrote, ‘but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and use it as the beginnings of new stories.’ And they are new stories – new every time they are read, as all great literature is. Don’t call them feminist fairy tales, as some have; Carter was a feminist, certainly, but one who resisted, powerfully, the boundary that term can imply.
What would she have made of the 21stcentury literary world of ‘safe spaces’, where argument itself is viewed as dangerous and threatening as any wolf? Not much, I reckon. Head back to her books, and see for yourself. Her work is tricky, troubling, wondrous and dark. Her own light has gone, but her brilliance glitters still.
‘The Invention of Angela Carter’ by Edmund Gordon (£25, Chatto & Windus) is out now.