Feature: Angela Carter's memoirs recalled with style
Pictured Above: Angela Carter
Published: 12 April, 2012
by JOHN HORDER
The feet of Angela Carter – novelist, journalist, poet and would-be trapeze artist – rarely, if ever, touched the ground.
When Richard Eyre turned down one of her plays because her larger-than-life imagination had defeated his limited resources, she let it be known to her dearest friends she was pissed off with him greatly.
She wrote radio plays with special effects to great acclaim.
What is not so well known is that Angela wrote fascinating and provocative journalism at London Review of Books for 12 years.
Susannah Clapp, the author of this beautifully written 105-page memoir enjoyed her pieces more than any by any other writer.
Angela, in her own words, “had journalism running through her veins”. Her father had worked for the Press Association.
After she left school at the age of 18, he pulled various strings to get her taken on at the Croydon Advertiser, where due to her “demonic inaccuracies”, she was quickly relegated from news to features, where she flourished.
During Susannah’s time at the LRB, Angela often turned down her requests for out-of-the-way pieces.
Who but she could have called DH Lawrence, who had worked in his early days as a schoolmaster in Croydon, a “stocking, not a leg man”?
Angela described herself when working for Susannah, and for Paul Barker at the greatly missed weekly New Society, as “a terrific deadline surfer … The only time I ever iron sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing”.
Two of her most-loved novels, Nights at the Circus, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize in 1984, and Wise Children (1991), were bereft of the safety nets most writers cling to for dear life.
No wonder she never won the Booker Prize.
A month before she died in February 1992 in Brompton Hospital, she was working on the manuscript of her second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. She left a husband, Mark, and a much-loved son Alexander.
Angela Carter’s first pamphlet of poems was published by Barry Tebb at Sixties Press.
It is now fetching £400.
• A Card from Angela Carter. By Susannah Clapp. Bloomsbury, £10.