For those with even a passing familiarity with tarot, the Rider–Waite deck will probably be what first comes to mind. Named for its original publisher William Rider & Son and the accompanying guidebook written by poet and scholarly mystic Arthur Edward Waite, it is a work of striking visual originality, dense with medievalesque and pagan symbolism and the first major tarot deck to feature full illustrations across all of its cards. Yet the contribution of its illustrator Pamela Colman Smith has been largely erased, not only from the deck’s name but from the art historical and literary milieu in which Smith moved at the turn of the 20th Century.
It was this gap in the historical record that first drew author Jill Dawson to retell Smith’s story in her semi-biographical novel Pixie, which takes its title from Smith’s long-running nickname. “I began with a feeling of wanting to right this wrong, and the great injustice of how she was treated,” Dawson says. Throughout her life, Smith struggled with poverty and obscurity: she was paid, in her own words, “very little money” for the 78 illustrations she created for the deck, and has been largely ignored in favour of the artistic men who moved in her circle, among them W.B. Yeats. Yet in researching Smith’s life through her letters and archives, Dawson was struck by her singular agency in negotiating an often hostile world that sought to put her in a box. “She seemed to inhabit it and take it into her own terms,” Dawson says. “Very modern, sort of like Madonna, or someone who reinvents herself constantly and keeps ahead of the crowd.”
Pixie reclaims Smith’s story, flooding the silences of her narrative with Smith’s distinctive and modern voice – filled with childlike curses, capitalisations and exclamations that lend the prose an almost Modernist style – and her coming-of-age journey towards creative emancipation. In this way, Pixie is somewhat of a Künstlerroman, interested primarily in the artistic development of its protagonist and how other aspects of her identity – her queerness, her racialisation, her poverty – intersect with this. “Self-actualisation is a theme I’ve been repeating in my entire writing life,” Dawson says. “How does a woman come to be herself? What does a woman need in this world to feel fully individuated? How can she survive the various constraints on her?”
Dawson has been working with tarot for over 40 years, and is now herself a qualified Jungian tarot practitioner. While Pixie is her first book to explicitly feature tarot so prominently, it has long been a part of her creative life. She often uses tarot to help her write, doing readings for characters and allowing the cards to shape the story. In Pixie, she found that the card she pulled most frequently for Smith was the Justice card, reminding her of the importance of being open to other narratives. “I would not, using my rational mind, have picked that card for her,” Dawson laughs. “No way, I’d have gone [for] The Fool, or all sorts of other things.”
Instead, in using tarot, Dawson lets other interpretations of her character bleed into her own preconceptions, allowing her to inhabit Smith’s world more fully – both the agency Smith exhibited and the chance and randomness that defined her life, as it does every life. It is a relationship to creativity that Dawson is drawn to, and that Smith herself exemplified: the possibility of simultaneous resolve and letting go. “I feel if you’re going to use tarot, you must have some respect for tarot,” Dawson says. “The idea is that you use elements of play and chance. You can’t impose your will too harshly.”
Jill Dawson: Pixie, Edinburgh International Book Festival Spiegeltent, 16 Aug, 12.15pm