Angela Carter Actually, we like it a lot. AK: At the reading you gave in October 1988 at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, you spoke about the private pleasure of writing, of playing games with the reader. Antonia Fraser, appearing on a television programme with Angela, once said that she had not been able to conceal a flicker of astonishment when Angela had admired her dress. That novel is set at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change. I went for a long time thinking that perhaps really I should write agitprop, but I couldn’t see how I could. They turned around Corinna’s bright screen. I knew some of what I would find in that cabinet – Angela had told me. RC I prefer the way your story ends—with her lying in grandmother’s bed between the wolf’s paws. So when I was a girl I made a conscious effort to make the male characters as credible as I possibly could and to write sometimes in the first person, male. And that is when I started getting ratty about it. But she would not be comforted. This is what will happen to you.’ But what you must do if you want to create a really credible woman is just imagine what you yourself would do in a particular set of circumstances and that’s what she’ll do. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms. She dressed “like a 30-year-old divorcée”. Most perverts are very, very proselytizing. When I wrote that novel in 1968, this was a very resonant theme that I am not so sure of now. AC No, not really. AC I don’t dream. It captured her bemusement and her fashion sense, though not the beauty of the young, primly costumed Angela. This interview is taken from a session at Marxism Today’s Left Alive. Not surprisingly, she won, hands down. To mark the 77th anniversary of her birth, I am proud to make available a never-before published interview with Angela Carter. What then was the first book about? She may have been wincing about the late delivery of a piece of copy. Crammed in with all the other gear packed for a ski trip was my copy of Angela Carter’s newest novel, Wise Children. There used to be a thriller writer called Peter Cheyney and all the characters in his thrillers were chain-smokers. For what turned out to be Salman Rushdie’s last visit, Angela insisted not only on getting up but dressing up, serving tea with an almost Japanese formality, laying out a tea service (perhaps in memory of the rosebud set her mother so cherished) and biscuits. The memorial service, held some five weeks later, was as expansive, inclusive and gaudy as the funeral had been small, plain and sober. “I’m one of the judges,” Angela explained, leaning away from her interrogator with a grimly polite chuckle. In 1969, when she had published three novels and been married to Paul Carter for some eight years, she won the Somerset Maugham award for Several Perceptions. I’m a great admirer of folklore. By the second “what if’ you would actually end up asking much more penetrating questions. Angela’s blue-biro message says: “Budapest is bliss, bliss, bliss. They find out much more about what their real existential status is from pornography, and it’s very unpleasant. That’s just what she says, a story that’s being constructed. I like animals and I’m interested in animals. I was forced after 43 years of evasion, to come to terms with my own incompetence. I realised that I’m actually an extremely incompetent person and I idle a lot. They changed into Special Branch men, who were moving forward to enclose the author of Midnight’s Children, in hiding because of the fatwa imposed on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini three years earlier. I’m glad. Donnaly promises to make Jewel a politician, king of all the Yahoos and all the Professors, saying, “they need a myth as passionately as anyone else; they need a hero.”. “Free range,” said Angela. Also, they have quite a long conversation about this when they are walking through the tundra. I knew she had drawn but I had not realised how much. But what a tragically sad end she met—it is, I suppose, a particularly poignant example of the terrifying fatality of being a woman. A week later I returned home to a stack of unread newspapers and very sorrowful news; while I had been struggling with moguls, Carter had succumbed to cancer. But I see my business, the nature of my work, as taking apart mythologies, in order to find out what basic, human stuff they are made of in the first place. I hadn’t expected to see so many small rural farms—there’s not much of that left in the United States, is there? They come out of pure theory, and that’s what that is about. And I’d actually have to clear a lot of that away. It’s a problem that Brecht grappled with, quite successfully. Do you find it very different? RC What is the myth of sexual difference? Salman Rushdie read Andrew Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew”. Angela fulfilled that requirement, but gave it a twist: “I used the money to run away from my husband, actually. It wasn’t scripted that way at all. She died on Sunday 16 February. In that story there are two characters. AC: Yes, I suppose so. Not that her fiction and her prose went unacknowledged while she was alive. The card, evidently sent in an envelope, is undated but must have been dispatched in the late 80s. Piping, soft, with clipped vowels, at times Angela sounded like a parody of girlish gentility. AC: It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world. We know a lot about her. Sometimes “I looked like Byron”. Right now, Granada Television is making a film based on another work of mine, my second novel, The Magic Toyshop. Take wolves – the film is a bit less ofa libel on wolves than the story. One of her postcards suggests something of this teenage shape-shifting. She wanted news of parties and literary gossip. One of the most radical things about her is that she assumes that most of the people who are going to be looking at her pieces are going to be female. That’s all. In a sustained piece of invective, and a dextrous analysis of manners, she tore into “piggery triumphant… [the] unashamed cult of conspicuous gluttony in the advanced industrialised countries, at just the time when Ethiopia is struck by a widely publicised famine”. What concerns me is the fact that the actual physical aspect of this has been ignored for so long. She asked for Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert’s B flat Piano Sonata, which she described as her favourite piece of music; in one of our last meetings she had said she now preferred Schubert to Beethoven – “more heart”. A lot of people said before the last election that it doesn’t matter whether you vote Labour or Tory. My interview with Angela, as she insisted I call her, was to my surprise like visiting with an old friend. Introduction. Search. Carter’s most recent collection of short fiction, Saints and Strangers was published in September by Viking Penguin. My friend thought for a while and said, “Well, what’s a heterosexual marriage a parody of then?” It’s the same sort of question put here. I made the great cross-country trip Americans always say they want to make. I began to read, but my thoughts kept reverting to that crisp November morning in 1988 when I had the pleasure of chatting with this woman over breakfast. W hen Angela Carter died – aged just 51, on 16 February 1992 – her reputation changed from cultish to canonical. It would come out in such a way that I couldn’t imagine anybody enjoying reading it. It’s very tricky because people are different and people have different responses to fiction. For her records, Angela had chosen Debussy’s “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”, because Hugh had played it when he was a music student, and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” because it brought back the 50s. RC How had the ending originally been scripted? She was also a talker, a gasser and a tremendous chatterer on the phone. RC You and he collaborated on the script, didn’t you? “Does that exclude me…?” Poor Scott seemed mystified: “I’m sorry… What’s your name?”, In 1985 she sent me a postcard from Austin, Texas. 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. You don’t have to be a woman to understand what she’s saying, but you have to position yourself in a certain way to understand her pieces, to see what she’s getting at. She was not altogether well, and she did not take things easy. A previously unpublished interview with Angela Carter by Kate Webb Angela herself did not eat cakes. But I just stopped using these configurations because they just stopped being useful to me. It’s enough to make women give up on the human race. And I said ‘well, there you go.’ If you start off everyday, except when you were lying down, seasick, you’d start realising what it’s like. I really don’t know how I would have managed if I’d had children when I was young, before I’d established a body of work. Then we went to live with my grandmother in the country in the North. It’s very, very difficult to describe this bias in language to men. The book, read by Susannah, will be Radio 4’s Book of the Week from Monday 6 February, 9.45am/12.30am, A conversation with readings from Angela Carter, at The Charleston Trust in 2012. Angela was fiercely interested in the history of food and in its social implications. I said this once to somebody after I’d read The Company of Wolves story. Do you feel that in the current political climate it is important that writers are more overt in their politics? He announced the tapes and summoned up the speakers: people from different parts and times of Angela’s life stood in for her voice. The reader is more or less kept uncertain until quite a long way through. That kind of laconic work is actually more difficult. She had set out intending to make in it some reference to all of Shakespeare’s plays: only a few eluded her. She liked the idea that journalism ran through her veins and was a terrific deadline surfer: “the only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing”. You know, you try things out and you try things out, and you figure out after a while when they’re not working or they stop working or maybe you no longer think it’s true. Angela had been asked to go on the programme towards the end of her life: she had chosen her eight records, the book she would take and her luxury, but she was never recorded. We were producing very, very much better writers in this country when people were leaving school between twelve and fourteen. He’s talking about a woman in the early twentieth century, in a very French and rhetorical manner. Often she looked like a model, though even when her shape was tight, her features were luscious. She went up to Angela and apparently mistook her for one of the many hangers-on at the feast, inquiring what she thought of the judges’ decision. The Thatcherite censorship certainly found it subtly offensive. This interview is taken from a session at Marxism Today’s Left Alive. I suppose I regard myself as just a rank and file socialist feminist really. There was a small wooden desk by the window looking down to the street, The Chase: “SW4 0NR. I immediately went for my copy of Wise Children, and for a long time gazed at the picture of the author’s smiling face on the inside jacket; it was the same picture as the one in the Times’s obit. Women much older than you are still redefining themselves everyday of their lives, as women and as people? In a way all fiction starts off with “what if,” but some “what ifs” are more specific. Do you have any desire to do more writing for film? Then I really did have to start thinking about organising my life in such a way that there would be time to write fiction. AC No. They cut it! She uses “you” and “we” a lot. One of her tasks was the judging of the Booker prize. How inconvenient to have wings, and by extension, how very, very difficult to be born so out of key with the world. The postcards she sent to her friend Susannah Clapp evoke her anarchic intelligence, her fierce politics, the richness of her language, her ribaldry and swoops of the imagination. You can’t guess these things. RC I have been wanting to ask you whether you liked Neil Jordan’s film version of your story The Company of Wolves? I mailed that to a radio place, and they censored it. I think that Godard was using the word myth in the same way that Barthes is as well. I wrote my first novel in the evenings and at weekends. It’s something that’s easy to fall into. So what? Alexander carried a lily and a red rose to put on his mother’s coffin. The early Godard films had a very strong effect on the way I observe and see the world. She’s very literally a winged spirit. Because sheer exhaustion made it difficult for me to stay awake past nine o’clock, I didn’t get to finish the book, which in a sad kind of way turned out to be a good thing. Among her most recent books are The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber. The landscapes there [The Bloody Chamber] are quite real. You can’t often do that elsewhere because too many other things happen. 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