It’s part of the task to understand things. Woody Guthrie’s “Riding in My Car” she chose because she liked being driven and because it reminded her of being in the car with Alexander, who was learning it on his guitar. Here they are, the girls. What sort of games do you most enjoy playing with your reader? It was a year ago. 14.3) Crammed in with all the other gear Do you keep a journal of your dreams? They can’t be all that, unless you can try very hard and make them move out of character a lot. We went from New York to San Francisco, by way of New Orleans because we were both fond of the jazz music from there. 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. ANNA KATSAVOS: In “Notes From the Front Line” you say that you are not in the remythologizing business but in the “demythologizing business.” What exactly do you mean? I suppose I regard myself as just a rank and file socialist feminist really. This interview is taken from a session at Marxism Today’s Left Alive. There’s the main character, the woman – Olga. AC Yah, boo, sucks. It’s enough to make women give up on the human race. She had gathered these stories from all over the place – from Norway and Burma and Palestine and Mordvinia – and grouped them under headings which included “Strong Minds and Low Cunning” and “Up to Something – Black Arts and Dirty Tricks”. I think maybe you’re referring to the short story, The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe, the bit about the “laser light of the republic.”. But certainly organising your life is almost impossible, especially when you’re used to having a certain kind of rhythm of work which has to be completely changed. RC From reading your books, I had the sense that you have an impression of America as a land that is ultimately somewhat disorienting—a place where the light and the heat are so intense that they are almost crippling or mutating. It was not that she was uninterested in people’s appearance – on one of the last afternoons I spent with her she went through our acquaintances ranking them in order of handsomeness. The ribbon in her hair this time was pink, and on the cassette machine at her side she played a tape of Blossom Dearie. It has to do with risk taking and it doesn’t work. Except things like pissing against walls. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction when I was younger, but there was a whole group of science fiction writers in Britain in the sixties, who really were doing very extraordinary things with the genre. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates. No big fiction had been left unpublished. Each is decorously clad in early 20th-century mode. But – why has Marianne gone blonde?! “The Tiger’s Bride” landscape, admittedly, is touristic, but it’s one of the palaces in Mantua that has the most wonderful jewels, and that city is set in the Po Valley, which is very flat and very far out, so in the summer you can imagine the mist rolling over. Reagan.” There was a grey filing cabinet, shabby, well organised and stuffed with papers. One kind of novel starts off with “What if I found out that my mother has an affair with a man that I thought was my uncle?” That’s presupposing a different kind of novel from the one that starts off with “What if I found out my boyfriend had just changed sex?” If you read the New York Times Book Review a lot, you soon come to the conclusion that our culture takes more seriously the first kind of fiction, which is a shame in some ways. I mean I’m not terribly interested in these particular characters. She was spindly, with very short curly hair and she did not know whether this extraordinary new appearance was nice or nasty. 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. AC Yes, but I understand how it’s happened—there is something classy about invoking myth, it implies you’ve got a college education, people like to spot myths, it makes them feel good. Susannah Clapp is the Observer’s theatre critic, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp is published by Bloomsbury on 16 February, £10. Carmen Callil spoke about her friend. The students on it are very highly selected, are extremely highly motivated. And laughed. I was out of the country—in Australia when he shot the ending and he told me that it varied somewhat from the script. They can’t carry all that much freight of meaning. These critics were as wrong in thinking Angela uninterested in food as they were in misreading her to mean that foodies were actually responsible for famine. I use free association and dream imagery when I write. There’s a Barrie play called The Twelve-Pound Look, about a woman who spends twelve pounds on a typewriter, and she gets that twelve-pound look in her eyes because she can now have everything…. 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. “I wonder why people are always so surprised when I’m interested in clothes,” she said, not wondering at all. 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. I’m proud of my child but I’m not proud of myself as a mother. I’m just sorry for Neil’s sake that the movie didn’t do better commercially. In the middle of it, a poster of Wise Children which had been stuck up at one side of the stage came loose and fluttered down. 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. AK: Are you moving towards stories that are less elaborately speculative? AC I was furious about the ending. I realised that I’m actually an extremely incompetent person and I idle a lot. “I’m one of the judges,” Angela explained, leaning away from her interrogator with a grimly polite chuckle. Well, of course, she’s not really a character. We are talking about fiction here, and I have no idea whether that’s true or not. But I just stopped using these configurations because they just stopped being useful to me. AC After she encounters the wolf at her grandmother’s house and what has happened becomes apparent she wakes up. 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”. The atmosphere was so permeated with the Republican virtues. I was reading “The Company of Wolves” the other day, and there are a whole lot of verbal games in that that I really enjoy doing, “the deer departed,” for example. It was Mark who came up with the idea of the Ritzy. Neither has Shakespeare.”. I suppose I do what I tell writing students: I occasionally get a young man sidling up to me and saying that he was very nervous about writing even the character of a woman, about making female characters, these days, because he thinks that we’re all going to stand around hitting him with our handbags. This may sound smug but it’s true. Among her most recent books are The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber.The film The Company of Wolves is based on one of her short stories, and she also co-wrote the screenplay. To mark the 77th anniversary of her birth, I am proud to make available a never-before published interview with Angela Carter. After the dinner at which the announcement of the winner (JM Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K) had been made, the television presenter Selina Scott went around with her mic, smiling and making mistakes. One of them, J. G. Ballard, coined this phrase, “inner space.” I was quite profoundly affected by them. And the Nicaraguans might feel with justice it was a particularly foul CIA plot. The director, David Wheatley, has worked mostly for British television—what drew us together was a film he made ages ago about the Brothers Grimm, that was full of terrific imagery and invention. They come out of pure theory, and that’s what that is about. He has a fantastic knack for portraying motiveless malignity, he will be just right. I don’t think The Company of Wolves is that kind of film. Obviously you change. ‘It’s all right’, I said. Yet austerity in her was the flipside of relish and gusto. Their social organisation is somewhat fascistic but who in Britain is to complain about them. It would come out in such a way that I couldn’t imagine anybody enjoying reading it. It was because ‘he lit a cigarette’, ‘he inhaled thoughtfully’, ‘he stubbed a cigarette out’ – that’s 25 words already and we’re working towards a strict 60,000 words. Angela Carter has been described as ‘the most consistently interesting and original writer of British fiction today’. Except what lousy fun it would be for the Angels. I just became uninterested in these sort of semi-sacrilized ways of looking at the world. Is that a feeling you share? And of course I knew I would not. In fact, creating a believable character is something that is quite schematic. Even the werewolf stories are set in some horror-filled invented landscapes, but there’s more a kind of down-to-earthness in those stories. Angela fulfilled that requirement, but gave it a twist: “I used the money to run away from my husband, actually. AK: In what specific ways do you see yourself helping to accelerate “the slow process of decolonializing language,” which you discuss in “Notes From the Front Line”? I’m quite pleased with it actually. Michael Berkeley, composer, broadcaster and friend, was the compere. Among her most, ( by Rosemary Carroll from Bomb — Artists in Conversation) Angela Carter is a British novelist and short story writer, By Anna Katsavos (From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1994, Vol. This, of course, was an everyday fact of most people’s lives in Europe until the industrial revolution. Well, it has changed my life. As she poured, she cursed her illness but took satisfaction from the fact that just before her diagnosis she’d taken out a whopping insurance policy; she “thought it very funny”, Rushdie said, “that the insurance company were screwed”. . It’s about the complex interrelation of reality and its representations. He announced the tapes and summoned up the speakers: people from different parts and times of Angela’s life stood in for her voice. How do we know what is authentic behavior and what is inauthentic behavior? AC You liked that? I don’t think it will suffer from the small budget, because that story shouldn’t really require so much money to realize on film. Posts about Interviews written by Caleb Sivyer. ... Carter said in an interview, "The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo. RC In the Sadeian Woman you stated that in Sade’s work women do not exist as a class and are subsumed into the general class of the weak, the tyrannized, and the exploited. That novel is set at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change. 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. But I think I was too old to redefine myself. What are you really trying to get at?’ You have to start out with people who know what they’re doing from the outset. And we became friends. One of the stories that I don’t deal with in The Bloody Chamber is about children who are left out in a wood because their parents would rather they starve out of their sight than under their eyes. The early Godard films had a very strong effect on the way I observe and see the world. 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. I don’t know what kind of a person I would have been, I might have been a much better writer. I have a small collection of Angela material. 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. And in so many parts of the world this situation is still unchanged. (an extract from Susannah Clapp’s A Card From Angela Carter, published, excerpted in The Guardian). 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