The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon (2016

 

Angela Carter 1940 to 1992, England, died of lung cancer

I have read only a few of Angela Carter's dark and wonderful short stories, mostly from her now most read work, The Bloody Chamber (1979).

The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon is a first rate literary biography. As I read on I came to like both the book and Carter so much that I was sad upon completion, maybe my feelings were amplified by her way to early death at fifty two.

Gordon shows us at least three processes of invention.  We see Angela inventing her persona.  Gordon does a very good job detailing the people in Carter's life, starting with her parents and then her first husband, Paul Carter.  Carter was a musician, the marriage failed not due to any villainy on either side, he simply did not fulfill her needs and I think he came to bore her.

Angela won the Somerset Maugham award, a grant for travel expenses.  Angela decided  to go to Japan and this opened up her creativity and lead to two important romances, one with a Japanese man, one a Korean.  Carter had a very strong, by her own acknowledgement, sex drive and her relationships were strained at best. Carter struggled to make a living in Japan and eventually got homesick and accepted a secure job offer in England.  By age 32 she had written five novels.  She also wrote reviews and such for income.  As she became more famous she worked as a visiting professor in New York City, Adelaide Australia (which she loved) and several English schools.

Gordon spends a lot of time detailing Carter's life style at the time of writing of her more famous works, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Night at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991).  He shows how she employed her life experience and her extensive reading in her works.

A few years after divorcing Paul Carter, Angela fell in love with a man younger than her by a good bit who was doing some repair work on her house.  They married after few years, had a son, and he seems to have made her happy.  She was the primary earner in the family.

Gordon brings to life the many friends in Angela's life, from famous writers, publishers and intellectuals to ordinary people.

Gordon talks about how feminist and folk scholars approached her work.

We learn a lot about the business side of her publishing career.

There is a lot more in The Invention of Angela Carter than I have mentioned.  It for sure made me want to expand my reading of her work.  I greatly enjoyed this elegant insightful erudite biography.

Edmund Gordon studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and English literature at University College London, and since 2011 has been a lecturer in English at King's College London. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, he has also written for a variety of other publications in Britain and the US, including Bookforum and The Guardian.  The Invention of Angela Carter is his first book.

Mel u

Angela Carter On Tales Versus Traditional Short Stories

Angela Carter Week

I have greatly enjoyed reading a few of Angela Carter's magnificent short stories.  I have learned a lot from the participants and hosts of Angela Carter Week.  The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter has about forty five stories, including those in her most famous collection The Bloody Chamber.  At the end of the full collection there is a very brief note from Carter in which she talks about the differences between Tales versus Short Stories and ways in which short fiction conveys meaning.  After reading this I wanted to share it with other participants in Angela Carter Week.  I found her remarks on the differences between tales and short stories very illuminating. I knew right she had permanently helped me understand fundamental differences in forms of short fiction.  Carter at her best writes classic tales, not short stories.  I want to share her invaluable thoughts with those participating in the week.

"I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the 

size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The 

limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent 

impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though 

the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making 

abstractions from them, I was writing, therefore, tales.

Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, I'd always been fond of Poe, and 

Hoffman -- Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal 

directly with the imagery of the unconscious -- mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted 

forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few 

pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it 

interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind 

everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of Experince. 

I hope to post on at least one more of her tales.  

I offer my thanks to Caroline and Angela for their hard work and enthusiasm. 

Mel u

"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter (1985) Plus an Expanded Dining out in Paris!

Angela Carter Week

 thanks to Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Delia of Post Cards From Asia I have fallen in love with the short stories of Angela Carter.

 As I strove for a way to kind of convey the feel of Carter's story I imagined dining in five hundred year old four star Paris  restaurant. The time is fluid.   As you enter, you are greeted by name and told your regular table is ready. You are a bit confused as this is your first visit.  As you look about you begin to see the strangeness in this restaurant.  Some of the diners are in the garb of Roma royalty, some in rags, some discuss the architecture of Proust, some the best places to find juicy rats, some conduct international affairs on their mobiles, others snarl out their orders just pointing to what they want.   Some speak a dozen languages, some none, or at least no human language.  The Maître De advises you the Count, gesturing very discretely toward a very odd and wealthy looking old man in the corner, alone but for two Siberian timber wolves sleeping by his feet asked your meal be placed on his account.  The Maître De tells you to ask no questions about the Count and says "Please M 'sieur U, do not make eye contact with his pets."  Your eyes acclimate slowly to the dim lights and you think you recognize other patrons.   Could that possibly be the rising star Greta Garbo?  You are pleased to see your old friend Ruffington Bousweau who you last saw in Tokyo in 1907 on a tour of the water world, along with Prince Youseff.   Hart Crane is at a table close to you, studying brochures for cruises.  George Orwell is Down and Out in the Kitchen.  You wonder if Balzac ever dined there and you know Flaubert often visited. Charles Baudelaire often escorted Jeanne Duval, always after midnight.  Suddenly a young woman, seemingly half covered in fur, enters and the owner himself rushes out, "Mme  Alice, the Count awaits you and  I will personally  serve these bones to Solomon and Sheba right away".   

"The Company of Wolves" is a retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, combined with werewolf lore.  When Carter wrote this story TV shows about occult things were not nearly as common, the Harry Potter books were still to come so werewolf lore was not commonplace.,Carter draws on ancient Northern European folks views.  She also draws on the legend of Little Red Riding Hood. Riding Hood is young and is having her period (a recuring factor to ponder in the stories of Carter) as she makes her visit to her grandmother) and would have been regarded as unclean in the culture of the era and place.  Of course a werewolf has replaced Grandmother, he smells her blood and is driven mad.  The ending is, of course, a reversal of the old story.

There is another plot in this six page story about a woman whose husband was attacked by a werewolf on their wedding night.

I offer my thanks to Delia and Caroline for hosting Angela Carter Week.

"Wolf-Alice" by Angela Carter (1985)

Angela Carter Week

Angela Carter's short stories are among the most intensely written stories I have read in a long time, enjoyed as if in four star Paris restaurant you have dreamed of dining at for years.  Just don't go into the Kitchen or ask who the odd looking very wealthy old man sitting by himself in the corner might be. As you look about you begin to see the strangeness in this restaurant.  Some of the diners are in the garb of Roma royalty, some in rags, some discuss the architecture of Proust, some the best places to find juicy rats, some conduct international affairs on their mobiles, others snarl out their orders just pointing to what they want.   Some speak a dozen languages, some none, or at least no human language.

"Wolf-Alice" is one of Salmon Rushdie's favorite stories.  In a way oddly parellel to her most read story "The Bloody Chamber" it centers on an odd, secretive wealthy man, a Duke, and a young woman who lives with him in a very strange relationship part fear, part love based on mutual oddness and codependency.  The Duke is a vampire but in Carter's hands this rises above a cliche.  Alice is a  feral child the Duke evidently found with a pack of wolves.  She is now maybe in her early teens and canot speak and rarely stands upright.  Besides the always exquiste prose of Carter, the best thing,for me, about this story was the intricate relationship between the Duke and Alice. Six wonderful pages.

I offer my great thanks to Caroline and Dalia for hosting this event which motivated me to read Carter after too long a hiatus.

 

Mel u

"Black Venus" by Angela Carter. Plus Salmon Rushdie's Favorite Angela Carter Short Stories

The details for Angela Carter Week can be found here, along with lots of good reading suggestions.

Angela Carter Week

Yesterday I was asked to list, from his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter, Salmon Rushdie's choices for her best stories.  Of her several anthologies, he says by far the best is The Bloody Chamber, and he says the title story of that book is for sure among her very best stories.  Here are the other Salmon Rushdie Best of Angela Carter Picks:

1.  Courtship of Mr Lyon

2.   The Werewolf

3.    The Story of Momotaro

4.    Black Venus. 

5.   The Snow Child

6.    "The Fall River Murders"

7.   Wolf Alice

8.   Peter and the Wolf

"Black Venus", the title story in the 1985 collection of that name, centers on Jeannie Duval (1820 to 1862, born in Haiti, of mixed French and African parentage) who was years a mistress and muse for the poet Charles Baudelaire.  Carter uses this basic material to demythologize the legend of the life of Baudelaire.  It also deals deeply with issues relating colonialism, sexual objectifying in Paris of women of mixed ancestors as animalistic and more voluptuous than French women.  To have a mistress with African French Colonial roots made a man seem and feel more manly, wilder, a breaker of conventional mores.  The story focuses on how Jeannie Duval felt about herself.  She was  at one point in her life a prostitute and would it seems turn back to this upon returning to the French Caribean when Baudelaire moved on from her.  Of course as she ponders her relationship to Baudelaire, who she calls, "The Poet" she wonders what she really was to him.   

The prose is just exquisite.  Carter is a master at making connections between high culture of the west and the cruel infrastructures that hold up those societies.  She makes us see the slave plantations and the overseers that financed high culture.  She loves French high literary culture, as do I, no less so for seeing the fathomless cruelty that held it up.  

I want to share the closing lines of the story to give a feel for her prose and I think they brilliantly sum up much of the themes of "Black Venus".

In Paris she sold herself and was seen by society as a whore.  Upon her return to Martinique, she is there treated with respect once paid in Paris to dandies and such.  The final sentence undercuts deep layers of myths and cultural artifacts while showing the sublime vengeance of the Black Venus.

I urge all devotees to the story of the wild Poet Baudelaire to read this story.  There are just so many layers of meanining in this story.

I am very grateful to Dalia and Caroline for motivating me to expand my reading of Carter

 

Mel u

"The Man Who Loved a Double Bass". Angela Carter's First Short Story. (1962)

The details for Angela Carter Week can be found here, along with lots of good reading suggestions.

Angela Carter Week

Up until today I had read only one work by Angela Carter (1940 to 1992, UK) her very famous and quite wonderful gothic story "The Bloody Chamber".  I was happy to see Beauty is Sleeping Cat and Postcards from Asia were sponsoring a week devoted to her work and very happy I was not long ago given a copy of The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter.  Salmon Rushdie has written a very well done introduction that should be read by anyone into Carter.  Rushdie loves her work and offers some very good reading suggestions for Carter neophytes like myself.   I decided just to begin with her very first published short story "The Man Who Loved a Double Bass", from 1962.

The story centers on a bass player and his instrument.  He calls her "Lola", he admires her shape, almost as if the large string instrument were a voluptuous woman.  He takes Lola everywhere.  When at a pub people are used to seeing Lola at the table with the bass player and his mates.  Someone always buys Lola a drink and it is left untouched when they leave.  The player had a beautiful silk cloth he polishes her with, almost as one would a beloved.  Everyone respects the way Lola has become animate and accepts the bond some would find a bit unnatural, nearly sexual between the bass player and Lola. I do not wish to give away the close but this is Angela Carter's first story and the ending is dark, cruel, and heartbreaking.  This is a powerful tale of obsession, maybe of madness.  I will try to read more Carter Stories this week, focusing on the one's mentioned by Rushdie as her strongest work.

My thanks to Dalia and Caroline for hosting this event.

"Master" by Angela Carter 1995

                1940 to 1992. UK

I am very glad to have at last read a story by the great English author, Angela Carter.  I have access to one more of her stories and hopefully will read it soon.  

"Master" is a multidimensional work with many thematic veins one could mine.  

There are only two on stage characters in "Master".  One is a totally horrible man who loves hunting, not for the sport allegedly involved but for the sheer love of killing, of inflicting murder, not for trophies or for food.  We learn little of his history.  When we meet him he is in Africa.  He kills any animal he can, leaving their bodies to decay.  His passion is for killing big cats. He purchases a young girl, begins to serially rape her and he insists she call him "Master".  His pleasure in having sex with her derives from the pain it causes her.  The story is told  as a dark fable.  I see the master as a symbol for colonial exploitation and accept this is tied in with a love, often buried very deeply, for killing, a hatred of beauty and serenity.   The story also deals with received images of masculinity and feminity.   There is a very interesting turn in this story I will leave untold. 

I read this in an excellent anthology of stories by  women writers that I have been slowly working my way through The Story:  Love, Loss, and the Lives of Women -One Hundred Short Stories edited by Victoria Hislop.

Angela Carter and Grace Paley Buy or Pass?

"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter (1979, 6 pages)
"My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age" by Grace Paley (2002, 4 pages)

Angela Carter and Grace Paley

A Test Drive 

Yesterday I was looking in the best book store in Manila to buy collections of short stories, Power Books in Trinoma Mall, to see what they had in stock.   I noticed they had
editions of the  short stories of two writers I have seen mentioned a lot in the book blog world but have never read, Angela Carter and Grace Paley.   I had checked before and there is no Kindle edition of their collections.   I decided I would see if I could read one of their stories online before deciding if I will buy the collections or not. I was happy to find a story by both writers. 

"Children do not stay young long in this savage country".

"The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter (1940 to 1992-UK) for sure pushed me into the buyer category.  It is kind of a very dark fairy tale about a  sinister world.  It is a very occult story no doubt with all sorts of references to English tradition that go over my head.   There are witches, people turned into wolves, evil children and a real sense of the terror of the night.   The story is just so marvelously written I have no ability to retell the plot without trivializing it so I will not try.  I am really looking forward to rereading The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter in 2013.   

"My father had decided to teach me how to grow old"

"My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age" by Grace Paley (1922 to 2007-USA)  Paley wrote only short stories, unlike Angela Carter who also wrote novels.  Successful short story writers often feel a pressure to write novels but Paley resisted this.    This story, originally published in The New Yorker, is told in the first person and is about a grown woman whose father has decided he wants to council her about how to deal with old age.  The story alternates between the advise he gives her and her reaction to it.   Her mother, the man's wife of decades has died and it was usually her who gave out the parental advice.   They are of Russian descent and of the  Jewish faith, just as Paley was. Her parents were Ukrainian emigrants and spoke Russian and Yiddish at home.  The father is very well read in the Russian classics.   He talks about which of the great Russian writers were probably anti-Semites.  He says in the times they lived most were.  He says Tolstoy was not, Gogol probably was and he did not think Gorky was.  This conversation was enough to push me to a buyer on Paley.  I will say I think her father was wrong about Gorky.   He talks about how his daughter is more in the American world than he is.  I hope to read The Collected Short Stories of Grace Paley in 2013.



You can read the Paley story in the free archives of The New Yorker 

"The Company of Wolves" can be read here.

I also found a 600 page edition of the complete short stories of Issac Singer at Power Books but that will have to wait!  I was also surprised to see they had an edition of the complete short stories of Zola Hurston which is also on my buy if it is still there next Christmas list!

Please share your experiences with Grace Paley and Angela Carter with us.

Mel u