The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon

Author:Edmund Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

On 28 April 1976, Calder offered £1,500 for British and Commonwealth rights to The Passion of New Eve. She wanted to publish it in a new ‘Fantasy and Macabre’ imprint, ‘which would be likely to include writers such as Ursula Le Guin, in the future’. Deborah asked her to raise the offer to £2,250, so as to outbid Hart-Davis. Calder tried to find the extra money, noting in an internal Gollancz memo that ‘Angela Carter is exactly the sort of writer we are looking for: young, already with her own following, something of a TV/radio pundit, committed, controversial, and enormously talented.’ Her bosses were evidently unconvinced, and Angela eventually accepted the original offer of £1,500, signing a contract on 27 May.

Shortly afterwards, she was invited to a dinner in honour of the Chilean novelist José Donoso at Calder’s home in London. One of the guests was the young British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, a ‘great fan’ of Angela’s work, whose first novel Grimus had recently been published by Gollancz. ‘Mr Donoso arrived looking like a Hispanic Buffalo Bill, complete with silver goatee, fringed jacket and cowboy boots, and proceeded, as I saw it, to patronize Angela terribly,’ Rushdie remembered. ‘I was completely unknown, but Angela had published a lot of books by that time, and the fact that he either didn’t know or affected not to know who she was, that offended me on her behalf. So I guess I stood up for her . . . I made a speech at Donoso about how this was like the greatest writer in England. I think it endeared me to her.’

Over the next few years, Angela formed a close and mutually supportive friendship with Rushdie. ‘In a literary sense she was one of my greatest allies,’ he remembered. ‘She was one of the people who really understood my work as I would have wished it to be understood, and was a great defender of it to anybody who would ask, and several who wouldn’t ask.’ In the neat, manicured landscape of contemporary British fiction, she had at last found a novelist whose wild, flamboyant sensibility corresponded with her own. They were both outsiders, with firmly held socialist principles; they were both interested in comedy and language and Joyce; both of them were drawn to fantasy, and both were blessed with spectacular powers of invention; and neither of them recognised the ways in which they were themselves invented in the media. When, in 1985, the young journalist Helen Simpson interviewed them together for Vogue (the headline was: ‘Hackle Raisers’), she expressed surprise at how easy-going and witty they both were:

HS: I’m talking to you two because I was at a reading where you appeared together and seemed to be enjoying yourselves so much, seemed such good friends. I’m interested in books and writers, and I hadn’t read anywhere else of your friendship. And I would have thought it a most unlikely friendship . . . Salman, your public image is not exactly one of approachable friendliness or bonhomie .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.