Angela Carter's Fairy Tales with Marina Warner

[MUSIC PLAYING] Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with, so they work hard and grow wise. She liberated so many of us from that fear of being despised for liking fairytales because she showed that they were actually intrinsically fascinating and rich and full of potential. We've just stepped out into Marina's beautiful and very luscious garden where we're sitting now, and rather appropriately, we're surrounded by forny rosebushes, which are looking absolutely fantastic. Once upon a time, deep in the heart of the country, there lived a pretty little girl whose mother adored her and her grandmother adored her even more. This good woman made her a red hood, like the ones that fine ladies wear when they go riding. The hood suited the child so much that soon everybody was calling her little red riding hood. That's the first line of La Poutine Chaparole Rouge, written in French in 1697 by Charles Perreau and translated by Angela Carter. Perreau is among the most influential compilers of fairy tales that ever lived, and Carter completely reinvented the way we think about the genre today. This little book, Carter's Fairy Tales of Charles Perreau, is a collaboration between two very different authors, born more than 300 years apart, but who both, in different ways, transformed the way we think about fairy tales. Carter called Perreau a humane, tolerant, and kind-hearted man. Salmon Rushdie called her the high sorceress of English literature. It's benevolent, which queen. The fairy tale is an unusual form. It slips between oral and written versions, between the verbal and the visual. There are no original texts, just performance after performance. Versions and translations carried on the voice to the page and back again. Each storyteller weaving his or more often her own interpretations. And fairy tales are more popular than ever with recent big budget movie adaptations of red riding hood, Cinderella, and beauty on the beast. But beneath their glossy surfaces, we glimpse a long, often painful history of difficult childhoods and domestic hardship. And deeper still, we sense that fairy tales somehow encode uneasy truths about our own darkest fears and deepest desires. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Andrea, the producer. Hello and welcome to On the Road with Penguin Classics, the podcast that takes a stroll around the world's favorite books. I'm Henry Elliott, the author of the Penguin Classics book. And today, I'm going to put up my hood and follow a trail of crumbs into the deep, dark forest of fairy tale. And for this episode, we've been welcomed into the home of our guest for today, who is Dame Marina Warner. Marina, thank you so much for welcoming us here. You're welcome. And since stepping inside, the boiling hot day has turned into a tempestuous storm. The rain is lashing the windows, and it feels rather like something from a fairy tale. Well, it feels very Gothic, which is extremely pertinent to Angela Carter. Yes, exactly. Marina Warner is professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck College in London. She is a renowned cultural historian, novelist and short story writer. The author of award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales, such as from the beast to the blonde, no-go-the-boggy man and stranger magic about the Arabian knights. In 1994, she delivered the BBC Reef Lectures on Myths of Our Time. In 2013, she was awarded the Truman Capote Award for literary criticism. In 2015, she was made a Dame of the British Empire. And in 2022, she became a companion of honor. Marina, I can't think of anyone better place to have this conversation today about Perro and Angela Carter. So thank you very much for agreeing to it. I'm delighted. It was a great passion of mine. Well, and it's also a great treat to be in your home. We're sitting now in a, frankly, magical sitting room in front of a fireplace with books and papers piled to the ceiling. Wonderful artworks on the walls. We're sitting under a pool of rago, and we've just been discussing some drawings by Lina or a Carrington. It's a really beautiful and, yes, magical house. So thank you for welcoming us in. Now, in your recent short history of fairy tale called Once Upon a Time, you imagine the history of fairy tale as a map with two prominent landmarks, Charles Perro and the Grim Brothers. Marina, would you lay out that map for us now and kind of talk us through it? What does it look like? Well, the map should be, first of all, a world map, because one of the characteristics of human beings is that they invent these fantastic stories. And they seem to have always done so. There isn't a culture so benighted that it doesn't have folktales and fairy tales. So we were taking a Eurocentric view at the moment. And you would see it right in the far distant north, you'd see Hans Christian Anderson in Denmark and South, you'd see people in Naples and so forth. But the two really most successful collections that have been into many versions, multiple versions, not only translations, but different editions, illustrations, so forth, are the Grim Brothers in Germany, 1812 and Charles Perro long before that in France, 1694 is his first major collection. And he was a courteier. He was rather different from what you'd expect, because the stories are presented as if they're coming from granis in bonnets or spinning wheels. But actually, he was a very sophisticated courteier at the court of Louis XIV. The Sun King. The Sun King, yes. So it was a surprising move for him to mine this theme of popular tales. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because he was writing at a time when, by writing about fairy tales, that was a consciously modern move. Wasn't it? He was doing that in almost in opposition to the camp who believed that only ancient classical is. No, it was a vicious schism within French culture. There were the people who had Wollot who wanted to continue with mythologies and chrassine and the classical stories and the myths and paganism and so forth. And to some extent, a dash of Christianity. And then opposing them was Behrou Ledit, actually led this whole movement. It was called the Battle of the Ancients and Modens, the Battle of the Books. And alongside with some other colleagues, he decided that national French culture, which was not literate and classical and not learned it, not Latin and Greek, but indigenous or Tothonus and so forth, this was the way forward to be a great modern nation. It was a very surprising and subversive move. And again, very surprising from a man in a Perry wig who was constantly enriching himself in the court. Absolutely. And it became a great fashion, doesn't it? And over the course of the 18th century, more and more people tried their hand at fairy tales. And eventually, one charcoal, Charles Joseph de Meyer, published a 41 volume series called The Cabinus of Fairies. Yes, just full of stories. That's right. The Cabinus of Fair. And it went on-- actually continued to be published in Geneva during the French Revolution when after in these 41 volumes. And it's very surprising that someone like Angela Carter became the translator of Behrou because she was a dedicated socialist all her life. And this was an aristocratic amusement imitating the imagined peasants, rather like Marie-Antoinette dressing up as a shepherd's egg. So it was a little bit of a-- there's a sort of frivolity hanging around the problem of why Behrou and his aristocratic companions. But the reason that someone like Angela Carter was attracted to it is that they buried a lot of subversive philosophy and ideas into this form. And the women who took it up who aren't so famous, but they were really a lot of them. I mean, really a great number. And they now gradually being studied more. They also passed on stories that they had learned from their governesses and then staff, their ancestral homes and so forth. But they saw in them a feminist message, because women were often the protagonists, and they were often in very difficult family situations. In many of those women's versions of the classic material, they were always messages about the need for women's emancipation and freedom, the right to choose a partner, not to be married off. The right not to choose a partner, not to have a partner, to be single. Some of the famous women who were involved in this never married, which-- so there was a strong revolutionary undertow to this aristocratic game. How fast did it even as early as that? Well, these are all topics which I hope will be coming onto in our conversation. But just going back to looking down at this map, so we've sketched out the landmark of Perro. And then in the early 19th century, the Grims come along. And of course, this is in the middle of the-- of romanticism, it takes fairy tales in another direction into deep dark woods, fairy-tale castles. Yes, well the Grims are much more macabre. There's touches of macabre in Peru, definitely. But the Grims are more generally macabre, savage and violent. And it's sort of on the edge of comedy, in the sense of where the macabre makes you laugh because it's so extreme. So the Grims picked up on that idea that, to be France, to be truly modern needed to have its own French culture, which was rooted in the peasantry, because they were really romantic nationalists. And for them it seemed that this was the true literature of Germany. And away with all this stuff from Greece and Rome, or even from the Vikings, let's look at the actual, what's actually going on in the German language. But they were very disappointed because as a philologist, they did a lot of work on the origins of the stories they were told. But they collected from passing people from their contacts, from one case, the daughter of an innkeeper and so forth. But they found that a lot of them were French. Right, a Frencher before that Italian, before that Arabic. Yes. Ah, so they were a bit confounded but disappointed. But they preserved actually a core that we only know from the Grims, it must be said, that is, although they have family likenesses, as happens in fact tales from mysterious reasons everywhere. And this is a point of stress, isn't it, that although these are the names that we associate with fairy tales, actually, this is an oral phenomenon, and they happen to write those ones down, but these tales being passed around. And Philip Orman has a nice line where he says that fairy tales are like jazz and that storytelling is an art of performance. Yes, that's right, yes. And it's a tale of Calvina who put together a wonderful collection of Italian fo tales. He quotes a Tuscan proverb which he says is, "The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it." So you get this sense that this whole community of storytellers passing these around. Well, Calvina worked from the collections of 19th century ethnographers. And that's it because the Grims were fairly pioneering in what they tried to do. You know, their first edition had pages and pages of footnotes. I mean, these were scholarly endeavors to collect the stories of the folk. But that then sparked off a move really right across Europe, including this country, including the United Kingdom. We were a bit late on the game, but on the whole, you know, the Colourage and Wordsworth with Lyrical Ballads were using the folk material that they were collecting. And then later, in the 19th century, people began putting together Scottish law, Welsh law, and so forth. I mean, it was a major cultural phenomenon to do with nationalism. Aha. And I guess that was one of the elements that Angela Carter would later want to break apart when she decided to. Yes, her interest to a very different. Yes, yes. Where we'll get to that. So let's go back now to Charles Perro. And you've described him as a courtier at the Court of the Sun King. What was he like as a person, do you think? Well, he seems to have been extremely affectionate to children, because he actually used his son's name as the author of the first edition of the Court of the Marlowe of the Mother Goose Tales. He said it. Well, that's a dramatic thunder offstage. I'm glad the skies are proved, as I was saying. Or perhaps it wasn't. Perhaps they wanted to blast me. Anyway, so he published it under the name of his son, Pierre Del Juan Coul, and for a long time they're raged in great controversies about whether it truly was by his son. They were very successful family. All the Perros were strivers and achievers. And we owe Claude Perro, his brother, the current Louvre, the actual design of Louvre, Pierrero himself, Manuvert, his brother into the position. His brother wasn't an architect at all. And I'm afraid the palm did not go to Bernini. Bernini was in Paris hoping for the drop. Oh, gosh. Perro got it. He's brother into it. How extraordinary. As Carter said, he. Perro would write about Pussin Boots and being such a kind of wily trickster, and there's an element of that in him. Yes, that he was a. Yes, he was a schemer. He writes. Yes. Now, you've mentioned how the subtitle for his book of fairy tales was Tales of Mother Goose. In the first edition, the Francis piece shows a kind of old lady by the fireside. It's a crime. We're sitting by the fireside now, speaking to a group of little children. Yes. And on the wall behind her head, other words, Conte de Ma Mère Loi. Yes, Conte de Ma Mère Loi. This mother Goose character was a sort of catchall for that type of figure. Yes, I mean, there were some other phrases for these types of stories, including one of the other stories that he wrote, which is Donkyskin Tales. They were conventionally known by the names of either the heroines or the people. But this storyteller, this old crowon, who is always of a lower class, that's important, because that's part of the idea that you're really drinking at the fountain of the authentic people. And the children sometimes, in this conventional image, are not only children, her children, as it were, her grandchildren, but also children that she's looking after, because she's a nanny figure. Oh. And sometimes a wet nurse figure. And frequently, in this kind of fronted piece, in this fronted piece, she's inside by a hearth. But sometimes she's sitting at the door of her cottage. And the cottage is often removed a little bit from the town, from, and is a kind of secret place on the edge of the forest. These old women who tell stories are old wives, as in old wives tale, or as in good wife in terms of witches. They edge into the idea of the witch, the idea of the canon of having internal knowledge. Right. And almost a character in a fairy tale themselves. Yes, yes. They're very mirrored in the fairy tales. I mean, they're good fairies and bad fairies. But they're frequently old women or disguised as old women. You know, the poisoned witch. I mean, do you remember the Fum Snow White? Of course. With the apple that she disguised herself as an old woman. Yes, right, of course. So the idea they're passing on deep knowledge. And that's something that Alexandra Carter responded to. She liked that idea that buried within the stories. There was some kernel of old knowledge that had been passed on from women. Right. And a reason why this story survived. It's a phase. An interesting contrast, isn't it, in Perros tales that we have this kind of folk fireside, outsider element. But then on the other side, we get these kind of golden courtyards, like beautiful chandeliers, mirrored walls, and the other settings in his tales are ones that he knew from court, very kind of extremely. Yes, Perros tone is quite difficult to catch. I mean, he's frequently tying in cheek. And in the context of the times, when he describes all this lavish and extravagant excess of wealth, he really is poking some kind of mocking finger, you know, at the excesses of the sun king. Because by the time he compiled this collection, he was no longer in favour of court. Ah, that's important. It's interesting that before he compiled his famous collection, he sort of tried his hand that fairy tales a little first. And he, one of his experiments was the tale you've mentioned already, Donkey's skin, which he published in verse in the early 1690s. And that's a kind of version of the Cinderella story, isn't it? It's a version which has many different types and very well known in medieval literature. And also it gave Shakespeare the idea for the beginning of Pericles. It's a story of father daughter in Cest. The father wants to marry his daughter after her mother, his wife dies. And the mother on her deathbed says, I want you to promise never to marry again, unless someone is beautiful. And sometimes says, as good as me. I mean, there's always a streak of misogyny in these kind of tales which also attracted to Antelacata. She wanted to deal with that. She wanted to confront that and expose it and change it. And so when his daughter grows up, she does look just as beautiful and is as good as his former wife. So that's when he proposes to her. Pericles turns it in his verse version, which is not the one Antelacata translated. But in his verse version, it's rubbled and comic, highly comic. And I think that it's a very interesting approach to difficult subjects like child abuse. In fact, I'm very much a part of Zan of this veiling in kind of tangen chic feline mockery of what is an important message. Because basically the young, the girl who's proposed to gets away with the help of her fairy godmother. But the story upholds her. She's not a rebellious daughter who hasn't obeyed her father. She's completely the heroine of the story. She's totally upheld. So in a way, this passes on in a very subtle and devious way, a message about it's okay to disobey your father in some cases. And this is one of them. Interesting. And it's interesting that Carter chose to place her translation of Donkeyskin at the very end of her collection. So, Perre would always finish his fairy tales with a little moral that sort of, or even sometimes a pair of morals that sort of drew the. Often contrasted. Yes, often. Just more confusing than if there had been one. But it means that the final words of Carter's translation are that as long as they're at children, mothers, grandmothers and mother goose, this tale will always seem new. And I think that speaks to exactly what you're saying. This kind of passing down from female generation to female generation. And also this kind of sexual secret. But that has been hidden in a coating of expert storytelling that's quite amusing and entertaining and feels safe. That's important. It feels safe. So the fairy tale is a way of passing on a lot of hard truths and yet not making the poor child completely spooked. Well, let's talk about one of the best-known fairy tales. We've said that Donkey Skin was a kind of version of Cinderella and in Perot's main famous collection there is his version of the Cinderella story. Now Cinderella has had so many different names and all different versions from different parts of the world. In Perot's she's called Sendrion. In the Grims she's called Ashen Puthul. In the English version she's called Mossycoat. But there's always a connection with sort of being by the hearth. The only place she can curl up to sleep is sort of in the cinder's part. Being rejected and being somehow disfigured. Her face is sooty and she's not allowed to wash. She's creaturely. One of the structural axioms of fairy tales is that there's a contrast between being beastly and being human. That's something that really Antracarta really liked and very much overturned. She really did something different with that. Tell us about Perot's version of Cinderella. What are the elements we might recognise from it? She's not someone who likes magic very much. He's frequently, you know, not apart from talking animals which is derogh really for the fairy tale. But in his Cinderella he goes full tilt for magical effects which have become the beloved sequence in the pumpkin coach, the rat, coachman, the lizard, footman. And he has little jokes within that because the lizard footman are there because they were famously thought to be extremely lazy. The idea of the sunning themselves under a stone. And it was sort of. It was meant to be a kind of comment on that. And that's he's full of little worldly aside. And then very important, of course, is the stroke of midnight. This idea that there's a prohibition and that she breaks the prohibition. She will be turned back. And that's a very deep magical idea because there's not only the idea that an enchantment has come to an end, but also that something vanishes under the ground. I mean that the transformation is that all her fineries just vanished into fairyland, into the world it came from. It rose from there and it's gone back there. And then there's the famous episode of the glass slipper. Right. And everybody is always very interested in the fact that this might be a survival of oral storytelling because ver, glass in French, is the same word as ermine, fur. So it's possible that when people heard the story from a punitive servant or granny or whatever, the word was a sulia de ver. Right. I mean an ermine slipper. Right, and he heard glass. And he heard glass, which of course was a brilliant symbolic move because the glass slipper has all kinds of associations with things cracking and breaking virginity and so forth. Of course. Yes, I think it's Philip Pouman in the introduction to his version of the grim fairy tales, who says that he doesn't believe it was a mistake. He thinks it's a very brilliant move to make it a good move. Yes, yes. Well we can't ever know really. Of course not. And there are some surprising elements. She's very generous to her horrible species. Yes, yes. Well actually that's something that Angelic Carter particularly brings out. And she likes the fact that bearers versions up less mean spirited than the grims, you know, the stepmother gives them a knife to cut off their toes and cut off their heels to fit into the bloody slipper. And they're really exposed because the blood starts running out of the sea. Yes, turn peep, turn peep that's blood within the shoe. And other versions round the world that you know, there's some really grisly things. In the earlier Italian version by Basil E, the Cinderella and that version called Zezola, she ends up killing her stepmother so that her governess can become her new stepmother and then she turns against her. Yes, well she then having promised that everything will be all right and she would no longer be treated like a half cat. Because it's called Agata Teren to La La Half Cat. She turns, she produces seven daughters of her own, all of whom are to take precedence ever poor Zezola. So that's, but then I think she does kill her. Oh gosh, well. And there's other, you know, in Indonesia. So she feels true people. Oh my goodness. Yes, you don't think so. She isn't sweet and kind. She doesn't buy purages for her sister's husbands. Well, that's a perfect moment then to perhaps move locations to somewhere to talk about another fairy tale and to talk a little bit more about her. And to talk a little bit more about Angela Carter and her own fairy tales. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path. Thickets bristling with thorns and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant. They're huge congregations of plush petals, somehow obscene in their excess. Their world tightly-budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle. Okay, we're just heading down through Marina's house, heading out into the garden to talk about our next fairy tale. Oh, and sunshine now. Oh, it says cooler. It's much cooler, isn't it? Gardens got much smaller because it's all grown up, too. It's kind of strong. So the rain has stopped now and we've just stepped out into Marina's beautiful and very luscious garden where we're sitting now. And rather appropriately, we're surrounded by forny rose bushes, which are looking absolutely fantastic. Marina, what roses are we looking at here? The ones that are climbing roses, which is really rather like sleeping beauty, thicket, which is very, very unruly and has to be pruned back very heavily every year. But even so, it becomes tempestuous. It's called kiff skate. It's very famous roses. It makes sort of drifts of flowers. It's not fully out. And that's all entangled with another monstrous tentacular rose called mermaid, which is the big yellow ones. It's very stunning. It's sitting among these roses, Marina, but it feels like a good place to talk about sleeping beauty. Another of the very famous tales from Charles Perreaux's collection. How does he present his version of the sleeping beauty and the wood? Well, it has a very, very surprising ending, which is almost always cut, especially for children, in which after the prince has had two children with the sleeping beauty. He brings her back to his family palace, and where his mother is of the ogre race. And he knows that, but he thinks that the children will be fine. But no, she smells delicious little babies, and one day he goes off to fight a war. And she tells the cook to serve up the children, well, the first child, and that she wants him cooked with sauce, raw bear. She's a typical Perreaux touch of kind of worldly, courtly knowledge with a sort of barbaric cannibalism. And then it's the same thing happens to the next little girl. But the cook, as in Snow White and other stories, you know, his two tender hearted to butcher the children. So he hides them. And then the ogre mother hears the children crying and is furious and decides that she's going to murder them all in a great vat of toads and vipers and horrible menacing animals. But of course, in the end, she's the one who's thrown into the vat. And that ending, there's no motive given. This is a perfect example of motive-less malignancy, which actually, in Courage, particularly praised, being so thrilling to read or to listen to. And anyway, she says, "We have no idea why she's impelled to eat her grandchildren." It makes for a very, very grisly ending, which is, as I said, always cut. Absolutely. I mean, it's a vision of the worst possible mother-in-law, isn't it? Your husband's mother eating your children. And Carter points out that Herro was also sometimes, he would censor his sources and sort of sleeping beauty as one example, because, for instance, in his version, there's no kiss when the prince wakes up the sleeping beauty. And in fact, in the earlier version, the Italian version by Straperola, she actually becomes pregnant while still asleep. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm afraid it's a rape, absolutely. But in the Straperola, the reason that she wakes up is that one of the children mistakes her finger for her breast and the finger with the splinter, her flax under the nail, and he sucks on her finger and pulls out the flax, and that's when she wakes up. Whereas in the payroll, none of that has happened. Certainly there isn't any rape. Yes, she's a humorous, a size that the source has her bear. Yes, exactly. I love that source her bear. Oh, the other thing that's very funny is when the cook wonders about cooking her when he's ordered to cook her, because though she was very fair and beautiful and still looked very young, she was over 100 years old, her meat might be rather tough. That's good. That's very good. And while we're talking about the sleeping beauty, sleeping for 100 years or more, one of the things that's often said is that fairy tales are dreamlike in some way. way and and To what extent do you see Faradhals as being like dreams? I think Angela Carter once said that they're almost like informal dreams dreamed in public. Yes, I think that's a very good line. She's got so many wonderful insights and absolutely brilliant ways of thinking about them. I mean, she makes an analogy with Monarchy and how we talk about Monarchy and the tabloids. It's actually very relevant to today even though she wrote this probably 30 years ago. And so there is a sense in which our preoccupations are mirrored in Faradhals. That's why she explains that all princesses and princesses. She says it's not because they're actually worshiping Monarchy. It's an idea of reflecting our ways of thinking about things. And this is the way of expressing the psychic importance of these figures to us. She says, you know, a Faradhale is a story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar. That's very good, isn't it? She's interested in how Faradhals don't have rounded characters. They have figures and types. And it's a kind of shorthand, a sort of lexicon of ways of thinking about human problems. And they need to be abstract because they're not particular. You're not Henry. You're the prince. Aha, aha. Now, we've mentioned already that Angela Carter was commissioned by the publisher Victor Galance in 1976 to translate Perro. And it was published the following year in 1977 with illustrations by the artist Martin Ware. Marina, you're actually holding a first edition of this translation. Well, because Angela Carter gave it to me. And it's even inscribed to me. That's wonderful. What's she written there? She says, "With love from Angela, and in brackets, and forgive the errors in the introduction." With an exclamation mark. I mean, the René errors in the introduction. I don't know why she told her. Oh, Blattery, that's wonderful. Well, I mean-- And the illicit-- it's sadly in the current Penguin edition. The illustrations aren't reproduced, but they're rather spectacular. Yes, no. It would be good that they would be reprinted. Because actually, they show already the way that she was thinking. I mean, she must have had conversations with them about them. And they show that she was already thinking that the fairytales had this troubling latent content. Because they're not at all fairytale-like, well, apart from the fact that the bus is standing up and wearing boots. But mostly, they're dark, they're definitely black and white, but there's a lot of black. And, for example, the sleeping beauty herself is Corpse White, very stiff, and apparently lying on her bun. Yeah, and so she looks very rigid. And he is not approaching at all in a lover-like fashion, which is not kneeling or gently affecting. He's stiff and looks absolutely aghast. The light that is very strong on her face, which makes her look like a corpse, very white, is reflected up towards his face and his eyes as it were staring out of his head. He is feeling the power of the Enchantment. It's not altogether benign. So that's what she was trying to get at in the bloody chamber. That kind of current of unease. And Martin Ware had already, as it were, divined it. But he does have moments of wit along the same lines as Peru. There's a vignette of a lizard that introduces the models. And a cacalty lizard. And also she, you know, the Lyloch Ferry is an old school mistress. Yes, with a big cat. Pantsenay on the end of her nose. Now, Marina, you knew Angela Carter. How did you meet her? I met her through her very close friend and publisher, Edita Carmen Caleo, who was also became my editor. Who founded Farragó? And who filed Farragó. And she was immensely important to figure in Angela's life. Because first of all, she really believed, you know, she wrote, I think, after her first encounter, she is a real writer. And Carmen was a very astute and very combative and persuasive person. So it was important for, even though Angela had had a lot of success with her early books. I mean, so she wasn't as if she was an obvious. But she was having a bit of difficulty getting some books published and Carmen just took her up and never, never swayed in her allegiance to her. So it was really a powerful relationship. And they shared similar politics, but similar caustic, satirical wit. And why do you think Golance approached Angela Carter to translate Perro? In 1976, she was 36 years old. She'd written five novels, one of which had won the Summer Set Normal Award, some short stories, and poetry collections, a couple of children's books. So she wasn't a new writer, but as you say, she'd had some success but moderate success. Why do you think he approached her? I think that she was very attracted in a kind of provocative way to the Asian regime. She was really a revolutionary, but like a lot of revolutionaries, her objects of attack were very fascinating to her. And then of course, she suspected that there was a lot of material about women there, and she knew she knew the stories after all. And she wanted to find out more about what women had been saying about women in the past. And in this reprehensible aristocratic setting. So she probably started off with rather antagonistic views to what Perro actually represented. But then she found that she was taken with him, captivated by him, because she calls him very nice things as a person. She's very complimentary in her practice. Interestingly, in the current introduction to the Penguin edition, Jack Zypes, another eminent folklorist, his kind of analysis of what Carter has done to Perro is that she's made the stories more earthy. He says more in tune with her radical vision of ascetics and the efficacy of storytelling. He says as a result, Carter returns Perro and his tales to the folk. I think that's, I mean, the greater Mara of Jack Zypes has also a friend, and actually reminded me that one of the things that Angela Carter did for me at the very beginning of our friendship, was she introduced me to Jack Zypes. And I went to Paris. He was then living in Paris because he was working on a lot of French hotels. And I thought I was going to meet a sort of grizzled, you know, very learned old scholar. And he was a tremendous athlete in his youth. And he also looked then like Steve McQueen. So when I came back to London, I said, "Angela, you never said to me that Jack Zypes was this unbelievable hunk." And she said, "Yes, he's a secret. I keep for my friends." Oh, wonderful. That's fantastic. Well, she worked on this collection, which was published in '77. And then as we've already mentioned, this somehow led to the work for, which perhaps she's best remembered and best known, the Bloody Chamber and other stories, which was also published by Golance in 1979. So just two years later. Can you tell us a little bit about how she came to write that book? Do you think it was a direct response to working on the parodranslations? Well, you have to go back a little bit to her previous interests. I mean, she did a lot of medieval literature at university and she was really taken with that. She was also a very good Shakespearean. She really knew Shakespeare's plays very, very well. So she loved Spencer. She liked the fairy tradition in Litt, which she'd studied. But nobody reads Spencer now. So it's amazing to think that reading Spencer actually has a relationship to the Bloody Chamber, but it does. These allegorical figures, these fairy enchantments, the landscape of another world, the idea that you can transmute the present world, the present world, the zoo, it is your world, you can actually transmute it into some kind of pleasurable other world. And also she was a real apostle of pleasure. She really, really believed in pleasure. And she was interested in its forms and how it, and its mixtures and its antithesis and so forth. She was really thought that was an important quality to pursue as a literary person. So it's been in her mind, you know, why did she want to do parole and why did it give her pleasure? Why would this story so appealing for so many centuries? And what was it about them? And then as I said before, there was an adequacy there too, that good women were too obliging and sweet and meek and mild. She wanted to give it some fight, some snap of excitement. So the Bloody Chamber for those who haven't read it, at ten fairy tales, all in some way inspired by existing fairy tales, mostly by paros fairy tales. Certain clusters actually, she doesn't do all of them. What she said was that her intention was not to do versions, or as the American edition of the book said, horribly adult fairy tales. That's her line. But she wants to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and use it as the beginnings of new stories. And so she creates this book and it is an extraordinary volume. Well, one has to mention that she's the most wonderful writer. I mean, it's really her use of, not only vocabulary, which is extraordinary, but all her study and reading and everything and her love of film all gets into her language, which is a mixture of extremely sophisticated and very dramatic. And she has a way of addressing you directly, frequently, addressing the reader. And actually, she might pick that up from Perot who does that, getting that into the energy of the syntax. and the pros. I mean, she was an absolute mistress of that. She was such a good writer. They are a joy to read. They're peculiar too. They've given you frissons all the time. They're bizarre. They're exciting. They're exciting. They definitely are. Well, we'll be talking about a couple in relation to Perot's Tales, but while we're here talking about the Sleeping Beauty, let's talk about the earliest of the stories in the bloody chamber, the one that she started work on first. In 1976, she wrote a radio play called Vampirella. She was thinking about what to write. Apparently, she ran a pencil along a radiator, and it made her think of someone's long nails scratching the side of a bird cage, and that suddenly sparked this idea for a version of Sleeping Beauty, which is really a vampire story, isn't it? The Lady of the House of Love. And what does she do in that story? Well, the Lady of the House of Love sets her sights on an innocent young man who comes strolling along. She inverts, as she often did, the plot, because normally the vampire would suck dry, the victim, and the innocent would be a girl. So here, the innocent is on a bicycle, I think. That's right. And he's a virgin, excuse me. But her passion for him absolutely slides off him. He's unhurt, and she fades away. So it's the inversion of the usual vampire story. And it's such a clever idea, I think, to take that idea of someone being sort of trapped in a sort of coma state for a hundred years, but map that onto this poor sort of victim of vampire hood, who's been trapped in this being a vampire for hundreds of years. And actually, it's this sort of innocent who comes into her house who releases her from that. And when she runs her finger along the bars of the cage, it's the caged bird. So there, it's an example of, no, Angela can't it also rip poems. And that's an example of her use of poetic imagery, because clearly the caged bird is also the vampire relar. Ah, of course. And when this young man is approaching the house, he comes through these thick, form bush with roses that are just a bit too luxuriant, aren't they? And then you discover at one point that it's the vampires victims of the manure that's feeding this. It's roast bushes. Why they're so flurrid and that sort of like sweet. The description is very perfect. I mean, very close. She was very, very good at sort of ecstastic description. I mean, very good at clothes. She was stylish. And she liked evoking the wardrobes of her characters and did it very well. She does very well. Just one last point on it is that one of the reasons that this young man is able to save the vampire in some ways is that he's completely sort of immune to her charms, but also to being afraid, rather like the the grims character, the boy who had to learn to shut her or to share her. And she has a line in the story where she says this lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero. And that reminds me of a line she has in the Sleeping Beauty translation where she says a young prince in love is always brave. That there's almost a sort of stupidity to heroism and braveness kind of blinkedness. Yes, I mean, one of the ways that she didn't always get on with self-declared feminists, though she was a self-declared feminist, but she was a controversial and often she had a lot trouble in America, for example, is that she was very sympathetic. First of all, she wasn't that interested in the difference between men and women. I mean, she didn't see it as a kind of absolute standoff. She saw it as social differences and class differences and money differences and so forth. But she was often sympathetic to men. I mean, she empathised with them. So here in a sense, the princes are not villains. I mean, in a lot of feminist fairytales, the prince becomes a sort of blue beard figure, but she didn't always do that. Well, talking of which, let's move to a different location to talk about Bluebeard and the longest story in Carter's collection, The Bloody Chamber. I just saw some bears go over the place. Oh my god, how wonderful. I love you. You never saw such a wild thing as my mother. Her hat seized by the winds and blown out to see so that her hair was her white mane. Her black-liar legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked around her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver, and behind her the breakers of the savage in different sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. So now we're just heading up to the top of Rainer's House past piles of books to her study. I'm climbing up increasingly narrow stairs, all the covered in beautiful pictures, artworks, and now I'm emerging into a fantasia of an office. Books piled everywhere all around, sunshine streaming in. There's a look of extremely organised chaos here, buried if you don't mind me say so. This is kind of what you dream of as a writer's study as fabulous. Well, what a privilege to be sitting in your study, Marina, your secret den at the top of your house, the final locked door at the end of the winding corridor. In Carter's collection, the story of the bloody chamber is based on Perro's story, La Barbe Blur, and it's the longest story in her collection. Why do you think she was so fascinated by the story of Bluebeard? It's about sexual attraction, her story, whereas the pyrrhove story is really about attraction to money and status. The mother of the bride wants her very much to get married to this figure, and she, as it were, complies to that in Carter's version, but that isn't really her motive. Her motive is, again, this latent idea, this idea of initiation. And Carter sees, I think she said somewhere, that she sees her as an apprentice in depravity, really. And she does that so superbly well. And it's very sensuously written, very baguilingly, characterised. I mean, he's very sinister. He's a mucky-de-sad figure. He's called a mucky. But I've taught this story a lot, and young women, who were mostly my students, are very, very enthralled by it, but also disturbed. They worry why they find it so exciting. And that's because there is a sense of sexual initiation going on. She, the heroine, is being initiated into something. And I think, Andrew, I use the word corrupt. There's a corruption, a corrupt possibility in her nature, which the blue beard figure, the mucky, brings out. Going back to the parrow, for those listeners who don't know the story of blue beard so well, because it has started to be phased out of children's versions of fairy tales, hasn't it? And so can you just recap for us what the original blue beard story is? Well, there's this terrifying man with a blue beard, who's considered a sign of a sort of stigma, a very serious, and people are very, very terrified of him. But he's looking for a wife, and the locals are kind of keen because he's extremely rich. And one of them pushes her daughters towards him. And the first daughter doesn't want to get married, but the second daughter agrees. And then he says he has to go away on business, and he shows a ring of keys. And he tells her that this is her shatland to the whole property, and she can go into anywhere and do whatever she wants with all his treasures and everything. But there is one little key on the ring, which she must not use to a certain room. And of course, that's the prohibition, that's the actual structural element of the fairy tale, that immediately you know that that ban is going to be broken. She opens the door, and then she sees hanging the bodies of all her previous predecessors, his wives. And then she hurriedly shuts the door, locks it. It's a horrific scene, isn't it? Yes, it's a gory blood all over the floor. In Carter's translation of it, she says the floor was covered with clotted blood, and in the blood laid the corpses of all the women whom blue beard had married, and then murdered one after the other. Yes, that's right. But she tries to conceal it from him, but he can tell because this is one of these marvelous moments of enchantment in these stories, which are quite thin on enchantment actually, but which is the key was fairy, and so the blood did not come off. And then he immediately acceses her by the hand, he's about to kill her, and she asks a little time to pray, to stave off the moment of exclusion, and she runs up to the top of the town. She calls for her sister, and calls for her brothers, and then eventually her brothers come and save her, they kill blue beard just in the nick of time. And that ending of the original perot story was not liked by Angela. She made a very definite change, which we can come to. Because as you say her version, the bloody chamber is a kind of initiation, isn't it? There's an equal attraction, and at one point the bride says, I longed for him and he disgusted me. That's kind of fear and desire. Yes. She had been working for a long time for many years, actually, on a book, a study of the monkey dissad, which arose as a topic in conversation with, I mean, so she was drawn to this type of milieu, which you could call liberty. She was interested in the relationship between the Enlightenment and Libertinism, the fact that free sex, sort of all sexual adventures, sexual experiments, were part of some Enlightenment project. And the side, of course, is this extreme possible version of this. And her book has stood at a very well as a study in pornography, but it's outrageous in terms of some feminist discourse on pornography, because she sees it as a series of lessons in what the true nature of marriage is, it's an exchange of, you know, it's chattel, women or chattels. She sees it as an instruction in masochism that dissad saw the masochism in women and sort of correcting it and opening up possibilities of how that could be used. So I think that this story, the bloody chamber, which was written quite late in the cycle, even though it's the opening story, takes off from her thinking about sad. She has a great line in that essay of a sadan woman where she says, "To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case, and to exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case, that is to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman." That is the kind of cry to be active in that. So she was opposing this and her, in her bloody chamber, after the fateful moment of seeing that all her predecessors have been killed, she actually takes things in her own hands and eventually ends up with a nice piano tuner. Yes, a blind piano tuner, yes. And you must reveal who rescues her because it's such a good moment. Well, that's an extraordinary moment, which when I was teaching the story for several years, the students really always wanted to write about it, is when her mother rides to the rescue. She's a sort of figure from a cowboy film in a way, almost branching her revolvers and her pistols. It's fabulous. And I was saying that Bluebeard is kind of disappearing to some extent from common knowledge, but it crops up a lot in other versions, doesn't it? I mean, in the mid-19th century, a novel like Jane Eyre draws on fairy tale themes, doesn't it? Jane Eyre seems like a furshish Cinderella and then Rochester's house is the kind of Bluebeard's castle, isn't it? Yes, and it's almost dead wife, yes. Exactly. Well, wife that's certainly not being cared for. And then we get a novel like Daphne de Borre's Rebecca, which has similarities and then a series of films like Hitchcock's adaptation of Rebecca and George Cookeau's Gaslight. And even something more recent, like 50 Shades of Grey, is a kind of Bluebeard version, although in that case, of course, he doesn't get his come-up and so. No, no, not at all. And also, the writing is not. I mean, there are differences in quality, even if the story lines are the same. Yes. In Andrew Coders' case, she changed the plots, too. I mean, this mother, writing to the rescue, is rather an unusual figure in her work. On the whole, she's not that interested in mothers. She's quite interested in stepmothers and why they're wicked. And some of her later, very late Cinderella stories, Ashputtle or the Mother's Ghost, are rather tender when she had herself become a mother and was sort of more interested in maternity and its emotions and passions. And then she wrote these very beautiful, three little fragments of Cinderella stories, much later. In the Bloody Chamber, she has a couple of stories that inspired by Beauty and the Beast, which in some ways is almost for kind of flipside of Bluebeard, isn't it? That's a story about a beast who turns out to be a lovely husband, in the end, rather than a lovely husband who turns out to be a beast. She had critical views about that, though. I mean, though she actually did translate also translate Le Pyrre Stabilnall's story, much later. But once had one of her great pungent phrases, she said Beauty and the Beast was about house training the id. Yes. Basically, unlike her Bloody Chamber, which is not about taming women's desires. It's releasing them. But about giving them authority over their own desires. She saw the boomer version of Beauty and the Beast in which he turns out to be a sweet young man behind the beast. She saw that as a cop out. She wanted to retrieve the beast. She wanted to bring back the beast and one of her stories, the Tiger's Bride, ends with this magnificent line in which he starts licking her. And as he licks her. Each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world and left behind a nascent patterner of shining hairs. So she becomes the woman. The beast, yes. So far from the beast becoming a human, did she want it to get back to this? And there's a tremendous love of animals and anonymity in her work. I mean, all the wolves in the company of wolves, which is one of her versions of Red Riding Hood. There's a tremendous sense of the wolves, bodily presence. Yes. It's worth saying just while we're talking about Beauty and the Beast, that that is not one of Perot's tales, although it's from that same French movement of Peri-Telse. It often gets misattributed to him, but it's really interesting. It's Madame de Bourbon, it's much later. Yes. But there was an earlier version by Madame de Villeneuve, which is really very, very different, but has a similar theme of the transfigured prince who has to be restored by the love of a human woman. Uh-huh. But in her version, the Tiger's Bride, it's the love of the beast that brings out the beast in the girl. Fantastic. It is amazing how she uses these stories to completely reconfigure what use we put these stories to. She was a friend of the author Robert Coover, who also was interested in repurposing Peri-Telse. In one of her letters to him, she said, "I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality can help to transform reality itself." And I wondered, do you think there was an element of the bloody chamber where she felt like, by writing this book, she could change the world in some way? Well, I think she had self-confidence, but she wouldn't have had that much self-confidence. I mean, she believed in her calling as a writer, and she believed that she had been changed by what she read and was reading all the time. I mean, she did believe she was a cultural loyalist, you know? She believed in the power of culture, which we are losing so much now, and it's really serious. Because without kind of common culture of this kind, you can't actually make moral decisions about the STEM subjects. You can't know what to do in law or in medicine or in economics or any of these things you need. You need the common culture of values. I mean, she was interested in emancipating women. She was interested in critiquing class, difference, and making the almost automatic respect for aristocracy which was, you know, doing something to that. Her love of the arseñar regime was a form of style. Her style is baroque, Rokoko or Nate. Very stylish, very artificial. So all those qualities, which we associate with the 17th century. She made it serve to a completely different purpose because she really was a very loyal and committed, engaged socialist and feminist socialist. I mean, she really was. It wasn't just a sort of lip service. Absolutely. She said in a 1983 interview that I'm in the demythologizing business. I'm interested in myths because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree. And it does feel like she's creating new myths. In fact, deflation and sort of puncturing is one of her hallmarks. And that she found in Peru too. I mean, he definitely does that. He's deflationary. He makes little the sides and jerks all the time about the conventions of the fairy tale. And she found that method, which is a very enlightenment, the most vivid exponent of it is his alter. With Condit, yes, of course. So exaggeration, playing your audience in two ways, thrilling them and threatening them at the same time, amusing them, tickling them. And so to manage to do that, it's both at the same time. It's such a feat. Well, on that note, let's move on to our final location to talk about one last fairy tale. Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves. She knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside, and she shivered. In spite of the scarlet chawl, she pulled more closely around herself as if it could protect her, although it was as red as the blood she must spill. Well, Marina and I now are perched side by side on her spare bed, looking out over the rooftops of North London. In the room is a large four-postor bed, which fills the space, and the walls are covered in, again, lovely paintings and books piled wherever we look. And we've come into the bedroom to discuss the last fairy tale we're going to talk about today, which is perhaps the best known tale of all little red riding hood. Marina, how do Perro and then Carter approach this story? Well Carter, in the very first paragraph, does something in addition to Perro, which is she explains what a red riding hood is. Because he doesn't tell us. Right, that's good. So very early on, like the sort of fourth line, she says, the kind of coats that great ladies wear going out riding. Making sense of the name. Well, making sense of the name, but also again, placing the story in a certain milieu, because Perro is very interested in how dangerous wolves are in society. Right, yes. He doesn't keep to the animal nature of the wolf. Definitely. You know, you get that from the very first page only when he says the poor child did not know how dangerous it is to chatter away to wolves. And you know what he's getting to. Her translation of his moral is, she writes, "Now there are real wolves with hairy pelts and enormous teeth, but also wolves who seem perfectly charming, sweet-natured and obliging, pursue young girls in the streets and pay them the most flattering attentions. And unfortunately, these smooth-tunged, smooth-peltered wolves are the most dangerous beasts of all." Yes, she's driving at home. I mean, in a very light and sophisticated way, but she's nevertheless making his moral even clearer, because he just has one word, "du-soul," which he's made sort of sweet. And she has three, this smooth-tunged. And she famously has a line in, I think, the bloody chamber, about the most dangerous wolves of "Hairy" on the inside. Yes, that's such a creepy idea, isn't it? And of course, Perot's story doesn't end with any reprieve. We are used to varied writing hood stories in which the father or a woodcutter, or some paternal figure, turns up in the nick of time, and cuts granny and red-writing hood out of the wolf's belly. That's the sort of ending that is now pretty much-- That's for crimson sanding. That's pretty much conventional in children's literature now. But of course, Perot ends with it, just, she gobbled her up and that was it. And Angela Carter remembers that her grandmother after telling her the story would pass on her and pretend to eat her. And in a way that memory of Angela's does catch the peculiar, quick, associate kind of contradictory pleasure of the story. Why do we like stories in which little girls get eaten by wolves? You're right. And why do we like our grandmother's puns, saying, "I was pretending to eat us?" And Angela was interested in these contradictory emotions. And the folklore is Maria Tuttas pointed out, the irony of that, that it's Angela Carter as a grandchild, being pounced on by her grandmother, pretending to be the wolf who just eaten the grandmother of a story. It's a wonderful image. But yes, that sort of sexual allegory of the story. Perot brings out, doesn't he? Because when little red-writing hood first arrives at her granny's house, he has to take off all her clothes and lie down in the bed with her before he starts even talking to this wolf in the bonnet. So there's something that is very intimate straight away. And now how does Carter, in the bloody chamber, how does she approach little red-wright? Well, she introduces a totally different denouement, you know, that the red-wrightening hood was nobody's meat. And she's not a victim. I mean, that's a strong theme in Angela Carter's feminism, that she really didn't like the idea that women were victims or that they would play their victimhood as a strength, that she was totally against that. She's very impatient of that. And her little red-wrightening hood is a heroine of that metal. She is not going to be subdued even by a wolf. And she leaps into bed with him. And just thinking about that vignette of Angela Carter being pounced on by her own grandmother as a child, we often think of fairy tales as tales for children, primarily for children. And yet we've been talking today about some very adult themes that are lying embedded within them. So in your view, are fairy tales for children? Well, they're in their origin and their history. For both, they were always told in Sir family circles. And Water Benjamin is quite right in the storyteller when he says that they were to alleviate the boutigium of ordinary tasks, especially in the winter, where you had to bottle peas, you know, shell nuts and spinning, all these very, very tedious domestic tasks, which our forebears were saddled with before domestic appliances, created the need for entertainment. And there was an element of invention and embroidery, but also there was these core stories. I mean, I think that what's interesting about fairy tales is that it's a hybrid form. It is double-tunged. The adults will get something different from it than the children. But what happens with the children is that certain elements of adult experience are passed on without the setting being an adult setting. So then they're not actually seeing people go to bed together. But they're hearing about the tensions. I think that it's a kind of code. And as you know, it's risen in age now. I mean, it was, all this infatigling in the 19th century, produced for children. In fact, you've got a wonderful historical set of beautiful books, illustrated books, Arthur Rackham, Edmond Delac, you know, it was kind of a vogue for the children of the elite to have these beautiful fairy tale books. And even Andrew Lang, his blue rose green- -Cullard fairy books. -Cullard fairy books, which started in the 1880s and went on right through to the 1914, I think, or even later perhaps. Andrew Carter really liked them and she said they were a model for her, to some extent. It's interesting because actually they're not, they were all rewritten by a team of women writers. So they were very expunged and very censored and not really at all what she was doing. But in which she was brought up on them and she really liked them. But that was a sort of example of where there's definitely for children. But now you find that there are infinite numbers of writers in many languages all over the world who are using fairy tales for adult material, adult purposes. And using it in a very dark mood. Especially in the space of recent films, I feel, that's true. -Yes. -That's really drawn on the dark side of her. And I think both Gothic, the sort of werewolf side of things and also pornography have become you know, the bonds that she, in a way, first showed between these forms are now pretty much acknowledged widely and exploited widely too. You have a fascinating line in, once upon a time, where you say that fairy tales are gradually turning into myths. So rather than being stories aimed at being optimistic or consoling there, stories held in common that bearers of wisdom, deep thought provoking and illuminating. -They don't have happy endings often, so any more. Actually, Rowan Williams reviewed by book and disagreed profoundly. So the myths were definitely religion. You know, whereas, I mean, they were to do with religious roots and spiritual values and the fairy tales were not, you know. There was a distinction. But I don't think there is really because a lot of myths, I mean, Cersei in the Odyssey, is definitely a fairy tale sorceress. I mean, she's changed his men into beasts. -Right, into pakes, yes. -I mean, there are just hundreds of scene-inths and mermaids are similar, so colipso who Odysseus lives with. So I think they are telling us myths. And by that, I mean, that they're seen as a way of thinking about common experience. In the way that we, Madera, is a very attractive to women directors and actors, because it seems to be a way of thinking about the extremes of women's anguish or maternal destructiveness and these experiences that need to be confronted but are very uncomfortable. And I think that similarly, a fairy tale goes into these disturbing corners and tries to give us ways to cope with them. I mean, I think Gantarokata was doing that. I mean, she, in Bluevierge, is trying to cope with the contradiction that many of us experience, which is that we're extremely attracted to things that are not totally, you know, healthy. Yes. And as a final question, Maria, why is it, do you think, that fairy tales have endured so long? And when you think about the future of fairy tales, what do you envision? Well, I think future fairy tales is looking as it were more prosperous than it used to be. I mean, for a long time when I was young, I was ashamed of my liking in fairy tales, because they were considered feminine, childish, silly, superstitious, and just generally trash. And actually, one of the reasons that I really, so revered and revered Angerokata is that she liberated so many of us from that fear of being despised for liking fairy tales, because she showed that they were actually intrinsically fascinating and rich and full of potential, full of possibilities. So I think the future is good for fairy tales. One downside of that future is that fairy tales are adapted to global entertainment, because it is a sort of Esperanto in which you can understand these figures if you're in Korea or if you're in Australia or if you're in Alaska. So it's an international short-hat. Even the symbols, you know, the keys, the glass slippers, the yn edw'n meddea newydd niegu i bod ei Gwi'r ric peth. Rydu hynny 'Mioedr a newydd ar gyda绾 eraill d recipients i yw Addaedd yn hwnw ff wernegoliad yn bakad y dry bob wedi'r lowfru leiau acc killers i gennw hyn i fod yn jeld wrth g Botrau'r chwilig blessDrive ag yn gallwЖ ei hunol fel fan Chyajeol yn I Away g díai irritatedio unwy ac y llwyys. Citywaestynach unith. Mae'n cewthing yn evaluated synau, canhun wrth yn cewd u foINAUDIBLEych ond yrое yn ac mae'n gyddiadol fel sut yn yr hynny. Mae'n gyddiadol fel yna, mae'n gyddiadol fel yna. Mae'n gyddiadol fel yna. If you enjoyed this episode of On the Road with Penguin Classics, please spread the word and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll leave you with James Ferbers 1939 Fairy Tale, The Little Girl and The Wolf. One afternoon, a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally, a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" Asked the wolf. The little girl said, "Yes, she was." So the wolf asked where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood. When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house, she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than 25 feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf. For even in a nightcap, a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro Goldwyn Lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead. Moral. It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be. [Muziek]