John Crowley

I’ve been reading Gibbon’s history, Decline and Fall, at bedtime, and I was going to write a SleuthSayers column about it, but over the weekend, John Crowley died.  He would have found it entertaining, to hear about the Gibbon.  He would have thought it appropriate.

[CROWLEY’S HAND & MANUSCRIPT]

I met John in Lenox, Massachusetts – introduced by our mutual friend, the bookseller Matt Tannenbaum – and we fell into a kind of pipe-and-slippers habit pattern.  He was working on Little, Big at the time, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a talisman it would turn out to be.  He told me he’d written a science fiction novel loosely based on the War of the Roses, and I read The Deep with great enthusiasm.  Beasts, his second novel, was chewier, but I thought it was very accessible, and I was surprised to find out people thought his stuff was difficult.  (I wasn’t surprised to learn he admired Nabokov.)  This would have been the winter of 1978-79, and to my knowledge, John hadn’t shown many people the book he was writing.  His agent, his editor at Bantam, and his old pal Lance Bird, the filmmaker.  So when he asked me if I’d be interested in looking at it, I was of course flattered, and said yes. 

Little, Big was about two-thirds of the way done.  He was actually further along than that, but the manuscript he gave me was as much of the finished rough as he felt confident in.  It was mostly typescript, but with a lot of handwritten interpolations, and the last hundred pages were entirely in his hand.  He wrote with a fountain pen, and a calligraphic nib, so the downstrokes were heavy, and the horizontals more delicate.  I found his handwriting in and of itself hypnotic, but it was also very sure.

That year, the third novel, Engine Summer, was published.  He told me it was in fact his first book, which he’d written in all innocence, not knowing about Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “By the Waters of Babylon,” or Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz – in other words, he wrote a post-apocalyptic story not realizing there was already an established library. 

It’s an over-simplification to call Little, Big a fantasy novel.  It is, of course, but it plays very little with the conventions.  Reading the rough draft, I was struck dumb.  I couldn’t believe I actually knew the guy who was writing this.  (A couple of years later, when the book was published, and I was pressed for a description, I called it a cross between The Wind and the Willows and A Hundred Years of Solitude.)  At the time, I wasn’t comparing it to anything; it seemed as if he’d invented a new fiction.  You were invested in the idea of story. 

I believe one of the reasons so many people are charmed by Little, Big is that you feel a sense of ownership.  As if he were writing to you.  John spoke sometimes of the ideal reader, as opposed, I think, to the generic reader.  What he meant was, that as a writer, you write to that person – to the ideal reader.  The many, many readers of Little, Big imagine themselves to be in on the secret, and they are. 

John was a lapsed Catholic.  This explains, among other things, his fascination with forgotten rituals, and lost brotherhoods, and secret signs.  Much of this comes out in the Ægypt quartet, the Rosicrucians, John Dee, alchemical mysteries, transmutation and transubstantiation.  You don’t have to believe conspiracy theories, but the faith in them of people who do is a kind of mystery.  The world is not how it’s always been, or it’s no longer the way it was, but once upon a time, these things were true.

Crowley had a distinctive voice, and an enormous curiosity.  He could take a familiar thing, and hold it up to the light, turning it back to front, and show you something entirely different.  There’s a fantastic metaphor he uses in Little, Big – the Art of Memory, which I remember him explaining to me, one night, when we were half in our cups, which goes like this:

You take an object, a leaf, a rose, a glass half-full, and it represents a memory, of childhood, of courtship, or mourning, and you place that object on a shelf, or in a niche, in an imaginary room, in your mind.  And you people that room with memories.  And over time, you build many rooms, and turn those rooms into a house of memory, that you enter at will, to bring back your own history.  And it may happen, that you wander in this house, and you come into one of your many rooms by a different door, and you see all the memories in that room from behind, as if their masks have slipped, and your orderly arrangement is no more than a fiction, a story told by the firelight. 

I’ll miss that curiosity.  His appetite for wonder, his intelligence, his kindness.  He was deeply thoughtful, and deeply thoughtful of others.  He was a sweet, decent man.  And for all of that, he wrote an immortal book.  He changed people’s lives.  He certainly changed mine.  God rest him.