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.

"Hello, Bookstore"

 

My pal Matt Tannenbaum is about to celebrate 50 years as a bookseller.  He made his bones at the Gotham Book Mart, working for the legendary Frances Steloff.  “Always bring the customer with you back to the shelf when he or she asks for a book which you don’t think you have in stock.  Especially if you know you don’t have it.  Your customer is bound to see something else along the way.”  Frances was enormously grateful for having been led into a trade she so cherished, and Matt clearly is, as well.  He once remarked that when you’re young, you’re unlikely to recognize a life-changing event, because you haven’t lived enough of a life to realize it’s going to change.  But that first day Matt walked into the Gotham, he set his life on a different path. 

                                   Matt Tannenbaum - Photo Credit: Bill Shein/Berkshire Argus

It’s enormously satisfying to see somebody imagine a thing, and make it happen.  Matt moved to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, and bought his own bookstore, on Housatonic St., in Lenox.  He and the store have been an enduring resource since, for both readers and writers.  Matt is very much a bookman, in the sense of loving everything about them, the texts, the smell, the history.  He’s achieved something not everybody gets, which is to make a vocation from his ardor.  This is a guy who breathes the written word.  And as a kind of grace note, in 2022, during COVID, a filmmaker named A.B. Zax made a documentary called Hello, Bookstore, which is in fact how Matt answers the phone.  I can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s hugely charming, and a terrific surprise.  I was prepared to like it, of course, because it’s somebody I love and respect, but there’s always your dread going in – like a high school production of Oklahoma – that it’s going to be amateurish and squirmy, and you have to trust me on this one, squirmy it ain’t.  It’s without pretense, and I hope I don’t doom your interest by calling it heart-warming.

https://www.hello-bookstore.com/

I was on the phone with Matt, just the other day, and if I sample a piece of the conversation, it gives you an idea of how his mind works.  He mentioned that he’d struck up an acquaintanceship with Otto Penzler – another bookseller, of course – because of their shared enthusiasm for Charles McCarry.  (McCarry hailed from Pittsfield, MA, just up the road from Lenox, and he and Matt had gotten to be pals; Otto, as a publisher, had anthologized McCarry in several collections, Best American Mystery Stories among them.)  My own acquaintance with Otto is very slight, but I’ve been short-listed several times for BAMS, and the first time I got in was the year it was guest-edited by Donald Westlake.  I told Matt that I wrote Westlake a fanboy thank-you, and we had a desultory correspondence over the next half-dozen years, snail mail, because he didn’t do internet, and his letters were written on a manual, because he didn’t like electric typewriters, either.  He didn’t want something humming at him, he said.  I’m thinking Don punched those keys pretty hard, and he must have gone through a whole bunch of Smith-Coronas over time, because the e was always out of alignment, about a sixteenth of an inch above the line of type.  Matt laughed, and said something about technology, and how of course Westlake was allowed his idiosyncracies, and then he said, You realize there are no rough drafts anymore.  On a computer, you don’t mark up a hard copy, you just overwrite what you wrote before.  It took me a minute to think that through.  Word-processing is a huge convenience, and I, for one, like being liberated.  But the consequence is an actual loss.  What we gain in momentum, we lose by having no record of the process.  It’s a thoughtful insight. 

I’ve had a lot of eye-opening conversations with Matt.  He’s always been a very alert reader.  He was the one who pointed out the elegance of the last line of John Crowley’s Little, Big to me – a shared appreciation – but truth to tell, I’d missed it, first time around.  I think, too, that I would have turned a deaf ear to Lawrence Durrell, if not for Matt.  Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.  Patrick Leigh Fermor, maybe.  He can be very attuned to what a reader might not realize they’d been missing.  This is the natural magic of the bookshelf, one thing next to another.