orn in 1942, John Crowley is a giant, not only of American fantastic literature but of American literature generally. His novels have a poetic complexity of style, a breadth of symbolic reference, a depth of characterization and an intricate mastery of narrative structure with few contemporary parallels; reading them can be daunting, but the rewards of doing so are enormous. SF and fantasy have midwifed the talents of a number of great modern writers—Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe—and John Crowley's is a name to be uttered in the same breath. (Photo courtesy of Ellen Datlow.)
Crowley's career began with three relatively short novels of quiet brilliance—The Deep (1975), Beasts (1976) and Engine Summer (1979), available in an omnibus volume as Otherwise. His eminence was announced with Little, Big; or the Fairies' Parliament (1981), a long fantasy encoding vast quantities of folklore into a timeless yet very modern love story; he built on this achievement in the huge, magisterial Aegypt Quartet, made up of Aegypt: The Solitudes (1987), Love & Sleep (1994), Daemonomania (2000) and Endless Things, the last forthcoming. Shorter and deliberately more accessible, The Translator (2002) is a memorable tale of an exiled poet and a talented student interacting on an American college campus in the early 1960s, a relationship with global repercussions. Crowley is also a fine if occasional short-fiction writer: His comprehensive collection is Novelties & Souvenirs (2004), including the superb, groundbreaking time-travel novella "Great Work of Time" (1989). Snake's-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley (2003), edited by Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, is a comprehensive survey of Crowley's oeuvre.
Crowley's latest book, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, published by HarperCollins Morrow in June 2005, is a mesmerizing reconstruction of an ironically autobiographical novel the eponymous tempestuous genius of Romantic poetry (1788-1824) might just have written in his later years, a document that changes the lives both of Byron's daughter Ada and of the modern scholars who uncover it. The Evening Land is, on the face of it, the story of Ali, the bastard son of a British lord, who, brought from the wilds of Albania to inherit a desolate Scottish estate, survives all the batterings cultural alienation, hereditary madness, arcane conspiracies, the Napoleonic Wars and the life of a desperate adventurer can throw at him; and as this dramatic tapestry unfolds, its significance grows and grows, resonating powerfully across the centuries ...
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed John Crowley by e-mail in May 2005.
Let's begin with your quite remarkable new book, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. You've clearly been interested in Byron for a long time, as your 1990 short story, "Missolonghi 1824," attests. Why this fascination? What do you find especially compelling about Byron as a writer and as a personality?
Crowley: Actually, the fascination goes back a lot farther than that. In the late 1960s,
I wrote a play—or maybe it would have evolved into a screenplay—about Byron and
[Percy Bysshe] Shelley in Pisa, and the death of Shelley. It set Byron as an homme moyen
sensuel and ambivalent realist against the pure utopian vision of Shelley—and how they
evolved a deep friendship despite the difference. It was a tale for those times, I guess. But
I came to love them both—Byron more profoundly, or intimately. He seemed to me—as
few historical characters ever do—a whole man, a man whose interior was as knowable
as any living person I could know intimately. Because he was so unguarded, his poses
and his personae were evident as what they were, and he was always ready to mock
himself for projecting them—mock himself as smilingly and tolerantly as he did the rest
of the world. I came to think of him as a friend.
The core of Lord Byron's Novel is exactly what the title promises: The Evening Land, a brilliant pastiche of the novel Byron might plausibly have written. This raises two questions: First, why engage in such elaborate literary impersonation when your own prose style is justly celebrated in its own right? And second, how difficult was it to master Byron's voice in such depth and in such idiosyncratic detail?
Crowley: The answer is the same for both questions. I really enjoy ventriloquizing or
channeling other voices, and I think I'm good at it, within some distinct limits. The long
pastiche 18th-century erotic poem in Daemonomania called "Ars Auto-amatoria, or,
Every Man his Own Wife," was a delight to write. (I managed a career as a publicist and
writer of public-relations and instructional films by imagining myself the kind of person
who wrote such things, and writing what he'd write.) It was like turning on a faucet to
reproduce the voice. (Of course I also kept notebooks full of turns of phrase, terms, bits
of slang, Latin tags, etc., to draw on at need.) Byron's letters and journals fill 13 volumes,
and I have them all—they've been my pick-it-up-when-nothing-else-suits reading for
years. They are lots funnier and swifter and eccentrically individual than my imitation.
Byron has been a favorite subject of historical novelists—one thinks of such books as Robert Nye's The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989) and Tom Holland's The Vampyre (1995). Nye reconstructed Byron's Memoirs, which were in reality destroyed after his death, and Holland took him in the direction of supernatural legend; did the fact that those approaches had already been adopted point you towards the idea of a novel amounting to Byron's fictionalized autobiography?
Crowley: No, actually—though there are even more than you name. I glanced at Nye's
book after conceiving my own, and found it unconvincing—I'm not being dismissive, I
didn't want to have my own attempt clouded by his. I particularly objected to Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's otherwise delightful The Difference Engine [1990] for its suggestion that Byron could have become a politician. Harder to put down was Paul West's wonderful Lord Byron's Doctor [1989], which was convincing, though his Byron wasn't mine, and I quickly had to avoid it, too. I didn't myself want to write about Byron, his real adventures or imaginary ones.
In The Evening Land, why do you have Byron couch his own life story in indirect yet eminently recognizable terms (as he also did in his long poems "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan")? Is his career still generally misunderstood, to the extent that he must be given a fresh opportunity for self-defense?
Crowley: Well, I don't think any but the learned will be able to compare in any detail his life and the tale I've written for him. I think the goal wasn't defending him or explaining
him so much as it was imagining the story he would tell—he was a modern man in many ways, but a modern writer because of his naked employment of his own life in his fictions—always knowing that because of his (also modern) media fame, his readers were going to make the comparisons, and try to guess at the (scandalous) truth.
Also along those lines: The Evening Land is supposedly written by Byron from around 1816 to 1822, during which time he, of course, changed, perhaps maturing, certainly evolving in outlook. The novel itself undergoes shifts of tone, from the Gothic onwards. ... How precisely do the differing modes and moods of the chapters of The Evening Land map Byron's ongoing psychological and literary development in those years?
Crowley: I'm not sure I was entirely conscious of doing this, though I am happy to think that it strikes you that way, and it certainly would be what I would want the book to do. I
think I was as much conscious of the growth and maturity of Byron's characters (that is, those I invented for him), just as he would have been. It could be thought that the historical progression of Byron's own life—childhood in Scotland, years at Eton and then at Cambridge, early visit to Albania and abroad, raising hell in London, bad marriage, debts, fleeing England, long residence in Venice as the lover of a married woman, growing involvement in the European revolutionary movements—is very intentionally mapped against my invented story, and of course the resonances are intentional, but—I guess it's a different kind of channeling—in the writing these just seemed to be the inevitable matters a novelizing Byron would be drawn to. And (as my imagined Ada notes) he is more nakedly undefended here, in some ways, than he was likely to have been in his self-justifying memoirs.
A further layer of Lord Byron's Novel is the later notes and commentary of his daughter Ada on the text of The Evening Land. Ada, herself dying of cancer, reaches out to her dead father; and it becomes clear just how determined Ada's mother, Lady Annabella, was to destroy her husband's reputation, to poison Ada's mind against him. Was Annabella really this monomaniacally vicious? And how did you conceive of the master stroke of having Ada, a highly gifted mathematician in real life, perform a certain cryptographical maneuver on The Evening Land?
Crowley: Lady Byron—Annabella—was indeed as far as I can tell a dreadful woman. I have most of my information from the books of Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord
Byron and Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Nothing in my account of her in the various notes and letters is invented. She deserves a novel of her own, except that I doubt Moore's nonfictions could be bettered. The inclusion of Ada in my account: I had at first, and many years ago, conceived a book that would be solely Byron's novel. My then agent—Kirby McCauley—was discouraging; he was pretty sure this was a highly rarefied sort of treat, and my idea that everyone of course knew the details of Byron's life and would get the subtext was mistaken. I see now he was right. When I revived the idea, my editor at Morrow also believed there had to be some armature of explanation for the reader, and some account of how and why the book existed. Who could supply that? It was my present agent, Ralph Vicinanza, who said "How about Ada?" Which instantly started a chain of thinking in me. What I didn't want to do was novelize Ada in a standard sort of way. The idea of notes was my way out of doing that. What I liked was that the present-day idea of Ada as a mathematical expert and computer prophet sends my sleuths off in
the wrong direction in understanding what she's done.
The outermost layer of Lord Byron's Novel, if I can call it that, is the e-mails exchanged by the people involved in the supposed unearthing and publication of The Evening Land in the present decade. The style here is contemporary, informal, after the Georgian cadences of Byron and Ada; why is this contrast so necessary? Can our own period redeem the mistakes, omissions and tragedies of two hundred years ago?
Crowley: That's an interesting idea, and it may be that the salvific role of Smith and
Thea and Lee did evolve as you say—but in fact the idea was simpler at the beginning—I
needed some way of the Byron text being discovered in the present, and also responded to from a contemporary point of view. I wanted someone who knew little of Byron and was unmoved by what she did know, who could, in her own learning, somehow instruct the (possibly also unsympathetic) reader in what's interesting about the man and his mind. I thought a young Lesbian woman into science would be just right. That's all. Then when you have a character, the character has to have a life, and a story.
Although Lord Byron's Novel is highly original, and a creative departure for you, it does reflect many of your abiding themes. One of these is the sense of a history lost, submerged, never to have been—as in Great Work of Time and the Aegypt sequence. Lord Byron and his daughter might have written the words you attribute to them; but they in fact did not, making LBN a counterfactual fiction of a kind, a statement only of what should have been ... or am I overstating the case here?
Crowley: I guess I think of stories and the telling of them as being in large part the
creation of unavailable worlds—lost or never existent. My books have tended to be one step up from this: They have often been about people telling or hearing or pursuing stories, and thus are about the creation or coming-to-be of those unavailable worlds. In this book both Ada and Byron imagine worlds that could have been but weren't—and the fact that the world in which they did these things never existed either reinforces the poignancy—I guess—I don't know—I hoped for a ripping yarn, and here I am with my constant concerns.
Well, Lord Byron's Novel does have many very exciting elements one might associate with genre fiction—the atmosphere of the Oriental fantasy tale; ferocious combat among Albanian clansfolk; an ancient crumbling mansion; a mysterious murder; a zombie rescuer; smugglers; battle scenes; doppelgangers; somnambulant episodes; a global revolutionary brotherhood; and so forth. And a certain "Roony J. Welch" may just be quasi-immortal. ... Is LBN in any major sense a work of fantasy?
Crowley: Well, I don't think Byron's novel is—as Ada points out, it may be sensational, wild and fantastic, but there are no strictly supernatural elements in it. Is mine? I think that if a novel has no whiff at all of the impossible, the fabulous, the inexplicable, the metaphysical as the Romantics meant the word, then it isn't very realistic, because the real (this, our shared physical and biological) world does have those intimations in it. (When the intimations become certainties, you have fantasy.)
Stepping back a few years, to your other historical novel about poetry and history, The Translator: There, you invented a Russian èmigrè poet, I.I. Falin, who, while teaching at an American college in the early '60s, influences and becomes closely involved with an American woman student. As in Lord Byron's Novel, the narrative is structured around father and daughter figures, intergenerational legacies and affinities; but there are crucial differences also, such as the directness of the relationship portrayed. How far apart do you see Falin and Byron as being, in character and wider significance?
Crowley: Falin was, or certainly can be interpreted as being, an immortal, or at least the avatar of one. He is remote, ascetic, tragic. Byron is to me the very idea of the physical and human—sensual, self-mocking, unfooled except by his own vanity (and aware of it, too), ambivalent, hungry, fleshly, funny, restless, curious, sometimes ridiculous. I guess they are—quite literally—poles apart: poles of the poetic temperament, maybe. The father/daughter connection is certainly there—Falin (I just remembered) has a daughter who died as a child, as Byron did. And legacies—lost manuscripts recovered or ambiguously saved. So while it's hard for me to imagine two novels more different in most ways, I guess a case can be made that my mind has been running on these themes in the last years. My own daughters (twins) have just turned 18. Could that have something to do with it? Not consciously, I can say with certainty, and I think it matters.
In The Translator, you evoke very effectively a disquieting sense that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 most likely should have ended in nuclear war, an outcome blocked only by means of miraculous intervention. Is this again your counterfactual theme at work, only this time involving a lost historical path—or "story"—we're lucky to have avoided?
Crowley: My repertoire seems to get narrower or more singular with every question. But
doubtless you are right: I have indeed long been running variations on a single metaphor: that the unavailable pasts, roads not taken, lands dreamed of but unvisitable, stories we can't complete, which we abandon or which abandon us—all these have a kind of anterior reality simply because we can name them and think about them. And as Byron said, "Words are things." In fiction—written fiction—the things that don't exist but can be named have as much existence as all other things, which—in the fiction—are themselves only names.
The Translator has a very authentic texture—and you of course were just 20 or so in 1962, very much an inhabitant of the '60s, of its idealism and social experimentation. Is The Translator in some sense your elegy to that time?
Crowley: It is a recounting of the days before what now count as "the '60s," the period that the upheavals of the decade would bring to an end, or seem to. The generation in college at about the time I began was called in the media the Silent Generation, but the newcomers were about to get very noisy. I am not a Baby Boomer—born in 1942, I am one of a small generation of war babies—I was formed as a person before "the '60s." I wouldn't call it an elegy: I don't mourn it. But it was delightful to recount it. The young heroine of the book has the experiences in college and high school that (mutatis mutandis) I had, reads the books I read, meets the people I met (including those Old Left characters) and does the things I did. It's as close as I will get to an autobiographical novel.
You have reputedly completed the final volume of the Aegypt Quartet—Endless Things. When do you expect this to see print? Is the new book as long and densely wrought as Aegypt, Love & Sleep and Daemonomania? Or is it more a relatively short coda, a summation?
Crowley: Various difficulties having to do with the exigencies of the modern publishing
world and the anomaly of what is in effect one very long novel in four parts have impeded the appearance of that volume. It will see the light, I very much hope in the company of the first three—it seems (to me) not too much to ask that they all be in print together in a form and in places where readers can get them and read them as one.
The last volume was always intended to be short, a coda, carrying the conceptions forward, maybe far forward—I was thinking of those musical compositions like Smetana's Die Moldau, which end in the skirling musical line heading off into the distance and disappearing. Sometimes you can hit upon a literary conception that is either not possible to execute, or one your own powers are not up to. The book's longer than I expected it to be but not as long as the others. Various threads are knotted. Some are dropped. The central metaphor of the book is the conception (attributed to Pythagoras) that life resembles the letter Y—a letter Pythagoras is reputed to have invented. We are continually choosing a way at the parting of a bivium, or "two-way." One way is broad and obvious; the other narrow (as in a classic Roman letter Y). The Middle Ages thought of it as the broad way of ease and pleasure, and the hard narrow way of virtue—my ways are different ones. I wanted to call the book A Y, but thought I'd given enough trouble to publishers with unspellable, unsayable titles.
What other books and stories do you have forthcoming? I know publication of the chapbook edition of your 2002 novella "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines" is imminent (Subterranean Press), and there's been mention of a nonfiction volume. ...
Crowley: Yes, the "Girlhood" volume will be a limited, signed edition, the nonfiction will be out in a year or so from Subterranean Press, collecting essays about reading and writing, pieces on magic and Utopia, studies of writers including Thomas M. Disch, Robert Louis Stevenson and T.H. White, pieces on comics and a collection of reviews. Other than that nothing is imminent except for the final volume discussed (if it is imminent). I have a conception for a new book, but it's not time to talk about it. Talking can fix the form of something that isn't ready to be fixed, and limit its growth.
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