John Crowley

1942-2026

[The news that John Crowley has died, at the age of 83, has rolled around the world of Fantasy in which he was so important and unique a figure. I never knew him, and his reach was I think less (less than it should have been) in the UK than his home nation; but he figured largely in my Fantasy: a Short History, as one of the most important counter-balances to the Tolkienian/post-Tolkienian tradition of the 1960s-2000s. I could have given Crowley a lot more discussion and space in the book, but: ‘short’ was in the title, and Fantasy is large. In the end my discussion mostly looked at Little, Big. Below is my initial blog-reaction to this magisterial novel: it was considerably boiled-down and essential-oiled to fit into the tight word-limit of the finished book.]

+++

John Crowley’s Little, Big is a large, complex book about, at its heart, the interaction between contemporary humanity and the kingdoms of Fairy, which exist, we discover, in a kind of topographical fold, or series of folds, within our regular world. Or vice versa.

The first half of the novel reads like a family saga. By the time you finish reading it you realise that this isn’t really a family saga at all. That, though, is how it starts. We open with Evan ‘Smoky’ Barnable, an innocuous young man, (he’s called Smoky because he is so easily ignored, so existentially tenuous) from an unremarkable family who works in the 1980s [or perhaps some earlier decade: I’m not sure it’s clear] as a clerk in New York City. He befriends another clerk, George Mouse, and through him meets Alice Dale Drinkwater, known as Daily Alice, a scion of the ancient, wealthy Drinkwater family. He falls in love. To marry Alice Smoky must walk into the countryside north of the city and find the family home, Edgewood, though it is not on any maps: a big house set in large grounds. He manages this, and meets Alice’s family, about whom there is something uncanny, something other-wordly, folk-tale-y, ‘away with the fairies’ as the old idiom has it.

Then the story flashes-back to the building of Edgewood, at the beginning of the 20th-century: wealthy American John Drinkwater marries a much younger English girl called Violet Bramble and builds the house for her. Drinkwater is an architect, best-known for designing a gigantic Manhattan tower, a modern cathedral of glass and steel. But after meeting Violet he turns his back on his practice and instead makes Edgewood, a topographically-complex country manor in an overlapping series of older styles. Violet, we discover, is in communication with the fairy folk, who are hidden in the interstices of our world. Drinkwater becomes increasingly fascinated by her visions and communications, and the nature of the fae. He revises and republishes his book The Architecture of Country Houses multiple times, turning it from a conventional architectural description into a disquisition of fairy spatiality: Drinkwater believes that ‘space’ is actually a vast, possibly infinite series of concentric spheres, with the corollary that each sphere, as we go inwards towards the centre, is actually and counter-intuitively larger than the one before. In the centre of this nested geometry live the fairies, a kind of parallel evolutionary life-form, unnoticed by science because they have left no material artefacts in the fossil record.

The novel then fleshes-out the family tree of John and Violet’s children. Through their mother the family inherit the ability to see, and sometimes interact with, the fairies. They possess a magical pack of tarot cards that can predict and in some cases determine the future. The Drinkwaters think not of ‘history’ or ‘family history’ but of Story, which folds back upon the novel itself, whose story Crowley is shaping and we are reading. The novel reverts several times to sex-scenes, often with a rather queasy vibe, under-age girls frolicking naked in the open-air and the like.

In a scene reworked from the Nibelungenlied John Drinkwater’s son August tastes blood (from a fish he has caught in a local pond, not from a dragon) and discovers he can understand the song of the birds. A talkative kingfisher strikes a deal with him: if he steals and hands-over his aunt’s tarot pack, August will get what he desires — which is, as August tremblingly confesses, sexual irresistibility to the local girls. The deal is sealed. This leads to August having many illegitimate children, whom settle in the land around Edgewood, and one of whom is adopted into the family (he becomes Daily Alice’s father) but August discovers that his bargain does not make him happy. He is as driven as are the girls by the ruthless force of sexual desire, and hates the unhappiness his promiscuity spreads around. He goes missing.

We return to Alice and Smoky, and the present-day. On their honeymoon, hiking through the wilderness, Smoky loses his way and ends up in the cottage of ‘the Woods’, a fairy couple, who gift him a golden necklace and a fine bag in which to keep his wedding-present from Alice (that present is: a childhood, since Smoky never really had one). When he finds his way back to Alice out in the wilderness the necklace is a twine of creeper and the bag mouldy and full of insects.

Still, Alice and Smoky’s marriage proves happy, except when it isn’t, which is, I suppose, pretty much the model for a marrige as such. They have three daughters, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and a son, Auberon. Alice’s sister Sophie has an affair with Smoky and becomes pregnant — with his child, she tells the family, although actually the baby, a girl called Lilac, was fathered by her cousin, George Mouse. Lilac is stolen by the fairies and replaced with a changeling. It is her destiny to become queen of fairyland.

The narrative moves on a generation: Smoky and Alice’s son, Auberon, grows to adulthood and moves to Manhattan, staying in George Mouse’s gigantic compound of tenements in the city. He falls in love with a Puerto Rican woman called Sylvie, and when Sylvie is lured away by the fairies he is inconsolable.

I had not read this book before, for though it was a big deal in the States — I know people who consider it perhaps the finest postwar American novel — it really didn’t make any kind of impact this side of the pond. I’m not sure why it didn’t: it is extraordinary. Perhaps it’s too distinctively American in focus. As I was reading the first few hundred pages — the whole book is over 600 pages long — I found myself thinking: oh, this is kind-of like A Hundred Years of Solitude, only better, because better written (sometimes Crowley’s writing grows over-fruity and over-insistent, but mostly the prose is very finely styled, evocative and striking and wonderful) and because the magical adjunct to its realism, rooted in the traditions of faerie imported from Old Europe, is more resonant and enchanting and charming than whatever random gubbins passes for the magico that is añadido a el realismo in Gabriel García Márquez’s book. But in its second part the story takes a different, unexpected turn, and I had to revise my opinion.

We seem to have moved into a near-future collapse-of-society dystopia. New York is decaying, poverty and crime are everywhere. A charismatic politician, Russell Eigenblick, becomes President of the United States, promising to wage war on the mysterious forces that, he claims, are behind the general decay and ruination. In a bizarre turn we discover that this person is actually a reincarnation of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who has been reawoken not to help humanity but to protect Faerie from human depredation. A female wizard called Ariel Hawksquill, a distant relation of the Drinkwater family, becomes Eigenblick’s adviser. Civil war breaks out in America, although few understand exactly what they are fighting for.

Auberon has, since losing Sylvie, become a homeless alcoholic. Recovering some of his former life, he learns the ‘arts of memory’ — these are memory-palace techniques, ultimately derived from Giordano Bruno, though perhaps better popularly known now than they were in 1981 (Hannibal Lecter uses a similar scheme in Harris’s novels) — from Hawksquill; in fact she is using him to learn how to get to the hidden Edgewood. Restored to respectability, Auberon becomes a writer for TV soap opera, of all things. He comes to understand that President Eigenblick is the emissary of the fairies, and that what is at stake in the ongoing war is the rolling-back of human civilisation and the restoration of the wilderness.

The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, Auberon knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands. [Little, Big, 338]

This second half of the novel reminded me not in the least of Márquez, but somewhat of Gene Wolfe’s Byzantine fantasy series Book of the New Sun— and more directly of Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) and of Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), though bigger, shaggier and more baroquely constructed than either of those two. Really, comparison is misleading when it comes to Crowley. He is sui generis.

As the book moves into its final act the contention between the human realm and fairyland comes to the fore. President Eigenblick has Ariel Hawksquill killed, and afterwards disappears himself, though the civil war has acquired its own momentum and no longer needs him. As the human world collapses, the fairies, who can see the future (but have a much hazier sense of ‘the transitory forms of the present’ and are almost entirely blind to the past) prepare to retreat further into their wildness. The novel’s subtitular fairy parliament is called to facilitate this migration—it happens at Edgewood, at Midsummer, and is attended by the entire Drinkwater family. Daily Alice departs for fairyland, and the rest of her relatives agree to follow her, to take the place of the retreating fairies — all except Smoky, who elects to stay (‘I was never really part of this, you know’ he tells the family). So he stays, and mends the magic orrery that provides electrical power for the house. But then, at the last moment, Sophie manages to persuade him to come along after all, and so he goes. Or he tries to. As he steps out of the house, he dies (I think of a heart-attack):

But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; and by her face he knew that he was right. The Tale was behind him.

“Back there,” he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction; back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the arches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless woods, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn’t matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summers house, and on a balcony there Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show hm her nakedness behind the shadow of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride. Dame behind, goddess of the land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch, there turning over cards. [Little, Big, 619–620]

His funeral doubles-up as the wedding of Auberon and Sylvie. Then there is a coda, entitled ‘Once Upon A Time’: a description of now empty Edgewood decaying into the wilderness, although still shining with light (because Smoky mended the orrery-generator) which, since electricity is a rare thing in the socially-collapsed human world in which the novel concludes, makes the place a legend.

The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circumstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels’ who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty-five stairs, fifty- two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and populous with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one.

Little Big is, I think, too long; the plotting too intricate and complicated, especially in its middle-and-latter sections, representationally over-busy, too easily distracted by this or that shiny element or possibility. But I found the death of Smoky extremely moving and affecting, and I concede that it probably wouldn’t carry the weight it does without the momentum of so long and detailed a tale behind it.

Earlier I called the book baroque, and that, I think, is the key — and that’s its connection with Wolfe’s New Sun books, in my mind, though those Dying Earth fantasies are, in many particulars and in general vibe, very different— baroque not in the sense of rococo over-ornamentation and kitschy artifice with which the term, as an aesthetic signifier, is associated (although there is a good deal of rococo over-ornamentation in Crowley’s writing and plotting) but in the sense that Gilles Deleuze argues in The Fold (1988). For Deleuze (to quote Tom Conley’s summary)

The Baroque does not comprise what we associate with Bernini, Borromini, or Le Brun. “The Baroque state reveals identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time. Baroque was not reserved exclusively for the Europe of the last three centuries any more than classicism was the unique privilege of Mediterranean culture.” ‘Baroque’ designates a trope that comes from the renewed origins of art and has stylistic evidence that prevails in culture in general. Under its rubric are placed the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, intense taste for life that grows and pullulates, and a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement. It could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble, and atomize when they crack along an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of a shoreline; in following the curls and wisps of color that move on the surface and in the infinite depths of a tile of marble; or, as Proust described, when we follow the ramifying and dilating branches of leaves piled in the concavity of the amber depths of a cup of tea. [Tom Conley, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Gilles Deleuze The Fold [1988] (University of Minnesota Press 1993) x-xi]

Everything is folded, infolded, and the art of the Baroque — the pleats and flexes of the painting, the curlicues and grace-notes of the music — captures this. Deleuze’s original French title is Le Pli — from this word we get implicate, explicate, complicate: all relevant — and his book is in large part a reading of Leibniz — (‘le pli-bniz’) — styled as the quintessential baroque philosopher. Leibniz’s monads are at once separate, indivisible, windowless isolations, and universal interconnectedness, at once multiple and singular, fragments of God and elements of the absolute wholeness of God. This is Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s monads:

If the differential mechanisms of our clear perceptions are checked, then the minute perceptions force selection and invade consciousness, as in drowsiness or in giddiness. A dust of colored perceptions falls on a black backdrop; yet, if we look closely, these are not atoms, but minuscule folds that are endlessly unfurling and bending on the edges of juxtaposed areas, like a mist or fog that makes their surface sparkle, at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain in a normal state. But when our clear perceptions are reformed, they draw yet another fold that now separates the conscious from the unconscious, that joins the tiny edges of surface to a great area, that moderates the different speeds, and rejects all kinds of minute perceptions in order to make from all the others the solid fabric of apperception: dust falls, and I see the great fold of figures just as the background is unfurling its tiny folds. [Deleuze, The Fold, 93]

Fairy-dust! This is not entirely a facetious comparison on my part: for though he doesn’t mention fairies, part of Deleuze’s argument is that the trandscendent, the miraculous and spiritual worlds (which Leibniz, devout Lutheran, identified with the God of Protestantism) are folded complexly into the material, mundane, ordinary worlds. It is not a matter of simple revelation, or of one magisterium subsuming the other; it is a striated and pleated surface, like the surface of the brain. This is also Crowley’s sense of things: magic, faerie, is there, but tucked away, easy to miss. Or to put it another way, we mundane beings are tucked away in the logic of wildwood and fairy glamour.

Crowley’s universe is one radically folded, fairyland into mundane reality and vice versa, just as his novel folds a wide range of story-elements and allusions — Grimms’ tales, Carroll’s Alice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Barrie, Wind in the Willows, the Cottingley Fairies — into its cinched textual surface. The two sizes specified in the novel’s title are not opposed, but complimentary. Alice, named (we can see) for Carroll’s heroine, whose own size keeps changing, who shrinks down and shoots up, who interpenetrates her wonderland and is interpenetrated by it, thinks so:

Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. [Little, Big, 207]

Alice’s sister Sophie has a number of dreams through the novel. This is the first:

I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctors office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus — all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story. [28]

Edgewood itself is a TARDIS-like structure, not just a combination of different architectural styles but of different topographies and dimensions, all folded into one another.

[Smoky] had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible) that once on a summer afternoon having entered through the screen door into Edgewood, he had never again left: that the various doors by which he had afterwards seemed to go out had led only to further parts of the house, cleverly by some architectural enfoldment or trompe-oeil (which he didn’t doubt John Drinkwater was capable of) made to look and behave like woods, lakes, farms, and distant hills. The road taken might lead only back around to some other porch at Edgewood, one he had never seen before, with wide worn steps and a door for him to go in by. [157]

The architectural enfoldment is also the principle upon which the book is structured: the reader passes from chamber to chamber, some tiny, some vast, each linked to the preceding in a way that feels intuitively right rather than linear or conventionally emplotted. Dreams are folded into the novel, just as they are into life, and as in life what dreams work is the pliable tucking-away of whole universes into our minds:

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: “There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.” This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn’t be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. [112]

Stories within stories, worlds within worlds, oak and thorn double-helixed around one another. Crowley is working towards a form that enables him not just to denotate but to embody, formally and evocatively, the way marvellousness and ordinariness are intertwined, one with the other. His success in this is the splendour of Little, Big, though it doesn’t work all the way through, or on every level. And there is another aspect: for I wonder if the ending Crowley chooses, after so much textual busy-ness, doesn’t weight the balance towards elegiac, even tragic disconnection: the pleat that cannot quite fold itself over. Like Moses, Smoky sees but will never enter the promised land. Fairyland is not incorporated into our world, as in Lud-in-the-Mist, nor does it stage a kind of land-grab as in The King of Elfland’s Daughter — leaving only a few religious hold-outs, but otherwise infusing the human kingdoms with glamour. Instead the situation is that the fairies have withdrawn further into fairyland, and the kingdoms of humankind have declined and fallen into desuetude. We cannot, the novel seems to be saying, connect, only or otherwise. At most we can glimpse, comfortably numb-style, out of the corner of our eye. Perhaps Crowley is saying: that’s enough, as Smoky acknowledges the brevity and incompletion but also the authenticity, the magic, of his time with Alice. But I don’t know. I put down the novel feeling sadness. Sunt lacrimae rerum.

+++

I come, as I say above, rather belatedly to Crowley. I’ve read Beasts, and Aegypt (though not its four follow-up titles) plus, now, Little, Big; but that’s all — I will read more, and I see why he is so highly praised by American literary critics, although not why he has been so neglected in the UK. But I am, I must say, struck by how little secondary criticism there is of him, or at least how little there is that’s any good. There’s a collection of essays by diverse hands, edited by Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi [Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley (Canton, OH: Cosmos Books 2003] but it is very variable, quality-wise. There’s a chapter in Paul Kincaid’s Call & Response (Beccon 2014). There are various pieces on JSTOR, but none that seem to me really to get at the distinctiveness or worth of Crowley’s writing. There’s quite a lot of identifying of sources which, since Crowley is undoubtedly a highly allusive and intertextual writer, is an understandable academic reaction. But it’s also point-missing: Crowley does not set up his allusions as a grid for us, as readers, to tick-off. Something more pli-able, more foldy, is the point here. The best essay, as in the essay that chimes with my sense of what Crowley is doing is Colin Burrow’s piece in the London Review of Books from a few years back. For Burrow the key to Crowley is the ‘impurity’, the askewness, of his approach to matters of generic convention — Fantasy, for instance.

John Crowley’s novels are hard to describe. His best one, Little, Big (1981), is probably something you might call ‘fantasy’. It contains talking trout, and little people, and witches in New York, and an attempt by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to rule the world again, which is thwarted by a family who possess a magic deck of cards. What makes it not quite fantasy, or perhaps fantasy askew, or impure fantasy, is that its magic is invariably seen only out of the corner of the eye, as a flicker in the undergrowth; most of its characters aren’t quite sure they believe in what they think they might have seen. I haven’t read a book quite like it. It flirts with a slightly donnish whimsy and yet persuades you that a possible way of seeing the world is to believe that there are alternative worlds inside or alongside what we think of as the world. A lot of Crowley hallmarks were first seen in Little, Big: an interest in hermetic knowledge, a fascination with Giordano Bruno’s elaborate mnemotechnic schemes, and a belief that our world sometimes shifts its shape, even though hardly anyone notices it doing so. It all sounds unbelievably tiresome, but it is saved by its own wishful uncertainty as to whether any of it is true.

For Burrows, Crowley is a fundamentally Apuleian writer. I can sort-of see what he means, although at the same time, Apuleius’s Golden Ass moves through its various magical, freakish, comic, burlesque and macaronic adventures towards a genuine, a heartfelt religious conversion: embracing Isis as goddess and queen of heaven and dedicating himself to her cult. This, it seems to me, is not Crowley’s way.