From: rjb@milton.u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)
Subject: John Crowley reading (long report)
Organization: University of Washington
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 18:27:21 GMT

   John Crowley (who does not pronounce his name 
to rhyme with "holy," by the way) has been in 
Seattle as one of the instructors at the Clarion 
West summer writers' workshop.  Last night he gave 
a reading at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company; 
afterward, he answered questions from the audience 
and then signed books.

   Crowley's work is probably of interest to some 
people here, since much of it deals with hermetic 
(and even Hermetic) themes.  His 1981 novel, 
_Little, Big_, subtitled "The Parliament of 
Fairies," is a novel of faery that's not 
completely alien to the faery of (say) George 
MacDonald, but takes a very modern form.  His most 
recent novel, _Aegypt_, is a fantasia on Hermetic 
themes that shows a close knowledge of their 
influence in European culture, and yet brings this 
knowledge into a modern, American tale.

   _Aegypt_ has three parts, named after the first 
three houses of the zodiac.  This  would lead one 
to expect three more books, though the novel 
itself (which is richly and recursively self-
referential) is quite clear that the point of such 
schemes is that they *need not be finished to be 
complete* (the _Faery Queen_ is given as an 
example).  Nevertheless, his current work-in-
progress is, in fact, the second volume of 
_Aegypt_, ("which is, or purports to be, a four-
volume work"), to be titled _Love & Sleep_.

   Crowley began his reading by pointing out that 
he had just recently heard of Orson Scott Card's 
_Seventh Son_, and hadn't known about it at all 
while working on the piece he was to read -- which 
was in fact an extended story embedded in the 
matrix of that kind of American folklore written 
up by Botkin and Randolph, and handled in a way 
thoroughly unlike Card's.  Card draws on this 
folklore as the founding matrix of an alternative 
American history, for tales that provide something 
of an alternative, rather optimistic, foundation 
mythology.  Crowley, setting his tale in the 
Kentucky of the early to mid twentieth century, 
draws on it to form the back side of the tapestry 
of pre-contemporary America, filled with that 
sense of decline (the Depression, the devil 
Hoover, the destructiveness of intensive coal 
mining, the triumph of witchery in the folk, which 
is to say evil, sense) also characteristic of 
_Little, Big_.  Staying very close indeed to the 
content and style of American folktale, Crowley 
nevertheless works in seamlessly the agrarian 
witch-fighting motifs explored in Carlo Ginzburg's 
_The Night Battles_.  The Kentucky voice never 
falters, never slips into archness, and never 
promises false comforts.

   After the reading, Crowley answered questions.  
Unfortunately, I didn't take notes, so this is 
simply a report of what struck me, as I remember 
it some time later.  If anyone else was there, I'd 
welcome your posting any amplifications or 
corrections.  I should also point out that my 
summaries miss the wit and style of the original.

   When asked how he had come to write about 
Kentucky, he hesitated, and then spoke briefly 
about his few years in Kentucky hill country as a 
child.  His father, a doctor, had a job in the 
early 50s at a Catholic hospital which provided 
him with the biggest house in town and a tutor for 
his children (a nun on detached service from the 
local Catholic school).  They had in a sense lived 
in a compound, isolated from the life of the town, 
and he had seen much that he had never understood.  
Later, he found himself trying to understand what 
he had seen and experienced by reading about that 
part of the world, and that period.

   Asked about his own reading, he sketched out 
several categories of books:  books one enjoys 
reading, books one admires immensely, books one 
feels have changed one's life, books one wishes 
one had written... He used _Ulysses_ and _Lolita_ 
as examples of books that he admired; he said he seldom reads 
for pleasure (evidently meaning fiction), that he 
cannot endure reading anything that doesn't do 
something worthwhile with language (he does review 
books, with the understanding that he sends back 
anything he can't keep reading after the first 15 
pages).  In response to another question, he 
repeated his key advice to would-be writers.  
Genre fiction especially, he said, is often 
approached as a shared secret vice, a collusion in 
which the writer displays certain conventional 
emblems (elves, swords, rockets) as an indication 
to the reader that they are on the same wavelength -- 
and then does nothing else.  No risks are taken, 
nothing new is developed.  This kind of thing is 
neither worth reading nor worth writing.

   Asked about his view of the publishing 
situation, he said that he was less horrified than 
he had been, that mostly he saw his own part of it 
and that he had a workable niche, that he couldn't 
see that publishing could really be done much 
differently, given the market forces with which 
publishers had to contend.  He summarized by 
saying that he thought the number of good books 
published each year was about the same as it had 
been in the 19th century -- it was simply that the 
amount of garbage had increased immensely (not 
that good things were harder to get published, 
just harder to find).

   When asked whether he himself used the Art of 
Memory he described in _Little, Big_, he laughed -- 
he guffawed -- and said he couldn't imagine anyone 
actually doing so.  A follow-up question, about 
whether he found memory important in writing, took 
him aback, and he finally pointed out that memory 
was a necessary basis for any kind of writing.  
For him in fact the Art of Memory_ was a metaphor 
for the kind of activity involved in creative 
writing; writing about memory allowed him to write 
(at one remove) about writing.  In another 
comment, he said he'd never been able to endure 
typing -- and retyping -- and that word processing 
had come as a great advance.  He thought it might 
be, for modern writers who had gone through the 
transition, much like the transition from longhand 
writing to dictation-to-a-typist had been for 
someone like Henry James -- whose sentences became 
even longer, more involuted...

   Asked about his writing habits, he said that 
since he has a job (as a screenwriter for 
documentaries), and two five-year old daughters, 
he is not able to write all day.  He said that 
someone (he thought perhaps it was Dumas, or Hugo) 
had pointed out that writing is easy:  writing one 
page a day amounts to 365 pages (one novel) a 
year; two pages a day amounts to two novels, and 
so on.  For him, though, writing does not come so 
easily; not only does he have to brood about it 
before he writes, but he can't write after a day's 
work, so he has taken to getting up at about 5am, 
so that he has a couple of hours for writing 
before his daughters get up.

   Someone asked, insistently and hopefully, about 
whether he characters came to life for him; as 
politely as he could, he denounced the idea.  "My 
characters do what I tell them.  When the book is 
over, that's it."  The questioner was insistent 
about how characters from his books kept living 
for her.  "I hope they're not doing anything I 
don't know about," he said, then more seriously 
tried to shut the door on the possibility by 
pointing out that he wrote his books specifically 
so that the characters at the end would be folded 
back into the world of the book.  He also pointed 
out that books were words, not characters:  that 
what was real was the language.  At the end, only 
the author's voice remains.  "I alone escaped 
alive to tell you."  He approved a suggested 
bumper sticker:  "No one here gets out alive 
except the author."

   Another questioner asked whether he had changed 
his mind much about Giordano Bruno.  He said he'd 
learned more; that he'd always thought of Bruno as 
an odd combination of genius and egomaniac, but 
that (as a result of reading Coulianu's _Eros and 
Magic in the Renaissance_) he'd come to agree with 
Coulianu's notion that Bruno was the magical 
equivalent of Machiavelli:  the first cold-blooded 
master of magic as mass manipulation, the ancestor 
of media politics and advertising.  He followed 
Coulianu's distinction between totalitarian 
societies and manipulative societies, and said 
that the latter were more interesting to live in, 
especially since, as magicians putting out their 
own blends of imagery and emotion, writers had 
more of a chance.

   Afterward, I mentioned, as he signed _Aegypt_ 
for me, that there had been a dreadful irony in 
the manner of Coulianu's death (shot through the 
head in the bathroom across from his office at the 
University of Chicago, presumably as a result of 
his speaking out against the Ceaucescu regime, 
shortly before it fell).  He said he'd been very 
saddened to hear it, that he'd known Coulianu 
personally and had in fact taken him to his first 
(and last) science fiction convention in Chicago, 
which Coulianu had enjoyed immensely, and that 
Coulianu had himself written some six fantasy 
stories, very good ones, which would now, 
unfortunately, probably never be published.