In Memoriam John Crowley

Little, Big and Big, Little

John Crowley was my undergraduate writing teacher. On the first day of class, he introduced himself by saying, “I’ve written six novels, and they’re all out of print.” Then he asked us all to give a book we wish we ourselves had written. He said Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I said Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

He would later recommend two books to me: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. I’m still amazed just how perfectly he identified my cragged intellectual spirit when I was just 20, and how gently he expressed his insights.

As it turned out, he had reviewed Lanark years earlier for the New York Times and perfectly interpreted its heart as well.

It is more like the great homemade books, the all-encompassing works that have always been constructed not of mainstream materials but of the author's own peculiar mud and straw: ''Pilgrim's Progress,'' say, or Branch Cabell's ''Jurgen.'' Like Swedenborg's ''Divine Love and Wisdom,'' ''Lanark'' is built on the conceit that the universe has the shape of the human body.

Such homemade structures can be accessible and popular, like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, or private and obsessive, like a yacht built in a basement. Which is ''Lanark''? It is a question to which a purely literary judgment is not a sufficient answer. The book often seems provincial, both in the narrow angle of its vision and the great size of its ambitions. It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy, often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers—for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots—to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.

And that was how I learned who James Branch Cabell was. Crowley was fascinated by mad works of art, whether it was Jurgen or The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosecreuz, and looking back on it, I think his (very American) position on such works was that they were about secrets. In his fiction, such secrets weren’t illusory…but they were inaccessible.

I believe the appeal of hermeticism to him was that it and other forms of gnostic seeking gave a peek into what it might look like for a person to be in touch with an untranslatable form of knowledge and attempt to translate it anyway. Even if the actual “knowledge” was bullshit (in my hard-nosed view), Crowley’s works keep returning to the question of what it would be like if that alternate knowledge were real but metaphysically separated “our” world from anything we in our scientific naturalistic world were capable of experiencing.

In Little, Big and Aegypt, the secret is there, and it is very real, and it is never revealed. It’s the fairy world in Little, Big (and the inner world beyond that, and the one beyond that, and so on…), and in Aegypt it’s the hermetic world of Giordano Bruno and John Dee. The way I read it, Crowley’s ingenious solution to the inevitable disappointment of gnostic-style mysticism was to turn the problem inside out, posturing the establishment of the concept of gnostic worlds as holding a permanent, ineluctable secret.

The “other worlds” of the Aegypt quartet are seemingly realized for us in the Renaissance sections of the novels, only for Crowley to eventually pull the rug and reveal that the seeming explanations aren’t sufficient explanations at all. If you read the quartet literally, you don’t get a payoff anymore than you get to see the fairy world in Little, Big. The payoff, in as much as there is one, is in the realization that any sense of the flows from one metaphysical paradigm to the next can only be grasped by the heart and not the head, and only by inadvertent feel rather than interrogation.

When Pierce Moffett has his vision of the artworks of the next age in Endless Things, he talks of them like this:

works that don’t cycle or promise completion as the old stories or tales did, nor that move as ours do by the one-way coital rhythms of initiation, arousal, climax and inanition, but which produce other rhythms, moving by repetition, reversal, mirror-image, echo, inversion; vicissitudes of transformation that can begin at any point, and are never brought to an end at all, but just close, like day.

But these are the words of a character of the present age who is drifting incomprehensibly into the next one, and so too this is not even a philosophical standpoint but the depiction of a mind metamorphosizing into something we can’t understand—at least not rationally. Pierce realizes in another fit of mysticism that the whole sequence is surrounded by a greater “enveloping realm.”

It provided all that was needed for this world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn’t shine through it as through a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is.

It makes the link to Little, Big so explicit that Aegypt could well have been called Big, Little. The only contact with the outer realm is our ability to feel our lack of contact with it, even if that doesn’t make sense.

I read the Aegypt quartet as Crowley’s attempt to chronicle by texture and ambience what could not be chronicled explicitly: a transition from one way of the world’s workings to a new one. The writer is in the position of a Giordano Bruno trying to convey something of what can’t be conveyed, and if it ever is sufficiently conveyed, then what’s conveyed couldn’t have been worth conveying. That expansive view of writing (and art more generally) is what I learned from him. The majesty and humility in how he communicates that view in his novels is why they stay with me and why they deserve to be read.