Totalitopia

by John Crowley

  Christopher Beha, who was then coeditor of the magazine, liked my novels, wrote a fine review in Bookforum about them. When I was asked to do a reading at the 92nd St. Y in New York I was told I needed an introducer, and I asked Chris. Harper’s later published a lecture I did about Utopia in the front matter of the magazine, and a review of a biography of Madame Blavatsky (very fun). When I found I needed an operation on a failing heart valve and would lose a semester’s teaching (and the accompanying income), I called Chris and asked if maybe I could submit some article ideas, and—to my astonishment—he asked if I wanted to do the “Easy Chair” every other month. Saved my ass, in effect. (He hadn’t known about the operation; he just thought I’d be good at it.)

  I don’t know about a different discipline. My fiction often depends on an authorial voice telling things—not only stories but facts and thoughts—to the reader; a lot of it is drawn out of research on all kinds of things. So are the columns. I felt a great freedom, and at the same time a fear: were these subjects and their treatment really interesting to anybody? Why did I think I had a claim on readers’ attention? Chris (who, sadly for me but not for him, is no longer at the magazine) was uniformly encouraging.

  What are the Least Trumps?

  If you think I am going to allow myself a cheap joke in answer to this (“the ones he hides in his hairpiece” etc.) you mistake me. The Least Trumps—that is, a deck of cards with mystic or allegorical pictures having connections to the story—appeared in my first novel, The Deep. The images and mottoes on the cards were inspired by Renaissance magic images described by Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory. The deck that various persons in Little, Big lay out has picture cards that are more like the Greater Trumps of the Tarot deck than the Renaissance images. Great-aunt Cloud—the character in the book who uses them most—calls them the Least Trumps because all they seem to answer are questions about small events of daily life—whether it will rain on a picnic or if a cold will get worse—though in the end they are discovered to be Great after all. Charles Williams’s 1932 mystic novel is called The Greater Trumps.

  Why are there so many John Crowleys in IMDb? Which one are you?

  I recently went to see the fine film Brooklyn and at the end was pleasantly disoriented at seeing my name loom up amid the titles, all alone and about nine feet long. If only. Of course he is the Irish film and stage director, living the life I should have had instead of this one as an ink-stained wretch.

  Another John Crowley (with middle initial W, inverting my own middle M) teaches American history at Syracuse. When we communicated once to untangle a confusion that had arisen about which of us wrote what—our bibliographies had gotten mixed together in Wikipedia—he told me that he’d had a student who went to Syracuse specifically to study with John Crowley, that is with me. Sorry I missed him.

  My filmography is long but most of it wouldn’t be on IMDb.

  Perhaps your best-known documentary film has a definite science fiction feel, The World of Tomorrow. Who is Lance Bird?

  Lance Bird (yes, his real name, though in an [unpublished] roman à clef about the movie scene in NYC in the 1970s the author gave him the name Blaise Falcon.) The real Bird’s middle name is Evan, which allowed me to make the neat and similarly absurdly romantic anagram Nic Ravenblade. Lance and I were at Indiana University together. We both wanted to make films, but he had already worked on a micro-budget horror film that was finished and exhibited in a couple of theaters. We both took photography classes (on the principle that the lenses and the film were the same) and set out to make an underground film (this term is getting too constant here) with the IU photography department’s wind-up Bolex 16mm camera. It was never finished but was to be called Tigers in Lavender—I had read somewhere that tigers respond to lavender plants the same way cats respond to catnip. Lance moved to NYC too and spent his time trying to get scripts read and deals made; I collaborated on the scripts. That never happened, but Lance began working with a partner, Tom Johnson, on documentaries about auto racing, beginning with stock cars and then Le Mans–style endurance racing. I wrote narration for some of these, despite the fact that I had not learned to drive and had never had a license (and me a Hoosier, sort of!).

  In the late ’70s the NEH began giving away lots of money for work in TV, and the three of us made a documentary that started as a study of Walker Evans and became a story of the whole Depression. And then The World of Tomorrow, about the 1939 World’s Fair, which is a weird kind of masterpiece (my wife calls it my “secret fiction film”). Working with Lance and Tom I acquired my love of archival film and the strange metaphysics of making movies with dead people walking and talking, sometimes about the world to come.

  The famed critic Harold Bloom dragged you from the Den of Obscurity that is the birthright of every SF/Fantasy author. Have you forgiven him?

  I’m not sure how much less obscure I am. But I owe Harold Bloom much. The connection had an odd beginning: I had never read his criticism, though I knew his name and fame, and once in the library I picked up his book Agon, which has a long essay in it on what he calls heroic fantasy. It was so illuminating and interesting that I wrote him a letter—I’d never written to an academic critic—and sent along a book of mine that I thought reflected his views (it was Engine Summer). Pretty soon he wrote back and said he’d read it, was moved by it, and had gone to the library and picked up some other books of mine and read them too. Little, Big was the one that touched him most, and he has never ceased to praise it to anyone nearby. His sponsorship got me the half-time teaching job at Yale I still hold.

  Like many SF/Fantasy authors, you teach writing. Do you actually have a method or are you winging it?

  Isn’t winging it a method? I talk mostly about the shapes and forms of fiction, the machinery that generates all kinds of stories. I don’t instruct them as to what sort of fiction I think is good or not good; I try my best to discover what they want to achieve and try to help. I have one great advantage at Yale—creative writing classes require applications with writing samples, and from thirty to fifty applications I can choose a class of twelve. So I get not only good or promising writers but ones I think I can help. I had no idea when I began how much I would enjoy teaching—mostly for the chance to be with young people and know their thoughts. I know more about how a certain (but broad) class of twenty-year-olds thinks than a great majority of people my age. Next spring, 2018, will be my last semester.

  Bloom praised your “superb and sustained elusiveness,” and I join him in that. But I sometimes wonder, commercially, is it a feature or a fault?

  Oh jeez. There is a nearly ontological difficulty here. I think I am elusive sometimes, but I also think I lay tracks (though sometimes I brush them away). I really want readers to follow, to play the game I’m setting up. At the same time I understand that a large percentage of the general reading public has little interest in such agonistic labor or pleasure. And I also want many many readers, both to enhance my self-esteem and make me money to live on. And (again) I want my work to please me in its multiplicity and its interconnections, formed sometimes by the repetition of a single word in differing circumstances. I keep believing that I have written a book this time that everyone can like, or at least millions can like, and it will make me honored and rich, and I keep on queering the deal by my usual elusiveness, peculiarity, literariness (by which I mean that the secret subtext of my works is always this is a book), and general self-pleasing. Oh well.

  What’s the deal with The Chemical Wedding?

  The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosencreutz (the actual author was a German theology student named Johann Valentin Andreae) is a sort of romance written in 1616 about a self-doubting and anxious but essentially good man who receives an invitation to a wedding in a magic castle. It’s usually regarded as some sort of allegory, maybe of the alchemical process (a lot of alchemical sort of stuff goes on in it, and some of the characters could stand for alchemical stages), but at bottom I think
it’s a mad sort of novel, using the farthest-out technologies and sciences of the time. It might also be a parody of those sciences and technologies. I have loved it for years, and I did a new version (not a translation) that I hoped would make it more accessible to readers. In trying to describe what sort of thing it is, I created (unintentionally) something of a stir by describing it as a candidate for the first science fiction novel. Complaints were made that the “science” in it was unscientific (Kepler and Galileo were the real scientists of the time) and that you can’t have science fiction based on bogus guesswork science. I imagine such critics hadn’t read much early SF.

  You once spoke in an interview of your “compassion for characters in novels—who live in a world that has a shape that they don’t know and can’t finally alter.” Hmmm. Equally true for Little, Big and for Four Freedoms? Is it a feature of The Novel in general?

  I think it is a feature. Just as we ignore unwelcome or difficult facts in our actual lives—personal and public and universal facts—we ignore the absolute fact that the characters in the novels we read have made all their decisions, errors, triumphs, before we start to read the book. The end that they will come to, which determines all that they will do in the story, is fixed—the book’s in print! Of course writers can fall in love with a character in the course of the writing and find themselves unwilling finally to subject them to the endings planned for them—but even so, the endings are the endings and can’t be changed when the book’s done.

  Little, Big and Four Freedoms seem to differ in that in the first there’s a tale being told whose shape is finally revealed, which all the human characters learn they have been enacting all along, and who exit that tale as the book ends. In the second, nothing seems fixed, and characters come upon new openings and new turnings they can’t have imagined; nevertheless they come to an ending in which they are as fixed as the archetypes they embody on the last page. If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on the subject you could go to Harper’s magazine and look for my “Easy Chair” essay called “A Ring-shaped World.”

  Ever get a bad review? One that helped?

  I’ve actually had very few bad reviews. I’ve wondered if this is because reviewers who are among the small band of committed readers of my books somehow manage to get the review copies and submit positive reviews. The vast number of bad reviews I seem to collect on Amazon (along with vast numbers of moderate, disappointed, confused, ecstatic, and unintelligible ones) suggests something of the kind. The worst review I ever got was in the New York Times, when they used to run short “also noticed” reviews. It was for Dæmonomania, the third volume of a four-volume novel, and the reviewer was apparently unaware of this fact. He was puzzled and annoyed and found the book both silly and tortured.

  Reviews that helped? Long ones, like Chris Beha’s mentioned, or James Hynes’s in the Boston Review. If for nothing but to learn if what I wrote was intelligible, if my general purpose was understood.

  Do you still write for film? Ever try a narrative (fiction) feature? How is writing for documentaries different?

  I have been working with Laurie Block, who is my wife, on a biography of Helen Keller for American Masters (PBS). It’s been in the works now for a long time, but there are signs it may soon be headed for completion. I cowrote the script (it was a heavily scripted show, much of it based on Keller’s writings, spoken by the great Cherry Jones—not portraying Keller but giving us Keller’s written words). I’ve long since given up trying to write fiction films; it’s easier to write a novel of a movie idea—at least you have something in the end. (None of my novels have been sold to the movies, though there was some interest in a couple.) Now I’m looking into the possibility of Little, Big being a “premium TV” project with multiple seasons. More on that in some possible future where there is more.

  Most documentaries have minimal writing; when I began writing those historical docs in the 1970s I took as my model the 1930s–40s docs like The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains and Night Mail (with narration by W.H. Auden!). Since sound recording was so clumsy then, most of the work of explication came through an intimate, characterized voice, sometimes even speaking in a (manufactured) present tense—that’s how I wrote The World of Tomorrow, with Jason Robards in effect playing a character. Today all of that is unnecessary (as you can shoot a nice doc with your smartphone) and unwanted.

  One sentence on each, please: Trollope, Lovecraft, Western Mass.

  I have read almost no Trollope; my mother was delighted by him, but the conventionality of his writing and the kinds of things his innumerable books are concerned with are largely uninteresting to me.

  I have read almost no Lovecraft; high school nerds I knew were delighted by him, and some people I know admire and cherish him, but the absurd extravagance of his writing, and his inability despite that extravagance to convey actual human feeling in extremity, make him uninteresting and in fact repellent to me.

  I love Western Massachusetts, where my children were born, to which I fled from a decaying New York City in 1977, where I now live in a house forty minutes from where my conscious life began seventy years ago in southern Vermont, and where I live among all kinds of people, rich and poor, back-to-the-landers and never-left-the-landers, pickup drivers and Prius drivers—about as close to a practical Utopia as it’s possible to get and still live in the ordinary.

  You often (Little, Big and Ægypt) write about arcane and conspiratorial religious orders that secretly control not only our lives but our realities. Do you know something that we don’t?

  There is much that I know, Terry. Actually, not so much. I can’t say why I am so attracted to stories and circumstances where thought and notions have power over the human realm and the natural order. It’s noticeable, though, how few real believers in the kinds of gnostic mythologies I retail are interested in my writing, and how the few I have met that are attracted to it get it wrong. The best example of what I attempt is in the fabulously long Ægypt Cycle: through three volumes the gnostic realm both of hope and terror continually grows, the world is posited as being labile and able to undergo shifts of reality that human souls can influence. In the last volume the final shift or change is into the common world that the non-gnostics among us (in fact all of us) actually live in: “the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case.” It occasioned some disappointment, though this conclusion was implicit in everything that went before.

  You write about poets (Lord Byron); do you write poetry? Do you read it for fun? What about James Merrill (who blurbed one of your books)?

  I assembled a personal anthology of poets and poems in my early years and it’s basically lasted the rest of my life. Small additions have been made over time (I like John Ashbery very much, and James Merrill, yes). I wrote my last poem somewhere around 1975, and there weren’t many in the previous decade—though masses of it in my teens and early twenties, most of it now well lost. But I don’t read much modern poetry at all. I wrote a novel about a poet (The Translator) in part because a poet—Thomas M. Disch, my friend Tom—said that a poet would make a great hero for a bestseller. Americans, he averred, love poets even though they don’t read poetry. I loved writing the book—and writing the poems in it, mostly the early poems of my heroine, and the translations she makes of the supposedly Nobel-worthy poems in Russian of her mentor. That was great fun. (It’s another gnostic-gods-and-angels novel that puzzled people and came nowhere near being a bestseller.)

  At Yale you teach a course in utopias, yet you’ve never attempted one. Or have you?

  I think Four Freedoms, my World War II home front novel, is a sort of ambiguous utopia. The gigantic (imagined) factory, the care for the workers at all levels, the welcome to women, people of color, Native Americans; the money spent and the effort expended to make workplaces healthy and safe (they were neither by modern standards, but the effort was real); the provision of nurseries, clinics, information, recreation—well, I probably exaggerate a
ll that, as utopias tend to do. At a point late in the book a woman who has won a management job in the factory wonders why the model provided by this factory, and by the astonishing productivity of industry in war, couldn’t be simply continued in peacetime, producing cars and refrigerators and radios for everyone. She imagines something like a nationwide telephone tree that would let the government know who needed what.

  In our title piece “Totalitopia” I present a glimpse of a socialist utopia with a world government, a distribution system like Amazon’s but owned by the world, and all people siblings. Lewis Lapham, the publisher of the quarterly where the article appeared, couldn’t decide if I was kidding. Neither can I. I recently read somebody saying that all utopias are dystopias in disguise—I reject that, though examples are legion.

  What’s next?

  I have a new novel coming out from Saga in fall 2017. It was deliberately conceived to sell lots of copies, and because it’s a frank fantasy I’m hoping it will win back the fantasy-fan readership I seem to have partly lost with the last couple of books. (To be clear, many readers of fantasy fiction also happily read books of other kinds, like mine.) The book is called KA: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. Dar Oakley is a crow, born some two thousand years ago, who becomes involved with the human world and its otherworlds, and by mistake comes to possess a sort of immortality—he dies over and over but always comes back. He travels from somewhere in Celtic Europe to the American continent and lives in various societies through the centuries, up until some time in the future. Dar Oakley learns to speak with various humans in many times and places, including one in near-future America who writes down his story. I’ve wanted to write a book about crows for years—for reasons obvious and not so—and here it is, or soon will be. I consider this my last full-dress novel—I’m very nearly as old as you—but my agent insists I never say that, so mum’s the word.