Little, Big

by John Crowley

  Crowley is a writer of surpassing, almost overweening, intelligence and cleverness. Some writers set the tone of their works with the first sentence—Crowley tends to start the ball of multiple meanings going with his very titles. His last novel was Engine Summer (1980), whose title plays with, and alludes to, the mood of elegy, the portrait of a post-technological decay in which engines are as much a memory as Indians and the hero’s apotheosis as a perpetually recorded memory of growth, maturity, and joy. Nor is Little, Big different; in its title the comma is as important as the words whose relationship it multiply defines. Little, Big is a formula cognate with Hermes Trismegistus’s “As above, so below.” The comma can also imply a simple listing—Little and Big; given the frequency with which Dr. Johnson occurs in the chapter epigraphs, this can be taken as a self-mocking reference to the lexicographer’s remark a propos of Swift that once you had thought of the little men and the big men the rest was easy. Little, Big has a subtitle, “The Fairies’ Parliament”—which taken in conjunction with chapter epigraphs from the Persian poem “Parliament of Birds” drops to the alert and the informed a hint of the novel’s resolution; it has six books—each with a title—twenty-six chapters—each with an epigraph—and just over two hundred sections—each with a title. It is not necessary for enjoyment or understanding of this novel to sit down and draw out the meaning of each of these, or of the relationships between them in numerological terms, which I have an awful suspicion exist—Crowley is not Joyce, demanding a lifetime’s study. In their complexity and multiplications of meaning they add to that tingle of pleasure that warms the reader from a level below that at which you can at all times be conscious of what is going on.

  There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist—the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power, and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life.

  “What is going on? Well, among other things a richly peopled novel of the generations of a clan,”

  And what is going on? Well, among other things a richly peopled novel of the generations of a clan. At the beginning of this century, successful Beaux Arts architect John Drinkwater marries the pregnant British theosophist Violet and takes her to Edgewood in upper New York State. Around the middle of the century, the amiably vague Smoky Barnable marries their great-granddaughter Daily Alice, has an inconclusive affair with her sister Sophie, and settles uneasily into the routine of a family and community where he loves and is loved but is forever a stranger. At the century’s end, his son Auberon returns to the City—superstitiously unnamed but obviously New York—to seek his fortune amid its crumbling buildings and economy: he loves and loses the Puerto Rican Sylvie, becomes a drunken vagrant and then a successful writer of television soap opera. And amid all this we are regaled with the inquiries and machinations of the clairvoyant Ariel Hawksquill, the rise to power of the demagogue Russell Eigenblick, known as the Lecturer, and the education of Sophie’s child Lilac, whom the fairies stole. Every detail of this complex narrative has its relevance to the whole; every detail is planned or rapidly improvised around by the folk of faerie, who whisk continually half-seen round the corners of the plot and whose intrigues turn out to be as complex, ambiguous, and intricate as those of the author.

  In Crowley’s novel, magic stands for what is done in the story but also for what the author is doing in the book. Magic is something that happens as you blink your eye or turn your back; Smoky lives among his wife’s family for years, knows that they think they talk to fairies and never believes a word of it—but when as a young man he proofread telephone directories, he assumed to be misprints places like the Seventh Saint Bar and the Church of All Streets that become important parts of his son’s city life: where magic is concerned, common sense is not to be relied upon. Magic is a sudden switch of perspective or blurring of image: it is impossible to say at what precise moment we realize that the Grandfather Trout in whom young Alice confides is literally her transformed grandfather, the promiscuous August, punished for double-dealing but principally used by the fairies for their selfish convenience. We come to know his identity through the confusions of his dreams: “(Supposing it was not his choice at all to be a swimmer here) how condign and terrible a punishment, bitter an exile. Mounted in liquid glass, unable to breathe, was he to make back-and-forth forever, biting at mosquitoes? If one were not a fish what a memory, the endless multiplication of those tiny drops of bitter blood.” Magic is a sudden intrusion of the outlandish into the everyday—the giant mirror that falls and guarantees ill fortune on Auberon’s first day in New York, the fake changeling Lilac that eats live coals and explodes amid fireworks. Magic is a coming to knowledge: Hawksquill’s clairvoyance is no trumpery affair of mirrors and crystal balls but a search through filed and structured memories for knowledge one may not know one has but which may be found if the mind is laid out for searching—Great-aunt Nora Cloud, then Sophie, regulate the daily life of the clan with a pack of tarot cards, the Least Trumps, which seem to deal only with domestic detail but which the fairies and Eigenblick are anxious to own. Magic is a telling of tales; the animal stories of Alice’s father the doctor, the soap operas of Auberon, are full of truths for a world that cares to hear, full of the knowledge of “Brother North-Wind’s secret,” that after winter comes summer and after summer, winter.

  “In Crowley’s novel, magic stands for what is done in the story but also for what the author is doing in the book.”

  “Magic is a telling of tales; the animal stories of Alice’s father the doctor, the soap operas of Auberon, are full of truths for a world that cares to hear.”

  Part of Crowley’s subject is America. It is in the spring of America’s century that Drinkwater brings his bride to Edgewood; at its high summer that Smoky walks there one June to his bride; it is in autumn storms that Auberon suffers loss and degradation in a City that has become the most dangerous of forests. “At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors, the woods there were tame and comfortable…. It was on these streets that you saw wolves; here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There.” Drinkwater decorated the rising City; as it falls, Auberon learns through an alcoholic haze the secret paths and hidden places that his ancestor and his colleagues almost unknowingly provided.

  This tale is full of people, clearly visualized and likable; it is without villains, though those who like Hawksquill and August abuse power have to pay a price. Crowley manages seemingly effortlessly to portray a variety of good people from the vague Smoky to the ardent and bitter Auberon and the earlier gentler Auberon, Violet’s son by Hawksquill’s grandfather, who wastes his life wistfully cataloging photographs in the hope he can unambiguously prove the existence of faerie, from the selfish passionate Sylvie to the faithful messenger Fred with his blend of jivetalk and John Webster and the Drinkwaters’ town cousin George Mouse, who moves amorally through life in a haze of hashish. Crowley perpetually shifts tone to capture the mental and moral atmosphere each character breathes, talks, and perceives through—so many of them share early memories and basic assumptions that this is not as difficult as it might seem. He is sparing with the presence of the fairies—busy old Mrs. Underhill, who instructs generations of Drinkwater women and is nowhere near as benevolent as they suppose, the rancorous kingfisher who corrupts August with a power the boy does not enjoy when he gets it—but when he lets us see them full face, theirs is no hollow mask of tweeness, but a powerful sinister lovely presence. There are other presences floating in the book—Lewis Carroll and Dr. Johnson for example; the novel deals with the extravagant and wild but does so with witty logic and with a sense of moral balanced reason. If in some SF the idea is hero, then here among the characters we must count the constant reticence with which the Drinkwater clan treat their knowledge even among themselves and the house Edgewood itself, the house made of time, the many houses united in one—a Gothic front interloc
ked with a Tudor one—a house that stands as a symbol of art’s imitation of nature and like the doctor’s stories and Auberon’s scripts of the novel itself.

  Crowley’s subject is one which might have succumbed to feyness and looniness; if his prose at times risks a too knowingly meaty rhetoric, it is to restrict naïveté to the passages where it is called for.

  “[Crowley] is sparing with the presence of the fairies … but when he lets us see them full face, theirs is no hollow mask of tweeness, but a powerful sinister lovely presence.”

  “The prose has a supple tough-minded energy, a luxuriance of conceit that renders the book full of lines and passages that have the air of being quotations from some famous book one has not read.”

  The prose has a supple tough-minded energy, a luxuriance of conceit that renders the book full of lines and passages that have the air of being quotations from some famous book one has not read. All his characters are dreamers who wander through miracle almost without noticing—they are continually surprised when pain hurts and Crowley’s eloquence makes us share the sudden surge of their joy or regret. He manages in prose images of love as compelling as most in poetry—for Auberon in his days of requited love “Happiness was a season; and in that season Sylvie was the weather. Everyone within him talked about it, among themselves, but no one could do anything about it, they could only wait till it changed.” After he loses her, “The little park his great-great-grandfather made he had remade into an emblem as complete, as fully-charged, as any trump in Great-aunt Cloud’s deck or any cluttered hall in Ariel Hawksquill’s memory mansions. Like those old paintings where a face is made up of a cornucopia of fruit … the park was Sylvie’s face, her heart, her body…. He had lifted the curse from himself, by main strength and the Art of Memory, and was free to go.”

  This is a novel full of wit and terror, of passionate creativity and energetic discipline, of young and of eternal love. It sets out to justify the wonderful and the hardworking everyday, and succeeds by never pretending that all pain can be mitigated, that all tragedies can be glossed over; there are gods who must die that other gods may mourn them. Crowley’s fairies are artists, concerned for their own interests and for what is elegant and beautiful; they are not kind or just, though their actions often seem so. Crowley balances losses and gains; like the hero of Engine Summer, Drinkwater’s descendants are transmuted into immortality—”Stories last longer; but only by becoming only stories.” Hawksquill gains power by a proper ordering of her mind; Auberon overcomes grief by organizing his memories of love; Crowley avoids easy answers by a preparedness to show the good faith of strenuous thought and effort, by hard sayings—he reconciles the fantastic and the mundane by ordering them in a vigorous, upsetting, and consoling fable.

  Read on: Have You Read?

  More by John Crowley

  LORD BYRON’S NOVEL

  In Lord Byrons Novel John Crowley imagines the novel the great, haunted, and enigmatic Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned … but very well might have. In the present day, Smith, a young American woman working in England, finds herself in possession of the lost manuscript of a novel by Byron—the lost manuscript that was saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a brilliant mathematician and Byron’s abandoned daughter. While Smith explores the curious mystery of what became of the manuscript, we are permitted to read it—the whole of Byron’s only novel—beginning to end. Interwoven with “Byron’s” thrilling romance are the stories of two women from different centuries, bound together across time by love, loss, and a terrible need to understand and connect with the fathers who abandoned them.

  “The novel-within-a-novel is pitch-perfect Byron and always engrossing … it is the other two narrative layers, which interrupt, explain and reflect on Byron’s hitherto lost whiz-bang, that give Lord Byrons Novel its powerful emotional resonance.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  NOVELTIES AND SOUVENIRS: COLLECTED SHORT FICTION

  A remarkable collection of almost all of John Crowley’s short fiction, Novelties & Souvenirs demonstrates the scope, the vision, and the wonder of one of Americas greatest storytellers. Courage and admiration are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales, at once lyrical and provocative, ranging from the fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, or a dead woman’s ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience, offering delights to be savored … and remembered.

  “A rich and varied volume…. Crowley manages to not only explore the legacy of colonialism … but also the enthusiasm of youth, the price of honor and the fragility of history.”

  —The Toronto Star (Canada)

  THE TRANSLATOR

  A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words—especially forbidden ones—could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

  “Grand and serious, involving nothing less than the souls of nations and the transforming power of language.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  OTHERWISE: THREE NOVELS

  Otherwise collects three critically acclaimed short novels by John Crowley. The Deep is set in a twilight land, in which two warring powers—the Reds and the Blacks—play out an ancient game of murder and betrayal. Then a Visitor from beyond the sky arrives to play a part in this dark and bloody pageant. From the moment he is found by two women who tend to the dead in the wake of battles, it is clear that the great game is going to change at last.

  In Beasts, it is the day after tomorrow, and society has been altered dramatically by experimentation that enables scientists to combine the genetic material of different species, mixing the DNA of humans with animals. Loren Casaubon is an ethologist drawn into the political and social vortex that results with a “leo”—a creature both man and lion—at its center.

  Engine Summer features a young man named Rush That Speaks, who is growing up in a far distant world—one that only dimly remembers our own age, the wondrous age of angels, when men could fly. Now it is the “engine summer of the world,” and Rush goes in search of the saints who can teach him to speak truthfully and to be immortal in the stories he tells. The immortality that awaits him, though, is one he could not have imagined.

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  Praise for THE DEEP

  “Crowley writes with style and wit, creates characters that live and breathe.”

  —Newsday (New York)

  Praise for BEASTS

  “Haunting, thought-provoking … extraordinarily touching.”

  —Booklist

  Praise for ENGINE SUMMER

  “A strikingly original and involving book … with uncommon sensitivity and grace.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  About the Author

  JOHN CROWLEY is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. His critically acclaimed works include Daemonomania, Love & Sleep, Aegypt, The Translator, and, most recently, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.

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  PRAISE

  LITTLE, BIG

  “Prose that F. Scott Fitzgerald would envy and a heartbreaking love story: the best fantasy yet written by an American.”

  —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

  “The kind of book around which cults are formed, and rightly so. There’s magic here.”

  —Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “A secret history of America: a love story of very great intensity; an apocalypt
ic view of the next century; a treatise on the workings of the imagination…. The greatest fantasy ever written by an American.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “A New England family saga in which the family has married into the secret commonwealth of fairies. Like the Velvet Undergrounds first album … its influence has been considerable, on writers from Mark Helprin to Neil Gaiman.” —Village Voice

  “John Crowley’s … Little, Big [is] my favorite book for these last several years.”

  —Harold Bloom

  “A very great fantasy novel…. This book is a reality, a world that Crowley sustains with an expert reticence…. Crowley is a writer of unmistakable humanity and unparalleled style.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A long, gorgeously written, picaresque family saga…. Arguably [Crowley’s] masterpiece…. When ‘You’ll love this’ isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as [Marquez’s] One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.”