Welcome to the perpetual motion machine of John Crowley interviews. Our exclusive conversation with the master of Edgewood, Old Law Farm, Blackbury Jambs, and Little Belaire is designed to be open-ended and every subscriber to Incunabula’s 25th Anniversary Edition of Little, Big is invited to join in.
If you’re a subscriber, and you’d like to help us interview John Crowley, here’s how. Before you send any questions, please read the entire interview to make sure that some form of your question has not already been answered. Then, please send no more than three questions (once those have been answered, you can ask more, but we have to keep things to a manageable level so everyone who wants to can participate) to me at editor@littlebig25.com, and put “Crowley Interview Questions” in your header. Also, in the body of your email, let me know if it’s okay to use your name when your questions are posted. And, of course, by submitting questions you give the Little, Big project and John Crowley perpetual permission to use, print, and reproduce your questions. All questions will be processed in the order received. Of course, John Crowley reserves the right to not answer any given question.
We will endeavor to regularly update this page with new questions and new answers, so keep checking back!
Although we will eventually open the floor to questions about any part of John’s life or career, for our first round let’s keep the focus on Little, Big.
Following my seven opening questions, you will find questions from the following subscribers:
RON DRUMMOND: As I re-read Little, Big, it often seems to me that, through the care and thoroughness of your invention, you are trying to convince yourself, more than any of your readers, of the efficacy and — dare I say it? — truth of the cosmology or worldview that’s explored / invoked / created in your novel. The same feeling characterized my experience of reading the Ægypt Quartet. What are your spiritual or religious beliefs vis à vis Little, Big and your other novels?
JOHN CROWLEY: There is a distinction here that relates to the kind of books I want these to be. Fantastic fiction proffers all kinds of beings that exist for the characters but not for the readers — gods, demons, fairies, witches. This is appropriate for the kind of fiction that most such tales are: distant relations of the saga, the fairy tale, the epic, the ghost story. I wanted to write novels with the breadth and depth of the greatest realistic fiction — my models were Dickens and Flaubert and Nabokov — yet with an element of the non-mimetic, or irreal, or preternatural, whatever the best word might be. And that meant not just positing such things but giving them the ambiguous and never-fully-plumbable depth that things have in realistic novels. I myself don’t believe in fairies, or ancient magic, or secret histories — any more than I believe in the Pickwick Club, or Gormenghast, or Winesburg, Ohio.
DRUMMOND: How have your spiritual and religious beliefs evolved over the course of your life, and how have they changed or been refined through your experience of writing these novels?
CROWLEY: I was raised a Catholic, which is a little different from being a Catholic. I was pretty unmoved in general by thoughts of God, heaven and hell, and generally unconflicted about moral imperatives — I had no dreadful impulses to fight off and generally approved of my own feelings of, say, sexual desire; I went through a James-Joycean conversion to Purity once, and it lasted about a week. I have very little imaginative access to the religious impulse in life, though I find I can use it in fiction. It was only when I discovered the Gnostic religious mythology (initially from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, which I now know to be a little unreliable, or better say a personal view) that I was truly moved by a system of belief — I was deeply intrigued and touched by this weird epic, and insofar as it could be combined with the (probably factitious) religion of the White Goddess as articulated by Robert Graves it seemed a complete spiritual analog to my inner being — which is very different from a belief in it — it would be absurd to believe in it as I believe in, say, evolution or world history.
DRUMMOND: To what extent are you a practitioner of the Arts of Memory? How have your researches into, and your imaginative explorations / evocations of, the Arts of Memory affected your own memory or your relationship to it? How have they affected or changed your life?
CROWLEY: I’ve never practiced the Art of Memory as described in my books. Indeed one of the things I found amazing and attractive about it was that — at least in its wilder forms — it seemed entirely impossible to use, and yet in fact was used, or claimed to be used, by people of the past. The array of arcane symbols brought to bear on simple questions (remembering texts or facts) was so out of scale that I found it at once moving and hilarious — a perfect instance of human mental enterprise at its strangest.
DRUMMOND: Who is that man behind the curtain?
CROWLEY: One of the most interesting aspects of writing a book, and the one that in a way is the most like doing magic, is that the person that the reader apprehends as the writer — the voice you listen to, the submost voice, below even the first-person narrators we are supposedly listening to in say Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn — that person is not the writer, that is, he is not the guy who got up in the morning and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. He’s a creation too, smarter, funnier, wiser, probably better-looking than the poor little man behind the curtain. Readers of my books who divine things about HIM may think they divine things about ME and maybe they do — but maybe not. To be discovered in my own person as the author (as D.H. Lawrence and a dozen others can often be discovered) is to blow it. As Dorothy said to the man behind the curtain, “You are a very bad person,” to which he replied, “No, my dear, I’m a very good person; I’m just a very bad wizard.”
DRUMMOND: Why Emperor Barbarossa? When did you first encounter the stories and myths surrounding him and what was it about him/them that captured your imagination?
CROWLEY: My interest in Barbarossa predated Little, Big. In the 1960s as I was beginning to conceive of a career as a writer of fantastic fiction I thought of writing a series of occult detective stories, wherein a detective wise about world mythologies and magics would solve puzzles others could not. I think the idea was related to Avram Davidson’s Dr. Esterhazy, but the discoveries were to be grander, and the magician more capable of magic of her own. Well, she became Ariel Hawksquill, and the first story I planned to write about her was about how she figures out that an enigmatic/charismatic/trickster politician is the reawakened Emperor Barbarossa, whose tale I had come across I don’t know where. So I simply included her in a book that seemed to need a subplot, as huge books of its kind do. I’ve always been sorry that I didn’t make clear one connection that’s so evident most readers have probably made it for me: Russell Eigenblick/Barbarossa is the our-world cognate or avatar of Brother North-wind, whose role he will take when he too reaches Faerie at the end. Ah well.
DRUMMOND: On April 10th 2006 I finished my third reading of Little, Big, not quite 16 years after my second reading and about 22 years after my first. (I’m looking forward to reading it three or five or seven times more in the coming year, in the process of editing, proofreading, and preparing it for publication.) But back on January 5th, when I was only pages into my third reading and had not yet come upon any mention of a banquet, and having entirely forgotten it from prior readings (and failing to recognize it), I had a dream and wrote it down, thus:
“I saw a frozen tableaux of characters and themes from Little, Big gathered at the ends and along one side of a long table, quite like the disciples and Jesus in so many depictions of the Last Supper. At one end (on my right, though I only viewed the scene and was not in it) was a cherubic man with a bushy white beard. Or maybe I was in it: for everyone at that table looked out at me with various frozen expressions. And I thought to myself, still dreaming, ’Can I resuscitate them with the breath of sustained attention?’”
CROWLEY: It’s possible the book is uncanny. I remember when I moved from New York to the Berkshires, after a year or two of writing about the country, I found on the grounds of a big Berkshire house a big stone birdbath, the basin supported by a crowd of obscure gnome-like figures, exactly as I had described in Little, Big, never having seen or previously thought of such a thing.
DRUMMOND: Is it possible that you, the author, are the Smoky Barnable to the Daily Alice of your creations?
CROWLEY: A question that the (historical or physical) author can’t answer: only the reader who creates the story and encounters the “author” can determine that. Though I admit I laughed to read it (laughter of surprise and delight rather than of contempt).
MARY PAT MANN: Where did They go after leaving the Wild Wood?
JOHN CROWLEY: They went one step within. “I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.” Fairy land is a universal retreating infundibulum, except that the farther in you go, the bigger it gets. Edgewood’s inhabitants move to replace the departing fairies, the fairies having moved to replace the persons in the next (larger) sphere contained within their own. And those beings (having undergone a story we’ll never know, or I’ll never tell) move one space too, and so on throughout.
MANN: Who lives now in Edgewood?
CROWLEY: Apparently no one does. As the book ends, a visitor enters there (“whose dog is that?” must be that visitor’s question), and I suppose he or she might be thinking of buying (but from whom?). Who do you think? If the world is arranged as I describe, then of course there must be those who come to replace the fifty-two who went one place in. Violet Bramble said that “any door, once passed through, ceased to be a door ever after,” though you needn’t believe that.
[Jodi Snyder has written a valuable overview of the Tarot-related aspects of Little, Big, in the context of which she posed several questions for John Crowley. Crowley’s comments are interspersed throughout, beginning with his prefatory thanks. Page numbers refer to the Bantam first / HarperCollins editions; after the new edition is published, I will add page references corresponding to it. — RD]
JOHN CROWLEY: Jodi, thank you for this, and I’ve done some annotating along the way as well as answering explicit questions.
JODI SNYDER: One of the factors in Little, Big, that swept me up back in 1983 was Violet’s deck of cards — I was already reading Tarot professionally and had been studying it for many years at that point. In the years since, after many rereadings of your wonderful book, my curiosity and fascination have only deepened. What follows is a summary of what I’ve learned about Violet’s deck and some of the ways it is different from standard Tarot decks.
CROWLEY: To tell you the truth, I knew next to nothing about Tarot when I began the book, and know not much more now.
SNYDER: First, here is a list of Violet’s lesser trumps, with the page numbers from the HarperCollins edition where early (if not always first) mentions of each can be found:
The Traveller, page 19 (card described)
The Journey, 19
The Sun, 19
The Host, 19
The Bundle, 75
The Secret, 92
Convenience, 112
Multiplicity, 112
The Sportsman/PISCATOR, 112 (card described)
The Cousin, 157
The Gift, 157
The Stranger, 157
The Vista, 157 (card described on 158)
Seed, 158
The Knot, 252
The Fool, 253 (card described)
The Banquet, 262 (card described on 263)
These 17 titles are the lot that seemed definite.
CROWLEY: I’m surprised there are that many named!
SNYDER: Also considered as possibilities — in the way that Multiplicity is first implied as a notion within an interior monologue (p. 39) — are the following:
Generation, p. 175
Silence, 373
Circumspection, 373
This gives us a total of 20 potential Lesser Trumps. In the section called “The Least Trumps” (pp. 156-157), Violet’s deck is described by Great-aunt Cloud as having twenty-one trumps numbered zero to twenty, denoting Persons and Places and Things and Notions. These trumps are apparently appended to a deck of 52 playing cards (probably Spanish or Italian, although not stated) that have the suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles.
A “traditional” tarot has 22 trumps or greater arcana, including the Fool which is numbered Zero. Although I assume you are already familiar with these, the full list follows:
0 The Fool
I The Magician
II The High Priestess
III The Empress
IV The Emperor
V The Hierophant
VI The Lovers
VII The Chariot
VIII Justice
IX The Hermit
X The Wheel of Fortune
XI Strength
XII The Hanged Man
XIII Death
XIV Temperance
XV The Devil
XVI The Blasted Tower
XVII The Star
XVIII The Moon
XIX The Sun
XX The Last Judgement
XXI The Universe
Your description of the Fool on page 253 is virtually identical to the Fool in the traditional deck, with the exception of the character’s age (generally a young fellow).
CROWLEY: I can’t agree with that. The Fool in my deck, is, of course, Russell Eigenblick, or, in his former incarnation or state, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a German (the “links of sausage”) who while on crusade to the Holy land (a “scallop shell”, symbol of the Pilgrim) fell from his horse while crossing a river and drowned because of the weight of his armor. I don’t think the traditional Fool has horse, sausage, armor, or brook. (What he does, or ought to, have is the Fool’s traditional Ouroboros over his head.)
SNYDER: Also, on page 92, at the beginning of “By the Way,” Dr. Drinkwater is discussing the painting called The Traveller with Smoky — Is the painting a recreation of that Trump?
CROWLEY: It’s actually a quite precise description of a painting by Arthur Rackham, called By the Way, showing the traveler and the little row of mushrooms. But I’ll accept it as a card too.
SNYDER: Other points for contemplation: Although Violet’s cards have the expected four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, there are a number of references (especially in the scenes between Hawksquill and Eigenblick) to there being a total of 52 cards among the numbered suits and court cards (one for each of the remaining fey creatures in the Dimension Next Door) — but a standard Tarot deck has 56 “small cards,” as there are four court cards each. Some of the Spanish and Italian playing card decks use these four suits with three court cards each (King, Queen, and Page), but they are not Tarots.
CROWLEY: This was beyond my knowledge of Tarot or card decks at the time. I guess I thought the Tarot deck was 52 except for the added trumps. I’m feeling ignorant here.
SNYDER: I can see why you wanted the twelve court cards (instead of the sixteen in a Tarot) — to represent the twelve months in the year. It’s all a lot cleaner for the purpose of the text than trying to explain the permutations of the Four Elements that the Hermeticists intend. And, as the 52 also follow the “weeks in a year and number of fairy folk that remain” theme it all makes sense metaphysically. So if Violet’s deck is ordered oddly, well, I have in my collection some decks numbering anywhere between fourteen and 168 cards. Each system works as a hologram of the universe in the same way that Violet’s deck provides a map to The Next World Over.
CROWLEY: Oh good. It’s what I hoped.
SNYDER: I continue to be fascinated by Violet’s deck, and I am certain many others are, too — it would be really great to have any additional information you’re willing to share with us about them.
How did Violet’s deck evolve? What kind of research did you do on it? Could you possibly identify the two (or three!) missing trumps, and clarify some of the unresolved issues regarding the differences between Violet’s deck and a standard Tarot deck?
CROWLEY: The deck evolved, basically, as the book was written: while an expert in Tarot (like, say, Charles Williams in “The Greater Trumps”) might start with the cards and organize the story according to their calls or demands, the cards in my story arose when they were needed — like the Sportsman, who of course is actually a fisherman, arising just as August goes to fish, and becomes a fish. It’s like the answers arising from the murk of the Magic Eight Ball, often just in time.
SNYDER: I am assuming that the 52 “small cards” represent the personages of the remaining fairy folk, while the “Least Trumps” of the deck reveal the permutations of The Tale. Is this correct?
CROWLEY: Yes, that’s very well put. As in Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies I wanted to create a situation where it was impossible to know whether the cards were bringing about, prophesying, or summing up the story.
SNYDER: It may be that you intend to leave us dangling with only 20 trumps or so, just to further demonstrate that all gifts from the Faerie realm are temporary, incomplete, and/or downright dangerous. But what you have given us, with Little, Big and the Ægypt Quartet, is beyond all measure. Thank you.
CROWLEY: You’re very welcome, and thank you for bringing your insights to bear upon it.