Nothing but sane and moonshot water - what is it like to be Grandfather Trout?

Somewhere at Wuthering Expectations – I suppose in a post about Puck of Pook’s Hill, Pykk claims to have seen “the Trout from Little, Big being described as a gateway between different states of the world, which is true,” which is not true, I mean that I or someone else used the word “gateway” or something like it, or mentioned states of the world, but is true if books are different states of the world and repeated elements and borrowings serve as ways to move among them.  So, true, and certainly true of Grandfather Trout.

“Suppose one were a fish,” Crowley writes, much like Richard Jefferies had written a century earlier in “Mind under Water.”

Fish-dreams are usually about the same water they see when they’re awake, but Grandfather Trout’s were not.  So utterly other than trout-stream were his dreams, yet so constant were the reminders of his watery home before his lidless eyes, that his whole existence became a matter of supposition.  Sleepy suppositions supplanted one another with every pant of his gills.  (Book 1, Ch. IV, “Suppose One Were a Fish”)

Since the fish is a fictional character, his doubts are warranted.  This particular fish is uncertain if he even is a fish.  He is perhaps a victim of a curse.  Perhaps someday he will be freed from the curse.

That however truly a satisfied fish he might appear to be, or however reluctantly accustomed to it he had become, that once-on-a-time a fair form would appear looking down into the rainbow depths, and speak words she had wrested from malign secret-keepers at great cost to herself, and with a strangulating rush of waters he would leap – legs flailing and royal robes drenched – to stand before her panting, restored, the curse lifted, the wicked fairy weeping with frustration.  At the thought a sudden picture, a colored engraving, was projected before him on the water: a bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm, his mouth gaping open.  In air.  At this nightmare image (from where?) his gills gasped and he awoke momentarily; the shutters shot back.  All a dream.  For a while he gratefully supposed nothing but sane and moonshot water.

I could not find a colored version of the Tenniel picture, sadly.  Please note that Grandfather Trout has misremembered the position of the letter.  Little, Big has barely begun at this point.  The lifting of the curse takes place 530 pages later in my edition, but offscreen, so to speak.  Why write it out twice?

In the meantime, the fish sleeps and dreams and eats mosquitos, “the endless multiplication of those tiny drops of bitter blood.”

I had thought about working more on the prose of Little, Big, the best descriptions and metaphors and details, applied to more conventional objects than a talking fish; “my models were Dickens and Flaubert and Nabokov,” says Crowley, and it shows, not just in the sentences, but in the patterning, the little gateways that lead from scene to scene parallel to or against the movement of the plot.  The hard stuff in the art of fiction.  I’ve been writing about the easy stuff.

The “Suppose One Were a Fish” section of Little, Big is for some reason available, for $30, as a poster.

subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth - Little, Big on the Art of the Novel

A character in Little, Big is the “greatest mage of this age of the world,” a common personage in fantasy novels.  Crowley cleverly makes her master of a single form of magic, one that is in fact real, the Art of Memory.  Like Giordano Bruno and other masters of the art, now “for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet,” the wizard creates a place, a memory palace, which she furnishes with everything: “her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss.”  How is this skill magical rather than merely impossible?

It was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth.  The ravished nun who meant Sacrilege might, when one passes her again, have acquired a depraved air about the mouth and eyes one hadn’t thought he had bestowed on her…  Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can’t conceive of beforehand…  that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had out a distant winter once and then forgot.  (Book 3, Ch. IV, “The Art of Memory,” ellipses mine)

Crowley is describing his own novel, in fact all novels and literature, and in a sense the history of literature, since the builders it turns out do not all have to be the same person.  But he is specifically describing his own novel, first in that much of it takes place in a house that functions as described here, and second because this is his method: do not just create but accrete, which is itself a form of creation.  Little, Big is a Joseph Cornell box of a novel.

Crowley uses tarot cards similarly, with the entire novel, every plot and subplot, implicit in the deck of cards.  “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” (the Perpetual Crowley Interview).  Calvino’s book (1969 / 1973) lays out the entire deck of cards in a sort of crossword puzzle and then tells stories using every row and column, backwards and forwards, discovering or creating the stories of Faust, Parsifal, Roland, and Hamlet within the cards.

I began by trying to line up tarots at random, to see if I could read a story in them.  “The Waverer’s Tale” emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck.  (p. 126, tr. William Weaver)

The good joke here is that all possible stories are contained in the tarot deck, given the free application of the imagination by the storyteller, and if somehow a limit is reached, the writer can always switch to another deck, which Calvino does – the book actually has two parts, the Castle and the Tavern, each using a different deck (the Tavern is pictured above, the scan borrowed from a writer interested in the book's architecture).  Crowley creates his own imaginary deck.

When I first read The Castle of Crossed Destinies many years ago, I placed it among Calvino’s most minor works.  That was not correct.

Is this book true? - John Crowley tells stories - he couldn't quite get at those secrets

The last line of Little, Big suggests that the John Crowley’s fairy novel may not be about fairies as such:

Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

Not fairies, but fairy tales, stories.  The novel is a pastiche of old stories, forms of stories, and stories about stories.  The method is to create something original by assembling and rearranging things created by others.  Thus a garden is lifted directly from Through the Looking Glass, and a fish from Rudyard Kipling or Richard Jefferies or both, and a photograph from the Cottingley Fairies hoax.  Characters take the place of birds and reenact the medieval Persian Conference of the Birds.  Folktale motifs are everywhere.  Santa Claus is a character for a single paragraph.  Every chapter begins with a quotation.  In Book 5: Augustine, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare (Coriolanus), and one from Thomas Love Peacock that just about knocks the wind out of the novel. The entire section is titled “The Art of Memory,” from the 1966 Frances Yates book on the history of memory systems.  The interaction between the novel and outside texts is dense and constant.

But the story itself is full of story-telling.  I know, now, from book blogs, that many readers actively loathe art about art and postmodern screwing around with stories.  Crowley’s novel is one of those.

Some of the story-telling metaphors that are built into the plot:

One character becomes a soap opera writer, transmuting the story I have been reading into another I only read about:

He save for the last a letter from Edgewood, some weeks in transit, a good long one from his mother, and settled to it like a squirrel to a large nut, hoping to find something within he could use for next month’s episodes.  (Book 6, Ch. I, “Carrying a Torch”)

His grandfather wrote children’s books about adorable animals.  Those also get looted for the soap opera.  Part of one of the children’s books, Brother North-wind’s Secret, is read aloud to me by a series of schoolchildren, so I get a good look at that kind of story.  This secret of this North Wind is different than the one in George MacDonald’s The Back of the North Wind.  The source of the children’s book are – well, one of my favorite jokes in the book.

Three characters, in succession, become devotees of an unusual pack of tarot cards, one that does not have the usual Major Arcana (no Death, Devil, or Hanged Man) but has a series of Least Trumps that include The Bundle, The Banquet, and Multiplicity, the latter being the governing principle of a tarot deck.  The seventy-three cards are constantly rearranged into many different stories that may or may not somehow imply a single larger story.  The latter idea is stolen directly from Italo Calvino.

There are, of course, books:

Books!  Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.  he liked them big; he liked them old; he liked them best in many volumes, like the thirteen on a low shelf, golden-brown, obscure, of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome.  Those – the big ones, the old ones – held secrets by their very nature; because of his years, though the paragraphs and chapters passed each other under his scrutiny (he was no skimmer), he couldn’t quite get at those secrets, prove the book to be (as most books after all are) dull, dated, stupid.  They kept their magic, mostly.  (Book 3, Ch. III [Marlowe epigraph], “Books and a Battle”)

These old books lead the character to the book that is like another running joke, Architecture of Country Houses, the one book that could explain everything that goes on in the novel to its characters if they could only understand it or perhaps believe it.

“Dad,” Auberon said, “is this book true?”

“What book is that?”

Auberon held it up, waggling it to show the covers…  “Well, ‘true’,” he said, “’true’. I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘true’.” Each time he said it the invisible doubt-quotes around the word became clearer.  (ellipses mine)

I have included a number of examples of Little, Big describing itself.  The final major self-description is the use of the Art of Memory, which I will save for tomorrow.  I also want to return to Calvino. And to that fish.

Sometimes we don’t entirely understand - Little, Big, somewhere in between

When I started reading Little, Big (1981) twenty years ago, I wondered if John Crowley had written the novel as the result of a dare, or losing a bet.  Fantasy novels did not have as many fairies back then as they do now.  Things have changed.  Anyway, I was close to right:

It also offered a challenge: could I get readers to take seriously these very standard Victorian fairies as beings of power and scope? So it was a moment of hilarity and also alarm or apprehension, which only made the hilarity richer — could I bring this off?  (from the Perpetual Crowley Interview).

The book is about an extended family, the Drinkwaters, and their house (Edgewood) in the Catskills, roughly.  The women of the family believe in and see fairies; the men of the family struggle along as best they can.

“Sometimes we don’t entirely understand,” Doc said, as though it were wisdom he had arrived at after some cost.  “But we have out parts to play.”  (Book, Two, Ch. I, “Responsibilities”)

A surprising amount of the book takes place in New York City, in a grim version of Manhattan that perhaps now seems dystopian but was at the time merely New York in the 1970s, the “Drop Dead” era, accurately described.  Now there are books that are written to fit something called “urban fantasy”; Crowley’s book is, retrospectively, an early example of one of those.

The Drinkwaters are part of a larger story involving the fairies, something like this-world agents or avatars of fairy powers.  Since this is a fantasy novel, I can just take this as something like fact, however indistinct.  The characters spend a lot of time worrying about, or ignoring the problem of, free will and predestination.  Do I have a destiny, am I part of a larger story, that sort of thing.  Some of the characters are sure, others have doubts.  The fantasy device allows Crowley to highlight the theme.

This is what Dolce Bellezza, who suggested a Crowley readalong, writes about, that and the unconventional domestic arrangements of the Drinkwater family.  Most of the novel, setting aside the tarot cards and talking storks and perpetual motion machines, is domestic fiction, a soap opera that in a parodic move supplies material for a television soap opera within the novel.  I wonder if Crowley is parodying some of the domestic fiction of the 1960s – Updike or someone like that – but I do not know that literature so well, and likely never will.  There is a strong whiff of the 1960s in the ethos of the book, its family something of a religious cult living in a communal arrangement.  One character even ends up, thirty years ahead of his (our) time, running an urban farm while hopped up on magical hashish, except now the farm would be in Brooklyn, not Manhattan.  It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  Parody, again.

The domestic scenes, especially some of the big parties, remind me a lot of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding; other parts are more like William Faulkner’s The Hamlet.  Maybe the closest analogues are Vladimir Nabokov's Ada and One Hundred Years of Solitude, all novels, like Little, Big, that demand family trees.  With  Gabriel García Márquez, Crowley shares a century, more or less, of action, characters who share the same name – multiple Auberons, multiple Lilacs – and in some ways an ending.  Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series uses this ending, too.  I am not sure that this particular story can have a different ending, other than “that schoolboy device he had once used, that last line that every schoolboy has once used to complete some wild self-indulgent fantasy otherwise uncompletable: then he woke up” (Book 6, Ch. IV, “Storm of Difference”).

Metaphorically, I mean.  Depends on who the “he” is who wakes up.  Crowley actually ends the novel with “once upon a time.”  There, that is what I need for tomorrow’s post.  I knew if I kept on I would find it.

The more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes - The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

Sometimes I need to read a book of criticism that is full of ideas, just to loosen up the drier parts of the brain.  The subject of the book hardly matters.  The Greeks and the Irrational, the 1949 study of the title subject by classicist E. R. Dodds, inflected with the latest in philological, anthropological, and Freudian thinking, was just what I needed.  Some of it is likely wrong, but what does that have to do with ideas?

The point of the book is to set aside Athens as the birthplace of Reason and work through the available evidence about the irrational side of Classical Greek thought and life, the superstitions and magic and weirdness.  Plato, Homer, and the tragic playwrights get most of the textual attention, along with the Pythagorean cult, the Orphic cult, the Bacchic cult, all of the best cults.

The book is packed with witches, oracles, dreams, and daemons, and was nicely complementary to Carlo Ginzburg and Rudyard Kipling, and I assume will mesh nicely with Little, Big.  Dodds – here we see the influence of contemporary anthropologists – would like to link Greek cultic practices to those of Siberians shamans (direct ancestors of Ginzburg’s semi-pagan witch-fighters), which I thought was a stretch until he began to pull examples from various sources about mystics coming to Greece from the North:

Out of the North came Abaris, riding, it was said, upon an arrow, as souls, it appears, still do in Siberia.  So advanced was he in the art of fasting that he had learned to dispense altogether with human food.  He banished pestilences, predicted earthquakes, composed religious poems, and taught the worship of his northern god, whom the Greeks called the Hyperborean Apollo.  (“The Greek Shamans and Puritanism,” 141)

I have omitted the many footnote numbers, five in the above passage, for example, leading to not one but many sources mentioning Abaris, a historical, not mythic, figure, and then many more mentioning other shamans, leading to this wild claim:

Such tales of disappearing and reappearing shamans were sufficiently familiar at Athens for Sophocles to refer to them in Electra without any need to mention names.

I obviously did not understand that particular passage (ll. 62-5) of Sophocles at all, an experience that Dodds let me know repeatedly, in Homer, in Pindar, and especially in Plato; oh how poorly I must have read Plato.  Dodds sympathizes:

But I must confess that I know very little about early Orphism, and the more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes.  Twenty years ago, I could have said quite a lot about it (we all could at that time).  Since then, I have lost a great deal of knowledge; for this loss I am indebted to [list of scholars]  (147)

This might give an idea of how Dodds’s book is pleasingly readable.  My own great hope is that if I read enough, I will at some point have no knowledge whatsoever.  Dodds has been a big help.

I hope that The Greeks and the Irrational will help spur some ideas about Little, Big.  Dodds ends with an account, social and psychological, of the collapse of reason during the Hellenistic period.  “The Return of the Irrational was, as may be seen from these few examples, pretty complete” (“The Fear of Freedom,” 253).  That has a nice touch of the cyclical ethos of Crowley’s fairy story.  The strange coincidence, though, were the many correspondences between what I was finding in Dodds and what I was reading at the same time in Far from the Madding Crowd.  Talk about the Return of the Irrational!  So as I write about Thomas Hardy next week, I will, if nothing else, lard my posts with quotations from this rich book.

"We don't mean that sort. We hate 'em too'" - some Rudyard Kipling fairy stories

To prepare for a big novel about fairies I thought I would read an earlier books about fairies, Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), in which Kipling plays a cruel trick on unsuspecting children by using a fantasy frame to disguise a book about that teaches  English history.  Why are writers so cruel?  Children are so much better off today, now that they are not expected to know any history at all.

A pair of children are performing  (for an audience of “Three Cows”) their abridged (“as much as they could remember”) version of Midsummer’s Night Dream – on Midsummer Eve – in a fairy circle – which is, obviously, something of a magic spell, one that summons the actual Puck.

‘We – we didn’t mean to,’ said Una.

‘Of course you didn’t!  That’s just why you did it.  Unluckily the Hills are empty now, and all the People of the Hills are gone.  I’m the only one left.  I’m Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England…’ (“Weland’s Sword”)

“People of the Hills,” not “fairies”:

‘And that’s how I feel about saying – that word that I don’t say.  Besides, what you call them are made-up things the People of the Hills have never heard of – little buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats, and shiny stars in their hair, and a wand like a school-teacher’s cane for punishing bad boys and rewarding good ones.  I know ‘em!’

‘We don’t mean that sort,’ said Dan.  ‘We hate ‘em too.’

That last bit could be the secret epigraph to Crowley’s Little, Big.  Promising enough, but as I said, after Puck and the children share cookies (“Bath Oliver biscuits” – this is Kipling, no vagueness here), the Old Thing begins summoning other Old Things, not fairies but regional historical figures, knights and so on, in order to march the children through 1066 and all that.  Roman Britain, Vikings, the Magna Carta.  Each chapter ends with Puck casting a forgetting spell on the children, a good running joke for a pedagogical novel, the point of which is to make historical episodes so fictionally vivid that they cannot be forgotten.

The historical episodes are linked in a number of satisfying ways, by a magic sword and a gold hoard and the exodus of the fairies and their degeneration from gods – “’England is a bad country for Gods,’” says Puck – and by Kipling’s style, his intense imagination, the way he sees and hears:

When they reached Otter Pool the Golden Hind grounded comfortably on a shallow, and they lay beneath a roof of close green, watching the water trickle over the flood-gates down the mossy brick chute from the mill-stream to the brook.  A big trout – the children knew him well – rolled head and shoulders at some fly that sailed round the bend, while once in just so often the brook rose a fraction of an inch against all the wet pebbles, and they watched the slow draw and shiver of a breath of air through the tree-tops.  Then the little voices of the slipping water began again.  (“The Knights of the Joyous Venture”)

I last saw that trout in a Richard Jefferies piece, “A London Trout,” which ended with the trout’s fate unknown, so it is nice to see he is thriving; I will next see him in the first chapter of Little, Big.

An irrational outgrowth - Carlo Ginzburg help me prepare to read John Crowley's Little, Big

John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) will be my readalong book of the month – please see Dolce Bellezza for details.   Quite a few book bloggers are, to my pleasure, joining.  Little, Big is an unusual book, a member of whatever genre – dream novels –  contain Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and George MacDonald’s Lilith. It is about a family of fairies who live in the Catskills.

I was tempted to beg off, not feeling that the book fit with whatever else I had been reading, but I read the first chapter to remind myself of what it was like.  “Make it fit,” I thought.  So I have been preparing the battle space.  Today, some true fantasy.

In The Night Battles (1966), Carlo Ginzburg tells two overlapping stories, both hard to believe but both in some sense true.  In 1575, a Catholic priest, an inquisitor of the Inquisition, stumbled upon the surviving remnants of an ancient fertility cult in the isolated region of Friuli (the far northeastern corner of modern Italy).  Four times a year, during the Ember Days, a specially selected group of champions, the benandanti, the good-doers, armed only with fennel stalks, spent their nights in combat with the region’s witches, who were armed with sorghum.  The results of the battles determined the quality of the harvests.  If the witches won, the harvest was bad; if the benandanti won, there would be abundance.

That is one story.  The other is the postmodern detective story in which the Inquisition tries to figure out what is actually going on here.  They have only one frame of reference, witches and witch’s sabbaths, and the idea that there are people with magic powers who fight the witches, who even claim to be doing God’s work, is incomprehensible. 

There was no place in the theological, doctrinal and demonological theories of the dominant culture for the belies of the benandanti: they constituted an irrational outgrowth and therefore either had to be made to conform to those theories or be eradicated.  (88)

It took fifty years of desultory pressure from the Inquisition, but over time the benandanti began describing themselves, detail by detail, in terms the inquisitors could understand, regularizing and thereby exterminating their own practices.  This is what I meant by “postmodern.”  The detectives, confronted with an unsolvable crime they do not understand, which is perhaps not a crime at all, accidentally convert the activity into a crime they do understand, thereby allowing them to solve it.

The historical sources are primarily the records of the bureaucratic Inquisition.  One of Ginzburg’s achievements was to figure out how to work with this evidence.  In a way, this second story, the subtle interaction between folk culture and official culture, is as interesting as the first story.  But then I remember that the first story involves men leaving their bodies to combat witches over the fate of the grape harvest as part of a Christianized remnant of a pagan fertility cult, and that people in early modern Italy openly talked about this until they realized that, oops, maybe a Catholic inquisitor is a dangerous audience for this stuff, and I think, no, that story is really hard to top.

Actually, it is topped by the story of the Livonian werewolf, which Ginzburg uses, along with the Germanic version of the Celtic Wild Hunt and similar legends, as evidence that there is something else going on, something bigger:

Three times each year on the nights of St Lucia before Christmas, of Pentecost, and of St John, the werewolves proceeded on foot, in the form of wolves, to a place located ‘beyond the sea’: hell.  There they battles the devil and witches, striking them with long iron rods, and pursuing them like dogs.  Werewolves, Thiess exclaimed, ‘cannot tolerate the devil’.  The judges, undoubtedly astonished, asked for elucidation.  (29)

Crowley has recommended The Night Battles (1966) as a source for fantasy writers, something radically different than the endless Tolkien knockoffs.  He has used it himself in his Aegypt series, especially in the 1994 Love & Sleep, if I remember correctly.  The essence of those books, and of Little, Big, too, is that there is something else going on.  Crowley, writing fiction, is allowed to elucidate a bit more, to take a guess at the something else.

A skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction

The Professor was bad enough that a chapter or two pretty much did me in for the day.  I was all too easily distracted by better books – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Great Gatsby, John Ruskin, for pity’s sake.  The most distracting of the distractions was In Hazard (1939) by Richard Hughes, a novel about a cargo ship caught in a hurricane.  Genuinely exciting, but at some point each evening, all too early, I would will myself to close it so I did not miss my day’s Bad Brontë quota.

I would like to direct interested parties to bibliographing’s review of In Hazard, as I proceed to ignore it.  Something in John Crowley’s introduction to the novel caught my eye.  He’s writing about the term “writer’s writer”:

But what writers would mean if they used the phrase (in my own experience they don’t) is a writer who, whether in plain prose or fancy, effusive or restrained, accomplishes things in fiction that writers know to be difficult to do, whether readers perceive this or not.  Writers of fiction often do care less about the characters and story in the fiction they read – they find it harder to suspend disbelief and be touched by made-up troubles and triumphs – but they notice a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction.  (xi, NYRB edition)

Does this help explain what goes on at Wuthering Expectations?  It sounds right to me.  Writing about The Great Gatsby, for example, I barely acknowledged that the novel had either characters or a story.  Do I believe that the specific mechanism Fitzgerald assigns to his narrator is what’s really important about the book?  Heavens, no.  I was dismantling the engine and trying to figure out what a specific part did, a tricky one.  Maybe it was merely decorative.  Maybe it didn’t do anything, a mistake left over from an earlier prototype.  Or maybe the engine is devilishly complex.

I’ve met a very few people who seem to be able to comprehend certain complex objects as a whole.  Seem to – what I assume they are doing is breaking the pieces apart very rapidly, and then rebuilding as quickly.  I’m not so fast, and not so interested in reassembling the clock.  An intellectual flaw, I’m afraid, one I hope to overcome.  Unlike a clock, the book is intact after I have smashed its casing and shaken out the pieces.  No harm done.

An Appreciationist, I want writers to succeed, and I want to discover how they do it.  As a result, I typically root for one character, the same one every time, the writer, the imagined writer.  In fairness, I can read at both levels at once.  I do care about the characters and story, but, just as Crowley says, less; I do want David Copperfield to do well, but not as much as I want David Copperfield to do well.  I’m a writer’s reader.