Subject: (urth) Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head?

From: akt <akt at attglobal.net>
Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2000 11:23:25 +0000

Had a short, unprepared interview with JC. Have not yet played the tape
back, but at one point I asked questions from the group and scribbled
notes, so this is from my notes. William, I forgot to ask about Edward
Gorey. But my guess is that you are right--will ask next time. I will
also amplify these answers, if need be, when I listen to the tape.

Adam:

1) Is the "other country" to which the Drinkwaters have gone in any
sense death? Yes. But it is not an ending; it is the start of something
new.

2)Does JC see this final destiny as positive, negative or ambiguous?
Ambiguous. You go farther in, and there is no answer to how far you can
go. The 52 humans have become the 52 fairies who control them; the
fairies have gone farther in.

(I did not ask the children's book question as I did not think he would
have a top-of-the-head answer; we've covered that area pretty
thoroughly. But I will get to it when I'm better prepared.)

3) What is the purpose of the Eigenblick subplot in LB? An exploration
of power. Power has no power; love has power. Also wanted to play with a
woman acting in ways that men do in the usual thiller plots. Also
(sheepishly) admitted that much of it came from a draft he had made for
another book entirely. (This does not surprise me at all!!)

4) Why in both TD and LB do the Tarot decks have 52 cards aside from the
trumps, unlike historical decks? Older deck have 52 cards including
trumps, in 4 suits. Tarot cards are the extra cards added to that pack.
(I can't read my notes here, but iirc he found the device useful enough
to use twice and pointed out that the packs were actually quite
different.)

5) In GWoT, why is the introductory chapter about Casper given such
prominence? Two answers: 1) Because he's responsible for all that
occured; 2) it was written long before the rest and was shoehorned in.

6) In GWoT why does old Dennis at the end think that meeting oneself is
impossible, and that the Otherhood claimed otherwise to protect itself?
It's not impossible, but forbidden. Leads to foreknowledge which might
be the end of hope. (I think that's what my note says.)

7) In ES, was the Long League of Women originally the League of Women
Voters? Yes, and other prominent women's clubs or societies.

8) Soap operas? Turns out it's not true; he has not written soap operas.

Here are some questions from mantis; I have already sent them to him,
but will edit my pasted-in e-mail since some of them refer mainly
to -Daemonomania-, which he and I have read but most of you haven't:

1) No on David Bowie. No gleam of connection. I get the impression that
JC doesn't relate to music, even the music "of his generation," all that
viscerally.

2) Philip K. Dick. Read -Eye in the Sky- in highschool and was much
impressed: a world that is not your own, not real, but inescapable.

3) The Fourth Tower of Inverness. Never heard of it.

4) -The Crying of Lot 49- Oh yes, big influence. One of the books he'd
"most like to have written." Though Pierce and Mucho do not come
directly from that book, he is aware of the name coincidence since an
early review pointed it out. Stamp collections.

5) -The Alexandria Quartet- No influence, but loved it.

6) -The Magus- No influence, but hated it. (He did explain a little, but
that will have to wait till I listen to the tape.)

7) Le Guin. Big influence, especially the early books. Prob read LHoD
first, then went back to the others (Rocannon's World, City of
Illusions, Planet of Exile). These, with parts of Disch's -334-, are
probably the biggest SF influences on his work. Aware of parallel
between TD and CoI (alien traveler with strange eyes, damaged mind, an
unknown purpose) but says the idea came to him before he read it. Says
un-self-consciously that his is a much better-constructed book, that
hers is something of a mess. Says he finds her later work dry, somewhat
priggish and hard going.

Moving on, ideas of humans as next to God, other critters as less than
human: You're on the right track. Conscious gnosticism here (can't
quite decipher my writing). Humans remain part of God, while fairies,
angels,
demons, gods have been forgotten (by us, I think, not God) (when I
listen to the tape, I'll send a less garbled answer to this one).

You: "People who mimic the other critters are debasing themselves and
moving away from God and toward the less-than-human." Him: "Right, but
not in an orthodox way, it is gnostic."

Next point about the LB family devolving (Nutria's horror). He says [a
spoiler snip] his thoughts were "more handmade" in LB; the family is
moving to
a new condition which is not necessarily either higher or lower. He says
he is not a "moral writer," that he can explore the dilemmas of
characters who are creations in a book, a Tale. This is pretty explicit
in LB, but also true of the AE series.

He says you may be thinking a little too hard. It is important to
remember that this is a Tale and they are in it. In the series,
characters realize this more as the books move along.

He was a bit amused at your reaction to the "dreamboy," [L&S] and
explained
that what Pierce has done is to wish for love, and then when Cupid/Eros
shows up he makes the fumbling human mistake of actually trying to make
love to the ideal rather than asking it to grant his wish. Cupid permits
this out of somewhat malicious amusement; it is in two ways a perversion
of Pierce's natural yearning.

[rest snipped]

Ratty, we talked quite a bit about religion. As I suspected, he has
completely fallen away from his RC upbringing, to the point of some
hostility. His wife is Jewish, and has made some attempt to impress
"heritage" on their daughters, but he can't bring himself even to do
that, though (like me, btw) he believes that knowledge of the Bible,
like that of Greek mythology, is important to a humanistic education. He
has become extremely interested in gnosticim, however (for those who
want to follow him, you can get everything you need out of Hans
Jonas's -The Gnostic Religion-, one of the older and simpler texts).
Harold Bloom is something of a mentor to him, as he is to me. I don't
know whether you have read, or plan to read, the AEgypt series, but this
interest is somewhat spelled out in it. In fact, knowing this makes the
series easier to read.

So I hope the above is of some interest to at least part of the list.

-alga

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:29:30 +0000

>also amplify these answers, if need be, when I listen to the tape.

I have finally finished re-reading LB, much more slowly and carefully 
than the last time(s) I read it. I even took notes, but I can't say I 
feel like I have achieved a much greater insight into the book than 
before.

There is another likely reference to Edward Gorey's _The Unstrung 
Harp_ in Book 6, Ch. 1, section "Carrying a Torch":

------------------
[...] he was not any longer someone to whom things happened.
------------------

(This is Auberon, thinking of himself.)

Compare this to:

------------------
Though he is a person to whom things do not happen, perhaps they may 
when he is on the other side.
------------------

at the end of Gorey's book.

[...]

>So I hope the above is of some interest to at least part of the list.

I was greatly interested in your list of questions and answers and 
thank you for posting it. I have a few more questions I would like 
answers to. I will give one trivial and one perhaps not so trivial 
below. I have one more that I still need to work on, but I will send 
it to you later.

1. When Smoky comes to Edgewood for the first time, to marry Daily 
Alice, he meets her great-aunt, Nora Cloud, and her mother, Mrs. 
Drinkwater. There is an exchange between the two women. (This is in 
Book 1, Ch. 2, section "Lead Astray" on p. 31 of the Quality 
Paperback Book Club edition, which includes _Beasts_ and _Engine 
Summer_.)

------------------
"Cloud," said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a 
slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, "Cloud, I was lead astray."
------------------

Mrs. Drinkwater had asked Nora Cloud for advice about berrying and 
had collected a full bucket of berries, but says that she had been 
lead astray. This is never explained further that I could see.

This section contains a great deal of foreshadowing, but this 
particular part of it seems to lead nowhere, although it seems quite 
significant at the time it occurs.

I would like to know if it was intended to be significant and, if so, of what?

2. In Book 6, Ch. 2, section "What a Surprise", p. 533 Sophie's long 
lost daughter Lilac has come back and is trying to tell her mother 
how she got back to Edgewood, describing her route. Lilac mentions 
passing the Summer House where Auberon the elder lived in his last 
days.
 
------------------
"Auberon," Sophie said.
"No," Lilac said. "Not _Au_beron."
------------------

(The "Au" are in italics, but not the rest of the name.)

What does Lilac mean here, that the correct version of the name is Oberon?

If you want to (and can) pose these question to Crowley, wonderful. 
If not, I understand completely.

William (picky, picky, picky) Ansley

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 12:34:52 +0000

A big, belated thank you to alga for posting this.  Another thank you
for asking nearly all the questions I suggested, in what sounds like
nearly my wording, which I hadn't expected.  Of course, now I'm kicking
myself for questions I forgot to suggest.  I'll mention some in my
comments below; possibly, alga, you can ask some of them in your
follow-up, if you're so inclined.

> sense death? Yes. But it is not an ending; it is the start of something

As I had told alga, I felt (and feel) the ending was deliberately
ambiguous, and I didn't want to seem crass by asking too directly for
clarification.  Hence the weaselly wording.  Now I wish I'd bluntly
asked "Are the Drinkwaters dead?"  While JC might have regarded this as
crass, he also might have given a more specific answer.  As it is, I'm
tantalized: the Drinkwaters are dead "in some sense," but we don't know
in what.

> The 52 humans have become the 52 fairies who control them; the

It's not conclusive, but from JC's wording here it does appear that the
Drinkwaters are not fairies to start with, but become fairies only after
they've crossed over.  That's a question I wish I'd thought to suggest.

And I also should have suggested asking "Is it cyclical?  Will another
group of humans eventually replace the Drinkwaters as fairies?"

> [Referring to the Eigenblick subplot]: Also

It surprises me, not because I don't find aspects of the Eigenblick
subplot intrusive (though I'm not bothered by it as much as alga), but
because it goes against my mental picture of Crowley as a meticulous
craftsman concerned that every word be just right.  JC makes a similar
admission concerning GWoT later.  A general question concerning his
composition methods might be interesting.

> trumps, in 4 suits. Tarot cards are the extra cards added to that pack.

Okay, so Crowley didn't deliberately change the number of "suit cards"
to 52, as I had thought.  There's a more general lesson here, one that
applies to Wolfe too.  I'm no expert on the history of cards, playing or
Tarot, but the books I have consulted give a history that differs from
Crowley's.  We shouldn't assume that the information we find in
reference books--even standard ones--was necessarily what the author had
in mind when he or she was writing.

This leads to another question I wish I'd suggested.  In GWoT, the Denis
who narrates the final chapters (and, as it turns out, the entire work)
mentions having heard from his father that a dirigible had crashed.  As
mantis has pointed out, the date given for this crash in GWoT is not the
date it crashed in reality (at least according to the reference work he
consulted).  Did JC deliberately change the date to indicate that the
world at the end of the story is not quite the Original Situation,
despite appearances, as mantis argued?  Or did JC, or mantis's
reference, simply get the date wrong?

> be the end of hope. (I think that's what my note says.)

Again, I wish I'd suggested asking "What happened on Denis's mission in
Rhodesia?  Did he in fact meet his older self who warned him against
creating the Otherhood, and confabulate the story of the lion later?" 
That's what I think happened, but not everyone agrees. 

JC didn't exactly answer my question here, but I don't want to beat a
dead horse.

> JC doesn't relate to music, even the music "of his generation," all that

Now that I think about it, there is very little music in LB or Aegypt
for works with such a countercultural feel.

> impressed: a world that is not your own, not real, but inescapable.

mantis, could you elaborate on why you asked this?  The only connection
I can see offhand is that Smoky is sucked intothe Drinkwaters' reality;
but in LB the Drinkwaters' reality is objectively real.

> 3) The Fourth Tower of Inverness. Never heard of it.

Me neither.  Should I have?
 
> early review pointed it out. Stamp collections.

Again, mantis, please elaborate.  This sounds fascinating.  I just
finished TCoL49, and must confess I don't see much connection between it
and Aegypt, except for a general sense of epistemological suspension
between two realms of being (though it seems the "conflict of worlds" in
the series is going to be definitely resolved in favor of magic).  I see
a bit more of a similarity with LB: in a sense, the fairies and their
allies, like Tristero, are a subversive conspiracy originating in Europe
centuries ago and imported to America.  And again there's that
epistemological suspension, although in LB not shared by the reader,
just by some of the Smoky and some of the other males.

> of Pierce's natural yearning.

I'd like more of an explanation of this, especially since I've seen it
suggested that Crowley's works display a certain animus against
homosexuality.  It might be interesting asking JC about this, of course
in a way that doesn't put him on the spot.

--Adam

---

From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 08:32:49 +0000

At 12:34 PM 6/11/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>A big, belated thank you to alga for posting this.

Ditto from Nutria. Settles most things I was interested in.

Nutricious