John Crowley

 

In Memoriam : John Crowley
1 December 1942 – 8 August 2026

John Crowley was a great writer, one whose work I prize above most other writers. I first knew and esteemed Crowley through his work, as with Borges and Avram Davidson (neither of whom I ever met), but the subculture of science fiction is permeable, so before long we met in person and became friends. (Peter Straub was the other magician writer I was lucky enough to get to know.) Our paths, it turned out, had many meeting points. I remember more than one Readercon where John and I were both wearing seersucker.

When John was agentless and somewhere in the morasse of writing Endless Things, Temporary Culture proposed decent terms to publish a small edition ; he declined graciously, reminding me that he sought a wider readership than I could achieve. Some years later, as Small Beer Press was getting ready to publish Endless Things in the spring of 2007, Gavin Grant commissioned a special binding of six copies for author and publisher and friends. It was a pleasure to oblige (and thus participate in the book) ; I designed and executed two further hand bookbinding projects for Crowley titles published by Small Beer, the Chemical Wedding and And Go Like This.

John was very generous to me : he accepted my invitation to participate in the Critical Fiction panel to celebrate the publication of Wendy Walker’s My Man and Other Critical Fictions (2011), and the event went well. John was funny, a smart reader whose essays and conversation demonstrated his wide reading and ability to make interesting connections. It was curious that he was for a time so resistant to the notion of the critical fiction ; yet when he grasped the concept, he saw the playfulness and deep roots of the mode.
[A recording of the symposium here : http://criticalfiction.net/wordpress/?p=209 .]

John contributed a nimble preface to A Conversation larger than the Universe (2018). His “Hatful of Adjectives for Henry Wessells” contains one of the trickiest sentences he ever composed :

. . . he holds (though lightly) the idea that a literature of impossibilities can be a revealing mirror of actualities. Hamlet says that playing (into which we can enfold “fiction” in a sense Shakespeare didn’t use) holds a mirror up to nature; but of course the image in the mirror (as C. L. Dodgson never tired of pointing out) is always reversed.

Read that again : Alice and Hamlet and mirrors in a single sentence.

The sage came down from the mountain top (or, anyway, from the Utopian Berkshire village of Conway) to the Big Apple for the SF Symposium I organized in connection with the Grolier Club exhibition in early March 2018. John joined Christopher Brown, Siobhan Carroll, Ellen Datlow, Samuel R. Delany, and Maria Headley. It was a good panel and a fun conversation at dinner afterwards.
[Link to the Grolier Club video here : https://vimeo.com/259778546 .]

In his essay on re-reading, William Hazlitt talks of certain books as “links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are land-marks and guides in our journey through life” : this very much applies to my re-readings of Little, Big. John did not merely write Little, Big. The four volumes of Ægypt (over a twenty-year period), The Deep, Engine Summer, The Translator, Ka, and his short stories and essays form a substantial and enduring body of work. The John Crowley papers are held at HRC in Austin (Manuscript Collection MS-01003).

John was a modest, even humble person. One afternoon in the spring of 2018 I got a call from him, saying he was in town to go to an awards banquet, would I like to come to the reception (he couldn’t get me in to the gala dinner). I met him at his hotel. As we walked down to the much grander hotel, talking of many things along the way, he told me, “it’s a story set in a library. There’s no chance I’ll win but the publisher asked me to be present, so here I am”: that evening the Mystery Writers of America presented the Edgar award for best short story to “Spring Break” by John Crowley.

Some years ago John and I were asked to be a panelist at an event in Boston organized to identify One Hundred Famous Massachusetts Books (there are a great many of them). At the last minute, John couldn’t make it. Only a couple of people showed up, so we panelists had a great conversation and came up with a good preliminary list. My friend David Godine was there. And so was Matt Tannenbaum, of the Bookstore in Lenox, Mass. We both agreed that Little, Big ranked high on the list : his was the shop where forty-five years ago today a publication party was held for Little, Big by John Crowley (see below).

John Crowley was a kind man and a wonderful writer. We are all fortunate that he wrote his books.