by John Crowley
Her two friends Peter and Andromeda are with her—they are actually companions assigned by her aunt to protect her, and only seemed to be American teenagers. Peter is Pieter de Graz, a seasoned soldier; Andromeda is a dog—though that’s not all she is. Peter has a new arm, the arm of a stronger, older man. All three will struggle to remember the Massachusetts they lost, but now for them America is a vast woodland, barely touched by Europeans. In time they are captured by Roumanian scouts sent to find them, and they begin a long hard trek through the wilderness toward the Albany trading post, the ocean and Roumania.
Simultaneously we are in Great Roumania, where several parties are tracking by occult means Miranda’s progress. The Baroness Ceausescu discovers a book like the one burned in the false Massachusetts, a book detailing a history of Roumania she rejects, full of Nazis and Soviet armies and a different Ceausescu regime, gloomy and squalid. Her Bucharest is the grand capital of a multiethnic country that hasn’t experienced our twentieth century. Nor has the world around it, where North Africa (“Abyssinia”) is the source of technical innovations and scientific progress, the British Isles and France were destroyed by a massive tsunami long before, there is a Tsar in Russia and a Sultan in Turkey, temples to Venus and Diana are the cathedrals and basilicas, and the many religions are conflated and deformed by (real) history into wonderful strangeness: “[Ludu Rat-tooth] told the story of Jesus of Nazareth, how he led the slaves to revolution on the banks of the Nile. Afterward he led his armies into Italy. He crucified the captured generals before the walls of Rome.” His warrior queen, Mary Magdalene, brought the Gypsies out of Egypt (so the Gypsies believe). Below this world is the hidden world, from which occult powers spring and humans are subsumed in their archetypes.
Such transmogrifications are common enough in alternative-world novels, though the extravagance and specificity of these is striking. What makes these four volumes unique is that the inventions are not dealt out to us as needed to make scenes or stage the plot, nor to form the background of the adventures of Miranda on her way to her destiny. They are the integument of the book as much as—perhaps more than—the course of the action is.
Descriptions, tones, a writer’s constant production of things—clothing and buildings and foodstuffs but also thoughts, momentary sensations, variations of sunlight and weather—these are what make the world of a fiction real, they are the metonymic medicines of actuality. In realistic (“mimetic”) stories and novels they have value only if they go toward making actual this family home, this city, this job, this restaurant, this love affair; those that do not are effectually nonexistent. Fantasy literature is different—much of what the author provides is particular to an invented realm while at the same time familiar, having symbolic rather than metonymic power—swords, chalices, crowns, steeds—that abstract readers from their familiar actualities. The strange thing is how few novels sold as fantasy-realm series and listed alongside Park’s contain enough such things, and load all their power into events, quests and conflicts that readers of such stories have encountered many times before. Park’s Roumania series—to a much greater degree even than the Starbridge books—is as dense with synecdochic detail as the great realist novels of the place and time in which (mutatis very much mutandis) it is set, and almost requires the constant attention that an obdurate self-creating modernist text requires. It’s like reading A Man without Qualities or Proust or late Henry James, not because these books resemble those books at all, but because they make a similar demand on the attention and on the reader’s powers of appreciation, and the risk of surfeit that reading them entails—you, or at least I, can only read in them for so long before having to pause. Keep up, the text seems to say, every word of this is meant, it’s neither page-filling nor self-indulgence, some of it will be answered in later pages and some not but that’s not the reason to pay attention.
There’s no doubt that a certain inspiration came to Park from Philip Pullman’s inventive series His Dark Materials, which basically initiated the current young-girl-born-to-greatness mode. Park may have got from Pullman the animal forms that inhabit his characters, which escape from the body at death (though such inner forms have further life and purposes in the hidden world). But Pullman’s narrative is as unsurprising and off-the-shelf as his world is imaginative and new. It progresses—as does Tolkien’s—by a steady alternation of scenes of threat, danger, discomfort, and ignorance, and scenes of warmth, relief, and intimations of resolution; each scene is like a brick put in place in a growing edifice, whose shape and reason come clearer and clearer to us. There’s no such rhythm to Park’s series. Some of the most memorable scenes have very little to do with the evolving dynastic epic or Miranda’s transformation into the long-awaited “white tyger” who will save her nation from German hegemony. A long episode in which the wandering Pieter de Graz is falsely accused of an inconsequential murder and brought before a grotesque Turkish magistrate, who forces him to participate in a wrestling competition or be executed, is Kafkaesque in its intensity and absurd detail, yet effectually comes to nothing. It’s among the most haunting scenes in the work, haunting the way dreams haunt waking life.
Park’s continuous production of small and large descriptions of the things and circumstances of his Great Roumania, the nuances of ethnic difference, the names of officials, hereditary and military titles, architecture, interiors, food and drink, hierarchies of speech—an almost hypnagogic flow of imagery—embed his characters as though in a highly researched historical novel. In fact one of the pleasures of the book is the recurrent remembrance that these things never did and never could have happened. This weird authenticity extends to the people: the Baroness Ceausescu is the evil force, the manipulative wicked fairy of the book, and yet in her belief in her own basic goodness—that she is alone and helpless and does only what she must, that others must see her as innocent and wronged—she is weirdly touching, an affect she understands and regularly deploys. Her great opponent, in the world of the living and in the hidden world, is Aegypta Schenk, Miranda’s aristocratic aunt, gentle yet iron-willed. When the Baroness seeks her out at her hidden shrine of Venus in the woods, her rage, self-pity, self-exculpation, and finally murder proceed not only through speech and action but through the things and nature of the place. Partial quotation can only suggest the power of this lengthy scene:
“You will talk to me,” she said. She knelt over the princess with the stiletto in her hand. She pressed the point into her spotted neck under the knot of the white cord, but didn’t prick her. Then, suddenly disgusted with herself, she got to her feet and put the dagger down on the ledge of the hearth. She had a headache from the brandy and whatever was in the tea, and she was breathing hard. “I won’t let you,” she said. Then to calm herself, she threw some more wood on the fire and started to explore the house.
This was the larger room with the fireplace and the armchairs, the table and benches. The princess cooked on a primus stove. There was a food cupboard set into the wall. Opened, it revealed a plethora of delicacies: marmalade, cornichons, olives, pickled cherries, sardines, smoked oysters, teas. Many of the bottles and cans had foreign labels.
“You know it’s true, what I told you,” the baroness said. “I came from a village near Pietrosul. Seven of us in a room. Not like this—we had nothing. Just a wooden shack in the mountains. Water from the stream. Cold in the winter, I remember. Oh, I remember …”
Her guilt at the princess’s murder will only increase her undying hatred and resentment, and—because this is not a historical fiction or a mimetic one—she will have to face Aegypta’s opposition from the hidden world forever.
The most puzzling character in the series is the central one, Miranda Popescu, whose nature is a puzzle to herself, and whose actions in the world of Great Roumania are for a long time tentative and irresolute. She behaves, in other words, like an American teenage girl reborn in these impossibilities, having lost everything—a refugee, in effect, with a young person’s tenta
tive allegiances and inability to be entirely whole. For a long time she suffers more than she acts, and follows more than she leads. Some readers have expressed impatience with this, and yet it is realistic in a way rare in this kind of fiction, wherein to be thrown into a different world is usually a test to be passed, and that is passed with dispatch. She grows by leaps—that is, in this realm she has sudden years magically added to her age, and by the end is no longer a teenager at all but a young woman. Her soul-growth is slower, though, and her stature at the end is correspondingly great. At the end she is offered—or creates for herself—a choice of realms, and takes the harder.
There is another key to Miranda, though, which leads me back to Park’s story collection where this present consideration began. The second volume of the series, The Tourmaline, is dedicated to “Miranda, of course,” and it’s easy to find out that Paul Park’s daughter is named Miranda, that she was born a few years before the Roumania series was begun (which makes her now about the age of Miranda Popescu at the time of the last volume), and that Park was born and lived in Williamstown amid the scenes where the book begins, to which it now and then returns in memory, and where it nearly ends. Of course—as noted above—a lot of books derive power from the author’s life; but a dedication to a daughter whose name is the name of the titular character, in a novel set in the town where author and daughter lived and that he causes to vanish like a dream—all that suggests metafiction. And in fact his work since the completion of the series has moved far and fast in that direction.
His next substantial publication was All Those Vanished Engines, comprising three intertwining novellas that would take almost as long to adequately describe as to read. It contains fictional versions of himself (a character writes the novel that Paul Park has written for the Dungeons & Dragons franchise) and various relations, including ancestors real and imagined that he places in the post–Civil War period in an America invaded by aliens, aliens who also invade in the future of that past—at least in the stories of a future writer who is imagined into being by one of those ancestors. And it includes an anti-history of the titanic machines housed in the buildings of the former Sprague Electric Company in North Adams (a few miles from Williamstown), which now comprise the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), for which Park wrote an interactive exhibit about an alien spaceship. It’s the constant transformations and evanescences of Roumania, now bound up with a real lived life. I have wondered how much the effect of it depends on the reader’s knowledge of these extra-literary things; it actually doesn’t entirely exist without them.
“I don’t want to think too hard, in this context, of the parasitic nature of the writer’s relationship to his or her subject,” Park says, in a note to one of the stories in Other Stories, a remark that suggest he thinks about it quite a lot. “The Blood of Peter Francisco” in the volume is a retro-noir story set in the same—or similarly distorted—world as the mad post-bellum one in All Those Vanished Engines; this would be evident to any reader of both, but only with Park’s note do we get the family history buried in it.
Autobiographical-metafictional in an entirely different way (or perhaps no way at all) is in “No Traveler Returns,” dedicated to a dead friend, Jim Charbonnet, “who was going to help me with the ending”: the same dedication, in the same words, appears in the first volume of the Roumania series. This story, though, which begins with Park at Charbonnet’s bedside as he lies dying, becomes a series of fanfold adventures involving yetis, mad monks in Tibet, beautiful women from his friend’s life, places he had promised to accompany him to, to which he now goes to battle evil agents, be taken prisoner, escape, nearly die, etc., on and on in a remarkable tour de force of continuously collapsing narrative that revolves but never resolves. It can’t be separated from the dying, then dead, then not dead dedicatee appearing and disappearing until the end; it would lose much of its hilarity and strangely touching power without the actuality described in the notes that form an integral and integrating part of this volume.
Readers acquiring it will get plenty more, including “Three Visits to a Nursing Home,” the central panel of the triptych that makes up All Those Vanished Engines, and a terrific Poe pastiche set in New Orleans. It’s common for a reviewer familiar with his subject to recommend a book of stories as a sort of tasting menu before embarking on the author’s big work. Witty, original, and beautifully written as many of these stories are, though, I think the way to read Park is to begin right off with A Princess of Roumania. Afterward there will be room for all the rest. Unless the reader is the sort who, having finished the four Roumania volumes, will want to immediately begin again—or, because it is that kind of work, to simply open a volume anywhere and start to read, and be taken up in a world as thick as her own but not her own.
“I Did Crash a Few Parties”
John Crowley interviewed by Terry Bisson
You received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2006, yet you are still with us. What went wrong?
Mario Puzo once remarked, after getting a $400,000 advance on The Godfather, that an amount of money like that (it was worth lots more at the time than now) was like finding out you don’t have to die. I’m wondering if you can win a Lifetime Achievement Award over and over without end.
Like many ambitious, eager, overly self-confident wannabes from the provinces (I’m one myself) you bolted for New York as soon as you graduated to long pants. What party were you hoping to crash? Any luck?
I went to New York from Indiana. There were two directions ambitious artistic/literary types could go then, to New York or to Los Angeles. I wanted to make movies, not write fiction (I’d done that), but I chose New York. The films made in New York were “underground” movies, and I saw a lot of them. I wrote what are now called pitches, also scripts, with an old Indiana chum—Lance Bird, who was more passionate about filmmaking than I was—and in the end I did work in film, but in documentary—historical docs made from old film, a job I loved. I did crash a few parties, too. At that time it was nearly impossible for anyone living in certain neighborhoods or going to certain bars (Max’s Kansas City) not to brush up against famous people or people once famous or about to become famous.
Ever cross paths with the Warhol crowd in those days?
My first New York job was as a photographer’s assistant to a big fashion/advertising studio photographer of a kind that hardly exists any longer. He shot fashion spreads for Life magazine, and the Life fashion editor thought that a shoot using underground movies as backgrounds would be cool. So as the resident young hip person I was sent up to the Factory to collect the reels from Paul Morrissey, who was about to become a filmmaker in his own right. I had tried to explain that Warhol’s films were stunningly boring (that was the point, of course) and that Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures or the Kuchar brothers’ Sins of the Fleshapoids would be better, but Life mostly used Warhol’s Empire and Sleep. At a party afterward one of the editorial women told me she was going to “get” Andy. I listened as she told him a story about the famous Art Market show where the paintings were set up as in a grocery store (including Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes and Andy’s Campbell’s Soup). Buyers took away their purchases in grocery-store shopping bags. She’d got one—they were signed by Warhol—and her son, she said, had thought it was just a paper bag and took it to school with his books in it! Warhol, po-faced as always, murmured, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” The woman was a little put off by this, and said, “But here’s the thing—the bag fell apart on the way! It was a lousy bag!” Warhol was almost thrilled. “Oh, that’s so wonderful, is that really true? Oh, you must tell that story to Henry [Geldzahler, the critic, who was at the party],” and he pulled her over to meet him. Andy was un-beardable.
Unlike many of your Grub Street colleagues, you are a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. Is the food any good?
At the one luncheon I was invited to, it was quite nice. Jackie Kennedy, Philip Roth, and othe
rs were there. I have never been asked back. Actually I’m not a member, or a fellow, or whatever; I was given an award in literature that year along with Roth and the wonderful Vicki Hearne (Adam’s Task). There was real money attached. Harold Bloom was on the prizes committee that year. I was quite poor. The name has changed, and now you must say The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
What’s the deal with The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (which is rather hard to find)? What’s its relationship to the nineteenth-century classic by Mary Cowden Clarke?
It was published by a small press (Subterranean) as a limited edition, and reprinted in the famed “New Weird” issue of Conjunctions, the Bard College literary magazine. How hard to find can that be? Actually I’m hoping to make it easier to find soon—I’m working on a book of my uncollected stories, and this is one. (Another will be the story whose first appearance is in this PM book.) Mary Cowden Clarke’s book, which I have, and have looked into, was described to me by John Hollander as a “very common romance type of the late nineteenth century,” though he didn’t describe the type further. It tells made-up (i.e., baseless) tales of the, yes, childhoods of Shakespeare’s heroines—how Beatrice won over a gang of robbers, how Juliet’s mother came into possession of the poison that later Juliet uses, and so forth. The language is sort-of-Shakespearean. The book’s long. In my piece (which originally was simply called “Avon”) the title is used to describe an aspiring teenage actress who contracts polio and is a heroine in several senses. She and the boy in love with her come upon the book in the library of a small town in Indiana, where there is (though there really wasn’t) a Shakespeare festival in the 1960s.
You wrote the “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s for a while. How did that come about? Do you have a different discipline and approach for fiction and nonfiction?