Mad, Bad—and Dangerous To Write About?

PW Talks with John Crowley

by Roger Gathman -- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2005

PW: It would be easy for the readers of your earlier novels, with their strong gnostic and fantastic themes, to imagine you writing a novel about Blake or Shelley. But you chose to write about the least mystical Romantic poet, Byron [Lord Byron's Novel, reviewed on p. 40]. Why?

John Crowley: It's true, I was never drawn to Byron's poetry. Of course, there are some lyrics—"She walked in beauty like the night"; "So we'll no more go a-roving"—which, as [poet] Tom Disch once said, seem like you could have written them yourself. That is their power, I guess. But it was Byron himself who drew me. I read Keats and Shelley and Blake when I was young, but not Byron. Then I picked up Leslie Marchand's biography, and I felt like I could really apprehend Byron as a person. In the late '60s, I even wrote a play about Byron and Shelley, with themes that seemed timely—the opposition between Shelley's romantic utopianism and Byron's more worldly, fleshly, ambiguous views.

PW: So you started out as a playwright?

JC: No, I started out wanting to make films. But I knew there was no way to make a film about Byron and Shelley. A few years later, Ken Russell did it and he proved my point—he shouldn't have.

PW: The sections in which you "invent" Byron's novel are pitch perfect—that is, when one compares them to his wonderful letters.

JC: Thanks. I bought all 15 volumes of Byron's correspondence. They have furnished me with a sort of constant bedtime reading matter. It seems to me that Byron should have written a novel.

PW: Interestingly, the Byron in the novel feels so much less earnest than the contemporary characters who rediscover the Byron novel. And those characters, Alexandra and Lee, are closer in tone to the Victorian character, Ada. Is there a reason for this? Have we sacrificed wit for virtue?

JC: Byron had a characteristic unwillingness to admit big truths, or big moral positions. He called that kind of thing "cant." He was committed to honor and to repair evils done to the weak by the powerful. However, he was always ambiguous about final, decisive moral things, in contrast to his wife, Annabelle, which was the reason they were so incompatible, and the marriage was such a disaster. Ada is Annabelle's daughter, but in the novel she does grow to appreciate Byron's possibilities.

Byron was never for the mob, although he had his sense of political justice. In fact, according to an account by his unreliable friend, Trelawny, he once [asked] Shelley, "Why should I join a movement to overthrow the powerful when I know my head will be one of the ones ending up in the tumbrils?"

PW: While this is different from the more fantastical novels for which you are known, it grows out of that night in which the seeds of Frankenstein were sown—when Mary Shelley and Shelley and Byron told ghost stories. Why do we return to that night again and again like it's some kind of primal scene for the gothic?

JC: It really is, in some ways, a primal scene: an interesting collection of people and, yes, a "dark and stormy night." Frankenstein is the first modern myth—that is, wholly without a classical precedent. And the first vampire novel came out of it, written by Byron's companion, Polidori. The great tradition is seen as the smooth rise of the realistic trend in novels that started in the 18th century and includes all those classic 19th-century novels, but there was always the secret, ignored tradition—gothic, sensational, mythopoeic—which has now come to be almost dominant. I have a feeling that if Byron were a writer now, that's the mode in which he would write: the novels of sensation, with imprisonment, crimes, lost heirs. It was definitely the kind of novel he liked to read.