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Above: Every year, to celebrate the season, I write a Halloween story which Marianne and I then copy out, one word at a time, on fallen leaves. The leaves are photographed and then left where they were found. The story is serialized online here, one sentence per day. The final sentence will be posted on All Hallows Eve.
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Above: Every year, to celebrate the season, I write a Halloween story which Marianne and I then copy out, one word at a time, on fallen leaves. The leaves are photographed and then left where they were found. The story is serialized online here, one sentence per day. The final sentence will be posted on All Hallows Eve.
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Above: Every year, to celebrate the season, I write a Halloween story which Marianne and I then copy out, one word at a time, on fallen leaves. The leaves are photographed and then left where they were found. The story is serialized online here, one sentence per day. The final sentence will be posted on All Hallows Eve.
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One of my guilty pleasures is reading outdated collections of essays and the like. Sometimes you discover forgotten treasures: A. A. Milne's essay on The Wind in the Willows, for example, or Edward Mott Woolley's writer's-autobiography, Free-Lancing for Forty Magazines. Then again, however, you may come up with Grant Overton's Cargoes for Crusoes, a 1924 guide to what Overton deemed the best fiction of the times.
In all fairness, he did hit upon a few writers with staying power: Aldous Huxley, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, most notably, though he was a little condescending toward Ms. Wharton and most of her gender. The bulk of the book is taken up by writers who are, I fear, little remembered today: Philip Gibbs, Melville Davisson Post (author of the Uncle Abner detective stories), Cosmo Hamilton, E. V. Lucas, Courtney Ryley Cooper... and Thomas Dixon, author of the Clansman trilogy of novels "undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin." The first of which D. W. Griffith turned into The Birth of a Nation.
The fact that these authors were all once household names and many of them quite wealthy as a result should teach humility to even the most successful of today's writers.
So much work went into this book! Yet, now that I've read it, it's going into the Wee Free Library out front of our house. There to await another antiquarian reader of dubious tastes.
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I am not sure what to say about The Illuminated Man: Life, Death, and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, which I've just finished reading. It's as if a book had escaped from the real of dreams--one which starts as one particular thing and then, as you read, becomes something else before returning to its original purpose and then warping into yet something entirely different.
Okay, let me explain.
David Pringle, over the course of many years, amassed and organized in a chronology some 400,000 words of biographical facts and quotes about the life and works of J. G. Ballard. Christopher Priest, who admired Ballard greatly, urged him to turn those notes into a biography.
Pringle, unhappily, had health issues that prevented him from taking on such a task. He suggested that Priest write the book instead. Priest's partner and later wife, Nina Allan, urged him to do so.
Putting aside the novel he had been working on, Priest began writing a critical biography, one he explicitly hoped would force the British literary establishment to include Ballard in the Canon. He was in good health at the onset of the project, but a fast-acting cancer felled him before he could complete the task, though by then he had written a great deal of the book.
Shortly before his death, Ms. Allan took over.
Here, the book takes a swerve, because Allan, seeing parallels between Ballard's life and works and those of her late husband's, inserted Priest into the narrative as a kind of "twin" to Ballard. Her primary emphasis, however, was on Ballard's works, where, it has to be said, she did a good job. The seams only show where she inserted the first-person pronoun into the text so the reader would know exactly whose experiences and opinions were being presented.
But there is also Allan's detailed account of Priest's illness, decline, and death. Which segues into her analysis of her own grief. She was clearly working her way through the pain and toward acceptance.
Then back to Ballard.
So there are, by my analysis, six major strands to the work: Ballard's life, Priest's analysis of his works, Priest's literary life, his illness and death, Allan's working-through of her still-raw sorrow and (at the end) a meditation on biography and on the book itself. It is a miracle that this isn't a complete botch. For which, full credit must go to Tina Allan and whatever editor she must surely have worked with.
But when it comes to passing judgment on The Illuminated Man, I am completely out of my depth. Does it achieve any of its goals from forcing Ballard into the Canon to easing a widow's grief? I have no idea. I can only say that it kept my interest throughout. Also, that there will surely always be readers for a work so uniquely structured.
I can think of no book remotely like it.
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A quarter-century ago, I carried a light portable tape recorder to a convention that my wife, Marianne Porter, could not attend. My intention was to record a few ephemeral moments of the con to amuse her later. In the bar, I struck up a conversation with John Crowley.
Crowley was then universally acknowledged to be one of the best and brightest writers working in genre He was also midway through his ambitious hermetic fantasy, the Aegypt Sequence. The first book, Aegypt, appeared in 1987 and the second, Love & Sleep in 1994. Daemonomania was forthcoming and the final book, Endless Things, would not appear until 2007, twenty years after the first.
With John's permission, I turned on the recorder and asked him why he was engaged in such a large and time-consuming single work. His answer was as follows:
God knows. God help me. For having ever started this. When we are young we think that life will go on forever. When we grow older, we realize that life has shapes. It's time, it seems to me, to find out that the largest stretch of my creative years is going to be taken up with a project that will probably be the major thing that I do in life. That's scary. That's a terrifying thought. You try to preserve possibilities. You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn't. And the idea that it doesn't, and that life has shapes, is borne in on me as I work on this book. It's not like I will go on and write dozens of books. I don't know what they are. No, I know what they are, and I am already in the middle of writing one of them. I don't know why. I wish I knew.
Which answer I found so engaging that I later published it in The New York Review of Science Fiction as the first of a series of “singular interviews.”
John Crowley lived another twenty years after completing that great work. But no author is immortal, though some of his works (Little Big is my favorite of his fantasies and Engine Summer of his science fiction) may be. He passed away on August 8, 2026.
John led a life that constantly opened out. Now, alas, it has closed.
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