This much of Ockham’s story has been known for some time. Some of Lady Byron’s connections and relatives found it shockingly hard-hearted of young Byron to cause this grief to his family at just this moment. What has not before been known was that at some time during his stay there—possibly when he guessed he would be caught—he put into a Liverpool bank vault the chest containing his seaman’s papers, some letters and other personal mementos, and the enciphered novel and the notes for it which his mother had committed to him. How clear it must have been to her—for she had her moments of clarity, those awful and pitiless and wondrous moments that do light up final illnesses, as anyone who has witnessed one knows—that he would try his best to preserve it. Did she want
him
to escape, as well? What was it she told him—to go straight from her house and her room, where she lay dying, away from everything, and to America?
He never did. He was put back into the Navy. He eventually won a discharge, or deserted, it’s unclear what happened. After more unhappy years—at home under Lady Byron’s care, then under the direction of the famed Victorian schoolmaster Thomas Arnold—he ran away again, and this time wasn’t pursued; he worked as a coal miner and then as a laborer in a shipyard, living under the name of Jack Okey. He died in 1862 of consumption, aged twenty-six. The dead can’t learn or change, but the one thing I would like Lord Byron to hear, the story I would most like to get a letter from him about, is the strange and sad story of his grandson, who wanted not to be a lord.
What follows then, I believe, is the result of a triple honoring. I want to say, of a triple love—the love of a father for his daughter, a daughter for her father, a son for his mother—but I can’t see into hearts long dead, and one of those involved left no record at all.
I
N JUNE
1816,
IN
Switzerland, as he began the novel he would at some point call
The Evening Land,
Byron completed canto 3 of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
. In the last stanzas he spoke directly to his faraway daughter—while knowing of course that his wife, and the whole reading world, were listening in. “The child of love, though born in bitterness,” he calls her. “Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught / I know that thou wilt love me…” Perhaps he did know this; certainly he seemed to know he would never see her again:
I see thee not,—I hear thee not,—but none
Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend
To whom the shadows of far years extend:
Albeit my brow thou never should’st behold,
My voice shall with thy future visions blend,
And reach into thy heart,
—
when mine is cold,
—
A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.
And so it did; his voice did reach into her heart. Lord Byron also never got to America, nor did he ever return to England; Ada never went abroad to see him—as she might have today, if her father could have been properly treated for his illnesses, if her mother had not retained a lifelong horror of her husband, if the world then had been more like the world now, if things weren’t as they are and were. But his voice reached into her heart, as it would have done, I believe, whether or not she had ever found the novel that here follows.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS TO ALL
those scholars and investigators who helped to authenticate and account for the manuscript of
The Evening Land
may be found following the Textual History. I would myself like to express here my own debt to two people for their help to me in solving the puzzle of
The Evening Land
and its fate: Dr. Lee Novak, for his editing of the deciphered manuscript, for his annotations of Ada’s annotations, but much more for his many insights and his encouragement; and Dr. Thea Spann, whose cunning and constancy were both indispensable, and whom I can’t find words to thank.
Kyoto
June 10, 2003
*
Benjamin Woolley,
The Bride of Science
(1999).
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE
to acknowledge those who aided him in the foregoing piece of impertinence, among whom are Ralph Vicinanza, Jennifer Brehl, L.S.B., Ted Chiang for thoughts about codes, Mary Irwin for French perhaps more correct than Byron’s, Benjamin Woolley for
The Bride of Science
(his biography of Ada, Countess of Lovelace), Doron Suede for
The Difference Engine,
and above all Paul Fry for his meticulous and sympathetic reading. The great dead need no acknowledgment from me.
Meet John Crowley
J
OHN
C
ROWLEY
is the author of nine novels and two collections of short fiction. His first published novels were science fiction:
The Deep (1975)
and
Beasts
(1976).
Engine Summer,
nominated for the American Book Award in 1977, appears in David Pringle’s authoritative
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
Crowley’s next book,
Little, Big,
won the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1982; Ursula K. Le Guin called it a book which "all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy." Also that year, Crowley embarked on an ambitious multivolume novel called
Ægypt,
of which three volumes have been published: Æ
egypt, Love & Sleep,
and
Daemonomania.
(The final volume is in preparation.) Both this series and
Little, Big were
cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. Crowley is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant.
The Translator,
published in 2002, received Italy’s Premio Flaianno.
Crowley’s short fiction is collected in three volumes:
Novelty
(including the World Fantasy Award-winning novella
Great Work of Time), Antiquities,
and
Novelties & Souvenirs,
an omnibus volume containing almost all his short fiction (a new novella,
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,
appeared in 2005). A volume of essays and criticism will appear in 2006.
“
Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
”
For much of his working life Crowley has written scripts for short films and documentaries, including many historical documentaries for public television. His work in this medium has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and several other venues. His scripts include
The World of Tomorrow
(about the 1939 World’s Fair),
No Place to Hide
(about the bomb shelter obsession of the 1950s),
The Hindenburg,
and
FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body
(about American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades, cowritten with Laurie Block).
A Conversation with John Crowley
T
HE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW
was conducted by Nick Gevers in May 2005, shortly before the publication of
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land.
A resident of Cape Town, South Africa, Gevers reviews for
Locus,
interviews authors for
Science Fiction Weekly,
and edits science fiction and fantasy titles for PS Publishing in Britain.
Let’s begin with your quite remarkable new book,
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land.
You’ve clearly been interested in Byron for a long time, as your 1990 short story, "Missolonghi 1824," attests. Why this fascination? What do you find especially compelling about Byron as a writer and as a personality?
The fascination actually goes back a lot farther than that. In the late 1960s I wrote a play—maybe it would have evolved into a screenplay—about Byron and [Percy Bysshe] Shelley in Pisa and the death of Shelley. It set Byron as an
homme moyen sensuel
and ambivalent realist against the pure Utopian vision of Shelley—and details how they evolved a deep friendship despite the difference. It was a tale for those times, I guess. But I came to love them both—Byron more profoundly, or intimately. He seemed to me—as few historical characters ever do—a whole man, a man whose interior was as knowable as any living person I could know intimately. Because he was so unguarded, his poses and his personae were evident as what they were and he was always ready to mock himself for projecting them—mock himself as smilingly and tolerantly as he did the rest of the world. I came to think of him as a friend.
“
Byron seemed to me—as few historical characters ever do—a whole man, a man whose interior was as knowable as any living person I could know intimately.
”
The core of
Lord Byron’s Novel
is exactly what the title promises:
The Evening Land,
a brilliant pastiche of the novel Byron might plausibly have written. This raises two questions: First, why engage in such elaborate literary impersonation when your own prose style is justly celebrated in its own right? And second, how difficult was it to master Byron’s voice in such depth and in such idiosyncratic detail?
The answer is the same for both questions. I really enjoy ventriloquizing or channeling other voices and I think I’m good at it, within some distinct limits. The long eighteenth-century erotic poem pastiche in
Daemonomania
called "Ars Auto-amatoria, or, Every Man his Own Wife," was a delight to write. (I managed a career as a publicist and writer of public relations and instructional films by imagining myself the kind of person who wrote such things and writing what he’d write.) It was like turning on a faucet to reproduce the voice. (Of course I also kept notebooks full of turns of phrase, terms, bits of slang, Latin tags, etc., to draw on at need.) Byron’s letters and journals fill thirteen volumes, and I have them all—they’ve been my pick-it-up-when-nothing-else-suits reading for years. They are lots funnier and swifter and eccentrically individual than my imitation.
Byron has been a favorite subject of historical novelists—one thinks of such books as Robert Nye’s
The Memoirs of Lord Byron
(1989) and Tom Holland’s
The Vampyre
(1995). Nye reconstructed Byron’s memoirs, which were in reality destroyed after his death, and Holland took him in the direction of supernatural legend. Did the fact that those approaches had already been exploited point you toward the idea of a novel amounting to Byron’s fictionalized autobiography?
No, actually—though there are even more than you name. I glanced at Nye’s book after conceiving my own and found it unconvincing—I’m not being dismissive; I didn’t want to have my own attempt clouded by his. I particularly objected to Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s otherwise delightful
The Difference Engine
[1990] for its suggestion that Byron could have initiated a police state. Harder to put down was Paul West’s wonderful
Lord Byron’s Doctor
[ 1989], which was convincing, though his Byron wasn’t mine and I quickly had to avoid it too. I didn’t want to write about Byron or his real or imaginary adventures.
Why do you have Byron in
The Evening Land
couch his own life story in indirect yet eminently recognizable terms (as he himself did in his long poems "Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan")? Is his career still generally misunderstood to the extent that he must be given afresh opportunity for self-defense?
Well, I don’t think any but the learned will be able to compare in any detail his life and the tale I’ve written for him. I think the goal wasn’t defending him or explaining him so much as it was imagining the story he would tell. Byron was a modern man in many ways, but he was a modern writer because of his naked employment of his own life in his fictions—always knowing that because of his (also modern) media fame his readers were going to make the comparisons and try to guess at the (scandalous) truth.
Also along those lines:
The Evening Land
is supposedly written by Byron circa 1816 to 1822, during which time he, of course, changed—perhaps maturing, certainly evolving in outlook. The novel itself undergoes shifts in tone from the Gothic onward. . . . How precisely do the differing modes and moods of the chapters of
The Evening Land
map Byron’s ongoing psychological and literary development in those years?
I’m not sure I was entirely conscious of doing this, though I am happy to think that it strikes you that way and it would certainly be what I want the book to do. I think I was as much conscious of the growth and maturity of Byron’s characters (that is, those I invented for him) as he would have been. It could be thought that the historical progression of Byron’s own life—childhood in Scotland, years at Eton and then at Cambridge, early visit to Albania and elsewhere abroad, raising hell in London, bad marriage, debts, fleeing England, long residence in Venice as the lover of a married woman, growing involvement in the European revolutionary movements—is very intentionally mapped against my invented story. Of course the resonances are intentional, but—I guess it’s a different kind of channeling—in the writing these just seemed to be the inevitable matters to which a novelizing Byron would be drawn. And (as my imagined Ada notes) he is more nakedly undefended here, in some ways, than he was likely to have been in his self-justifying memoirs.
An additional layer of Lord Byron’s Novel is the later notes and commentary of his daughter Ada on the text of
The Evening Land.
Ada, dying herself of cancer, reaches out to her dead father; it becomes clear just how determined Ada’s mother Lady Annabella was to destroy her husband’s reputation and to poison Ada’s mind against him. Was Annabella really this monomaniacally vicious? And how did you conceive of the masterstroke of having Ada, a highly gifted mathematician in real life, perform a certain cryptographical maneuver on
The Evening Land?
Lady Byron—Annabella—was indeed as far as I can tell a dreadful woman. I have most of my information from the books of Doris Langley Moore,
The Late Lord Byron
and
Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Nothing in my account of her in the various notes and letters is invented. She deserves a novel of her own, but I doubt Moore’s nonfiction could be bettered. Regarding the inclusion of Ada in my account, many years ago I conceived a book that would be solely Byron’s novel. My then agent Kirby McCauley was discouraging; he was pretty sure this was a highly rarefied sort of treat and my idea that everyone of course knew the details of Byron’s life and would get the subtext was mistaken. I see now he was right. When I revived the idea, my editor at Morrow also believed there had to be some armature of explanation for the reader and some account of how and why the book existed. Who could supply that? It was my present agent Ralph Vicinanza who said "How about Ada?" This instantly started a chain of thinking. What I didn’t want to do was novelize Ada in a standard sort of way. The idea of notes was my way out of doing that. What I liked was that the present-day idea of Ada as a mathematical expert and computer prophet sends my sleuths off in the wrong direction in the attempt to understand what she’s done.
The outermost layer of
Lord Byron’s Novel,
if I can call it that, is the e-mails exchanged by the people involved in the supposed unearthing and publication
of The Evening Land
in the present decade. The style here is contemporary and informal after the Georgian cadences of Byron and Ada; why is this contrast so necessary? Can those in our own period redeem the mistakes, omissions, and tragedies of two hundred years ago?
That’s an interesting idea, and it may be that the salvific role of Smith, Thea, and Lee did evolve as you say—but in fact the idea was simpler at the beginning. I needed some way for the Byron text to be discovered in the present and a response to come from a contemporary point of view. I wanted someone who knew little of Byron and was unmoved by what she did know, who could in her own learning somehow instruct the (possibly also unsympathetic) reader in what’s interesting about the man and his mind. I thought a young lesbian woman who was into science would be just right. That’s all. Then when you have a character, the character has to have a life and a story.
Although
Lord Byron’s Novel
is highly original and a creative departure for you, it does reflect many of your abiding themes. One of these is the sense of a history lost, submerged, never to have been—as in
Great Work of Time
and theÆgypt sequence. Lord Byron and his daughter might have written the words you attribute to them; they in fact did not, making
Lord Byron’s Novel
a counterfactual fiction of a kind, a statement only of what should have been . . . or am I overstating the case here?
I guess I think of stories and the telling of stories as being in large part the creation of unavailable worlds—lost or never existent. My books tend to be one step up from this: They have often been about people telling or hearing or pursuing stories, and thus are about the creation or coming-tobe of those unavailable worlds. In this book both Ada and Byron imagine worlds that could have been but weren’t; the fact that the world in which they did these things never existed either reinforces the poignancy. I guess—I don’t know—I hoped for a ripping yarn and here I am with my constant concerns.
Well,
Lord Byron’s Novel
does have many very exciting elements one might associate with genre fiction: the atmosphere of the Oriental fantasy tale; ferocious combat among Albanian clansfolk; an ancient crumbling mansion; a mysterious murder; a zombie rescuer; smugglers; battle scenes; doppelgängers; somnambulant episodes; a global revolutionary brotherhood; and so forth. And a certain "Roony J. Welch" may just be quasi-immortal. . . . Is
Lord Byron’s Novel
in any significant sense a work of fantasy?
Well, I don’t think Byron’s novel is—as Ada points out, it may be sensational, wild, and fantastic, but there are no strictly supernatural elements in it. Is mine? I think that if a novel has no whiff at all of the impossible, the fabulous, the inexplicable, or the metaphysical as the Romantics meant the word, then it isn’t very realistic, because the real (this, our shared physical and biological) world does have those intimations in it. (When the intimations become certainties you have fantasy.)