Dr. Houghton was interviewed in his home in Culver, Indiana, by C. Thomas Noble, on Thursday, March 10, 2005.

CTN: Let me say to begin with that I enjoyed reading Rough Magicke, even as a .pdf file. I see you have a copy of the actual book there.

JWH: Yes, this may be the only physical copy in existence so far—it's the printer's proof, that they send out so you can check to make sure there are no pages upside down or anything. But I noticed that the book is listed, just today, on Barnes and Noble.com and Amazon.com, so it looks like there should be real copies in a month or so.

CTN: I'm sure that last month of waiting is hard on the writer! How long have you been working on the book?

JWH: Well, since I was at Yale, anyway—which would be around '87 or so—though it may have picked up some older pieces than that as it grew. I wrote a big chunk of it while I was at Notre Dame, where one of my cousins got me into a little writers' group that met every month and read what we'd been working on.

CTN: That must have been fun. Now, I want to talk about the story, but first I have to ask a question about the book itself. I see that Rough Magicke is being published by Unlimited Publishing in Bloomington. Isn't that what they call a vanity press?

JWH: They have done a lot of subsidy publishing, as I guess the politically correct term has it; but they're trying to do some conventional publishing, too. In my case, at least, I didn't put up any money and I get both an advance and royalties. Assuming anyone buys the book, of course. Even my poetry collection produces the occasional check, though I hardly think it's a best seller.

CTN: That would be Falconry, I suppose I should say.

JWH: Right, yes, thanks.

CTN: And Unlimited Publishing is a Print on Demand house?

JWH: Right. What that typically means is, when you order a copy by POD, the bookseller's request gets sent back to a middleman like Ingram or Baker and Taylor and they have a copy manufactured just for you. I mean, you might happen to catch a bookseller with a copy or two on hand, but basically there's no inventory. Of course, there's a trade-off: on the one hand, the book never goes out of print, but on the other hand, there aren't copies on bookshelves for people to browse by and pick up.

CTN: I see. Now, let me ask you about some of the details in Rough Magicke. In the novel, the town of Annandale, founded by the Mears family, is on a large lake in northern Indiana. The town is home to a military academy, and the narrator of the novel, Jonathan Mears, is a graduate of the Academy and of Harvard who is now the school chaplain and a member of the English Department. And, as I understand it, the town of Culver, founded by the Houghton family, is on a large lake in northern Indiana, and is the home of a military academy, while you are a graduate of the Academy and of Harvard and have been a chaplain and a member of the English Department there. Several of the characters are apparently named after friends of yours. And, if I read the author's note right, you have ancestors in England named Mears. There seems to be a certain amount of similarity!

JWH: Well, yes. That's all true, more or less—when the town of Culver first began, back in 1844, it was called Union Town, and the proprietors were Bayless L. Dixon and his wife Emma Houghton Dixon. They sold it in turn to Thomas K. Houghton, Emma's brother, and so on and so forth. And Emma and Thomas K. and my own great-great-grandfather, Thomas-without-a-K, all have in common a grandmother whose maiden name was Mears. And I have been a chaplain at Culver—the school, I mean—in the summers and taught English there, too, but that's been a good many years ago. So if you want to suggest that there are a lot of ways in which Annandale—both the town and the school—are like the town and school Culver, that's true in a certain sense. Of course, to begin with, there's the legal point—what is it that it says—oh, here: "This is a work of fiction. All characters, products, corporations, institutions, and/or entities of any kind in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual characteristics." So that makes the practical distinction. But in the literary world, there's an important qualification I would make, too, and that centers on the name "Annandale," which I didn't just pull out of a hat.

CTN: It comes from a Meredith Nicholson novel, I understand.

JWH: Yes, exactly. The House of a Thousand Candles, published just a century ago, in 1905. And the thing is, you see, that Nicholson wrote the novel while staying here, in a cottage that belonged, then, to one of the Vonnegut family from down in Indianapolis, and the story is set in a fictionalized version of that cottage and a fictionalized version of the town of Culver, with Culver Military Academy replaced by a girl's school. So Annandale Military Academy is not directly related to the real-world Culver—there's that intervening element of this Indiana novel being based on an older novel that was based on Culver.

CTN: What's your connection with Nicholson?

JWH: Well, when I was just a kid, my Dad used to mow lawns at couple of the old Vonnegut cottages, including "The House of a Thousand Candles," [Click here to go to a picture] so I remember being in and around the buildings. And a copy of Nicholson's book was the first thing I ever bought at an auction, when I was in sixth grade or so.

CTN: Really?

JWH: Yes—the auction was for a distant cousin's farm—which would take in a lot of farms around here, I admit—and I bought a bushel basket full of old books to get the one I wanted. Actually, the story of the second copy of the book I bought is even better—I was walking past the shop window of a men's clothing store down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on my way home from the grocery—and there it was being used as a prop in the display. So I went in and offered them $10 for the book—which was a good deal less than they would have asked for anything else in the window. The clerk had to go into the back to check with the manager, but pretty soon I was on my way home with a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a second copy of the book.

CTN: So have you read a lot of Hoosier authors?

JWH: Not to where I could brag about it, no. Some of Vonnegut, of course, and a little bit of Tarkington and Dreiser. I've got Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles here on my desk—it was in that same bushel basket, so maybe it's about time for me to read it!

CTN: I noticed a few Vonnegut jokes in the book...

JWH: "Used fictitiously without any intent to describe," and so on.

CTN: Of course. What about James Whitcomb Riley?

JWH: Oh, yes, absolutely—couldn't go through grade school in Indiana without him. And Ben-Hur, too—in fact, I was once asked to leave the Lew Wallace museum because I kept correcting the docent. Or at least that's how the story goes.

CTN: Did she know you were a historian yourself?

JWH: Actually, I was a Second Classman—a junior—at Culver at the time—I think that made it worse.

CTN: What I hear you saying is that you want Rough Magicke to have a place in an Indiana literary tradition, but clearly there are other connections here. Some people might describe the book as Christian Fantasy, and the authors who wrote blurbs for it refer to Dead Poets Society, Harry Potter, The Name of the Rose, the Father Brown mysteries, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

JWH: Yes, and Charles Williams, too—which may be the closest to the mark.

CTN: Williams was an Inkling, wasn't he—part of that circle of Oxford authors with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien?

JWH: Yes, though the conventional wisdom is that Williams was probably a closer friend of Lewis than he was of Tolkien; Williams had some connections, even at second hand, with the occult world that would have bothered Tolkien, I think, and Williams's poetry was in a modern style that I don't imagine Tolkien was very enthusiastic about. Tolkien is my favorite of the Inklings, and I have written about him, but I haven't thus far succeeded in writing anything like him.

CTN: Which isn't to say that you haven't tried...

JWH: Well, no. In any case, though, I suppose that Rough Magicke has a lot in common with a Williams novel like War in Heaven or Many Dimensions or The Greater Trumps: books he wrote in the 30s about the supernatural bursting into the everday world—the Holy Grail, King Solomon's Stone, and the true set of Tarot cards, in those three cases.

CTN: But in your case, these things break through into ordinary Indiana rather than ordinary England—and somehow Indiana seems just a little more, well, ordinary.

JWH: To us, anyway, yes. But I suppose Williams meant for his England to seem pretty ordinary to his readers.

CTN: You mentioned Williams had some distant connections with the occult world, and there is certainly a fascination with the intersection of the natural and the supernatural in all the books you named—and also in his The Place of the Lion, where the world of the Platonic forms gets opened up directly into the English countryside. Is it possible to talk, or write, about the supernatural without trespassing into the occult?

JWH: Oh, I think it's possible, certainly, though I grant that the other is possible, too—that some people do slip away from orthodox Christianity into New Age, if not actually occult, practices by what seem to be a series of innocent steps at the time a person is taking them. But I've certainly tried to picture Jonathan Mears as an orthodox Christian believer, from the Anglo-Catholic wing of his Church.

CTN: Those are two sort of loaded words—how would you define them?

JWH: 'Orthodox' and 'Anglo-Catholic,' you mean...well, when I say that he's orthodox, I mean that he believes that the god whose self-revelation runs through the history of Israel is the One God, in Trinity of Persons and Unity of Being, who creates and sustains the universe; and that God the Son, the second "Person" of that Trinity, became the human being Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified by the Romans, died and was buried, and rose again on the third day, in whom, as the Messiah, the Christ, all of God's promises to Israel meet their fulfillment, and through whom God reconciles the creation to Godself; and that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the beginning of the last days of the world, so that Christians pray for the coming Reign of God, the resurrection of the dead, Christ's final judgment, and the life everlasting, and are, in the mean time, sustained by the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

CTN: So that's orthodox, as in the Nicene Creed. What about Anglo-Catholic?

JWH: Well, within that Christian community, Jonathan is Anglo-Catholic in the sense that he is "Anglican," part of the tradition of English Christianity, including the English Church's declaration of political independence from Rome at the time of the Reformation. More specifically, he's "Anglo-Catholic," part of the movement that began, within the English Church, in the nineteenth century, to recover for the Church ideas and practices that had largely been abandoned at the Reformation—people who thought that the ceremonial and even theological babies had been thrown out with the political bathwater, so to speak. And even more specifically, though it's not obvious in the book, there are two branches of Anglo-Catholicism, one which looked around to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church of the nineteenth century to see what ideas and practices might be restored, and one which looked back to medieval England—Jonathan is of the looking-back-to-the-medieval school, who tend, I think, to be more politically liberal than the other.

CTN: So Fr. Mears, at least, isn't going to be taking up the ouija board or tarot cards.

JWH: No, and I daresay there's not going to be a labyrinth in the Cathedral of Michigan City, either—Jonathan would tell people to do the Stations of the Cross, which he would say have the benefit of focusing a person's attention on Jesus Christ. But you asked at first about Christian Fantasy, and I do think that mentioning the Stations brings us 'round to the point: while he is anything but occultist, he is also politically Protestant but theologically and liturgically unapologetically Catholic. To take the most obvious case, he really does think that Jesus is actually present in, with, and under (to use a Lutheran phrase) the forms of bread and wine in the Eucharist, so that the elements deserve the same honor as if Jesus were visibly standing there; he believes that the communion is a re-membering, but not just a memorial. So while he won't be mistaken for a Wiccan, no-one is going to think of him as an American Evangelical, either. So if "Christian Fantasy" means "Evangelical Fantasy," which I think it may for some people, then Rough Magicke won't fit in.

CTN: And The Name of the Rose?

JWH: Oh, right. I think the point there was just that the book does come across as learned—or, I guess I mean, the characters do. Someone commented early on that it required a willing suspension of disbelief to accept teenagers who make or recognize so many allusions!

CTN: Like that one?

JWH: Hmm? Oh, right, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria : "that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith."

CTN: You talked about the Inklings, but that thread of allusion reminds me of Dorothy Sayers, particularly in Busman's Honeymoon....

JWH: Yes, exactly, where even the chimney guy quotes Shakespeare. That was certainly in the back of my mind. More so than something as thickly woven as The Name of the Rose.

CTN: I'm not so sure that it may not seem a little thick to some of us! But I see that the website has some of the technical expressions explained, at least.

JWH: Right, and it has some maps and a genealogical chart, too. The sort of things Tolkien would have put in one of the famous appendices, I suppose. That's www.annandalemilitary.com, by the way.

CTN: I'm not sure they'll allow me the luxury of an appendix, so I suppose I'd better stop there. Thanks very much.

JWH: You're more than welcome.