The Flame is Green (1971)

[Cross-posted from Goodreads.]

Four and a half stars. It's probably five stars in the sense of being one of the ‘high art’ novels that Lafferty produced (along with the likes of Fourth Mansions, Okla Hannali,  The Fall of Rome, Archipelago, and others). But it didn't resonate with me quite as strongly as the novels I like best by Lafferty. It's pretty incredible though, as I would expect from his unique genius.

The first chapter is one of my favourite things I've ever read by Lafferty. It hits all the right notes of myth and marvel and history and narrative sophistication, in the way that only Lafferty can hit and combine those notes - and in the setting of 19th century Ireland, which I don't think I've run into before in Lafferty.

The rest of the book is more mixed for me. There are many more marvels of both language and event, but there are also long sections of comparatively mundane material and plot motivations that I don't fully understand (due to unfamiliarity with this era of European history generally and Lafferty's more arcane interests in it particularly). After the first chapter, the setting moves swiftly from Ireland to Spain and eventually to a few other European locations. (It’s worth comparing in this respect with his novel East of Laughter). So The Flame is Green is more of a European tale than a specifically Irish one, though the fact that the protagonist, Dana Coscuin, is Irish remains central. The cast of supporting characters are very tall and salty as you'd expect from Lafferty. The geographical descriptions, after the first chapter, are perhaps not as strong as I could have hoped, though a significant amount of the action takes place in the mountains and this setting is firmly felt. I happened to be reading this section of the novel whilst travelling through mountains in Spain for the first time, on holiday with my family, which was a very exciting coincidence. (We live in Scotland, so this trip isn't as huge as it may sound to USA readers of this review. It's kind of the equivalent of a Midwesterner taking a vacation in Florida.) But the richest fun is to be had more in the character descriptions and their darkly comic and mythopoetic interactions.

There are the usual philosophical and theological discourses and asides, which I always enjoy and find enlightening for understanding Lafferty's body of work as a whole. The novel is about some sort of freedom fighters on the eve of another European revolution. In the idiosyncratic ideological terms of the novel, it is the Green Revolution (to which Dana and his company adhere) vs. the Red Revolution (to which an equally tall and salty company adhere). Dana and Co. are ‘Carlists’, at least in their Spain setting. Brief visits to Wikipedia, together with speeches given in the novel, suggest the Green Revolution represents a sort of counter-Enlightenment movement, which opposes, among other things, the reductionism of the alleged Age of Reason. As a member of Dana's company argues:

The rational age has cracked wide open with the realization that man is not a rational apparatus. He is a stolid animal, or he is an hysterical ghost, or he is an effete avatar; but he is not a reasoning machine. But should we not respect and strive for reason? For reason in grace, yes. For reason out of grace, no. (Ch. 3/p. 49)

Or as is later urged: ‘There is no rationality at all without passion, and no logic. What would one hang them upon?’ (Ch. 5/p. 87) (This is remarkably close what Timothy Morton argues in his latest book, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Co-Existence.) This anti-reductionist ideology is vividly portrayed as well as argued in Lafferty's novel. Take a scene involving recovery from a battle injury:

Certainly the six-inch-deep knife wound had not been healed in three days, nor had the great ragged slash on his face. But Dana had sloshed wine immediately into his wounds, and he had been blessed with curative magic when he lay atop Magdelena Brume and imbibed grace from her and covered her with his blood for a sign. Moreover, Dana had had his wounds cleaned and bound by a doctor in Isaba before he had come to Pamplona. (Ch. 3/pp. 54-55)

Folk ways and modern medicine combine here. Many scenes such as this make this novel (along with a number of other novels by Lafferty, notably Okla Hannali and Archipelago) significantly overlap with the international genre of magical realism.

The Green counter-revolutionaries are theologically motivated, of course, as can be seen by the references to ‘grace’. It is also seen in their concerns about turns the Catholic church is taking toward empowering bishops who seem to be sexually and theologically decadent in not fully fleshed out terms in the novel. They also oppose what Lafferty presciently (this was published in 1971) calls the coming ‘pornocracy’, calling it the ‘easiest way, the cheapest way, the stultifying way, the indulgent way’ (Ch. 7/p. 111).

It's not quite as reactionary as some of this may sound (though I sometimes worry ‘alt-right’ leaning readers might think, mistakenly I hope, that they have an ally in the author of this novel; that an Afro-Caribbean man, one Charley Oceaan, is included in the company of the Green Revolution counts for something one hopes). Lafferty is well-known as a self-professed conservative, sure, but one not easily pigeon-holed. The rhetoric he puts in the mouths of the Green Revolutionaries contains nuance, if also tending toward the irascible and polemical, such as this quote that has been passed around the web for some years, even though there must be very few readers of this obscure, limited-run novel:

Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. But do not pity them overly: it is your own death and your soul's death that they work by their deception. (Ch. 5/p. 78)

There is pity, even if limited, toward ideological enemies here. More than can be said on many a social media account. That said, the rhetoric can be more strident at times, though admittedly compelling in some respects:

“There are only two possible statements that can be made about the worlds,” the Black Pope of the Carlist Hills had lectured one day. “Alpha: There is a God. Omega: there is not a God. To adhere to either of these two statements strongly is to be logical at least. Not to do so is to be in the snivelling wasteland between and to have no point of contact with logic or reason. Upon either of these two statements a total system can be built, and it can be true to itself in each of its million details. But the two systems cannot have points of contact in even the least detail.”

I can't agree with that last sentence especially (and I'm pretty sure Lafferty's work overall shows that he didn't fully agree with that idea in any strict sense as well). Nor can I agree that all those who remain undecided between these poles are ‘snivelling’. Some occupy that ‘wasteland’ quite honestly in doubt and deferral. Some do so by principled agnosticism. I sympathise with doubters and agnostics, yet I also feel the force of the alleged logical divide set up in this quote. At any rate, it makes for fiery reading.

Yet the way the details of the novel play out show a more generous and muddy view. Dana is a very compromised character, especially by his own movement's lights. He quite fleshily falls from grace by literally sleeping with the ideological enemy. And is restored by grace. And this ‘enemy’, though she is portrayed somewhat villainously, is nevertheless drawn with some complexity and sympathy. Mind you, the ‘good’ characters are of no more, or less, depth than the ‘evil’ ones - that's just the way Lafferty writes. As some have said, Lafferty's characters are more like archetypes than traditional characters; but I would add that they have many telling human details as well, so that they hover between the mythical and the ‘naturalistic’. Even the ‘son of the Devil’ in this novel (one Ifreann Chortovitch, an apparently literal offspring of the Devil, in keeping with the magical realist tone) is portrayed with some sympathy, even as a genuine friend of sorts to Dana whilst also a dangerous, corrupting enemy. Dana and other characters have a huge drinking party with the son of the Devil at one point in the novel, another falling from grace moment, from which they are again restored. Saints and sinners, as in most of Lafferty's fiction, often blend in this novel. Trajectories of good or evil may be strong in various characters, but no one is untainted by either grace or sin. It's richly human reading in that respect.

And the Green Revolution rhetoric can be downright beautiful and strange and inviting as well. A character named Catherine Dembinska, who eventually marries Dana, speaks like a St Francis or a Black Elk:

Listen, all you people, the green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not. [...] I even say ‘Listen, all you people’ when I talk to birds in the parks or to cats sunning themselves in windows. Listen, all you people: no, I am not a pantheist, not even a green one. To be that is to confuse the bridge with the ultimate shore. It is to confuse the pot with the potter. But I am a living pot; I am a green vessel of earth; I am the perfume of a full vase. (Ch. 9/p. 157)

There are many wonderfully weird battles and visions and travels and chases and spaces in this novel as well, but I will conclude this overlong, yet under-sufficient, review with another quote from Catherine (which has also made its rounds on the web for years). It would seem a caution to anyone wanting to slap some final interpretation on Lafferty's work, much less the world. Not because of some facile catch-phrase like ‘there is no truth’, but rather because full truth will always be both prior and higher than our finitude, requiring our constant adventurous maturation from its deep roots toward its towering radiance:

Beware of those who manufacture final answers as they go along, of those who will catch you on their catch-phrases and let you perish in the traps. All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen. They may be too bright for us, they may be too clear for us. Well then, we must clarify our own eyes. Our task is to grow out until we reach them. 

We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time. It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above. And we must be rooted deeply. A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one. (Ch. 9/p. 158)

'There were also - hold it, hold it!': R. A. Lafferty's Object-Opulent Ontology

One of the things I'll be looking at in my dissertation on Lafferty is how he evinces a wide-angle and deeply layered view of physical existence similar to that advocated by a recent philosophical movement known as 'object-oriented ontology' (OOO).  Graham Harman's writings on OOO, for example, are often replete with rhapsodic lists of non-human objects, a vivid reminder of the physical surfaces and entities that surround, uphold, and impinge on every one of us during every single second of every single day.  Lafferty's writing has a habit of frequently and lavishly enumerating such layered lists as well.  His story 'And Read the Flesh Between the Lines' (1974) contains the longest instance of this I have encountered so far.  The passage lasts for over two pages and it is one of my favourites.  It's too long to quote in totality in my dissertation, so I want to share it here. 

As the tale opens, there is a rumble in a room over Barnaby Sheen's garages, at Sheen's residence in Lafferty's native Oklahoma.  But before we get to the source of that rumble, Lafferty dishes out a historical feast of artifacts, and even the smells of previously occupying artifacts, with his characteristic erudition.  (And he slips in a line about something 'almost-ape', which will become the subject of the story.) 

The sense of deep (even though relatively recent) history Lafferty induces is poignantly nostalgic, quirky, and full of wonder.  It puts me in touch with my own boyhood moments spent overwhelmed and delighted in time-cluttered garages, rooms, attics, and the like, and of times with boyhood pals reading comic books and pursuing our hobbies.  And it reminds all of us what an endless array of overlapping objects and their 'remnants' accompany our human life.  Indeed, I suspect Lafferty would say that so-called 'inanimate' objects are a lot more animate than we think.  See, for example, his story 'Symposium' (1973).  And this would be in some measure of agreement with OOO theory.  To Lafferty, we are not alone - in this object-opulent sense as in others.  Life is full, even of 'non-living' things. 

Let’s hear a little about this room, then.

            In the time of Barnaby Sheen’s grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion,” this was not a room over the garages, but over the stable and carriage house.

            It was a hayloft, that’s what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft.  And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmakers’ needles, and a cobbler’s bench, and spokeshaves (for forming and trimming singletrees), and neat’s-foot oil, and all such.  The room, even in its later decades, had not lost any of its old smells.  There would always be the perfume of timothy hay, of sweet clover, of little bluestem grass and of prairie grass, of alfalfa, of Sudan grass, of sorghum cane, of hammered oats and of ground oats, of rock salt, of apples.  Yes, there was an old barrel there that would remember its apples for a hundred years.  Why had it been there?  Do not horses love apples for a treat?

            There was the smell of shorts and of bran, the smell of old field tobacco (it must have been cured up there in the jungle of rafters), the smell of seventy-five-year-old sparks (and the grindstone that had produced them was there, operable yet), the smell of buffalo robes (they used them for lap robes in wagons and buggies).  There was a forge there and other farrier’s tools (but they had been brought up from downstairs no more than sixty years ago, so their smell was not really ancient there).

            Then there were a few tokens of the automobile era, heavily built parts, cabinets, tools, old plugs, old oil smell.  There were backseats of very old cars to serve as sofas and benches, horns and spotlights and old battery cases, even very old carbide and kerosene headlights.  But these were in the minority:  there was not so much room for a room over the garages as for a room over the stables.

            There was another and later odor that was yet very evocative:  it could only be called the smell of almost-ape.

            And then there were our own remnants somewhat before this latter thing.  This had been a sort of club room for us when we were schoolboys and when we were summer boys.  There were trunks full of old funny papers.  They were from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe, The Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune—those were the big-city papers that were hawked in our town, and our own World and Tribune.  There were a few New York and Boston and Philadelphia funny papers also.  And the funnies of the different papers were not nearly so uniform as they later became.

            There were the comparatively more recent comic books.  We had been older then, almost too old for such things.  Yet there were a few thousand of them, mostly the original property of Cris Benedetti and John Penandrew.

            There was the taxidermy of George Drakos:  stuffed owls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats.  And there were the dissections (also by Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens.  The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles.  Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wire-clamped holders, will contain formaldehyde forever:  this is a fact too little known.  (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?)

            There were the Lepidoptera (the butterfly and night-moth collections) of Harry O’Donovan, and my own aggregations of rocks and rock fossils.  And there were all the homemade radios, gamma-ray machines, electrical gadgets generally, coils, magnet wire, resistors, tubes, of Barnaby Sheen.

 

            There were also—hold it, hold it!  If everything in that room were listed, there would not be books enough in the world to contain it all (there were even quite a few books in there).  There would be no limit to the remnants, not even to the remnants of a single day.

A few thoughts on The Flame Is Green - from Kevin Cheek (our 2nd ever guest post!)

"In the paintings of Fragonard, there are trees that are unreal. Sometimes they seem to be a curious heaping up of elements of oak and elm and yew trees, but not according to any rational botanical system. Sometimes they seem to be massive studio montages made out of clustered purple grapes and bird feathers. Yet one traveller wrote there really were groves of these impossible trees in Dauphine and Piedmont in the eighteenth century. One grove of them had, in fact, survived into the nineteenth century: and Dana Coscuin and Malandrino Brume had just come through it afoot.

In the novels and plays of Marivaux, there are men who are not real. They seem to be a curious heaping up of elements in Old Roman and Old French, with inconsistent modish attitudes and the dated smell called 'Moment of Time.' Sometimes these men seem to be studied mélanges of shepherds and princes and rogues and pedants. Yet one student of the period has written that there really were such impossible men in the eighteenth century. At least one of these unlikely men had, in truth, survived into the nineteenth century. Dana Coscuin and big rough Brume had just come to visit this unlikely man who lived on the fringe of the too-blended, too-arty grove".

from The Flame is Green, p. 93, the opening of Chapter Six.

Only Lafferty could have written those two paragraphs. I almost wrote “and get away with it” but the truth is that only Lafferty could have written them and the fact is that he did get away with it every time he did something like that. The first sentence tells you that you are reading Lafferty. Firstly there is the mention of Fragonard, a name with a glorious sound to it--an eighteenth century painter, once the darling of the aristocracy, now almost entirely forgotten. Then there is the statement that the trees are unreal. Trees in a painting unreal? Of course they seem unreal or appear unreal, they are just paint on canvas. However Lafferty doesn’t say they appear unreal, he says they are unreal. There is just enough of a difference there to make you pause and wonder what you just read. This recalls the statement in “Narrow Valley,” talking about the trees in the Cross Timbers: “Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all.”

Never one to let narrative convention drive his craft, he bent his description of the two men’s work into deliberately parallel paragraphs, drawing a parallel between the trees and the characters and implying that they are artificial constructs. All of this is set up to introduce a character who in some ways can be considered an artificial construct, someone who through affectation attempted to appear more than he actually was. Ashley, the character about to be introduced, was an artificer and thought too highly of his creations--though they were merely the webs of his spiders, an aping of the spiderishness of the conspiracies of the day.

It would not have surprised me at all if Lafferty had make up the names Fragonard and Marivaux for the sake of the narrative. It would not have been out of character. After all, he used a description of Atrox Fabulinius and his narrative of Raphaellus to interrupt and redirect a chapter in The Fall of Rome. However, I did a little bit of reading on Wikipedia and learned that both Fragonard and Marivaux were not only real, but lived through and were affected by the events half a century before The Flame is Green takes place.

Fragonard was a Rococo painter known for romantic excess in his paintings. He lived in Paris in the 19th century and painted primarily for the aristocracy. He was forced out of Paris by the French Revolution and did not come back until the beginning of the 19th century.

Marivaux was a novelist, playwright, and journalist in Paris in the 18th century. He was very influential on the development of French literature, especially in his portrayal of his characters' thoughts. Wikipedia says, “Marivaux's characters not only tell each other and the reader everything they have thought, but everything that they would like to persuade themselves that they have thought.” This has a parallel with an important point within The Flame is Green, in that Dana Coscuin frequently deludes himself into following the wrong path while attempting to convince himself that it is the right one, or at least that he couldn’t have been expected to know better.

Reading up a little on Fragonard and Marivaux adds to a general background understanding of the novel. And this raises another point about Lafferty. The man was so astoundingly erudite, that when you do know the history behind his small mentions and asides, it enriches your enjoyment of the narrative. It is actually very rewarding to read a Lafferty novel, especially one of his historical novels with the internet near at hand to look up every small character and side reference. Some writers use historical settings as a backdrop for the story they want to tell, but the more you know about the period, the more irritating you find the writing. Lafferty is the exact opposite. I find that reading (or more often re-reading) one of his novels with Wikipedia open in front of me leaves me jubilant at everything I have just learned.

'Would that we all could employ our own imperfections so superbly' - Wrestling with Lafferty's biography

It was really exciting to see a full-scale article on Lafferty pop up on the web this past week.  Click on the following link to read it:

Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works)

Bud Webster, who wrote the piece, states that his method is not really as a critic.  Rather, he says, 'I'm a biographer and historian—a biorian?—and my purview is above all the individual who created the work, and the significant personal characteristics that infused their work.'  Accordingly, his article tries to look more into Lafferty as a person than into Lafferty's work.  For us mad Lafferty fans this is very welcome as biographical detail is fairly scarce to date.  Overall I think Mr. Webster did a very fine job and I'm certainly grateful to him for bringing Lafferty to light at all.  This is only a good thing.  I do, however, have just a few, perhaps ultimately fairly minor, qualms.  (But regardless of any critical comments that follow, I am delighted he wrote this piece and found it a very enjoyable read that I am more than happy to pass on to others.)

Webster describes Lafferty as a 'complex and complicated man' - very true, seen in Lafferty's writings as much as anywhere else.  Whatever aspects of Webster's 'biory' I may take slight issue with, I can't fault him for his cautious summary of Lafferty as a person:  'There are no easy conclusions to be made (or at least none with any validity), and few opportunities to be glib at his expense, so I won't even try.  Lafferty made it impossible for anyone to pigeonhole him as either a stylist or a human being... Like his work, Lafferty was multi-layered.'  

The first of these layers Webster mentions is that Lafferty 'had a self-deprecating sense of humor that served as a buffer for many of the people with whom he worked and interacted'.  Webster then proceeds to tell his own amusing little reminiscence of Lafferty displaying this quality when he met him at a convention in 1976.  (We fans can't get enough of these anecdotes, so that alone makes Webster's article worthwhile.  And he records a few others - new ones, I believe.  I'm beginning to think that eventually we'll be able to make a nice little chap book that compiles these now mounting Lafferty-at-a-convention anecdotes in one place.)

I'm not sure whether Webster considers himself to be unravelling another layer of Lafferty when he makes a few initial remarks about his fiction, but I think his perceptive comments about Lafferty's writing help fill out the picture he's sketching of the man.  He notes what so many others have noted, but in a fresh aphorism:  'Nobody ever wrote—or will ever write—quite like Lafferty.  I'm not at all certain that the literature could hold two such, in fact.'  He then takes a decisive stand about Laff's writing, rather than just affirming what's been said with a unique turn of slogan.  He says what he thinks Lafferty is not as a writer.  'Lafferty wasn't a science fiction writer, regardless of the section of the bookstore in which his titles may have appeared; rather, he was a mad fantasist, a maker of mythologies, a Wizard of Oddities.'  I think I and Andrew Ferguson (see his more succinct comments here), at least, would take issue with removing Lafferty from the s.f. category altogether.  He certainly transcends it, but I think he contains and/or straddles it too.  Indeed, Lafferty himself wrote a fair bit of non-fiction on the subject, in which he considers himself an s.f. writer (among other things) and has very definite views about what the writerly strategy of an s.f. author can and ought to be.  Aside from this quibble, I very much enjoyed Webster's fresh coinage of monikers for Lafferty as a writer - and he's certainly right to emphasise that Lafferty was a fantasist and mythologist.  I guess I would have just said Lafferty's not merely an s.f. writer, but also these.  It's an important point, I think, but we're still very much in minor league as to what I want to wrestle with Webster about a bit here.

He gets to the meat of what might be controversial matter about Lafferty this way:  'Three primary things made Lafferty the brilliant writer he was, inevitably and indubitably.'  He lists these as:

1) 'The first, and foremost, was his unfaltering and dogmatic Catholicism.'
2) 'Second, and not far behind, were his staunchly conservative political views'.
3) 'The third facet, however, is where the difficulty really lies.  In his off-hours at conventions, Ray Lafferty drank heavily.'

As to 1) Webster notes:  'Nothing odd about sf/fantasy writers being religious, of course.  C. S. Lewis made an entire career out of it, as you probably already know.  Tenets of the Church of Latter-Day Saints infuse the work of Orson Scott Card, and we won't even mention L. Ron Hubbard.'  The only unfortunate thing here is that this list, and the way it is presented, might be heard as sounding rather patronising and/or dismissive.  To say Lewis's Christianity in his writing was a 'career' move sounds, well, you know exactly how it sounds.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if Webster really didn't intend this offhand way of putting it to sound snide or cynical.  Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he did intend it to sound that way, or didn't really care if it came across that way to some.  People writing from that perspective are legion (to borrow Webster's joke in the article).  But I'm going with the generous interpretation and simply pointing out how this (probably unintentionally) sounds.  Even his choice of the word 'dogmatic' to describe Lafferty's Catholicism (rather than, say, 'committed', 'devout', etc.) could give off the wrong idea.  Lafferty's passionate commitment to his church's 'dogma' resulted in a truly wild form of creativity and outside-the-box thinking.  That can't be ignored.  Like Chesterton, Lafferty was on the wild 'adventure' of orthodoxy, not warming a church pew to be spoon fed sentimentality and platitudes.  As I say, I assume all this is unintentional and I only mention it to help clarify what Webster is after:  a true portrait of the man based on facts as we know them (and good interpretation of those facts to the best of our ability).

Unfortunately, with regard to 2) Webster is in danger of becoming outright derogatory and inflammatory.  I am not a very political creature myself, so I'm ill-equipped to make much comment.  But I think I might rightly discern a thing or two here.  Here's Webster's zinger about Laff's politics:  'It's not inconceivable that he and the Tea Party could have been friendly, although I suspect he valued intellect far more than most of those who considered Sarah Palin a viable candidate for high office.'  His qualification about intellect in the second half of this statement comes as a blessed relief; however, the damage is already done in the first half of the statement and it's very hard if not impossible to revoke it.  I suppose both Webster and I are being very unfair to Tea Party folks:  he by implying they're un- or anti-intellectual; me by tacitly agreeing with this and even more so by intimating that it is a damning libel for Laff to be associated with them.  Well, sincere apologies to those offended by this.  Please do interact with me and I hope I'll be a good listener.  But, for the moment, let's assume Webster and I are somewhere in the ballpark of correct in our shared view of (what is to us) the rather embarrassing existence of such a party.  To me it does indeed seem precisely inconceivable that Lafferty would have been friendly with the Tea Party due to exactly the qualification Webster put on his claim.  This is where Webster's lack of emphasis on or engagement with Lafferty's actual writing as he conducts his 'biory' really shows up and lets him down.  Lafferty's fiction is chock full of wry and lively protest about the masses of people being 'fed' and 'led' by slogans and catchphrases - various forms of groupthink and anti-cognitive manipulation, oversimplifications that make simpletons out of us if we let them.  (Practices not at all limited to the Tea Party, by the bye, nor to only the 'right' or 'left'.)  Sure, maybe Lafferty would have completely sold out if some party with a lot of his political convictions were to make a grab for power by means of the very methods he despised.  But that's pure speculation and I'm guessing we just don't have the evidence to back it up.  I, at least, would like to think Laff's fiction shows some pretty stout integrity on his part and therefore and unlikeliness to say 'how high?' when the 'right' people seem to say jump.

After going on to make Lafferty's politics sound very controversial indeed among s.f. readers, something 'whispered about at dead-dog parties', Webster again tries to balance out his comments by quoting a long-time Lafferty advocate in the small press, Guy Lillian, who said of Lafferty's fiction:  'I had found a writer who—though a rock-ribbed conservative—spoke to a scrawny Berkeley hippie used to being generously tear-gassed every spring.  I'd found a poetic spirit who invested science fiction with madness and tragedy and laughter.'  Again, I wonder if this comes too late to have force, and, indeed, Webster leaves it without his own comment or elaboration.  To be true to his programme of showing Lafferty as the complex man he was, I think Webster needed to draw out the implications of Lillian's statement more (at least to the degree he'd drawn out implications of Lafferty's conservatism).  Lafferty's fiction was (and is) not just amenable but downright inspiring to people of various politics - people who want to wake up from social catatonia and think and feel and live and play and work for what they take to be good.  Honestly, that's a bit of a rare gift in a writer and it only adds to the complexity of this man full of intriguing tensions.

Now, with regard to 3) I find this one the most, ah, kind of hilarious.  Basically:  what's the big fuss?  I mean, it's actually quite well known amongst even more casual Lafferty readers that he was a heavy drinker.  Lafferty wrote or spoke of it many, many times.  It was something he actually tried to overcome by means of his writing and I think that shows!  There is an inebriation to his work, both in the text and in the effect it has on the reader - indeed, many have confessed to contracting a literal addiction (the same word used again and again by people in the s.f. field who fell under his sway) to Lafferty's tall tales.  It's potent, highly alcoholic stuff!  The fact that this literary exorcism of his drinking demons didn't fully come off is no affront to his (for all we know, valiant) struggles against his problem.  Heck, I think he deserves our respect and sympathy for his frankness alone about his weakness.  Furthermore, like Lafferty is the first genius-level artist to struggle with addictions and substance abuse, especially alcoholism?  One reads of this kind of thing all the time.  I'm not sure why Webster finds it to be such a 'difficulty'.  It's a sad truth that many like Lafferty have had to live with and you'd think we'd be pretty used to hearing about it.  Indeed, Webster acknowledges just this about writers in particular (further making me wonder why he finds it so remarkable in Lafferty): 'In this, of course, he was far from alone; as a species, writers are notorious sots, and the literary world is crowded with fables of overindulgence and subsequent debauchery.'  One must point out that Lafferty is not himself actually ever noted for 'debauchery'.  He seems to have been fairly private about his drinking, 'caught' only on occasion in an inebriated state, and then in just a fairly quiet and 'harmless' drunkenness, maybe even passed out according to some.

Don't get me wrong, it is here most fully that Webster exercises generosity:  'I do not raise this issue to demean the man, or to denigrate him or his skills with pen and paper, but a key fact of heavy alcohol use is that it unavoidably permeates every facet of the drinker's life' (emphasis his).  But Webster goes on to speculate (rather wildly I'm tempted to think) that Lafferty's heavy drinking affected his writing in a particular way.  He garners a quote from s.f. author and editor, Mike Resnick, saying that, while many thought  Lafferty 'was the most brilliant short story writer in the field', yet 'his novelettes weren't as good, and except for "Space Chanty [sic]" his novellas were unexceptional, and his novels were for the most part mediocre.  I blame his drinking for this.  If he could grind out a story in one or two sittings, he could be brilliant.  But if a novel took him 50 writing sessions, you get the feeling that each day he had to refresh his memory of what the hell he wanted to do, how he wanted to say it, etc.'

Again, this is where hearing from Lafferty himself would have helped to enrich the assessment of his life and work.  In a 1983 interview with Lafferty conducted by Darrell Schweitzer for Amazing Stories (collected in Schweitzer's Speaking of the Fantastic II, Wildside Press, 2004), Laff discusses very engrossingly at some length his use of the methods of tall tales and oral storytelling in his short stories.  The interviewer then asks:

Q: Can you use any of this method when writing a longer work, like a novel?
Lafferty:  I can try it, and I do it for short periods, but I can't sustain it, which is the main reason my novels are choppy, I guess.  They're really just short stories strung together.  I never learned the sustained novel very well, and what I do write in it isn't very good.  So I was meant to write choppy novels or none at all.

Again, the disarming frankness about his own limitations.  But note that he sees his less successful execution of writing at the novel length due to a technical issue:  he has neither the giftings nor has acquired the skills for it.  His strengths are elsewhere.  But he had novels in him to write so he wrote them anyway - as bad tall tales if you like.  I for one am extremely happy he did!  They are certainly an acquired taste and are not, as a rule, as immediately brilliant as the best of his short stories, but they can be rich fare indeed!  (Pace Resnick's claim of 'mediocrity'.)  Many of his fans, including editors and fellow authors, find at least a few of his novels to be among his very best output right alongside the legendary short stories.  Frankly, I find Lafferty's own account of his seeming ineptitude as a novelist to be a far more plausible explanation than attributing it to (strictly or largely) his heavy drinking.

(Strangely, Webster comes back to this later in his article and seems to have forgotten all about this theory and states one much more believable and more in keeping with the author's own assessment of his work.  Says Webster later:  'In tune with Mike Resnick's words above, I find that Lafferty's longer works don't read quite as well.  That's me, not him, and it's just as much a commentary on my own flaws as it is on anything of his.  I think he was more comfortable at shorter lengths, and I certainly understand that.  The kind of elliptical worldview in which he worked would have been terribly difficult to sustain for 50 thousand words or more, and readers could have found the effort of keeping up with it daunting.'  Where's the 'due to heavy drinking' theory gone?  Mercifully, it's vanished.)

In keeping with this almost bizarre turn in his 'biory' of Lafferty, Webster's comments become more and more gloomy and baffled (not to say baffling).  He states categorically that 'extensive reading of his writings shows an arch bitterness'.  Some of us here in the small Laffertian community that comments on this blog have been wrestling on and off with this very notion (often propounded most sweepingly - and, paradoxically, bitterly - by the well-known editor Gardner Dozois, who was a huge fan of Lafferty apparently, until his later work) for some time.  We find the evidence very, very mixed.  At the most one could say that Lafferty wrestled back and forth between a truly incredible and joyous generosity and big-heartedness and a darker, more frustrated lament and woe - and sometimes perhaps even rather poisoned denouncement.  (And one must remember that at least sometimes his anger and/or bitterness could be directed at, for example, 'white' conquerors for what they did to American Indians - it wasn't like it was some despicable white supremacy or something, come on.)  At any rate, Webster's take is that 'Lafferty seems to have internalized his bitterness, perhaps as an inevitable product of his alcohol use in conflict with his doctrinaire Catholicism.' Hum.  From here he almost seems to want to paint Laff as a pretty pathetic case.  He quotes acclaimed s.f. author Robert Silverberg to this end:  Lafferty 'was clearly a very troubled man, and he clearly drank much too much at conventions, and no doubt was extremely lonely.  But he could be a charming guy . . . and anyone who knew his work— brilliant, of course—would instantly be aware of the disconnect between the work and the unhappy figure we saw at conventions and know that something very sad was involved.'  Look, I'm not going to deny that part of Lafferty's complexity was that at times he could be a sad case and maybe for some of the reasons here speculated about.  I love and laud the valuable original research he's done here, but Webster's portrait at this point seems too close to losing the complexity he's aiming to be true to by over-emphasising Lafferty's bouts of alcoholism and bitterness.

From here Webster tries to bring things back to some positive aspects, yet even here I'm bound to note the implicit negativity toward a writer like Laff even being religious and conservative at all.  Webster states:  'If I'm duty-bound to mention his politics, religion and alcohol use, I'm equally bound to shine a light on other, more positive factors of his character.'  Laff's particular brand of politics and religion are in the same negative category as alcoholism without even a trial?  Religion is a negative factor of someone's character?  Well, enough of this!  I've raked poor Webster over the coals too long already.  I still trust he means well.  He goes on to acknowledge something very important about Lafferty, especially considering what might be his 'darker' tendencies:  'Lafferty was capable of great warmth and generosity, and many people I spoke to, both fan and pro, were forthcoming about their positive encounters.'  This definitely needs to go into the balance and I gladly acknowledge Webster's fairness in placing it there.  To this end he quotes again the passionate Guy Lillian:

'If, in the pursuit of accurate reporting, you insist on dwelling on Ray's flaws, mention also the love and loyalty he engendered in fans who knew him, who took care of him when he was incapacitated, because they appreciated that they were dealing with a genius with great depths of humor and sadness . . . and the strongest Catholicism of anyone in the field.  He expressed these things exquisitely through his incredible gift, with humility and verve, and was loved for it.  After St. LouisCon [the 27th WorldCon in 1969], where he first appeared to fandom . . . a 20-year-old boy I know—myself—wrote him a fan letter.  He sent me back a page of gratitude, affection and wisdom I still cherish.  I have never known a finer soul.'

I think that testimony really bears meditating upon.  As a mere reader, having never met or corresponded with the man, this is very much in tune with the sense I've gotten from his works.

Moving on from this whole issue, Webster returns to biographical information - standard stuff about Lafferty's Oklahoma upbringing and occupation as electrician.  But he remarks neatly:  'Little of this would seem to have led him to a life as a fictioneer, let alone one who would turn the stfnal [sic] world on its literary ear, but that's what he did.'  He then goes on to relate warmly and engagingly his own first encounter with Lafferty's fiction (the short story 'Boomer Flats').  In sum, says Webster:  'It's magic.  Not "magic realism," whatever that may mean, but just full-on, bull-goose magic.  I read it with my eyes wide and my mouth agape.  It was not the last time Lafferty would have that effect on me.'  Thinking, as many understandably have done and continue to do, that Lafferty's literary wildness must surely have come from doing mind-altering drugs, Webster comments:  'Acid was the last thing R. A. Lafferty would have downed, considering his religious and political views.  No, all that dream-like stuff came straight out of his own unenhanced imagination, and that's almost scary.'  Yep.

The rest of Webster's comments on Laff's fiction are worth quoting in full:

'Not all of it was as brilliant as that first mind-blowing tale, but it was all just as unEarthly.  This wasn't science fiction as we usually think of it.  No fancy hardware, high-concept technology or plot-points turning on an astrophysical dime here.  Nor was it what Bradbury and Nelson Bond used to call "science fantasy," although it comes close in some ways.  Lafferty's work stands apart—not necessarily above, but undeniably apart—from his colleagues'.  You can't even hold it in the same (metaphorical) hand without your fingers wanting to bend in strange directions they weren't designed for.  He was sui generis, was Lafferty, and there were plenty of readers who scratched their heads and called his stories unfathomable, but oh, the mythological impact of those stories!'

Amen, brother.  Preach it.

Webster then talks about Lafferty's novel Past Master for a bit and then Lafferty's paradoxical relationship to the New Wave in s.f. during the 60s and 70s and even how this eventually affected his sales and readership when that Wave dispersed.  On the topic of his diminishing sales and the recent acquisition of his literary estate, we get another fresh anecdote, from a visit Mike Resnick paid Lafferty in the eighties:

'When I visited his house down in Oklahoma, I opened the guest closet to hang up my coat—and saw a 3-foot-high pile of manuscripts.  He told me they were his unsold books, he had just turned 70, and he wasn't writing another word until Virginia (Kidd, his agent) sold all of these.  She found a little press up in Minnesota, but she never did sell them all.  She used to cry on my shoulder that she and I and four dozen others thought he was one of the greatest short story writers alive . . . but she couldn't find 10,000 people to buy his paperbacks or even 500 to buy his signed, numbered hardcovers.'

After a brief comparison of Laff to Cordwainer Smith and James Triptree, Webster concludes with these very poignant and powerful words:

'R. A. Lafferty left us a magnificent body of work, stories that cry and wail and laugh and bray.  They come from, and take their readers to, places few others could even conceive of, let alone limn with the skill and richness that he wielded.  Already middle-aged when he sold his first, he laid down a road paved with bright, deadpan madness for us to walk, mouths agape and eyes wide with wonder and trepidation; after all, he's taking us to worlds never seen before, and we can't know what's around that corner until the page is turned.
He was a writer of shining, bedazzling stories made all the richer by his flaws.  Would that we all could employ our own imperfections so superbly.'

Those last two lines show that all this talk of Lafferty's admitted flaws is really only going to enrich the reading of him in the long run and inspire us more richly than without them.

In closing myself, I want to again emphasise what a delight it was to read this article and how grateful to Mr. Webster I am for doing it.  I think the man is a pioneer, being Laff's very first biographer.  Congratulations to him!  If I took exception at points, it was only because his article was so good and engaging and I too share his passion for accuracy.   (Also, I neglected to mention Webster actually concluded his article with a gargantuanly extensive bibiliography of Lafferty, including foreign editions!  Bravo all round.)

Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus

Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus
By
R. A. Lafferty

The title comes from a verse work, An Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope:

“Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great…
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”

We aren’t really the ‘Sole judge of truth’. And we are hurled in ‘temporary’ and not in ‘endless’ error. But most of the rest of it applies to us humans accurately. We are beings darkly wise and rudely great. And even if our glory is pretty spotted, we are indeed the jest and riddle of the world. And one of the tall labors assigned to us is reading the riddle of the world and of ourselves.

One side of this riddle-solving is named ‘science’, and another side is named ‘intuition’. But it has several other sides, both brighter and darker. The riddle itself is a many-sided thing. We lack even a clear statement of the riddle, or of the story of it. There is dispute about the riddle, or of the story of it. There is dispute about its shape and appearance. But various obscure mirrors held up by riddle-writers do give a mottled view of this authentic history of the world. The riddle-writers are in every field, and they are busy in several of the areas of Science Fiction. The works of all the riddle-writers are really garbled ‘Remembrances of Great Things Past’.

All of them write scraps of the History of the World in riddle form. All of them spin theories of what mankind really is, what the true appearance of mankind may be, what its purpose and plight add up to, who its nearest kindred are. And all of the riddle-writers essentially agree on at least the first of the several parts of The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World. All of them agree (though some of them try to deny it in their less intelligent moments) that there was a Fall from a higher and more pleasant place to a lower and less pleasant.

The ‘After the Catastrophe’ stories of which there are so many in modern Science Fiction are really ‘After the Fall’ stories or ‘Love in the Ruins’ stories. Many of the riddle-writers place the Fall correctly near the beginning of the human affair. Others place it in the near-present or in the near or far future.

Most agree that there is an amnesia about the Fall, that it has been forced out of our conventional memory and thus has become the most enigmatic part of the life riddle. Most hint that the Fall has a certain dark grandeur and renown about it.

Some people swear that the Fall is nowhere in history, nor in clear memory, nor in vestige, and nowhere in common sense. But it is in psychology, and in clouded memory, and in inherited folk impressions.

Any competent practitioner of History will know that ‘The Fall of Man’ is there and that perhaps it is the event that divides history from pre-history. Any competent practitioner of anthropology will know that man cannot be described without stating that he is ‘The Fallen Creature’.

“Hold! Go no further!” upset people cry out. “You are coming too near to the subject named ‘religion’!”

“Yes, ‘Religion’ is one of the taboo words that modern science fictioneers may not think nor say, unless they use it to mean something else. The selective speculation which they are allowed will not stretch far enough to allow religion itself, not far enough to see that we have passed the Isthmus and have only to take off our handcuffs and blindfolds to be free. In this, the narrowness, Science Fiction stands where much science stood a hundred years ago and where almost all pseudo-science still stands today.

But the theme of the Fall in the deep past is implicit in most of the central works of science fiction and in virtually all of the fringe works. It is the breath of life of High Fantasy. It is the ‘memory of Magic’ behind all sword-and-sorcery. The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind, is echoed in the Tarzan stories, in the Planet-of-the-Apes pieces, in the Island-of-Doctor-Moreau pastiches. The idea of humanity still containing a spirit world, a supernatural world as well as a preternatural world, a ghostly as well as a poltergeistly world, is the theme of all the Tales-of-the-Uncanny-and-Supernatural, or all Tales-of-the-Mysterious-and-Macabre, of all Great-Tales-of-Terror-and-the-Unearthly, of all Weird Tales, of all Great-Ghost-Stories-of-the-Gas-Light-Era.

The fascination of the tales about space travel echoes the times when we really could travel through deep space effortlessly, instantly, and without vehicles.

The fascination of designing new fantasy worlds echoes the time when our own world was new for an immeasurable period of time, when it had a million different aspects and could present a different one every minute.

The fascination of new inventions echoes the time when to think was to invent, when to conceive was to construct with no interval at all in between, the time when man was given dominion over all the world.

The fascination with ecological fantasies echoes the time when the lion really did lie down with the lamb and eat straw like an ox, when it had not yet rained in the world but “…a mist rose from the earth and watered all the surface of the ground…”

Once we were a more intricate species than we are now.

Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so.

Once we had the Midas Touch, the transmuting touch.

Once we could walk through walls, or walk on water.

Once we could move mountains.

All these things remain as normal but occluded powers of mankind, as true attributes of mankind. But humankind came to an abnormal situation and place, to the narrow isthmus of the middle state where the full normal powers are inhibited.

Who are we really, we who could normally do all those things? Who we are is part of the answer to the riddle.

How did we get onto the isthmus? We fell onto it.

How do we get off of this isthmus? We solve the riddles, or we accept the solutions that stand ready and waiting. Then we discover that we are already off the isthmus.

The implausibility of almost every Science Fiction or Fantasy story lies in the answer to the riddle being readily available, and not being grasped.

The real difficulty is that we have looked back, not at the ‘first state of magic’, but at the isthmus of the middle state where magic is forbidden. And in looking back we are turned into pillars of salt.

But even that need not be fatal. Remember that once we could turn into anything at all, and then turn back again. We have already left the uninspiring isthmus or we could not be looking back at it.

Is this that I have just written no more than a very poor Science Fiction story in the guise of an article? Very likely it is. And yet, very poor story that it may be, it is the synopsis of ‘The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World’.

Once we were indeed Lords of the World because we were at one with the world.

Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so. It still does.

Once we had the transmuting touch. We have it yet.

Once we could walk through walls. We can still do it, if we disregard the caveat of the skeptic who says “When you’ve walked through one wall you’ve walked through them all.”

Once we could move mountains. Haven’t you heard the Good News? We can still move them.

Who are we who can do all these things, except that we have half forgotten that we can do them?

There is one good Science Fiction story that I haven’t gotten around to writing. It’s about the hero-adventurer who answered all the ten thousand riddles except one, and each one was more difficult than the one before it. He answered all of them except the final one, which had also been the one before the first one. No wonder it sounded familiar! That question which stopped him was and remains:

“What is your own name?”

If he can answer that last question, then he can win all the prizes there are. Why does he hesitate when it is so easy?

[March 21, 1980]

-R. A. Lafferty, It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs: R. A. Lafferty Non-fiction (1984), Drumm booklet No. 14, pp. 18-21

This article is one of the pieces of which the inside cover says: these ‘essays, reviews and articles were written as columns for the Italian fanzine, Alien.’

Back cover: ‘Starting with the much-acclaimed Past Master in 1968, at least 19 books by R. A. Lafferty have been published. He has entertained a faithful band of enthusiast with his fertile imaginative gifts and his great spirit of play. These qualities are on full display in the essays, reviews and articles contained herein.’