Thoughts on Lafferty's East of Laughter, Part 2 of 2

Can Good Science Fiction Only Grow From the Soil of Fairy Tale or High Fantasy?

Part 1 of this essay-review may have given the impression that in this particular novel Lafferty has pulled up all dividers and is letting all fantasy break loose, indiscriminately—literally anything can and does seem to happen. But on further reflection this turns out not to be true at all. Lafferty has set definite fantastic limits and contours to East of Laughter. The beings, for example, consist of a very certain variety. There are (mostly in very brief appearance or mention): ghosts, goblins, goddesses, fairies, fauns, sprites, giants, ogres, trolls, genies-from-out-of-lamps, shape-shifting humans (e.g. a were-panther, a were-snake), sea monsters, sea-nymphs, saints, angels and so on. One can fairly easily see that the beings by and large are the beings of Old World fairy tales, fables, myths, legends and the like (yes, Lafferty would have taken saints and angels to be real, not mythical, entities, but their appearances and miracles became part of the legendry of the Old World).

The only exceptions I can think of are the utterly absurd and freakish Solomon Izzersted (a baseball-sized talking growth on the belly of another character) and the comically creepy human-faced bats, the Sussex Wraiths. But these two anomalies are seen, significantly, to be grotesquely self-important interlopers who have to be taken down a notch.

Lafferty assembles these beings out of fairy tale and juxtaposes them with certain modern entities and amenities: scientists of various sorts (biologists, nuclear physicists, and so on), intelligent personal computers, newspapers, and ‘modern world transport’ devices (instantaneous teleportation units in wealthy homes). This is the scenario Lafferty has created and he sticks to it. And whereas the world of any given story or novel by Lafferty is very often open to the presence of at least one alien entity (if not outright taking place in the deeps of space or on another planet), here no such characters or elements are allowed to intrude. Indeed, the interloping ‘neo-scribbling giants’, the Sussex Wraiths, suggest at one point that they thought the ‘writing of the world’, which is the philosophical subject of the novel, should include a scenario of extraterrestrials controlling the earth—and this is rejected out of hand. Lafferty has dealt with aliens, alien worlds, space travel and so on in many other novels and stories. This one sticks strictly to a closed-system earth that needs to clean up its own self-contained trouble (‘closed’ only in the interplanetary or intergalactic sense, obviously—not in terms of the supernatural or paranormal).

Indeed, East of Laughter may be Lafferty’s one Fairy Tale or High Fantasy novel (albeit in a modern setting – I’ve heard this called ‘mythpunk’). The rest of his novels seem to be science fiction of one sort or another (e.g. Past Master, Reefs of Earth, Space Chantey, Arrive At Easterwine, Aurelia, Annals of Klepsis) or historical fiction/fantasy (e.g. Fall of Rome, Okla Hannali, The Flame Is Green) or contemporary ‘urban fantasy’/‘magic realism’ (e.g. Fourth Mansions, Apocalypses, The Devil Is Dead). In terms of science fiction, it’s interesting that East of Laughter is about the ‘writing of the future’ and whether there will be a real future, but it finds the key to ‘futurology’ in a correct understanding of and continuity with history and fable.

Of course, Lafferty here is really just bringing to the fore the fairy tale aspects that were latent in much of his fiction all along. Think of how many stories and novels have a human character who is described as a goblin, giant, or witch, for example (Past Master, Arrive at Easterwine, The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, and The Fall of Rome all spring immediately to mind).

To some degree I think in East of Laughter Lafferty was going back and more explicitly reiterating: by the way, before we get to spaceships and aliens, we need to be sure we don’t leave behind all the wonderful and woolly myths that got us there. Indeed, in the midst of our Brave New Worlds of Artificial Intelligences and so forth, let’s keep it peopled with the whole crew we’ve had from ancient times and infused with aspects of the worldview(s) they represent. Otherwise we’ll find the whole show pretty empty, from the sketchy nations and landscapes right down to the emaciated and insipid atoms and musical notes. As Bertigrew Bagley, the Patrick of Tulsa, says in Lafferty’s novel Fourth Mansions:

‘Somehow there is the belief that people in the Dark Ages believed that the world was flat. They didn't. But it is the contemptuous ones of today who have made a really flat world that is the sad answer to everything. What is wrong with the world and why is it not worth living in? It's flat, that's what.’ (p. 59)

Don't you DARE judge this book by its cover!

The Laughing Christ Will Renew the World (Mythological Beings Included)

In connection with the Fairy Tale theme of East of Laughter it is interesting to note the Sylvan Spirit, one of the last living Fauns, who steps out of the Laughing Christ icon. This scene seems to resonate with a similar notion to what C. S. Lewis held: that the best of paganism is ‘hid in Christ’ and finds its true meaning and flourishing in him, especially at the renewal of the world.

Compare the scene in Prince Caspian where the children remark that they’d be afraid to be around Bacchus if it weren’t for the presence of Aslan—under whose rightful kingship the pagan god and his elfish crew flourish and rollick as part of Aslan’s renewal of Narnia back out from under the materialistic reign of terror it has endured. (These are themes to be found in Tolkien and Gene Wolfe as well.)

This viewpoint answers well to Lord Dunsany’s poignantly satirical tale, ‘The Development of the Rillswood Estate’, about the ignominious treatment of a satyr in the modern world, who can only survive and ‘get ahead’ if he modernises—in this case by marrying well and becoming a successful and rather fancy financier. Where the wonderful fantasist Dunsany seems to consistently find modernism repellent to his beloved paganism, Lewis, Tolkien, Lafferty, and Wolfe are in agreement. But they are not stuck with lament and lampoon and lambaste only. Lafferty and the others find (perhaps in what would be the most unexpected place to some) a certain sort of redemptive, sanctifying safe-house for mythical beings of paganism in the midst of the paltry modern world: the Church and her Lord. (See Lewis’s essay ‘Myth Become Fact’ and the Epilogue of Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy Stories’.)

Interestingly, I found this constantly recurring person-statue a rather side-note and comic figure on first reading East of Laughter. Later, I found him still creeping up on me, in a way that faintly and strangely resonated with Flannery O’Connor’s character in her novel Wise Blood who is haunted by Christ as ‘the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind’. Sure enough, when I went back and re-read the Laughing Christ passages, I realised how subtly central he was.

The marble statue was ‘the greatest of Denis Lollardy’s forgeries’ (it remains a mystery whether or not there was a 5^th century original). Early on we are told that it ‘cured the melancholy of people who gazed on it’ and that its maker ‘was terrified (Oh, but there was joy mixed with the terror also) by the miracles worked by the Laughing Christ that he himself had carved’. From the start we are to associate this figure with miraculous terror-joy that heals the sickness of melancholy.

As the story progresses, the Head Scribbling Giant, Atrox, keeps intermittently accusing Denis: ‘You stole from me the thing I most prized in my life, the thing that has authorized my strange continued life. That was the statue or figure or eidolon The Laughing Christ… I believe that it is the Christ himself in the train of his second sepulture. I buried him, as he had instructed me to do, in the ground of Italy. And after three quinque-centums of years [1500 years] he was to rise out of that ground again and renew the world.’

Denis retorts: ‘You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there’. Then suggests: ‘we will ask the Laughing Christ just what he is and how many authors he had’. Atrox still insists: ‘The Christ was alive when I buried him, at his request’.

The significance of these strange little exchanges to the central theme of the novel—the need for new Scribbling Giants who write the future of the world, the need for a renewed mythology in a world that is languishing on mere ‘facts’—does not leap out at one right away. This is merely hint and echo: an insistent implication that the prized, authoritative source of a Scribbling Giant’s life is the Laughing Christ who will renew the world. As the obverse to mythological beings finding their life ‘hid in Christ’ so the living Laughing Christ is hid, buried, in the heart and mind of the Scribbling Giant who writes the future, an apocalyptic future of renewal (a recurring theme in many of Lafferty’s novels). If this figure is dislodged from the Giant’s possession, he feels it as a worry and ache and irritation that signals a missing element that must be restored. Thus it seems that the health-giving mythology for the naked and emaciated modern world finds its source in the Laughing Christ. (‘Mythology’ in this case does not necessarily signify something that is ‘pretend’ or ‘make-believe’, but rather that which is a vehicle of truth, a lively and fulsome and dramatic metaphor for what is really real, which can co-exist and even be rooted in actual history [see Lewis’s essay]).

When the novel later returns to this subject matter, Lafferty quotes from John Masefield’s 1911 poem ‘The Everlasting Mercy’:

‘O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter

Of holy white birds flying after.’

Then Gorgonius inquires: ‘The Christ, where do you have him on display… He raises so many questions.’

Indeed. He is meant to.

When the statue is interred ‘all eleven of them (including Denis who had carved the statue) drew their breaths in sharply at the sheer beauty and joy and friendliness of the masterwork. Well, this was the most pleasant piece of statuary that any of them had ever seen, slightly larger than life-sized, and wrapped in the colored cleanliness of its own laughter. The Laughing Christ! But who was he really?

‘“No, he is not Christ. He is creature,” Laughter-Lynn said, “and he is alive. Oh, the wonderful eeriness!”’

And it is here that the Faun emerges from the statue. After that interesting episode we are reminded: ‘But the wonderful statue, the Laughing Christ of Creophylus still remained a thing of overwhelming joy.’ That night, having been re-buried, the statue is now brought up once more and the ‘flickering torch-light made it seem as if it were a live man laughing. And all ten of them… were again stunned by the sheer beauty and joy and friendliness of the masterwork.’

So, the statue is indeed merely some weird preternatural creature (in his final scene he has become a member of the questing ‘Group of Twelve’ and partakes in a Mass with them, having ashes and sackcloth put on him by the others), not the Christ himself. (Atrox is presumably just a bit muddled about this, but we might say that his heart’s in the right place.) Yet surely we are meant to think his overwhelming beauty, joy, and friendliness derive from his divine namesake, the real Renewer of the World.

The Faun who came out of the Laughing Christ dies, but the hope is expressed: ‘Maybe some other cheerful spirit will come and live in him’. The statue-creature, as representative of his namesake, will continue to host and house the remaining myth-creatures of the world until its renewal.

Saint Joseph's Great Circular Stairway Built With Only Three Nails

There is one more scene connected to this theme. At the seaside house of Oosterend, the Group of Twelve is asked: ‘Have you seen our Great Circular Stairway that possibly was not built by living hands?’

It is a strange and impossible marvel of architecture: ‘It is one of the Three Wonders of our house and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It runs from the Monsters’ Den which is two levels below the booming ocean itself to the Sky Studio that is unsupported save by the winding stairway… I came home one evening and there was the beautiful Circular Stairway completed. And there was the Sky Studio new in the sky like a large head on the end of a long corkscrew neck. The whole thing would have taken a crew of five carpenters five weeks to do, except for the portions of it that would have been quite impossible to do at all.’

‘It was Saint Joseph who did it’ they are informed (he was initially recognised by his frugal Galilean pipe and tobacco). As a stranger passing through, he was asked to fix a step in exchange for a meal and so he brought out a small package: ‘It contained a small saw, a small hammer, three nails, a very small board of wood, and two little panes of glass, one of them clear and one of them clouded. I noticed the name on his small package, Joseph Jacobson, so then I knew for sure that he was Saint Joseph; for the father of Saint Joseph was named Jacob. ’

The man of the house who had commissioned this afternoon’s repair work relates: ‘in my sleep I heard a hammer with a melodious ring to it, very pleasant. But even in my sleep I wondered “He has only three nails, and how can he be doing so much melodious hammering with them?” When the man rose from his nap he was told: ‘Really I did a little bit more than fix the step. I built a new stairway.’

The man further recalled: ‘I saw the Circular Stairway then and was delighted almost out of my skin. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I went up to the floor above me and I went down to the floor below me. I did not notice then that it went very much further up and down. “I believe that you are the best carpenter who ever lived,” I said. “No,” he told me, “my son was a much better carpenter”.’

It is a quiet episode of strange beauty and wonder, of magic and miracle (based on an actual legend). Again, we have hints and echoes. The stairway reaches down to monstrous ocean depths (where reside not only sea monsters but ocean-ogres and ocean-nymphs) and up into creative skies (in the Sky Studio they shortly find the scribbling giant Atrox in the midst of writing a resurrection of one of the murdered human characters)—and it was built with only three nails. The discreet allusion to the three nails with which Christ was crucified crescendos into a little punch line about Joseph’s adopted son, Jesus, trained in his own profession, but ultimately capable of far greater wonders of miraculous construction and creativity and connectivity between ocean and sky, earth and heaven, fact and myth, modernity and faerie, psyche and cosmos.

Often There Will Emerge a Face

Between Joseph’s allusive three-nail wonder-carpentry and the recurring figure of the Laughing Christ, Lafferty subtly weaves in both the passion and the laughter of the Christ, the crucifixion sorrow and the resurrection merriment (and thereby, his constant note of carnival—see Andrew Ferguson’s dissertation 'Lafferty and His World', page 25ff.), suggesting that these twin achievements and qualities are what rebuild and renew the fallen world, what reconstruct and reunite all that is ancient and future. I just began reading Lafferty’s The Fall of Rome the other day and was surprised (but not really surprised) in this connection to run into the following in its prologue:

‘Near the end of the fourth century, the Mosaic-of-the-Great-Picture came into its own… The great mosaics were made up of thousands of small cubes or tesserae imbedded in a matrix of plaster or cement or clay. The colored cubes formed intricate pictures, one picture merging into another: these smaller pictures, when seen from a distance and in the right aspect, would form one great picture. Most persons could see it clearly: some could not see it at all… The smaller pictures were of people, animals, actions, furniture and handicrafts, towns, fields, banquets, worships, labours and pleasures, buildings, ships, plows, soldiers, children, courtesans, sheep, and asses. They combined in the great picture (which not everyone could see), the face of Christ… Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus.’ (pp. 3, 5)

Intricately knowledgeable as he is of such forms of art as the mosaic, I think Lafferty intends to foster the ability of our readerly sight to eventually put together his individual tesserae (the many beautiful, strange, and gem-like stories, as well as the equally crystalline—if frequently opaque—episodes, images, and so on in his novels) into larger pictures (the consistently recurring themes and threads) that merge into each other and eventually form a Face. A Laughing Face. Some see it clearly. Some cannot see it at all.

As the eminent s.f. critic John Clute so aptly observed of Lafferty: ‘his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he writes (or has been ignored)’ (Encylopedia of Science Fiction). But if we care to really understand why Lafferty's work delights and moves us so, we ignore this permeation at our peril, for, as Clute also observed: 'his Roman Catholicism governed not only the surface of his work, but its deep structure as well' (obituary).

From Drunken Binges to Wine Tasting: Reading and Re-reading Lafferty’s Short Stories

When I first started reading Lafferty’s short stories, I was collecting them ‘One At a Time’ in second-hand 1970s anthologies. I had been wowed by a few early on, and, without realising I was doing it, I from then on approached his stories with an all too flippant take-it-or-leave-it mentality. I wanted thrills and laughs and if the story didn’t seem to deliver right off, I was unduly disappointed and dismissive. Sometimes they would surprise me by meeting my expectations in a new way or by doing wholly new things to me, which subsequently created new contours in my expectations. Even so, I didn’t really want to work too hard for anything or be all that challenged. I skipped along the surface of my reading of his tales, lingering only over the ones that immediately took my fancy and largely forgetting the rest.

Now I know better. More than a decade on from the reading of my first Lafferty story (probably back in about 1998—it sounds so pathetic next to some of his extant readership that goes all the way back to the 70s or 80s!), having also read so many other authors in that time as well, I now know what an outrageously rare writer he is and what a distinct and priceless treasure each individual story is. Ok, yes, I’m speaking besottedly as a fanboy. There are no doubt some of his short stories that are only ‘OK’ no matter how you spin it. Still, there is huge truth to my initial exaggeration.

First of all, so many (indeed, most) stories I was less than bowled over by in the past, I have, on second or third readings, found to be either moved up the scale very considerably or, really, to be one of his best stories and I simply blockheadedly missed it the first time round. Secondly, I seriously doubt that there exists a story written by the man that does not contain a Laffertian gem the world would be significantly poorer not to own: an exquisite turn of phrase that only he could turn; a wonderfully descriptive sentence or paragraph in his utterly unique style; an inimitable scenario, setting, or character that only he could have madly concocted; a distinctively fresh philosophical musing from a mind so sharp it cut the crap like no other; a slice of life seen through the strangest eyes the world has known; or, as often as not, a tiny little micro-tall-tale (such an impossible-sounding term is perfectly—perhaps only—suited to Lafferty’s fiction) that we would definitely not want, upon discovery, to have missing from the overall Laffertian lore-trove.

Lafferty’s stories honestly deserve our loving time and attention, without distraction and with commitment. I am finally re-reading all my Lafferty short story collections (Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Ringing Changes, and Lafferty In Orbit—as well as a handful of Drumm booklets—and oh! how I wish I could afford to own the collections Golden Gate, Iron Tears, and Through Elegant Eyes). These days, I am savouring each individual story for all its worth, getting every sliver and slaver of meat and juice, then cracking the bone to luxuriantly suck out the marrow, and, finally, worrying the shivered bones themselves as a pleasant desert. I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Dr. Ransom eating the exotic fruits and nuts of the floating islands of the edenic planet Perelandra: of some he said they were a mystical experience that deserved a ritual benediction, while others were simply a hearty meal that called for a hearty ‘Amen!’, but every bite was a blessing like he’d rarely tasted back on Earth.

So it is with Lafferty’s short stories when they have become a vintage to the seasoned reader. In the early days of reading him we are soon drunk on how quick we quaff them, happily bloated and bleary-eyed from our binging. Sure, his glint-eyed and grinning stories, full of grotesquery and grandeur, certainly lend themselves to this brackish boyish racket. All the same, re-reading them in later days, our gaze a-sparkle, we tend to swirl and smell and sip and swish and swallow. Oh, it is still a heady and high time and the tales are as ruddy and rowdy and gladly mad as ever. But now we take our time with each story. Swirl and smell and sip and swish and swallow. Slowly. Each one. Each and every one.

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 4: Never was the World Outlook so bright, and never had the girls been so pretty

I didn’t actually own a collection of short stories by Lafferty until several years into reading him. I simply looked for one Lafferty story at a time in s.f. mags and multi-author anthologies of the 70s/80s at second hand bookshops (reminiscent of the title to his story ‘One At A Time’!). I’d buy dirt cheap 70s anthologies that looked interesting, especially if edited by someone I respected, like Brian Aldiss. That’s how I came across the story ‘Parthen’ in Best SF: 1973, edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison.

This story (built on the momentum of having read the previously discussed ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’ [see part 3]) did the trick of hooking me completely. A particular part toward the beginning had me laughing uncontrollably, reading one line again and again, each time erupting afresh in giggles and guffaws—tears in eyes, hand slapping thigh—the works. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, the story begins thusly:


'Never had the springtime been so wonderful. Never had business been so good. Never was the World Outlook so bright. And never had the girls been so pretty.'


Lafferty had a real knack for a cracking opening paragraph to a story. Indeed, the story that follows often cannot live up to its gem of an opening. But this story definitely does. In fact, reading through this story afresh I find it is one of his (perhaps somewhat rare) ‘perfectly’ written stories. The prose just does not falter, right through to the end. It is confident and lyrical; the writing produces an exquisitely taut chord that rings true when plucked (read). It may not be one of his very deepest (though it undoubtedly has depth), but it is one of his most finely crafted in my opinion.

(But always remember, whatever encomiums I employ to describe Lafferty, you must ever be prepared for him to live up to the glowing praise in the queerest way when you actually read him for yourself. I’m firmly convinced he was a great writer, but he was a weird writer! A fact which, for people with tastes like mine, only adds to the esteem we heap on him.)

I still didn’t yet realise how characteristic these few opening lines of ‘Parthen’ were of Lafferty’s wry, consistently anti-utopian satire. And that he usually employed ridicule in such magnanimous-yet-cranky terms—that is, he harangued humanely. That’s why so many people love him irrespective of whether they agree with his ethical, religious, or political framework.

I don’t know how he pulls it off, but these opening lines (especially if seen within his wider work) drip with sarcasm and a certain deep cynicism and yet they evince what seems to be Lafferty’s genuine zest for life, even at its worst. It is not life itself or even certain persons or groups of people, but rather the philosophical (and hence, ethical) thinning of the zest that he objects to crankily (he called himself the ‘cranky old man from Tulsa’). But as I say, so many readers who might even be ideologically on the receiving end of his withering criticism find themselves warming to him because of his affirmation of being human and of life, even when facing a darkness, even when accusing you in particular of supporting a structure that creates that darkness. This is his genius. This is what people of all stripes love him for. The story continues:


'It is true that it was the chilliest spring in decades—sharp, bitter, and eternally foggy—and that the sinuses of Roy Ronsard were in open revolt. It is admitted that bankruptcies were setting records, those of individuals and firms as well as those of nations. It is a fact that the aliens had landed (though their group was not identified) and had published their Declaration that one half of mankind was hereby obsoleted and the other half would be retained as servants. The omens and portents were black, but the spirits of men were the brightest and happiest ever.

'To repeat, never had the girls been so pretty! There was no one who could take exception to that.

'Roy Ronsard himself faced it in a most happy frame of mind. A Higher Set of Values will do wonders toward erasing such mundane everyday irritations.'


The ostensibly light humour, the fun-having sarcasm and lampooning of ‘new moralities’, the effortless and unobtrusive introduction into the narrative of a well-worn s.f. trope (‘the aliens had landed’) all combine to create simple, pleasurable entertainment… and no one really suspects (or is only marginally wary of) the bite beneath the ink! And Lafferty just goes on light-footedly satirizing and, indeed, simply joking around:


'There is much to be said in favor of cold, vicious springtimes. They represent weather at its most vital. There is something to be said for exploding sinuses. They indicate, at least, that a man has something in his head. And, if a man is going to be a bankrupt, then let him be a happy bankrupt.

'When the girls are as pretty as all that, the rest does not matter.


Lafferty also had a knack for odd description of odd things and would go into great detail unexpectedly, frequently thereby disclosing his considerable (in the main arcane) erudition. We have been informed that the girls are unusually and perhaps even unbelievably pretty and many an author might leave it at that. But Lafferty’s next line is ‘Let us make you understand just how pretty Eva was!’ And Eva is the first in a rapid succession of lovely women he sketches. And what you would expect to come next? What kind of description in what kind of terms? No one would do it like Lafferty does:


'She was a golden girl with hair like honey. Her eyes were blue—or they were green—or they were violet or gold and they held a twinkle that melted a man. The legs of the creature were like Greek poetry and the motion of her hips was something that went out of the world with the old sail ships. Her breastwork had a Gothic upsweep—her neck was passion incarnate and her shoulders were of a glory past describing. In her whole person she was a study of celestial curvatures.

'Should you never have heard her voice, the meaning of music has been denied you. Have you not enjoyed her laughter? Then your life remains unrealized.


Let me pause and suggest the following exercise to you: some day, once you’ve read and enjoyed Lafferty for a while, try typing out a paragraph you always found humorous. What an effect it has! I grinned as I began. The grin widened into a (probably frightening-looking) smile. Little involuntary giggles began erupting. By the time I was done I was quietly but firmly belly-laughing, shoulders gently convulsing. I had to savour a few of the lines again, then laughed yet louder, sighed. No doubt there was a twinkle in my eye that if my wife or one of my children had entered the room and observed, they would have queried: ‘What mischief have you been up to?’ What a gift to write like that! (C. S. Lewis has wonderful moments where he achieves this and G. K. Chesterton many more.)

Even given that the grandiosity of this praise is necessary to the plot, what a wonderful way to describe the beauty of a woman! A quality I appreciate in Lafferty (and I’m not sure how many others would appreciate this) is that he did not describe graphic sexual scenes (unlike, say, his Catholic contemporary Gene Wolfe), though he by no means shrank from the subject on a number of levels – married, illicit, fulfilling, or unfulfilling. Elsewhere in this connection, Lafferty remarked:


‘Well, well, was there a seduction scene then? Enjoy or abhor such things according to your inclination, as the sage says, but it is contemptible to seek such vicariously.’


(From his novel The Devil Is Dead. He seemed consistently to disdain and subvert society’s appetite for pornography – see, for example, his story ‘Brain Fever Season’ – collected in Ringing Changes.)

As ‘Parthen’ shows, male-female relationships and gender inter-perceptions were often a central feature of Lafferty’s stories. Nor did he shrink from the sensual as I think the above passage shows. Indeed, here is deep respect and true awe in describing a woman’s physical dimensions. And this thus comes across as so original! Every s.f. writer in the 60s/70s experimental New Wave movement was busy gettin sexy and sexually liberated and Lafferty was diverse from them in this area as in so many others. Though he demurred from joining in the sex lib ethos, it’s clear he was no prude and his work regularly celebrated and explored the joys and perils of human sexuality.

And of course not only does this passage have beauty, but also mirth, even joy! Lafferty continues:


‘It is possible that exaggeration has crept into this account? No. That is not possible. All this fits in with the cold appraisal of men like Sam Pinta, Cyril Colbert, Willy Whitecastle, George Goshen, Roy Ronsard himself—and that of a hundred men who had gazed on her in amazement and delight since she came to town. All these men are of sound judgment in this field. And actually she was prettier than they admitted.

‘Too, Eva Ellery was but one of many. There was Jeannie who brought a sort of pleasant insanity to all who met her. Roberta who was a scarlet dream. Helen—high voltage sunshine. Margaret—the divine clown. And it was high adventure just to meet Hildegarde. A man could go blind from looking at her.’


I don’t know why, but I must have read this story over again half a dozen times in as many weeks and would seriously have tears in my eyes by the time I came to ‘the divine clown’ every time! I suppose different bits of Lafferty tickle different people in different ways, but this one just grabbed my funny bone and wouldn’t let go until I was aching every time. Indeed, people often refer to the happiness and joy they feel from reading him, no matter how dark or bloody certain aspects may be.

And Lafferty gives us this joyful pleasure always with a sting in the tail. The wives are understandably not taking it well that their men are all besotted with these new über-women. The protagonist Roy Ronsard says to his wife:


‘“Have you noticed how many really beautiful women there are in town lately, Peggy?”

‘“Roy, I hope those aliens get every damned cucumber out of that patch! The monsters are bound to grab all the pretty women first. I hope they’re a bunch of sadist alligators and do everything that the law disallows to those doll babies.”

‘“Peggy, I believe that the aliens (and we are told that they are already among us) will be a little more sophisticated than popular ideas anticipate.”

‘ “I hope they’re a bunch of Jack the Rippers. I believe I could go for Jack today. He’d certainly be a healthy contrast to what presently obtains.”’


This thought that ‘Jack the Ripper’ would be better than the current lack of ‘manliness’ provides a snapshot of a lot of what Lafferty had to say in his work. His was a (imaginatively) violent reaction to the reductionism(s) of his (and our own?) times – reductionisms that pretended, ironically, to be on a ‘higher plane’ of values. The effects of these values play out this way in the story before us:


‘How could a man not ascend to the higher plane when such wonderful and awesome creatures as these abounded? But the damage was done when the men carried this higher plane business home to their comparatively colorless wives. The men were no longer the ever-loving husbands that they should have been. The most intimate relations ceased to take place. If continued long this could have an effect on the statistics.’


I won’t give away rest of this enjoyable (quite short) story. The light touch continues throughout both in terms of humour as well as social criticism and perhaps this story gives little hint of the sublimities Lafferty can reach. But it is one of my favourites and I think a fine and gentle introduction to the man’s oeuvre.

Next I shall mention a flurry of stories that I came along subsequently with much pleasure and with increasing interest in his critiques of theories of origins among other themes.

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 2: Closing in on the Mad Man Riding (Raucously) the Crest of the New Wave

In my early 20s I discovered science fiction as literature through C. S. Lewis’s ‘Space Trilogy’ (‘Cosmic Trilogy’ in UK) and in my nerdish obsessive tendency proceeded to read s.f. non-stop for 2 or 3 years.

Now I had grown up on sci-fi films and TV and loved the genre, but books-wise had only read fantasy and horror as a child and teen. Furthermore, I was ‘singing’ in a ‘sci-fi/horror’ punk rock band at the time (Blaster the Rocket Boy, later Blaster the Rocket Man). My childhood imagination had readily poured out in my lyrics along with my young-adulthood faith, so that our songs were a strange and heady mix of the spiritual experiences of monsters and robots and aliens. I was a huge C. S. Lewis fan (reading his Mere Christianity at age 18 genuinely changed my whole life, especially by finally fully switching on my intellect and effectively and thrillingly meshing it with my imagination and faith) and I was writing science-fictional lyrics from a Christian worldview but still hadn’t read his science fiction books! A dear friend finally posted me the books in the mail and prompted me to read them, which yet again changed my life.

I must admit, though, I look back on those 2 or 3 years of slavish voracious s.f. reading with some nausea. It was mostly tripe, sadly (I wasted some precious hours of my life on the revered Asimov – but bless him, he’s a classic in his way and is still highly pleasurable in the rare story—reading ‘The Bicentennial Man’ aloud to my children was a fine moment).

However, I think what I mostly identified with then (and still do sometimes) was a phase in s.f. history called the ‘new wave’ in the 1960s and 70s. The hotties of this loose grouping were Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, and Harlan Ellison in America (gotta love those names!). Apparently it was Brits like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard that started the literary trend in this experimental direction. Philip K. Dick would go here as well and I’m sure there are others I’m glaringly overlooking. It was particularly some of the feel from Ellison and Zelazny that grabbed me, and even more so Aldiss drew me into his flame for a period. There was a quirkiness and ‘coolness’ and ‘science fantasy’ (in the good way) feel to the Americans. Aldiss had their oddity but with the much more articulate and patently intellectual tone usually ingrained in British writing (which for most of my life I by far preferred – I’ve now come to appreciate quite acutely the American style of intelligent prose as well).

In this period (the 60s/70s, as well as my phase of reading this work, which was the mid-90s) there emerged another American author that surely by default of name had to align with this grouping: one R. A. Lafferty. Initially he has the same quirky feel (not as ‘cool’ though, the first thing to set him apart), the oddity, the wry wit and wisdom. Indeed, all of the aforementioned authors praised Lafferty without exception or qualification. Here’s what they were saying about his first (and most well known) novel, Past Master, in 1968 (a novel I didn’t read until much later in my Lafferty experience).

You can hear the genuine admiration mixed with bemusement about how to praise a genius even stranger than themselves who had popped up in their midst:

I read it in one sitting; I couldn’t put it down. Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He’s good. [Roger Zelazny]

This is a great galloping madman of a novel, drenched in sound and color… As with everything the man writes, the wind of imagination blows strongly… and we can settle back to appreciate the special magic proffered by the madman Lafferty. [Harlan Ellison]

The Lafferty madness… is peppered with nightmare: witches, lazarus-lions, hydras, porsche’s-panthers, programmed killers that never fail, and a burlesqued black mass. One hears of black comedy? There are places in PAST MASTER where humor goes positively ultraviolet. [Samuel R. Delany]

…wild, subtle, demonic, angelic, hilarious, tragic, poetic, a thundering melodrama and a quest into the depths of the human spirit… R. A. Lafferty has always been uniquely his own man. [Poul Anderson]

It’s a minor miracle that a serious philosophical and speculative work should be written so colorfully and so lyrically. There is, happily, no way to categorize the book: it has elements of science fiction, of pure fantasy, of poetry, of historical fiction; it is sharply critical and marvellously gentle; very serious and irrepressibly funny; profoundly symbolic and gutsy-realistic by (unexpected) turns. A first rate speculative work. [Judith Merril]

Yet he transcends his peers, he transcends. I don’t mean to be patronizing to clearly great writers who went on to much more renown than Lafferty ever knew. But I think even they knew they were in the presence of someone truly in a league of his own, even if that distinction pushed him into the realm of the ‘mad’ and ‘wild’ like an animal-skinned prophet in the desert.

I first happened upon one or two of his stories in old s.f. mags I had collected second hand and certainly the name stuck if no other impression was made. (I do remember the ending of a story I was otherwise not impressed with, something about a witch making a chilli recipe, that totally made my heart thud against its cage with painful yearning – it utterly surprised me, but it didn’t yet shock me out of my stupidity for I didn’t at that time take up the quest for more Lafferty.) Then I came across the entry on Lafferty in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (edited by the brilliant scholar John Clute). Yes, I know, it’s utterly geeky to own such a tome, but honestly it’s actually high quality lit. crit.! I bought the encyclopaedia in the heat and height of an obsession for ‘Inklings’ style imaginative literature when I noticed it had interesting lengthy entries on all three (Williams, Lewis, Tolkien as well as predecessors Chesterton and MacDonald)! Anyway, it mentioned that Lafferty’s Roman Catholicism infused all his writing and I was intrigued on that count. Theologically driven s.f. is rare indeed (particularly by Christians), but is perhaps the most precious jewel worth digging up and collecting. And if you’re gonna dig, dig Lafferty!

Next: I properly encounter my first Lafferty story. It takes a minute to say, so please forgive the long entry…