Lafferty's 80s novels

Academia and family have obviously kept me far too busy to keep up with this blog over the past many months.  (The last post was in late February!)  I've got so much to share on various fronts, but I always find myself tucking away a blog post idea that gets buried into the deep geological layers of ye ol' To Do list.  Today, I'm going to try to break that trend by posting here a comment I just made on a thread in the Lafferty Facebook group (East of Laughter: An Appreciation of R. A. Lafferty).  I really want to write about LaffCon1, which I just attended in New Jersey last weekend, but that too will have to wait.  (Spoiler: it was wonderful.)

Someone in the FB group asked when Lafferty's novel Sindbad: The 13th Voyage, published in 1989, was actually written by Lafferty.  Here's my rather hearsay and anecdotal response:

I once saw Andrew Ferguson write that all of Lafferty's 80s/90s novels were written sometime in the early 80s - 80 to 82 I think. Possibly some as early as 79. I remember Andrew writing that this was Lafferty's second wind sort of period where he landed on a newfound inspiration and approach and became very productive for a while in some quite new directions. Andrew argues that these later novels are not the incoherent mess that some readers have thought them, but are rather Lafferty's maturation as a writer where he finally broke into the new ground that all his earlier novels were urging readers to break into. I.e. think of the 'cliff hanger' endings of Past Master (1968) and Fourth Mansions (1969). Lafferty's novels written in the early 80s are the next and continuing chapters as it were. These late novels are the new worlds that were birthed through the struggles of his earlier novels. These new worlds are, admittedly, just as embattled and yet-to-be-finished as those of the earlier novels, but there are definitely new levels of perception and narrative experimentation happening. I think this groundbreaking creative aspect is also why the late novels remain somewhat 'choppy' (as Lafferty said in an interview) in style. Sometimes even knottier than the earlier novels. Even less commercially viable. But I'm pretty convinced it was because Lafferty had entered uncharted territory, even for him! And as a trailblazer he was bound to look rather 'primitive' (nay, primordial) in his slashing and hacking at the undergrowth he'd entered with this fresh spate of novels. I know Andrew's gonna cover this period in his biography of Laff (due out late 2017 perhaps?) and I hope to pick up his argument after it's published, developing the idea that Lafferty's late novels represent some of his best and most important work, at least as regards their groundbreaking aspect.

Reading the Argo Cycle part 2 - Archipelago Ch. 1: Hans & Marie & the Poetry-Eating Squirrels

Well, I've begun reading the last book of the so-called The Devil is Dead Trilogy.  That is, I'm reading More Than Melchisidech Book III: Argo.  I will say this:  whatever the trilogy's ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, mysteries and marvels and madnesses, it makes me want to re-read not only the trilogy itself but the entirety of Lafferty's oeuvre in light of it.  The Argo Cycle seems to be some kind of metaphysical template or manual or schema by which to better grasp what Lafferty's doing in everything else.  At times, in certain respects, it almost lacks substance in and of itself while seeming to promise to flesh out everything else, like a spirit or soul or ghost that is elusive and ephemeral in itself but utterly animating when inhabiting a body.  Lafferty said that he thought the entirety of his body of work kind of added up to one long unfinished novel that he called A Ghost Story.  The Finnegan/Melchisidech Trilogy (as I'd prefer to call it) and the Argo Cycle more generally seem to be something of the ghostly animus/anima of that Ghost Story.

Though there is some kind of elusive and insubstantial quality to this series in some ways, it nevertheless sparkles and flashes reasonably frequently with fulsome style and imagery and philosophy.  Take the following for example.  I quote the entire passage - which is part 6 of Chapter One of Archipelago (1979), the first book of the trilogy - so that you can see absolutely all that Lafferty's doing and layering in an extended scene like this.  Neil Gaiman, when recently asked what sticks out to him about Lafferty's writing, responded that first of all it is the sentences.  I couldn't agree more.  Even mere clauses within sentences can effervesce, delight, or gore in Lafferty.  That's why I have a whole Twitter account of Lafferty quotes.  I think he works wonderfully at the micro level.  But the following shows how you have to see him at larger, longer levels as well to catch all of his genius.

Hans Schulz is one of the mystical 'Dirty Five', a group of post-WWII army buddies whose lives and times (told in idiosyncratic Lafferty fashion) are the subject matter of this novel.  Each of the guys pairs off with a gal, most of them eventually marrying.  What would young love feel like to the Laffertian mind?  You need wonder no longer.  But this passage is so much more than romantic.   Lafferty's remarkable linguistic and cultural erudition are on full display here, interwoven with several micro tall tales tucked inside a larger one, and rustic local colour (by which enters Lafferty's ubiquitous ecology, in this case flora and fauna).  All this juxtaposes high and low registers very amusingly.  There's also narrative experimentation with voice and structure, an instance of Lafferty's frequently exemplified 'metafictional' habit (long before that word was hot and in a way that's on the opposite end of douchey; it's clever, but it's fun - not boring or snobbish or detached).  There are several wee punchlines to laugh out loud at, as well as the whimsy of the whole segment.  And, of course, there's one preternatural or paranormal aspect very casually asserted in an almost sleight of hand manner.  For my money, this is Lafferty firing on all cylinders.

Hans was in love. He was in love with Marie Monaghan. This had come swiftly to him who usually made up his mind slowly on important things. 

Marie might not have seemed exceptional to anyone else. She had regular, nice features, but her hair was too red and her face was too freckled. She was chubby by contemporary standards, though divine by classical. Hans’ feelings were classical. Marie's eyes were green, but were green eyes classical? Were any of the goddesses green-eyed? You couldn't trust Homer with colors. 

“—my uncle Homer Hochheimer,” it was Marie speaking in Hans’ mind, “he had a fortune but he missed it because he was color-blind. He had a purple cow and he thought she was black. He kept her till she was fourteen years old and then sold her to the butcher. ‘Man, you're throwing away a fortune,’ the butcher told him when the sale was consummated. ‘You've the only purple cow in the world and you've sold her for a pittance. I'll have a million pounds for her,’ and he did.” 

But to the green eyes, this would have to be solved. The paint is gone these two thousand years from the Greek statues that were colored in their prime, but they were still painted when Pausanes had seen them. Did he call any of them green-eyed? How would he call them green-eyed? Not chloros surely. Chloros was light yellow-green. Nobody would have eyes that were chloros. Prasino was a nice green, but was it classical? What was the Greek word for eyes the color of Marie's? In Romany it was sheleno, Gypsy green. And once in French vair, the green they sang: 

Nicolette had eyes of vair,

Something, something, yellow hair— 

But vair had become vert with the disintegration of the French soul, and it was no longer the green of the Troubadors: ignorant wise men even said that vair was a shade of gray. 

The Blessed Virgin was red-headed and green-eyed in early Flemish Annunciations. Witches were green-eyed. Lilith who was before Eve was a witch and therefore green-eyed. This would give primogeniture to the green-eyed women of the world. 

Belloc wrote the only stanza to green eyes, this little bit out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter on all the lesser subjects. 

“—Belloc? I mean my uncle Biloxi Brannagan. They called him that because he went ashore then. From his window he could see the top of an old piling and he thought it was the mast of his ship. ‘There's no hurry, she's still there,’ he would say. My aunt Gertrude, she's a Biloxi girl, never did tell him any different. He's still there. He never did catch his ship.’ Marie talked so in Hans’ mind as he waited for her at the Lotus Eaters. Then she came in person and sat down with him. 

“What are you doing, little Hans?” she asked. 

“I'm writing a poem about you. You can't see it. You won't scan and you won't rime; that's the trouble with you.” 

“Shakespeare had the same trouble, Hans dear.” 

“He did not.” 

“My uncle Shakes Pearson had the same trouble. We called him that because he always had them. He entered a jingle contest once. It was put on by a chewing tobacco company and he had to write a limerick. He drank pop-skull whisky and he shook all the time. His verse would go like this:—‘There was an old lady from Gacko—Who doted on chewing tobacco—’, then Shakes would get the shakes after so much effort and have to go after more pop-skull. When he got back the squirrels would have eaten what he had written. They lived so far back in the boondocks that they didn't have any paper and he wrote on bark with oak-ball juice.” 

In the company of Shakes Pearson, Hans did not feel so incompetent, so he let go with one of the stanzas he had written: 

“The muses sang when Eve was small,

And they were but diurnal;

But you were long before them all,

For you're at least eternal.” 

“You make me seem old,” said Marie. “Am I the eternal one? Well, Shakes would get another piece of bark and start again: ‘There was an old farmer who grew it—And never had leisure to chew it—’, then Shakes would get them again and go off for more pop-skull. And when he came back it would be as before: the squirrels would have eaten his epic.” 

So Hans read again: 

“I dreamed of you before we met,

I never was without you;

And all the masters praise you yet,

For they all wrote about you.” 

“I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew. Well, Shakes would start another one (all our family are very persevering): ‘There was an old farmer named Glugg—who was always cutting a plug—He'd whittle and whittle—till it was too little—’, then Shakes would go off for more of the same before he got to the last line.” 

So Hans read more boldly: 

“But here the brighter pearls are strung

And rings for all your fingers:

I'll sing you as you ne’er were sung

By all the Minnesingers.” 

“That's nice, Hans. So Shakes would start another one: ‘When I was a cocky young Jacko—we made our own chewing tobacco—We chopped up old sacks—and boots and boot-jacks—’, then he'd go off for more of it, and what do you think the squirrels did to his opus while he was gone?” 

“Ate it up. We poets have a hard time.” He continued: 

“And though the globe become a shell

You still will be the leaven,

And I'll remember you in Hell

When you forget in Heaven.” 

“That's Swinburnish, which is the next thing to swinish, and untrue, dear,” said Marie. “We shall be together: I have decided that. Well, Shakes killed himself. His is the only blot on our escutcheon. And the only note he left said ‘Miriam’ (I'm name after her), ‘You've got to do something about those damned squirrels.’ She never did know what he was talking about or why he killed himself. I'm the only one in our family who understands these things.” 

“Why didn't the squirrels eat that last note too?” 

“Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away.” 

“Are there squirrels in Australia, Marie?” 

“Not that I know of. Are you trying to trap me? If I'd said wallabies I'd have had to explain what a wallaby was. And besides, wallabies can't read, so there goes the story. I have a letter from Loy to Finnegan. I stopped by the house to kiss the boys good morning. They weren't up yet so I brought their mail to them.” This was the letter: 

Cambeltown, New South Wales

Thursday, February 11, 1943 

John Solli:

Dear Finnegan: 

Margaret and I will be in town tomorrow. If you haven't any more girls, we'll see you and have a big picnic. And if you do have some more girls, bring them, and we'll get two more boys and join you and Marie and Hans. And bring the other Dirty Fiver that we didn't meet and we'll get him a girl too. No news. The garden I planted in November is all weeds. Papa wouldn't hoe the damned thing. But he killed the fatted calf for his prodigal daughter yesterday. 

Meet us at the train at 7:45 AM (yes, I said AM). I know that you think it's decadent to get up in the morning and I know that you're right. But it isn't necessary that you be wide awake; I like you better the way you are. 

Margie says to tell you that she loves you too. She wants you too now. She switched to you just because I did. But tell Vincent we both still love him also. We love Hans, we love Marie, we love your friend Casey whom we haven't yet met. Meet us tomorrow. 

Love— Loy Larkin

Me too— Margaret Murphey

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The passage is somewhat the classic 'I wish he'd stop writing verses about me long enough to kiss me' act, but it also shows a male-female dynamic that Lafferty visits again and again in the couples that frequently cross his fiction, where the man is a bit of an over-theoretical windbag while the woman is wry, witty, insightful, sensible, and cheeky.  Lines that sneak up on me and make me smile, chuckle, or guffaw (thanks especially to what precedes them) are:  'Hans’ feelings were classical'; 'Something, something, yellow hair'; 'I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew'; 'We poets have a hard time'; and, of course, 'Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away'.  And what a wonderful phrase: 'out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter'.  The ending of their conversation exemplifies Lafferty's recurring investigation of what makes storytelling storytelling, tall and otherwise.  And I left in the transition to the letter because that's how Lafferty ends his numbered chapter segment, creating yet more formal stylisation, appending a written personal letter to a scene of dueling love poetry and tobacco jingles and tall yarns all nested inside a dialogue that was preceded by a linguistic rhapsody.  I'm almost glad that the entire novel's not written this way.  It might (might) be too much.  But there are plenty more interwoven experimentations and styles and registers in the remainder.  To more of which we'll turn next time.

A Prelude to Lafferty's Weirder Tales

I want to review Lafferty's short story 'For All Poor Folks At Picketwire' (1975) next, but I feel compelled to try to get this off my chest first.  It's probably completely unnecessary for a lot of readers, but it's something that puzzles and intrigues me.  Feel free to demur from or expand on the view expressed below.

Since I first started publicly writing about Lafferty in 2009, I've claimed that Lafferty is weird, odd, strange, experimental, and bizarre in a way that the first-time reader is just not going to expect. Nothing will have prepared you for how Lafferty goes about being offbeat, even 'crazy'.  I know that people often hear about 'the Lafferty madness' (as the likes of Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany called it when Lafferty's fiction emerged on the scene in the 1960s) and they understandably think of the experimentations of the likes of Captain Beefheart perhaps, or the paranoid but fascinating open and subversive universe of the likes of Philip K. Dick perhaps.  Or you name it.  Whatever your background makes you think of when you hear the claim that someone is utterly original and 'insane' and the like, that thing you're thinking of, it's almost guaranteed to not be an apt comparison or preparation for Lafferty.

Even as I say all this - that no one is like Lafferty, nothing can prepare you for his brand of weirdness - you're getting the wrong idea!  Why?  Because when we hear such encomiums we generally think of one of two things (or both).  We think either of something crazy in a really cool and 'hip' sort of way, something experimentally-minded college students might get into maybe, or something a well-(if-defiantly-)dressed 'alternative' crowd of one variety or another might champion. I get that.  I was a teenage punk rocker and never grew out of it.  When I think of crazy and original, I think of bands like The Birthday Party or The Fall (or in an alterna-metal direction, Mike Patton and his projects Mr. Bungle and Fantomas).  If you're thinking speculative literature, you might think Neil Gaiman or China Mieville.  If film, maybe David Lynch or the wackier and wilder aspects of the Coen brothers or Tarantino.  But Lafferty's work is not (or not immediately) like all this, not soaked in these kinds of aesthetic assumptions and expressions.

On the other hand, the 'crazy-original' claims might make us think of really 'out there' bizarro examples like maybe Daniel Johnston or the aforementioned Captain Beefheart.  If film, then maybe the likes of Terry Gilliam or John Waters.  This impression is closer to the mark.  But in most of these cases there can still be an aura of (usually countercultural) 'coolness' about the weirdness.

Now don't get me wrong.  I often exclaim 'Cool!' in response to what I read in Lafferty.  But I mean it the way I meant it as a kid in the 80s - an expression of sheer enthusiasm for something that strikes me as in some way excellent.  Not as a confirmation of something's 'hipness', something's trendy now-ness, even by 'alternative' or 'indie' standards.  Nor do I mean to deny that Lafferty is deeply countercultural in his own way (indeed, he's probably better called counter-ontological so reality-bending is his work and perspective).  Lafferty was indeed what he called a 'queer fish', swimming crankily but joyously against the mainstream.

I also don't want my denial that Lafferty is 'cool' to give the impression that his weirdness is 'geeky'. Lafferty isn't comic-con weird either.  Lafferty can, in certain respects, fit in both worlds - the geeks and the hipsters.  Yet he is a misfit in both as well.  That was seen to be the case when the 1960s/70s New Wavers of U.S. science fiction - Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, and the like - championed Lafferty.  They never lost their love of Lafferty's work, but they eventually didn't know how to categorise him as he was clearly not of or in the fold.  All in all, Lafferty is by turns too literary, too genre, too experimental, too dark, too comic, or too difficult for various groups.  That's why his work has tended to generate its own category of literature (what Theodore Sturgeon called 'lafferties') and its own following of Laffertyans or Laffertians, a diverse fan base comprised of all schools and allegiances, the unifying commonality being that they are struck and captured by Lafferty's unique genius.

So what should you think of when you hear that Lafferty is 'a genius, an oddball, a madman' and 'a genre in himself' (Neil Gaiman) or that 'Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs' (Zelazny) or that Lafferty 'bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will' and has 'the most unfettered imagination' (Terry Carr) or that 'Lafferty is fun, sophisticated, and utterly insane', 'a madman, a wild talent' (Reader's Guide to SF)?

Well, maybe start by thinking of the likes of Amos Tutuola or Black Elk.  Like them, Lafferty is a native primal force, an individual that grows out of the fecund soil of an ancient communal worldview and speaks the cosmic magical vision of a people, stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, sure, but overflowing with more than what one individual could ever imagine or convey.  Yet Lafferty had more than one soil to grow out of - not only his family's Irish-Catholic soil, but also the Southwestern American Frontier and the lives and lore of his Native American neighbours.  If you cut Lafferty, he bleeds all three.

Further complicating this possible resonance, Lafferty was classically educated in Augustinian and Thomist traditions, well-read in history and theology and philosophy, knowledgable of the hard and soft sciences, abreast of some major 20th-century developments in thought such as Jungian psychology and Teilhardian cosmology. Lafferty was a largely self-taught but impressive polymath. So his weirdness is going to be not only primally visionary like Tutuola and Black Elk, but also inevitably book-learned (albeit inclusive of some cranks and conspiracy theorists).  So maybe when you hear about Lafferty's mad experimentation you should be thinking also of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.  Or in a slightly different register, the wildnesses of Chesterton's buoyant dialectics and carnivalisations.   (The weirdest parts of Kafka might be appropriate here too, but minus the unmitigated bleakness.)

Yet Lafferty is even more than the above hybridity of Mystic and Man-of-Letters (+ a pinch of crackpot) suggests, for he also embodies regional and class (Oklahoma and blue-collar) dialects, dictions, and perspectives that liberally salt his visions and sophistications with homespun wit and wisdom.  And these perspectives puncture a whole helluva lot of pomposity and intelligentsia-speak along the way (though they don't foreclose Lafferty's own arcane and sesquipedalian theorisings, which are frequently embedded into his stories).  I suppose Lafferty might be a bit of a Mark Twain in his knowing and humorous use of colloquialism, except that he comes across as more thoroughly from these classes, child of an extended frontier family as he was.  This sincere rusticism is one crucial way in which Lafferty will surprise many a reader expecting The Cool Weird from him.

Now, all that said, once you've encountered and immersed yourself in Lafferty a while, it's not altogether unlikely that you will indeed end up thinking of him as a literary-yet-rustic Beefheart or Lynch, an 'outsider artist' and auteur in one.  And dammit, Lafferty's weirdness is cool!  So utterly cool, what would've made us 80s kids exclaim with approbation:  'Bad!'  And it does get crazy weird and beautifully bizarre and sometimes disturbing.  And its weirdness is deep, because Lafferty, like Lovecraft, is playing for keeps.  This is a cosmic view of things that gets beneath the surface into the ontic architecture of existence.

All right, let's get back to reading these stories one by one.

R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit

The astonishing emergence of R. A. Lafferty on the horror and science fiction scene over the last dozen years is a subject of much discussion and a Hugo Award.  Appreciated by both those who favor the more traditional story and those inclined to prefer the most offbeat and experimental, he has been a favorite of the best anthologists: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Damon Knight.  And while best known for his inimitable short stories, he has also turned out fine novels of science fiction, as well as Okla Hannali, which deals with the American Indians.  All this from a writer who has published most of his work past age fifty. But readers should not confuse Mr. Lafferty's chronology with an identifiable style of writing.  R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit.  Like this bit of regionalistic myth-lore, set in his native Oklahoma.

-from Frights: Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976), edited by Kirby McCauley, featuring Lafferty's story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'.