Short Story Review # 8: Heart Of Stone, Dear (1983)

3/5

This is a rare one, existing only the Chris Drumm booklet of the same name (and now in a nicely made electronic 'pirated' collection).  To me, this is one of Lafferty's tales full of singular and memorable elements that nevertheless doesn't quite hold together as an all round solid story.  It is definitely of interest in that it is woven of many fibres that overlap with the rest of Lafferty's fiction. For example, it features a central and likeable Syrian character as do a number of Lafferty's other stories and novels (e.g. 'Funnyfingers' and Fourth Mansions). (The relevance of this Syrian character for current news is not lost on me.  See my comments about this at the end of this review.)  It features a heist as do many Lafferty stories in one form or another (again 'Hands of the Man' comes to mind). It includes a giant livestock-eating bird as does the, to me, superior story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'. And it mentions the failure to reach the Second Age of Benevolent Magic, a phrase which ties it to 'In Deepest Glass' and perhaps other stories.  It deals with a magical Islamic relic and is also a Philosopher's Stone story (I'm not sure how much these overlap with similar elements elsewhere in Lafferty's fiction).  And it's another of Lafferty's stories of youthful unrequited love, again connecting it to 'Funnyfingers' as well as 'Eurema's Dam' and others.  Makes you wonder what Laff's own youthful experience was with the amorous.

The other central character introduced in the second half of the story, Alfred Freck, a 'thin little boy with red hair' and 'colorless gray eyes', is interesting as well.  Alfred embodies the general geologophilia permeating all of Lafferty's fiction, but also more specifically the ideas of living and 'remembering' stones that Lafferty broaches in various stories such as 'From The Thunder Colt's Mouth', 'Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs', and 'Bank and Shoal of Time'.  This gives Lafferty and opportunity to make one of his many, many rhapsodic lists of erudition:

He was very lucky in his collecting. He said that the special stones called to him to come and get them. He had hundreds of garnets, red and orange (his red hair was the exact color of orange garnet) and black and green and almost colorless gray. This latter is the gray that sometimes clarifies; it is mostly found in spherical or ‘onion’ crystal. It is the ‘Crystal Ball rock’, and is also the exact color of Alfred Freck's gray eyes. 

Alfred had garnets that were more than a foot in diameter. He had emeralds and rubies, jade-stones and opal-stones. He understood the stones and could recognize all of them when they were still imbedded in their clay. Some of them were remembering stones and some of them were whispering stones. They told him about the big stone that is the Emperor of all the stones on the Earth.

There's a lot of other delightful and magical imagery.  It's a work of fantasy proper by Laff, I'd say, which is slightly rare in his body of work it seems to me.  Most things he writes can either very roughly fit into some kind of broadly science-fictional scheme or are more historical fiction in nature, with elements of folklore and magical realism (not quite the same thing as fantasy in my opinion). But this 20th century Arabian-American wonder story is solidly fantasy.  (It goes nicely with 'Phoenic' in that regard I'd say.)

One last thing I want to say.  With this week's news about refugees ringing in my ears, I can't help but be struck that I'm reading a story by an Oklahoma Catholic Irishman, which features a sympathetic Syrian character - as I've said, it's a recurring phenomenon in Lafferty's fiction.  It is just such curious and generous portraits of our racial others that can widen our empathies, preparing us for just and compassionate attitudes and actions toward our global neighbours.  May this kind of racially empathetic imagination increase and may our hearts of stone be replaced with hearts of flesh (a biblical allusion of which I doubt Lafferty was unaware).

* 'Heart of Stone, Dear' discussion on Facebook

An Excessively Normal Childhood (according to Lafferty)

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal, for he came very near the high norms themselves.  He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk.  All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel.  Abel was an imaginative, a creative boy.  He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world:  that is always important.  And he did not like empty spaces at all.  Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination.  There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house.  He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes.  He would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley.  A house had once stood there.  It had burned down: the house had faced on the side street.  Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house.  He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs and Mr Ostergoster.  He put a boy to live in the house.  He fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster.  Mikey fixed a cat.  Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away.  Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick.  Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man (he was a soldier such as they used to have in another time, not the sort of soldier they have now).  Mrs and Mr Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier.  Everybody began to have a big fight then.  Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

"You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina.  "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there - ah, in the little house that is not there.  And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern.  And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog.  I remember that dog before they had to kill it.  It was one mean dog; its a wonder that you weren't bitten.  Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid."

But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all.  He was absolutely normal.  It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel.  The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected.  (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts... Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult.  An average child will lose such talents, but a normal child will retain them:  the two aren't the same.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Rivers of Damascus' (1974)