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.

Excerpt from 'Boomer Flats'

I'm studying Lafferty's short story 'Boomer Flats' right now for my forthcoming essay for Feast of Laughter volume 3.  Just had to share the following excerpt.  Up to this point in the story, the style has been fairly plain (but Lafferty's prose at its plainest still tends to be graceful, taut, and often lyrical - even if the difficult concepts and narrative experimentations sometimes obscure his generally mellifluous style).  I suspect the sudden change in style here reflects the new and strange and heightened setting the characters have suddenly found themselves within, for they have entered a sort of 'shadow' town not shown on maps, in search of monsters. 

Dr. Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step. 

“Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked. 

“No,” she answered simply, but it wasn't simple at all. Her voice didn't go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes. 

“We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?” 

“They're fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring it after a while.” 

There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit. 

“Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar quality.” 

“Not just a springtime; it's an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I've noticed that about them in other places. It's old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.” 

The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric. 

“There's a lot of the gas-light era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren't gas lights either.” 

“No, they're hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”

“Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her. 

“Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame. 

“Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked. 

“They're fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring them after a while.” 

Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation. 

“We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?” 

“You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn't such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn't done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink.

~R. A. Lafferty, 'Boomer Flats' (1971) 

I think it's a pretty good example of Lafferty's odd yet robust prose when he really lets it out of its cage (though he can wax even richer and wilder than this).  The dialogue sparkles, humour abounds, yet the language becomes injected with imagery of the huge and redolent, hinting at a dark, green, muddy, deep vitality beneath the effervescent chatter.

This exchange between the 'eminent scientists' and Crayola Catfish (the waitress) is followed by plenty more fearful wonders and laughing horrors in 'Boomer Flats', but the high-ish prose style here starts to crack and recede, probably to reflect one of the characters' stubborn unbelief in the redemptively monstrous nature of the place and people they've encountered (and which they discover is in themselves as well).

The description of Velikof's eyes here also reminds me of some passages in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian where men's eyes are described similarly, as caves and the like, but I'm not going to go hunt up the exact references right now.  Here too the woman's voice is said to call forth deep geological time, green spring times between ice ages - deep geology being another theme dear to McCarthy also, especially in Blood Meridian.  Both McCarthy and Lafferty share a tendency to describe human features - soulish as well as bodily - in the imagery of landscapes (as well as other aspects of ecology).  Another example from Lafferty that springs to mind is the enthralling description of a man's large and contoured hand at the opening of his short story 'Hands of the Man' (1970).  

Here in 'Boomer Flats' you can see the clear connection Lafferty is making between ecology and people, between the non-human and human, troubling a complete disjunction, re-enfolding subjects into objects. Notably in this story, outside of the excerpt above, Lafferty folds regional fauna and humanity together as well, especially catfish and bears.  These kinds of anthropo-eco boundary blurrings and hybridities are part of what I mean by the  'ecomonstrous' and what I'm researching in Lafferty's writing.  (The PhD is now 100% funded by the way, thanks to the generosity of a lot of kind and supportive folks out there.)

('Boomer Flats' was first published in IF magazine, then the collection Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add?; but I'm obviously not the first to see the story's eco implications as it was also later included in this 1994 anthology)

Globular Narratology (and glimmerings of a case for the greatness of Lafferty's late works)

'The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.

But why narrate spheres? Why strive for such an ideal or ideated form? Surely there are other shapes more curious, more open, more pregnant, though pregnancy does tend toward the spherical. There are other shapes more varied. Why not narrate saddles or quarries?  What kind of saddles, then?

Dromedary saddles, I suppose.  They're the closest thing to the shape of it.'

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive At Easterwine (1971), Chapter Eleven (attributed to the fictional work Ermenics of Shape by the fictional character Audifax O'Hanlon)

For years this has been one of my go-to passages on the craft and puzzle of writing and storytelling. In the scheme of Lafferty's novel I think it takes on cosmic and ontological significance as well.  But in regard to narration it speaks of a universal puzzle that all storytellers must confront.  Few perhaps have pursued it as rigorously as Lafferty did.  I think this is why his narrations can be so notoriously (yet delightfully) difficult (not least among them Arrive At Easterwine!).

Not all of his stories are narrationally difficult, of course.  As one commenter on this blog aptly put it: Lafferty wrote the 'storiest of stories'.  Some of them positively hum and buzz with taut style and plot and the reader happily trips down the paragraphs to the usually wham-bang ending.  But let's be honest, Lafferty also wrote some utterly brain-melting narratives:  wildly and joyously baffling novels like Easterwine as well as Not To Mention Camels and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. And, of course, there are the woollier, idea-drenched and/or structurally experimental short stories like 'Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies' or 'Rivers of Damascus' or 'The Man Who Walked Through Cracks' or 'St Poleander's Eve' or 'Inventions Bright and New'.

Lafferty himself admitted in an interview that he wrote 'choppy novels', but I think that was due as much to the unwavering integrity with which he genuinely tried to 'narrate a sphere' (or a saddle or quarry for that matter) as to any lack of skills or intuition he may have suffered as regards traditional notions of plot and so on.  (And just as is the case with the short stories, there are examples of novels that, for me at least, flow quite well - e.g. Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, The Devil Is Dead - even if what they narrate can be fairly mind-bending or mystifying.)

In some of the later and seemingly crazier-than-ever novels, Andrew Ferguson (in an unpublished paper) makes a very convincing case that Lafferty was stepping out into the true and un-plied innovation he had been calling for in his works from earlier decades.  From what I've read of those novels - mostly published in the 1980s - I couldn't agree more.  Among these too is showcased (intentionally) 'choppier' and more 'flowing' instances:  East of Laughter being an example of the former and Annals of Klepsis and Aurelia being examples of the latter.  They strike me as the fruit of a very mature and very exciting, if inevitably disorienting (because of the sheer newness of the endeavour), phase of an author finally truly stretching forth into the great work of his life.  (Pace Webster, who's excellent and engaging article I already took issue with when I 'fisked' it here.)  If illness (and at last, alas, the weight of obscurity) had not diminished him in the 1990s, I think we would have seen Lafferty write his final and fullest masterpieces.  But even the beginnings of that late and mature work are powerful statements to behold - if we have ears to hear.

In my opinion, the way to obtain such ears is to very carefully listen to the early works and follow where they lead.  That is the huge mistake I think so many of even Lafferty's ardent admirers make. They were fond of his 60s and early 70s stuff and revel only in that era and fail to see how those very works are paving the way for later greatness.  For probably a very long time to come, our best guide to grasping how these early works set us up for later works is Andrew Ferguson.  Start with his Master's Thesis 'Lafferty and His World' - don't worry about the passages of this paper that get incredibly dense with theory and jargon.  They lighten up again and bear a lot fruit when he starts analysing specific stories by Lafferty.  Then proceed to his mesmerisingly informative and insightful blog:  Continued On Next Rock.  Pay close attention, stay tuned in.  Beyond that, all one can do is pray for the day some sane and just publisher eventually gives Andrew the go ahead to write Lafferty's biography (I've seen a sample - it's gonna blow us away), and when that happens you'll see what I mean.  Our understanding of Lafferty is gonna go interstellar.  We'll still be mere half-conscious mortals plumbing infinities, but we'll be far better off than we are at present, trying as we are to see a mosaic from too close, lacking vantage and vista.

The Trouble with Going Beyond Cliche

I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble. (R. A. Lafferty)

More R. A. Lafferty quotes at izquotes.com

'an exhilarating statement of intent from a young and ferociously talented writer'

'Among the (numerous) apocryphal stories about Lafferty is this one: like many young, bookish folks, he set out at one point to be a writer, even enrolling in a night class to augment his part-time study in electrical engineering, as well as the innumerable languages he taught himself. The writing teacher took a look over his stuff and told him, you might have something here, but you need to go live your life for 20 years or so, and then come back and try it again. Being a literal minded person (something I’ll explore further later on), Ray took the prof at his word and put aside his typewriter for a couple decades. Nothing survives from this earlier period—nothing, that is, except this unpublished novel,Antonino Vescovo, dated in Lafferty’s hand “ABOUT 1935 TO 1937”.'

-from the Lafferty blog Continue on Next Rock 

Andrew (the blogger of said blog) sums up:  'It is, in many ways, an exhausting book; certainly not one to read in a single sitting. But it’s also an exhilarating statement of intent from a young and ferociously talented writer; albeit one, like O’Brien, well ahead of his time.' 

(In his subsequent blog post, Andrew relates another fascinating detail of Lafferty's writing apprenticeship:  '1957 was the year when R.A. Lafferty returned to writing after a twenty-year hiatus. He submitted stories to several magazines (all rejections), enrolled in and completed a correspondence writing course, and also sent several stories to dubious fee-charging literary agencies in the hopes of gaining representation.')

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.

I Unreservedly Support the “Find the Giant” Movement

‘Monika Pantera was both shocked and amused to notice that the genuine Ifrit whom she had evoked by rubbing the genuine Aladdin’s Lamp, a creature who had been into everything and nothing since his arrival, was now wearing a huge button of the political sort. And the words on the button were: I unreservedly Support the Solomon Izzersted Non-Partisan “Find the Giant” Movement and Congress and I urge that it be Universally Supported.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter, p. 165-66

“The health of the world depends on this high position being filled. The bleak refusal We will not serve is not the right answer. And Giant Despair who lives in Doubting Castle is not the right answer.” (p. 166)

“What heart should not throb at the prospect of becoming the Foremost of the Giants who Write the World? Why are all the giants or quasi-giants in the world not shouting “Here I am, here I am”?’ (p. 167)

‘One of the blessings of the Eighth Day is that the dead and the living mingle there on easy terms… And another gracious dead person said, “Living people often wonder whether their world dramas are actually happening, whether they are indeed real… In recent days, some fastidious people have questioned the very existence of the Institution of the Scribbling Giants Who Write the World. And they have questioned whether the world failures have been due to the Giants’ failures in writing the world. But it doesn’t matter whether the Giants are real or not. What does matter is that they are important. There is good evidence that the Aeon which is just beginning will be the Aeon of the Scribbling Giants and of the flow and movement and direction that they give to the world.

'“The first Seven Pillars of Righteousness, the first of the Pillars that Sustain the World, those of the Seven Sustaining Saints, are of waning importance. Certainly there is plenty of holiness in the present world. The second Seven Pillars of Righteousness, those of the Seven Sustaining Technicians, are not presently of overwhelming importance. Certainly there is plenty of technology and gadgetry in the world. But Oh, the third Seven Pillars of Righteousness, the Seven Scribbling Giants who write the scenarios of the world, never has the world needed them so much as today. For the world is aimless and arrant when it has no narrative flow or way or direction or impetus to move it. The world is goofy when it has no such direction.

'“If I were alive again, I would wish to fill the most important and the most self-sacrificing job in the world, that of Top Scribbling Giant. Oh, why is there not more animation in living people! How can they leave such things undone!”’

-pp. 168-69

He’s taller than the wind or rain,

And like the lightning bold.

A joyful monster comes again

As monsters came of old.

The Sponsors loom from far and fey,

And brassy trumpets blow,

A Giant’s born to us today.

O let the people know!

(p. 170)

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 3: The Ants of God are Queer Fish (And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire)

The next Lafferty story I happened upon was the 1972 ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’ which the dust jacket to the anthology of the same name somewhat misleadingly calls a ‘chilling dip into the occult’. It was weird; it was surprising; it was effortlessly (unintentionally I reckon!) original; it was tasty and tantalising; like everyone else testifies when they first read him, it was like nothing I’d ever read. And it was overtly Christian! Right here in the middle of other ‘sf masters’ (as the intro claimed, placing Lafferty’s name in their midst) such as Robert Bloch, Roger Silverberg, and Philip Hose Farmer was this wonderfully subversive story that was G. K. Chesterton writing a bizarre science-fictional Screwtape Letters for the freshly and giddily post-Christian, drugged-up, rock-n-roll-institutionalised America! The story begins:

‘The Ichthyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds.’

If you know where he’s going with it and what he means by it, this in some ways sums up Lafferty’s whole take on things. Already, I was enjoying the taste of the style and was open to an entertaining story about aliens. Anyway, the story continues:

‘They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum also. It is only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. There is also the fact that most of them are very young, or at least of a youthful appearance. Their threat to us is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It’s a double danger they offer us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect to fight them. They’d almost trick us into organising to hunt down their organization.’

[Those who know VOTM will see the blatant influence on my lyrics – ok, plagiarism on my part!]
So, this is not a story about aliens after all. Not conventionally anyway. This is a poker-faced but laughing-eyed, satirical but deadly serious tract for the times, and for those with eyes to see it, a ‘religious’ tract at that! And it was couched in freshly self-ironic yet taunting terms like ‘Queer Fish’ and ‘Ants of God’! I was suddenly wide awake and fully engaged, grim-browed and glint-eyed, bent on seeing just where this was going.

Here I face a narrative problem. I want to quote half the story! It deserves a lengthy chapter all to itself in some critical book! So I deem. Let me just try to point out a few more things about this story so as to end this entry and move on to the rest of my Laffertian journey and to thoughts on his wider work.

This opening to the story is one of a handful of something like excerpts from a professional scholarly journal that punctuate the story (a trope Lafferty often uses). At first the ‘scholars’ sound like scary bureaucratic social architects but slowly their identity morphs into demonic personages writing about the much-needed extermination of these pesky Queer Fish and all they stand for. (Hence the Screwtape Letters comparison above.) But immediately it moves on to proper storytelling as well:

‘Judy Thatcher was moving upcountry in a cover of cattle.’

Need I say more? Nobody writes like that! A ‘cover of cattle’? Come on! If that’s not totally awesome I just don’t know what is. This is Lafferty’s Oklahoman/Iowan uncool ‘coolness’. I’m from Indiana, not either of the coasts, so maybe that’s why I get it. But I’m pretty sure I’ve heard plenty of voices from East and West coasts that chime in with approval. Even some Brits. Definitely the Japanese seem to love him. (When you read more Lafferty and watch, say, Japanese animated films, you can probably see quite readily why.)

The cattle are further described as ‘wobble-eyed and unordered’ which is a condition we eventually see has afflicted every living thing on the planet except the birds and the few and scattered Queer Fish. Who’s Judy Thatcher?

‘Judy was a young and handsome woman of rowdy intellect. She had, by special arrangement, two eyes outside of her head, and these now travelled on the two horizons. These eyes were her daughter, travelling now about two miles to the East and right of her on a ridge, and her son moving on another ridge three miles to her left and West. She was a plague carrier, she and hers. All three of them were Queer Fish.’

This is a Chestertonian Hemingway or Steinbeck (or maybe even Louis L’Amour)! But no, it’s Lafferty. Some people seem to get tired of hearing it, but he’s truly one of a kind. (S.f. scholar John Clute: ‘With R. A. Lafferty… comparisons are more than usually misleading. He stood alone.’) Still, approximate and tentative and even facetiously tenuous comparisons can’t hurt. I actually think Laff himself, in describing his own characters or in comments they make, gives us the vocabulary we need to delineate his style. A ‘rowdy intellect’ is one of many such descriptives that captures well the man’s mind. In fact, he later describes Judy writing a letter ‘with great sweeps of writing in a rowdy hand out of a rowdy mind… Yet she wrote with difficulty, for all the free-handed sweep of her writing. There are things hard to write, there are things impossible. She dipped her calamari pen in lampblack and in grace and wrote to somebody or something that might no longer be in existence.’

Bang! There it is for sure. This is Lafferty’s writing very well described indeed and we shall return to this thought in a later entry. But for now just know that he’s a rowdy, sweeping, grace-dipped intellectual of a writer writing things hard to write, and things impossible, perhaps written to someone or something now extinct. If that doesn’t make you hurt inside with a good hurt, sad inside with a good sadness, pierced inside with sweet aching joy, roused inside with glee and grit, well, friend, read on and pray for grace!

Judy’s juvenile son Gregory is presently tempted by a junior demon called Azazel and they’re both a bit embarrassed by it because it’s both of theirs first time and they end up laughing it off a bit. But Gregory does successfully resist temptation in the end and the demon departs a bit miffed, promising ‘The show isn’t over with boy’.

It’s just this sort of matter-of-fact and rather irreverent theological supernaturalism seamlessly woven into his stories that characterises Lafferty’s genius for being theologically orthodox in a contemporarily heterodox manner. That’s why so many non-Christians read him and don’t know whether he’s comin’ or goin’! Whatever pre-beliefs we bring to it, we just eat it up. Why not? Something this good can’t be all bad, can it? I honestly feel sorry for atheists and other ‘unbelievers’ who read Lafferty with pleasure. They must feel so guiltily tempted toward the (to them) dark side! As C. S. Lewis said, ‘a young atheist can’t be too careful what he reads’! Nor can any non-Christian of any age for that matter! I know not everyone sees these theological underpinnings right away. As the aforementioned Encyclopedia of SF notes: Lafferty’s ‘conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he writes (or has been ignored)’. But I wonder whether readers can really understand or even truly enjoy Laff’s work without coming to some kind of terms with his faith. Again, Clute: ‘unlike almost anyone else in the field, his Roman Catholicism governed not only the surface of his work, but its deep structure as well.’ More on that in later entries. Suffice it to say the dialectic he sets up in the following two paragraphs from later in this story should make the stakes pretty clear:

‘There has been a long series of “Arrow Men” or “Beshot Men” who have been called (or who have called themselves) Sons of God. These Comet-like Men have all been exceptional in their brief periods. The Queer Fish, however, insist that their own particular Mentor “The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds” was unique and apart and beyond the other Arrow men or Comet Men who have been called Sons of God. They state that he is more than Son of God: that He is God the Son.’

But what we’re reading here is another of the demonic-bureaucratic journal entries and it goes on to argue the other side:

‘We do not acknowledge this uniqueness, but we do acknowledge the splendor and destroying brilliance of all these Arrow Men. To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been some huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.
‘The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself, the ceasing to be man, the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him; and the unstructuring, the destroying of the very hole then.’

Hmm… Lafferty seems to be taking us to the future in order to see our present times. Then the devil-scholars show their hand:

‘We who were made of fire were asked to serve and salute those who were made of clay. We had been Arrow Men ourselves. Our flight was long flaming and downward, and now it has come to an end. We destroy ourselves also. We’ll be no more. It is the Being that we have always objected to.’

And this is their sinister-sweet invitation to us all:

‘What, have you not lusted for rotted mind and for rotted meat? Here are aphrodisiacs to aid you. Have you not lusted for unconsciousness and oblivion? You can have them both, so long as you accept them as rotted, which is the same as disordered, or unstructured, or uninstituted. This is the peaceful end of it all: the disordering, the disintegrating, the unstructuring, the rotting, the dry rot which is without issue, the nightmare which is the name of sleep without structure. Lust and lust again for this end! We offer you, while it is necessary, the means and the aids to it.’

Well, it’s ominous to be sure, yet the story ends on an achingly transcendent note, bizarre and completely without banality or cheese or hoaky religiosity. Not a false note is rung. But that’s for a future entry!

Next: I encounter another story, belly-achingly humorous, and find myself hooked for good. The search begins.