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.

The Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor

Article from the Wall Street Journal Special Eighth Day Overseas Edition (‘another of the very few papers in the world that actually published an Eighth Day paper’):

“It was once said that with the coming of the World of Computers, the World of Mythology would disappear completely and the World of Fact would have arrived. Was ever any notion more mistaken? The clear fact is that the World of Computers is entirely a world of Metaphor and Mythology. That is the whole purpose of it. We already had the World of Fact. Oh, the poor, dingy, hopeless, small-minded World of Fact! It didn’t deserve much, but it deserved at least to have its nakedness clothed with metaphor and mythology. The World of Computers is bearable. The old World of Fact was ceasing to be.

“Even the Quest for Reality of the talented but diminishing Group of Twelve has now changed (without their knowing it) into the Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor.”

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), p. 167

They Learned that a Quest for Reality is Possible

‘Several of them were like pigs in clover all that Monday. Oh, how they did pack it in! They were gluttons for all the facts and pseudofacts that could be found in the catacombs and libraries and the storied countryside of the Parisi villa near Sora in the middle mountains of Italy. They wined and dined, and they exuberated in the wonderful air that was itself like wine, specifically the wonderful red Pramnian wine.

‘But they did receive several warnings during the day that all was not right.

‘“Atrox is sulky, Atrox is furious,” said an old lady of the neighbourhood, Gioia di Sotto La Montagna, “and when Atrox is both sulky and furious, somebody always dies in a bloody scandal.”

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), p. 54

‘But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn’t yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed and reveled and studied. They learned that a quest for reality is possible.’

-East of Laughter, pp. 55-56

“You know so much mother, do you know what quest we are on?”

“Yes. All of you are marooned East of Reality, and you are questing to find your way back to Reality. So you have come to the Castle originally named East of Laughter though now the name has generated simply to Gaire or Laughter. And yet we are still somewhat to the East of the thing itself. I myself love to play Quests.”

-East of Laughter, p. 63

What We Are Smelling is Cosmic Fraud

“What we are smelling is cosmic fraud,” Leo Parisi said. “Everything is composed of ninety percent of nothingness, and when we come down to the smallest units of it, it is composed of more than ninety-nine percent of nothingness. I seem to remember old physics texts in which more than fifty sorts of sub-atomic particles were mentioned. But nobody remembers such texts or particles now. There is something wrong. The whole world should not have forgotten things so pertinent and so fulfilling.”

…

“And we intuit the need for fifty, at least, of them,” Solomon Izzersted said with real wonder in his ugly little voice. “Why aren’t the particles there? – for they aren’t.”

“It’s the same with musical notes,” Perpetua Parisi said sadly… “Open up a musical note and you’ll find that it’s ninety-nine percent empty,” Perpetua said. “I still don’t understand how they’re so pretty when they’re so empty.”

“There is something else,” said Solomon Izzersted. “Both myself and my alter ego John Barkley Towntower, as well as Jane Chantal and Hilary Ardri and Hieronymous Talking-Crow have noticed it and been spooked by it. We feel that we do not really live in the United States, we the only supposed Americans in this group. We feel that instead of really living in the United States, we are living in somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea of what the United States is like.”

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988),pp. 47-48

The ghost of Alexander the Great: “You worried about the detailed unreality of small units. But it is in these smallest units that these unrealities begin, and then they spread to the larger units. One adage for you then: reality is not something that one has the right and title to. It is something that must be earned. And I never spent much time in unreal lands. If you conquer one such land, what have you conquered? And if you die there of the unreality disease, you are really dead.”

“Alexander,” asked Hieronymous Talking-Crow, “can a land that was once unreal later become real?”

“I don’t know, Hieronymous, I just don’t know. You are talking about your America, I suppose. I just don’t know.”

-East of Laughter, p. 53

That Is What I Call Politeness

“There are two things that I try to foster above all others in my Castle,” the Countess Maude said. “One of them is rowdiness and the other one of them is politeness. I love rowdy fun games above all, and I love politeness above all things. There was a perfect gentleman who was gunned down, for business reasons, in one of the streets that surround my Castle just yesterday. So he lay in the gutter spouting little fountains of blood. A man came by and looked at him there. “How’re you doing?” the man questioned him. “Dying,” said the perfect gentleman, raising his hat from his head in salute, “but it was kind of you to ask.”

“That is what I call politeness.”

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), p. 64

The Rough Account of The Group of Twelve: 1. Hilary Ardri (excerpt from R. A. Lafferty's East of Laughter)

‘HILARY ARDRI, a rusty-coloured man, red-haired all over his body (an Esau man). He stood an even two meters tall and was very thick in the arms and shoulders and chest. Like an earlier hero, he was blue-eyed when he gazed out over the land, and he was green-eyed when he gazed over the ocean. He was only moderately intelligent, but he had great mental stamina: he could stay with an argument for thirty-six hours and tire out his opposition. He had, for a while, been in politics where this quality of mental stamina was important. His inquiring mind had one restriction on it, and this was his old family motto: When you have a good thing going, don’t ask questions. He had a remarkable memory for details, and this made up for his not quite remarkable intelligence. And he did have one good thing going, and he didn’t ask questions about it. He had stumbled onto it by accident.

‘Hilary had an enterprise on the shore of a recreational lake in eastern Oklahoma. This was the Computerized Lake-Fish Company. But Hilary did not have a Commercial Fisherman’s License to operate on Lake Tenkiller nor on any other lake, stream, river, pond, or reservoir in Oklahoma. Commercial Fisherman’s Licenses were quite rare and very hard to obtain. The only really good way to get such a license was to be born with it. And why should one bother? Those who did have commercial licenses seldom fished, for there were no longer any fish to be caught in the lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, or reservoirs of Oklahoma. Nevertheless, Hilary Ardri had become quite wealthy from his Computerized Lake-Fish Company. A man from the State Fish and Game Department spied on Hilary constantly to find out how it was all accomplished, but he could find out nothing at all. And the fact was that Hilary himself did not understand how he did it.

‘“I do not break any of your thousand-and-one regulations,” Hilary always insisted to that man from the State F&G Department. “I do not fish at all, not with hook or line or net or jug or dynamite or gaff or harpoon or fish-line or fish-bane. I do not poison the waters to kill the fish. There is no smell of fish on my shore (my own shoreline is only ten meters long), and there is no debris of fish. I have no factory or processing plant. Where is my fish works if I am accused of engaging in commercial fishing without a license?”

‘“I dunno, Ardri, where is it? That’s my own question,” said the man from the F&G Department.

‘“It’s right there, on my table there, taking up only half a square meter of space,” Hilary said in a moment of candor. “That computer, small and efficient and personalized, is all the fish business that I have, is all the business of any sort that I have.”

‘“You deliver packaged fish (excellent fish they are) to more than three thousand Oklahoma stores every morning,” said the man from the F&G Department (his name was Myron McMasters). “How and where do you get the fish, and how do you deliver them?”

‘“My computer there takes care of everything. It gets the fish without hook or crook, and it delivers them by driverless vehicles to the stores. It puts them in stock. It bills them and it collects for them. And it deposits all the profits (the profits are 100%) in my cash accounts and in my security accounts. Hey, these fish are good, are they not, Myron? They’re some of mine. The computer delivers them to me every morning too. And then it prepares and serves them however and whenever my whim desires it. And the driverless vehicle by which it delivers them, well, it isn’t anywhere when it isn’t in use. But I don’t know anything at all about fish.”

‘“What do you know about then, Hilary Ardri?” Myron McMasters from the State F&G Department asked. He had a touch of irritation in his voice, but not too much irritation, for he loved Ardri’s fish and he also believed that one shouldn’t ask too many questions about a good thing.

‘“Computers,” Hilary Ardri said. “I know about computers. I am not known as a big brain among the computer people, but I know a few things that the big brain people haven’t learned. One thing I know is that a happy computer can work wonders, and that a computer is most happy when it can indulge itself in a little bit of sociability. But computers don’t find the society of humans all that captivating. Some computer-owners stable a goat with each computer to keep it from getting lonesome. That’s the second best solution to the problem. But the best solution is to let the computer welcome the guest of its choice, and most computers are kept too clean and antiseptic by their owners to appeal to the special visitors. But I was never bothered by the fetish of cleanliness and over-maintenance. My computer has a poltergeist friend that lives in its maw and does not take up any physical space there. And my computer is happy by this circumstance. So it works wonders for me.”

‘“You’re kidding, of course,” Myron McMasters said. “I’ll solve your mystery yet, Hilary. I’ll solve it yet.”

‘There wasn’t much of a mystery to solve. Hilary Ardri did know about computers, and he knew about them by hard study as well as by sudden intuition. He studied things that other computer people didn’t bother about. He even studied a humorous chapter in an obscure computer operators’ manual, a chapter named Theoretical Things That Could be Effected by a Computer in the Ambient of an Unreal World.

‘“Might as well try some of them,” Hilary had said.

‘To take one example, the one that he did take, he learned that in an unreal world, the amount of fish that may be taken out of a lake has no connection with the amount of fish in the lake. The amount of fish to be taken out is related only to the amount of fish that the computer programs to be taken. It does not matter whether or not there are any fish at all in the lake. In an unreal world, the ambient is never restrictive. The fish will be processed as the computer programs them to be processed. They will be delivered, collected for, and deposited for as the computer programs them to be done. It is a little mental game that one may imagine for a computer. And it is safe, for it will work only in the ambient of an unreal world.

‘But it worked for Hilary Ardri. That wasn’t the first indication that Hilary had that the world was unreal, but it was one of the most telling indications. So Hilary Ardri learned, quite by accident, that the world in which he lived was unreal. And hardly anybody in the world knew that.

‘To be real is to be unique. To be unreal is to be common.

‘And the odds in favor of the world being unreal are prohibitive. There is only one chance in all infinity of it being real. But there are a billion billion and ongoing billions of chances of it being unreal.

‘And besides that, Hilary’s computer had an alter ego, or at least an inhabitant, who became a pleasant friend of all of them in the household.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), pp.4-6

The Rough Account of The Group of Twelve: 2. Jane Chantal Ardri (excerpt from R. A. Lafferty's East of Laughter)

'JANE CHANTAL ARDRI was an artist of all the arts. But she denied that her art was completely computerized art. Her personal computer, in the family room of the Ardri home, was invisible, except to the eye of another artist. It was housed in a hunting-horn that hung on a rafter (a computer-hewn hickory rafter) in that pleasant room. But every artist who came there (and most of Jane’s friends outside the circle of Twelve were artists) would say at once, “Oh, how quaint, Jane Chantal, how cult! How could anybody not put her computer in her hunting-horn! How could anybody not have a hunting-horn! And does it still sound like a hunting-horn?”

‘And, in her programming voice, Jane Chantal would immediately order, “Sound, horn, sound, and mean it when you sound!” And lively and rousing (though computerized) hunting-horn tunes would immediately tumble out of the rafter-hung horn-computer. Jane was a huntress, of course, always and in everything, but she was a fuzzy and somewhat lazy huntress, one who was seldom in a hurry. She knew that her game would wait for her, that her prey would take only token (though colourful) flight. She was the huntress who was always in charge of the hunt.

‘But Jane Chantal always maintained, “I use the computer only for the tedious and difficult things in art, and in my hunting. Many of the things in art are hot and heavy, or they are cold and clammy, or they are back-breaking and finger-breaking. These things the computer does, but I do all the artistic parts, and all the really avid pursuits.”

‘Yes, certain aspects of bronze-casting are hot and heavy, as is the carrying-in of a full-grown elk on the shoulders and hanging and drawing it. Certain aspects of massive sculpture in travertine-marble-limestone are rockdust-breathing and arm-breaking and unpleasant. So also are aspects of stalking a prey by the belly-crawl through frozen grass on a winter pre-dawn. And the whole process of writing and regaling of Heavy Drama is nerve-jangling and emotion-wrenching. So let it be the computer whose nerves are jangled and whose emotions are wrenched. And it is the business of the computer to find rimes for unrimeable words and to devise new meters, just as it is the business of the computer to find new Canadian Geese to rise from the lake in the morning and to make their turn-back when a furlong in the air to receive the shot. And the computer can gaze directly into the sun (directly by remote-control) and then record the after-images that result form that encounter. Or the computer can go, not physically itself, but in its probing processes, down into the bottom of the deepest well or aquafer and there record the curious poetry of the blind brooks and the blind fish. And, whenever Jane Chantal returned from one of her frequent trips to other parts of the world, she would find that her artistic production had gone on unabated in her own absence. Her joyous computer (it was named Joyeuse Vice-Reine and it was a female computer) never failed her. Her newest productions were always in the newest style, whether Jane Chantal was physically present at their production or not.

‘Like the computer of her husband Hilary, that of Jane Chantal Ardri was also inhabited by a sprite that was kindred to a poltergeist, but less obtrusively adolescent. And the two sprites were excellent friends. The two people with their computers and with the two infestations of their computers all lived together in one happy household.

‘Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri also had five children of their own flesh and blood, good, pleasant, smart children. They will be mentioned without hesitation if ever there is a reason to mention them again. The names of the children (they were named by the computers: neither Hilary nor Jane Chantal was good at naming children) were Hilary Henry, Jane Chanteclaire, Marie Rieuse, Anne Auclaire, and Urban Urchin. Urban Urchin, the squeaking wheel, got a certain amount of attention form them simply because he was the squeaking wheel. And the eldest of them, Hilary Henry, was their “man in New York” and so they maintained a sort of business relationship with him.

‘“If you ever meet a happy artist in any of the arts, fall back and regroup,” a brilliant critic in the late twentieth century has written. “Fall back and regroup, or back out of it any way you can, for you will have stumbled into an unreal world.”

‘But the fuzzily-beautiful and fuzzily-avid Jane Chantal Ardri was a happy artist in all the arts. This wasn’t the first or the second indication the Ardris had that they lived in an unreal world, without difficulty or complication. But it was another of those most telling indications.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), pp. 6-8

The Rough Account of The Group of Twelve: 3. Solomon Izzersted (excerpt from R. A. Lafferty's East of Laughter)

‘Lector Delectus, if you are standing up, sit down for a moment. If you are alone, call somebody to be with you until a strange thing has been narrated to you. People do sometimes faint in the presence of sheer horror, and in doing so they often injure themselves. And people do sometimes come unhinged if they face diabolism uncompanioned.

‘John Barkley Towntower was born with a dark and sullen growth on his belly. When John was very small, this growth was very, very small, but already it looked like a miniature human head and face. And soon it became clear that the growth was more precocious than was John himself. It learned to talk before John did. At first, for a long time, the only words that it said were “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, and it spoke this always in a horrible, screaming, rasping voice. This puzzled Mr. And Mrs. Towntower for they had no Solomon and no Izzersted in any of their antecedents.

‘Mrs. Towntower the mother of little John Barkley Towntower (and apparently of the shocking growth that called itself Solomon Izzersted also) tried to kill the growth with a hatchet, but she came closer to killing John Barkley than Solomon. Mrs. Towntower was then incarcerated in Eastern Oklahoma Hospital, and she is still there thirty-eight years later. John Barkley, soon after he learned to talk with his own voice, also learned to do the Solomon Izzersted voice with his own mouth and throat. And he made, when he was four years old and just starting to grade school, the first of the little Solomon Izzersted mannequins which he wore and manipulated on his hand like a glove. And John Barkley and Solomon Izzersted became an established ventriloquist’s act by the time that John was six years old. They played not only in their own school but also children’s hospital wards about town, and for all sorts of parties. And they were good. People, they were good! And they got better. And whenever, in the midst of an act or at another time and place, the furious and ugly little head of Solomon Izzersted himself would pop out through John’s shirt-front and the furious voice would shout “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, why, it was thought to be only a part of the act, the best part of it. And the other kids, completely enraptured by the display, would cry out to John “How do you do it, how do you do it?” And John would say self-depreciatingly “Oh, it’s just a little trick that I worked up.”

‘(Dismiss your companion now if you wish, Lector. If you have survived, then you have survived the most horrible part of the symbiotic account.)

‘John and Solomon made a sort of truce with each other, though they never felt real fraternal love each for each. John became, by choice, a fat boy (do you remember those early Milky Way candy bars?) and then a fat man; and he kept Solomon pretty well smothered in his rolls of belly fat. But Solomon was a ham, and he loved to act. It was always his live voice now that was central to the act. When John was through college and was established (to the small but intense circle of people who matter) as one of the great mathematicians of the world, Solomon still compelled the arrangement that they should spend six months of each year touring with their fabulous ventriloquist act. People who didn’t understand said that it was a shame that one of the greatest mathematicians in history should have to put on a variety stage act to eke out a living. But that wasn’t the case at all.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), pp. 11-13

Some Initial Thoughts on R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions

It's usually agreed that Lafferty is stronger at his short stories than his novels. The wonderful weirdness that is usually a strength at the short story length can sometimes threaten to become overwhelming, or even unreadable incoherence, at novel length. Nevertheless, besotted fans of Lafferty's short stories are impelled by sheer addiction to his prose--the sweaty, shaky need for more Laffertian lore, from any source whatever--to wade into the novels and grapple with Lafferty's uber potent strangeness in depth, for one long sustained narrative. And though Lafferty fanatics are often not a little baffled by the novels, we tend to go back for more!

Besides Fourth Mansions, I've read the following novels by Lafferty: Past Master, Reefs of Earth, Space Chantey, Arrive At Easterwine, The Devil Is Dead, Annals of Klepsis, Where Have You Been Sandaliotis, and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. That's nine novels in total (over a period of about as many years), so it's not as if they're unreadable. Indeed, you get the hang of them. You start to love some of them, or parts of them, as much as the short stories. In fact, I've read the afforementioned Past Master, Annals of Klepsis, and Space Chantey at least twice-over each (the latter two I even read out loud to my children!) for sheer pleasure--just delighting to savour again the prose and the narrated events.

The bottom line is that I've found, basically, however Lafferty's novels may compare to the short stories, however much they may or may not 'succeed' as cohesive versions of that particular art form - they usually ALL contain some amount (usually quite a lot) of solid Laffertian gold.

Interestingly, despite the sometimes overwhelming concentration (or diffusion) of weirdness in Lafferty's novels, I have usually found them quite 'easy' reads. I can usually get through them in fairly short order. Despite the wonkiness, they still manage, oddly, to have a fairly page-turning flow. The novels sometimes reel, roil, and riot, but they seem to be eminently finishable.

But this is where Fourth Mansions was the exception to the rule for me. When I first tried to read it some 8 or 9 years ago, I just couldn't finish it. I had finished all the ones I had read before that and have subsequently finished all the ones I've read after abandoning it. I knew that a number of fans and critics considered Fourth Mansions Lafferty's best (and some even said it was possibly his most coherent plot), but this just baffled me as I found that its story just didn't pull me in beyond a few chapters and the strangeness wasn't cohering into anything inviting for me. I gave up half way through. I knew also that some fans found Fourth Mansions to be one of Lafferty's 'worst' novels. (The R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page categorises it as 'lame'--below even 'OK'--then again, how LAME is it that a site 'devoted' to Lafferty even has the category 'lame' for his works! Honestly, I admit I've read what comes close to 'average' from Lafferty, but 'lame'? Never.)

Anyway, I assumed that since I had more or less easily downed all the other novels I'd tried, this one was just truly flawed. Still, I had always intended to go back and get through it. I recently read a 1975 paper by Sheryl Smith on Arrive At Easterwine that mentioned Lafferty had written three 'end-of-the-world comedies'--Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions (1969), and Easterwine (1971)--which she recommended reading in that order if possible. I found this to be a fresh way of labelling and grouping some of his works. Having recently re-read Past Master and planning to re-read Easterwine soon, I decided now was the time to finally muscle through to the end of Mansions.

Basic result? I totally missed it on my first reading. This is an amazing book. Definitely one of Lafferty's very best and most important. It is packed with tons of the finest of Lafferty's prose on a lot of levels. It is also packed with fantastic marvels and action-adventure (of an utterly bizarre variety, of course) as well as Lafferty's usual long and creative portions of exposition - ranging from various types of conversations to college lecture Q&A sessions to prophets preaching on the streets. It is bristling with a wonderful cast of weird and well-sketched characters of various ethnicities and powers and beings. The pedestrian protagonist, newspaper reporter Freddy Foley, is a bumbling favourite for me alongside Past Master's Thomas More.

The novel is still very, very strange and hard to follow and even hard to finish toward the latter half (though all the later chapters are as good as the early chapters - it's just that mere mortals flag in trying to quaff one of Lafferty's most potent brews). Yet it is full of joys and thrills and pleasures.

In one sense it is a sustained meditation on a theology of monsters (which is very exciting for one of my lifelong study projects). But even more centrally, it is another crucial piece in the puzzle that Lafferty's body of work constructs: a profound, pungent, tenacious argument that we need to wake up and rebuild intellectual and spiritual DIMENSION in an intellectually and spiritually FLAT modern/postmodern world.

‎'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.' (Fourth Mansions, p. 59)

This novel, as all of Lafferty's work, joyously and rambunctiously attempts to diagnose this problem and proffers a beautiful and scary cure: unleash all the metaphorical, metaphysical, and material monsters inside us and outside us, reintegrated under the good rule of God again, freed to gleefully destroy a fake world that has been foisted on us and gruesomely rebirth a real one again.

That diagnosis and cure is no doubt unpalatable to many, but Lafferty is cooking and seasoning a musky rump roast according to his own recipe (yet one he claims is not at all his own) and he has a disarming and seductive way of wafting wonderfully inviting aromas our way, inciting our salivating mouths and rumbling bellies.

Sizeable Excerpt from The Devil Is Dead

A song I wrote called 'Close Encounters of the Ominous Ape-Cat' was inspired by a chapter from Lafferty's novel The Devil Is Dead. On my theology of monsters blog I quote a sizeable excerpt from the novel, from the chapter called '36,000 Pieces of Paper', which I reproduce here:

'It was nighttime, and Finnegan had gone feral.

'He did not, as Papa Devil had done briefly, regrow his lost stripes and become a tiger. Finnegan was a smaller and other breed of cat; or ape, perhaps; or climbing grotesquerie.

'There was in that city a small hotel of curious gothic style. It ran up to parapets and to those stone knobs that are called merlons. At this moment there was a living gargoyle sitting on one of those merlons and it seemed perfectly natural there. Such places are their dens, their nests.

'The gargoyle was carved of dark brown stone that seemed blue in the dark and the ambient half-light. It had climbed up the outside of the building for six stories to come to roost there. Those things can climb; and the little hotel of gothic style was covered with ornamentation that made the climbing easier...

'For two or three days and nights now, there had been a legend in that city (they love legends there) of an ape or monstrous man that climbed up the outsides of the buildings at night and roosted on the pinnacles. It was even said that this was one of the stone gargoyles from an ornamental building come to life. It wasn't, though. It was Finnegan.

'On an ornamentation of stone six stories up, he perched above the dark street. Through a blade-thin slit between drapes of a sixth floor window, Finnegan looked inside at a coven or meeting of gargoyles. "You have to admit that we are funny looking," Finnegan said to himself.

There were the four senior gargoyles from the Brunehilde... With these four were seven Devils more evil than themselves. Eleven of them, all of them men or whatever of some age and authority.

'Finnegan was pleased... The old monsters would not be expecting an attack from a sixth floor window, not from an opponent they had not heard from in several years and who was not likely to be in that part of the world. Or would they? ...

'It was quite cold; and the mist was beginning to ice on the stones, making them dangerous, even for an ape-cat of a man...

'Finnegan had opened one window noiselessly and easily. He was a cat that could climb, he was an ape that could open anything. He left the opened window and moved dangerously and swiftly to the window the length of the room away. Both of these windows were sheer above the street.

'There was, however, in the side of the building (in the back of the room) a third window. Finnegan would not enter this, but he hoped to come out of it. Below this third window, and some nine feet out, was the roof of a four-story building.

'An animal on the surge does not consider. It strikes. Finnegan smashed the window in front of him with the lead weight, letting it fall heavily inside...

'Then one of them turned out the lights, and not with the wall switch. Look out! Someone was well-aware inside.

'Finnegan... came noiselessly into the room whose darkness was modified only by a slight neon ambient from outside.

'Two foci, neither of them to be seen in the dark, both of them to be remembered from observations of seconds before. Finnegan grappled the man where the man should have been , found him, and drove the knife into his throat, leaving it there. There was a death groan and a fall. And yet there was something the matter with that death groan...

'He leapt to the sill... and surged. He shattered that third window, crashing spread-eagled through it, leaping twenty feet down and nine feet outward. It would have killed a man to hit the way he hit on the edge of that roof.

'And there had been a wrong laugh in the dark room behind him just as he leaped.

'The man Finnegan was on a fourth floor roof, and there was gunshot behind him. So Finnegan was a man again; but a swift and sudden man who went quickly down the iron fire-ladders into an alley, and thought as swiftly as he could with his man's brain. But what he had just done he could not have done as a man. Only as the ape-cat that he had become when he climbed and invaded could have done it.

'Finnegan moved quickly, angling from alley into street and into another alley, abruptly into a cluttered space between buildings, through another alley, into another street. He was elated about one thing, disconsolate about another.

' "Got it! he exulted to himself. "But I killed the wrong man. Ah, well, I'll kill him yet. I'm a trick ahead of him now, even though it's his pursuit."'...

'Finnegan had little cuts about his face and hands. It was odd that one could go through a sheet of glass and receive only small cuts like that. The freezing rain had turned to a noisy sleet... it was necessary that he get off the street at once. A siren sounded, and it shook him, though he knew it could not be for him yet. A dog pursued him, noisily and relentlessly, and that could be more serious. A bum fastened onto him, and Finnegan gave him all his pocket change to be rid of him. A policeman bore down dourly on him, and Finnegan just as dourly continued past.'

A New Introduction to R. A. Lafferty

R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) is truly my all-time favourite author of fiction, a huge inspiration on my own writing and thinking. Here is a fresh attempt at introducing him to my small world:

Dostoevsky meets Chesterton
Let’s start with a hefty dose of a few Old World masters of moral-spiritual fiction: Dostoevsky and Chesterton. Think of the deep, dark, and tenacious quest for God in a post-theistic world in the former mixed with the biting, satirical, joyous exuberance, wit, whimsy, farce, fancy, and wildness of the latter. (And, in terms of being predecessors to Lafferty, it is no coincidence that both of these great authors were creative adherents to Christian Orthodoxy.)

American Tall Tale meets Native American Folklore
Does this sound a bit serious and weighty? Well, Lafferty was such. But he is also constantly called ‘mad’, ‘insane’, ‘zany’, and the like. And he has the reputation of making the reader laugh aloud. So much so that the weightiness of his art has not often been appreciated. Chesterton’s influence can certainly account for some of the ‘lunacy’ and laughter. But for his unconventional qualities we must now also mix in the ingredients of American tall tales and Native American myth and folklore: Paul Bunyan meets Coyote the Trickster as it were. Think of the larger than life, hilarious, and gigantesque frontier exaggeration of the former mixed with the sly, wry, tribal, traditional, spiritual, ancient magic and mystery of the latter.

With these two major streams of Old World authors and New World folklore (you might call them ‘high’ and ‘low’ respectively, in terms of ‘register’) you can already see how Lafferty’s is going to be fiction that doesn’t easily fit moulds and that needs very large, wide-open spaces of thought and imagination to breathe and move and play and preach and fight and astound. But we’re far from through concocting this utterly strange brew.

Vaudeville meets Carnival

Keeping in the register of ‘Cowboys and Indians’, bring in the Vaudeville variety show and the Carnival barker. It’s the comedic, popular fun and 'burlesque' (as in absurd parody and exaggeration: there's no striptease in Lafferty's stories) of the former mixed with the freakish grotesquery and weird wonder of the latter—and the call for the audience to participate in both. There's song and dance and feasting and drinking and brawling and bragging a plenty in Lafferty's tales.

Irish meets Greco-Roman

Now let’s reach back to the much older Old World for influences before we finally charge into the latter 20th century context of when Lafferty was actually writing. Lafferty the Oklahoman was of Irish Catholic descent and it shows. The Irish storyteller is in him and he’s often been compared to both Flan O’Brien and James Joyce. You can also hear resonances in the contemporary playwright, Martin McDonagh. There is often even an Irish lilt or brogue to Lafferty’s cadence, syntax, and word choice.

In terms of wording and style and content we must also look back to ancient Greco-Roman sources of all varieties—plays, myths, philosophers, church fathers, politicians, treatises, epics, satires, ‘histories’ and so on. Thoughts and ideas from these ancient sources abound in Lafferty as well as everything else we’ve mentioned up to this point. The Bible and Medieval literature also make their influences felt, adding both a Hebrew and European flavour. And it’s worth mentioning here that there is some Arabic influence to be found also, perhaps mainly from the Thousand and One Arabian Nights and from Muslim culture of the Charlemagne era. From these Old World sources too I think comes Lafferty’s great interest in languages (partly by a working knowledge of which he re-invented the language and syntax of English Literature fiction to suit his own purposes).

American New Wave Science Fiction meets Southwest Regional Fiction

Lastly, we mention not so much influences as context—but a context that very much shaped the contours of Lafferty’s fiction. Lafferty’s fiction emerged mostly in the science fiction magazines of the 1960s among a constellation of ‘New Wave’ writers who were experimenting with new directions in the genre, focusing more on the ‘soft sciences’ of language, psychology, and anthropology rather than the traditional ground of science fiction in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, technology, and so on. Harlan Ellison and the authors that populated his Dangerous Visions anthologies such as Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany warmly welcomed Lafferty into their midst and praised him almost without qualification and with some genuine awe at the raw potency of his imagination and originality.

Many of these New Wave s.f. authors have a strong feel of the Beat Generation stylisings of the likes of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac—and you often hear echoes of beatnik and jazz talk in Lafferty, but it is mostly just played with; his real roots are in the aforementioned, which arguably enabled him to out-jazz the ‘cool’ set at their own game.

But ‘cool’ Lafferty was not. He might be mistaken for such at a glance, but he was actually quite a bit older than most of his fellow writers of the time and really was doing something that was strange in a truly bizarre and pungent mode, not just a bit zany in a ‘hip’ sort of way. His experimentation, frankly, went far deeper and was more truly radical and structural, not least by being rooted in and nourished by potent traditions rather than attempting any kind of clean break with the past into a ‘new age’ or ‘summer of love’ or what have you. He was searching for bigger, muskier, shaggier, bloodier, spookier, gladder, subtler game.

One way he wasn’t as ‘hip’ as his contemporaries was by being far more of a ‘regional’ writer, particularly of his native Oklahoma and Southwest region. The open feel of the plains and prairies, of cattle and horses and horns and hooves, of fishing and hunting and living under the open sky, of saloons and ropes and saddles, of bucks and buffalos and bears, of Native Americans and ranch hands and cowpokes and so on, all permeate his fiction. Indeed, I felt so many tactile resonances with Lafferty’s fiction when recently reading Cormac McCarthy’s anti-western novel Blood Meridian. That was really when my eyes were fully opened to Lafferty as a regional writer of the Southwest. This places him, with all his other associations, loosely alongside some of his fellow Catholics who were Southern regional writers like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

A Ferocious, Generous, Joyous Storyteller
Does all this sound like perhaps a little too much broiling and roiling inside one man, too much for one artistic output? Well, frankly, sometimes it is! Lafferty at his very best (usually in his short stories) has a gemlike quality of concentrated power that swiftly and furiously, but smoothly, weaves and blends and infuses all or most of these streams of influence into an exquisitely coherent piece of art. It is truly awe-inspiring when it comes off. Really. But often his fiction is over-full, bristling, and careening with this background and all his feral genius firing and flailing.

Lafferty's world is one that feels like absolutely anything can happen, and yet it has an underlying coherence and solidity – it’s not a drugged up, tripped out psychedelic fantasia. It’s meaty, earthy, punchy, mythic, transcendent, wry, jokey, gruesome, funny, wily, ornery, amiable, farcical, grave, gritty, grotesque, delightful, magical, realistic, wild, noble, uncanny and canny all rolled into one. Indeed, this makes it something of a minor miracle that he can write an almost-mediocre story now and again (though there’s almost always a memorable wonder in there somewhere). His short story collections are the best place to start before moving on to the usually less cohesive, but equally wonder-filled, novels.

Lafferty can make you laugh harder and think harder than you’re used to, and also amaze your imagination and sense of wonder like few ever will. He called himself ‘the cranky old man from Tulsa’ and yet he fought hard to imbue the world with highly creative and inventive hope for a spiritually renewed present and future, calling all who would hear to join in world-up-building with all their powers and faculties on full throttle. He was a ferocious and generous and exuberantly joyous storyteller who spun out whopping tales at breakneck speed in a tumbling torrent of wild and glad and angry urgency and ecstasy. We are truly blessed to have had him. We must make the most of what we can get hold of.

‘Come on, y’all, this is awesome’
In closing, I want to mention that contemporary giants of ‘alternative’ dark fantasy such as Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman have cited Lafferty as a hero and influence. Both Wolfe and Gaiman have attempted to write stories in the ‘Lafferty genre’ (he really did essentially invent his own genre – in many ways he is the Captain Beefheart of American literature).

A few years ago, the New York Times asked the Saturday Night Live comedy actor, Bill Hader (a fellow Oklahoman), what books he recommended and he started his list with R. A. Lafferty’s collection of short stories entitle 900 Grandmothers. I’ll leave you with his apropos words trying to describe the experience of reading Lafferty:

‘It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark… You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”’

Tall Tale Pro Wrestling and an Interview With A Genie In A Bottle

Today I discovered Lafferty's short story 'Ifrit' online HERE.

It's from the collection Iron Tears, which I ordered a few years ago and never received. (I've since heard this has happened to others.)

This is one of my favourite short stories by Lafferty I've ever read. It's full of laughter and wonder. No one can tell a tall tale as well as Lafferty. He starts with outrageous 'pro wrestling' scenarios (in which the common notion that 'it's all fake' is used to hilarious effect) and ends up with a lightly but movingly mythopoeic interview with a Genie, conducted within his bottle. The story then finishes on a really weird but characteristically dark and exuberant note with 'lions in the sky'.

I've always strongly suspected that there are more truly astounding gems out there by Lafferty in the remaining collections I still don't own (Golden Gate and Through Elegant Eyes are two more major ones I still need to obtain), not to mention many more in s.f. magazines and anthologies that have never been collected in a Lafferty volume. (E.g. 'In Deepest Glass' and 'Symposium' are two of his best stories and I've never seen them but in the obscure 1970s multi-author anthologies I found them in.) This story proves to me afresh that searching out every last Lafferty story I can find is so totally worth it.

I highly recommend 'Ifrit' - go read it! (It's a fairly short read at only ten pages.) As the story itself says:

'If you are of brave heart as well as honest heart, try it. You have nothing to lose except your own orientation and perhaps your life. And you stand to gain a whole new way of looking at things.'

Indeed, this aptly describes what lays before us in reading any and all of Lafferty's fiction.

The First-Ever Book of Essays On Lafferty (for which I will contribute a chapter)?!?!

Ok, after about a year's silence on this blog, I'm picking it up again. I'm delighted to report that I've been asked to write a chapter for an upcoming book of essays about the fiction of R. A. Lafferty (the first ever!). This is being pulled together from various sources by Andrew Ferguson (who recently wrote his MA dissertation on Lafferty's carnivalesque world-building narrative strategy - a very lengthy in-depth, technical, and thrilling read!). It may be sometime before the proposed book sees publication and, of course, my chapter will only be included if it 'makes the grade'. But I'm honoured and thrilled to be asked to contribute and to have this opportunity.

The contributors to the book will be looking at Lafferty and his large, diverse, and brilliantly/notoriously unconventional body of fiction from various angles. I've been asked to cover Lafferty as a Catholic/Christian storyteller, sort of an Irish American G. K. Chesterton. He was one of the very best of the 2oth century and puts so much 'Christian art' to shame. I will probably begin by looking at the praise heaped on him by the New Wave s.f. movement from which he emerged and how 'new weird'/'urban fantasy' writers like Neil Gaiman still praise and emulate him, none of whom share his Catholic faith, yet all of whom find a companion, mentor, and inspiration in him.

Then the main body of the chapter will look at how Lafferty's fiction evinces his Christian worldview inventively, invitingly, feistily, and generously, mainly in the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire'. But probably also with reference to some elements in the novels Past Master, Arrive At Easterwine, and Fourth Mansions, as well as other short stories like 'In Deepest Glass', 'Symposium', and 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.

I'm toward the end of doing a close reading of 'Walk Now' (that I've written previously about on this blog here). This story is about the Queer Fish, who are also called the Ants of God 'for their building proclivities' that are troublesome in an 'unstructured, destructed, destroyed society' (and now you can see where the title of the blog derives from). It is a story full of laughing irony and biting satire that paints a bleak picture of the possibility of 'post-humanity' only to incite a very rowdy hope for redemption, toward which we are urged to build, to reconstruct, to renew. I'll be quoting some passages from it in upcoming posts.

Please feel free to make suggestions of how I ought to tackle this subject!

PAST MASTER BEER!

Yes, it's true. My next door neighbour (and friend) is, in cooperation with local brewers here in Scotland, concocting a Past Master original beer. I don't know the details yet, but tomorrow I'm supposed to help him to write up the label which will synopsise the book to some degree.

Good times!

Stay tuned for photo documentation. (I think it will debut in a few weeks as part of an art exhibition at a local Glasgow gallery. All will be explained in due time.)

Check Out Proper Lafferty Discussion Below!

Folks, you need to know that a fine fellow called Jay and I are having a stimulating and illuminating discussion on Lafferty in the comments section of the previous post 'Neil Gaiman Presents... Space Chantey'. You don't see much back and forth like this about Laff so come sample some of this rare brew!