Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs o

Bix Beiderbecke, one of Smith's great interests I began to write late in life when I realized suddenly one day that I was leaving nothing at all in the world. All old bachelors come to this feeling sooner or later. Don't let it ever happen to you . . . — Lafferty, letter to Sheryl Smith, October 1, 1971 This will be of interest to about three people. Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first strong critic and his clever correspondent, ran a computer consulting business in the years befo

“There’s only one thing in the world more pompous than a SF writer who takes himself too seriously.” “Whazzat?” “A SF writer who takes herself too seriously.” —Letter to Sheryl Smith, January 2, 1976 I have heard another Lafferty reader express some unease at the way Lafferty sometimes spoke about other science fiction writers. He certainly was no flatterer. We see this side of him in No Stone Unthrown, a series of short satirical squibs aimed at writers, editors, and reviewe

“I’m Marco Rixthaler,” the young man said. “I am the son of the eminent Melchior Rixthaler.” — Aurelia Thinking about Aurelia and her crash landing a few weeks ago put me in mind of one of Lafferty’s best translations, his version of a poem by Fernán Caballero, the pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber. She was one of the most important Spanish writers of the nineteenth century. Born in Switzerland, she became associated with Spain, especially Andalusia, whose customs, landscape

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone. There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people. So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons e

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was one of Lafferty’s favorite poets. At one point, he wrote to Sheryl Smith about his experience translating him, saying, "I didn't know you translated Heine. So did I when I was a young person. So did Henry James when he was young, and Maurice Baring, and Lord Acton. Heine avoids the hoppety-hop himself, but most of his translators fall into it. I did." Heine’s “The Grenadiers” (written c. 1816) is a lyric about loyalty, honor, and the pull of nat

One question in Lafferty’s thinking about the end of contingent worlds is how to measure a life against the world’s. Everyone grows older and sees worlds fade. That is, anyone who is lucky enough to live long enough to experience that kind of loss. Lafferty certainly went through it. He was probably haunted by this more than most people because his father was so old when he was born, and he was the baby of the family. His grandparents were a century older than he. He liked th

Goethe's "Erlkönig" (1782) is a classic of weird poetry. It tells a story about a father riding through the night with his child. The child believes he is being lured away by the supernatural Erlking. The poem has two obvious readings: on one, the child is seeing a real supernatural presence; on another, he may just be sick, fevered, frightened, and dying while the father keeps explaining everything away as fog, rustling leaves, and wind. The child is having a visionary exper

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro, b

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech "Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure" (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . . This post moves into tricky territory. Signpo

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty, so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it is in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense, he wrote prose poems. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (A list of his translations appears at

"LAUGHING KELLY" Black comedy about the burials of several Lafferty characters. The titular Kelly won’t go quietly. He keeps laughing from the grave. Here one thinks of The Devil is Dead and its "Diabolique." "A STRINGLESS-FIDDLE NOTION" This nonsense verse tells the story of an inventor. He creates an impossible stringless fiddle and uses its music to bake waffles. He and his partners open a successful restaurant. Lafferty having fun. "SYLVESTER" Surreal and melancholy. It's

Desperate causes. A polemic on a topic that bothers me. Bothers me a lot. I hate when people fret and hedge about Lafferty’s conservatism. He is a dead author. I have even heard it said that Lafferty doesn’t fit within American conservatism. He didn't want to be part of what we now call movement conservatism. This is true to the extent that Lafferty’s largest circle was Catholic, a fact that is also acknowledged by his fretters and hedgers. And most Republican Catholics will

I admire Lafferty’s verse. It's often the reactor core of his imagination, where he puts so much pressure on the carbon of his imagination that it becomes diamonds. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, but my current choice has held its place for the last few months. And if the babe is less than ten, He's given to a woman young Who utters him anew, and then (For benediction splits his tongue.) What matters if from

First, a table that lays out the plot of Space Chantey (1968), then some thoughts about Lafferty's Lay. When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded With long-eared rout, to battle sounded, And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, And out he rode a-colonelling. That's Hudibras, Samuel Butler’s scathing seventeenth-century takedown of Cromwell's England. But they sound a lot like Lafferty. There