07 Misc Laff: The Maybe Jones Epic

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun.

Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow going to serve as a vehicle for the Watkin metaphysical schema. He is called “the man of a kaleidoscope,” and then Lafferty shows us why, laying color upon color in a single breathless paragraph. Jones’s hair is straw-yellow (Art), shot through with purple vetch (the Positive Sciences), red russet vetch (Religion), yellow safflower thistle (Art again), and verdigris-sage (Metaphysics, the blue-green of sky and sea), with a garnish-orange fringe beard noted in the margin (Sex, the intermediate fire between beauty and supernatural love). His eyes shift from fire-blue (Metaphysics) to green (Life) to red (Religion), depending on the angle. His skin is space-burned dark brown (Matter, the ultra-violet darkness at the edge of being), but slashed with glowing sarcomatous patches (Mysticism, the ultra-red that shines beyond visible light). When he opens his mouth, you get specter-white teeth (the undivided Divine Light itself) against a hungry hell-red gullet (Religion at its most consuming).

The idea did not get off the ground, but one can see what is going on: no single color or metaphysical band can contain this version of Maybe Jones. He is warm and cool, dark and bright, natural and alien. It was a variation on the Watkin conceit that one could intimate a full metaphysical reality by teasing out bands of metaphysical being, the notion that runs through TMWKE from “Mud Violet” until the series breaks with Watkin’s schema.

This seems like a good place for the notes on how the short story "Space Chantey" changed when it became the novel: