19 Misc Laff: Some Essential Books Lafferty Drew On

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader.

1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel; it ridicules scholasticism, legalism, war, social pretension, and religious folly. Lafferty “critic talk” likes Bakhtin, but Bakhtin misses the conservative yet humanistic logic of carnival and enlists it as politicized desire for this-worldly political emancipation, as good as he might be on the battle within the body of head and what happens below the navel, his take that, Stalin. Start with Book II, Gargantua, if you are new to it.

1907–1912 — The Catholic Encyclopedia. Herbermann, Charles G., Edward A. Pace, Conde B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne, eds. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907–1912. Multi-volume reference set. A major early-20th-century Catholic reference work, covering doctrine, church history, biography, theology, liturgy, institutions, and related fields. It contains more than 10,000 entries. Lafferty devoured it, and it shows up in his work everywhere. He rejected its interpretation of Rabelais but frequently drew on ideas such as occult compensation, and whenever writing about a location, he looked it up in it. Anyone who loves Lafferty should know its entries on Gnosticism and Origen. A treasure.

1931/1932 — The Bow in the Clouds. Watkin, Edward Ingram. The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience. London/New York: Sheed & Ward, 1931/1932. A philosophical and religious essay on integrating different dimensions of human experience—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual—within a Catholic framework. It is impossible to understand The Men Who Knew Everything sequence without having mastered its contents.

Grolier’s. Any of the early editions. An illustrated geography and world-cultures reference set, arranged by regions and countries, with maps, photographs, and descriptive accounts of peoples, places, economies, and customs. Lafferty breathed it as a boy and said he knew it eidetically. He did.

1938–1942 — A Companion to the Summa. Farrell, Walter, O.P. A Companion to the Summa. 4 vols. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938–1942. Volumes include The Architect of the Universe, The Pursuit of Happiness, The Fullness of Life, and The Way of Life. A popular-language exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, designed to make the structure and argument of the Summa accessible to non-specialist Catholic readers. This is the orthodox Lafferty, a baseline for his flights of fancy.

1949 — Israel and the Ancient World. Daniel-Rops, Henri. Israel and the Ancient World: A History of the Israelites from the Time of Abraham to the Birth of Christ. Translated by K. Madge. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949. Related U.S. title: Sacred History. New York: Longmans, Green, 1949. A Catholic narrative history of ancient Israel and the biblical world, running from the patriarchs through the period leading to the birth of Christ. How Lafferty understood sacred history as history. He told Sheryl Smith he took it as the limit of what people could historically say about the Old Testament.

1951 — Songs of the South Country: Selected from the Poems of H. Belloc. Belloc, Hilaire. A short selected-poems volume rather than a full collected edition, representing Belloc’s lyric, regional, religious, and occasional verse. Fragments of Belloc show up frequently in Lafferty. One should also read The Jews and Belloc's late essay, where he defends himself against the charge of anti-semitism. Strong evidence that Lafferty knew the volume, in which Belloc’s apologia appeared, and Lafferty embraced its variety of defense in his own case. Rational (unlike full Holocaust denial) but forever controversial. Rational, I say?

1952 My Way of Life.  Farrell, Walter, O.P., and Martin J. Healy. My Way of Life: Pocket Edition of St. Thomas; The Summa Simplified for Everyone. Brooklyn: Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 1952. Current reprint: TAN / Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 2014. 638 pp. ISBN 9781618908339. A compact, devotional, reader-friendly digest of Aquinas’s Summa, presenting Thomistic theology in short, manageable sections. Lafferty’s view of how to live a good life.

1954–1958; extended later — A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer et al.: Oxford: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1954–1958 for the original main volumes; later volumes extended the set. A major scholarly multi-volume history of technology, covering tools, agriculture, metallurgy, engineering, machinery, transport, industrial processes, and scientific-technical development across civilizations. Lafferty’s crib for historical technology.

1963 — Harry Thurston Peck, ed., Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. Peck, Harry Thurston, ed. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963. Reprint of the late-19th-century Harper edition, first issued in the 1890s; the standard edition runs about 1701 pages with illustrations and maps. A comprehensive reference dictionary for Greek and Roman literature, mythology, biography, history, geography, religion, and material antiquities. If Lafferty is going to draw on classical myth, bet your bottom dollar he has looked it up here.

1967 — Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. Molnar, Thomas Steven. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. 245 pp. A philosophical and political critique of utopian thinking, treating utopianism as a recurring heresy or temptation in religious, social, and political thought. He means heresy. A book Lafferty recommended and a clear articulation of his view of utopia, though Lafferty would have disagreed with him about Thomas More. Remember it when anyone talks about Lafferty and the utopian, so that no one sells you the Brooklyn Bridge.

1994 — G. K. Chesterton, Collected Poetry. Chesterton, G. K. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 10: Collected Poetry, Part I. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. ISBN 9780898703917. Note: an earlier related title, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, appeared in London in 1927 and in New York in 1932. This is the first of several volumes of a collected presentation of Chesterton’s poetry, including religious, comic, political, narrative, and occasional verse. Better than the older Collected Poems for Lafferty’s favorite writer. One should read as much Chesterton as one can enjoy, but most of Chesterton is brilliant ephemera. In the poetry, one will find all of Chesterton the man.