21 Misc Laff: Blasphemous Optimism
- Jon Nelson
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 18 hours ago
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 Novels.” — Letter
Of Lafferty’s novel titles, my favorite is The Devil Is Dead. It is hard for me to see the title and not hear The Young Wolfe Tones belting out “Some Say the Devil Is Dead”:
Katie, she is tall and thin, tall and thin, tall and thin Katie, she is tall and thin. She likes a drop of brandy Drinks it in the bed at night, drinks it in the bed at night, drinks it in the bed at night It makes her nice and randy
Most sources say the song is Irish, but a Scottish variant has Kirkcaldy in place of Killarney:
Shades of Dana Coscuin.
It is a venerable phrase, “the devil is dead,” with deep roots in English.
What brought it to mind today was an old review of Chesterton’s The Defendant. C. F. G. Masterman attacked Chesterton for being insufficiently attentive to suffering and to the darker, dourer aspects of life, a charge sometimes brought against Lafferty. In Lafferty’s case, the objection is not usually put so cogently. Readers notice the blood, murder, and extravagant death, then ask, “Why is there so much this stuff here?” Then one will get something about about martyrs that makes little sense but not the obvious question. The problem isn’t blood or death. What the reader wants to understand is why there is so much cruelty in Lafferty, and why is cruelty treated so lightly. It is hard to frame the right question. Cruelty makes black comedy possible, but cruelty can seem an offense against Christian charity.
Here, we find a real difference between Chesterton and Lafferty because, no doubt about it, Lafferty’s art is often cruel. For instance he is callous to the mentally disabled. Chesterton never is. Yet Lafferty’s cruelty is not cheap shot cruelty. It restores proportion to horror, either by disarming it with good humor or by exorcising it as something so contemptibly ugly that it ought to be laughed away. But it will not look like good humor should one not share Lafferty’s ultimate horizon. At times, it will seem pinched and mean spirited.
Masterman was troubled by something different but analogous in Chesterton, again, not cruelty, but the comic unseriousness of evil. In “The Blasphemy of Optimism,” published in The Speaker in 1902, he dropped his tactical nuke, writing, “Mr. Chesterton is convinced that the Devil is dead.” In other words, Mr. Chesterton is minor because Mr. Chesterton does not recognize the evidential problem of evil. Mr. Chesterton is morally and intellectually unserious and therefore metaphysically meretricious. The same worry can be raised about RAL.
The earliest use of the phrase “the devil is dead” that I have found comes from the East Anglian morality play Mankind, usually dated to 1465–1470. Mankind dramatizes the agon for an ordinary human soul. Its hero, Mankind, is tempted by comic Vice figures such as Mischief, New Guise, Nowadays, Nought, and Titivillus, while Mercy tries to guide him toward repentance. The play is both pious and bawdy, and very funny, and it often draws the audience into its stagey action through invitations to interact with its Vice characters. At one point, Titivillus, the devil’s agent, hushes the crowd. One can imagine him shushing with his scandalous hands as he implores the rowdy audience,
Qwyst! pesse! þe Deull ys dede! I xall goo ronde in hys ere.
The phrase later shows up in John Skelton’s Colyn Cloute. Skelton was an early Tudor English poet and satirist, creator of the irregular Skeltonic verse and of memorable attacks on church corruption. For Skeltonic flavor, one could do far worse than this YouTube video, a poem that has the finest invective about an ugly woman in English literature, a satirical masterpiece about tavern sin.
Colyn Cloute also savages the corrupt clergy and abuses of Catholic pastorality. Near its beginning, Skelton says that writing, preaching, or criticizing vice is all but useless nowadays in England because people will the knock teacher of virtue as a fool or an incoherent prig no matter what he says, even when he is right. When such a teacher hits
the nail on the head It standeth in no stead; The devil, they say, is dead The Devil is dead.
By this time in the English language, “the devil is dead” is all but a proverb, so it is not surprising to find it in John Heywood’s mid-Tudor treasure chest of proverb books. Heywood was a minor poet and musician, now best remembered for his witty interludes, such as The Four PP and Johan Johan. In some of his examples, we discover a bridge between the medieval morality drama of Mankind and later English comedy by focusing on debate, satire, and everyday speech. He records the expression and offers variations on a theme:
“The devil is dead” then became a line in a popular nursery rhyme that has some relevance to Lafferty’s The Devil Is Dead, if we think of the grave of Iffrean of the Coscuin Chronicles, father of Papadiabolous I and II of Argo, and Iffrean’s headstone that reads I.N.C.G.P. Bogovitch, weedy and overgrown in Galveston, Texas:
The novel describes the discovery of his grave:
Finnegan led them, after some wandering around, to an old and neglected grave. They had to pull weeds to see the carving on the gravestone. And it meant nothing when they had cleared it, nothing to Finnegan, at least. The carving on the stone was I.N.C.G.P. Bogovitch. This was the grave of the Devil himself. And that was the puzzling name carved on his gravestone.
Most of these English currents eddying around the expression flow into Lafferty's great poem "Diabolique," maybe the best poem he ever wrote, so let’s end there:
