36 Misc Laff: The Rat-King of SunCon
I'm now having sixteenth and seventeenth thoughts about Phoenix, though I have a membership in it. It promises to be G&FOGo-dominated (Gays and Friends of Gays only), but I guess all the SF cons will be that henceforth. But there will also be the hard-core tedium guaranteed by the luminaries selected for the bask, the narrow range (SH(shriek) to SI (Simper))... and the One-Tantrum, Two-Tantrum, and Three-Tantrum appearances. — letter to Sheryl Smith, December 21, 1977.
I didn't know that READERCON was a GAFOGO convention or I'd have warned you. I usually know which ones are, and there aren't too many of them, none of the big ones, although the faction is present to some extent everywhere. GAFOGO (Gays And Friends Of Gays Only) is a sort of Truth-in-Labeling tag used in identifying them privately. But you seem to have met some good guys there in spite of everything. — letter to Dan Knight, April 11, 1990.
Offutt wrote bunches of Historicals with a gay (we still called it 'queer' then) slant, he didn't have to do it. He was good enough without slanting it that way, but that's the way he chose it. — letter to Al Doty, March 24, 1993.
In late 1977, Lafferty was completing the expanded rewrite of More than Melchisedech, incorporating Argo and Thundercolt. During this period, he completed “Happening in Chosky Bottoms” on September 18, “Heart Grow Fonder” on November 6, “Quiz Ship Loose” on November 22, and “Snake in His Bosom” on Christmas Day. Of these, only “Quiz Ship Loose” can be called science fiction, stretching the term to Lafferty’s sense of it. He was not in a good mood about the state of science fiction.
On September 11 of that year, he finished his poem “A Scholarly Appraisal of Science Fiction in Late 1977.” It would appear in Spang Blah, a science-fiction fanzine edited and published by Jan Howard Finder. The fanzine was first published in Italy and later in the United States. More interesting than many fanzines, it carried commentary for the international fan community, originally helping American fans living in Europe keep in touch with developments elsewhere.
In the poem, Lafferty vents his spleen at what he regards as the dominant culture of science fiction in 1977, but he begins by affirming its greatness. As in his nonfiction essays, he treats science fiction as one of the few refuges of story in the late twentieth century. Here, he calls it a “Golden Key” that opens unfamiliar worlds. It has done that, and it can again, but he thinks its potential has been buried under bad writing, ideological dogmatism, and sexual preoccupation. He talks about muck, incrustation, and sewage. Something valuable is being fouled. He kept beating this drum from the mid-seventies until he stopped writing, and even afterward in personal letters. Science fiction had to recover its freedom and imaginative reach.
In the next stanzas, Lafferty starts throwing punches. “DISPOSSESSED” singles out Le Guin’s novel and turns its title against it. Lafferty says: this dispossession is a poverty you guys have brought on yourselves by choosing the trashed life principle. “Self-abasing, self-abusing” is him being very nasty: intellectual degradation and masturbation.
He then trashes Delany’s Dhalgren with “The dragon’s mothers’ son reversed.” Lafferty treats its supposed sophistication as nihilism and infantile self-indulgence. Delany would later write a tepid introduction to one of the stories in the extremely weak The Best of R. A. Lafferty. It is probably a good thing that he didn’t know how much Lafferty reviled his work. His strongest statement about is in an unpublished letter to Sheryl Smith:
But what is this business of your still degrading yourself with Dhalgren? The thing is dishonest, it is tedious, it is nihilistic. I realize that dishonesty, tediousness, and nihilism are the three hottest commodities on the scene today; but somehow I wish it weren't so. The piece is a monumental phoniness and is subscribed to only by monumental phonies. (Notice how I can turn a phrase to please everyone. It's a gift.) — letter to Sheryl Smith, December 8, 1975.
He then moves from books to behavior. Lafferty opposed boycotts as a leftist form of collective action, and when Anita Bryant’s campaign against gay rights prompted protests and a boycott of Miami Worldcon, he was not happy. A Baptist gathering arrived at the convention hotel as the science-fiction convention ended. These events account for the poem’s references to Anita, boycotts, and Baptists. Lafferty took the jeering and dirty verses as an index of the health of science-fiction writers and fandom.
The man who “once stood tall” particularly disappoints Lafferty: someone he admired is now trying to win applause with obscenity. The feet of clay have spread to the heart. Science fiction is far from a major interest of mine, so I wondered if it was Harlan Ellison when I first read the poem. Ellison had boycotted SunCon over Anita Bryant, so the booing of the Baptists made me doubt it. Also, there is the sticky fact that Lafferty never thought Ellison stood tall: his pet name for him was “imp of Satan.” Unless it was a height joke, it didn’t make sense. When I looked up who the toastmaster was, then it made sense: Robert Silverberg, who had published “Eurema’s Dam.”
Later I came across this in a Lafferty letter:
The Miami Beach World-Con was a pretty good one in spite of the California Nazis. As one who drinks orange juice for breakfast I was warned by several of the vermin. Their leader toast-master Silverberg was always trying to get people to boo Florida and the Baptists, which became pretty tedious. But they were only a very mouthy minority. — letter, September 9, 1977.
Bibliographical Note
Manuscript dated September 11, 1977. First published in Spang Blah, no. 15 (Autumn 1977), pp. 9–10, edited and published by Jan Howard Finder.
The two-page typescript is subtitled “This Stickiness Need Not Be Forever” and bears the inscription “to JAN HOWARD FINDER for the SPANG BLAH.” The poem consists of eleven quatrains.
Sources: R. A. Lafferty, “A Scholarly Appraisal of Science Fiction in Late 1977,” Spang Blah, no. 15 (Autumn 1977), pp. 9–10 (FANAC scan); the author’s dated typescript, pp. 1–2, reproduced above.
