"Almost Perfect" (1961/1980)

“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?” Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.” — G. K. Chesterton, “The God of the Gongs” 

"Seven Story Dream" (1961) centers on a delusional, self-exculpatory fantasy that recasts a murder victim as art. Two years before Lafferty wrote it, he had already written a story about murder as a fine art, and about perfection as something located in the murder process itself. That earlier story was published twenty-one years later in a collection edited by Alice Laurance and Isaac Asimov called Who Done It? (1980). The names of the seventeen authors in the anthology were coded, turning the book itself into a participatory mystery in which readers could puzzle out who wrote which story, with the list of authors alphabetized at the beginning of the volume, although it is hard to imagine anyone confusing Dorothy Sayers with Robert Bloch or John D. MacDonald with R. A. Lafferty.

Here is Asimov’s headnote for Lafferty’s story:

This reading is conventional but inadequate, ignoring both Lafferty’s treatment of perfection and the esoteric mode of writing he employs, esoteric here in the sense I discussed on the blog before (Melzer’s sense). What appears obvious is being coded: Lafferty understood that cultural power had changed, Christendom had ended, popular fiction exists to entertain, and that religious art could reach mass audiences only by concealing its ideas. That can make late Lafferty a snarling bear of a read for those unfamiliar with his earlier methods or his intellectual tradition.

"Almost Perfect" hides in the open. It places perfection in its title, making unmistakable its exploration of what, in Lafferty, is one of the most Catholic—and most easily misunderstood—of terms. Rather than rehearse this at length again, I will point to the "Seven Story Dream" post and say the short version. Skip the next paragraph if you know what is coming.

When perfection appears as thematic architecture in Lafferty, he is using the Latinate sense of the word as completion. This notion of completion is classical and medieval and especially inflected by Thomistic thought, which Lafferty learned in his prep-school education. It is grounded in the concepts of potentia and actus. The simplest version of this is potentia as the seed, actus as the blossoming, and telos as the full bloom. Perfect means complete (from Latin perfectus, past participle of perficere “to complete,” from per- “through” + facere “to make/do”); complete means maximal actus; maximal actus means an individual having reached its telos. The ultimate telos and the most perfected of all is God. The final telos for man is the worship of God, which is most perfect for Catholics in what is called the beatific vision. That is how it works in orthodox Thomism, but Lafferty is Lafferty, and there are complications. Fortunately, those complications are not relevant to "Almost Perfect."

George Grimoire links his act of murder to perfection and completion when he describes his act:

“I had suddenly the vision of the perfect murder, one absolutely not to be suspected and not to be traced, a work of art. Who would ever get wind of an undertaker killing a man already dead? How could it possibly be proven? How? Was this not perfection? That which had never been achieved before? No clue, no whisper, no inkling.”

With Lafferty's ideas about perfection in place, the plot of “Almost Perfect” comes into focus. Two aspects of this warrant close attention: first, its main character, who is not a good man but an ambiguous figure; and second, what Isaac Asimov misses about the story, which many readers unattuned to Lafferty's use of counterfiguration will miss for the same reason. This second point bears on questions of grace and what in Catholicism is called imperfect contrition. It is "almost perfect" contrition or incomplete contrition. But first the plot.

Donald Dalton is a wealthy and tyrannical landlord, and his luck has run out. Doctor Land, his physician, has given Dalton a month to live. This prognosis prompts a wager between the doctor and our main character, George Grimoire. Grimoire is a local businessman, an all-around jobber who wears many hats, one of which is that of an undertaker. Like many people in the town, Grimoire is financially indebted to Dalton. Dalton is one of Lafferty’s devilish figures. He says that he has prepared four conflicting wills to be distributed among his sons by his granddaughter, Betty-Jo. All Grimoire wants is a rent reduction in light of Dalton’s terminal diagnosis. Dalton says that his financial demands will continue through his heirs. The rich stay rich for a reason.

On the twenty-seventh day of the month, Dalton is pronounced dead. In his role as an undertaker, Grimoire prepares the body for embalming. Dalton is laid out on the table with the whiskey that was the stake of the wager. Then something happens that an old Switzer who trained Grimoire said happens at least once in the trade life of any undertaker: Dalton regains consciousness. Grimoire recognizes the opportunity. If he finishes off Dalton, no one will know because everyone already thinks Dalton is dead. In some of Lafferty's best black comedies, Grimoire opens Dalton's veins to ensure his death while viewing the act as a "perfect murder" that cannot be detected by medical examination. To make Dalton look peaceful in death and remove the look of horror from Dalton’s dead face, Grimoire cuts his cheek muscles.

He worked rapidly over the dead man then, for it was late at night, and he was tired and anxious to get it over with. He was a little disturbed by the look of horror on the finally-dead Dalton’s face. From inside the mouth he cut into the cheek tendons and made them relax. And he loosened the taut throat with several small incisions. "What have I forgotten? Nothing. What is there to forget? Not even a medical detective could find anything wrong, outside of my usual sloppy work. He could in no way discern murder here."

During the murder, Grimoire has a minor stroke. The facial muscles on one side go slack. At Dalton’s funeral, Betty-Jo notes the dead Dalton’s face, which looks as if it is not at all at peace. Grimoire tells her it is due to post-mortem muscle spasms and gases produced by decay.

Now comes the first twist: the four wills. After the burial, Dalton’s son Eugene tries to bribe Grimoire into giving false testimony that would validate Eugene’s claim as the sole heir. Grimoire is so stressed by this that he has a second stroke, and now he will be dragging his leg behind him. At a formal meeting, Grimoire declines the bribe. He gives a full confession of the murder, saying that he himself was the only "weak link" in his otherwise undetectable crime. Grimoire is hanged on the 27th day of a thirty-one-day month—an idea that patterns the story, but one that I’m going to set aside.

I understand why Isaac Asimov reads the story as he does and why he takes Grimoire at his word (that he himself is the flaw in the perfect murder), but I know how a confession works in an R. A. Lafferty story. I also know that, as someone who loved Father Brown, Lafferty would have agreed that there is no such thing as a perfect murder. Perfection again. He would have seen the radioactive glow in Asimov’s remark: “I should think that the perfect murder in real life is very common—but reality is for the baseborn.”

Grimoire says,

“But what was the weak link?” he asked. “I confess I can't see it. It looks to me as though it were foolproof, almost sublime in its perfection. It was a perfect murder if I ever heard of one. What was the weak link? “It was myself. Some men are just not cut out to be murderers.”

That is the joke in the title: "Almost Perfect." In a moment of self-revelation, Grimoire says, "Some men are just not cut out to be murderers." Those are men who have a chance at redemption and who are capable of cooperating with grace. The theological paradox at the center of the story is that what gets called a “flaw” is, in fact, the messily grotesque process of being perfected in a Lafferty storyworld. Because Grimoire has a Catholic conscience, he confesses to the murder. This is not a flaw; it is what separates Grimoire from a man like the damned Dalton. Key to this is the most important line in the story: the quotation from the Book of Wisdom, which may have given Lafferty the idea for both the plot and the disfiguring of Dalton’s face. It is certainly the story’s central attractor, the point that holds it together, and it is easily underappreciated by a reader who is not reading closely:

"Mr. Grimoire, he was so serene appearing after he had just died. Now he looks frightened. How? Why?" "Miss Dalton, the dead never really look serene. They have put on the mask." "Yes, he was serene then. He is not now." She gazed at the card on the wall: In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are in peace. George Grimoire had many pious quotations on the wall. "His face has changed, Mr. Grimoire. How could it have changed?" insisted Betty-Jo. "I am sure you are wrong."

Step back and notice a few things. For instance, we are not dealing with Protestants or a Protestant undertaker in Grimoire. We know this because Protestants do not include the Book of Wisdom in their Bible. They follow the Hebrew Jewish canon of the Old Testament, which does not contain the Deuterocanonical books later affirmed by the Catholic Church. Anglicans, for example, are told in Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles that the Apocrypha may be read for instruction and manners, but not to establish doctrine. That is not the case for Catholics, who believe that it contains sacred doctrine. The Book of Wisdom, also known as the Wisdom of Solomon, is centrally concerned with the destiny of the righteous and with the difference between human judgment and God’s truth.

The line, "In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are in peace," comes from Wisdom 3:2. It is a classic element of Catholic funerary culture. It explains that those who lack true wisdom judge only by appearances. To them, the suffering and death of the righteous look like defeat or abandonment by God. The author of Wisdom corrects this misunderstanding by affirming that the righteous are actually at peace with God, even if their lives end in hardship. God’s justice is not always visible in earthly life; faithfulness leads to peace and eternal life beyond death.

It should now be clearer what is happening with George Grimoire. He looks at the face of Dalton and knows that Dalton is damned and not at peace. In one sense, he experiences a kind of face transplant, because he sees his own final judgment as a murderer on Dalton’s dead, contorted face. The look on Dalton’s face after his murder matters because, and this is deeply Chestertonian, the grace that makes Grimoire better pushes him toward perfection. It is what leads him to confess. For Isaac Asimov, and for readers like him, this looks like weakness, Grimoire’s “flaw.” But to see it that way is to miss what Lafferty is doing.

One important point separating Catholics and Protestants is the distinction between imperfect and perfect contrition and its role in sanctification and purgation, a process of spiritual purification, in Catholic theology. For many Protestants, the idea of imperfect contrition is difficult to accept. For Catholics, it is simply a reality that has been defined over time in the development of doctrine, and it is caught up in the incredibly complicated and mysterious history of the Sacrament of Penance within the Catholic Church, which, as a matter of canon law, now brings together much that once was separate.

Suffice it to say that confession now does two things privately that were not done privately, and that those two things were earlier in the history of Christianity done separately. How does this show up in the Church after the Council of Trent? A priest who hears a confession hears from two groups: those who are in mortal sin and those who are not. Those who are not in mortal sin are not, strictly speaking, being reconciled with the Church, but are participating in a devotional act. Venial sins are forgiven in the Mass itself and in other ways. The Catholic Church encourages everyone to go to confession regularly, including those not in mortal sin, but this is a result of the Church as a visible institution that moves through time. For Lafferty, it is the Argo, sailing across history.

As Lafferty writes in Archipelago:

It was hard to discern whether this was a toy boat, or a real boat afar off. Part of it was plainly more real even than the prosaic world, and part of it was drawn in with child’s crayola. The seamen may have been dolls, or they may have been alive. There were the Apostles; and Stephen and Paul and the Baptist; Linus and Clement and Cletus. There were Barbara and Catherine, looking like sea-urchins; there were Gregory and Constantine. Jerome and Augustine glared at each other over a davit. Francis and Anthony were there, Thomas and Patrick, Hildebrand and Adrian the Dutchman. The Thereses, French and Spanish; and Joan and Xavier. "It is odd that I know them," said Henry, "for I never saw them before. But that is who they are." The boat was in trouble, and it gained in verisimilitude as the waves rose and the wind blew. It was a real ship and it was badly tossed, et descendit procella venti in stagnum, et complebantur et periclitabantur, and the account seemed to be translated for Henry into his own tongue like the subscript of a foreign-language movie, un tourbillon fondit sur le lac; la barque se remplissait d’eau—”

When the waters were very rocky for the Church in the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent did something important. On November 25, 1551, it defined imperfect contrition during its Fourteenth Session:

And as to that imperfect contrition, which is called attrition, because that it is commonly conceived either from the consideration of the turpitude of sin, or from the fear of hell and of punishment, it declares that if, with the hope of pardon, it exclude the wish to sin, it not only does not make a man a hypocrite and a greater sinner, but that it is even a gift of God, and an impulse of the Holy Ghost—who does not indeed as yet dwell in the penitent, but only moves him—whereby the penitent, being assisted, prepares a way for himself unto justice.

We see Grimoire perform an act of imperfect contrition in the story. One assumes that, as a Catholic troubled by his conscience, Grimoire would have been shriven on the eve of his execution. Lafferty leaves it open whether Grimoire goes beyond imperfect contrition before being hanged on the 27th. But what is imperfect contrition?

In Catholic theology, imperfect contrition differs from perfect contrition in its motive. Grimoire does not confess because he has offended God, but because the agonized death-face of Dalton frightens him. Torn between fear and guilt, he finds himself haunted by the visage of his victim, a specter of his own transgression. The story says Grimoire knows there will be hell to pay. Fear, not love, pushes him toward the noose-side confessional. The distinction between imperfect/perfect contrition developed over time within the Church. Imperfect contrition, sometimes called attrition, arises from fear of punishment (such as hell) or from recognition of the ugliness of sin. Perfect contrition arises from genuine love of God and sorrow for having offended Him. Both acknowledge sin as wrong, but only perfect contrition is rooted fully in charity.

Protestants tend to think that only perfect contrition counts. Catholics hold that imperfect contrition does count, and that it is one reason most men and women who participate in the life of the Church will undergo purgation after death. These distinctions became especially clear in medieval theology and were formally articulated at the Council of Trent, as the differences between Protestant and Catholic teaching hardened. Trent taught that imperfect contrition is sufficient for forgiveness when joined to the Sacrament of Confession, while perfect contrition can reconcile a person with God even before confession, provided it includes the intention to confess.

That is a lot, but it is why “Almost Perfect” is a story about Catholic murder. One could go through it as a prenucleation story to show how Lafferty uses counterfiguration to create other subtleties that mislead a hasty reader, but I’ll point out two. One is the name Grimoire. That name might lead the reader to overlook that this is, in fact, a black comedy about God’s mercy. The other is the major counterfiguration of the word flaw. The flaw here is the classic thorn-in-the-flesh. It is a very clever version of what Christ imparts to St. Paul: "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness."

Almost Perfect Notes.pdf

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