"Beautiful Dreamer" (1960)
- Jon Nelson
- Jan 12
- 9 min read
Updated: Jan 14
Vivian was in with a loud rustle, and her footsteps like music as she started up the stair (the tone of her footfall at a frequency of 265, just above middle C, compounded with a vagrant, two harmonics, and a mute). Few men could so analyze their wives' footsteps. Everything about her was in tune, and she hummed the "Dreamer"as she ascended.
May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep! — William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802
Definalization again.
Imagine a continuum of Laffertian weirdness, running from the extremely narratively weird to the so conventionalized that it really isn’t weird at all. On the familiar end is what Lovecraft thought about werewolves, but for Lafferty. As you probably know, Lovecraft thought that supernatural horror was culturally exhausted. For me, the far reach of the other side of cultural exhaustion, the really mind-bending side of the definalization in Lafferty, is Barnaby Sheen in In a Green Tree keeping his daughter Loretta Sheen’s corpse, and how Barnaby comes to live with the doll. When Loretta dies, Barnaby says, "I will keep her here till she comes to her senses, in several meanings of that phrase. There is no law against that. I will declare this room to be a crypt or shrine, and I will keep her here." That is a character who refuses finality. No surprise that he refuses to have Loretta embalmed. "We will not eviscerate her clay. She has already suffered too much transformation." Here definalization takes the form of Peggy Marie Tyrone intervening. She dresses up Loretta’s life-sized doll in one of Loretta’s party gowns. Over the next few years, Barnaby’s friends will patch up the doll with sawdust and linen. All this will be seen, but very dimly, through the slight displacement of the Green Tree universe in the Men Who Knew Everything and Austro stories.
Sometimes definalization is present in a particular person at the end of a novel. This what I think of as being the Lafferty wall-spreader. It holds ontological openness away from the necessity of novelistic closure. Books must come to a last page; a definalized character says books are not life. Think of Witchy at the end of Reefs of Earth or think of Biddy at the end of Fourth Mansions.
Other way-out instances of definalization are less structurally significant but wildly memorable. The spook Maxwell in Past Master and Maxwell’s bodies are this: among the most interesting things in the novel, at least to me.
“Yes, Maxwell, that’s the name I couldn’t think of. Yes, I’m Maxwell, and I begin to recover my wits a little. I believe I found the old lady dead in an alley. It is an embarrassing situation I find myself in, gentlemen, but do not think any the less of me for it.”
Other major figures of definalization in Lafferty’s narratives are vertical load-bearing supports. Such is the role of Christopher Brannagan in Annals of Klepsis. Such is the role of Atrox Fabulinus in East of Laughter. Here is Atrox being definalized before the reader's eyes:
The outline of the giant began to form at the biggest of the tables . . . . The giant outline raised the huge cup and drank from it, which proved that there was substance and strength to it . . . An eel-waiter placed adozen of the big eels in the big funnel, and the fuzzy giant outline began to slurp and eat them from the bottom of the funnel. "When the last eel is gone, then the last giant must go too," the giant outline spoke in an amazingly giant-like voice.”
One last example, one of my favorite instances of significant definalization, this from the unpublished Iron Tongue of Midnight:
And also, in a reverse fashion, this "double vision phenomenon" had not completely engulfed Patrick Shatwell more than one time that morning, and it still hovered over him, faintly to the eyes of some of them, and with an immediate and horrible intensity to the eyes of others. This doubled, or superimposed, vision was that of Shatwell himself lying stricken and contorted and dead. The red-eyed and dazed, but living and vital, Shatwell, who talked to the others there, was at the same time wrapped in a death cloud of another way of seeing him. This cloud showed Shatwell killed with an iron dart of idiotic size, a dart threemeters long and half a meter thick, that went through his chest and bodyand absolutely destroyed his chest with the very size and power of it. It showed Shatwell surprised by the sudden death, but still tortured with the pain that did not cease with the death.
I particularly like this because it gives another name for definalization: the double vision phenomenon.
If some of these double-vision effects fall on the wild end of the continuum—and one could go on for a long while adding examples from that way-out region—then at the other end lie familiar forms of definalization: the standard devices that show up across writers, the common lumber of the storymaking industry. In such cases, conventional storytelling rehearses definalization in a predictable way. The return of the dead in a ghost story is one of the most well-worn of these devices. Lafferty blows the dust off it in his pre-nucleation ghost story “Beautiful Dreamer,” and he does so in order to pursue characteristically Laffertian ends.
That was a great deal about definalization. But if one keeps this all-important Lafferty strategy in mind, and remembers its significance in the whole Lafferty, the story becomes legible. A Lafferty story can often be rationally reconstructed by asking two questions: what is being counterfigured, and how is that counterfiguration used to definalize in a way that points toward an anti-secret? With those questions in view, we can turn to “Beautiful Dreamer.”
The main character is Stephen Knight, a successful and hyper-rational petroleum engineer. He equates luck with logic and takes pride in his analytical mind. Stephen is also married to the most perfect woman in the world, Vivian, who others see as a scatterbrain. Stephen knows this isn’t quite right. There is a deep, subliminal intelligence beneath Vivian's surface.
While waiting for Vivian to come home on a wintery night, Stephen experiences a strange sensory sequence. He sees the sweep of car lights. He hears tires crunching on snow. The Knights’ pet bird (Lafferty never calls it a parrot) whistles "Beautiful Dreamer," knowing Vivian is near. Then the phone rings. Knight yells for Vivian to catch it, but the phone rings on and on until Knight himself answers. The police tell him that Vivian has been murdered. Knight doesn’t believe it. Isn’t Vivian at home? He checks the front of the house, where he finds the driveway empty and the snow undisturbed, except for a light fresh covering over his footprints. He tells the officer he will be down at the station.
Following the funeral, Stephen is uncannily detached. He even tells friends that he always expected to lose Vivian. Vivian was just too perfect to be real. An old doctor assures Stephen he is sane and gives a logical explanation for the hallucination: the sounds were the wind on a gusty night, and the bird reacted to Stephen's own anticipation, and so forth. And the doctor tells Stephen to sleep in the house that very night. Stephen agrees. He will use what the doctor calls "careful credulity" and demystification of the supernatural event he experienced.
Back in the empty house, Stephen tries to sleep, but the sensory sequence begins again exactly as before. Terror mounts when he sees that the night is perfectly still rather than gusty. So much for the doctor's explanation. Stephen attempts to fortify his logical reality by barricading the bedroom door with heavy furniture. The footsteps continue up the stairs. Like other characters who walk through walls, the figure of Vivian enters the room as Stephen screams that she is dead.
This is a straightforward early Lafferty story, but two things stand out to me on a second reading. First, Lafferty offers a critique of modernity; second, he uses the ghost-story form, an easily exhausted mode of defamiliarization, to write an allegory, here without the intensified anagogical dimension that becomes so important later, in the other Ghost Story, Lafferty's entire writing project. In “Beautiful Dreamer,” hyperrationality slams into the miraculous.
There is a double game at work. Any reader will immediately see Vivian as the obvious “beautiful dreamer,” lying in her sleep. But I think it would be a mistake to read Vivian as a Ligeia figure. The real beautiful dreamer of the story is not Vivian at all, but Stephen himself. It is Vivian who is calling to him, while he sleeps what Blake called the sleep of Newton.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world heard in the day, Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away.
Wake from your too-small world, Stephen Knight, the story says.
It is a double vision phenomenon. Even in such an early and seemingly genre-conforming story, Lafferty is doing something quite special. He is sharpening his tools, counterfiguring the life principle itself as the source of terror. This is what I have called Lafferty's half horrors. "Berryhill" is perhaps the most successful version. Simply put: these are not horror stories for the Christian. Vivian is perfected vitality. Life on life. She is vivus.
Lafferty uses small, precisionist touches even as he depicts Stephen as a sterile agent. Stephen does have a taste for the direct and living thing, and Lafferty gives us examples of the art and music Stephen appreciates: the Cimmaron Valley Boys, the annual Okeene Rattlesnake Roundup, which fascinates him and possesses the “logic of lightning.”
Lafferty tells us that Stephen likes Andrew Tsinnahjinnie and Woody Crumbo, but there is something voyeuristic about this appreciation. He likes them for “the logic of the line . . . [which] never fails,” a formulation that diminishes the vitality of what he admires it and that sees it under a disminishing aspect.
This attitude extends to Stephen’s marriage to Vivian. Lafferty makes it obvious that Stephen sees Vivian as a logical acquisition belonging to one who has “staked out the best part for himself.” The reduction goes all the way down to his sensory experience of her. It is clinical. Stephen prefers to “break up sensations into their component parts,” hearing the music of her arrival as a frequency of 265, just above middle C.
That last bit is one of my favorite moments in the story.
Related to this is the story’s juxtaposition of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” with the music satirizing Modernist high culture. As Stephen sets out to prove to himself that he is rational and unafraid at the end of the story, he retreats into the “stark dry fragments” of Lafferty’s invented modernist composer, Strilke. The name tells you everything. The music must be hostile to melody and to all the obvious meanings melody carries in the story.
“Beautiful Dreamer” is a patently allegorical story pretending to be a just another ghost story, though you can read it just as a ghost story if that is what you want in your Lafferty. Allegorically, there is a subtle implication that Stephen has “killed” Vivian—not literally, of course, but by her being only apparently extinguished by what Stephen represents.
At a wide angle, the story attacks this as Modernity trying to barricade itself against Mystery. Significantly, regarding this, Stephen is, in some sense, a failed Neo-Thomist. He goes to the Neo-Thomist club, and one can imagine him as a 1950s Neo-Thomist who wants to explain how miracles are possible without violating natural laws, God acting through or above natural causes, with the result that Stephen becomes less open to the miraculous. Stephen might accept the Neo-Thomist formalization of obediential potency in theory, but is unprepared when he faces it. He has the philosopher’s key to logic, the Aristotle in St. Thomas, but he misses the mystical St. Thomas. There is nothing in Stephen of Thomas who writes, “All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me.”
This type of character we meet many times in Lafferty. He is a person whose faith is not sufficient to see, under new aspects, what Lafferty keeps trying to show through his signature strategies, like counterfiguration and definalization. Because this is such an early Lafferty story, the lineaments are easy to trace with the naked eye. When the old doctor says that Stephen is sane and advises him, he is encourages spiritual deadness.
“But we do not know if it is actually true, do we?” “No, we do not. But we turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ by careful credulity. The world is built on such a system of credulities and we have no wish to pull it down. Now then, this is what happened, and there is no alternative.”
A system of careful credulities is Lafferty’s lancing wit. Careful—the euphemism. Credulity: the belief with its knees sawn off, belief less useful than warmed-over varieties of William James. That system, the doctor thinks, is the system of modern myths that holds reality together, which is why this is not really a story about a dead woman but about a spiritually dead man.
What a huge mistake to read "Beautiful Dreamer" as though it were about something irrational intruding, as if it were just a spooky tale, when it bears on the rejection of beauty, life, spirit, grace, and the screaming panic that comes to a man when he knows he is defenseless when any of it really appears. I think it overlooks Lafferty’s genius, just as it was undoubtedly overlooked when first read in the illustrious pages of Shock: The Magazine of Terrifying Tales.
“You’re dead! You’ve got to believe that you’re dead!”
A familiar Lafferty message.
Stephen is early Lafferty, but he is also just about as unsympathetic a Lafferty character as one can imagine: a man barking out his refusal of a gift—the return of his beautiful wife—because he has somehow become late Modernity, screaming at what late Modernity abjures and wants to banish. Because Stephen is Catholic, the story is also a family quarrel, just as Civil Blood (1962) is a family quarrel.
