Bridlegoose (1958)

But when you have done all these fine things, quoth Trinquamelle, how do you, my friend, award your decrees, and pronounce judgment? Even as your other worships, answered Bridlegoose; for I give out sentence in his favour unto whom hath befallen the best chance by dice, judiciary, tribunian, pretorial, what comes first. — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapter XXXIX, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart

His passion is for the British law, and he has spent a large fortune in litigation. He fights for the mere pleasure of fighting and is equally ready to take up either side of a question, so that it is no wonder that he has found it a costly amusement. Sometimes he will shut up a right of way and defy the parish to make him open it. At others he will with his own hands tear down some other man’s gate and declare that a path has existed there from time immemorial, defying the owner to prosecute him for trespass. — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter VIII, “First Report of Dr. Watson”

“Bridlegoose” is an unpublished short story that has been collected in The Man Who Talled Tales. An amuse-bouche in the Willoughby saga, Lafferty wrote it when he was trying to crack into different markets. The title comes from the name of the story’s antagonist, Benjamin Bridlegoose, an aggressively litigious man with an impressive history of winning over a thousand suits. In his latest suit, he threatens to sue the somewhat uxorious Tom and always bold Myra Willoughby for $500 because their puppy barked at night. Tom panics. Catholics with a big family, the Willoughbys lack funds, and Tom’s pinchpenny boss, Wally Waldorf, isn’t much help when Myra tries to guilt him into giving Tom a raise. He just warns that settling out of court will only provoke another suit and that Bridlegoose routinely gathers evidence with “an electronic counter on his back porch” and a “decibel recorder.” At this point, “Bridlegoose” becomes a story about Myra, not a well-known character in the Lafferty canon but my favorite of his many female characters. She visits a recurring character in the sequence, a local bartender named Nokomis, who explains why Bridlegoose is such a successful litigant. Judges favor him out of fear of his retaliatory motions for “debarment, mistrial or juridical prejudice.” Nokomis recounts several successful past grievances:

“He sued Freddy Fodorko because the crabgrass spread across the Fodorko yard to the Bridlegoose yard. He sued George Mullendorf because the fumes from his trash burner made his (Bridlegoose's) tropical fish ill. He sued Conchita for cooking with garlic, said it debased the scent of his African violets and depreciated them for the flower show.”

When Nokomis says that learning the law takes five or six years—though “the smarter you are the faster you can learn it”—Myra does a very Lafferty female-protagonist thing. She decides to master the legal trade immediately. Taking out a three-dollar loan, she uses part of it to pay off the family paperboy and spends a dollar and twenty cents on a secondhand copy of the four-volume Handy Andy Home Library; then Myra mugs up on the final hybrid text (Home Legal Advisor with Road Atlas and First Aid Book: What to Do till the Doctor Comes combined in one volume), spending Wednesday evening reviewing its contents alongside a guide on everyday calculation, autodidact that she is.

At the Friday preliminary hearings—long designated on the docket as “Bridlegoose Morning”—the judge calls out Bridlegoose’s weekly claims against his neighbors before introducing thirty-three separate counterclaims brought by the Willoughbys totaling over a quarter of a million dollars. Bridlegoose says that “nobody ever sues me,” but the judge points out that everything is in clean order. The Willoughby filings are systematically constructed using Bridlegoose’s own prior legal actions as authority:

“Believe me, the briefs are well-prepared and parallels are intelligently cited, in this case Bridlegoose vs. Wimbish in which a parrot of the plaintiff was awarded damages for lost tail feathers in an incident of a broom-handle eviction from the Wimbish premises, it being held that obscenity of speech and arrogance of manner of the victim was not justification for the violence of the ejection.”

Now confronted with suits seeking compensation for his chasing the Willoughby children—including one child's resulting “physical abridgement known colloquially as a spanking”—Bridlegoose panics. He cries out for a change of venue and flees into the street. Asked by the judge when she learned the law, Myra says that she only read the manual for part of Wednesday evening before getting distracted by an easy trick to “divide any number by nine.”

This is very fun, very simple prenucleation Lafferty, with a few Easter eggs for those who want to know his work. First, it is part of the wonderful Willoughby sequence that never sold well and was thus abandoned. It is one of a few short-story cycles in the canon and would make for a fun small anthology for Lafferty fans. Second, it is the first appearance of Duffy, without an “e,” as he is in some of the earlier material. This version of Duffy runs a secondhand bookstore and antique shop, but it is fun to see him here, lifted, one imagines, from early drafts of Archipelago.

Finally, this unsold conte léger shows in a very clear way something about how Lafferty writes because one can see its two primary palimphanies glowing just under and on its surface. Lafferty liked to say that he was the biggest man in science fiction, a joke about his weight, but his output is a largely underexplored continent, and the kind of palimphanic technique he uses in “Bridlegoose” becomes increasingly complex in his work. In “Bridlegoose,” Lafferty riffs on two elements from earlier texts, rubbing them together associatively to create his legal comedy.

The first is Bridlegoose himself. Bridlegoose was Sir Thomas Urquhart’s English translation of Bridoye in French. Bridoye is an elderly judge in the third book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. One of Rabelais’s most memorable portraits of the legal system's inherent ridiculousness, Bridoye obsesses over paperwork, observes legal formalities, painfully overscrutinizes, and then decides each case by throwing dice. When called to account for a bad judgment, he says he isn’t responsible. He blames his failing eyesight for misreading the dice, piling randomness on randomness, then defends his methods with a flood of legal citations. Of his four thousand judgments, 2,309 were appealed, and every one of those appeals upheld his decision. Similarly, Lafferty’s Bridlegoose unintentionally sets the precedents that make him suable.

The other palimphanic link is also legal. It alludes to a location in the Sherlock Holmes stories that would have caught Lafferty’s attention: Lafter Hall, the home of Mr. Frankland, the elderly neighbor obsessed with lawsuits in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Nokomis explicitly recalls the Conan Doyle character who sued over the excavation of a prehistoric grave without the next of kin’s consent. Bridlegoose responds by launching similar suits himself. Frankland has spent much of his fortune on litigation. Watson says that he “fights for the mere pleasure of fighting.” Typical Mr. Frankland behavior includes closing a public path and challenging the parish to reopen it, then tearing down someone else’s gate to defend an ancient right of way.

In associating Rabelais’s Bridoye and Doyle’s Mr. Frankland, Lafferty creates a perfectly miniature piece of palimphany that becomes one of the major operations in all his work, here at its simplest, and in the later novels, at its most baroque.