Childhood and Sex in Lafferty
The things that the people were doing right now were a little bit extreme. Granted that they all loved one another. Granted that they were all present and were not doing these things behind each others’ backs. But the quick loving was going on a bit too hotly. And there shouldn’t have been that sort of mixing of generations. Well, everybody loved the several young girls who were there for the ‘evening’ (Mary Jill O’Trassy and Chiara and Teresa Benedict and Canta Maurine O’Donovan and Mary Rita Bluestem and Judith Adamstone were all there) just as they had always loved their mothers. But how far should such things go? “How do you say ‘funny uncle’ in Provinçal, Edith?” Peggy asked. Several of them were acting like funny uncles and funny aunts for the nonce.“Aw, break it up, folks,” Beatrice Belle O’Trassy said suddenly. “It becomes fetid. More than that, it becomes tedious.” — In a Green Tree
“There is Stink Finger: The Adult-Type Coloring Book for Children Five to Seven.” — Jeb Porno, “Sex and Sorcery”
“And there's several small children of both sexes that I must rape. It's an old pleasure that's coming back into favor.” — The devil, “Thou Whited Wall”
In the past, I’ve written about how Lafferty’s “virtuous antisemitism” gets tied up with pedophilic plot elements in the Argo Legend. Today I want to think a little about how pedophilic affect shows up in In a Green Tree and in other places in Lafferty.
By pedophilic affect, I mean something that I hope won't be confusing, and that might be illuminating. It is a current of feeling in which childhood itself becomes an object of adult erotic interest. In Lafferty, I find it where his attention to children’s innocence, precocity, and bodily play acquires a sexual charge. This can be present even when the story explicitly condemns sexual misconduct. The term concerns how Lafferty’s writing sometimes presents children.
When Green Tree is published, readers will find a scene in which adults participate in sexualized entertainment involving a ten-year-old girl. Lafferty refers to some of the adults involved as “funny uncles and funny aunts.” Rereading Annals of Klepsis put all this on my mind again because one finds a funny uncle in it.
“What is your relationship to Tharrala Thorn here?” I asked the Prince in what I believed was a sly manner. “I am her uncle,” Prince Franco said. “Also her Dutch uncle. And, to some extent, her funny uncle. And I am her godfather. The next victim—I thought for a moment that it was a girl from your party, but I see that it is a substitute.”
He also loved several younger girls, especially from that bunch who used to come into his bookstore. They came in from the time they were eight or nine years old: Mary Frances Rattigan, Mary Catherine Carruthers, Mary Jean (what was her name anyhow before she married Sebastian's nephew Hilary Hilton?), Margaret Stone. Ethyl Ellenberger. It was all hearty fun with the little girls, of course (hell is made out of such hearty fun), and Duffey played the funny uncle with them. There was an old, black leather sofa in the bookstore, and Duffey would wrestle the little girls on it. Mary Frances and Ethyl were usually in the store together, and what Duffey did to one of them he did to the other. In their double number was safety. Really, it was all right with them, but maybe it wasn't all right when Mary Francis was there by herself. — More than Melchisdech
In Green Tree, several female characters intervene to stop what is happening, and the novel recognizes the prurience. The more difficult question concerns the affection and bodily play surrounding it, the kind of thing the book elsewhere presents with considerable warmth.
The episode I have in mind takes place in the chapter “And Never Grow Old.” Edith O’Melody Drakos has begun holding evenings modeled on a medieval Court of Love. Her daughters participate in these gatherings, including Irene, whose age becomes a plot element. Lafferty writes, “Irene was ten years old.” At these parties, Irene and her adult sister Catherine appear nude. Lafferty writes:
One or the other of the bare daughters would go with one of the gallant gentlemen to a cubicle for a short while. But BeeBee and Peggy Marie were both like watch dogs and they did not behave at all within the Love Court Code.
Lafferty doesn’t tell us what goes on inside the cubicles, but the setting and subsequent conduct nevertheless give the reader good reasons for inferring that Irene is participating in sexualized entertainment for adults.
Edith at one point offers art as a defense, but Beatrice calls the troubadour cultus “clear rotten.” Peggy, a very important character in Green Tree, calls it all “incomparably vile.” As the evening goes on, Lafferty writes:
The things that the people were doing right now were a little bit extreme. Granted that they all loved one another. Granted that they were all present and were not doing these things behind each others’ backs. But the quick loving was going on a bit too hotly. And there shouldn’t have been that sort of mixing of generations.
In this scene, it becomes difficult to know what Lafferty is doing. “Granted” introduces the circumstances that might excuse the conduct. They love one another. They are together. They are not deceiving the other people in the room. The narrator seems to accept these circumstances, and at the same time he judges that something has gone wrong. Peggy calls it out for what it is:
“How do you say ‘funny uncle’ in Provinçal, Edith?” Peggy asked.
Then we get the line:
Several of them were acting like funny uncles and funny aunts for the nonce.
Any discussion of pedophilia or pedophilic affect in Lafferty will need to work through this material, and it will need to account for the fact that the novel condemns what is happening.
The really tricky part is that Lafferty condemns what is going on, yet the narration seems to me to linger over it voyeuristically. Before describing these evenings, we get the allusion to Luke that gives the work its title:
“If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in a dry?”
The same page says that members of the Old Gang “were torn up by maladjustments and itches and hungers.” Several episodes of sexual disorder follow. Edith founded her little Court after she had come to “middle life and a strange boredom,” and Lafferty distinguishes it from the ordinary gatherings in the old neighborhood:
But what Edith tried to set up was different.
On the one hand, affection and bodily freedom belong to the community’s good life. On the other, boredom and disordered appetite corrupt them. The women who stop the evening defend an idea that the novel holds out. Lafferty gives the reader a portrait of communal decline, which naturally shows corruption among the characters toward whom he feels so much affection.
What interests me is how the narration balances these things. The sexual misconduct is surrounded by gestures and expressions that have already become familiar as signs of affection. Lafferty writes that the adults love the girls “just as they had always loved their mothers,” then he asks:
But how far should such things go?
One sign that Lafferty’s affect is involved is the piggyback riding, something that shows up often not only in Lafferty's fiction but also in letters. For instance, in 1971 he wrote to Sheryl Smith,
You intrigue with your unclear reference to ‘evil upheaval’ in the last sentence of your last letter. The question is who upheaves (lifts up) whom. I want to be the rider. It would be fun to be picked up (literally) by you . . . It would be fun to walk across on your back in ‘Mountain Bridges’ or to ride on your shoulders or back in ‘Ride the Wild Mares’. I really do ride on girls’ backs; big girls’ and little girls’ too (is that perverse of me?), and it’s fun to think about riding my own chaotic Sheryl Smith. Or sitting on your lap, or standing on your stomach
The naked daughters give the men piggyback rides. Amid whispered insinuations about whether Peggy had once given other kinds of rides, the passage refers to “other sorts of rides that were not so harmless as those frolics.” Not so harmless?
That is part of what I mean by pedophilic affect: a way of presenting children that invites or accommodates adult erotic attention, including occasions when the work condemns particular acts.
A more ambiguous passage occurs a few pages before the Court of Love. Lafferty describes the adult James Tyrone’s attachments:
James Tyrone still loved the little girls passionately, for he was still a little boy. He loved the middle-sized girls and the big girls also, for he remained of their age and spirit. He loved all the young ladies, and all the slightly less young ladies, for they also were his contemporaries.
At this point in Green Tree, James is a middle-aged husband and father. The next sentence identifies the little girls as “eight and nine and ten and eleven years old.” These are kids in the Green Tree neighborhood, several of whom are named, and Lafferty describes James’s present attachments rather than remembered versions of women who have grown older with him.
The word “for” is supposed to explain this. James loves the girls passionately because he is a little boy. One wonders if this was Lafferty’s view of himself. He writes of James and his adult friends:
Most of them were at least three major ages at one time.
Making it all more complicated, many members of the Old Gang are said to be “genuine never-grow-old people.” Whatever this weird affect is about, it connects to what an ordinary person is in the novel. It ambiguously hovers between the idea that happy people are in some ways still kids and licensing what would now be euphemistically called “minor attraction.”
Maybe it isn’t sexual. “Passionately” can mean intensely affectionate, and the novel uses extravagant language for several kinds of love. Rita’s response to the young Patrick Pius is one example:
“Oh, how I wish you were my son, Patrick Pius Pantagruel O’Trassy,” Rita Palacios declared as she worked towards conclusion of the wonderful portrait. “How I want you, how I want you!”
Rita in Green Tree is “in love with four generations” of the family. There is maternal attachment here. So we might not want to conclude that James desires sexual contact with the little girls.
Now consider the following from the book. Irene Drakos is “nine years old, going on ten.” She tells James that she wants to ask him something. He initially points to her parents’ qualifications:
“Your father is Doctor Drakos himself, Irene,” James told her, “a man of very wide education in many fields. Your mother is Edith O’Melody herself, and there was never a girl faster with an answer than Edith.”
Lafferty readers will know Drakos from the stories in The Men Who Knew Everything.
Irene says that she finds James and Peggy easier to consult, although she would feel awkward asking Peggy the question she has on her mind:
My main question is ‘What is Explicit Sex?’ And my side questions are ‘Is Explicit Sex better than the regular kind?’ ‘Is it more fun?’ ‘Are the Irish against Explicit Sex?’ And ‘Why are they?’
James gives a helpful little lesson on healthy sexuality, distinguishing the moral stuff from sexuality performed for an audience. Of those who prefer privacy, he says:
They like the regular kind, the mysterious and secret and private kind, the joyful-in-itself kind. Devotees of explicit sex always feel the need of the presence of third parties in some form or other, of an audience. And these third parties, on some form or other, they should applaud.
Irene enthusiastically anticipates having an audience herself. James ends the exchange with:
“Any other questions, Irene, my implicit sweetheart?”“Yes. What does ‘etymologically speaking’ mean?”
And with that, she is back to being a precocious Lafferty kid.
This enthusiasm for exhibition plays a role in the book. It anticipates her participation in her mother’s Court of Love. James’s preference for privacy can thus be read as a contrast to that later entertainment. Unlike Duffey in More Than Melchisedech, James does not play the funny uncle in this conversation.
Maybe he just wants Irene to grow up to be a well-adjusted woman who avoids mortal sin. “Sweetheart” can be a kindly address. Answering someone else’s child’s question about sex is weird, even if it is narratively justified. Yet here we have that strange collision of elements we often find in Lafferty’s affect. There is an older man’s “passionate” love and his identification with little girls. It is hard for me to read the material and not sense that something erotic is going on.
If so, then we have at least two things going on. The novel makes James’s continuing childhood an explanation for his attachment to children. It makes that attachment seem innocent. It also gives that attachment a sexual coloring. If this seems unprecedented in Lafferty, I recommend rereading stories such as “Parthen” and “Funnyfingers.”
Now let’s look at the early childhood episodes in the book. The first part of the novel follows James while he really is a child. An adult novelist can describe a boy’s attraction to girls without doing anything gross. Remembered childhood desire is distinguishable from an adult’s present desire for children.
In “O! Red-Dark Cave!” James is approaching ten, and his sexual reveries become more vivid. Lafferty traces them “five or six years further back.” At this point, Monica and Edith compete to discover which is the “better lover,” with James as judge, and into the mix goes sexual experimentation alongside childish improvisation and fear. These scenes give childhood a strong erotic charge, but the participants belong to the same age group. One might be inclined to give it all a pass if it weren’t for the larger patterns.
Consider the episode involving James and Peggy Marie in which their mothers discuss whether they are too old to share a bed:
“Oh, I don’t think so, Adriana,” Alice said. “They won’t be eleven until next month. And they are so innocent.”
What do the children do? They have intercourse. Peggy calls what they have done fornication and worries that their pledged kinship also makes it incestuous. So they run off to confession, as Duffey does in More Than Melchisedech. Lafferty writes:
And then grace flowed over them. So everything was clear and bright with them again. They did not sleep with each other again for fourteen years. And then it was lawful for them.
Then there are relationships that involve older partners. Susie Peterson’s intimacy with James begins when she is about eighteen, and James is about thirteen.
Susie loved him. She’d tease him into sitting on her lap.
“That’s what secretaries are for, honey,” she’d say. She’d kiss him.
Like piggyback riding, sitting on laps carries an unusual charge in Lafferty. Susie says she is twenty-one, but:
She was really about eighteen, and rather kiddish. She was about five years older than James and the girls. A good secretary though.
Later, she is “the smoochiest of all his girls when they were alone.” Her being “rather kiddish” softens the difference between them, I suppose. There is, at least, a clear novelistic reason for the scene: the adolescent James takes pleasure in having an office, a secretary, and the trappings of adult importance. But there is the sexualization of age and age difference.
I think there are grounds for speaking of pedophilic affect in parts of In a Green Tree, and for asking how his affect for children inflects other areas of Lafferty’s work. I do not think Lafferty was a pedophile. What interests me is how childhood acquires an erotic charge in the narration, even where Lafferty condemns sexual misconduct. Why does he write stories like "Funnyfingers?"
Think of the novel Dotty. In its early chapters, one finds the following:
“Are you sure you are only nine, Dotty?” Nolan had asked her. “Yes, nine.” But she lied. She wouldn't be nine till next October 15th. “I'd give a million dollars if I had it—and I'd get it somewhere if it'd do the trick—if you were just about twice that old.” “Don't you like me the way I am?” “You'll never know, Dotty, you'll never know how much. And that isn't whisky talking either. It's the rum and the wine.” So she left them there, the finest friends she had made all day, and among the finest of her whole life.
And when her mother asks her about it a few pages later? Dotty resents her mother's relationship with Colonel Keen. She lays into her mother, but Lafferty's narrator tells us about her eight-year-old night out.
“At least I didn't let a Colonel kiss me.” Not a Colonel. A Corporal and two Privates.
There is Dotty's menu of paid affections when she is a little older:
“Little kiss fifty cents. Big kiss one dollar. Squeeze, a quarter. Bear Hug, a dollar. Hold Dotty on lap, fifty cents. Sit on Dotty's lap, a dollar a minute. If over two hundred and fifty pounds add five percent surtax.” “What else shall we put, Dotty?” “No free samples. Do not order anything not on the menu.”
In the unpublished novel When All the World Was Young, where everyone in the world dies except special prepubescent children, children work the floor in a topless bar. Lafferty invites us to imagine their flat chests without saying look at the flat chests of these little girls:
Madeline Wherry, Nancy Standish, and Sallie Brown were topless at the Port in Any Storm Bar.
A character named Claud Cobbing talks about the sexual precocity of nine-year-olds:
It doesn't do a thing for me yet. But I believe that these horny new precocities are in and that ours is out. Nine year old studs and doxies are all over the place today. The nubile nines. Who would have believed it?
There is the sexual precocity of Harun in Sindbad: The 13th Voyage:
Of what did the Boy-Caliph consist? His flesh was fifty years old in his present life. Nor was he retarded in his functions, for he had sired his first son when he was six years old and his second son when he was seven. But he was eternally boyish; and yet his boyhoods were interrupted by his strange deaths.
All this might seem a world away from the Lafferty that most people have read, yet there is bleed-through. For instance, one thinks of powerful moments from The Reefs of Earth, a book every Lafferty fan will have read.
The early-mourning passion of a goblin child raised on a hothouse planet is something that no Earthling will ever know. He belonged on a world where the months and years were different, and where balanced precocity was the rule. But here on the gray Earth there was something that at the same time inhibited and retarded the substance of it, while it forced the accidentals in untimely fashion. Peter was out of balance. He was sick with the wild surging sickness.
The children had not avoided the Earth Sickness entirely, certainly Peter had not. And the essence of Earth Sickness is the violent emotional revolt of interior passion against itself, its throttling by the inhibiting Earth ambient, and the subsequent regression into a listless lethargy as sometimes to be fatal in the case of adults. This turmoil is unexplained, but the Puca Anima in an Earth Matrix suffered from violent and misdirected yearnings of all sorts, and these were entangled with depressing frustrations.
Then Peter looked at Helen and he wasn’t sure. It was quite possible with her. She was younger than the rest, but she was weird. And in all other ways she was precocious. Then she looked at him the same way he was looking at her, and they were both scared.
Or the following from Okla Hannali:
Already at nine years old the three Innominee daughters were noticed. In the following years their fame would come with a rush. Almost everybody in the Territory would know of the three pretty, bright-talking, little girls. It was increasingly because of them that so many visitors stopped at the Big House.
Hannali watched the little girl Natchez standing behind the torches. He noticed about her that, though she was quite a little girl, she was not as young as she had seemed at first sight. She was marriageable.
“Yes the little girl your daughter Natchez have you looked at her lately do you know that she is old enough to get married although she is so little I want to marry her and take her to the new country with me.”
Now look at the following sequence from the unpublished fifth part of In a Green Tree. Lafferty never finished it, but even allowing for that, I find it hard to explain the narration’s apparent pleasure in these scenes on didactic grounds alone. The line about “hellishness” brings in moral judgment, but his preoccupations seem to have freer play here.
She would get little girls, nine-to-twelve-years-old, to give grown men rides on their backs or shoulders, and the ‘hour’ was always popular. Old Peggy and Monica and their sixteen-to-eighteen year old friends would also be ‘ponies’ for the Ponyride Hour, and Peggy was herself still a ponyride pony there fifty years later.
Quite a few men from the audience came up, and the little girl (she was eight years old) gave each of them a ride on her shoulders.
“At pony-ride hour, any man or boy may ride any woman or girl he wishes,” Peggy announced over the loud speakers. “Is anybody too bashful? Does anybody feel neglected? Does anybody want to ride me?”
I think that we smart kids are a new species entirely. We transcend the humans and we disregard the human proprieties. The things that those kids, the things that we kids, are doing now are awful. There's a touch of hellishness here, and I feel that a lot of it is passing through me.
“I am Irene, and I try to be ladylike just often enough to keep them guessing. Lets fall in love with each other just for fun.” So Irene and the boy fell in love with each other, and went to get the Swiss bells.
Irene Tyrone invited John Raffels, the Swiss Bell boy, to ride on her shoulders, because she knew he was in love with her; and she carried him on her shoulders all around the club for half an hour.
The daughter was much livelier than the mother, and her strange and haunting ugliness caused men who saw her for the first time to shout in sudden delight “My god, a Goblin, a real live Goblin! I'll give anything in the world to have that one.”
By the time Lafferty writes these passages, the didacticism seems almost incidental. This is more about Ponyride Hour than about any moral message. As much as I admire him, I see his libidinal wiring on display, sparking like a downed power line after a hurricane.
In whatever other ways Lafferty is brilliant, he is brilliant at creating his weird kids, which is a throughline in his work. His strange, brutal, violent, innocent, corrupt, amoral children. They are powerful creations, vortices. That erotic charge often seems bound up with their imaginative power, making it worth understanding how innocence, affection, cruelty, and desire work together in him. I suspect there are interesting comparisons to be made with Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie, and with the conjunction of childhood, violence, and fantasy in Henry Darger’s outsider art. The Helen Dulantys, Oreads, and Carnadine Thompsons are no more real children than are the Vivian Girls.
