"Company in the Wings" (1960/1983)

Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air. "I’m sure that I know that grin from somewhere," Professor Dodgson mumbled. Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone. "If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything," said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that anyone ever saw of Simon Frakes in that neighborhood.

Fairbridge O'Boyle is a professor. He often wakes in the morning with a sense of unremembered pleasure, finding himself standing and clothed but unable to recall where he has been. His unusual associate, Simon Frakes, is delivering a series of academic lectures. The topic of these lectures is Simon’s theory that all imagined beings and objects possess literal reality within a "psychic pool" or a "limbus of those not yet born." Humans do not invent these entities; they encounter them through imagination. Simon demonstrates his theory by materializing a passage-penny, an "obolus," from a five-line drawing. He can pull it off the page, and it allows one to cross the mythological River Cocytus.

Simon takes Fairbridge across the river into a multitude of alternate universes. In one pseudo-bucolic world, they meet people and objects that only exist in the physical dimensions visible to the observer, a kind of anamorphosis that adjusts with the view. Chairs can lack back legs, and bottles can have no reverse sides. Fairbridge experiences hundreds of these universes. It feels transcendent when it is happening. Despite his repeated vows to remember his night travels, he wakes up every morning as a "morning fool." The memories are gone.

A songwriter named Benny B-Flat also learns the secret of the obolus from Simon, and he decides he wants to dip into the psychic sea for new musical tunes. Unlike Fairbridge, Benny is an opportunist, but he somehow retains the technique and uses it to bring back melodies that become commercial hits, which is how the story ends. Before this, however, we learn something important about Simon Frakes. Simon reveals to the skeptics attending his lecture that he was never born and vanishes, leaving a lingering grin behind.

So the good-will mission of Simon Frakes had been without effect. Nobody had understood what he was trying to tell them, not even his friend Fairbridge O’Boyle. And nobody knows how to visit the myriad and interesting and valid worlds of the unborn, the company waiting in the wings.

The story concludes with Fairbridge unsuccessfully searching for the hidden doors to these worlds, while the ability to visit the "company in the wings" is known to certain children and Benny B-Flat.

Lafferty completed “Company in the Wings” in 1960, and he kept working on it until it took its final form in 1971. It is a version of the "oceanic," this time in the form of a geography of imagination, but without the sea of archetypes that becomes important to Lafferty. Instead, we have the entire universe of fictional characters (including Richard Nixon). The story is an excellent place to find a reading list tied to Lafferty’s reading.

I read it as a fantasy, perhaps inspired by Alexius Meinong (1853-1920). Lafferty owned Copleston’s history of philosophy, but Copleston wouldn’t get to Meinong until Volume VII, which was published three years after Lafferty’s first draft. Alexius Meinong argued that objects possess their properties (Sosein) independently of whether they exist (Sein)—the golden mountain is golden whether or not it exists—and that being and non-being are equally external to the object as such, a condition he called Außersein.

Simon's lecture topic is pretty close to this: "They are not because we imagine them. We imagine them because they are . . . . To imagine the non-existing is an impossibility." What separates Simon from Meinongianism is the geographical element that becomes so important to Lafferty’s oceanic. Meinong placed the ontological status of objects beyond being and non-being, but Simon makes Außersein experiential: the Limbus Nondum Natus is a place, there is a river to cross, and the obolus is a magic ticket to it. Where its prenucleation origin point shows is how quickly it moves across the space of Außersein. Lafferty’s oceanic mode is far more interested in teasing out the associational, the travel experience, as it were. One can see its prenucleation DNA by reading it alongside Lafferty’s great oceanic short story “Configuration of the North Shore.”

Lafferty is playing with ideas, but not with archetypes. The pseudo-bucolic world isn’t dreamy in the way “Configuration” is. It is a thought experiment, and the shotgun-wedding device is one of the rare moments when Lafferty’s humor feels tacked on: he has already said what he wanted to say, but he needs a way to end the scene.

Returning to Meinong, the pseudo-bucolic world is filled with Meinong’s incomplete objects (unvollständige Gegenstände), objects that are indeterminate with respect to certain properties. If seen from the front so that the back legs are not visible, the chair will have front legs but no back legs until it is observed; the room can have two or three walls but never four at once; the parthen O'Boyle meets has no back to her dress until she turns around. “If one thing hid another, it was not necessary for the hidden thing to be.”

The idea of the obolus as a silver key and what happens to O'Boyle alludes to the second line of the nursery rhyme:

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, Show me first your penny; Says Simple Simon to the pieman, Sir, I haven’t any.

The palimpanic dimension of the story links this to Theo Marzials’s “Twickenham Ferry.” Lafferty quotes only the first part of the ballad at the start of Section One and leaves out lines relevant to O'Boyle's loss of passage, something Lafferty often does, trusting the reader to reconstruct how the paratexts work together:

"Ahoy! and O-ho! and it’s I’m for the ferry,” (The briar’s in bud and the sun going down) “And it’s late as it is and I haven’t a penny— Oh! how can I get me to Twickenham Town?”

Instead of more "Twickenham Ferry," Lafferty writes his own version for Benny B-Flat:

What bride and what ferry, what bright ford, is this it? What half-penny passage so open to get! If miss you this crossing, forever you’ll miss it. To worlds in the wings all unbornable yet. — Benny B-Flat, Cocytus Crossing

I enjoy Lafferty’s games with his paratexts, and what follows this is an especially cool one, with a metafictional trick up its sleeve. It lets the reader imagine hearing some of the music Benny has brought back from the far side of Außersein. It is music that O’Boyle has lost. And if it sounds familiar, don't think of “Twickenham Ferry,” because Lafferty has the explanation:

[Benny] still goes and listens to Fiddle-Foot Jones and a thousand others in a thousand worlds. He brings back the tunes that serve his purpose, so he stands high in his profession. His loot is on all the jukes, and they have what is necessary for good tunes: They sound familiar. And they are out of this world.

I'll wrap up with a word on Lewis Carroll.

He is clearly a major influence on the story, from Lafferty’s use of the Cheshire Cat’s smile as a key to understanding Simon Frakes's strange grin, to Lafferty’s Meinongian play with the logic of incomplete objects. With this in mind, I think a key intertext is the famous ending of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you recall, Alice refuses to believe that the characters in Wonderland are real, becoming decidedly anti-Meinongian as she shouts to the court cards, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” That brings the fantasy to an end: Alice startles herself awake and then tells her sister about her strange dream of Wonderland.

In “Company in the Wings,” Lafferty writes, “Except that in every group of children there is one who knows. He will do the trick, and the other children will wonder a little.” Alice is one of those kids who can do the trick. She is a counter-image to Lafferty’s O’Boyle, who repeatedly wakes up confused, clothed, and standing, one of the most melancholy images in Lafferty.

Fairbridge O’Boyle had been the ‘morning fool’ before, waking empty from exciting dreams that he could not hold onto. But there was a difference this time. He did not awake in bed, but standing and clothed. He did not know how he had spent the night, save that it had been elsewhere and that it had been pleasurable.

Fairbridge O’Boyle did visit many more than a hundred universes with Simon Frakes that night. He swore that he’d remember them all. And he didn’t. He woke at dawn, standing and clothed and oblivious, a morning fool.

And Fairbridge woke in the morning, standing and clothed, a morning fool with the manifold memories of the past night slipping away from him forever.

But Fairbridge O’Boyle wasn’t one in a million. Fairbridge was an ordinary man who now worried because he woke up every morning standing and clothed and with his hat on his head. He woke with residue of unremembered pleasure and with frustration of loss. He worried because he didn’t know where he spent his nights.

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