Empson and The Reefs of Earth
Puca dramas differ in pace and climax from the dramas of Earth people. In the high classic form, there is always a scene (very near the end) where all the bloody stuff is heaped together for the greater enjoyment and convenience of all. It is extravagant and outré. It is both tragic and comic in the tall burlesque of it. It thrills the liver and entrails and heart of the Pucas. And to Earth people it would seem rather crude and excessive. — The Reefs of Earth
A Happy Story of The Insides of Goblins And Exiles on Wrong World, Of Rootlessness and Rapacity, Degradation and Despair, Truculence and Terror, Madness and Murder All seen through the amoral Eyes of Childhood. — Or Altered World
Thinking about Lafferty and plot brought to mind these lines from a favorable online review of Lafferty’s The Reefs of Earth. Although I have read this several times in response to the work, the blog post does an excellent job of capturing what seems like a very common reaction to the book. Today I thought I’d say a little about it.
As the extermination story never really gets off the ground, I found myself wondering what the story was actually about. Lafferty seems to draw a tenuous parallel between Native Americans and the alien family that is hounded because every human can sense that they are not like them. Laffery always had great affinity for Native Americans. They feature heavily in his writing, and it isn’t the first time that he invented an alien people who make humans look like fools. But the parallel is not very strong and buried anyway under the numerous anecdotes and shaggy-dog-stories that make up the narrative. —A Sky of Books and Movies
Recall that The Reefs of Earth is the story of Lost Haven, a coal town reduced to a shell by Coalfactor Stutgard, who has found fraud more profitable than mining. He collects relief payments for absent, dead, and wholly made-up inhabitants and agricultural payments on fictitious crop histories. Marshall explains the land scheme:
“You’re smart, for an animal, Dulanty. Oh, there’s the land in the pits, quite a few sections of it. Crop histories are easily created by a man who controls the men who pass on them. Stutgard got paid for not growing cotton on land that never saw cotton, and for corn where corn was a stranger. The land had always been worthless, except for the coal, and Stutgard had originally stolen most of it for a dollar an acre. I expect to inherit all this, but that’s several steps ahead.”
At the structural center (versus narrative center) of the novel is this scheme, which seems inspired by real events or, minimally, a category of real event in Oklahoma.[^1]
Crocker murders Stutgard; the crime is blamed on Henry Dulanty, a newcomer to Lost Haven who happens to be an alien with a big family. A villainous character named Mandrake Marshall, who is involved in the fraud, wants to take over Stutgard’s racket, and Henry Dulanty is a problem. So he hunts down Henry.
Alongside this history of exploitation, murder, and persecution, there is another story. It is about the Dulanty children's little adventure. They acquire a raft and imagine having little kingdoms among the abandoned strip pits. The strip pits in Oklahoma, which you can still see, are water-filled, man-made trenches left behind by historic surface coal mining operations that started in the 1920s across the eastern part of the state. At one point the kids decide to kill everyone else so that they can have the world to themselves.
But that is not how one tends to remember the book. One remembers the children: their green eyes, their weird verses, their quarrels, their funny cruelty and murderous machinations, and their delight in the world they hate and seem to be captured and captivated by. The kids are in the foreground; the whole struggle over Lost Haven is the dangerous adult business unfolding behind their actions. The children run their kingdoms on the ruined land, and over the course of the book, their claim to ownership of Earth and their wish to conquer begin to invite comparison with the adults playing out in the background. In fact, their frank, amoral ambitions point to what the veneer of respectability hides.
The violence of the kids is funny in the way that Lafferty’s kid violence always is, and the adult violence is about as horrifying as it gets in his work. At the same time, the children only make it through by getting some help from people they at one point propose to kill. I think most readers, at least the ones who enjoy the book, follow their adventure with pleasure, but they often overlook the other plot, which is a major part of what the work does.
Before getting into that, a little background. Lafferty originally wrote what became The Reefs of Earth as a story that didn't involve alien kids, just shanty kids. It was called “The Raft,” and that story seems lost, but it was presumably a short story with genre similarities to his unfinished boys’ story “Green River Cave,” which is also a child’s adventure story. Both “The Raft” and “Green River” feature Green River. If the story were a period piece set in Oklahoma with nothing to do with aliens, as Lafferty said it was, then we can perhaps see the origin of the adult plot in the R. V. Boyer scandal.
After Lafferty broke into science fiction, he expanded the story to novella length, put on a coat of science-fiction paint, kept the shanty kids Irish by making them Pucas, and developed and expanded its overall shape. But it didn’t sell, so he went back to it and expanded it into a novel. Although “The Raft” doesn’t survive, the second-stage manuscript largely does. Called “Or Altered World,” it adds science fiction elements while keeping a clear counterpoint between the child plot and the adult plot. When one compares “Or Altered World” with the novel, one sees immediately what happened. Although Lafferty expanded some of the adult scenes and added new incidents (for example, the memorable death of Henry Dulanty’s confessor), most of the expansion centers on the children, which works because that plot is so enjoyable.
But there is a price paid. The adult plot becomes a little harder to track, maybe a little less memorable. Readers are more likely to remember the kids and the Indians than anything about Stutgard and the land scheme, which is, however, very important to understanding the role of the Indians in the book.
This brings me back to the idea of a double plot, a concept proposed by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson argues that a double plot organizes a work around two distinguishable courses of action whose relationship helps create the whole's meaning. Each plot has its own participants, purposes, conflicts, and lines of development, and characters and events may belong to both. One action may be more prominent, but the second contributes something that changes our understanding of the first. Their connection can be causal: events in one affect the course of the other. They can be comparative: similar situations develop differently. Repeated parallels, contrasts, and metaleptic crosshatching work in concert to create a texture that all but tells the reader to interpret the complete set of actions together.
Empson puts the relation this way:
The two parts make a mutual comparison that illuminates both parties (‘love and war are alike’) and their large-scale indefinite juxtaposition seems to encourage primitive ways of thought (‘Cressida will bring Troy bad luck because she is bad’). This power of suggestion is the strength of the double plot; once you take the two parts to correspond, any character may take on mana because he seems to cause what he corresponds to or be Logos of what he symbolises. (34)
In other words, in a double plot one action comments on another action, often across large spans of differences. Empson was a socialist, so he was interested in class, but he also points out that this cross-commentary happens across different levels of seriousness and tone, which I think we see in The Reefs of Earth. In that situation, a comic action may show hidden assumptions that a tragic action makes impressive or moving; the tragic action may underscore the suffering the comedy treats lightly. The upshot is a deepening ambiguity: one admires the characters while seeing the limits of their judgment. Neither action necessarily supplies the final verdict on the other.
We see this kind of thing in The Reefs of Earth when we contrast the war the kids wage on the Lost Haven kids with the shocking murder of Henry Dulanty. Marshall shoots him repeatedly, and Crocker fires the final shot into his face.
First, the comedy of the strip-pit war in the kid plot:
“Truss the prisoners,” ordered Peter, one of the most astute eight-year-old generals in the world. The Stinkers were bound up, and a rock tied around the neck of each. Elizabeth hit each of them sharply on the head with a pipe wrench, and Charles and John booted them off the craft to their destruction. “Death and destruction!” Helen sang. “See all the nice bloody water.” And the Dulantys began to jubilate, and let their guard down. For, possibly because of faulty staff work, the spot of execution was near water only two feet deep. This was the Stinkers’ own water, and they knew the shallows. They swarmed onto shore, for only their arms had been tied, and disappeared around a shoulder of rock. Following them on shore, after a stunned interval, was no good. Kids always know their own stronghold, and the Stinkers knew theirs. They had escaped.
Then the tragedy of Henry’s death in the adult plot:
Henry Dulanty was on his feet again, and then down once more, gut-shot by Marshall. “Too many shots are hard to explain,” Crocker said dryly. “You’re excited, Marshall. Finish him off this time, and then change guns for Butterfield here.” “In my own way, Crocker,” Marshall panted. “Come on Dulanty! One more time! Come get a piece of me—you think!” Dragons’ Children Hatching, Growing—Henry was up again, but wobbly. He knew that he was dying, but he had a sudden humor to spook his killer in dying. He moved three steps almost too fast to follow, then stumbled and grappled into Marshall, falling, and sending a sudden wave of fear through that man. Marshall screamed, but Crocker shot Dulanty in the face. Crocker was cool as ice when there was killing to be done. Henry Dulanty fell and lay still. “What’s a goblin like inside, Dulanty?” Marshall shouted, quickly recovering from one insanity into another. “Let’s spill you out a little more and see.” “That’s enough,” said Crocker. “He’s dead. Don’t mark him up any more. This much will be hard enough to explain.” Come the Green-Eyes, Come Requiting—Henry’s shot face had become somewhat unhuman in repose, but not less than human. The Dulantys could manage to look like regular people, till they had to laugh, or die.
In The Reefs of Earth, the double plot hooks up the children’s plan to take possession of the world to the adults’ vicious battle over land and money. The two stories become one chain of events, with each informing judgment of the other. Miss that and you get an escapist fantasy about goblin kids.
[^1]: In Oklahoma, R. V. Boyer, director of the Oklahoma County Welfare Board, participated in a relief fraud in 1935 very similar to it. Boyer and a druggist used fabricated requisitions in the names of people who had neither signed the claims nor received the supposed assistance. His conviction was upheld in 1939. The scheme involved real people falsely listed as recipients, rather than Stutgard’s dead and invented Lost Haven people, but the principle was similar: false beneficiary records produced real public money. I can't prove Lafferty knew about the case, but it is the kind of malfeasance he has in mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did.
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