Ferguson’s Best
Anyone who wants to understand Lafferty should read all of Andrew Ferguson. If you’re new to his work, I think his best work isn’t his MA thesis or academic article, but his editorial and documentary work. I’d recommend these posts to anyone who wants to see his talent and contributions to understanding Lafferty.
Ten posts I recommend, roughly in order:
This is his strongest combination of manuscript research and criticism. He shows how Pohl’s requested changes altered the story, particularly the removal of the epigraphs and documentary collage. A brilliant piece of work.
Probably his most affecting criticism. He follows Dotty through successive households, spiritual crises, bereavement, and her final community, without losing sight of her suffering. I disagree with him on a few interpretations and details, but this is essential.
His best bibliographical detective story. He traces an obscure appearance of “One at a Time” through the magazine itself, submission records, illustrations, and the absence of a payment record. It’s a model of how rewarding Lafferty can be if you put in hard work.
He reads the ending through mutilation, the disrupted shootout, inverted Eden, frustrated Pietà, and circular chronology. He is particularly good on the connections between the Argo books. It is stronger than his introduction to the Legend itself.
One of his best pieces of close reading. He examines Joe Spade’s grammar, mangled idioms, and comic misunderstandings to show how Lafferty treats the commanding inventor of science fiction. This is a story I dislike, but Ferguson makes it interesting.
Sharp on the difference between experiencing another person’s perceptions and understanding them. He considers what the machines achieve and what they do to their users, then turns to Valery’s sensuality and capacity for love. Knowing about Valery’s bad pregnancies (Arrive at Easterwine) makes the story more powerful.
He shows how lists, exaggeration, and direct addresses to the reader draw us into the tall tale. He explains how the jokes work without spoiling them.
A comparison of four versions of the opening paragraph. He shows how changes in typography, punctuation, and lineation alter its cadence.
His most useful account of how Lafferty wrote: handwritten notes, notebook-paper drafts, successive carbons, corrections, and replacement pages. As someone who has spent a lot of time with Lafferty’s handwriting and compositional history, I find this invaluable.
He identifies Kidd’s intervention and places the manuscript and published passages side by side. I disagree with his assessment, but this shows what he is excellent at doing: finding the textual basis for possibilities that one did not know about.
Ferguson’s story entries.
His numbered entries appear below, followed by fragments and related essays. My closest posts appear beside each, with a brief comparison.
1. Antonino Vescovo. My post: 05 Misc Laff: The Novel Sequence. We agree on Antonino’s early place in Lafferty’s career; I put it beside the unpublished novels that formed his apprenticeship before genre publication.
2. Cabrito. My post: "Cabrito" (1957/1976). Ferguson calls the story liminal; I find that description too loose and distinguish the narrator’s facts from Amata’s changing claims and the diners’ beliefs.
3. Ghost in the Corn Crib. My post: "Ghost in the Corn Crib" (1959/1973). Ferguson leaves the haunting unresolved; I argue that Old Shep’s final response gives the narrator the last word and confirms Jimmy Johnston’s encounter.
4. Adam Had Three Brothers. My post: "Adam Had Three Brothers" (1957/1960). Ferguson reads the Wreck genealogy chiefly as a con; I leave open both the con and the possibility that the genealogy is literally true.
5. The Saving Grace. My post: The Willoughbys. Ferguson treats grace as a thin restraint on domestic violence; I read the Willoughby cycle as a celebration of a family’s durable, loving strength.
6. Hands of the Man. My post: "Hands of the Man" (1957/1970). Ferguson describes the shift into science fiction; I argue that the revision’s removal of Jewish names also belongs in that history.
7. I Don’t Like You. My post: "I Don't Like You". Ferguson finds no moral good to cling to; I distinguish Soapy’s honesty from Fell’s hypocrisy and the institutions’ unequal treatment of them.
8. Johnny Crookedhouse. My post: "Johnny Crookedhouse" (1957). Ferguson identifies two direct mentions of intellectual constancy; I document five and trace the idea’s sources in Ellis and de Gourmont.
9. The Ugly Sea. My post: "The Ugly Sea" (1957/1961). Ferguson sees a Jewish stereotype being subverted; I argue that the story uses the moneylender stereotype for comedy instead of undoing it.
10. Milly. My post: "Milly" (1957). Ferguson calls Dugglesby kind but oblivious; I emphasize how his professional habits suppress ordinary moral judgment and turn a corpse into research material.
11. Aloys. My post: "Aloys" (1957/1961). Ferguson reads the lecture chiefly as snake oil and the characters as Lafferty’s divided self; I find serious Laffertian ideas inside the fraudulent speech.
12. Live It Again. My post: "Live It Again" (1958) and "Of Laughter and the Love of Friends" (1975/1984). Ferguson places it in the repeated-year sequence; I pair it with “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” as another failed tale of domestic cruelty.
13. The Vanquished. My post: The Willoughbys. Ferguson reads Tom’s victory through class and the ability to become a character; I stress the Catholic household’s strength against the world outside it.
14. Bridlegoose. My post: Bridlegoose (1958). We agree about Myra’s comic ferocity; I trace the legal joke to Rabelais’s Bridoye and Conan Doyle’s litigious Frankland.
15. Seven Day Terror. My post: “Seven-Day Terror” (1962) and Exposition. Ferguson celebrates the children’s make-believe logic; I find the story unusually tidy and concentrate on its parody of science-fiction exposition.
16. Handful of Fire. My post: The Willoughbys. We agree that Myra’s theatrical anger affirms the fun of family life; I connect that domestic independence to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity.
17. The Other Side of the Moon. My post: "Other Side of the Moon" (1960). Ferguson compares its domestic estrangement to Pamela Zoline; I trace Johnny’s divided experience forward to Finnegan and Lafferty’s schizo-gash.
18. Get Off the World. My post: "Get Off the World" (1958). Ferguson finds the plot well managed and its rejection puzzling; I think the rationalized haunting and noir setting never quite support its extravagance.
19. Day of the Glacier. My post: "Day of the Glacier" (1958/1960). Ferguson reads an ecological eclipse of Cold War politics; I find a moral comedy of pride, with Eimer’s good humor exemplifying Aquinas’s virtue of eutrapelia.
20. Girl of the Month. My post: "Girl of the Month" (1958). Ferguson stresses the cerebral innocence of the farce; I connect its courtesan jokes to sexual preoccupations that become more troubling in In a Green Tree.
21. Pamponia. My post: "Pamponia" (1958). Ferguson values the experiment in epistolary form; I find the story marginal and am more impressed by how many characters it fits into so little space.
22. Chombo. My post: "Chombo" (1958). Ferguson finds the boxing plot predictable; I think the fight disguises an intricate heist whose identity reversals make the story work.
23. L'Avare. My post: "L'Avare" (1958). Ferguson calls this an unLaffertian apprentice piece; I find a carefully built theological satire in its biblical language, avarice, and unnoticed charity.
24. Club Mentiros. My post: "Club Mentiros" (1958). I build on Ferguson’s manuscript comparisons, but distinguish the club’s use as a setting in Esteban and stress the betrayal that follows its storytelling triumph.
25. Three for a Quarrel. My post: The Willoughbys. Ferguson follows Chesterton’s warning about meddling peacemakers; I read the Willoughbys’ resistance to outside interference through the Catholic principle of subsidiarity.
26. Panic Flight. My post: "Panic Flight" (1958). Ferguson attributes its rejection to science fiction’s resistance to self-criticism; I think the story fails artistically while already attacking utopian immortality and spiritual poverty.
27. Golden Gate. My post: "Golden Gate" (1958/1982). Ferguson reads a rupture between historical worlds; I place the sharper loss in the community’s ability to recognize evil through something close to liturgy.
28. Through Other Eyes. My post: Some Thoughts about "Through Other Eyes". Ferguson stresses the limits of understanding another person; I press the moral objection to Charles’s spying and distinguish differing perceptions from unequal access to reality.
29. Great Green Goat. My post: "Great Green Goat" (1958). We both think the story fails; I locate the failure in its collision of abstract Order and Entropy with a domestic plot that needs psychological depth.
30. The All-Star Series. My post: "The All-Star Series" (1958). Ferguson doubts that the story makes a larger social argument; I take the conflict between baseball’s adaptable rules and the Imperator’s legalism more seriously.
31. The Weirdest World. My post: "The Weirdest World" (1958/1961). Ferguson follows the alien’s rise and fall with sympathy; I think the comedy blunts its Catholic satire and leaves the Fall, embodied by Pete, underdeveloped.
32. The Wagons. My post: "The Wagons" (1959). Ferguson contrasts childhood’s possibilities with adult limits; I read Jim and Jimmy as two aspects of one person, an early form of Lafferty’s schizo-gash.
33. The Cliff Climbers. My post: "The Cliff Climbers" (1970). Ferguson concentrates on the professor’s misreadings; I ask whether the narrator’s supposedly corrective history is itself another imaginative reconstruction.
34. Holy Woman. My post: “Holy Woman” (1957). Ferguson entertains gin rummy as a sexual euphemism; I read the games literally, as Martha’s improbable means of escape and an instance of providential grace.
35. Red Headed Future. My post: "Red Headed Future" (1959). Ferguson sees an accomplished but unpromising realist exercise; I find a darker ambiguity in Jimmy’s promotion, which may reward his becoming another Mr. King.
36. Rain Mountain. My post: "Rain Mountain" (1959/1988). Ferguson explains the panther through the plus-one pattern; I dwell on the ending’s seven-year shift, which makes the reader the next initiate.
37. Marsilia V.. My post: “Marsilia V” (1975) and Iconographic Insetting. Ferguson weighs the story’s military experience and treatment of the enemy; I follow the butterfly net as the image that becomes the plot.
38. John Salt. My post: "John Salt" (1959/1985). Ferguson finds the miracle resistant to television; I value the teleplay’s unresolved questions and read the revised story’s ending as Eucharistic.
39. Communion of Saints. My post: "Communion of Saints" (1959). Ferguson wonders whether Lafferty’s communion includes the damned; I stress how doctrinal development clarifies an existing unity under the Church’s teaching authority.
40. Long Teeth. My post: "Long Teeth" (1959/1960). I follow Ferguson’s account of the mystery market, then trace the repeated inheritance murders as a closed loop of greed that anticipates Lafferty’s later forms.
41. Saturday You Die. My post: "Saturday You Die" (1959/1960). We agree that Henry’s disappointment begins his passage toward adulthood; I connect that loss to Lafferty’s distinction between adolescent diminishment and historical Flatland.
42. Try to Remember. My post: "Try to Remember" (1959/1960). He finds little beyond an absent-minded professor sitcom; I read the exaggerated joke as an early instance of Lafferty’s concern with cultural amnesia.
43. Thousand Dollar Melon. My post: "Thousand Dollar Melon" (1959). He treats the tale as Willy’s backstory; I keep this married, autobiographical Willy on a different fictional level from the elusive figure in the published stories.
44. Snake Cabin. My post: "Snake Cabin" (1959). He treats it as an excursion into men’s adventure; I find a recognizably Laffertian attack on the competent frontier hero.
45. Almost Perfect. My post: "Almost Perfect" (1961/1980). He reads the undertaker’s confession as the flaw in a perfect murder; I read that supposed flaw as imperfect contrition and an opening to grace.
46. Enfants Terribles. My post: "Enfants Terribles" (1959/1971). He stresses Carnadine’s precocity and the sequence’s loose chronology; I read the police investigation as a Chestertonian criticism of respectability mistaken for truth.
47. McGonigal’s Worm. My post: "McGonigal's Worm" (1959/1960). He finds the religion muted and the worm largely irrelevant; I read the sterility as chastisement and the worm as a sacramental sign of procreation.
48. The Polite People of Pudibundia. My post: "The Polite People of Pudibundia" (1959/1961). He follows Conrad and colonial mimicry; I find Chandler’s Marlowe more revealing, especially where Marlow shapes Mitzi to his desire and dies through looking.
49. The Six Fingers of Time. My post: "The Six Fingers of Time" (1959/1960). Ferguson stresses the conspiracy Vincent seeks to expose; I read Vincent’s last discovery as a possible turn toward salvation.
50. Golden Trabant. My post: "Golden Trabant" (1960/r1965/1966). He proposes an allegory of imagination; I examine the international financiers and the conspiracy traditions behind their destruction of the asteroid.
51. Loup Garou. My post: Loup Garou (1960) and "Three Shadows of the Wolf" (1974/1975). He chiefly laments what the shorter version loses; I examine how its werewolf ending changes the authority of Pidgeon’s rational explanation.
52. Goldfish. My post: "Goldfish" (1960/1996). He connects the trapped mind to Lafferty’s final illness; I trace the story’s afterlives in light verse and the death jumps of Not to Mention Camels.
53. In the Garden. My post: "In the Garden" (1961). He reads the closing joke as a possible attack on misogyny; I find that wishful and read the counterfeit Eden through original sin.
54. Snuffles. My posts: 32 Misc Laff: Snuffles DNA. Plato and Snuffles. He identifies Snuffles with Lafferty learning to make worlds; I read him as an ignorant demiurge whose ancestry runs through Plato, Gnosticism, and possibly Hume.
55. Rainbird. My post: "Rainbird" (1961). He approaches Rainbird through regrets over a late creative start; I read the return to hawking as a recovery of culture from technological obsession.
56. One Minute Before. My post: "One Minute Before" (1960). He reads the pre-creation interlude chiefly as artistic world-making; I read it through Gosse’s prochronism and Origen’s relation between creation and the end of the world.
57. All the People. My post: "All the People" (1960/1961). He stresses justice and the shifts between genres; I ask whether Trotz’s refusal exposes a failure to recognize an individual person with intellect and will.
58. One at a Time. My post: "One at a Time" (1960/1964). We agree that the tall tale draws readers into McSkee’s performance; I use Constance Rourke to explain how his talk builds a temporary community.
59. Ewe Lamb. My post: "Ewe Lamb" (1960/1985). He stresses the reversal of detective conventions; I read Beth’s misuse of Nathan’s parable as a failure of repentance and self-recognition.
60. Company in the Wings. My post: "Company in the Wings" (1960/1983). He reads the story as creative mythology rescuing what adults forget; I use Meinong and Carroll to examine the reality of imagined beings.
61. Beautiful Dreamer. My post: "Beautiful Dreamer" (1960). He calls Vivian’s return an intrusion of irrationality; I see life and grace confronting a spiritually dead husband who mistakes his refusal for reason.
62. The Man Underneath. My post: "The Man Underneath" (1960/1971). He makes recovered fun the story’s governing principle; I find the psychoanalytic scheme limiting and trace sub-c’s moral superiority to the Christian homo interior.
63. Maleficent Morning. My post: “Selenium Ghosts,” “Maleficent Morning,” and Lafferty's Originality. We agree that it is a weak story; he faults its diminishing momentum, while I read the failure through Lafferty’s struggle between originality and formal constraint.
64. Ride a Tin Can. My post: "Ride a Tin Can" (1960/1970). He treats Holly as giving the Shelni language; I read her chiefly as a listener and preserve the story’s uncertainty about where their language comes from.
65. Berryhill. My post: "Berryhill" (1960/1976). He calls this perhaps Lafferty’s darkest story; I read the murdered siblings as Catholic relics whose works of mercy turn the ending toward salvation.
66. Been a Long Long Time. My post: "Been a Long Long Time" (1966/1970). He treats the typing error as chance; I place the failure at Shakespeare’s guarded personhood, where mechanical reproduction cannot manufacture a soul.
67. Bubbles When They Burst. My post: IIep. Why Epiktistes?. He documents the suppressed reference to spirit; my Institute survey concentrates on the fatal telepathy experiments and their place in the cycle’s developing Christian cosmology.
68. Dreamworld. My post: "Dream/Dream World" (1962). He reads the reversal through external archetypes and worlds for which we are nightmares; I read it as a warning about consensus overpowering revealed truth.
69. Phoenic'. My post: "Phoenic" (1960/1980). He celebrates the ending as creative renewal; I find a commercial counterfeit of resurrection, with both John Counts and Wiedervogel turning sacred possibilities into merchandise.
70. Eurema’s Dam. My post: "Eurema's Dam" (1964/1972). He reads Albert through intellectual disability and narrative exclusion; I trace the same outsider’s inventiveness through Havelock Ellis and Lafferty’s Law of Intellectual Constancy.
71. Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas. My post: "Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas" (1960/1962). He rejects an anti-census allegory; I read the counting and annexation as political trespass that reduces persons and communities to instruments of bureaucratic power.
72. Task Force Fifty Eight and a Half. My post: "Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half" (1960/1988). He treats the rescued men’s life as a loss worse than drowning; I read their purgatorial suffering as salvation and identify the rescuing boy, not the raft, with the Church.
73. Guesting Time. My post: "Guesting Time" (1960/1965). He reads the Skandia as a caricature that leaves room for moderation; I read them as a cheerful pro-life answer to population panic before Humanae Vitae.
74. Other Kind of Animal. My post: "Other Kind of Animal" (1960). He finds pulp formula suppressing Lafferty’s identity; I argue that the changing classifications, improvised mercy, and Catholic afterlife already make the story unmistakably his.
75. The Transcendent Tigers. My post: "The Transcendent Tigers" (1961/1964). He leaves the destructive Logos unresolved; I read the needles, red cap, and inverted ball through Anaximander’s apeiron as a nightmare of sub-rational cosmic power.
76. Hog-Belly Honey. My post: "Hog-Belly Honey" (1961/1965). He calls Joe Spade a triumph of narrative voice; I find the malapropisms exhausting and argue that the rewrite blunts the original’s attack on treating people as disposable.
77. The Man Who Never Was. My post: "The Man Who Never Was" (1961-64/1967). He reads Lado as an author punished by his audience; I read the town’s destruction of records as its entry into a future governed by manufactured reality.
78. Tom O'Shanty’s Aura. My post: "The Man With the Aura" (1961/1974). He treats the aura chiefly as a trial run for later media stories; I read it as an angry Cold War allegory of American political disillusionment.
79. Whittle Come Back. My post: "Whittle Come Back" (1961). We agree that the story looks assembled from unfinished pieces; he faults its murder-mystery construction, while I call it an incompletely conceived screwball comedy.
80.1 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Ferguson starts with Hans’s character and craft; I emphasize that his mythic identities are real forces in the story, with consequences beyond personal psychology.
80.2 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 5: War and New Orleans. We both follow the Five’s fellowship in New Guinea; I supply more of its chronology and trace the ambiguity of Stein’s apparent defeat.
80.3 Archipelago. My posts: Argo Legend 5: War and New Orleans. Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Ferguson approaches Ward Fourteen through combat trauma; I also follow its ghosts and archetypal visitors as participants in the novel’s metaphysical action.
80.4 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Ferguson treats Duffey and Finnegan as facets of Lafferty; I stress that Duffey’s creations have their own reality, subject to limits he cannot control.
80.5 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 5: War and New Orleans. We agree about the group’s Catholic purpose; my account gives more attention to Dotty’s practical direction of the press and Duffey’s charitable work.
80.6 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Ferguson proposes a conflation of Peleus and Pelias; I retain the named Peleus identification and trace Casey’s later soul-trading and disputed Antichrist role.
80.7 Archipelago. My posts: Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Argo Legend 7: Later Lives and Last Things. Ferguson compares Finnegan’s companions with readers who sustain his existence; I trace his Teras nature and his place among Duffey’s Animated Marvels.
80.8 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 7: Later Lives and Last Things. He leaves hallucination open as an explanation; I take Finnegan and Theresa’s shared twelve-year marriage as evidence that their lives cross realities.
80.9 Archipelago. My posts: Argo Legend 8: The Books and Stories. Argo Legend 2: Characters, Archetypes, and Other Beings. Ferguson reads Hans’s bohemian years partly as Lafferty’s remembered youth; I connect his Orpheus identity with the cycle’s external, active archetypes.
80.10 Archipelago. My post: Argo Legend 7: Later Lives and Last Things. Ferguson follows Casey’s uneasy return to the Church; I follow its complications through his later soul-trading and disputed Antichrist role.
80.11 Archipelago (end). My posts: Argo Legend 1: Reality in the Argo Legend. Argo Legend 7: Later Lives and Last Things. Ferguson stresses mutilation and narrative anticlimax; I trace Finnegan’s deaths and returns through the cycle’s distinctions among Time, Aeon, and Eternity.
Dotty 81.0. My post: Vogelsprachekund and Dotty (1957-58/1990). Ferguson studies the opening paragraph’s manuscript forms; I trace the novel’s poetic craft through Dotty’s sonnet and Lafferty’s verse translations.
81.1 Dotty. My post: Dotty and the Pig People. We agree about the novel’s realism; I follow its possible transformation into “The Ugly Sea” and its later echoes in Past Master.
81.2 Dotty. My post: Dotty and the Pig People. Ferguson follows the households that shape Dotty’s spiritual life; I use her becoming a pig-person to read recurring figures elsewhere in Lafferty.
81.3 Dotty. My post: Dotty and the Pig People. Ferguson studies perfection in Dotty’s marriage; I make her loss of grace, and the pig-people who embody it, central to the novel.
81.4 Dotty. My post: Just How Old Is Dotty?. I place Dotty’s ending around twenty-one, not eighteen, and distinguish her return to Catholic faith from the loss of consolation.
81.5 Dotty. My post: R. A. Lafferty and Antisemitism. Ferguson separates Dotty’s words from her author; I argue that Lafferty’s documented Holocaust denial makes that separation inadequate without the archival record.
82. All But the Words. My post: IIep. Why Epiktistes?. Ferguson enjoys its comic apocalypse; I place that catastrophe at the end of the Institute’s internal chronology.
83. Once on Aranea. My post: “Once on Aranea” (1961/1972). We both recognize the resurrection parody; he reads the invasion as Lafferty spreading his fiction, while I stress the revision’s cosmic horror.
84. Seven Story Dream. My post: “Seven Story Dream” (1961/1973). Ferguson thinks Kidd’s revision restores moral coherence; I argue that Lafferty already condemns Gadberry’s false perfection and that jealousy and sexual frustration remain central.
85. Among the Hairy Earthmen. My post: “Among the Hairy Earthmen” (1966). Ferguson stresses what Pohl’s revisions cost the reader; I read the surviving story through the Church Militant, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation.
Fragments and undated work.
F1. Hell to Pay. My post: Hell to Pay (1959/1961). Ferguson reads the fragment through Faust and Fierst’s market strategy; I examine Baruch Ball, the planned reversal, and Lafferty’s early antisemitic pattern.
F2. L.H. [Leo Hughes]. My post: L.H. (1961). I agree with his account of the novel’s origins; my reading concentrates on Peter Wund as Job’s Satan and the resulting structural bind.
??. Nostos. My post: 05 Misc Laff: The Novel Sequence. Ferguson conjectures a link to Space Chantey; my chronology follows the documented expansion of the story “Space Chantey” into the novel.
Related essays.
Excerpt 2: Austro and the Colors of Heaven. My posts: The Men Who Knew Everything. “Mud Violet” (1971/1973). Ferguson stresses Watkin’s colors as a framework for stories; I emphasize Lafferty’s arguments with Watkin, especially over matter and form in “Mud Violet.”
How Lafferty Wrote. My post: Millions of Lafferty Words, Intellectual Compression, and Teasing Incompletion. Ferguson reconstructs Lafferty’s drafts and daily routine; I follow that labor into the finished work, arguing that its apparent ease conceals elaborate design and intellectual compression.
Interlude: Archipelago and the Argo Legend. My posts: Lafferty’s Use of “Worlds”. Lafferty’s Sacramental Poesis: Creation, Distinction, and Adornment. Ferguson stresses the collaboration through which worlds are made; I argue that such making depends on a divine order that survives cultural collapse.
Lafferty in Debonair. My post: “One at a Time” (1960/1964). Ferguson reconstructs the magazine appearance; I credit that research and examine how McSkee’s talk creates community.
