"Girl of the Month" (1958)

“I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.” “I am a live one all right. Sign here and we’ll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you’ll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.” “Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.” “To talk to? Are you a talker? I had a talker once before. Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished talking, O Boy. I hope you can do as well.”

A warning at the outset: this post begins with an early and pretty innocent Lafferty sex farce, then offers one interpretive key through the history of Greek prostitution. It then moves on to difficult questions in Lafferty as part of a broader line of thought on erotics in his fiction. I seem to be the only person interested in this topic, and I know it is not standard-issue Lafferty.

“Girl of the Month” is another early story, completed in February 1958 and never published. Lafferty tried to shop it to men’s magazines of the day—Gent, Escapade, Rogue, and Adam—as well as to The New Yorker and Esquire. It has a spicy premise, but no one would mistake its content for titillation or crypto-erotica. Instead, it is a jokey vignette about a sexy, low IQ escort and a pedantic autodidact. The erudite jokes come from an author who was himself one half autodidact (he had that first-rate prep school education) who usually keeps his pedantry in check. The story is him showing off while making fun of showing off.

The main character is Mansard Moluney. Mansard compulsively joins the niche mail-order "Month" clubs that were a mainstay of mid-twentieth-century American culture. From the clubs, he gets everything from rare books to exotic sausages. One day, while looking through material from a book club, he carelessly signs and mails an advertising card, thus inadvertently joining the exclusive "Girl of the Month Club." Mansard thinks he has subscribed to receive a monthly art photograph. In reality, it is an escort service. The pedantic Mansard failed to read the fine print, so he is surprised when a brassy young woman calling herself Ginger arrives at his door on the seventeenth day of the month. She makes her business clear:

She kissed him with kindly passion, and sweeping into the room, opened her weekend bag and set out a small but select number of items: a fifth of Maryland Rye Whisky, an album of seductive records, a small but expensive portable smorgasbord, a handful of yellow jackets, and a few small objects which he did not comprehend.

Are those sex toys? And then she starts to strip. Throughout, Mansard is oblivious. Ginger keeps trying to seduce him, but Mansard just sees it as an opportunity to have a captive audience:

“This may be the most delightful club I ever joined. My greatest need is always someone to talk to. Many people, comical as it seems, consider me a shattering bore.”

He mistakes the situation for Whore of Mensa territory. So he talks, and he talks, ignoring her sexual advances and innuendos as she repeats words like "playmate" in his relentless monologues on obscure historical topics. These include the ancient origins of sheer silk from Kos, etymological theories of early liquors, Carian burial customs, and so forth. Bored by his nattering, Ginger falls dead asleep. Mansard is fine with talking to her sleeping, scantily clad body until dawn. In the morning, Ginger wakes, takes a gratuity, and gets ready to leave. Then she pauses at the door to warn Mansard to skip his upcoming selections:

“Listen, peach pie, you know when you belong to this club you don’t have to take all the selections . . . April and Mae and Junie are all right. But let August go by. And whatever you do, skip November! I wouldn’t want to be responsible for what might happen if you pulled that talking routine on her.”

Those particular women, especially the November girl won’t be so easygoing with him.

More vignette than story, “Girl of the Month” interests me in its use of the kind of trivia Lafferty always brings into his work, not because the story deals with sex. Sex is all over Lafferty. It is symptomatic that people miss this. The most relevant piece of trivia in “Girl of the Month” is the distinction between the pornai and the hetairai in classical Greek culture. There is a great deal of interpretative controversy on the issue, but the predominant view is that pornai were ordinary prostitutes, usually lower-status, openly commercial, and often tied to brothels or pimps, while hetairai were elite courtesans, valued not just for sex but for charm, wit, education, social polish, and cultivated companionship in male social life. In Lafferty’s story, that distinction is a big part of the joke, because Mansard casts Ginger as a hetaira when he compares her calypso dancing in black lingerie to one “described in Greek verse”:

“You are not a hetaera, are you?” “Gee, glamour boy, I don’t even know what one is.”

The situation is a coarse commercial sexual appointment, closer to the pornē, except that the irony flips again, since Mansard wants conversation and intellectual companionship, which is the very thing a hetaira was supposed to provide in addition to sex, while Ginger expects coitus. November’s girl, a real pornē, isn’t going to take it.

Again, it is jokey, not titillating. One sure sign is that Ginger sits on Mansard’s lap. It is here that Lafferty’s own libidinal interests enter the story in a compromised form. The detail is small, yet it is fascinating, because this is just not how it works in Lafferty. As anyone who reads him knows, one of his recurring fantasies, to judge by how often it appears in both the fiction and the letters, was sitting on women’s laps and piggyback riding women. It also appears in many Lafferty scenes in which male characters stand on women, ride them like ponies, or are carried by them, often slung their shoulders.

At times, this fantasy leads into uncomfortable territory, though he usually approaches it in so eccentric a manner that it is likely to titillate very few readers. Proof? No one thinks of Lafferty as an erotic writer. In Lafferty, the fantasy is wrapped up in playfulness and intimacy (full-body contact, power play, mock cruelty, real cruelty, powerlessness, masochism, and, usually, youthfulness) no matter who is participating.

A clear extended example of it can be found in the unpublished fifth part of In a Green Tree, In the Thunderbolt Mountains, which Lafferty was working on in 1987 after his retirement. In it a 1978 version of the Turnabout Party, first introduced in Part I of Green Tree, takes place, in which the boys ride the girls and some of them wear spurs:

I think this is Lafferty’s version of titillation. Sedalia Shipwake’s awareness that something is disordered about it perhaps points to a plotline involving the character Peter Lavender-McClure that Lafferty never fully developed before abandoning the manuscript. Peter is a mysterious boy with two homosexual fathers (this goes deep into the Green Tree backstory), one of whom had been married to Father Cloud McKay, an ex-priest who is presumably also a pedophile, before marrying each other. He is also perhaps an infesting poltergeist.

Cloud McKay had gone all to the bad. He had had a homosexual relationship with Cletus McClure. Then he had such a relationship with Peter Alfred Pitchbende. Then he had a homosexual marriage with Peter Alfred; it was performed by another ex-priest. Then Peter Alfred Pitchblende and Cletus McClure had a homosexual marriage with each other . . . between them they were the male parent of Peter Lavender-McClure.

Father McKay sues for bigamy in California. Whether the hellishness Sedalia senses is tied to all this Peter Lavender-McClure business or not, what also happens parallels other transgressive sexual material from In a Green Tree. I am thinking about Edith O'Melody Drakos's "horny parties” that involve nude parthens in set off rooms. InThunderbolt Mountains, Lafferty writes that the grown men get their turn during the "Ponyride Hour":

Peggy had had these Ponyride hours several times a week. 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.

This material belongs to that terra incognita of erotics in Lafferty, which readers have either not thought about or, if they have, have chosen to be silent about. When In the Thunderbolt Mountains is published, as I understand it will be, one will see some of the stranger regions in Lafferty. The Part 5 fragment of In a Green Tree was written not to break into a market at the beginning of his career but to satisfy the needs Lafferty’s own inner world. To begin struggling with its geography, a distinction from Roland Barthes’s may be useful, that between ordinary pleasure (plaisir), which comforts the reader, and a more intense bliss (jouissance), which pushes the subject beyond cultural norms.

A specifically Laffertian jouissance is present in the Turnabout Party of In the Thunderbolt Mountains. Lafferty enjoys it. It nearly takes over the manuscript’s early movement, as if one reads Lafferty’s experience of reading himself as he revisits imagery with a powerful purchase on his imagination.

“Girl of the Month,” by contrast, belongs to the order of plaisir. It is a patently commercial effort, perhaps one that started as an assigned exercise, certainly one catering to the middle. The sexual subtext of “Girl of the Month,” and indeed Lafferty’s frequent prostitution theme more generally, should shock no one familiar with his work. As stereotyped plaisir, it is quite easy to understand, especially when set alongside the jouissance of ponyride hour.

Girl of the Month Notes.pdf

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