"Great Green Goat" (1958)

“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.”

Being a big Barry Mazberg fan, I love that anecdote. It's true that

“Johnny Crookedhouse” is not a good story. But it is an interesting one, in that it sets out an early attempt by Lafferty to explore what would become a major theme in his work: the Law of Intellectual Constancy. So yes, not great, but interesting. The unpublished “Great Green Goat” might be Lafferty’s worst story because it is neither good nor interesting. I’ll try to say why it doesn’t work after the plot.

This time, Lafferty gives us a man later identified as Peter Potsworth. He comes home three days early to find the house in a state of chaos. This offends his meticulous standards. Outraged, he retrieves his automatic pistol, declaring, “This has to end… It will end tonight.” He goes to his wife's empty room, a scene of calmness in the midst of disorder, where clothes lie like fallen leaves. There are scattered candy wrappers. There is a dirty garden trowel. Peter eventually finds a rambling list she had been writing: “What will old Fussbudget do when he finds out that I let the fish die?”

Peter’s investigation continues into the bathroom, where he finds a dead gopher and jars of writhing worms for the garden. All this fits his wife’s past behavior. The medicine chest looks like “a nest of witches.” Finally, Peter is shaken to discover his red toothbrush is wet—a violation he hates. His wife should be using her blue toothbrush. Determined to find his wife, Lila Lee, he phones her friends. They dismiss him with comments like, “Why don’t you wise up, Fussbudget?” Peter gets an answer when he receives a call from a woman with a “weirdly guttural disguised levantine voice.” Through the faux-Jewish shtick, she tells Peter that Lila is at Freddy Dinsmore’s house.

Equipped with his pistol, Peter goes to Freddy’s. He uses a glass cutter to create a perfectly circular hole in the window, carefully pocketing the piece of glass so as not to be unseemly. Inside, he follows a trail of Lila’s carelessly discarded clothing (shoes, stockings, a red belt) upstairs. He flings open a door, eyes blazing and the automatic in his hand, to find Lila and Freddy together.

But Peter isn’t raging because his wife has cuckolded him, so he mostly ignores Lila’s flimsy claim that Freddy is a newfound cousin. Instead, Peter criticizes Freddy’s untidiness, pointing to “your shirt on the bedpost and your pants on the floor.” Waving the pistol, Peter’s fury lands on its real target. He says to Lila, “Did you fire this today?” When she admits she killed a gopher with it, Peter sobs, “Then, by the great green goat, why didn’t you clean it?” He turns and leaves, leaving a bewildered Lila and a shaken Freddy.

“Great Green Goat” is prenucleation Lafferty, and because the story world is so flat, Lafferty’s compensatory fabulation (his usual technique for creating interest in the absence of characters with much interiority) does not get off the ground. What makes this one such a failure, I think, is that when it comes to stories about infidelity, readers want psychology, and Lafferty’s approach to psychology is to exteriorize it. So one feels cheated. Here is a story about an affair with no emotional stakes, no introspection, no catharsis. There is nothing like a psychological portrait. The closest we get is Peter’s red toothbrush being gendered like a firetruck, and Lila Lee’s red belt, color-coded like a scarlet woman. Her own toothbrush is blue. The only other color in the story is green, which ceases to be the green of jealousy and becomes the grotty green of dirt and slovenliness, the Peter’s Great Green Goat, not Othello’s Green-Eyed Monster.

I would go a little further. Peter Potsworth is not a man who values order if only because he is not a man at all; he is a completely flattened and trivialized metaphysical Principle of Order, a parody of Order leveled down into the neatness of an effete prig. His every action, from cutting a perfect circle in a glass door to his outrage over a messy room, is an unmediated expression of axiomatic neatness. His wife, Lila Lee, is not merely careless. She is less woman or wife than the principle of entropy itself, with her randomness and disorder as natural as fallen leaves. The story’s plot is a collision of non negotiable forces. The radical flatness is the plot. These are not characters in a realist story; they are Lafferty characters saddled with a situation that realist fiction never tires of worrying about, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. Because they are fairly typical Lafferty characters, they are incapable of much psychological change or real marital anguish, physical pain being Lafferty’s exteriorized version of psychological suffering. And there is no bloodsmell.

Flat psychological interiority joined to flamboyant verbal expressivity normally allows Lafferty to pull off plot effects other writers cannot. In this story the flatness becomes a liability. He wagers that the brevity will work in its favor, yet it does not. The distancing and defamiliarizing techniques Lafferty trades in simply block conventional reader engagement, and they damage the story’s own possibilities for compensatory fabulation, which appear only weakly exteriorized in the silly opposition of being neat and being messy. That kind of self reflexive move works in Lafferty’s bold story worlds. His genius was to see how the stratospherically high concept plot could serve as a foil to his character building. Here it points to the story’s artistic defect and its prenucleation status: we are simply too close to genre expectations of realism, or pulp versions of it, for the small gimmick to work. The stakes are too low.

By withholding psychological interiority, Lafferty also does what he usually does to delight a reader: he gives the reader other footholds, namely linguistic quirks, oddly specific details, irony, and above all the play of ideas and thematic scaffolding, here in the theme of Order versus Entropy. But it fails because the dozens of small footholds in “Great Green Goat” are not enjoyable ones. The allotropic state we associate with a Lafferty story does not appear. Peter and Lila Lee draw our focus away from it and away from human drama, and toward the puppetry of the story’s philosophical machinery. They are somehow both secondary players in this domestic non drama. The story is Lafferty at his least oceanic.