"Heart Grow Fonder" (1973/1975)

“What would not I give to wander Where my old companions dwell? Absence makes the heart grow fonder; Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!” — Thomas Haynes Bayly, “Isle of Beauty”

The noonday devil is walking among the Cepheids, and Lucifer who fell like lightning is still falling. At the same time Christ has not been born, and the time is today, and the world has already ended and exploded into something bigger. We are all of us contemporaries for we all live in eternity. Belloc wrote that it is good not to have to return to the Church. But the smartest man in the world (we both smile, Hans, for we know that I am a charlatan) left the Church, and so had to return. In the Father's House there are mansions even for Charlatans. — Archipelago

Swag-in-Radert and the scarved man turned to go out when they had finished their swift and final transactions. And Simon-in-Swag stood in their way. But that inner Swag glazed his eyes and went by Simon without seeming to see him, and who can say what a man with a scarf over his face might see?

This is a long Lafferty story but an exceptionally smart one. There are so many ways into it. It draws on the idea of the noonday devil, that recurring figure of acedia that Lafferty uses elsewhere. Finnegan and others know him. Lafferty purposely avoids the phrase, but make no mistake, the noonday devil is the story’s animating metaphor. Lafferty must have been thinking about it because he builds the story around both noon and the diabolical. Put differently, Lafferty transforms the phrase into a plot, and we get a conte cruel of sacramental betrayal, perpetuated by a main character, a lousy husband, who today would be said to have intimacy issues.

At another level, the story is a Christian allegory about sinking into the stench of sin. There is an awful lot of smell here, so one should note the olfactory descent and how the main character comes to savor the stink. As far as I know, no one has written about the moral economy of smell in Lafferty’s work. It is on full display. For me, the most vivid and telling use of the trope in his work can be found in the unpublished “Sex and Sorcery,” where its moral coding is also vertical but cringeworthy:

“Look, midget,” I said. (He was really a big man, but it sounded as if he might have a midget mind.) “I am Jeb Porno, and what you smell is ascent that I invented myself and that I sell for four dollars a little spraycan. It is named Pit and Crotch and is just plain the latest thing in scents.”

At yet another level, the story is an accomplished entry in Lafferty’s lifelong sequence about divided identity, taking the form of what the story calls somamorphology, or body swapping, with several metaphysical twists.

So, where to start? With the title, perhaps.

It obviously alludes to the modern proverb: absence makes the heart grow fonder. The line originates in a nearly forgotten, highly sentimental poem from 1844 by the English poet Thomas Haynes Bayly. When the story’s protagonist, Simon Radert catches one last glimpse of his wife, Norah, he quotes Bayly. Simon is quite simply a Pharisee and a Philistine, but Pharisees and Philistines can be sentimental, especially when they are self-pitying. I’ll add that the unusual last name “Radert” appears to be an anagram of “trader,” probably because of how he trades down with the wife swapping, a meta-game in the story.

In the early twentieth-century glory days of the family-owned upright piano and bench that contained sheet music, Bayly’s poem was probably best known for having been set to music; one can almost hear it play as Simon is hoisted by his own petard. We expect the hoisting by the halfway point because of the name of the man Simon trusts above all others is Baalbek.

After summarizing the study, I’ll share my notes on the formally clever ending. It almost looks as if the story exists for the ending. It dazzles, with Lafferty juggling language to track people who aren't what they seem. This is the kind of self-imposed challenge one finds in “Junkyard Thoughts.” There is nothing else quite like it in his work.

Lafferty begins by introducing Simon Radert and his wife, Norah. They acquire new neighbors, the conspicuously sinful Henry H. Swag and the aptly named Buxom Jean. At first, Simon shows the sharp instincts of a hypocrite. He recognizes Swag for the creep he is. Soon enough, however, Simon finds himself being the creeper, examining the magazines and paperback books Swag leaves out for trash pickup. Among them are titles devoted to identity exchange and “People Exchange Mechanisms.” Swag eventually catches Simon in the act and offers him a business card, or rather several business cards, identifying himself as a Mind-Changer who works by “Highly Scientific Methods. By Appointment Only.”

During a noon-hour walk at work, Simon experiences a sudden physical shock. His clothes feel tight, and he finds himself bouncing along on his heels in Swag’s manner. That evening, Norah, flushed with a post-coital glow, tells him that he came home at noon for an encounter, and she is delighted that the noonday devil that had settled on their marriage has been overcome. This leads Simon to realize that Swag has inhabited his body, though there will be a further twist, since there is good reason to believe that it was in fact another man, Gaspar Okuma, who cuckolded him.

The next day, Simon stays at his office to experience the transformation again. He finds that the walls themselves seem to change as he is physically transformed into Swag’s body, while his inner voice remains his own. Simon soon begins using the daily noon-hour exchanges to investigate Swag’s business, which involves placing clients into the bodies of wealthy men for purposes of theft and manipulation. There is a great deal of fine Lafferty writing here, but the essential point is that Simon decides to use his own expertise as a paper-shuffler to counter-swindle Swag. He liquidates Swag’s assets, transfers them into the Radert accounts, and, while inhabiting Swag’s body, sleeps with Buxom Jean. The corruption takes hold quickly. Simon even names his scheme “Project Greener Grass.” He plans to defraud the defrauder and then flee to Rio de Janeiro with Norah, though he admits that he is fonder of Norah in her absence than in her presence.

As the day of the flight approaches, Simon consults both a scientist, Baalbek, and a priest, Tupper, deepening the story's allegorical structure. He learns that the body-swapping follows an inverse-square law and may be linked to diabolism. He also discovers that Swag has been simultaneously inflating the apparent value of the Radert accounts, making Simon’s net worth appear five times larger than it truly is. On the morning of the flight, a massive financial scandal involving a man named Gaspar Okuma breaks into the open. The self-satisfied Simon, however, heads to the airport to meet Norah and escape to Rio with the money.

At the airport, Lafferty stages one of his finest set pieces involving identity exchange. Simon, still in Swag’s body, confronts the man occupying his own Radert body with a gun and demands that they switch back immediately. Another jolt follows, and Simon believes that he has returned to his own body. He is then accosted by a man wearing a scarf, a man who bears Simon’s face and speaks with his voice. Simon now understands that he has been caught in a three-way exchange and is himself wearing the fugitive Gaspar Okuma's face. The real Swag and the man in Simon’s body, now Okuma, board the plane for Rio, leaving Simon behind to face what Lafferty will make him endure for a long while.

This is a Lafferty story that rewards close rereading, if only to see how carefully he hides the presence of Okuma early on as he builds toward the terrific confrontation at the airport. As a story, “Heart Grow Fonder” reads like peak form prenucleation Lafferty, akin to the unpublished detective stories he wrote, but here with Lafferty in full command of his powers and techniques.

“And forgive me also, Gaspar,” said the Whoever-in-Radert-body, “but who has the power of forgiving you? It is said that even the angels weep when one of the bright ones falls. Ah, the pity of it!” And this man with Simon's face and body also was looking at Simon and calling him Gaspar. That bleeding hypocrite! He was Gaspar with his mealy mouth, and he had stolen Simon's body in a-three-way switch, and had left Simon to face the retributory music. [emphasis added]

Heart Grow Fonder Notes.pdf

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