Historical Lafferty

A short post about something that does not seem to be recognized by most Lafferty fans, and that seems to me important: the place of the historical fiction in the Lafferty canon. Most people who love Lafferty love Okla Hannali, which was published by Doubleday in 1972, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1973, and later issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 as part of its American Indian Series. Lafferty was amused by this Oklahoma Press cover, writing,

But the picture on the cover is another matter. When somebody showed that picture to Hannali, where he was pitching horseshoes with some friends in that green meadow just inside the Pearly Gates, he burst out with the loudest laughter heard since St. John Bosco arrived at the Place Itself. “That is supposed to be me,” he howled, “that shriveled-up Cherokee with that puckered-up persimmon-eating look! I am a Choctaw man as wide as I am high. I lived happy, and I died happy, and I am happy in this fun place beyond all others.” Then he laughed so loud that God Himself had to intervene with a “Dool it, Hannali, not quite so loud.” Yes, it is funny. I got a good laugh out of it myself . . . And no, I will not let the picture be changed. That would spoil the joke.

Lafferty was proud of the book's reception and noted that it received over 100 reviews at its release, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. With humor, he himself let it be called "Great Undiscovered American Novel."

At some point, its history should be written. It was optioned for film and television multiple times, beginning in 1972, with a series of renewals totaling $14,000 in fees. Lafferty discussed further options in 1979 but declined to write the screenplay himself. He said he lacked aptitude for the format.

What is extraordinary about all this, from the genre-centric point of view, is that Lafferty had written all three of his historical novels before he decided to major in science fiction. Under its original title, The Fall of Rome was completed by January 10, 1963, and even went to Lafferty’s first con-man of an agent, A. L. Fierst; both Okla Hannali and Esteban had been written by March 1963.

In other words, almost all of Lafferty’s science fiction, with its recurring concern for world loss, was written after Lafferty had already worked out his fictional exploration of historical world loss in fictional form. The Oceanic novels in which the world ends are, in many ways, translations of his early philosophy of history, which he had worked out in his forties in what I call the pre-nucleation period, with the later nucleated fantasies serving, to a large degree, as genre translations of ideas he had developed elsewhere. In many ways, this general transformation is what nucleation means, with nucleation tracking how Lafferty folded aspects of Forte, Jung, and his varied other interests into his imaginative process.

Few, if any, readers think of the historical novels in this way, perhaps with the exception of the unpublished Esteban, which is sometimes mistakenly taken to belong to a different period of Lafferty’s writing than Okla Hannali. That is partly because Okla Hannali and The Fall of Rome were published in the 1970s. They are positioned in the minds of Lafferty readers after the three novels of 1968 and Fourth Mansions in 1969. This, however, could not be more wrong if one wants to understand Lafferty's development as a writer.

To put the matter in perspective, Lafferty had written Okla Hannali and The Fall of Rome before he created Epiktistes. He had written all three historical novels before most stories one associates with the first flowering of Lafferty, the period that includes such stories as “The Pani Planet,” “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” “Primary Education of the Camiroi,” and “Slow Tuesday Night,” to name only a few. For this reason, almost all of Lafferty’s science fiction should be understood in the post-imaginative context of his historical work, because it largely translates his historical and religious preoccupations.