"Hog-Belly Honey" (1961/1965)

A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. It has been said, that a man of wit could not resist it; that it was a voluntary deviation from sense. But I believe he indulged himself in it, as a practice of the age, to show his reading or his memory, and to divert by producing something unexpected. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (1765)

THE ANGEL. Yes. You are all now under judgment, in common with the rest of the English speaking peoples. Dont gape at me as if you had never seen an angel before. PROLA. But we never have. THE ANGEL [relaxing] True. Ha ha ha! Well, you thoroughly understand, dont you, that your records are now being looked into with a view to deciding whether you are worth your salt . . . THE ANGEL [reassuring them in a pleasantly offhanded manner] Then you will simply disappear: that is all. You will no longer exist. — George Bernard Shaw, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934)

Let’s start with the plot.

Our main character is Joe Spade, a self-proclaimed flat-footed genius and inventor. Joe visits an anapsychologist (a head-grifter) because he has too much stuff in his head. At the session, Joe breaks the doctor’s glasses, and he is given the advice, “It is not good for Man to be alone.” Believing the doctor has “hit the nail on the noggin,” Joe thinks he needs a business partner. Enter Maurice Maltravers, a down-on-his-luck intellectual whom Joe decides is his twin, calling him “as much like me as two feet in one shoe.”

Joe recruits Maurice, who explains that he has been barred from the university computer he needs to finish building his Ultimate Machine. Joe takes him to his own lab, which is a converted horse barn, and shows that the finest calculator in the world is the one in his own head. Now understanding that Maurice is building a nullifier—a machine that can also posit moral and ethical judgments and make philosophical pronouncements—Joe offers his help. Combining Maurice’s theory and Joe’s intuitive engineering, they get the device in a week, in part by letting the machine itself decide its final components. Joe names it the Hog-Belly Honey, while Maurice prefers a Greek name, the Pantophag.

At a Trade Fair, the two give a demonstration, a spectacularly successful one. The machine makes candy wrappers thrown at it disappear. It cleans out a man’s stuffed briefcase. It eliminates anything that is “no good for nothing.” Things get serious when Maurice wonders how many people have visited their booth. Being an automatic calculator, Joe gives him the exact figures: nine thousand three hundred fifty-eight have entered, nine thousand two hundred ninety-seven have left, and forty-four remain. Maurice says, “It doesn’t add up.” At that moment, Joe feels “the hair riz up on the back of my neck.” He cottons on to the fact that the machine has been nullifying attendees.

Understanding the immediate danger, Joe whispers a warning to Maurice to flee: “Crank the cuckoo... hit the macadam!” But Maurice says, “Je ne comprends pas,” and goes back to his sales pitch. Joe escapes alone by jumping onto a departing sky-taxi. Later, from the safety of Mexico, he contacts Maurice via a Voxo communicator, but Maurice is now trapped in a closet by an angry mob. Joe cracks a dark joke, then switches off the device as Maurice make gurgling noises. The story ends with Joe back in town. He says the Hog-Belly Honey was too logical for safety. Now he is looking for a new partner—a genius who “understands me when the scuppers are down.”

Despite being much loved by many Lafferty readers, this is one of my least favorite of the well-known Lafferty stories. I’m sure it is because what others delight in—the fun with language—gets in the way of the Lafferty I prefer: the one who uses his own language so strangely and so surprisingly and often opaquely.

This connects to something in reading James Joyce. By far my least favorite episode of Ulysses is “Nausicaa,” not only because of how odious I find Gerty MacDowell, the small mind Joyce is sending up. That is only because she isn’t really the main character; her language is the main character. What does Joyce do? He fills the entire episode from margin to margin with stultifying, deadening prose, page after agonizing page of it, parodying women’s magazines and other slack language of the time, giving the reader insight into Gerty through its cracks. If you aren’t a Joyce fan, here is an example:

“Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she’d never speak to her again.”

The sheer mindlessness of “a deliberate lie.” It makes me squirm. It’s dazzling, this being brilliant about stupid, and carried out so heroically, but it puts me in mind of something Randall Jarrell said about Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Technically masterful but the artistic equivalent of juggling. Joyce can murder clichés in his sleep.

The same goes for Lafferty and the voice he ventriloquizes in Joe Spade’s catachrestic language. Joe is a language mangler. Lafferty is not a language mangler. Joe’s brain is full of idioms. Lafferty’s linguistic hygiene is obsessive. Joe is the kind of person who has to twist words a bit, as if that somehow makes it less clichéd. Of course, it is Lafferty twisting up words and phrases for us to get low comedy out of it.

The wonderfully poisonous Wyndham Lewis famously called Joyce’s bluff and got something right when he said all of Joyce’s art is about clichés. Lafferty is the anti-Joyce in this regard. For me, it just doesn’t work. Its nadir is “like I,” Joe using the nominative case first-person singular pronoun instead of the objective case first-person singular pronoun. That is laugh-track stuff.

So I’m glad Lafferty does not have too many characters like Joe Spade. While it can amuse, it’s a notch beneath the genius, like watching Groucho in Love Happy. I wouldn’t go as far as Dr. Johnson’s hatred of Shakespeare’s puns, though I do hate moments in Shakespeare like this one from Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act IV, Scene ii):

Holofernes: Via, goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while. Dull: Nor understood none neither, sir. Holofernes: Allons! we will employ thee. As thou sayest, we will have, if this fadge not, an antique. I beseech you, follow. Nathaniel: Via, goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while. Holofernes: This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions . . . These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.

Johnson was right to be hard on it.

On the other hand, most Lafferty readers seem to enjoy the weaponizing of verbal idiocy in "Hog-Belly Honey," and Joe Spade is not Joe Spade without that. He has to process language and re-engineer it through his literal-minded, self-proclaimed genius. So “hit the nail on the head” becomes the wrenched “hit the nail on the noggin and put his toe on the root of my trouble,” which is a multi-level joke in the story—but also an exhausting kind of joke. Lafferty wrings out some dark humor, uses it to show Joe’s profound amorality (partnership as “two necks in one noose”), and finally uses it to drive the plot and the story’s ending, which itself turns on a cliché. Maurice doesn’t get Joe’s mangled “let’s hit the road.” It’s all very clever, but it isn’t the kind of cleverness I appreciate most in Lafferty.

I mention it because the over-the-top language only became the main character when Lafferty rewrote the story and goosed it with acton (the ridiculous sky taxi escape). The story’s transformation hinged on three key strategies. First, Lafferty created a fulsome narrative voice through the idiot savant Joe Spade. This turned what was a measured conte philosophique into a rowdy, satirical tall tale. Second, the roles got reversed: the cowardly inventor who escapes in “Pantofag” (Maurice) became the victim, while the pragmatic corporate partner (Orlando) was replaced by the amoral Joe Spade. Finally, the tone swung from philosophical horror and black comedy to fast-paced black humor, where the jokiness was broadened by Joe’s complete lack of remorse and thumping solecisms.

Unlike the rewrite, the original reads like a response to Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), the underread play where Shaw most clearly dramatized his idea that useless people should be eliminated, so I wonder if the material grew out of Lafferty's interest in the Chesterton-Shaw debate. For the full Shaw treatment and "Hog-Belly Honey," the following is worth a watch.

In the original, Maurice Maltravers puts it like this, with the incredibly Shavian "that was the whole point of it":

And now for the quiet irony of the situation. Roll it around on your tongue, my friend; savor it to the fullest. For the Pantofag was right; that is the whole point of it. It was infallible in its uninhibited decisions. According to its basic principles it obliterated only useless matter. Of the fifty or sixty thousand persons who came to see it perform on those memorable three days, it negated only those five to seven thousand (do you have the final count?) who were absolutely useless. I am surprised that the figure ran so low. I would have set it at about one third of unclassified humanity, and I am delighted to learn that there is some use (God knows what) in a larger percent.

Both the original draft and the finished version feature the garbage disposal trope, but in the original, the Pantophag literally functions as a garbage disposal used on people. Two decades after Lafferty wrote the story, Pope John Paul II would take up a related concern in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), warning against what he called the “culture of death,” a mindset and social system that devalues human life, especially the weak, unborn, elderly, and disabled. In the original story, this aspect is far clearer: some people are garbage according to Maltravers. Shaw would have agreed.

The original is not half as good a story as the version Lafferty eventually published, yet its Chesterontian affirmation is unmistakable. "Hog-Belly Honey" shows Lafferty, early in his career, padding his sharp elbows to please the market and, in doing so, dulling the story’s original satirical bite.

Hog Belly Honey Notes.pdf

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