"I Don't Like You"

"We do not even know what his character is,” said Doctor Fell. “Most men who sound vicious take out their viciousness vocally. And all of the sadists I have known, and I have known a great many in thirty years of police work, are mild of talk and appearance and inclined to banter. You will have to admit that Soapy Seeley is not what we might call a sterling character. A man of sterling character is not arrested two hundred plus either thirteen or fourteen times in ten years. And all of the arrests were not for drunkenness. He has gone on any number of violent binges. If he is crossed when he is very drunk he will use any weapon that is handy on anyone who is present. He once inflicted thirty-nine shallow stabs on a poor bum who happened to be drinking with him. He did this with a can opener that fortunately would not stab more than three-eighths of an inch deep. He did it in a sudden fury because the bum was taking too long to open a can of beer with it. He has used jagged wine bottles for weapons. He has used half bricks. He has beat up his last three landladies. Any number of times he has been guilty of breaking and entering. He has not been picked up as a molester, but we do not know that this was primarily a sex crime. And yet in a way I am sure that it was, and that this may be the answer to a line of them that curiously goes back ten years."

This is another early Lafferty story that uses the police interrogation to pattern its plot. The title alludes to Dr. John Fell (1625 to 1686), best known now through Tom Brown’s English adaptation of Martial’s Epigram I.33 (“Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare . . .”). The original Latin says, in effect, “I don’t like you, Sabidius, and I can’t say why; I only know I don’t like you.” According to legend, Brown was a student at Christ Church, Oxford, where he faced expulsion by the dean, Dr. Fell. Fell offered to remit the punishment if Brown could produce an impromptu translation of the Martial epigram. Brown complied (maliciously) and turned it into a personal insult aimed at Fell himself: “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, / The reason why I cannot tell; / But this I know, and know full well: / I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.” From there, it became one of the most quoted pieces of light verse in English. For a long time, “Dr. Fell” was a byword for an unaccountable, instinctive dislike. In “I Don’t Like You,” Lafferty gives the reader a Dr. Fell far more sinister than the historical figure.

The story’s main character is Soapy Seeley, a likable bum, arrested for the murder of Doris Dark, a crime we would now call overkill. Dark, young and attractive (her name perhaps a play on Doris Day), was strangled, her neck was broken, and she was stabbed many times. During a preliminary hearing, lawyer Joe Plunkett (who also appears in the unpublished "Milly") and police physician Dr. Charles Fell talk about the nature of identity and the probability of Seeley's guilt. The evidential base is damning. He was at the victim's apartment after midnight. On his person were found a $100 bill and a key. Even worse, a blood-crusted jackknife with his fingerprints is discovered under the victim's sofa. Seeley says the knife belongs to him, but he also says he was drunk and has no memory of the night's events, except for two things: he knows he did wake up where he fell asleep, and, before that, he knows he cut his hand on the knife while trying to open a wine bottle. He is pretty sure he will be hanged for the crime and makes a bet with Plunkett about the outcome of the case.

The investigation advances. There is more interrogation of Seeley. There are interviews with the victim's acquaintances. Junie Gogarty describes Dark as a young woman who was kind to lowlifes like Seeley. She says that Seeley often slept in Dark's room when intoxicated. Dr. Fell browbeats Seeley at one point, setting up the allusion that gives the story its title:

"You are a sponger and a leacher and a drunkard. You have never had any regard for anyone but yourself. You will take anything from anybody, even a life, to gratify yourself. You are as sane as a Solon and as mean as the devil. You have committed the most dastardly murder I have ever encountered and you will pay for it to the extreme. You are the most despicable criminal I have ever encountered." "Doc, I don't like you either."

Dr. Fell has one odd peculiarity, though: a defective left eye that never fully opens or closes, which Seeley sees as a sign of insanity. He knows this because he once sent off for a correspondence course on medical matters. A witness from across the hall next testifies that she heard the voice of a "smooth-talking dude" in the room at the time of the murder. Although Lieutenant Rich thinks he has picked out Seeley, the witness expresses doubt upon hearing Seeley speak in person. Are they "talking about the same dude?" It turns out that the voice heard was that of Dr. Fell.

The story ends with Dr. Fell confessing to the murder of Doris Dark. He followed her home, found Seeley asleep on her sofa, and planted the knife and money on Seeley's person before carrying the bum to a nearby alley. Fell says that he killed Dark after she looked at him with contempt and rejected his advances. The story closes with a dark little coda highlighting the bitter irony of Fell's institutional fate versus Seeley's:

But in a way Soapy did not have the last laugh. For the doctor is still alive and well and minds his pleasant confinement not at all. He writes up notes on fanciful medical and psychiatric cases, and he talks at great length to the other patients; for he is indeed a smooth-talking old dude.And Soapy Seeley suffered an unfortunate hanging two years later when he mistreated unto death with a broken bottle a fellow bum in the after-midnight hours.

Soapy Seeley is one of Lafferty’s more distinctive characters—a man of low character who is at the same time absolutely honest. One of the funnier moments in an unpublished Lafferty story happens when we read about Soapy’s violent past, including his stabbing of another bum. We find Lafferty’s fixation with eyes, before he developed his technique of noetic darkening, in the half-shut eye of Dr. Fell, which indicates his madness. As in several of the early mysteries, Lafferty’s murders of women are sexual homicides, but he chose to write around the fact, making it a feature of the deep background that is difficult to see. It is apparently the case that Dr. Fell is, before the coining of the term, a serial-killing sexual psychopath who gets soft treatment because he is crazy, while the comparatively saintly Soapy Seeley is not. That suspicion of psychology is a deep theme in the ghost story.

In general, Lafferty’s stories treat this as a fundamental suspicion: the profession trades in the same commodity as the confidence trickster. It makes people believe things about themselves. Sometimes this is literal, as when Dr. Steinhard turns out to be a con man named Charley O’Malley running the "Pygmalion Clean-out" ("Johnny Crookedhouse"), or when a psychoanalyst splits fees with a crooked well-driller who creates psychosis by draining buildings of their psychic underlay ("Dig a Crooked Hole"). More often, it functions as a plot device that orders the story. The doctor in "Beautiful Dreamer" defines his role as an enforcer of "careful credulity." The agreed-upon world must be propped up: "the Scatterbrain may be only another name for a wide-ranging intuitive comprehension." Psychologists tend to be bunglers. They misinterpret a scientist on a ledge as suicidal ("Fall of Pebble-Stones"), diagnose in a way that misses the point ("The Hole on the Corner"), and refer endlessly up the professional chain. We get a sequence of analysts who analyze the analysts who analyze the analysts, a loop with no exit to reality ("The Hole on the Corner," "Splinters"). Lafferty’s character Joe Spade seems pretty close to Lafferty himself when he talks about a "head-grifter," an "anapsychologist" ("Hog-Belly Honey").

At the same time, Lafferty is not completely hostile to psychology. After all, he wants to explore it in his turn-it-inside-out way. There seems to be some respect for practitioners who exceed their profession, who are, in the language of "Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough," phenomenal in both senses. The phenomenal psychologists of that story are the first adults to take the perception of other-dimensional beings seriously. They record these observations and recognize some of the entities as "angelic messengers ascending and descending on Jacob's Ladder." Another figure in Lafferty who isn’t treated completely negatively is the trilobal James Riddle in "Dorg," who, half-mad and horn-rimmed, has a third brain lobe that grants him access to truths normal psychology cannot reach. The five (or six) "psychologs" of "In Outraged Stone" throw themselves into anthropological fieldwork with vigor. The unnamed psychiatrist in "McGonigal's Worm" investigates rather than explains away. Psychologists in Lafferty can get at least partly on his good side by being open to life and capable of astonishment.

Unsurprisingly, at the base is a coherent Catholic anthropology. If everyone is already mad — "I have never known a single human who I could call unqualifiedly sane" ("Beautiful Dreamer") — then the profession's claim to define and police it is a boondoggle. One thinks here of Albert's credo in "Eurema's Dam": "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it." Lafferty's angriest demonstrations of this principle show entire societies classifying sanity as a disease. These are all those coded traditionalists whose coding points toward the Christian tradition. We see this in “And Mad Undancing Bears” (fish clan, Clovis, Francis, Cluny, Trent). Catholic anthropology gets called berserking in a world of noise. Sometimes this shows up in a story as just getting it wrong: automobile drivers are hunted as incurably insane by Lafferty’s trolley utopia in one of his greatest stories, "Interurban Queen.”

Lafferty, of course, was much more open to Jung than to Freud, but he is quick to qualify Jung. We are told that Jung’s depth psychology contains "the shadow, but not the substance" of the truth ("The Hole on the Corner"). Jung is, at best, a door into realities outside his own system ("Episodes of the Argo," "In the Turpentine Trees"). Freud fares badly. To give two examples, Freud is one of the secular-liberal saints in "The Forty-Seventh Island." Edmund Weakfish, in Lafferty’s complicated, very great "Mud Violet," causes the Freudian accidents. The implication seems to be that Weakfish, who teaches participation psychology and is an incarnation of the Putty Dwarf (we can argue about this), imposes a counter, half-formed imago dei on his charges. He is a weak fish (anti-Christos) as opposed to a strong fish (Christos).

I’ll wrap up by saying that the story shows Lafferty using idioms brilliantly and has some of the best verbal texture of the unpublished short stories. More importantly, perhaps, is that it is an anxiety dream about what alcohol does to selfhood and moral agency. Like Finnegan, Soapy has blackouts, but Soapy's blackouts make him unable to distinguish himself from a murderer:

"I wish I knew, I wish I knew. It's the most damnable thing I ever heard of. She's about the only one in the neighborhood I haven't sometimes wanted to see dead. I hope the rope breaks three times so they can keep hanging me over and over for it."

He can't account for the blood, the key, the hundred-dollar bill, or his movements. Early in the story, Plunkett outlines a "toy philosophy" of sleep that serves as the perfect metaphor for a drunk's epistemology:

"But when you are asleep or when you are just going to sleep or awakening you do not seem to have any particular identity. It is as though one drop which is you fell into a big bowl of water which is everybody. Then when you awaken it is a drop drawn out again and given back to you. But you cannot be sure it is the same drop. We may in a small measure be different persons every day of our lives. And is anyone entirely responsible for what he did the day before?"

If you dissolve your identity every night in alcohol, you cannot guarantee what reconstitutes in the morning. This is a serious moment of iconographic insetting from a writer who was obsessed with the nature of memory, probably afraid of "wet brain" (we find evidence of this fear in Archipelago), and who could imagine a world where he ended up a rummy One of the more intense lines of the story comes from Plunkett, who says that Soapy is responsible for whatever he bought when he put his dollar on the counter at the Port-In-Any-Storm bar.

I Don't Like You Notes.pdf

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