"Johnny Crookedhouse" (1957)

I am speaking literally about a real happening: the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization’, happened suddenly, sometime in the half-century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was ‘The World’ for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all ‘ends of worlds’. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected, because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went. "The Day After the World Ended"

They admitted that there was such a thing as 'occult compensation' which compensated the underlings for being underlings, but it wasn't really a threat so long as it remained sufficiently 'occult.'   "An Essay Explaining the Alternate Endings of the Book ARGO"

Andrew Ferguson has covered Lafferty’s unpublished "Johnny Crookedhouse," drawing the reader’s attention to the Law of Intellectual Constancy. He notes that Lafferty returned to the idea near the end of his career in More Than Melchisedech. “Though examples are found throughout his work,” Ferguson writes, “the only other direct mention of the Law of Intellectual Constancy is as the basis of the unpublished story 'Johnny Crookedhouse.'” Today, I want to consider the role and significance of the Law of Intellectual Constancy in Lafferty’s work and to suggest that Lafferty readers ought to be attuned to it.

Like Ferguson, I see examples of the law—unnamed and unmistakable—throughout Lafferty’s stories and novels, both major and minor. You can see it in the well-known “Eurema’s Dam,” where Lafferty imagines the last of the dolts; and you can see it in lesser-known works, such as “I Don’t Care Who Keeps the Cows,” where the law is broken. It's a strange attractor, pulling Lafferty’s unpredictabilities into broader coherence as he runs permutations on key motifs. This includes cultural skepticism and cultural amnesia, both of which are always important to Lafferty.

It's pretty easy to overlook that in three places outside of “Johnny Crookedhouse” and More Than Melchisedech Lafferty talks about the law. It shows up in Aurelia as the model for the Law of Planetary Constancy. That isn't terribly relevant to this post, nor is its mention in Iron Tongue of Midnight. But the third mention is. Lafferty goes into detail about it in his unpublished Esquire article, “Notes from the Golden Age” (1974). Without the explanation of the Law, he wouldn't have had his strongest argument for the late 1960s and 1970s being the beginning of a new Golden Age, an idea that becomes important to the direction of his In a Green Tree.

Be warned: what Lafferty does with the law is messy, what he remembers of its origins is muddled, and what he makes of it is subject to near-constant variation. I'll discuss the four explicit mentions (the ones I am aware of) in Lafferty and conclude with thoughts on how he adapted the idea. I’ll explain how it fits both his fascination with transformational leaps in humanity and his distrust of progress and utopianism—a central generative tension in his fiction. Then I’ll put together a précis of where I believe he arrived after decades of experimenting with the idea.

First, the plot of the unpublished “Johnny Crookedhouse” (the version I’m working from appears in the 5.0 edition of The Man Who Talled Tales, a fan project that collects Lafferty’s short fiction).

A “retired doctor,” Z. J. Steinhard (really Charley O'Malley, a Wreckville con artist) and a skeptical businessman, R. K. Random, wager $1000. The bet? Does a low-class criminal, the seemingly inept Johnny Crookedhouse, have as much latent intelligence as any man? Steinhard says that the Law of Intellectual Constancy necessitates it.

To test the theory, Random hires Johnny at his factory, where Johnny's performance is a series of comical and destructive blunders, reinforcing Random's certainty of winning the bet. While appearing to be an accident-prone fool, Johnny's actions are eventually revealed to be a deliberate cover for a sophisticated heist. The story concludes with a major robbery of Random's factory. Steinhard tells Random how he has been had, and he collects. Johnny's incompetence was just a ruse for a Wreckville con called the Pygmalion Clean-out.

As you likely know, the Greek myth of Pygmalion is about a sculptor who falls in love with the statue he has created, Galatea. The gods eventually bring Galatea to life. George Bernard Shaw popularized this myth with his 1913 play Pygmalion, in which a professor transforms a flower girl into a refined lady. Most Americans know the story through My Fair Lady (1956 stage musical, 1964 film), an adaptation of Shaw’s play, which is more American in that it includes more romance and music numbers, while retaining the same themes of transformation and identity. Many writers have since offered variations on the myth.

In the Pygmalion Clean-out con, Dr. Z. J. Steinhard takes on a role similar to Shaw’s Henry Higgins, while Johnny Crookedhouse parallels Eliza Doolittle. The con’s name alludes to Shaw’s central theme — the transformation or realization of hidden potential. However, this theme becomes ambiguous in the story: unlike Eliza, who begins as an unrefined cockney flower girl, Johnny was never unintelligent or unformed to begin with.

What follows is unavoidably a bit heavy going. Even so, it needs to be taken into account to see how Lafferty understands and reworks the Law of Intellectual Constancy.

1.  The French intellectual Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915) is best known in the Anglophone world as an influence on T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). He introduced the Law of Intellectual Constancy in his still-untranslated Promenades Philosophiques (1905), adapting it from a largely forgotten episode in the debate over evolution. De Gourmont closely followed the evolutionary science of his day, formulating the law from his reading of the French biologist René Quinton (1866–1925), who believed that popular Darwinism smuggled in teleology. Teleology, in this case, can be defined as implicit biological functionalism. In L’eau de mer, milieu organique (1904), Quinton rejected both the by-then largely discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) (nearly everyone had by this point) and the dominant framework of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). He proposed the Loi de constance, or law of constancy, illustrating it with several empirical examples, most notably from marine life. In short, Quinton was concerned with biological laws of constancy in a scientific context. De Gourmont, who was fascinated by physiology and aesthetics, gave the principle a philosophical turn, though with a biological coloring: this is his Loi de constance intellectuelle, translated into English as "the law of intellectual constancy." It seeks to say something about human culture by arguing that the intellectual capacity of the human species has remained unchanged. From this view, people in 2000 AD were about as intelligent as those in 20,000 BC. I have found no direct evidence that Lafferty read either Quinton or de Gourmont, though it remains possible. What is certain is that Lafferty encountered the idea elsewhere and credited it solely to that other source.

2.  That source is Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), a truly unlikely name to associate with one R. A. Lafferty. But there he is. Lafferty singles him out as the only person named in his programmatic statement about his life’s work—the Ghost Story statement in More Than Melchisedech. This likely has little to do with who Ellis actually was and much more to do with the Law of Intellectual Constancy and the deep impression it left on Lafferty’s imagination. In his own time, Ellis was known to the British public as a polymath. Today, Ellis is remembered mainly as a pioneering sexologist, though he was more a proto-anthropologist of sex than a psychologist. He is a strange figure—too progressive for the late nineteenth century, too dull for the twentieth. Unlike many other British sages, he is not much fun to read. His reputation also suffered after the 1920s among the kinds of intellectuals most likely to preserve it because he resented and resisted the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. Lafferty encountered the Law of Intellectual Constancy through one of several essays by Ellis, most likely in “The Star in the East” from The Philosophy of Conflict and Other Essays in War-Time (1919); a review of J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of an Idea (initially published in The Nation, May 22, 1920, and later collected in Views and Reviews, 1932); or “Rémy de Gourmont,” included in From Rousseau to Proust (1928).

Here are what I take to be the most probable candidate passages.

From “The Star in the East”:

Rémy de Gourmont was wont to insist on what he called the law of intellectual constancy in civilisation.¹ He based it on the memorable biological researches of Quinton, which have indicated that evolution—which, as Spencer left it, Gourmont declared, arose in the void and pointed to some unknown Messianic end—is an adjustment, in part effected by the formation of new, better-adapted species and in part by the action of intelligence, to maintain against the increasing hostility of a cosmos ever departing from the state in which life originated, those fixed and determined conditions of thermic, chemical, and osmotic constancy required by life. Every species possesses a constant and limited measure of force, but no more, wherewith to attain this vital and necessary end. Within the limits of the human species it seemed to Gourmont—and various distinguished thinkers and investigators have associated themselves with this conclusion—that there must be the same constancy in intellectual force, from prehistoric times until now. The achievements of today impress us more than the achievements, so far as we know them, of primitive man. We overlook the fact that the difference is accidental, the accident of position and the result of accumulated traditions.

From the book review of Bury's The Idea of Progress:

Although Professor Bury insists on the preoccupation of the French with the idea of progress, he makes no mention of Rémy de Gourmont's pregnant conception of "the law of intellectual constancy"—accepted as probable by so distinguished a thinker as Jules de Gaultier—according to which every species is provided with only a limited and constant power, the nature of its achievements being conditioned by the environmental level on which it happens to be placed. That view is supported by the recent tendency of anthropologists to recognize that what we regard as the modern species of man really existed at a vastly remote epoch, with just the same physical conformation and the same brain capacity as he possesses today. So also it is with the civilization, or, as Faure would call it, the style, of a people. A civilization is not indefinitely modifiable, and when it is unable to struggle with hostile conditions, it gives place to another more apt, but springing, not from itself—though some of its achievements may be handed on—but from an originally lower human level. The conditions of the present age favor the contact of civilizations, but it is not clear that the result is a new style; it may be only a chaotic confusion of styles.

From Rousseau to Proust:

Rémy de Gourmont is more than a critic of literature. He is a critic of ideas. He was first led to philosophy and science, he has himself indicated, by the study of words regarded as the substance of thought. But it is clear that, whatever the avenue of approach, his searching and independent spirit was bound, sooner or later, to undertake the task of examining and appraising the current notions of the time. He has devised a doctrine of the dissociation of ideas and what he calls a law of intellectual constancy as clues in the fields wherein he has approached the most various and most fundamental problems, not excluding that of sex. In science and in philosophy he is the heroic amateur, lacking in training and in equipment, but never failing in ideas. . . .

Somehow, this two-step transmission—from Rémy de Gourmont to Havelock Ellis—became entangled, in Lafferty’s thinking, with a set of his familiar hobbyhorses: suspicion of chronological snobbery, skepticism toward utopian notions of progress, his theory about the ends of worlds and the births of new ones, faith in human potential, and hope for a postlapsarian spiritual recuperation. De Gourmont, however, was forgotten, and in Lafferty’s mind the Loi de constance intellectuelle became firmly attached to Ellis.

Returning now to "Johnny Crookedhouse," one crucial thing Lafferty says about the Law is tucked away in a parenthetical. Random has just heard Steinhard’s claim about Crookedhouse: he has the same human capacity to learn as any of Random’s employees. In response, Random says,

“That is the stiffest nonsense I ever heard. If I hadn't developed a sort of grudging respect for your views on other subjects I would say you were a damned fool. As it is I will bet you are a damned fool in this. Do retired doctors have any money?”

Dr. Steinhard replies,

“If I did not have money I could not have retired. This is the proof that doctors are smarter (within the limits of the Law of Intellectual Constancy) and better moneymakers than businessmen. Businessmen are never either rich enough or smart enough to retire.”

Lafferty’s work is filled with reflections on intelligence; the word “smart” appears hundreds of times, alongside countless variations on near-synonyms. In "Johnny Crookedhouse," Steinhard states that under the law, certain people can be smarter than others. At first glance, this seems to contradict what Lafferty writes later in More Than Melchisedech. There, he appears to take what was originally a species-level claim in de Gourmont—that intellectual capacity is fixed, in the sense that the human brain has remained roughly the same for 40,000 to 100,000 years—and apply it to individuals instead. In More Than Melchisedech, the law becomes a statement about individual potential, not just the species budget.

Here is the relevant passage. I have put in bold those parts that are factually questionable, seemingly ambiguous, and potentially puzzling:

There was a man named Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) an essayist, editor, physician, psychologist, and publisher of the ‘Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists’, designed to bring the 17th century dramas to a wider public. This drama revival was one of the great loves of his life: but he had very many great loves in his life. One of them was his fixed idea that there are no common people, that all of us are geniuses, that all of us are absolutely wonderful. He encapsuled this idea in a writing called ‘THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY’. The thesis of Havelock was that all persons with brains and bodies not seriously damaged are of about equal power and ability, that a guy who scratches out a slim living on two and a half acres in shantytown is as intelligent and capable in all ways as are John D. Rockefeller, or Thomas Alva Edison, or Wilhelm Wagner, or George Bernard Shaw (G.B. Shaw and Havelock Ellis were very close personal friends), or Victor Hugo, or the President of the United States or of U.S. Steel, or of Alexander Graham Bell, or Henrik Ibsen. It was simply that peoples' fancies turned to different ways of fulfilling themselves. Ellis, in his work as physician, psychologist, and as forerunner of the psychoanalysts, was thunderstruck by the creative richness of some of the totally unimpressive lower-class people that he turned up. And he remained thunderstruck by such things for ten years or so. People selected the enjoyments that appealed to them and followed them out in lifetimes of high pleasure. And Havelock's ‘Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists’ found echoes here. Some of the common-uncommon, lowly-but-not-really-so lowly people were recreating the wonders of the THREE PENNY OPERA or the BEGGARS OPERA in their lives. Some of them exulted in the wonderful world and racy challenges of extreme poverty. It takes as much brains and ability for the very poor to make it as it does for the very rich. Some of the people played with Hell Fire itself and its unholy excitement. Havelock Ellis was a little bit before his time with his LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY. The people who were manufacturing the current thinking of the world considered themselves very superior people, and they would not easily admit that they were barely equal to the lowest of the lowest. Yet, in less than a decade they adjusted to it. They admitted that there was such a thing as ‘occult compensation’ which compensated the underlings for being underlings, but it wasn't really a threat so long as it remained sufficiently ‘occult’. And a little bit later, though buried under a mountain of words, it was admitted that the LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY was true, but not really very important on a working level. And such is still the case with it today. But it is important as a cornerstone to the explanation of the Detailed Workings of the World Itself. It is established that the human race is made up entirely of glowing geniuses.

Some difficulties to consider.

1. Havelock Ellis did edit the Mermaid Series, and it is an interesting inference for Lafferty to draw. Still, it is more accurate to say that Ellis was primarily interested in making those works accessible to bourgeois readers, rather than to the underclass figures Lafferty evokes in his aside on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera. More intriguing is why Lafferty thinks Ellis held this interest for about ten years—as if he later abandoned it. I suspect this is because Ellis became more explicitly eugenicist over time, though in truth he had held eugenicist views from the beginning. What makes Ellis notable is that he was a more moderate eugenicist than his main precursor, Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement and cousin to Charles Darwin. Like Galton, Ellis was deeply interested in the nature of genius. First difficulty: Ellis was a eugenicist.

2.  Ellis's interest in genius first culminated in his 1904 A Study of British Genius, published fourteen years after his first book, The Criminal (1890). Having now read both books, I think Lafferty read them, even though Lafferty's sense of the timeline is confused. Ellis started editing the Mermaid Series in 1887. This makes the ten years Lafferty refers to most likely the period between that editorial work on the Mermaid volumes and the publication of The Criminal. Alternatively, he may have meant the fourteen years between The Criminal and A Study of British Genius during which the Mermaid volumes were still coming out. But I'm going to apply Ockham's razor here: the timeline was imprecise in Lafferty’s mind. Remy de Gourmont did not formulate the Law of Intellectual Constancy until 1905. Havelock Ellis, for his part, did not write about it until more than two decades after publishing his first book, nearly thirty years after he began editing the Mermaid Series. Here is the second difficulty: the Ellis timeline.

3. I think Lafferty bundled all of this together with the knowledge that Ellis became increasingly vocal in his support for eugenics, something he, like G. K. Chesterton, would have rejected. Ellis was sympathetic to the Law of Intellectual Constancy on the species level, though he once wrote that it was a rather pompous name for what it described. But he was an elitist. What matters for Lafferty is that both The Criminal and A Study of British Genius speak directly to themes that preoccupy him. For example, in The Criminal, Ellis classifies various types of crime and notes that burglars are intelligent compared to other criminals ("criminals against the person show a much lower level of intelligence than criminals against property"). This point fits neatly with the “Pygmalion Clean-out” in "Johnny Crookedhouse":

“Oh Mr. Random, we have been robbed, ransacked, taken completely.” “That so? Well it can't be very serious. My mind always notices the most important things first. They have not even been at the door to the stairway down to the vault room. Everything of worth is there.” “But they were in the vault room. They went down through the floor in your office.Come and see.” “That wouldn't be possible. There is four feet of concrete there. They couldn't have broken it out in three days.” “They did it in thirty minutes. That stuff that Johnny puton the tiles, it not only ate up the tiles; it ate up the concrete too. They shoveled it off just like mud. And then they cut through the vault top with torches in ten minutes.”

To Lafferty’s interest in genius and social class, Ellis writes in A Study of British Genius that British genius often comes from rural, non-impoverished backgrounds rather than from cities. Ellis writes,

"One is tempted to ask how far the industrial progress of the nineteenth century, the growth of factories, the development of urban life, will alter the conditions affecting the production ofeminent men. It seems clear that, taking English history as a whole, the conditions of rural life have, from the present point of view, produced the best stocks."

At the same time, echoing Galton’s views, Ellis claims (consistent with his eugenicist outlook) that genius tends to run in families. Among the poor, he notes, genius often manifests in exceptionally tall individuals, unlike among the more affluent, where it tends to show up in the short. And so forth. In both The Criminal and A Study of British Genius, many passages support Lafferty’s view about the uneven distribution of gifts across social strata. The third difficulty is this selection bias.

Finally, for de Gourmont and Ellis (to the degree that Ellis accepted it), the law of intellectual constancy was transhistorical and impersonal. There is no social history dimension. But Lafferty gives it a historical twist, writing, “Havelock Ellis was a little bit before his time with his LAW OF INTELLECTUAL CONSTANCY. The people who were manufacturing the current thinking of the world considered themselves very superior people, and they would not easily admit that they were barely equal to the lowest of the lowest. Yet, in less than a decade, they adjusted to it." Presumably, this is in the 1920s and 1930s.

In other words, Lafferty has a theory about how the Law of Intellectual Constancy plays out in 20th-century history. To explain this, he introduces the concept of occult compensation, a technical term from the Catholic intellectual tradition (The Catholic Encyclopedia has an entry on it that Lafferty would have read). It refers to the extra‑legal, secret recovery of something owed to a person when the debtor refuses to pay and legal means are unavailable; essentially, taking by stealth what is rightfully yours.

In a nutshell, for Lafferty’s version of the Law of Intellectual Constancy, occult compensation means this: although the law was philosophically and scientifically accurate in Ellis’s time, it was not fully active in practice. Society offered hidden channels , Lafferty's occult compensations, that allowed individuals to grow, create, and flourish. Only later did the law become overt and fully operational.

Lafferty had previously thought through this in “Notes from the Golden Age”:

The Law of Intellectual Constancy had just recently become true. Its verification (becoming true) is the biggest thing that has happened in anthropology. It was not true fifty years ago when Havelock Ellis and others were pushing it. It has just become true in the last half-decade, since the beginning of the golden age. And it says that every human has just about the same amount of potential. Each may carry it in buckets of a different shape, but each has about the same amount of it.

I think we can now sketch the whole idea. A précis might go like this . . .

Human beings have always shared roughly the same level of intelligence from person to person, barring intellectual defect, and the species as a whole has operated within a consistent intellectual budget. But in earlier times, the lower orders—the “little guy”—thrived through a kind of occult compensation. This delayed the law’s full visibility; it kept many from seeing that it applied to them. The powerful exploited that ignorance. They imagined themselves different in kind—and believed it for as long as the occult compensation remained real. The little guy had folkways, religion, crafts, and countless other means of self-realization and native genius.

Then the world ended, sometime between 1912 and 1968. As a condition for what followed, an inverse relationship took hold: cultural amnesia spread, and occult compensation faded. The voice of the little guy was amplified in new ways: through mass media, the pulp press, and emerging literary forms like science fiction. That shift made the Law of Intellectual Constancy fully active and increasingly visible, a fact the powerful have had to accept, however grudgingly. Public education expanded. Nutrition improved. Democracies widened. But the change also brought flattening. Amnesia. Flatland. To make the law un-occulted, non-compensatory, and directly operational, people had to forget the older, hidden compensations. That is the world we now live in: a Flatland, the birth pangs of the next Golden Age.

Much more needs to be said about what Lafferty means by genius, and why his concept diverges from the family of theories that includes Francis Galton’s notion and Spearman’s g. His argument about the Law of Intellectual Constancy serves a larger purpose: it anchors his broader vision of human genius.

That would take us beyond the remit of this argument. Still, genius recurs throughout Lafferty’s fiction, as every reader quickly discovers. It is often bound to the Fall, which Lafferty repeatedly portrays as a form of amnesia. This amnesiac intelligence—forever losing the worlds it builds on its fixed budget—should be set alongside his historicization of that intellectual budget: what he called the Law of Intellectual Constancy.

Lafferty wrote that there once was “a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind” (as he puts it in "Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus"). He also saw the present human condition as marked by ghostliness—“the different persons in the PERSON” (as he describes in More Than Melchisedech).

Drawing these elements together would make a good start on a conceptual map of Lafferty’s view of what makes humanity so exceptional, stretching from trial balloons like "Johnny Crookedhouse " in the 1950s to the many thematic variations he developed through the 1980s.

In the next two posts, I’ll briefly touch on how the Law of Intellectual Constancy shows up in "Eurema's Dam" and "I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows."