L.H. (1961)

Andrew Ferguson’s view of how L.H. fits in Lafferty’s early career development as a writer seems right to me on all the key points. This kind of bibliographic work is Ferguson’s strength. Lafferty also made it easy for us because often wrote on his MS his submission histories with dates, and he kept note cards. By 1961, he had written Dotty and Archipelago, though Archipelago had not taken final form. He was starting to think about how to bring characters scattered across manuscripts into his version of the human comedy (pinpointing this in L.H. is smart archival work). L.H. is ghost story material from before his professional identity as a genre writer (one that never fit his genre) achieved its nucleation.

One interesting detail in the manuscript is that Lafferty went back and wrote new final lines by hand on short, unfinished chapters to keep it from busting, his term for when a writing project stalled. These last-line additions bring in mystery elements and shift the book’s center of gravity, from a philosophical novel with low mimetic characters to a philosophical murder mystery. But they are bluffwork. If you were to read a hypothetically retyped manuscript without knowing about the handwritten additions, you would sense that a larger structure is there. Lafferty never worked it out. I’ll summarize the abandoned novel first, then say a few interpretative things about the Job elements and what Lafferty seems to have been doing with them.

L.H. opens with its main character, Leo Hughes, a thirty-year-old man in 1959, thinking about the nature of luck, not providence. We know that Leo was meant to die because Lafferty penciled in a birth and death date for him, placing his death in 1960. Leo calls himself as “a mediocre man for whom everything had come right.” He sees his life as a long streak of luck. The plot begins with Leo asking the gruff hotelier John Bender, “I wonder how long a run can go, John?” Bender believes that “if a real run is broken, then . . . that man is broken for good.” This rattles Leo. His own approach to life is to make a go of it as a gracious fake, but he feels his luck is about to sour. They talk about Job. Leo says Job got into trouble by bragging. Bender correct him. It was not Job who bragged, but God, and that was what brought the trouble. So the first chapter, we get the line that sets the tone for everything that follows: “I’ve been on a real run, John, and now I feel that it’s over.”

Next comes the dismantling. While swimming in the always dirty and always rough Gulf of Mexico in Galveston—a setting shared with Dotty, and one Lafferty planned to connect with other Galveston characters, according to his notes—Leo is struck by a “large, blue-green, whiskered creature.” It is not a shark. It is not a walrus. It is the mysterious Peter Wund, a strange beggar-apostle. After the collision, Wund brushes Leo off as “Not a thing. As empty a man as I ever met.”

Leo then meets Eva, a woman of “much style and no wealth at all,” known both as a “saint” and as the “hottest cat in town.” Together, they rescue a starving, “almost-blond” girl named Judy. They do this from time to time. Here Leo begins to encounter a raw and chaotic world that his long run of luck had kept at a distance. Lafferty then introduces Leonard Schiefer, a wealthy industrialist who offers Leo a rare Maryland Rye, the “essence of the essence.” If Leo’s luck were not about to collapse, this would still feel like his future, for Schiefer is a man whose luck never broke.

What survives in the manuscript shows Leo’s descent from his earlier stability. The hard break begins with the collision in the Gulf, when Leo tells Peter, “I just feel that the run’s over. Anything might happen to me now.” His time with Eva and the confused, half-starved Judy (whom he helps shower and who was to be murdered in the unwritten part) pushes him further. He niw sees suffering that he cannot stay detached from. This contrasts with his earlier indifference toward the death of a young prostitute he had known from past visits to Galveston. For him, she has been an aesthetic object. When Eva tells Leo to practice clinical detachment with Judy, he lies to himself: “Never had any.” The turning point comes when Leo again speaks with John Bender, who has been trying to reach him. Bender’s eyes are ice gray. He calls Leo an “Irish crud,” and hands him a check stamped “Account closed.” Leo calls home in a panic and gets the truth from the maid, Lela. His wife, Angela, has emptied their joint bank account and skiped with one little bag and one big bag. Leo is broke and stranded in Galveston, and that is where Lafferty left him.

The most interesting character in all this is is Peter Wund, the devil. His last name means wound in German, and he wounds Leo, busting his mouth open, when he careens into the swimming Leo, far out and seemingly alone in the Gulf of Mexico:

Blue, or blue-green, with the water shining on it, it was large and noisy, seeming flesh-colored on the fore and snout, and whiskered like a walrus. That had been only a glimpse from the top of a swell, but it was coming very fast and bearing down on him. Leo swerved, angled off in the water, and started under; but he had misjudged the direction of the creature. It hit him with stunning force, bowled him over and over in the water. Confused, Leo fought for depth, turned at bay below it, and found that it had stopped and was hovering over him on the surface. He had not filled his lungs. He had to come up, and did so as distantly from it as possible. But it slid to him with a great water roar and had an iron grip on him. Leo hadn't been able to identify it from that first glimpse from the top of the swell, and he had been blinded from the blow when it struck him, and unable to comprehend. Looking at it from below he had felt that the shape was of something that he should recognize, knowing at the same time that it was an exaggeration of its species. Yet Leo knew that species well enough, or thought that he did. It was shaking his hand now, and near drowning him in the act, jerking him under with every downstroke. "Peter Wund," said the thing. "It's been sudden, you'll have to admit. You're bleeding bad about the mouth. We'd better go in. It's not over a mile. Can you make it?”

Wund helps Leo back to shore, and it becomes clear that Leo has completely misunderstood what is happening. One can imagine Peter Wund appearing in the water just after some version of Job 1:6–11 has taken place. Back on land, Wund is direct about the situation. And here Lafferty does something remarkable. After the intensity of the sea scene, he manages to make what happens to this Job-like figure both physical comedy and something more. Leo looks at Wund, who is standing there in soaking wet overalls. Then Lafferty gives us his version of the line: “Have you considered my servant Job?”

“Have you a job, Peter Wund?” “I am a beggar by profession, and I have a job to do that doesn’t pay.” “I ought to give you a little something. You did run me down, and smash in my mouth, it’s true; but you swam in with me, and I might not have made it without you. You’ve heard of the small island that had only two automobiles on it, and their head-on collision. There couldn’t have been anyone within a mile of us, and yet we collided. It was against the odds.” “No it wasn’t. I ran you down on purpose.” “Why, Peter?” “It’s one way of meeting people. Just wanted to see if there was anything in you.”

The clearing out of Leo’s bank account is the moment when Wund’s role as ha-satan really begins. John Bender takes on the role of the messenger in Job 1:14, delivering the bad news. So it's intersting that Lafferty gives us the physical wounding of his Job but then begins the attack on property only at the end. This shows a profound change in direction. In the original plan, it looks to me like the testing begins when Wund injures Leo. It then has another start with Angela's betrayal. These two blows against Leo are story attractors. The first pulled toward a text that was leisurely and philosophical, the the other colored by the conventions of the thriller. I would like to know what happens next, but it’s clear that Lafferty wrote himself into a structural bind.

First, what survives is very talky. On one level, that was by design. The Book of Job is very talky. It begins with conversations between spiritual powers, moves through dialogues between Job and his comforters and Elihu, and ends with a lesson about where all conversation must stop. To keep his characters talking long enough to get there, Lafferty needed a plot device. So he brought in a murder mystery. But once L.H. becomes a murder story, how can the rest of the Job pattern still hold together? Does the murder of another person draw too much attention away from Leo? I doubt that was the real problem, though. Getting out of structural binds was part of Lafferty’s genius. It seems more likely that a few things were happening.

The first was modal. L. H. reads like Dotty, not like a genre work. Lafferty had to go in to stitch on the genre chapter endings on rereading what he had done.

Second, he probably knew that Peter Wund was right about Leo Hughes because even Leo Hughes is right about Leo Hughes. He is an empty man, closer to Candide than Cassandra. That might work for a breezy absurdist murder mystery, a fit for the kind of character Leo is imagined to be in the notes Lafferty made as he was reworking the material into a mystery novel. It does not work for a Job stand-in—unless the point is to parody Job. In considering what Lafferty produced here, I do not believe he had an interest in writing a parody, as evidenced by the philosophical approach he took and the way the conversations were intended to build upon one another. Nor was Lafferty going to put God on trial the way James K. Morrow did decades later in Blameless in Abaddon.

Finally, there was the fact that one of America's best-known writers had recently done a popular retelling of the Job story, this being Archibald McLeish and his pretty rotten but much celebrated at the time J.B. (1958). Retelling Job was fresh on the minds of American middlebrows. So Lafferty moved on to other things.

L.H. Notes.pdf

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