Misc Laff 05: The Novel Sequence

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. I have my view of pre-nucleation and post-nucleation of Ghost Story themes, with Lafferty's ideas about the phenomenology of oceanic unconscious and time becoming increasingly important and overt. That's the idea of a whole Lafferty that unshackles Lafferty from being a quirky sf/fantasy writer of short stories. I call the default Lafferty the weird O. Henry of SF and the cotton-candy Okie. Outside of a handful of fans, this is how he tends to be discussed. If one finds him blogged about in passing or referred to on Reddit, it is likely a variant of this.

As Lafferty readers know, Lafferty's novel-writing career divides into phases that very loosely track his publishing history. He began with the Catholic fantasia Antonino Vescovo in the mid-1930s, but his real apprenticeship as a novelist came between roughly 1957 and 1963, when he produced seven novels (Dotty, Archipelago, Civil Blood, Loup Garou, Alaric, Okla Hannali, and Esteban), none of which found a publisher at the time. Dotty and Archipelago may have been drafted to some degree before 1957, but there is no hard evidence (that I have seen), only internal evidence within the materials themselves. These early manuscripts were long by Lafferty's later standards, often running 85,000 to 100,000 words. He was trying hard to break into the publishing market. Though the rejections span past the immediate period at hand, Archipelago, for instance, had about twenty-five rejections. This was a man learning his version of novel-craft in near-total commercial silence, writing historical fiction, his version of hyperbolic realism, before he became a genre-tagged writer.

The published era brought a steadier rhythm, beginning with Past Master and running through Half a Sky. During this period, Lafferty found his professional footing: Terry Carr at Ace bought Past Master in 1967, and Virginia Kidd, his permanent agent, received nearly every completed manuscript within a day or two of its completion. The novels grew shorter and sharper, as we see with early versions of Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, and Arrive at Easterwine, and Lafferty was also producing the extraordinary run of short stories that built his reputation. He revised relentlessly during this period. For instance, he rewrote Archipelago twice (1965 and 1968). He expanded Past Master from a 38,000-word novella into a full novel. He built the novels Space Chantey (the unpublished short story "Space Chantey") and The Reefs of Earth ("The Raft") from short material. He plugged "The Shape We're In," an unpublished Institute short story, into Arrive at Easterwine to give it its powerful ending. His notes for The Devil Is Dead say"Much rewritten." As we know from the “Apocrypha,” he was revising that novel as it was on its way into print.

Then came volcanic years. After a near-total gap in novel production from 1972 to 1973, the period of the heart attack, Lafferty erupted with thirteen novels in five years, from Not to Mention Camels in February 1974 through the four parts of In a Green Tree completed in September 1978. The output in 1975 alone is staggering: he wrote four novels totaling approximately 270,000 words, including the first version of More than Melchisedech. If we think about the Green Tree tetralogy's index cards and its record of exact writing periods, Lafferty sustained roughly 1,500 words per day for eight consecutive months, writing 306,000 words of semi-autobiographical fiction with only brief pauses between installments. At the same time, he was rewriting older works. He expanded More than Melchisedech by incorporating materials. He rewrote Mantis and rewrote Half a Sky. A lot of his work, of course, remains unpublished.

Around 1980, there was a short break in this rhythm that did not really end it. After a nineteen-month novelistic silence following Annals of Klepsis in November 1980, Lafferty wrote five more novels between 1982 and 1984. Sindbad, Serpent's Egg, and East of Laughter were banged out. He seems to have known he wanted to hang up his spurs on his birthday in 1984, so he completed his last major task with the final two installments of the Coscuin Chronicles, Sardinian Summer and First and Last Island, the latter two completed just fifty-one days apart in the spring of 1984. It completes the very important Coscsuin sequence that must come out for there to be anything like a Whole Lafferty. It gives the background for the Argo legend. At that point, he was finished with the novel. Of course, it is all more complicated than that because Lafferty thought the novel form was long dead. He was writing something else, something extraordinary in the literal sense, that could be packaged like a novel.