"Pamponia" (1958)

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-century advice columnist. Over the course of those exchanges, a drama unfolds, and by the end, there has been a reversal. It is cute but marginal. Others have noted that it demonstrates Lafferty's formal inventiveness. What impresses me is the small space in which he juggles so many characters.

The whole correspondence begins with a letter from a young girl who calls herself Incipient Butterfly. She is an indifferent student with failing grades who wants to move to the city and meet her hero, the advice columnist, Miss Pamponia Perkins. Pamponia Perkin implores Incipient Butterfly to stay at home:

Wherever you are, stay there! Don't come to me. Don't come to town. There are no jobs in town. Don't do anything. Forget your problem. I don't believe that you have a problem. Blossom out where you are. Don't call for me. Don't come here. Don't do anything.

But the girl ignores the advice (one joke in the story is that she always does) and travels to the big city, which we learn about in her next letter. She signs this next letter "Filbert,” says she has locked down a job at a local nut shop, and asks for advice on her schedule of dates with four men. She talks about their flaws: one is a constant borrower of money, one reads highbrow books, one has her carry him through a street puddle, and one sleeps during the day. Perkins advises Filbert to develop an inner glow. Cliches are a theme. We next learn about the girl’s new suitor, Bertie. He has all the financial, intellectual, and behavioral flaws of the other four men, so he must be perfect.

The letter writing continues, and we read one in which the girl signs herself Ophelia. She is suicidal after having lost both her job and her boyfriend. She wants poison from Miss Pamponia Perkins, and she talks about her unsuccessful suicide attempts involving eating mothballs and soap, and then trying to jump off a bridge, though the railing was too high:

I have tried falling down the stairs but I keep clutching the banister. I soaked myself with cleaner fluid and lit myself but I only burned one thumb. I have eaten a bar of soap and a jar of moth balls. I was going to eat some ground glass but I don't know how to grind glass.

It's funny, but one can see why it didn't work for Seventeen.

Next, we learn that her circumstances have changed. She was trying to kill herself by walking in front of a car, and, luckily enough, she was struck by one driven by a man named Nesbitt Newman, who offered to take her to his home on the condition that she not bleed on his car seats:

After the wheels had passed over my body he got out and looked at the car; then he looked at me . . . . Then he told me I could get in the car if I'd promise not to bleed in the seats. And he took me home with him. And sister, I've got me a home!

Writing under the pseudonym Ball of Fire, she says she now lives and works at a larger nut shop owned by the Newman family, and adds that Nesbitt's father is pretty handsy with her. She then adds that she thinks she sees Miss Perkins on the street, whom she describes as a crow and an old biddy, but she offers to introduce Perkins to the elder Newman, who was attracted to Perkins. The whole thing ends with Miss Perkins acknowledging the physical description and welcoming a social meeting with the correspondent and her prospective father-in-law.

Lafferty at his lightest and least demanding.

Pamponia Notes.pdf

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