Past Master and the Dillons

“Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. ‘I knew it would,’ said Paul.”

On the East of Laughter Facebook group, Brad Frank, a long-one Lafferty reader who knew the man, recently posted about finding a copy of Past Master at the Tulsa flea market:

Frank's lucky find got me thinking about the original Past Master cover again. It was done by the Dillons (more about them soon) who also did the cover for Lafferty’s short story collection Iron Tears (1992).

Lafferty sometimes spoke about the covers, ones he liked and those he disliked. For example, Lafferty liked Robert LoGrippo's surreal cover art for The Devil Is Dead (1971), but he told a correspondent he did not know who painted it. At the other end of the spectrum, Lafferty is on record as really hating the cover art for East of Laughter (1988). Who could blame him?

In 1991, when the University of Oklahoma Press edition of Okla Hannali neared publication, a bad cover was as much a fact of Lafferty publishing as broken noses are a fact of boxing. Consider what happened when Lafferty first saw the cover art for the reprint of Okla Hannali. He must have been expectant. For the first time, Lafferty would appear in long form under the imprint of a university press, and Okla Hannali is a very great book.

After seeing the cover art, Lafferty was amused. He wrote:

Thank you for the sample of the cover jacket of my book OKLA HANNALI. Why no, I don't agree that the result is quite unsatisfactory. Nothing ever is. I am not a ‘retired newspaperman.’ But the picture on the cover is another matter. When somebody showed the picture to Hannali where he was pitching horseshoes with some friends in that green meadow just inside the Pearly Gates, he burst out with the loudest laughter I ever since . . . ‘That shriveled-up Cherokee with nothing to be mad about, is the funniest thing I have ever seen.’ I am a Choctaw man as wide as I am high, I live happy, and I died happy, and I am happy in this fun place . . . . Then he laughed so loud that God himself had to intervene with a ‘Cool it, Hamali, you're making so much noise.’ Yes, it is a funny thing. But it's a good laugh that bursts above the stars and I tell you confidentially that something even funnier will happen here tomorrow . . . And no, I will not let the picture be changed. That would spoil the joke.

Not the Chocktaw chuckler: the shriveled up Cherokee from the cover of the University of Oklahoma edition of Oklahoma Hannali,

To this day, the book gets it wrong. Looking at my copy, it calls Lafferty a newspaperman.

The Dillons’ Past Master cover appears not to have been among Lafferty’s favorite covers or illustrations of his work. It is my favorite. It was done by the extraordinary Leo and Diane Dillon, two artists now well known to science-fiction and fantasy readers. Harlan Ellison dedicated Dangerous Visions (1967) to them; and they illustrated Lafferty’s terrific “Land of the Great Horses,” which appeared in that volume. In the DV dedication, Ellison was Ellison. He commented on the black-and-white art the couple had produced and, at the same time, made a sixties political statement about their interracial marriage. They had taught him something about race and art.

I want to be careful here because for as good as Ellison often is, he is very silly and very theatrical, and because Lafferty’s views on race are complicated. Suffice it to say I do not think the dedication would have impressedor moved Lafferty. His reservation would have had far less to do with race than with the role race ideology played in the new left’s discourse of the 1960s. He would likely have disliked the utopian smell of Ellison’s rhetoric, for at the time Lafferty was thinking through his rejection of revolution. Marx famously said that he was not a uptipian. Lafferty would not have believed that. Past Master is an ensemble of intermixed character types. Father Oddopter is a black man; there are many forms of hybridity present; but race and hybridity cohere inside an pugnaciousl anti-utopian vision.

Here is what Ellision wrote in his dedication:

Leo and Dianne Dillon's illustration for Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses"

Lafferty was often mordant about this flavor of grandiloquence. Of Ellison, he remarked that whatever Ellison said needed to be read in light of whom Ellison was trying to impress. Here, it was the readers of the new speculative fiction with its enlightened values, sociological commitments, and transgressive seasonings.

The second time the Dillons illustrated Lafferty is the Past Master cover, a year after Dangerous Visions. In looking at it, would Lafferty have though back to Harlan’s utopian rhetoric and the Dillon illustratiobs of stories he did not like? As far as I know, Lafferty never mentioned the Dillon art when asked about covers he liked. In my view, their work is by far the most artistically accomplished cover ever to appear on Lafferty books. Both Lafferty and the Dillons would later receive the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award—Lafferty in 1990, and the Dillons in 2008. Artwise, this is strength meeting strength, masters together.

Nonetheless, we are looking at opposing ends of the American conversation. Ellison brought together Lafferty and the Dillons, and Ellison thought the old world was to be leveled for a brighter future. Children such as the Dillons’ son deserved as much. But it is fair to say that Lafferty thought like Harlan Ellison (Lafferty. Allen them the science fiction people) unintentionally paved Flatland with good intentions.

Why? Because race and utopia are distinct issues in Lafferty’s mind. Making Father Oddopter black is a sincere symbolic move on his part, a didactic statement about universal Christian dignity at a moment of political crisis. An ex gf of mine who is black used to say we were not a mixed couple: we were both Catholic. It's an old line. At bottom, it is the view that utopia is political in a way that race is not.

For men like Ellison, that distinction is nonsense. Race and utopia are both political projects. Ellison’s treatment of race is off-putting to me because of how political it tends to be: Harlan dropping into his slang mode, motormouthing jive, baby, jack; Ellison with his sexy black and asian girls; Harlan, paladin of the lost hour, who couldn't help but get himself into trouble from time to time.

In the draft for Past Master, we find the following excised passage:

“So, the pack of you were modeled on the libs,” Major said. “And they were Programmed Persons from the beginning. It is most odd that they should come to the fore beyond honest men, but false coin always drives out good. It’s true that they were always machine-things in their minds, and now they are the majority. Concatenated chowder-heads they are! They walk in lock-step and they bleat in unison! The sick twang of their falsetto chorus curdles the heavens. Fools’ fools they are.” “Watch your talk,” said Holygee, “or I shall torture you in your brain with my extension. They are our fathers. They are our brothers, and we go into loving oblivion with them. And they are not all fools. Some of them have been very shrewd or they would not have come to the fore beyond divergent men. The bulk of folk, Major, has always been manipulated by a small number of astute men. And now the folk, in their terminal days, are manipulated by a small number of astute machines—ourselves and no more than a hundred others.”

Setting all that aside, the quarrel with utopia is being played out in the materiality of Past Master’s physical cover, not just in its pages; the right-wing Lafferty and the left-wing Dillon brought together in 1968 to make this ephemeral object of the late 1960s, to make art.

Returning to the Past Master cover, it really features two pieces of art by the Dillons. In 2012, the original lower image—the one of More, caught at the moment when he seems to realize what is happening with the banning of the beyond on Astrobe—was sold at Heritage Auctions. That sale gives us a chance to see the work in relatively high-quality resolution:

Had I been a Lafferty reader at the time, I would have been seriously tempted to buy it.

As far as I know, there is no high-resolution image of the upper, geometric piece. The Mondrian-like spiral at the top of the Ace cover is not merely decorative, in the way much science-fiction cover art is. It reads instead as an image of the book’s central enemy: the Nothing, Ouden.

Several of the Ace Science-Fiction Special covers done by the Dillons used the two-part layout, with abstraction on top and representation at the bottom, but it is an especially effective choice for Past Master.

Early in the novel, when More and Ouden meet, Ouden explains that his Nothingness is not a simple absence but a vortex. He boasts that he is, in fact, the shape of the universe.

“Yes, I am that. But all who encounter me make the mistake of misunderstanding my nothingness. It is a vortex. There is no quiet or static aspect to it. Consider me topologically. Do I not envelop all the universes? Consider them as turned inside out. Now everything is on the inside of my nothingness. Many consider the Nothing a mere negative, and they consider it so to their death and obliteration.”

And there, in the top geometrical image, we have the shape: a net, with its negative space, around the two planets. That Mondrian-like image at the top of the Ace Special captures it well.

Past Master is deeply interested in shape. One thinks of the many things the novel says about shape: that shapes can be both objective and subjective at the same time; that thought has mysterious shape; that the future itself is a shape—the shape of things to come.

The conceptual pun (being in a certain shape and being inside a certain shape) is already present in Past Master. In Arrive at Easterwine (1971), it is Valery Mok who sees Ouden:

“It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot. And the eggshells! What hatched out of them? I dreamed of them before I was born—pieces of broken eggshell millions of parsecs long.”

In Past Master, it is eschatology; as the Past Master chapter title has it, “The Shape of Things to Come.”

Past Master appeared in 1968, the same year Lafferty wrote the seed of Arrive at Easterwine in the unpublished short story “The Shape We’re In” (1968), so he seems to have had this entire cosmic shape-concept on his mind at roughly the same moment, and he was going at it in different ways. Ouden’s boast that he is the shape of the universe anticipates the imaginative climate of Arrive at Easterwine.

The Dillons’ cover plays abstract shape against the human form, the Past Master movement from abstraction to humanity spatialized on the page, with its justly pained and paranoid Thomas More at the bottom. Is the blue circle Earth and the other Astrobe? Are we looking at Ouden as a vortex, a malignity that wraps reality and consumes, or are we looking at a visualization of what the book calls chornometanastasis? Or is it just an image of time going timey-whimey.

Probably both, the Ouden-like vortex and the time tunnel.

I will add that the shadowy hands are effective images of the book’s conspiratorial backdrop. If the three figures are Proctor, Foreman, and Kingmaker, perhaps refracted through Thomas More, then the entire cover reads as an illustration of the novel’s first two, or possibly three, chapters.

One reason to suspect that what we see is drawn directly from those opening chapters, and that it therefore depicts the outermost layer of the conspiracy, is that the hands are so conspicuously human. There is another reason as well. I am not sure I want to call it an Easter egg, though it probably is one: a design element with a fascinating Paul–Sourwine/Ouden connection.

Owing to the diet he had followed from his youth—alcohol, wormwood, green snails—one of Sour John’s kidneys had become vitrified, and in apeculiar manner. Not only had it turned into glass, but it had turned intoglass of a fine jewel-like green. This he had seen himself on the fluoroscope.

No doubt some readers will think this a stretch, but how else is one to explain that green dot, so strange, so oddly out of place? Elsewhere, I have argued that the Sour John allegory matters because it provides one of two crucial allegorical clues to Ouden and idolatry. Yet the five critical allegories in Past Master are routinely passed over, much as tens of thousands of eyes have glanced at that green dot without ever stopping to think about it.

One last thing, and this is hopeful. If only the two planet-like shapes overlaying the eye of the androgynous figure were a nod to one of the most important and overlooked passages in the book:

The two small stars that revolved around each other were joined together by a long steel chain. It was that which held them in their tight, rapid orbits; it was that which made them the governor of the universe. Paul quickly located the trouble. There was a small green creature, with the body of a monkey and the head of a gargoyle, cutting the chain with a hack-saw, and he had it near cut in two.“Pray that I be not too late!”

If this is the right way to read the cover, then its imagery is visual alchemy applied to the novel’s first two or three chapters, elements that are not so much action-centered, but instead index its deeper secrets.