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.”

Brad Frank had a recent post on East of Laughter about a copy of Past Master he found at the Tulsa flea market:

The cover of Iron Tears was also done by the Dillons. Lafferty sometimes spoke about the covers he liked and those he disliked. He liked the cover of The Devil is Dead, and said he hated the cover of East of Laughter. Elsewhere, he was funny about the university press edition of the cover of Okla Hannali, 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 beyond all ‘there.’ 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. What and when at 4:30. 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,

The Past Master cover does not seem to have been among his favorites. It is among mine. It was done by Leo and Diane Dillon. Harlan Ellison dedicated Dangerous Visions (1967) to them.

The Dillons’ work for Past Master is exceptionally good. Lafferty himself does not appear to have thought so; he never mentioned it when asked about covers he admired. In my view, it is by far the most artistically accomplished cover ever to appear on one of his original-run books.

And it is a twofer. The cover consists of two separate pieces 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—was sold at Heritage Auctions. That sale gives the 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 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, even when it is wonderful in its own way. 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 (A Torent of Faces, Synthajoy, Picnic on Paradise, Why Call Them Back Again from Heaven?, and The Two-Timersers), 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 Easterwine, 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 (1971) 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, then the entire cover reads as an illustration of the novel’s first two—or perhaps three—chapters.

One reason to suspect that the cover is drawn directly from those opening chapters and depicts the outermost layer of the conspiracy is that the hands are human. There is another reason. It is the fascinating Paul/Sourwine 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.

How else to explain that green dot, so strange, so oddly out of place? I have argued that the Sour John allegory matters because it provides one of two allegorical clues about Ouden and idolatry. Yet, the five critical allegories in Past Master are routinely passed over, much as many 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 the imagery is visual alchemy applied to the novel’s first two or three chapters.