"Seven Story Dream" (1960/1973)

Pre-War Apartments, Tulsa, OK

Q: Do you believe in the perfectibility of man, or is he a constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe, to be forever rebuffed at his attempt to rise above the madness which surrounds him? RAL: The perfectibility of “man”? I believe in the perfectibility of people—some people, possibly most people. I do not believe in the perfectibility of society, or of the world, or of “man” in the abstract. Maybe it is a madness that surrounds and rebuffs abstract man. But each person can select his own ambient, because it is subjective to such a large degree. The madness is optional, both for one’s self and for the surroundings. You can send it back to be cooked right. But you don’t have to accept the raw madness. Sure, the individual is perfectible (though there’s probably a less pompous word for it somewhere). Perfection (the real meaning of the word is “completion,” not “faultlessness”) is always there for the taking. A person will finally come to it unless he refuses it. You’re making me sound pompous the way you put these questions—“constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe.” That’s not a real phrase; that’s one of the consensus impositions that somebody stuck in your pocket when you weren’t looking. Throw it away.

“Why did you kill the girl, Gadberry?” “Jealousy, frustration, curiosity . . . ” “I can understand the jealousy. She was an attractive girl. What was the frustration?” “She was almost perfect, but not quite, and it is that which is just short of a masterpiece that infuriates. It is so near—yet it misses. I'm always in anger to destroy a near-masterpiece.” “So you destroyed her. And the third element was your curiosity, like when you said, ‘The girl was somehow completed in death.’ You had to see how she would look dead.”

In making a mostly aesthetic decision to carry out a murder, Gadberry reflects also on the morality of the author as artist, even to the point of staging the opening scene for maximum sensory effect (in the process ‘savagely striking down’ a lone white flower—again, subtlety not really the point of this piece). He cites as his motives ‘jealousy, frustration, curiosity,’ but the first two are clearly deprecated to the third, which he shares with any author who creates a character for the sole purpose of killing them off. —Andrew Ferguson

Again, we come to perfection. Lafferty approached it from multiple angles in his work, creating strange shapes from it. The story that develops this theme most fully is the minor “I’ll See It Done and Then I’ll Die,” in which the plot hinges on fantasies and misunderstandings of completion and perfection. That story was written after The Ghost Story was well underway. However, an earlier, prenucleation story from 1960 addresses the idea of perfection with remarkable intensity: the metafictional detective tale “Seven Story Dream.” It is metafictional in part because Lafferty never wrote mysteries that were not, in one way or another, self-reflexive.

In what follows, I want to think about how “Seven Story Dream” has been read and propose a counterreading of Andrew Ferguson’s interpretation. The only other time I have discussed Ferguson’s readings in depth was in relation to mimesis—an issue essential to understanding what worlds mean in Lafferty. “Seven Story Dream” may not be a central text, but Ferguson's interpretation is unavoidable, since the story contains a revision that Ferguson was the first to identify and since that revision shapes any reading of the story, whether the Lafferty reader recognizes it or not. I begin with a brief summary, then describe the revision, and finally offer an analysis that develops the limitations of Ferguson’s reading.

“Seven Story Dream” is filled with fine and amusing detail. It piles on characters. Much of its pleasure lies in the fact that iterative pile-up is a clutter of odd personalities and red herrings. I strip them away in this summary to foreground the development of the murder plot.

The story begins with Gilford Gadberry, a pompous, second-rate artist, a man who often finds nature aesthetically displeasing and might best be described as a would-be perfectionist. One morning, Gadberry wakes to discover the body of his neighbor, Minnie Jo Merry, on the lawn of their apartment building. He surveys the elements of the scene, running them through his mind to determine what is off. The offending detail is a white aster among the hollyhocks, which he cuts down. Only then does he report the murder to the police.

The murder investigation quickly zeroes in on the building’s eccentric tenants. Detectives Keil and Gold reason that the killer must live there, because the morning dew on the lawn hasn’t been disturbed—a very Lafferty-ish clue. They question the off-puttingly devout landlady Mrs. Raffel, a timid dishwasher named Lamprey, a merchant named Izzard, and George Handle, a gullible man who uses sleep-learning recordings to “educate” himself. As they dig in, they learn Minnie Jo was "friendly" with everyone. Most of the story takes place here, with the detectives interviewing everyone until something unexpected happens. When asked who killed Minnie Jo, the simple-minded George Handle offers a repetitive admission, saying he strangled Minnie Jo Merry and threw her out the window.

The detectives find the confession suspicious because it sounds robotic and because Handle believes he committed the act within a dream. The detectives return to the apartment complex and catch Gadberry trying to break into Handle’s room to retrieve audio equipment and tapes. The twist of the story is that Gadberry has used Handle’s sleep-learning machine to condition him into confessing night after night. Gadberry admits he engineered the murder of Minnie Jo out of artistic frustration, because she was a near-masterpiece that “needed” to be destroyed. Those are the broad contours of "Seven Story Dream."

What is the revision? In the 1960 manuscript, the recording repeats a confession (“I killed Minnie Jo Merry . . .”) until George Handle learns it; in the published version, it instead trains George Handle to answer on cue to the question “Who killed Minnie Jo Merry?”, and it adds Gadberry’s line about “uninspired questioners” and the “cliché”:

I agree with Ferguson that the revision is significant. The disagreement over reading the story centers on why it is significant. He argues that “Seven Story Dream” is a meta-mystery about how murder mysteries work: the plot’s hypnopædia frame-up and the story’s clutter of “tapes, wires, records” pull attention away from the killer’s identity (never really in doubt) to the mechanisms and motives that make a corpse “necessary” in a piece of detective fiction. In Ferguson's reading, the murder is an aesthetic problem—Minnie Jo Merry is made “more aesthetically pleasing dead than alive.” Ferguson takes this outward into a critique of the genre itself, which often requires a body to satisfy what Ferguson calls its own ironic, even sadistic, aesthetic. On a meta-level, culpability raises questions about the authorial impulse that invents a character to kill another. Ferguson calls this a “grim promontory” to find oneself on, and he wonders whether it might be why Lafferty sat on the story for a decade. He sees Gilford Gadberry as a true Decadent who elevates aesthetic experience above ordinary morality, then says Virginia Kidd’s addition to the story is important because it reintroduces the competing moral/rational framework of detective fiction: Gadberry knowingly panders to “uninspired questioners." This pandering betrays his aesthetic absolutism and pulls the story back from pure decadence into a serviceable detective story that critiques the genre’s clichés without letting its amorality swallow the narrative. The view is that an artist avoids clichés. The final story is said to be more in line with the Chestertonian Father Brown stories. Finally, Kidd's addition made the story more marketable.

First, points of agreement. There are three. Laffery is metafictional. The killer was never in doubt. Virginia Kidd made the story more marketable.

Now to the points of disagreement. There is a great deal in Ferguson’s argument with which I disagree, and it would be easy to get lost in the weeds. My first impulse is to address, at some length, how his reading deploys Northrop Frye and Chesterton, both of whom illuminate Lafferty. Because the Frye point largely subsumes the Chesterton one, I will set Chesterton aside for most of the point, but will say something. Readers uninterested in Frye, or in how he bears on Ferguson’s argument, may wish to skip ahead.

For those who stay: a few points about what Frye actually says about detective fiction and irony. In the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye is working with a technical term in his system—what he calls “modes”—and the relation between modes and literary conventions is anything but straightforward. The Anatomy is a deep and complicated work. Suffice it to say that, contra Ferguson, detective fiction, for Frye, can be restorative or non-restorative, moralizing or non-moralizing, which is connected to why Frye ultimately describes detective fiction as a form of romance. Its conventionalization has led to the romance of detective fiction as being primarily reintergative, if not always restorative. In The Secular Scripture, Frye writes that “the detective story operates, for the most part, in a deeply conservative social area, where the emphasis is on reintegrating the existing order” (138). Remember this: reintegrating the existing order because it seems to be what Fergson downplays. Frye's analysis of the pharmakos in the Anatomy centers on this point. A scapegoat produces reintegration. Ferguson, by contrast, claims that Frye assigns the genre “not to the realm of moralism or any romantic restoration of society, but to the realm of sadism and ironic comedy.” "Sadism" is Ferguson, not Frye. Frye does say that savagery in detective fiction tilts toward moralism. See the relevant passages at the end of this post from the Anatomy.

Frye's detective fiction is popular in the 20th century because that was a period when the ironic mode dominated historically. What he most emphatically does not say is that the detective story has nothing to do with restoration. Spelling out why Ferguson goes wrong would take us too far from Lafferty, but Ferguson seems to confuse Frye on modes and Frye on the conventions of marketing genres. Again, those who want to understand this should look closely at what Frye says about melodrama and detective fiction in Anatomy of Criticism, and compare it with Frye's fully developed view of detective fiction in the Harvard lectures that became The Secular Scripture. One of Frye's private passions was reading detective novels. He wanted to get it right for his theory of literature as an order of words.

It should now be clear that Frye ultimately thought that the genre of detective fiction (as opposed to a marketing genre popular at a historical moment when the ironic dominates) is a form of romance, one tied to "reintegrating the existing order." Here is Frye saying it a little differently, but with zero ambiguity. The passage is from The Secular Scripture: "In the general area of romance we find highly stylized patterns like the detective story, which are so conventionized as to resemble games" (20). This contradicts Ferguson's primarly argument that detective fiction belongs "not to the realm of moralism or any romantic restoration of society, but to the realm of sadism and ironic comedy.” This argument looks to me like skimming Frye or not understanding the complete picture.

None of this would matter in the slightest if it were not being used to prop up Ferguson’s larger argument that Lafferty, as an artist, found himself on a grim promontory with the ironic mode in the original “Seven Story Dream":

This is a grim promontory on which to find oneself, philosophically speaking, and I wonder if it isn’t that which led Lafferty to shelve the tale for so long. There’s a further inquiry to be had over the degree to which this tale deviates from the spirit of oft-cited inspiration G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown treats murder less as a crime against morality than as one against rationality: there is evil in the world, and no amount of detection will make that wholly right again, but so long as such crimes can be made comprehensible within the wider moral universe then the logical coherence of that universe remains unshaken.

Now something about Chesterton. The strangeness of Ferguson’s claim that “G. K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown treats murder less as a crime against morality than as one against rationality,” largely speaks for itself but bears thinking about. Across Chesterton's fifty-three Father Brown stories, murder is certainly not "less a crime against morality" than against rationality. In Chesterton, the problem with murder is the Judeo-Christian problem with murder: murder is, first and foremost, a moral crime. The Catholic formula is "mortal sin." Chesterton never drives a wedge between moral judgment and rational intelligibility. Murder is no less a crime against morality than against rationality, because for Chesterton the two are mutually implicating: moral judgment is inseparable from intelligibility, so that evil can be recognized, named, and judged within an ordered moral universe. That is how the Father Brown stories work. My suspicion is that Chesterton would have laughed at "Father Brown treats murder less as a crime against morality than as one against rationality." It is something one would expect an antagonist, usually an intellectual or a businessman, in the Father Brown stories to say.

Together, all this Frye and Father Brown business in Ferguson's argument is meant to underwrite a larger thought about what Ferguson calls the "grim promontory" on which Lafferty supposedly finds himself. The metaphor describes the situation Ferguson believes existed in the original 1960 version of “Seven Story Dream” before Virginia Kidd’s revision. On his reading, the unrevised 1960 story forces both Lafferty and its reader onto an exposed philosophical ledge where murder is no longer a just crime to be repaired narratively but an aesthetic choice—and if, more broadly, the corpse in a murder mystery is understood as an aesthetic requirement of the genre—then (philosophical? moral? metafictional?) responsibility no longer rests with any character within the story but with the author who creates the murdered character. The position is, I assume, grim because it recasts detective fiction as something closer to ironic cruelty than moral restoration (again, the misreading of Frye), and it is a promontory because, once the genre and the artist are implicated in this way, there is no comfortable vantage point to which one can retreat. The detective story artist stands on a cliff of sadism and ironic comedy, with nowhere left to go but down.

I do not find this persuasive. In fact, I find it silly because Lafferty built the 1960 "Seven Story Dream" around the idea of perfection from the very beginning. The situation appears grim only if one takes Gilford Gadberry's hierarchy of values seriously, is tempted to dissociate morality and art, or accepts Ferguson’s account of metafiction in the story, which overlooks the importance of Lafferty's Catholic notion of perfection. Read this way, the idea that the detective story writer is implicated as a kind of murderer depends on a wafer-thin metafictional analogy.

Why not just reject Gadberry’s worldview as being overintellectualized and self-serving bunkum? Gadberry is what the story mocks. As we should expect, Lafferty has already constructed a mousetrap for Gadberry by turning Gadberry’s own melodramatic (Frye would say moralized) commitment to a false view of perfection against him. Ferguson appears largely unaware that the story is not really about Gadberry’s ideas of perfection but about Lafferty's.

Examine how perfection works in the story. Crudely, Gadberry acts like God. He claims the authority to decide when something is perfect, setting its telos by determining when it is complete or incomplete. He chooses to “complete” Minnie Jo Merry through her murder because he imagines himself in competition with God. His outward aestheticist pose is that, by killing her, he can ontologize Minnie as an art object.

Ferguson argues that Gadberry’s primary motive for this is artistic curiosity. He writes:

In making a mostly aesthetic decision to carry out a murder, Gadberry reflects also on the morality of the author as artist, even to the point of staging the opening scene for maximum sensory effect (in the process “savagely striking down” a lone white flower—again, subtlety not really the point of this piece). He cites as his motives “jealousy, frustration, curiosity,” but the first two are clearly deprecated to the third, which he shares with any author who creates a character for the sole purpose of killing them off.

Yet the textual evidence points to something beyond this aestheticist reading. There are signs of jealousy and frustration—clues that the story is not only about an aesthete “perfecting” someone in the name of art, but that the murder is also, in part, sexual and about possession and sinful (not aesthetic) destruction.

Lafferty’s opening scene is a brilliant piece of writing in several ways, but certainly brilliant in one word choice:

In spite of the elements that went into the composition the effect was near perfect — and yet there was one clashing entity in that aubade scene. Gadberry reviewed it in his mind, for the artist is satisfied with nothing but perfection. The firs, the hedges, the corpse, the mimosa, the garbage cans, the lawn, the hollyhocks with their lone aster — something was in that peaceful morning scene that simply did not belong there.

The critical word is aubade. An aubade is a literary genre, and it matters if the story is read metafictionally. Most well-known aubades rely on an implied sexual situation, simply because they are set at daybreak after lovers have spent the night together. Perhaps the most famous aubade in English—one Lafferty, as a devoted reader of poetry, would almost certainly have known—is "The Sun Rising" by John Donne. It is a classic inverted aubade, opening with the poet in bed with his lover and proceeding by scolding the sun for intruding on their privacy. We see the same trope in Romeo and Juliet (Act III, Scene 5), where the newlyweds argue over whether the bird they hear is the nightingale or the lark. They want to prolong the night. Daylight means that Romeo must leave.

The opening scene of "Seven Story Dream" is sexual. Gadberry thinks of himself as a lover in an aubade. He is not only apprehending the scene of the broken corpse through a painter’s eye, but savoring his libido. That counts when weighing Gadberry’s motives, not least because there is a far more unpleasant implication in the text—one that seems to have gone unnoticed—namely that Minnie Jo Merry may have been raped before being strangled and thrown from the window. There is an allusion to Jack the Ripper, which puts sexual murder in our imagination. Then Lafferty lets something drop in the very last lines of the story.

The machine went on to recount certain abominations that only the killer knew he would commit, but the voice of that most polished adman returned again and again to the command: “Say, ‘I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed—’”

What are these “certain abominations,” beyond the murder itself? Are they just punching and kicking her? Is kicking or punching an abomination? Why are they called abominations when the murder itself isn't? Why were these certain abominations necessary for the composition of Gadberry's scene with Minnie Jo Merry’s body? To state the obvious, an abomination is a true horror. In a story shot through with sexual implications, the most plausible answer is that these abominations are indeed sexual.

“Minnie Jo was quite a good girl, but she was on the edge of becoming quite a bad girl. I have seen it happen to so many of the young ones who are loose in the world.”

“He can talk about music and funny paintings and the new dirty novels and psychology and things like that.”

"No, I never laid a hand on her, except sometimes in attempted affection.”

All of them always looking at the young girl.

Nor was she the only girl a third his age that he brought in. The sap was not all dead in him yet.

There is, moreover, no strictly “artistic” reason for Gadberry to have George Handle commit acts that simply will not register in the final visual composition of the crime scene. Certain abominations are on the tape: they are not perceived on the body in the yard except in Gadberry's understanding of the aubade. If they are not visible, they do not act as aesthetic elements in the scene. Their inclusion, therefore, cannot be explained on purely artistic grounds. Gadberry must have wanted these certain abominations for reasons that exceed, and undermine, his own aesthetic rationalizations.

The Virginia Kidd additions may have ensured publication, but they also divert attention from the story’s subtler aspects, which were not Virginia Kidd but R. A. Lafferty, which is why I think Gadberry is not a true aesthete but a hedonistic, self-absorbed, second-rate artist, motivated to get off to a sexual murder and call it art. The needless certain abominations point to jealousy and frustration as real components of his character and motive. The part of the confession that Lafferty wrote keeps Gadberry's scopophilia front and center:

“I lied. She had eyes, and she wasn’t conventional. She was near perfect, gentlemen. So near.”

Twenty-nine years later, in a 1989 letter, Lafferty explained his philosophy, and we can see why he was never on the grim promontory:

There has never been a perfect book . . . of all time and for all people except the one; and its author is far more human than we are. There has never been a perfect man but the one. To look for things which are truly excellent, one must look for things that are distant kin to these two; one must look for things that are flawed.”

There is also something distinctly Lafferty-devilish about Gadberry’s desire to destroy beauty, to reject the flawed, and then to claim that one does so out of concern for perfection and completion. After all, it is the rhetoric of the devils in Past Master who know that complete means perfect:

“Suffice it to say that those single-minded men who invented us did break down the barrier between living and nonliving matter. And they discovered that the living was the illusion. Well then, they created us as dead men, and dead men we be. We are dead, and all is dead. But we believe that we are complete. We feel that there is no dimension beyond ourselves. In our beginning man made us. Then we made ourselves, a little more efficiently than man could do it. We reproduce almost in your own manner. We even cross with humans, with some curious results. We have become man. We have replaced man. Soon man will be nothing.”

The severe moral judgment Lafferty passes is present in the 1960 version of "Seven Story Dream." If anything, the 1973 version's Virginia Kidd revisions obscure Gadberry’s range of motives rather than clarify them. This is what happens when your agent fiddles with your story. Lafferty loved Virginia Kidd, but her revisions were a generic overlay of needless cuteness on the story, helping it more effortlessly sink into the genre slum. She knew how to sell a story.

With these considerations in mind, we are ready to turn to the unusual Mrs. Raffel, the apartment landlady. Lafferty gives her lines that will strike some readers as off-putting, for reasons akin to the discomfort many feel when confronting The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically the notorious train episode and Susan’s fate. What is at work in both cases is an uncompromisingly Christian moral vision, one that insists it is preferable to die young and saved than to live longer only to die damned. For this reason, the following passage is comic without being ironic; it is, more precisely, an instance of Christian black comedy:

"Not necessarily, Captain. Minnie Jo was a very open person. If Jack the Ripper himself had come in, red from his trade, she'd have said, ‘Hi, honey, sit down and talk to me.’ But it was probably someone she knew.” “What are your feelings on hearing of the death of Miss Merry?” “Satisfaction—though I'll miss her—and relief and thankfulness that it has finally turned out all right.” “Turned out all right? Do you call it turning out all right that she was murdered?” he asked her. “Oh yes. There were many worse things that could have happened to her. How lucky that Minnie Jo was killed before they happened!” “You will have to explain that. Did you hate her?” “No, I loved her—and I will explain. Minnie Jo was quite a good girl, but she was on the edge of becoming quite a bad girl. I have seen it happen to so many of the young ones who are loose in the world. Every time I know one, and notice her nearing the change, I pray that something will intervene and prevent it. This is the first time my prayers have been answered, and I'm thankful.”

Finally, it looks to me that Ferguson conflates the artist’s instrument with the artwork it produces. Ferguson treats the tape as if it were part of Gadberry’s art, as if it were an element in the composition. Gadberry uses the recordings to manipulate Handle and to (he hopes) evade justice. It is no more part of his art than the handle of Van Gogh’s brush is part of Starry Night. It is closer to being like the money Gadberry extracts from Handle: a means to an end. Gadberry says, "I often have use for fools." The real artwork, as Gadberry himself conceives it, or says he conceives it, is the murdered body of Minnie Jo Merry:

Captains Keil and Gold arrived quickly and took charge. Minnie Jo was bruised around the throat, and dried blood framed her mouth. Her death, however, may have been caused by a violent concussion.

Thomas De Quincey, one of my favorite writers, wrote a long essay with a famous title: On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827). There is an important distinction between murder as a fine art and committing murder to create an art object. The former aestheticizes the entire process; the latter aestheticizes the victim. Lafferty’s story is concerned with the second, not the first.

Lafferty on a grim promontory with respect to his own art accords with no Lafferty I have read. When Lafferty could sell a story with revisions, he usually did so and cashed the check, as Ferguson himself has noted. There is no need to imagine an existential crisis or philosophical discomfort with his own work, particularly since the Kidd revisions distract from what Lafferty was already doing, which would be consistent with decades' worth of repeated statements about the meaning of perfection.

Why, then, did Lafferty not push much for the story’s publication? Try this. It was an early story (what I call prenucleation Laffery), written for his unreliable soundrel of a first agent, A. L. Fierst. It relied on a learning-in-one’s-sleep conceit that already felt played out. Ferguson’s observation that the story may connect to an episode of My Three Sons is a genuinely good catch. It gives a far better explanation than the one he ultimately proposes. There is a name for that. Occam's something. Here, I am tempted to quote Father Brown's "There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon."

“Seven Story Dream” turns on a weak, sitcom-grade twist, redeemed by Lafferty’s ingenuity elsewhere and by his brilliant verbal texture. The 1960 and 1973 versions rely on the same trite device. The story matters as an early, pre-nucleation probe of Lafferty’s perfectibility theme and as another trial run of a large cast in a small package, not as any grim philosophical promontory. Ferguson’s bibliographic command is impressive; his critical attunement is not. The disparity suggests a preference for bibliographic collection over understanding. Lafferty knew what he was doing.