Silent Lafferty

Harry Langdon (1884-1944)

Whenever someone thinks of Lafferty and silent movies, the story that comes to mind first is "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies," one of his stone-cold masterpieces. He graded it himself in September 1978, reporting to a correspondent "a fair story in Orbit 20, a fair story in Shadows (Doubleday, edited by Charles L. Grant), and a very good story ('Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies') in Terry Carr's Universe Eight." If that story is Lafferty working the vein of the old melodramas, then there is a companion piece, his wonderfully slapstick "The Doggone Highly Scientific Door." Don't be fooled: it is a silent comedy, even if there is dialogue. Just picture that dialogue coming up on hand-lettered intertitles, Speedball style.

The correspondent was Sheryl Smith, his Chicago verse dramatist friend and critic who also wrote about film, and old film is one of the subjects that draw out the most decided opinions in Lafferty's letters to her. Lafferty checked on both of her habits in 1982: "Are you still a Dramatic Verse Poet? Are you still hooked on the Movies?" He thought well of her film writing, telling her she wrote "much better film stuff accidentally" than the critic Louis Black wrote on purpose in "Hollywood's Shadow Cinema," and he lifted from her letters. In 1972 he warned her that he took chapter epigraphs "from personal letters" and that she might "sometime find a quote from Sheryl Smith at one of my chapter headings"; the versicle at the head of chapter fourteen of Not to Mention Camels is hers.

Smith's own description of the letters, when she copied them for Dan Knight in 1993, is right: "they were more literary than personal, and that's their value." A smart cookie, that Smith. On film, Lafferty was always willing to give his views. He ranked the old comedians. He corrected her plans for a silent-comedy program. He reached back to a childhood memory of Buster Keaton's hometown, Perry, Oklahoma, where Lafferty is buried. And he set out a short argument about what sound did to drama, an argument that bears on his fiction.

Some notes on that.

Lafferty placed Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon at the top: "I think that Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon were the best of the silent screen comics, better than Chaplin, better than Harold Lloyd." When I read "The Doggone Highly Scientific Door" now, it is impossible for me not to see Harry Langdon: the baby-faced innocent of The Strong Man and Long Pants, whose reaction always arrives a beat late. The story had an odd road to print. In April 1974 Lafferty listed "Elroy Hunt and the Doggone Door" among the stories "that aren't written or aren't finished." It first appeared in Dutch, in the 1979 collection Dagen van Gras, Dagen van Stro, one of three stories in that book that, he told Smith, "have never before been published in any language." Lafferty's own eye for a gag shows in a memory of The Navigator he sent her in July 1979: "He seemed to be lugging the knocked-out girl up and down the gangways and ladders of the ship. He drops her a few times, and he's accidentally standing on her torso while he's trying to open a deck chair to put her in. Neither the girl nor the deck chair is hinged right."

To explain Lloyd, he used the term "human flies," and he explained the term too. "One of them would come into a town, persuade civic leaders to raise one hundred dollars for him, would make a moving little speech memorializing several others of the human flies who had lost their lives in the year just past, and then would climb up the outside of the tallest building in town without props or hooks." Lloyd, "who never used a double," in Lafferty's phrase, "worked partly in the tradition." (Lafferty's "never" is too strong. Bill Strother, a professional human fly who appears in Safety Last!, doubled him in some long shots.) Anyone who knows the name pictures him hanging from the clock face in Safety Last!

The Keaton detail stands out to me because Lafferty was obviously always fascinated by doubles and doppelgängers of every kind, and he chose to pass on that Keaton had one. "Keaton sometimes used a double though, and the double he used was Vic Orsatti, the center-fielder of the St. Louis Cardinals who looked exactly like him." (Lafferty's memory slipped on the first name. The Cardinal who doubled for Keaton was Ernie Orsatti; Vic, his brother, was a Hollywood agent.) What he relished was the scale of the arrangement, as he wrote in 1980: "Things were in the right proportion then, when big league baseball stars had to work as stunt men or something else in the off season, and movie comedians could make as much as mail men make now."

Through Perry, Lafferty and Keaton had a personal link. That story is best told in his own words, from September 1978: "The first time I ever heard of Buster Keaton was a shameful day for me. I was four years old, and we had just moved down from Iowa to Perry, Oklahoma. Some of my contemporaries there took me down the street and showed me the house where Buster Keaton used to live (he came from Perry). 'Who is Buster Keaton?' I asked. 'He, he, he he! He doesn't know who Buster Keaton is?' those little Okies giggled. 'He, he, he, he!' Oh, those damned giggling little Okies!" This is the sea change he fictionalizes in "Saturday You Die."

He also told Smith he had not seen the whole of Keaton: "I'm not sure that I've ever seen Steamboat Bill Jr., or the Blacksmith or Seven Chances for that matter. In my childhood and youthhood I probably saw twenty-five or thirty of the hundred or so movies that Keaton made, and they all run together in retrospect."

At one point, when Smith was planning an Oktoberfest of silent comedy, Lafferty gave some advice. "Your Oktoberfest of silent comedy sounds good, but not with a live organist. No, no, they only had organs at those big downtown first-run theaters. At the real places they had an old unshaven pianist playing sleepy ragtime that just fit the mood and picked up every nuance."

On sound, he was consistent across a decade of letters. In 1972, warning her off his story "And Mad, Undancing Bears": "Not only is it anti-rock, but it is pretty much anti-music in general. Hey, that stuff is too noisy, isn't it? Wagner too. The race is losing its hearing from all the noise. What, what, what did you say?" In January 1974, answering her plans for a rock opera drawn from the books of Samuel, he set out the argument in full:

Aw, come off it, the drama is not an art form organized based on sound. It began with shadow-play cast by firelight or candlelight on the wall. The producer wiggled his fingers to make his characters. It developed through pantomime and dumb-show puppetry and body-dance sans music. Every blamed people had dumb-show for their earliest and best drama: Japanese, Malayans, Indians. The Americans had their best drama, so far, in their old silent movies. It was sound and music and talk that ruined the hula and the belly-dance and the hand-drama and the magic-lantern show, and pantomime in both comedy and tragedy. Of course, if you had written that drama was an art form organized on a visual basis, I'd have taken the other side of the argument.

He flagged his own contrarianism in that last sentence, but the view was sincere, because six years later, unprompted, he said it again. This time about the movies and the cars together: "Yes, those silent comedies, and those old classic automobiles, also around 1923, were the high points of US culture. But when they started to use electric headlights instead of those carbide-flame brass lanterns, and when they started to use Technicolor and sound in the movies, something went out of both of them." The sentiment turns up in several Lafferty stories, with "Interurban Queen," the story of the world that turned down the automobile, as the standout example.

He thought little of film in general, at least when it came to the modern stuff. In 1979 he said why: "I hardly ever see a new movie any more. Sort of a smell of new paint about them that has to be given a chance to go away, and then I have this horror of being contemporary."

Set the 1974 letter beside "Selenium Ghosts," and the date connection comes into focus. Drama that "began with shadow-play cast by firelight or candlelight on the wall" and was ruined by "sound and music and talk" is the theory; "Selenium Ghosts," written four years later, is the theory turned into fiction. This must be one reason he was obsessed with working out his own media theory in what he called his "modern period novels" of the 1970s and in stories such as "Selenium Ghosts." He had already told Smith in 1974, thanking her for a review of Arrive at Easterwine, what all communication is up against: "Writing things like EASTERWINE is like throwing rocks over a hill. They don't hit the intended target, and the sound that comes back is usually confused or too faint to hear. That's the trouble with all communication."

Finally, a note on vaudeville. It enters the letters mostly when Lafferty talks about style. In February 1977 he sent Smith what he called a "Prose Poem for Two Voices," and it is a cross-talk act:

"Aw hoky, here comes Alfie Bester. Now we're going to be hearing all those Alfie Bester jokes." "Don't you like Alfie Bester jokes?" "They're all right if they're told right, but he doesn't know how to tell them." "How come Alfie Bester doesn't know how to tell Alfie Bester jokes?" "He doesn't understand them. They're a way over his head." "How could Alfie Bester jokes be over Alfie Bester's head?" "He's got a low head."

"Oh well," he added, "people never do rush out to accept a new form." Smith's verdict on his prose poems came back as "mediocre vaudeville," and that June he objected to the adjective: "Whadda you mean my prose poems are indistinguishable from mediocre vaudeville? They are indistinguishable from good vaudeville. Mediocre vaudeville was terrible." He drew on vaudeville for James Joyce as well, in 1976: "Someone should reconstruct one of the languages used by Joyce in his bilingual puns. It seems to be about a third Milt Gross dialect English, about a third old Dutch Comedian vaudeville dialect, and a third plain Yiddish." (He had told her in 1973 that Joyce was "almost completely unreadable" and "a disgrace to the Irish.")

And when Smith wrote of the days of the silent movies, he answered, in September 1978: "You mention the 'Days of the Silent Movies,' but do you remember the 'Days of the Silent Radio'?" The joke was already in print. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, with its days of silent radio, had appeared the year before in Apocalypses, and Lafferty was proud of that book: "SWEENY is carefully wrought, and even has diagrams and chronologies. What other work carries a total history of the century with it?"

One last thing on "Selenium Ghosts," since that is where I started. Lafferty never claimed to understand it. In January 1980, after praising an article of Smith's: "I wish you had enclosed 'Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.' That's one of the pieces that I like very much but do not understand very well. You could probably help interpret it to me." In May 1982, after her Riverside Quarterly essay on his stories: "But I never did understand such stories as RIDE A TIN CAN, GINNY WRAPPED IN THE SUN, ST. POLEANDER'S EVE, SELENIUM GHOSTS OF THE EIGHTEEN SEVENTIES, or PUDDLE ON THE FLOOR. Explain them to me sometime. How could I have laid such eggs as those and not understood them?" It was to have led a collection called Selenium Ghosts and Other Stories.

In the early 1990s Patrice Duvic, Lafferty's French translator and publisher, paid a $2,000 option for a one-year right to make a ninety-minute film of it, to be shot "in France, in French, by Frenchmen." Lafferty weighed how long a picture drawn from the story could be sustained, a half hour, an hour, or a full two-and-a-half-hour feature, and settled on an hour as the most reasonable length. He had no film agent and relied on Virginia Kidd, noting that film agents, for the most part, held "rather narrow views, not much given to experimentation."