IIb. Belloc: Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! A Catholic tale have I to tell!” — Hilaire Belloc, "Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! "(1910)

"I stand by all that I wrote in the ‘TOLKIEN AS CHRISTIAN’ essay, but I don’t understand why Tolkien acted and wrote as he did. One of my friends has insisted that ‘EVERYTHING that Tolkien wrote was in a sort of cipher.’ Well, I haven’t been able to uncipher it, nor to uncipher the effect he has had on so many people." — Lafferty, Letter to Al Doty, September 4, 1993

“In his talk Belloc came out with one of his pet themes: that the Anglo-Saxons were utterly unimportant in the history of England. Now, there was present on this occasion a man who was probably the greatest authority in the world on Anglo-Saxon subjects and was the professor of Anglo-Saxon history [sic] at the time. He is presently professor of English Literature at Oxford. The man’s name is Tolkien, and he was a very good Catholic …. Well, Tolkien disagreed profoundly with Belloc on the question of the Anglo-Saxons. He was sitting just in front of me, and I saw him writhing as Belloc came out with some of his more extreme remarks. So during the interval, I said to him, “Oh, Tolkien, now you’ve got your chance. You’d better tackle him.” He looked at me and said, “Gracious me! Do you think I would tackle Belloc unless I had my whole case very carefully prepared?” He knew Belloc would always pull some fact out of his sleeve which would disconcert you! Now, that was a tremendous tribute from probably the greatest authority in the world at the time on that particular subject.” — Martin D'arcy, S.J.

"Find half a dozen straight words in yourself and use them." — Lafferty, Letter, 19 June 1989

Today will be a little bumpy. I want to transition the blog away from the issue of antisemitism (aside from the Antisemitism section of this blog, which now has to exist), having done what I can to put it unavoidably on people’s critical radar. I want to dive into new territory and have been putting together thoughts on In a Green Tree and the unpublished Lafferty novels and other materials, and I’ll start posting about them soon.

But before turning to that, a word about the American philosopher Richard Rorty. I don’t share his views, but I love watching his interviews, and his essays are among my favorite pieces of writing about philosophy. He had a gift for handling difficult people and subjects in a way that drove others mad. In one filmed interview, the host asked him something like, “What do you think of Martin Heidegger?” Rorty replied, “I think he was a bad man who wrote good books.” Perfect—gets Heidegger exactly right. My TL;DR on Lafferty would be: “I think he was a good man who wrote good books and said bad things for dumb reasons.” Some people refuse to believe that good people can say bad things.

Which brings me to the questions of race and politics in Lafferty’s work, questions rooted in the problems of Catholic intellectual history. In my view, they are mitigated in Lafferty's case for a reason the academy is unlikely to accept but which has the old-fashioned virtue of being true. It’s not that Lafferty was simply an old man with outdated views who blundered into controversy. Holocaust denial was a highly marginal Catholic position by the 1970s, and Lafferty was a brilliant man who knew exactly what he was doing. What he seemed not to care about was anyone who might wish to make him the subject of academic study. When asked by Sheryl Smith whether he would be read in two hundred years, he said, Yes, he would be reading himself.

So take this less as a verdict and more as a charitable read of intent, with an eye to what the Church was (and wasn’t yet) saying

To him, this stuff was historical fact plus his observation and inference—and it wasn’t personal, nary a bit. It would be offensive if people were Holocaust victims; there was no Holocaust; therefore, it is not offensive on rational warrant. He wasn’t going to be cruel to anyone who is Jewish, but he wasn’t going to budge an inch on his view of history. That view bears on fictional worlds and the real one (“More Worlds Than One?”). That said, there are Lafferty letters out there I haven't read, and that information needs to be taken into account.

Lafferty’s admiration for Belloc emboldened him—and, incidentally, helps explain why he loathed Tolkien. Lafferty doesn’t mention Belloc in “Tolkien as Christian,” his idiosyncratic essay on Tolkien, but I had to laugh when I noticed Belloc was there in spirit. Of course he was. In the Tolkien essay, Lafferty critiques the The Lord of the Rings for constructing what he saw as a non-Incarnational world; but in a letter from the archive, he goes after the man himself. His argument? Being a Catholic at Oxford was difficult. Yet for Lafferty, there had been one unyielding Catholic who had shown Tolkien exactly how it should be done: Hilaire Belloc.

Here is what Lafferty writes about Tolkien to Al Doty:

“Tolkien was born in 1892 at Bloemfontein in South Africa, so he had a slight aura of the strange when he got to Oxford, and he was a fairly elderly man when he wrote The Lord of the Rings in 1954. When it became quite a best seller with young people in the United States ten years later, he was as surprised as anybody. As a Catholic at Oxford that was still extremely violently anti-Catholic, he and the very talented group to which he belonged kept something of a low profile, referring to themselves humorously as ‘Papists’ rather than Catholics. When Tolkien finally got a full professorship, he threw away most of the low profile. The only Catholic at Oxford who never showed any deference to the powers at Oxford was the half-Irish French-born Belloc, 20 years Tolkien’s senior, who took over his contemporaries at Oxford with his high-spirited and exciting Catholicism, so that he put a sort of crypto-Catholic mark on all of them, a mark that is still on them a hundred years later, today. But none of this explains Tolkien and Oxford, and the quirks that turned up in Tolkien.”

Ironically, Belloc died just in time not to need to work it into his theory of history, with its "Tragic Cycle" of what happens to the Jews in every nation. If you want to see Belloc a little like Lafferty did, consider reading this.

The above is a simplified snapshot of Belloc’s main conceptual framework from the 1920s onward.

Belloc Outlines.pdf

Download PDF • 187KB

Not that I put it all on Belloc.

In any case, as I turn to other matters, I want to say a few words about the people with academic training who have worked on Lafferty, voices who will no doubt have something to say, perhaps all the more worth hearing for being just a little too sensitive.

My own position isn’t shifting: keep Lafferty what he was: the Cranky Old Man from Tulsa, a Catholic who, by the Church’s own logic, probably squeaks through. Not because he was right, but because he wasn’t personally malevolent, he was a model parishioner, he never set out to cause scandal, and he had the good fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) to die at precisely the right moment to slip through the theological net—though not in… well, I’ll channel Enniscorthy Sweeny here—in whatever sells best for reputation management when marketing Lafferty or in a left-leaning academic consensus reality.

The real man was too singular for anything else, and one amusing episode in his correspondence shows him losing all patience with a fool who tried to meddle with his views. There, he made his feelings clear.

"I answered two babbling and confused letters of yours as well as I could, though it was obvious you were fishing for an easy catch-words you could twist into some false justification for a wrong choice."

Then he gave some advice,

"Show a little manhood and get out of that ‘nest’ you’re in. Stop trying to twist people’s words into easy answers, and do some honest, plain thinking."

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State of Lafferty Studies, as I see it.

Andrew Ferguson is the obvious starting point for anyone who truly wants to understand what is going on in Lafferty—at least insofar as you want actual facts he has shared through his research. He got into the archive and mapped the land. His critical instincts are right about the most important and potentially productive aspects of Lafferty that aren’t explicitly Catholic. I differ on their significance, taking the view that Ferguson’s theoretical tastes are probably better served on video games and other media. The documents he landed on matter because of the complicated ways Lafferty worked out his Catholicism within them. I don’t think Ferguson sees this, either because he doesn’t understand Lafferty's Catholicism very deeply or because it’s easier to present them as being less problematic by being less Catholic. He thinks you walk away with Lafferty by subtracting too much of the real Lafferty. By “problematic” I don’t mean anything narrowly about race or antisemitism but what the real Lafferty’s view of ontology means for areas of inquiry such as utopianism, subcreation, and mimesis—all now more crucial to understanding Lafferty, since mimesis links his two great preoccupations by way of racialized categories in both history and fiction. So: Ferguson for what he teaches us about textual history, not Ferguson for a critical imagination. I wasn’t surprised when he said his biography would also be a biography of Tulsa, because nothing makes one of the most interesting minds in American literature more interesting than talking a lot about Tulsa. I’ll add that I don’t think there’s enough action in Lafferty’s life to write an interesting bio of him that isn’t an intellectual biography. To do that, one would need the kind of critical imagination Ferguson seems to lack.

Gregorio Montejo is well-positioned to understand Lafferty, but his work tends to put Lafferty into boxes that go out of form at the edges. For example, Lafferty is, I think, closer to an outsider artist, as Ferguson sees him, and the bricolage thing isn’t helpful critically. I’ve already explained the problems with it elsewhere, so I won’t beat a dead horse. Where Montejo is most critically strong is also where he is weakest: bringing in someone like von Balthasar to make sense of Lafferty. Wrong kind of Catholic twinkle, fits like a glove on a foot. So, Montejo for what he can teach us about Lafferty’s theology when not deformed by his own intellectual formation and pets, not Montejo when he superimposes structures alien to Lafferty’s metaphysics. My assessment will go up or down depending on the apparatus in In a Green Tree. Having now read the long, continuously paginated version of the MS, I truly don’t understand why it has taken so long to appear.

Daniel Otto Petersen uses Lafferty to explore ideas that interest him because Lafferty interests him, and I often come away with new angles from his work that help me work out mine by thinking, how can he be so wrong? One example: Lafferty’s lists look to me more like Menippean rhetoric that passed through the Renaissance by way of Erasmus and copia, then into later modernity by way of figures like Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, and ended up in the work of an eccentric Okie, than like evidence of OOO—but Petersen might just think rhetorical amplification itself is evidence for OOO and other materialist ontologies. For me, rhetorical figures say nothing deep about the structure of reality but do say a lot about the part of reality that uses language. This is just the unending Western quarrel between the philosophical realist and the sophist. One of my new favorite Lafferty quotes is what he told Sheryl Smith, which I am now going to use twice in one week: don’t expect your enthusiasms to have enthusiasms for each other. The upshot is that Petersen usually argues illustratively, turning Lafferty into “Allegorical Lafferty.” The Lafferty text becomes the vehicle for the theory. I think Petersen is best when concrete. The most interesting idea I’ve heard from him isn’t written down—though ecomonstrous stuff is important to anyone working on Lafferty and eco-studies: how Lafferty’s apocalypses and post-apocalypses fit into a developmental typology. Ironically, that would be a genuine contribution, a big idea, since people need a way to put together the novels as a sequence, and that is truly insightful. So, Petersen for provocation, though he will make sure you see how clever and politically high-minded he is. That sounds like an insult, but it isn't: it's something that I think gets in the way in his criticism of Lafferty.

That’s my blunt—if admittedly impolite—assessment of where the Department of Lafferty Studies currently stands. Each contributor has done some good work, though each approach also carries serious flaws [1].

For the vast majority of Lafferty’s fans? There’s little reason for them to care about the academy, its passing fashions, or the inner workings of its publishing world.

Paradoxically, the academy might find Lafferty more interesting if someone intelligent took a warts-and-all approach, with less makeup on the warts, and I hope those flaws are addressed directly. Until someone offers a clear, evidence-based case for “rescuing” an old man in the name of science-fiction studies, I see no reason to change my mind about what I have seen or how I am making sense of it.

The uncomfortable facts about artists have no better ally than the quality of their work. That calls for criticism informed by biography, not biography in place of criticism. And if readers can embrace Evelyn Waugh, they can handle the real Lafferty. I saw it this summer my progressive-minded students, all under twenty and in a joint Rice–University of Houston program, visited Waugh’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. They didn’t like the Waugh the man, but he made them laugh.

What did Lafferty think about himself after he quit writing? In a 1987 letter, he wrote, "For the rest, I'm a Catholic, Conservative (if that word has any meaning any more), introspective (if that word still has meaning), left-handed, straight, fairly wealthy, and perhaps too satisfied. I believe that I've had a happier life than have most people I know."

Lafferty ended his Tolkien–Belloc letter to Al Doty with a sharp one: “Maybe somebody will uncipher the Tolkien cipher someday.” He believed Tolkien temporized. Belloc, he thought, did not—and Lafferty wanted it on record that he was not a Catholic in Tolkien’s mold. Whether he was right about Tolkien remains an open question, but he saw him as an in-house enemy. That was how Lafferty thought. I hope someday someone unciphers the Lafferty.

After his death, his Church has spoken more directly and publicly and intelligently on the Holocaust. As Pope Benedict XVI declared, Holocaust denial is “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.” It’s a shame Lafferty’s belief wasn’t challenged by an authority he respected. Still, there is a line from a Belloc poem—one Lafferty loved and quoted more than once—that fits here. It’s relevant because it would almost certainly have been his response to one source of authority he clearly did not respect: the timid, hush-hush academic:

“May all my enemies go to hell! Noël! Noël!”

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[1] I was called vitriolic. If any of this post sounds vitriolic, judge it within the context of my other non-polemical and more academic (but hobbyist) posts on the work of Lafferty scholars. Vitriol, after all, has a precise meaning. If the critical conversation grows sharper because of it, the vitriol will have proved itself worthwhile.