"Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half" (1960/1988)

Q. 1383. Are the souls in Purgatory sure of their salvation? A. The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God which is called the Beatific Vision. Q. 1384. Do we know what souls are in Purgatory, and how long they have to remain there? A. We do not know what souls are in Purgatory nor how long they have to remain there; — Baltimore Catechism, 1885

  “But there has never been a day like this before, has there, Ahmad?” called Stuff.      “I am not sure. It may be that such a day comes to everyone, and that each of your ancestors has known one. Or it may be that this is the only day like it that has ever been. To me also it has been an especially vivid day.”     They did not understand what he said, for he spoke in deep Malay, not the pidgin that only strings a few of the words in. Yet they knew what he said well enough.

“Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half” is an early but ambitious story. Like “The Ugly Sea” and a few others from the first years of Lafferty’s return to writing, it shows him working on the literary side of the market. As far as I know, it has been written about twice. Heywood Reynolds wrote a brief appreciation piece in the second volume of Feast of Laughter, where he speculates about Lafferty’s experience in the Pacific Theater and how it relates to details in the story. Ironically, the piece appears in the “You’re On the Right Track, Kid” section. The irony is earned, because Heywood writes that Lafferty “refers to ‘Elias the Syrian from Oklahoma,’” and then glosses Syrian as meaning that Elias was Syrian “as a member of an early civilization, notably a Phoenician. Phoenicians were seafarers.” He adds: “Later he describes himself: ‘One was an apostate seminarian.’” That failed seminarian is not Lafferty but Joseph Stalin, just as the “stone-mason, son of a blacksmith” is Benito Mussolini, the “poster-painter, son of a customs official” is Adolf Hitler, and the “dilettante, son of a dilettante” is Hirohito, who was an amateur marine biologist interested in small marine predators.

The other interpretation is by Andrew Ferguson, who is, of course, good on the biographical and bibliographical details. After the summary, I will focus on where my reading diverges from his and relate those divergences to the Argo Legend, an interpretive choice Ferguson also makes.

This time, Lafferty gives us a story set in the final days of WWII. On July 4, 1945, four soldiers, Joe “Stuff” Stoffel, George Elias, Phil Plunkett, and Calzatoio (nicknamed Shoe-Horn), are on liberty. They take a rubber boat, jokingly named Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half, to the island of Ita Pulau in the Moluccas. During the journey, the young men discuss big topics, including their desire to control their own fates. Stuff talks about his specific ambition to have “the world by the tail.” Lafferty’s narrator then gives a brief, brilliant lesson in Malay vocabulary, defining terms like “ba-goose” (good) and “tiddy ba-goose” (bad). Once one knows this, one has mastered most of what one needs to know, but Lafferty pushes the joke further, teaching the reader how to count in Malay. This lesson is both out of order and incomplete. From the start, we are told that communication matters, a point that will return in a speech given in Malay. The introduction ends with the four men rowing through waters that appear increasingly deep and concave, almost mystically green. The story contains some of Lafferty’s most poetically intense mythogenic writing, delivered comparatively straight. Then the men arrive at the island to meet a local man named Ahmad.

Lafferty suggests that Ita Pulau is a paradise. The group shares a meal of fish and taro with Ahmad. They drink a large quantity of a beverage called coconut wine. Under its influence, which takes on the nimbus of myth, the soldiers enter a state of mental clarity and heightened sensory perception. They feel as though they have awakened from a lifelong dream into total wakefulness. A philosophical discussion follows about luck, religion, and the nature of success. The legend of Faust comes up, as does the question of what it means to be graced enough to hold the entire world in one’s hands. Then an important moment arrives, as Ahmad warns them that they have had enough to drink. He urges them to row back to their base before the tide becomes too strong.

Off go the four men in the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half, rowing back to their stations. At first they feel like giants. They possess immense power. Then something unexpected happens. As they approach the shore, they experience a kind of collective failure that points to their deep flaws. One is incapacitated. Shoe-Horn throws the oars into the sea and starts a fistfight with Elias. Stuff falls into a spiritual paralysis. Lafferty says they died. Then Lafferty says they did not, because he gives us a second ending. The men wake up in a muddy swamp, where a local boy they disliked says he rescued them by hauling them ashore and kicking the water out of their stomachs. This is likened to waking up in purgatory. The story ends with the group walking back to their unit along a rough jeep road called the “World Famous Dixie Highway,” followed by the narrator’s observation that the world has been in decline since that perfect afternoon.

There is a lot to say about this story. Ferguson’s reading is provocative, so I am going to build on it by marking points of disagreement, not because anyone cares about disagreement in itself, but because I think it matters for a richer reading of Lafferty. He interprets “Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half” as a philosophical microcosm of the world and the Church, using a mundane World War II raft trip to prototype Lafferty’s techniques, many of which are already apparent here, and his theological themes. So far, so good. He argues that the characters’ drinking of local coconut wine grants them a fleeting, omniscient “writer’s perspective” and a perfect “high afternoon,” and he points out that this absolute clarity carries the cost of realizing their impending end. He notes that the story presents two outcomes: a literal death by drowning, and a purgatorial survival in a “shadow-world.” As Ferguson aptly summarizes this punishment:

"But the loss of what they had is unbearable: a death more devastating than drowning could be: 'the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again.'"

There are minor but important errors. Ferguson writes that Plunkett and Elias fight until the raft capsizes. In the story, the raft is capsized by the breakers, an act of God, as if God says, “I have had enough of this,” and that is a significant detail. He also writes that Stuff is completely paralyzed in the water. In fact, Shoe-Horn and Elias are the ones fighting, Plunkett sings incoherently, and Stuff does manage to paddle weakly. If I am right that the story is a character study in spiritual failure, this confusion matters. Finally, Ferguson reads the story’s overarching pessimism about a world “going downhill” as an early stylistic marker, in contrast to the more hopeful, restorative faith of Lafferty’s later work.

There are three main areas where I disagree, and they seem significant: pessimissm and hope in Lafferty's long arc of development; the allegorical and religious dimension is missed and misunderstood; and the story is almost an anti-Argo story.

Ferguson writes:

And yet it’s these same tics that mark this as an early Lafferty, despite the late publication date: the sentiment that “the world has been going downhill since [those] ancient days” has little place in his most mature work, when despite his own personal pains and bouts of despair, his faith remained firm that the world would be reborn, would exist again, and that it would not be downhill—or worse, unendingly flat—forever. While it’s true that the world changed, it need not always be a shadow-world; there will again be high afternoons, and some boats will eventually make it safe to shore.

I see two propositions:

1. This passage shows “early Lafferty” traits (notably the “everything’s been going downhill since ancient days” sentiment), and that pessimistic note doesn’t fit his most mature work, where his faith stayed firm despite suffering.

   
   

2. The world’s decline/change isn’t final: even if it has become a “shadow-world,” it won’t remain that way forever—the world will be reborn, “high afternoons” will return, and “some boats” will make it safely to shore.

There is a great deal here that I agree with, so I am going to try to be careful.

In reverse order, starting with 2. I think this statement gets the story wrong because it doesn't understand the role of Purgatory in it. It is certainly correct that Lafferty never gives up grace and eschatology, but it reads both in a way that makes the shape of the story ungraspable. I will come to this in a moment.

More important for understanding Lafferty as a whole is the first proposition, so a few words about it. I do not believe that Lafferty becomes more hopeful and less pessimistic as he goes along. My view is that Lafferty was culturally pessimistic about the state of the West from the beginning, but he always paired that pessimism with a deep love of fun and eschatological hope. He was, in this sense, a Catholic accelerationist who threw himself into apocalypse and rejected utopianism. Throughout, one finds Lafferty being both pessimistic and optimistic in ways that interlock with his sense that the world has gone to hell and with his desire for apocalypse. For instance, late works such as Serpent’s Egg, Sindbad: The 13th Voyage, and East of Laughter have black strains of pessimism, alongside the spaces that keep eschatological promise open. That is obviously a major difference in how one reads Lafferty. It is connected to Ferguson’s view that Lafferty becomes someone who encourages us to make our own worlds, a claim he gives a utopian inflection. I read Lafferty as saying that utopia is a disaster, and that the utopian impulse is dangerous, but when you are stuck in no-place, what are you to do? Oddly, I probably also see the story as more hopeful than Ferguson does, because I take the Purgatory coda seriously and read it as being about suffering and hope. After all, the two endings of the story are that the men die and go to hell, which is the hopeless first ending, or that the men undergo some other kind of death, real or spiritual, and pass through a purgatory. In the first ending, they are done as persons. In the second, they wash up on shore, a very long and painful path ahead of them.

Second, I think if one wants to understand the story, one needs to understand that the actions on the raft that get the men killed are tied to their speeches in the story, with each action being a metacommentary on the personal characters of the men. They are young, which is what lends the story its tragic coloring, though it is hard to ever read Lafferty as writing tragedy since his view of the world is metaphysically comic. What does that mean in regard to the four men? Let’s take a look at each one in turn, stepping back to consider how the story allegorizes human choice and character.

Joe “Stuff” Stoffel’s failure is one of spiritual pride. Throughout, he is a portrait of superbia. There is a presumption of some kind of immanentized salvation: he is a great man who will be lifted by fate. The experience on Ita Pulau is really one of the sacramentality of creation. The men see creation in all its graced goodness. Stuff looks at the perfect afternoon and its transcendent experience on the island, and he thinks about it as a commodity to bottle and control. He says he will package and sell the coconut wine. Stoffel also obviously, even heavy-handedly, plays with Faustian temptation. The men and Ahmad talk about Faust and the Faust tradition. Stuff believes he can manipulate spiritual judgments and network his way out of hell, explaining his hubris:

"They didn't do what they had the opportunity to do in the years that they had. But give me twenty years of the power and I will make such connections in all three of the worlds that they can't put me in hell.”

Second, to understand the story, one needs to see that the actions on the raft that get the men killed are tied to their speeches, with each action serving as a metacommentary that indexes the men’s characters. They are young, which lends the story its tragic coloring, though it is hard to read Lafferty as writing tragedy, since his view of the world is metaphysically comic. What does that mean for the four men? Let’s look at each one in turn, and step back to see how the story allegorizes human choice and character.

Joe “Stuff” Stoffel’s failure is spiritual pride at an extreme pitch. Throughout, he is a portrait of superbia pushed to parodic heights. He assumes a kind of immanent salvation for himself, because he thinks he is a great man who will be lifted by fate. Either God chose him, or he will make a deal with the Devil. If the experience on Ita Pulau is anything, it is an experience of the sacramentality of creation, the full presence of the world in its shining wonder. It is as if the men, for one afternoon, see creation in all its graced goodness. Stuff looks at that perfect afternoon and treats it as a commodity to bottle and control. He says he will package and sell the coconut wine: “I will bottle the stuff,” said Stuff, “and then I’ll really have the world by the tail. It doesn’t make you drunk, it just hones you to a fine edge, and it brings all the rest of the world up to your high level. It is the greatest thing ever.” To make the point unmistakable, Lafferty frames Stoffel as someone who would seize Faustian temptation. The men and Ahmad talk about Faust and the Faust tradition

Now take George Elias whose character defining momnet is the following:

"‘I'll gamble it,’ I said. ‘You've all made me mad now.’ I told God and all the rest of them that they had done wrong to try and panic me, and that I wouldn't go back to the sacraments till I was back from the war and away from those dangers . . . ‘But after this is over we will figure it out unemotionally,’ I said. ‘We will see.’"

Although Elias possesses some of the virtues of self-honesty and prudence (he at least knows it is time to leave the island), his reliance on grace on his own scheduled terms is the stuff of damnation. His descent into a violent, empty-eyed fistfight on the raft illustrates the theological warning that pride is no substitute for formed virtue. If he goes to hell at the end of section one, it is a classic case of delayed contrition.

We now come to a part of Ferguson's interpretation that, to me, looks like he is so interested in the biographical and bibliographic elements that he lost track of what is on the page. He calls Calzatoio “Shoe-Horn” a “genial Italian.” There is almost nothing congenial about Shoe-Horn. He mockingly butchers the host's name and rudely ignores Ahmad's fable of eggs to aggressively demand women. The fable is about hiding the girls of the island from men such as Shoe-Horn:

“Where are the girls?” asked Shoe-Horn. “One day a cuscus (the coconut possum) came to visit the turtle,” said Ahmad. “‘Where are your eggs?’ asked the cuscus. ‘I love to look at turtle eggs, so round and soft to the touch.’ ‘Up on the hill,’ said the turtle. But they were not up on the hill; the cuscus could not find them, and he came back. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘I have an affection for them. I always did like children in whatever form.’ ‘Up in the top of the kapok tree,’ said the turtle, but the cuscus could not find them there. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘They are so leathery and smooth that I like to pet them.’ ‘Perhaps their mother has taken them to the other side of the island on the rocks,’ said the turtle. The cuscus went to look, but he didn't find them there either. This was because the turtle had lied, and the eggs were buried in the sand all the time. He knew in what way the cuscus liked turtle eggs.” “Oh, I never heard that story before,” said Shoe-Horn. “But where are the girls?”

Shoe-Horn cruelly taunts Phil, saying that Phil’s fiancée is probably shacked up and cheating on him. He becomes the fatalistic jinx for the group (the allusion to the molasses jar in Uncle Remus is to a child named Babe who tips the jar over just out of sheer high spirits). He is the one who won’t listen to Ahmad’s wisdom about knowing when to say enough is sufficient. He almost has to be physically forced to leave the island, and then dooms them all by giggling as he throws both of their oars into the ocean. He picks the bloody fistfight with Elias as their raft drifts into the dangerous dark. He whines that he would rather lie in the mud and drown than make the arduous walk back to base in the second ending, which means that even then, he does not see that the characters have been spared and graced to suffer in Purgatory. He is a colossal failure of intemperance and an unformed will. But we can leave him there.

Finally, there is the pathetic Australian Phil Plunkett. His failure illustrates the limits of natural virtue. In the end, he just checks out mentally, becoming a slobbering, singing idiot at the bottom of the raft. On the one hand, Plunkett seems to have a genuine humility, and he seems to have a deep, anchoring love for his fiancée, Aileen; but that is also his limitation. His mental image of Aileen is his primary moral orientation toward goodness. Note how he talks about her as being the meaning of everything. He is a shallow fool of a man, and Lafferty goes to great lengths to make it easy for the reader to see this. Plunkett does not resort to active malice, but in the end, he does not have perseverance.

At this point, it should be clear that the men are deeply flawed, unlikable, sad characters, but they are young, and perhaps their callowness can be redeemed. One way to read the story is that one has one perfect day, and all of life afterward is a letdown. Another, stronger reading is that the men who had the perfect afternoon were unworthy of it, full of ingratitude, and not oriented to the experience. One of the most interesting ways of misreading the story is not to recognize the boy at the end, hated by everyone, as an early instance of counterfiguration. For a Roman Catholic, to wake up in Purgatory is welcome news: one has been saved, even though one will suffer. The boy is like an angel giving the men that news. They will be saved, but they will have to take a very long road before they can appreciate what the afternoon meant, something like the gift of experiencing the sacramental order. As the story notes of this shadow-world:

"It wasn't just the terrible pain and nausea of entry into it; that would disappear in two or three days... It was the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again."

If you read the second ending as depressing, I think you have fallen into a literary trap. You have read the story from the viewpoint of the men of Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half in hell or at the beginning of their pugatorial journey, still unappreciative of how close they came to damnation. It would be as if one sees the afternoon as an ungrateful man sees it, bitter because he once received a great gift and did not receive two great gifts. That is the point of Ahmad’s speech to the men, delivered in his own language, and it is why Lafferty opens the story with the lesson in Malay.

In other words, you must learn to speak this language of grace if you want to be understand what matters. The opening is not just a cute scene about (good) “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose” (bad) and counting. This should be glaringly obvious when the disliked boy at the end says “Tiddy Ba-Goose” to the men:

One sees one's three friends similarly dead and beslimed, and standing above to torture and mock is a particularly disliked Malay boy. “Tiddy ba-goose,” he says with all the contempt and disapprobation that can possibly be expressed. He is the worst one of the lot. They shouldn't allow him even in hell. He is a thief and has been kicked out of every battery area on the island. “Just where in hell are we?” asked Stuff, “or have I answered my own question?” “Even a lizard can find his own hole,” said the boy. “Maybe you a little bit lower.” “How did we get to this shore?” “Oh, I haul you in. Might not have been a very good idea.”

We are hearing Lafferty, or something axiologically identical with him. Have you learned enough Malay to get by? Can you correctly say “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose”? Something like that question is being posed to the reader.

The third point I will keep brief. Ferguson reads the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half raft as a version of the Argo, the figure of the Catholic Church as a pilgrim church in Lafferty's Argo Legend. The Argo does take many forms, and we know from Archipelago that it can be as small as a canoe. Even so, I am persuaded only in a narrow sense: the Church is the channel of extravagant grace, and there is a boat in this story. But to be fully convinced, I would need a much stronger reading of the story’s particulars. Ferguson sees the Task Force as “every inch an Argo.” I do not. To me, the Task Force sits in the Argo’s shadow. It is what you get when you try to ride it out while not being on the Argo. Count yourself lucky, Lafferty seems to say, if someone hauls your ass back to shore to stomp the water out of your lungs.

Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half Notes.pdf

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