The Four Green Stories (1972/1973)

Idolatry is distinguished from Image-worship by an undue finality. It rests in the relative as though it were the Absolute, worships the creature, the image and vehicle of the Divine Spirit, as though it were that Spirit. — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds

Here is one of the more complicated clusters in the Lafferty canon: four stories, all published in 1973, that form a sequence within The Men Who Knew Everything. The ongoing Centipede Press edition chose to break them up, a serious mistake that says a good deal about the level of understanding behind the project. These stories should be read together. Lafferty wrote them as variations on a single theme, and they were originally published together. On the surface, each may look self-contained, but they are in philosophical dialogue with one another about the nature of life. Doctor George Drakos creates weird mice. Cris Benedetti creates a literary lion. Harry O’Donovan builds a political animal. Barnaby Sheen models a world. The four stories are “The Hellacious Rocket of Harry O’Donovan,” “The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos,” “The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti,” and “The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” Rather than take them one by one in a series of posts, I want to consider them as a conceptual unit, with the idea of returning to them later as part of a full introduction to TMWKE stories.

Once again, Barnaby’s home is the center of gravity, this time his cluttered study in Tulsa. Our cast includes the four principals, Barnaby, Harry, Drakos, and Cris, along with the narrator Laff, Austro, and the ghost-girl Mary Mondo. Across all four story facets, the company remains constant while the relation between life and human making rotates through the hobbyhorses of the four men. Lafferty is being schematic. He gives the reader mandala through juxtaposed partial answers to a single question: what is life, and can it be manufactured? Each is found wanting.

At this point in the TMWKE sequence, Lafferty is working most intensely with, and against, E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds, published in 1931. I am going to foccus mainly on how he complements Watkin. By way of refresher: Watkin was an English lay philosopher in the Thomistic and Bonaventurist traditions, writing for educated Catholic readers between the wars. The chapter these stories draw on is titled “Green / Life,” and anyone who wants to see the underlay of the stories should read it (see below). It is clear that the Centipede not do this, which is why it seemed natural to them to split the stories across volumes.

Watkin’s Green chapter, like the others in the book, is a meditation. The subject is biological and elemental life, the “green” zone between dead matter and spirit. It is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the life that works in leaves and blossoms, moves in animals, and seems to share a secret with the elemental powers of wind, sun, water, and rock that can seem alive. For Lafferty it is a hybrid zone, and the mystery surrounding it, prompts him to press hard on the question of what counts as life.

Watkin’s main argument is that once matter reaches a certain degree of complexity, life may appear in it, but the prepared material does not itself generate the living form. Rather, spirit descends. One sees this throughout Lafferty, most famously in the hope, at the end of Past Master, that life might descend upon the gel cells. Watkin’s technical term for this process is Catholic: ratio seminalis. Lafferty uses this idea in “Brain Fever Season” as well. A seminal form flashes upon prepared matter through the Divine Logos. The clearest statement of the idea in Watkin is, I think, a sentence that Lafferty copied out in his own crabbed handwriting on a set of loose notes now kept apart from the manuscripts of the Green stories at Tulsa: “Looking at evolution from below, we see emergence; from above, creation.” Here we find the double vision that fascinated Lafferty: a single event perceived either phenomenally or metaphysically, depending on how one approaches it.

That is the positive side of the chapter. On the negative side, Watkin warns against idolatry, the error of resting in the creature, the image, or the vehicle as though it were the Absolute that gives life. This, too, is a major theme in the four Lafferty stories. Watkin uses the slightly misleading notion of image-worship to convey it. When one stands before a sacred image and worships, one honors the form as a reflection of the divine Creator. Idolatry, by contrast, treats the reflection as though it were the source. Each of the four Green/Life stories depicts one of the men who knew everything trying to make life from below. Each discovers that what he has made is not what he intended to create. At the same time, a surplus something appears. The conditions for life are prepared, and then the Life principle takes over and runs with them.

This is brief, but it is enough to begin looking at what happens in each story. I am going to take them one by one, abbreviating plot so that the idea of Life as what Watkin calls “concrete actuality, a participation” comes into the foreground. That seems to me what Lafferty explores in the Green stories.

“The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos" is the story in which Watkin’s argument is most plainly at work. Unsurprisingly, it was the first of the four stories Lafferty completed when he sat down to write the Green/Life mini-sequence; he finished it on December 19, 1972. George manufactures mice from gas plasma and hair and claims to have created animal life. The mice talk, count, and mimic the four Men Who Knew Everything in their own voices. Yet their little feet do not quite reach the ground. At one point, Oliver the dog does not recognize them as alive. They smell of ozone. Drakos eventually admits that he used ‘short-cuts and short-cuts and still more short-cuts,’ and that the mice came to life before he had applied all the techniques he had intended to use. He takes this as proof of success, but the story turns it into comedy. Barnaby’s judgment at the end paraphrases Watkin on reflection and idolatry:

“You've not created life, man,” Barnaby said sharply but compassionately. “You have deceived yourself. You have indeed put yourself into it; you have projected life, your own, a little.” “My mice are alive, my mice are alive,” Drakos insisted. “There's no man else in the world who could have made such mice.”

In the end, the mice are destroyed by ball lightning that comes down the chimney in search of them; as each is extinguished, Drakos screams as if something were being torn from him. It is as though the matter he prepared had received no seminal form from above and were instead parasitic on him.

Five days after completing “The Ungodly Mice,” on December 24th, Lafferty finished “The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti.” Cris concocts a literary hoax, Clement Goldbeater, a great Irish writer born in 1890, to prove that readers talk about books they have not read. He creates fake covers for real turn-of-the-century books and sponsors a student magazine devoted to Goldbeater’s work. Then the student committee sends Goldbeater the fare, and Goldbeater actually appears, walking out of Braniff International with a blackthorn stick. He greets Austro in Irish, and he knows that Loretta and Mary are ghosts. When Cris protests, the story dramatizes the blinkeredness:

“Stop this nonsense,” Cris Benedetti suddenly howled. “There is no such man as this here present. I made him up and he doesn't exist otherwise.”This wild outburst shocked not only Austro and Loretta and Mary Mondo and the kids of the Goldbeater Guild. It also shocked Harry O'Donovan and George Drakos and Barnaby Sheen and myself who were also present at the tay. Cris had popped his stopper; there wasn't much doubt of that. “God made me up,” Clement Goldbeater said with a sort of roguish dignity. “You're in His image, but weakly so. You did not make me up, man.”

Then a second Goldbeater, a cousin from Howth, arrives by a different airline and accuses the first of stealing his money. Again, one sees the pattern of creation from above and below, this time through a variation on Lafferty’s fondness for doubled characters.

Six days after completing “The Two-Headed Lion,” on December 30, Lafferty finished “The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O’Donovan.” Were I writing a more typical post on the story, I would want to show how fully it dramatizes the warning against idolatry that Watkin places at the beginning of his chapter. Harry tries to create a politician out of three components: a mask (David Concourse, a handsome used-car salesman with no brains), a pitch (Ennis Hardhandle, the sportswriter and phrase-maker), and a brain (Baxter Hungerman, the strategist). Lafferty lays out his Jung-inspired 3+1 pattern, as the two men debate the necessary anatomy of a manufactured creature:

“There are only three pieces needed,” he said with his usual floridity. “The mask or front-man, the pitch or phrase-maker and image-maker, and the brain. [. . . ] Three things only, and I believe that I have them all at hand.” “You are wrong,” Barnaby Sheen told him. “A successful political apparatus, a successful political animal, is always a quaternity, a four-way thing. The fourth element will be there, or the thing will not succeed.”

The fourth element does indeed appear. A tall, angular man in a black hat who looks like he is from another century walks up the stairs, enters the study, and transacts with the three. He is the devil in the form of Abraham Lincoln. Then black lightning strikes. The campaign ignites. Concourse goes from dead last to winning the primary in ten days. On election eve, Cris saves the day by performing an exorcism in the Latin of Mark's Gospel — exi ab eo — and Austro supplies an older rite. The story ends with an eight-inch miniature of the Lincoln/devil man scuttling away its coat-tails on fire. Concourse goes back to selling cars.

One day after wrapping up the third story, Lafferty finishes "The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen." He now has the three other stories completed, and he can look back. What he does, I think, is run Watkin backward for comedy. Barnaby builds a cubic-meter model of the Earth's mantle — continent, ocean, dome — meaning only to study weathering and tectonics over geological time. Mary Mondo, looking in, asks the question that haunts the whole cycle: "Is there any life in it?" She asks it as someone who has reason to wonder about her own life. She even whispers "Let's fake it, kid" to Austro, and then begins to speak weather into being:

“Fiat fulmen, fiat tonitrus, fiat pluvia,” Mary said almost inaudibly. There was a little flicker of light. “What's that?” Barnaby asked. “One of the bulbs about to blow?” There was a little rumble. [. . .] “Rain,” said Harry O'Donovan. “It's raining in your world.”

Watkin quotes Hildegard of Bingen on these images, and I think Lafferty is riffing on that part of him: from thee the clouds move, the stony rock exudes moisture, and the earth puts forth the green herb. In Barnaby's study experiment, there are clouds, real rain, a miniature city called Phantasmopolis, and finally a volcano that shatters the dome and sets the rug on fire. In the end, the pseudo-world’s cosmos ends up being the fleas Mary has gathered off Austro.

Stepping back from the sequence, one can see that the four Men Who Knew Everything in these stories are, in various ways, self-deceived about the extent to which they can model and control life. They’re all failed epistemologists, with the subcycle's real epistemologists being Mary Mondo and Austro. Mary asks, "What is life?" in Mice and again in Lion. Each time Lafferty’s narrator notes she is asking it the way Pilate asked what truth is. By the conclusion of Rocket, after the somber man has been driven out of Concourse, she varies the question to strike at the very heart of the sequence's central mystery:

“How can you tell whether something like that is alive or whether there's just a little man inside working the pedals?” Mary Mondo asked. “It is sometimes hard to tell,” Barnaby admitted to the ghost-girl.

The quartet of stories varies Watkin’s two-sided theme: first, the contrast between seeing life from above and from below; second, the distinction between life itself and idolatrous arrangements.

Watkin - Green.pdf

Download PDF • 553KB