"The Man With the Aura" (1961/1974)

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability.

“The Man With Aura” was first written in 1961, went through several iterations, and was first published in 1974. It is very much a political story of the early 1960s, yet one published after Watergate. Online interpretations treat it as a character study or a gadget tale. That is not very interesting to me. I see it instead as one of Lafferty’s angriest early portrayals of societal decline, a theme always central to his work. It belongs to the period when his irritations were those found in the unpublished novel Civil Blood. In its pages, Professor Maurice Chapelle, the father of the novel's Juliet character, puts it unvarnishedly in a public lecture:

“Now then, are you possibly wondering what in the blazes I am talking about? No, you are not. Even the dullest among you, and believe me you are dull, know exactly what I am talking about. I am talking about you. I am talking about the mask, foisted sometimes as Contemporary American Culture, or a certain contrived beauty and synthetic poetry, bloodshed with obscenity and corruption; and the face it covers, the face of him who fell like lightning, the liar and the father of lies, the old stony face that is older than the world. You know what I am talking about but you will not admit that you know it. You are the new Pharisees hungry for the blood of a prophet.”

The main character in "The Man With the Aura" is interested in power, money, and himself. Unsurprisingly, the story turns on social appearance and reality, self-deceit, and failure of collective will. It is bookended by two snapshots of American society. It opens with dialogue, then points to a grand scale, moves back in to focus on Tom Shanty, or Thomas Castlereagh, and then widens out again. It ends with Lafferty coopting the reader’s perspective, one of his fourth-wall breaks, to introduce a bewildered “we.” This “we” speaks for us, a culpable public that fails to recognize moral wrongdoing or assign responsibility for it. The result is an accountability problem disguised as a locked-room mystery, with the obvious perpetrators being those who wield power and control narratives and those of us who inexplicably seem mesmerized into letting them do so. Much that would later become more interesting in Lafferty is already present in this early short story.

At the center is the schizo-gashed Tom Shandy/Thomas Castlereagh, a man celebrated throughout America as the pinnacle of respectability and integrity. One night, he hosts his dejected friend James Madigan, the Secretary of Crime Prevention, for an evening of brandy and conversation. While this might look like a kind gesture to boost a friend's spirits, it is selfish. Madigan explains that the country has gone to hell. Crime is up. Moral fibre is gone. He doesn’t know whether people should know this, and has been withholding the truth about the moral climate. Everything in the story, I think, should be read against Madigan’s attempt to manage this data.

During the visit, Madigan’s worries quickly move to the background. This will be about Thomas. Thomas starts talking about himself, and Madigan mistakes it as an attempt to cheer him up. America celebrates Thomas as all that is good about the country, and Thomas begins confessing that his "Face of America" is a total fabrication, and the more Thomas tells Madigan, the more Madigan refuses to take him seriously. Thomas reveals that he is really Tom Shanty, a former "fox-faced sneak" and unsuccessful petty criminal. He says his success in the country is due to his invention of an "aura machine"—a series of electronic components surgically implanted in his head and throat. This device projects magnetic and electronic fields that cause others to perceive him as a man of charisma and rectitude, regardless of his real actions or appearance.

“It didn't take much: a subcutaneous device which I inserted myself; a selenium plate set into my head by a quack butcher; an apparatus embedded in my throat to give my voice what I wanted; a power pack; a harmonic booster . . . A duck call is a simple device, and a duck is a complex one. Yet a duck will be fooled by a duck-call sounded by a man. A duck will even come to the artificial call in preference to the real, if the artificial is made with sufficient care.”

It turns out that Thomas is going to be killed by his doctor, who has discovered the truth. It doesn't help that Thomas has been carrying on with the doctor's wife. Thomas then gives his lifelong history, one full of undetected atrocities performed under the protection of this machine. It includes the murder of two previous wives for insurance money and the staging of massive, profitable arson frauds. He stood on public trial for nationwide fraud, where he was acquitted after turning the device to full power. His acquittal led the Chief Justice to embrace him in tears. Throughout the confession, Madigan is simply unable to see that Thomas is a truly evil man. He interprets every admission of murder and theft as a display of piquant humor and deep drollery. He is under the irresistible influence of the aura machine. Of course, Thomas could turn down the machine while he tells Madigan his life story, but he doesn’t: he apparently keeps it on as he moves through the entire thing, knowing how he plans to end the evening:

“Dying, I tell you. Dammit, man, can't you get it through your head that you're dying before you die? I want you to believe me! It's less fun when you don't believe me. James, I kill you! Act like a man being killed!” “You are such a wonderful man, Castlereagh. If I am somehow called away, and it seems that I am, I'll miss you woefully.” “Believe me that I kill you, Madigan! It's no fun if you don't believe.”

Madigan dead, Thomas then travels to the home of Dr. Forester—a man who had discovered the device under Thomas's skin—and bludgeons him to death. The story ends with the public regarding the two high-profile murders as a baffling mystery and a personal tragedy for Thomas Castlereagh:

“A certain commentator best encapsuled the feelings of us:‘The sympathy of the nation and the whole world goes to Thomas Castlereagh. So great and good a man, and he suffered such sorrows in the past! And now to be deprived of his two closest friends in a single night! The heart groans.’”

When Lafferty wrote the story, his critique of society was not yet aimed at the corruption of youth culture, which would preoccupy him later in the decade and through the early 1970s. It was aimed instead at what he saw as betrayals during his own youth and young adulthood. He despised J.F.K., another figure with aura, and he wrote the story during the early Kennedy administration, which points to his political disaffection. But he traced the deeper source of social decline further back, to FDR, another man with aura. For much of his early life, Lafferty remained at least nominally a Democrat, as he once joked, out of sympathy for his father, who was one, while his siblings all became Republicans. After the war, he said, he, too, became a Republican, disappointed above all by Yalta and especially Potsdam. He believed that those compromises set the stage for the Cold War. Americans were sold on them through relentless ideological messaging. I take this to be the immediate background of the story: an America that, as Lafferty saw it in the early 1960s, had already lost its national narrative

I don't like the mesmeric theory of media in “The Man With the Aura,” but it is shorthand for what I take to be a Cold War paranoia about the enemy within. I like it as a time-stamped allegory of political disillusionment. In the final scenes, we discover that the locked room is the public’s mind. All evidence is powerless against the aura. Lafferty’s shift to a collective “we,” observing Thomas Castlereagh’s “august hands,” gives us a society conditioned to prefer the Face of America to the exposed fox-faced sneak. Sixty years later that America itself seems to me long, long gone, its civil religion as poisoned as James Madigan.

I’ll wrap up with something that has bothered me about the story since I first read it. Why is Doctor Forester the only person in the story able to overcome the aura? Is it because he sees the rash? Is his name a pun on seeing the forest for the trees? Is it because Forester just is somehow uniquely capable of thinking, or uniquely wronged by the cheating wife? The obvious answer, that he knows the aura is a hypnosis field, will not do, because we have already seen Madigan’s reaction as someone inside that field. It shuts down that kind of thing. So why does the hypnosis field fail to entrap Doctor Forester?

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