The Old Jew

The second is a Jew with a huge obscene nose and a glittering bald head which is sinuous, one might almost say, rather than smooth like a respectable European’s. He has a disgusting habit of saying “We of this nation” instead of “You of this nation” when talking to the folks on great states days, so he is looked upon as an upstart. He is fat to the very ends of his fingers and he waddles when he walks. He is stubborn and the people believe that he is conceited. After he has been once mobbed for ogling a christian woman it is quite impossible to place him on a pedestal, though his actual deeds should win that place for him. —Antonino Vescovo

Him Who in His heaven laughed at the sound of the nails Being driven into your living flesh — Baudelaire, “Saint Peter’s Denial”

Dotty may have been Lafferty’s second completed novel. Its place in the compositional sequence is uncertain because we know so little about Archipelago's early manuscript history. Nonetheless, it is Lafferty’s most underrated novel, and one that more readers should know because of how much of Lafferty it opens. To make a weird comparison, it has roughly the role in Lafferty’s corpus that Junky has in William S. Burroughs’s. Both are far more conventionally written than most of their authors’ other work. Both carry the DNA of their authors' stranger, more difficult work. Junky was written before Burroughs turned to routines; Dotty, before Lafferty began transmuting popular genres. Both are pre-nucleatory works in their authors’ canons. Yet both followed early experiments with techniques their authors would exploit in maturity: “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” for Burroughs and Antonino Vescovo for Lafferty.

Andrew Ferguson has done a good job of running through the plot of Dotty, so I’m going to avoid doing that at length. The novel follows a young Irish-American Catholic through her childhood in Oklahoma and moves with her to Galveston. It tells the story of her marriage, bereavement, apostasy, and difficult return to faith. Lafferty leaves it open whether Dotty will be saved.

Along the way, she loses her unborn child. That is as tough as you imagine. Then she loses her husband, Charles Peisson, at sea. There is, I think, a version of this material in “The Ugly Sea.” After Charles’s death, she reaches a breaking point and turns furiously to the God she had considered her friend:

You are that Old Jew from the beginning. I beg pardon of all the good Jews. You are that old note-caller, that debt-caller who has to be paid with the last drop of blood. (Chapter 16)

One complicating factor is that Dotty has tried to bargain with God. She admits God gave her more time with Charles than she asked for. Her accusation, and the apostasy that follows, turns on what God has taken from her. It is poisonous stuff. She likens God to the victorious Serpent, consuming the creatures who mistakenly believed themselves under a benevolent ruler.

In his discussion of the novel, Ferguson points out the antisemitic language and connects it with Father Coughlin’s preaching. He writes:

I would balance this carefully against the other treatments of Jewish individuals in his works

He then distinguishes Dotty’s words from her author’s and notes her apology, while questioning its division between good and bad Jews. These are reasonable considerations. But his discussion omits the passage that complicates them most.

I have argued elsewhere that Lafferty’s larger history of thinking about Jews matters to the reception of a book published in 1990, however early its composition. Now I want to set that history aside and think about the book internally. The scene Ferguson quotes is one part of the picture. It rhymes with a later scene, and to understand how virtuous antisemitism might work in Dotty, we need to account for both.

In chapter 18, Soft-Talk Susie and Father Knight discuss the difficulty of bringing Dotty back to the Church. Susie complains about the time spent recovering one wayward person. She invokes the Master of the Vineyard, who will want results, and uses Dotty’s name for him: “That Old Jew.” Father Knight replies:

Of course He is. She is clairvoyant in seeing that phase of Him. He does want every ounce of flesh, and every drop of blood. He is jealous and this bleeding to death of the corporate body displeases Him.

Note that Knight calls Dotty clairvoyant. He takes her image and repurposes it. Dotty imagines God consuming his creatures; Knight speaks of God’s displeasure at the Church’s loss of its members. Even those losses, he suggests, may create a sympathetic penumbra around the Church from which nations eventually return. His response modifies Dotty’s accusation while keeping something uncomfortable in play: the Jewish figure and the demand for flesh and blood.

Now a distinction. Knight does not endorse Dotty’s identification of God with the victorious Serpent. Earlier, the narrator has also rejected Dotty’s idea that God enters bargains on her terms: “And he does not break a pledge who gives none” (chapter 6). The novel corrects her conception of her dealings with God. But what happens to the antisemitic associations as it does so? Does putting the image to a benevolent use undo them?

In chapter 19, Dotty praises God’s craftsmanship in making every blade of grass different. “You have not scrimped,” she tells him. This matters: she is acknowledging his generosity. She then describes his monopoly on the next world:

You have a monopoly there. You bought up all the corner lots, and if anyone wants to locate there they have to come down to Your spring to drink.

The commercial language has now been revalenced. That revalencing is part of what we need to explain. So here is an attempt.

This is what I mean by virtuous antisemitism in Dotty. Dotty suffers, and she apostatizes. At this moment, at the height of her suffering, we know that she has a defective understanding of God. Later, Lafferty takes his association of Jewishness with exaction, calculation, and cunning and shows that these traits have been seen from the wrong aspect. Knight recasts this figure as the jealous God of ethical monotheism. So the image stops being entirely accusatory and becomes part of the novel’s theodicy of providence. What had seemed to be a creditor out to consume his creatures is the righteous God determined to recover them. Lafferty puts the stereotype to positive theological use without undoing its ethnic associations. As an image, it seems well-intentioned, but it is ultimately prejudicial, which makes it a useful exemplar of how virtuous antisemitism functions in Lafferty. Ferguson’s proposed balancing leaves this problem unresolved: how the novel imagines the good through these negative associations.