"The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street" (1975)
- Jon Nelson
- Jun 28
- 16 min read
Updated: Oct 31
A Note on This Post
I am leaving this post as it stands. When I saw the depth of Lafferty’s views on Jews, I began to see his work differently. The clearest sign is that he omitted the Holocaust from a book he called a complete history of the twentieth century. There are smaller indicators too: the rabbi blessing pork in "Bright Flightways," a story I otherwise admire, or the Zionist in "Forty-Seventh Island.” One could easily trace a trail of such clues. What surprised me most was how little any of it seems to matter to the Lafferty community.
A Theory
Cognitive dissonance. Many Lafferty admirers treat him as a tall-tale spinner, not as a moralist. They may not realize it, but they do. He was a moralist who used clowning as method, not a clown by nature. He passed judgment on everyone, including his readers, leaving no stone unthrown. Yet most fans prefer to think of Lafferty as a jokey sage, someone dispensing a whimsical humanist wisdom, even though he made it abundantly clear that he rejected humanism and that his wisdom was hostile to secular expansiveness.
An Age Problem
Not Lafferty’s; his readers’. Most are older now. They think they know him and resist a truer, more complex Lafferty. Many lean left and are too ready to excuse things like Holocaust denial because they like him and want to believe such views never touched his fiction. I like him too. But because I read him as a moralist, I cannot excuse him when he is morally wrong. To do so would make it impossible to enjoy his sharpness when he skewers the falsehoods around us.
Community Silence
It has been over two months since I raised the issue of Holocaust denial and antisemitism in Lafferty’s work. No one with a public platform in the Lafferty community has addressed it. On Facebook, most responses came from Jewish readers: Jakov Varganov, Alex Krislov, Nancy Lebovitz. Others dismissed it. One suggested Lafferty had read about Holocaust denial in a book and merely repeated it.
The leading voices around East of Laughter—Kevin Cheek, Gregorio Montejo, and Daniel Otto Petersen—have remained silent. None has publicly acknowledged the post, or the fact that Lafferty, whose work is celebrated in five volumes of Feast of Laughter, denied the Holocaust.
On Ferguson and Petersen
Petersen has said he plans to address the issue, and I believe him. Ferguson has said nothing publicly, though he offered to make a statement for my blog. I declined. Once I knew he had long been aware of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial and chose silence, I could not trust him as a biographer to tell it straight.
When Ferguson wrote about the antisemitism in Dotty, he minimized it. Anyone familiar with both Lafferty and Dotty knows how much of the author inhabits that novel. Having worked closely on Dotty, I found Ferguson’s post self-conscious.
He wrote that “a character is not its author,” and asked readers like me to balance Dotty’s antisemitism against Lafferty’s other depictions of Jews while keeping in mind a “mental apology to all the good Jews.” But if Ferguson knew of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial when he wrote that post, he stacked the deck. Holocaust denial is directly relevant to any discussion of antisemitism—unless one believes denial itself is not antisemitic, as some have argued.
Why, then, did Ferguson not acknowledge that Lafferty denied the Holocaust? Ferguson’s own blog shows he was familiar with the archive, and Dotty was published by the same person to whom Lafferty wrote his denial letter. Could he really at the time have missed the IHR materials? I don’t know what he knew when. He never updated the post.
I will continue to note that Lafferty openly denied the Holocaust after the late 1960s, drawing on The Myth of the Six Million, and that—despite this—he remains a writer of real significance. But Ferguson’s omission is a stain on Lafferty’s reception because he was the leader in a small field. It did nothing to help our understanding of how Lafferty lived with conspiracy, and it is critically relevant to his representation of Jews.
Academic Silence
Make no mistake: some trained academics who work on Lafferty have known about his antisemitism, if not his outright Holocaust denial. They chose not to address it because it was inconvenient, professionally risky, or simply unpleasant as Lafferty fans. I assume they understood its significance; I respect their intellects. Yet they avoided it even in contexts where it was clearly relevant, such as discussions of Lafferty’s other reactionary views.
What makes this disappointing to me is that Lafferty was not a virulent antisemite. The issue could—and should—have been examined with the intellectual tools academics are well equipped to use.
What happened instead was in my view reputation management disguised as nuanced appreciation, as if Holocaust denial could be treated as just another reactionary opinion or dismissed as a late-life failure rather than a sustained ideological position. And it worked. Had Lafferty’s Wikipedia entry acknowledged his denial, the Library of America Past Master edition would likely have been a more difficult. It is, to me, obvious what happened. Again, this is my opinion.
If you read “Leptophlebo,” pay close attention to how Lafferty encodes his views on Jews. Once you see it, you will start noticing it elsewhere, too.
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Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck, And his nose it had a hook, And his attitudes were anything but Aryan; So I gave him all the pork That I had, upon a fork; Because I am myself a Vegetarian.— G. K. Chesterton
"How can we tell you that? It's a secret. We know you are not so base a person as to want us to tell you the answer. You will have the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by, but we will not tell it to you. Ah, your gold is ready for you, Canute."
“One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is by no means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it incomprehensible.”— Friedrich Nietzsche
It's hard to miss the big idea in “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street," where Lafferty aims at the extractive capitalism Pope Leo XIII condemned in De Rerum Novarum (1891). But it isn't an easy story. It's secretive. The bits amass into something strange, both bold and cautious. This is no accident but deliberate coding, and today I'd like to examine that, although it takes us into areas of Lafferty's work that no one discusses openly. In this story so much hinges on Hiram Poorlode's line, "Believe me, the hook isn't a logical one."
The story's setting is familiar. Lafferty once again gives the reader a form of microtopia that he particularly favors: the odd, half-magical street. We find this in novels like Serpent's Egg, with Structo Lane, as well as in short stories, such as "In Our Block."
Canute Freeboard, the story's protagonist, wanders onto Leptophlebo Street wanting money for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We are never told what the opportunity is. This might be a connection to leptophlebia since mayflies live under extreme temporal pressure: they must seize the opportunity to mate and die.
In any case, Canute discovers a peculiar community of extremely skinny residents on Leptophlebo, which includes clever monkeys, and learns that these, the people of Leptophlebo Street, make “profitable” use of nearly every scrap of material around them.
One of them, Hiram Poorlode, is particularly important. He is a nut merchant, but, more importantly, he is a moneylender who has a near limitless amount of gold stored beneath the cobblestones of the street. Canute eventually secures the funding from Hiram that he needs for the opportunity (Hiram says that Canute's security is his face), but when Canute returns to the street, presumably successful in his speculative venture, he undergoes a series of “free” procedures that turn him into an emaciated, ghoul-like person. There are two versions of the story. In the original 1975 publication, the effects of the surgeries are only implied.
As I interpret all this, the gold results from Leptophlebo’s usurious alchemical biocapitalism: the extracted flesh in the story somehow becomes the pounds of gold under the cobblestones. Exactly how that happens is undecidable, with this indeterminacy being built into the narrative. So, how can one get at the "oh, you have to guess where the gold comes from" coyness that Lafferty places at the dead center of "The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street"?
One approach is to take a page from the literary critic Hugh Kenner, who had a critical principle for reading the great but antisemitic Ezra Pound. He advised treating the allusions and references in the Cantos as tangents that pick out a curve. Building on this, we can think of textual clues as the derivative of a function, a collection of tangents that give readers the slope of a curve. If readers are given enough of these, they can integrate, performing the reverse of differentiation, to recover the original curve. One consequence is that you will not know the exact vertical position unless you have at least one point on the curve. Lafferty withholds that vertical coordinate. (“We know you are not such a fink-dink as would like to be told,” Effie said. “It took the last one about a thousand years to guess it, and you want to miss all that fun?”). And why he withheld it may be why he rewrote the ending of the story.
With this in mind, here are some tangents on "The Skinny People of Leptopheblo Street":
Lafferty’s secret society Glomerule (best known from his brilliant “About a Secret Crocodile”) operates in the background. I take Glomerule to represent a lineage of anti-Catholic modernity, along with the Church’s own critique of that tradition, which reaches back to Pope Clement XII’s 1738 bull In eminenti apostolatus, which condemned Freemasonry. That history reached its peak in the farce of the Taxil hoax in the 1890s. Glomerule also links the story to King Solomon, who stands at the origin of Masonic mythology.
The allusion to Solomon probably explains why the moneylender is named Hiram. There are two important Hirams in the story of the building of Solomon’s Temple. First is King Hiram of the Phoenicians, who supplied Solomon with gold and cedar, and then there is “Hiram Abiff,” the master mason sent by King Hiram. The Hiram Abiff legend plays a central role in Masonic ritual. Of the king, 1 Kings 9:11-14 says :“Hiram the king of Tyre furnishing Solomon with cedar trees and fir trees, and gold according to all he had need of… then Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee. And Hiram came out of Tyre to see the towns which Solomon had given him, and they pleased him not. And he said: Are these the cities which thou hast given me, brother? And he called them the land of Chabul, unto this day. And Hiram sent to king Solomon a hundred and twenty talents of gold.” That Hiram was haughty and insulted by Solomon’s gift and found the Galilean cities displeasing makes him, to my mind, a little sinister, though biblical scholars haven’t been able to agree on what this episode means or why Hiram rejected the cities. The connection between King Hiram and the gold beneath Leptophlebo Street seems like a solid one, and it probably also explains the monkeys, because . . .
In addition to supplying Solomon with gold, King Hiram also gave him monkeys. [I know Lafferty noted the monkey connection in his private papers.] As 1 Kings 10:22 puts it: “For the king had merchant ships at sea with the fleet of Hiram. Once every three years, the merchant ships came bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and monkeys.” This detail, of gold and monkeys arriving together, seems especially suggestive in the context of Leptophlebo Street, where both appear as part of its peculiar economy.
Where did King Hiram get the gold? The details are mysterious, just as the origins of the gold hoarded by Hiram Poorlode on Leptophlebo Street are left unclear. Readers of Tarzan probably know the basics: “The fleet of Hiram that brought gold from Ophir . . .” Because Ophir plays such a major role in pulp adventure fiction, the connection intrigues me, though I’m not sure much can be done with it.
Then there are the echoes of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Some are small. Others are central to Lafferty’s story, especially the line about a pound of flesh ("The third legend is that it is all pound-of-flesh gold."), which suggests that moneylending and flesh extraction are the reasons the people of Leptophlebo are so thin. But Merchant might also be the source of the monkeys. In Act 3, Scene 1, Shylock says of his late wife’s ring, “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” The monkey with bagpipes may also point in this direction, since bagpipes are mentioned by Shylock (“And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’ nose / Cannot contain their urine”), and the commodification of excreta is a key idea in the story. In any case, the Hiram, Solomon, and Shylock connections take the story into what will be uncomfortable territory for many. Psychoanalysis as a Jewish tradecraft might be behind the following joke:
“Analyze your dreams, analyze your dreams!” a little boy of the street was making a pitch. “My father makes fine dream analyses free. Lie down on the cobbles.” “How can your father make a living by analyzing dreams free?” Canute asked. “Residuals,” the little boy said. “He gets rich on the residuals.”
Here, the residuals are both showbiz payments. and what Sigmund Freud called
Tagesreste—the day's residues that appear in the manifest content of the
6. This aspect of the narrative becomes even thornier when one looks at the Jewish
figure who accepts gold from Hiram Poorlode, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof, also known
as The Lean Eagle. Like the grackles caught by the quicklime on Effy Poorlode’s
hat, he is ensnared. This might have some connection to Shakespeare’s inspiration
for The Merchant of Venice, Il Pecorone (The Golden Eagle).
7. Now, I will say something very speculative: the story has a strong dimension of
monetary allegory. It runs from the mercantilist capitalism favored by Hiram
Poorlode and the other people of Leptophlebo, with their bullionism, to the paper
system used by the monkeys, monkeys who, we learn, may have become
monkeys because of the gold. The monkeys are even called "people" at one point:
“People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk”). Specifically, given how
seriously Lafferty took the ideas of Belloc and Chesterton and how he interpreted
the 1930s, when he thought the old world had completely unravelled, the paper
money seems to be a Bellocan critique of fiat currency and of the economic agents
who are exploited by it. So Lafferty is probably grinding his gears about both usury
and F.D.R., a man he reviled, taking the U.S. off the l gold standard, and then about
of the Federal Reserve. If all of this holds up, Lafferty has encoded a critique of how
the dollar and the pound, once they became the world’s reserve currencies,
replaced gold with increased monetary velocity and abstraction, thereby
intensifying usury. “A man’s face is his security.” The story might imply that this
opened the world to intensified superexploitation. Capital overspills
its limits. It finds ever-new areas to commodify, making possible greater assaults
on human dignity by potentially commodifying the flesh, down to night-soil and
scum on the teeth, opening previously unimaginable markets. Hiram
Poorlode's wife, Effie Poorlode, puts this clearly: "Ah, there is profit everywhere you
look, in the stones, in the air, in the very rain." It is a short hop from this to seeing
the Lean Eagle as the American eagle, with the escalating debt of the 1960s and
early 1970s.
As I mentioned, the story’s original version in Orbit 16 (1975) ends differently from the one printed in Lafferty in Orbit (1991). In the original, Canute reflects on the hook, saying, “I have swallowed the hook without noticing it,” and then adds, “I wonder what distinguishing mark has been placed upon me?" Not specifying that the mark strikes me as being significant. It leaves open other possibilities, and I think of Lafferty's novel Archipelago (1979), where the Jewish "Stein was interested in noses.
I don’t have a synthesis; I do believe “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street” is continuous with the post-Rerum Novarum Distributist critique of capitalism advanced by Belloc and Chesterton. If anyone manages to integrate the tangents coherently (“the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by”), I suspect the result will be controversial for the same reason Belloc and Chesterton remain so. The emphasis on the hook, the moneylending, exploitation, the money hunger, the stinginess ("We have but one pair of shoes here, and whateverperson goes to make a prestigious visit will wear the shoes"), and the concealed wealth, as well as details such as the Yiddish name Schlemel kurz Karof, the rip-off of the monkeys, the psychoanalysis joke, and the insular ghetto of Leptophlebo Street that outsiders must visit for a loan all point in that direction. But I may be wrong.
ADDENDUM
This post was originally written in May 2025. After being redirected here on 08/08/2025 from the original post where I revealed Lafferty's history of Holocaust denial, Gregory Feeley made a valuable bibliographic comment:
You seem to believe that the 1991 version is more recent than the 1975 one. (You refer to the latter as “the original.”) But Bryan Cholfin assembled the contents of Lafferty in Orbit from Lafferty’s manuscripts, not from the tearsheets of the published versions. (You can tell because his text contains Lafferty’s sometimes-eccentric punctuation, which the Putnam’s and Harper & Row copy editors would have regularized.) So it is very possible that Damon Knight edited out (presumably with Lafferty’s acquiescence) what he regarded as a too-fulsome detail.
This was an important detail I hadn’t known when I first wrote about the themes in this story, and it was kind of him to take the time to point it out.
Since visiting the University of Tulsa, photographing "The Skinny People" manuscripts, and reviewing the correspondence between Virginia Kidd and Damon Knight, I have a better sense of the story’s compositional history. It turns out there are two long endings for the story, as well as one short ending. It was more complicated than either Feeley or I suspected.
On April 15, 1974, Virginia Kidd acknowledged the tendency of Lafferty’s stories to end without dramatic resolution. She wrote to Knight,
Sometimes, with Lafferty stories, I am unable to make a precis; and quite often, I'm not 100% sure just what levels he wants to be understood at. But my best reading of THE SKINNY PEOPLE leads me to believe that is talking about people who have nothing left but their bones. I think they are maybe the dead . . . .
On May 5, 1974, Knight wrote back to Kidd:
Dear Virginia, I send you herewith contracts for THE SKINNY PEOPLE, which I am happy to get. The new ending is bloody awful (Raphael Aloysius thinks I want an explicit answer to the puzzle, although I would have to be daft to want that; but it is well known that all editors are sometimes daft), but it cuts like cheese, & what I propose to do is to cut, from p. 14, pp. 3–6, and also from “should be so trim?” to the bottom of the page; and then, from p. 15, to cut everything but the second sentence, from which I remove the quote marks. Ça va? I like the changes R.A. made earlier in the story, & think it is a jolly piece of work now. And I would like to quote from his wonderful letter in Arcs & Secants, & will keep it with your permission until I have a chance to copy. Love, Damon
The "Skinny People" material at Tulsa runs about forty pages, not including the correspondence, and there may be additional material at the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. Since Andrew Ferguson has worked in the Kidd Agency archives, he is likely the person who knows the most about what’s there.
The Afterword variant has never been printed, but it gives a direct, though weak, resolution to the story's central puzzle. Canute Freeboard stays on Leptophlebo Street and successfully figures out the secret of their wealth in under twenty years. Having solved the main mystery, he is shown to be assimilated into the street's life, now amusing himself by working on a new, simpler riddle given to him by one of the monkeys. It ends with the lines, "Effie and Hiram are offering cash prizes for the best time in guessing their secret. And they sure do have a lot of gold to offer prizes out of."
Where does this leave us? If the distinguishing mark is meant to suggest a Jewish nose, and the swallowing of the hook is part of a coded hooked-nose joke, then Lafferty doubled down on the antisemitic coding as he continued to develop the story. I had initially thought he was dialing it back.
Even if no nose joke was intended, the story is plainly about usury. It contains hidden or hoarded wealth; portrayals of stinginess (“one pair of shoes”); exploitation of others for profit; a ghetto-like, insular community outsiders must visit for loans; a moneylender named “Hiram” linked to gold and mercantilism; a psychoanalysis joke tied to Freud as Jewish tradecraft; allusions to The Merchant of Venice (“pound of flesh,” monkeys, Shylock quotations); and a Jewish-coded figure with a Yiddish name (“Schlemel kurz Karof”) associated with greed, each an antisemitic motif.
My primary interest in "The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street" is not bibliographical criticism. Instead, this was a post about whether Lafferty's fiction sometimes contains coded antisemitism, how such elements relate to his intellectual development, how they fit into his Roman Catholicism, and why neither Lafferty academics nor his broader readership have addressed this issue. When I first read "Skinny People" last May, it made me uncomfortable enough to write about it. Gregory Feeley had nothing to say about the thematic elements in this story. In my experience, this is typical of Lafferty fans, who would not hesitate to point out the problem in other writers.
* Is this a bird joke? Lafferty’s fluency in German means he would have known that “fink” probably comes from the word finch, which fits perfectly with the story’s bird-ensnarement theme: "I will wait," Effie said. "The pot wants a bird, but the pot must wait also. These grackle birds attract one another for a while. This is not one of our own grackles that I know; it's one of the newly arrived grackles from the countryside. They will not be wary of one bird stuck there, nor of two birds stuck. They will not be wary of less than three stuck birds. I will be patient and I will have three grackles for food and for byproducts. Will you not stay with us this evening and have a look at our night life on Leptophlebo Street?" Compare "fink-dink" to the chirruping wordplay of "cheap-creep": "We know you are not such a cheap-creep as would listen even if someone whispered the answer to you."
