"The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street" (1975)

Leptophlebia marginata

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 easy to trace the outer contours of “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street": Lafferty is critiquing the sort of extractive capitalism Pope Leo XIII condemned in De Rerum Novarum. But it isn't an easy story. The bits amass into something strange that is both bold and cautious. I suspect this is less an accident than deliberate coding, and today I'd like to look at that. As the moneylender Hiram Poorlode says, "Believe me, the hook isn't a logical one."

Image by Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916)

The story's setting is familiar, a microtopia that Lafferty particularly favors: the odd, half-magical street. The protagonist, Canute Freeboard, wanders into Leptophlebo Street wanting money for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We are never told what the opportunity is. He discovers a peculiar community of extremely thin residents (including clever monkeys who may have once been human). These skinny people of Leptophlebo Street make “profitable” use of nearly every scrap of material around them. Hiram Poorlode is a nut merchant, but, more importantly, he is a moneylender who, surprisingly, has a near limitless amount of gold stored beneath the cobblestones of the street. Canute secures the funding he needs for the opportunity (he is told his security is his face), but when he returns to the street, presumably successful in his venture, he undergoes a series of “free” procedures that turn him into an emaciated, ghoul-like person. As I read the story, Lafferty implies that the gold is the result of Leptophlebo’s usurius alchemical biocapitalism: the extracted flesh in the story somehow becomes the pounds of gold under the cobblestones. Exactly how that happens is undecidable.

Here are some interesting things about the story that may or may not be part of its intended meaning.

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.

2. 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 solid one, and it probably also explains the monkeys, because . . .

3. In addition to supplying Solomon with gold, King Hiram also gave him monkeys. 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—gold and monkeys arriving together—seems especially suggestive in the context of Leptophlebo Street, where both turn up as part of its weird economy.

4. 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.

5.  Then there are the echoes of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Some are small, like the bagpipes. Others are central to Lafferty’s story, especially the line about a pound of flesh, which makes moneylending and flesh extraction the reason 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 dreamwork.

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: there is a strong dimension of monetary allegory in the story. It runs from the mercantile capitalism favored by Hiram Poorlode and the other people of Leptophlebo, with their bullionism, to the paper system used by the monkeys—the monkeys who, we learn, may have become monkeys because of the gold, and who are even called "people" at one point (“People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk”). Specifically, the paper money seems to be a critique of fiat currency and of the economic agents who are exploited by it. Lafferty is probably grinding his gears about F.D.R., a man he reviled, taking the U.S. off the gold standard, and then about Nixon eliminating its last vestige in 1971. Leptophlebo Street may stand in as a satire 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 velocity and abstraction, thereby intensifying usury. “A man’s face is his security.” The story suggests that this opened the world to superexploitation. As capital overspilled its limits, finding ever new areas to commodify, it made its major assault on human dignity by commodifying the flesh down to night soil and scum on the teeth.

Curiously, 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?” One thinks of Archipelago, where "[Arnold] Stein was interested in noses. 'The appearance of the nose in

the goyim is a hopeful tendency.'"

I don’t have a synthesis, but I read “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street” as continuous with the Distributist analysis of capitalism advanced by Belloc and Chesterton. If anyone assembles the pieces coherently, I suspect the result will be controversial for some of the same reasons Belloc and Chesterton remain so. The emphasis on the hook, moneylending, and concealed wealth, as well as details such as the Yiddish name Schlemel kurz Karof, ripping off the monkeys, and the insular world of Leptophlebo Street itself all point in that direction. But I may be wrong.