"The Ugly Sea" (1957/1961)

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty

A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to correct it. "Young lady, one should play well or not at all. Please play better, or stop. That is acutely painful."— "The Ugly Sea"

It seems impossible to know whether Lafferty wrote “The Ugly Sea” before he wrote Dotty. “The Ugly Sea” is one of the stories from 1957, when he returned to writing. It is quite possible that Dotty existed in some form before 1957. Dotty is one of my favorite Lafferty works, and “The Ugly Sea” was one of the Lafferty stories that made me a Lafferty fan.

What stands out is how much the protagonists of each text have in common, as if they are funhouse versions of each other. Both are damaged. Bonny physically, Dotty spiritually. Both use the word cripple to characterize themselves. Both live at waterfront bars that are their second homes. Both play the piano in their own way, drawing people to hear them. Both warn the man who loves them that they are dangerous. Bonny tells Moysha to stay away, or she'll ruin him. Dotty writes to Charles that she has blown her whistle, and he is warned. Both can be diabolically caustic, in the way Lafferty parthens usually can be. Both know it. Bonny says she wishes she knew why she is mean. Dotty never pretends. Both marry seamen who die at sea. Both had a plan to beat the sea jinx by getting the husband away from the sea. In both cases, the plan fails. Both survive their husbands and continue playing the piano. Both are described as lovely after experiencing death. And both are, in the economies of their respective stories, the point around which men orbit and are destroyed.

Before I knew about some of the thorny issues in Lafferty, I did not spot how odd the story is on Bonny’s age. I took it to be a quirky feature of the time in which the story is set. Neither did I think much about a Jewish seaman being the comic foil. Now, when I read it, those two aspects stand out.

Sexual precocity is something else the two characters share, and both works are interesting because they are literary stories, not prose packaged within a genre, as is the case with “Parthen,” "Funnyfingers," or More Than Melchisedech, where the sexual undercurrents more easily become secondary. There is also the Oceanic connection between the two characters, with The Blue Room in Dotty and The Blue Fish bar in “The Ugly Sea,” blue being in unconscious and eros.

Early in Chapter 4 of Dotty, Lafferty writes the following passage, featuring a whore named Naomi. It follows dancing in The Blue Room:

After that they went to Naomi's room and sat around on the sofa and floor, and talked some of the damnest talk that you ever heard. Dotty was the only one with any money left, so she gave three dollars to Helmrich (Kit) Carson who went to get a bottle of snake-bite serum, which Dotty knew was a euphemism for pop-skull whisky. For Dotty was not slow at understanding phrases, just because she came from Oklahoma. Dotty stayed there till it was plain straight-up midnight, and got higher than a balloon, and never laughed so much in her life. Then she kissed the three soldiers goodnight, and Naomi too, and took her leave, for things were slowing down. Helmrich was slowing down, and Railley and Naomi were more interested in smooching than in telling jokes; and the right time to leave a party is just before it loses its glow. “Are you sure you are only nine, Dotty?” Nolan had asked her. “Yes, nine.” But she lied. She wouldn't be nine till next October 15th. “I'd give a million dollars if I had it — and I'd get it somewhere if it'd do the trick — if you were just about twice that old.” “Don't you like me the way I am?” “You'll never know, Dotty, you'll never know how much. And that isn't whisky talking either. It's the rum and the wine.”

It is one of the more difficult passages in Lafferty. No one has written about it. What is one to do with such material? In Dotty, the talk is not played for comedy. In contrast, “The Ugly Sea” is very funny, and it is funny, in part, because Bonny is twelve and knowing.

“The Ugly Sea” begins with a conversation with an unnamed companion. He turns out to be Sour John, who argues that the sea is foul and untidy, akin to a sewer. He describes its morbidity:

“Everything about it is ignoble. Its animals are baser than those of the land. Its plant life is rootless and protean. It contaminates and wastes the shores. It is an open grave where the living lie down with dead.”

He says that humanity subconsciously denies the ocean's true nature, and notes that historically, God's people have avoided it entirely. To illustrate his point, John recounts the story of Moysha Uferwohner, a young moneylender who becomes one of the few Jewish seamen in history. Moysha's unexpected switch to a maritime life begins when he visits a waterfront tavern the Blue Fish on business and meets Bonny, the proprietor’s twelve-year-old crippled daughter.

At the tavern, Bonny plays the piano poorly and treats Moysha with deliberate cruelty, warning him of the psychological torment she plans to inflict if he continues to pursue her:

“I'll tell you that I do filthy things, and you won't know whether I'm lying or not. You won't know what I mean, and you'll be afraid to find out. You'll never be able to stay away from me if you don't stay away now. I'll have husbands and still keep you on a string.”

Despite her hostility, Moysha develops an fixation on the girl. Bonny says that she intends to marry a sailor, even though there is a local superstition that any seaman who marries a crippled woman is cursed to die shortly after. Driven by his obsession, Moysha abandons his land-bound profession to work on ships. Over the next several years, he embraces the harsh life of the sea, adopting the mannerisms of a sailor and acquiring a talking bird, a monkey, and a snake. During his lengthy absences, Bonny marries two different sailors, both of whom quickly perish, fulfilling the superstition.

Eventually, Moysha returns to port, and Bonny agrees to marry him. To avoid the curse, they sell the tavern, move uptown, and Moysha leaves seafaring behind. The couple lives comfortably for three years and has children, until Bonny tells Moysha to get rid of his exotic pets. She is worried about the kids. Unable to bring himself to put a price on the animals, Moysha goes to the waterfront where he unexpectedly crosses paths with Sour John. Rather than return home to his wife, Moysha signs on as an engineer on a ship and goes back to sea. The story concludes with Sour John revealing that Moysha died a year later, summarizing the baffling nature of his final choice:

“It is an immoral story. And it's a mystery to me. A man will not normally leave a clean home to dwell in an open grave, nor abandon children to descend into a sewer, nor forswear a lovely and loving wife to go faring on a cesspool, knowing that he will shortly die there as a part of the bargain.”

Meanwhile, a widowed Bonny now supports her children by teaching piano and searching an atlas for a place to live as far away from the ocean as possible.

Putting these two works together shows that the same erotically charged materials appear in both, yet the criticism has been selective in what it will acknowledge about this.

To close, I turn to a problem in the Lafferty scholarship, using Andrew Ferguson’s reading of Dotty as an example. He often identifies one troubling element while passing over others that are at least as serious. In his summary of Dotty, for instance, he discusses Dotty’s relationship with Joe Smith. Dotty meets Joe when she is probably fourteen or fifteen. Two years pass, and she is about sixteen or seventeen, out of high school. Of this, Ferguson writes,

A side note: the narrative voice hardly condemns Joe; for all that he is a sort of ersatz Finnegan, there is enough ambiguity about his motivations that he could read borderline sympathetically. However, from the contemporary view at least: Dotty is a minor and Joe is at least a decade her senior, and his flirtation with her earlier in the book, when she’s even younger, is easily recognizable as grooming.

What Ferguson does not do, however, is call attention to what Nolan in Chaper 4 says to Dotty when she is eight, nor does he note that this is a recurring theme in Lafferty’s fiction. He passes over it as though it were unworthy of mention. It is this kind of selective emphasis that stands in the way of a serious reading of Lafferty, as I have written elsewhere in discussing the antisemitism issue. One notes the grooming, but not the flirtation with the nine-year-old; one chooses to address the matter only once Dotty is older. It controls the fire.

The same pattern appears in Ferguson’s treatment of the antisemitism issue, as I have before pointed out. He writes:

In connection with this, there is something off-putting about Dotty, an Irish-American Catholic girl, referring repeatedly to the God whom she regards as forsaking her as "the Old Jew," most especially when speaking about Him in her fury and grief as "a debt-caller who has to be paid with the last drop of blood." In 1990, readers were far removed from the anti-Semitic Church Militant preaching of Father Coughlin, but in the early 1960s—while still far off his 1930s peak—he was still serving as a parish priest, and his radio show would still have been in the living memory of many Catholics. I would balance this carefully against the other treatments of Jewish individuals in his works, and remind again that these are not the words of the author, but of the character he created, who goes on to issue a mental apology to "all the good Jews" (as opposed to the ‘bad’ ones that God is acting like?). Something to bear in mind.

Yet here too he stops short. Are we to bear in mind Lafferty’s portrait of the Zionist Julius Brass? He does not point out the Holocaust denial or IHR materials in the Tulsa Archive, nor does he note that Melchisdech Duffy is blackmailed for being a pedophile by Jews.

I point this out here, again, because the same selectivity appears in Ferguson’s discussion of “The Ugly Sea.” He writes that “There’s a lot to this story,” and that one of those things is “the cultural (in this case, Jewish) stereotype established and subverted.”

I do not see that, at least not if the claim is that Lafferty is subverting stereotypes as they obtain in life. He is certainly subverting sea story conventions, but that is not the same thing. What he is doing, rather, is playing a kind of virtuous antisemitism for humor. Moysha “ate goy foods and sinned in the ports.” Bonny borrows $2.50 from him at 30 percent weekly interest, which is usury. Lafferty says that in the history of the sea there have been only three Jewish seamen, and then adds that the family business was “an honorable trade not directly connected with the sea, that of the loan shark.” This is being played for comedy, not for the subversion of stereotype.

The way people have talked about certain aspects of Lafferty reminds me of what Richard Rorty once said to Donald Davidson. Piqued, Davidson said a lot of smart work had been done in a certain technical area of analytic philosophy. Rorty said he completely agreed. He just thought it wasn't very good.

The Ugly Sea Notes.pdf

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