The Whole Magillah

La Banda’s under Eastern Sun And polyglottal stews, More babble-ish than Babylon And jew-er than the Jews. — Half a Sky

Antisemitism is an exceedingly small part of my interest in Lafferty, but getting a grip on his variety of Catholic satire as a whole sometimes means dealing with it. Read a story or two for entertainment, and it probably won’t matter much. Someone recently linked to my blog on Reddit, and the reactions were predictable: pearl-clutching dumbassery from the left and dumbassery from the right about canceling Lafferty. The reality is more complicated.

Lafferty was a very, very good writer, a man of his time whose fiction depended on a profound interest in history. Part of his historical outlook was the virtuous antisemitism that culminated in his Holocaust denial. He remains worth reading, but that antisemitism matters to his most ambitious works: his histories of the nineteenth century (Coscuin) and the twentieth (Argo), and, above all, the immensely complicated The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. These are not works many people will care about, but through them he attempts to convey his historical vision.

Across his works, one will find Jewish moneylenders and financiers, jokes about Jewish names, accents, and noses, concealed Jewish identities, religious accusations, and persecution, but it is a small piece of the whole. He wrote about 4 million words of fiction. “The Ugly Sea,” “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street,” and Sommerville and Spongetown have examples of moneylending. “The Hand of the Potter” describes Patrick T. K.’s adoption of an Irish name; In a Green Tree depicts the Brass family concealing its Jewish background and profiting from the Klan. In Dotty, Father Knight assents to the description of God as the “Old Jew.” “How Many Miles to Babylon?” brings in Little Hugh of Lincoln, the child associated with a medieval blood-libel accusation. “Promontory Goats” has a verse about gas chambers and soap; The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny has its furnace theater.

I’ve tried to put these pieces together with as little spin as possible. Lafferty is one of my favorite writers, and by far my favorite science fiction and fantasy writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Having read all of Lafferty now, this is what I see. It is either relevant to your reading or it isn’t.

At this point, I’m going to go back to blogging about other aspects of his work that interest me.

Short stories and novellas

• “Golden Trabant.” Patrick T. K. is a gold launderer. He reappears in “The Hand of the Potter,” where his Jewish background and adoption of an Irish name are disclosed.

• “Great Green Goat.” A woman makes a telephone call using a “weirdly guttural disguised levantine voice.”

• “The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll.” Patrick T. K. explains that he adopted an Irish name and underwent speech training to remove his Jewish accent. A boy tells him the accent remains.

• “Hands of the Man.” In the original manuscript, Henry Gottlieb and David Shapiro are the two Jewish men involved in the diamond transaction. In the revised story, they become Henry Hazelman and David Daumier.

• “How Many Miles to Babylon?” An unborn child speaks from the furnace, identifying himself as Little Hugh of Lincoln, the child associated with the medieval blood-libel accusation. The crowd laughs. Another passage names “Freemasonry and Jewry” among the groups represented in the altered Church.

• “In the Turpentine Trees.” Shamus Eagnach seeks to discover how God became God so that he can repeat the process. The book containing the answers, The Terebinth Groves of Mamre, is written in Ladino, described as Old Spanish in Hebrew characters.

• “Or Little Ducks Each Day.” Jim Snapjudge silently calls Jonah Hirnbrecher “Damned Jew-bug!” Later, tavern patrons attack Snapjudge’s nose and eyes and speculate that he is Jewish. Snapjudge is a Protestant, not a Jew.

• “Phoenic.” John Counts is identified as Jewish and owns the boat hired by Wiedervogel. He recounts capturing a living mermaid and attempting to sell her in England.

• “Promontory Goats.” Casey’s verse includes: “A gassing chamber smells of soap / Though I’d have bet it wouldn’t.”

• “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street.” Hiram Poorlode lends gold; Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof receives it. The story uses the phrase “pound-of-flesh gold.” Canute undergoes procedures that leave him emaciated.

• “The Ugly Sea.” Moysha Uferwohner is a Jewish moneylender who becomes a sailor. Bonny borrows $2.50 from him at 30 percent weekly interest. The family occupation is described as “the loan shark.”

  
  

Novels and unfinished fiction

• Antonino Vescovo. A Jewish man is described as having a “huge obscene nose.” Elsewhere, a Jewish-born novice rejects jokes about Jewish speech and money. An embedded story describes Jewish peddlers collecting execution stones and reselling them.

• Archipelago. The relevant passages concern Arnold Stein and the resemblance between his nose and Finnegan’s, described on the blog as their brotherhood of noses.

• Dark Shine. Rolo chooses the surname Danovitz to declare descent from “the house and tribe of Dan.” He also uses the name Dolg the Dagger and is proclaimed King of Babylon.

• Dotty. In chapter 16, Dotty calls God the “Old Jew” and a creditor demanding blood. In chapter 18, Father Knight answers, “Of course He is,” and repeats the demand for flesh and blood. Chapter 19 returns to God’s ownership and monopoly.

• East of Laughter. Solomon Izzersted is called an “ewigerjude-tand,” a Wandering Jew figure. He seeks the highest position among the Scribbling Giants and proposes to make a billion dollars annually from the office.

• The Flame Is Green. A passage refers to “Mordecai or Marx” and describes the web he has been spinning in Paris and elsewhere.

• Hell to Pay. Carl Curlee makes general statements about Jewish women, virtue, and worth. The millionaire Baruch M. Ball is a principal suspect; the surviving planning notes identify Prentice Pilkington as the actual murderer.

• In a Green Tree. Julius Brass explains that his father changed the family name from Messing. Hiram Brass profits from selling Klan robes. Julius calls Palestinian Arabs “the lowest form of human life on Earth.” When All the World Was Young also contains the young banker Conrad “Goldfingers” Goldmeister.

• More Than Melchisedech. The Hugo Stone/Absalom Stein blackmail episode involves photographs of Duffey with children and demands for participation in his magazine, The Crock. A news article calls Shirley Israel a “nefarious Jewess.”

• Sommerville and Spongetown. The financier Abel Gruenwald is described as a “Phoenician” who charges interest and worships the devil. The narration connects his ancestors’ commercial activities with child sacrifice.

• The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. The alternate chronology makes Bernard Baruch president. Etc.

  
  

Additional passages for comparison

• “For All Poor Folks at Picketwire.” During the discussion of Purgatory, a prairie dog announces, “Jews, close your ears!” Greeks and Covenanters are also addressed.

• “The Forty-Seventh Island.” The colony commander is Hugo Katz. The planetary names include Mordecai, Freud, and William B. Ziff, alongside numerous other historical figures and movements.

• “Ishmael Into the Barrens.” A sheltered community includes a Jew, a Baptist, a Muslim, and a future pope living together and receiving food from God.

• “John Salt.” The faith healer Joshua Halas is called a “Levantine Lincoln.” His assistant supplies makeup and effects for the staged healings.

• “Bright Flightways.” The pig-blessing rabbi blesses time as “the circuit of the seasons and our own road-journey through them.”

  
  

Related reading on history and conspiracy

• “About a Secret Crocodile.” The conspiracies include seven men controlling world finance and a society called Ocean, whose membership includes the devil and which directs Bolshevik and atheist organizations.

• “The Effigy Histories.” Karl Effigy produces celebrated histories that are factually inaccurate. The Cosmo Club investigates the source of his apparent knowledge.

• “Groaning Hinges of the World.” After a geographical turnover, the Jilolo people retain their names and appearances but torture and slaughter their neighbors. The survivors attempt to reverse the turnover.

  
  

Poetry

• “No Stone Unthrown” and “Son of No Stone Unthrown.” See the verses on Barry Malzberg and Ben Bova, particularly the wordplay involving “juke,” Bova’s nose and profile, and “Ben” as part of his patronymic.