The Willoughbys: Tom, Myra, Clarence, Clarissa, Clementine, Harold, Corine, Jimmy, Cyril

“Who’s playing? This is for real.”

First published in If in March 1962, “Seven-Day Terror” is one of Lafferty’s better-known stories. It belongs to an unpublished cycle he set aside in the late 1950s. As a group, these stories show him hovering between slick fiction and genre writing. The pieces all center on a family named the Willoughbys—light entertainments and some of my personal favorites—satirical fables about a Catholic household both eccentric and happy, chaotic and fiercely loving. Throughout, the domestic life of the Willoughbys continually tips into crises that spill over into their quiet neighborhood. In each story, the family’s intuitive, illogical strength careens into the rigid systems of the outside world. Law, science, social convention, and bureaucracy all get the Willoughby treatment. This is Lafferty at his clearest, celebrating domestic chaos with one fixed idea: the family is stronger than the fragile order beyond its doorstep.

This is all very Catholic. As the Catholic Church puts it, “The family is the original cell of social life,” and by the principle of subsidiarity—“it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for higher bodies to take over what lesser ones can do. The Willoughby household bears the first responsibility, with larger systems assisting but not supplanting that work. And if the systems don’t get that, they ought to watch out. It’s an idea that the cycle has a lot of fun with.

The Willoughbys will probably never get much attention. I had hoped they might turn up in In a Green Tree, but they don’t. I like them a lot, so I thought I’d post the notes and graphs I made while thinking about them.

Willoughby Notes.pdf

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