Peggy Marie Tyrone had long since taken it upon herself to keep Loretta Sheen in good repair. Loretta Sheen, the daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen, had died three and a half years before this, in 1959. — In a Green Tree, Lafferty's synopsis Some Barnaby thoughts. During the fall of 1978, Lafferty was looking for someone (anyone) to publish a completed masterpiece, the quasi-autobiographical tetralogy, In a Green Tree. To help the effort along, his agent, Virginia Kidd, brought good news. People were interested in the work, so she gave him a task. Write one-page summaries of each book, Raphael, just like the one-page proposal summaries you had previously done for the Dana Coscuin saga. When Lafferty had earlier in the decade proposed Coscuin via synopsis, he left aspects of the ending open. He said he would discover what happened by writing it: The "Series" from my viewpoint would be one large historical novel (1000–1200 pages) of the sort I always wanted to write but feared was unmarketable. But this can be set out in four coherent self-standing parts or novels without damaging either the parts or the whole. This fourth novel cannot be well detailed yet, simply because the selection of incidents will be dictated by the development of Dana Coscuin in the first three, by what man he has become. Such battles as there are will be smaller ones, and the episodes I hope more varied and portentous. Lafferty’s last major accomplishment as a writer would be finishing Coscuin right before he retired in an astonishing explosion of energy. Lafferty’s other great long work, In a Green Tree, differed from Coscuin because when Virginia Kidd asked him to summarize it, the tetralogy was complete, minus his aborted fifth part written after his retirement, and the Austro stories themselves were in the past. This was no proposal. So he set about drafting the requested promotional material, a rethink of what he had made. It is a fun read and, really, an independent Lafferty work that ought to be published. Synopsis is so effective for Coscuin and Green Tree because they have definite centers. The first has Dana and his infernal rival; the second has the Tulsa neighborhood. Contrast this with Argo. Argo is polycentric, divided between Finnegan and Duffey. It has been Lafferty’s great fortune and his misfortune that his best-known large design is Argo, for Argo shows his heaviest themes and ideas, and perhaps his greatest inventiveness, with much of his best prose. It shows his psyche. But it is also far less linear. Argo nearly requires initiation from readers who already know the territory. Good luck finding, one. When I first read The Devil is Dead as a teenager, I had no idea what I was looking at. The cover intrigued me, and the title won me over. Coscuin and Green Tree, by contrast, have easy, well-lit entrances and exits because their movement is, first, sequentially temporal and, secondly, broadly linear. Unlike most of Lafferty's works, they could both be filmed and would look great on screen, and one would not do too much violence to their meaning. They also feel autotelic, fully conceived, architectonic, whereas Duffey, of course, has contingencies, and Argo often feels discovered, cosmic, and wild, or perhaps, inextricable from a yeasty making process. It is a work for artists. Both Finnegan and Duffey are artists, so no surprise there. What makes Coscuin and GT so difficult to know is their encyclopedic detail. In the first, one gets Lafferty’s fascinating obsession with history, and in the other, his prodigious memory. Summarizing In a Green Tree did, however, pose a problem. Believing that a single page would not convey the tone and narrative arc of each part of GT, Lafferty enlarged his assignment from Kidd and wrote substantial synopses of roughly 3,000 words each, creating a 12,000-word supplementary document for the tetralogy. One can therefore read GT as he read it, after taking into account that he was trying to market it. You can see the pages Lafferty was summarizing as he sat at his Mexican typewriter, flipping through them. This, that, and not that. (The Coscuin proposal shows where he changed his mind.) The document is thus immensely useful as a crib for any reader who wants to see the outline of the thousand-page work. And it is perhaps just as useful for showing what Lafferty considered not terribly important, because it also shows what he leaves out, the not that. And what does he leave out? Almost all of the Austro, Roy Mega, Mary Mondo, Australopithecus, Guna-Slopes material. Almost all of what people love about the Austro stories. In the summary, Austro is not mentioned. Nonetheless, the whole The Men Who Knew Everything sequence occurs within the less fantastical, parallel plane of In a Green Tree. Austro is there. Our other friends are as well. Barnaby himself is a key to the GT history of Flatland, with his appearance after he is cut off from his future by Loretta’s death and saved by it. But a universe of weirdness is sublated within its mostly low mimetic rules. The cumulative effect is to show that In a Green Tree is not exactly adjacent to TMWKE, nor a realist dilution of it, but a parallel recasting in which the earlier cycle’s metaphysical and Fortean machinery is redistributed into genealogy, marriage, paternity, Tulsa history, and Catholic-social memory. Among the details most telling in the synopsis is one not stated overtly in the novel. Lafferty writes about Loretta Sheen’s paternity. “Peggy Marie meets Loretta Sheen, the three-year-old daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen. But it was really somebody besides Barnaby who fathered the girl on the misbehaving Monica.” As with the Sheen cuckolding, other Lafferty choices in the synopsis can be used to cut through ambiguities in GT, and perhaps the synopsis unintentionally gives us Lafferty's deeper intentions. This morning, I reread Martin Heavisides’s essay “Oklahoma Gothic,” from the second volume of Feast of Laughter. It can be found here. It started me thinking about the synopsis again. Heavisides writes his essay to argue that the TMWKE stories in Through Elegant Eyes are novel-like in their totality, and he is especially interested in the absence of Barnaby’s wife, puzzling over her absence. It is a symptomatic gap, later filled by the misbehaving Monica of GT. Heavisides's essay is the first record of reading the TMWKE stories as a larger arc, and it remains useful for anyone who wants to think about them. Heavisides gets a great deal right, I think. I once had an argument with him and changed my mind. His insights, the things a careless reader might miss, are these: he sees that the cycle’s accumulating power is not accidental; that Lafferty was looking forward in the early stories and, in each later story, looking both forward and back, and he points out why; and that the sequence builds what Heavisides calls “a vivid moving mosaic,” rather than filling in a master outline. Again, he notices the important absence of Barnaby’s wife, treating it as an occlusion rather than an oversight, and presses the point hard enough to see that the sequence gives no account of widowhood, abandonment, or Athena-like motherlessness either. But it isn’t occlusion, really. Barnaby Sheen’s wife, Monica MacLish, had not yet been created. In retrospect, she can now look like a big absence hidden inside the sequence, but that absence belongs to Lafferty’s later enlargement of the material. He introduced her, thereby pulling out one string that holds the short stories together: Barnaby’s bachelorhood. The THWKE polyander dissolves when Lafferty decides to work the whole Sheen family into the governing metaphor of the oak: his green tree image of human community, Catholic in its heartwood, but larger than Catholicism, with generations being born, living, and dying. Family, therefore, became very important to the characters of The Men Who Knew Everything stories in a way it had not been when Lafferty was chiefly exploring creation and time, Gnosticism, Fortean damned fact, sexual sin, animality, metaphysical possibility, and formal experimentation. In a Green Tree is pretty close to our world. It looks at the story sequence through real history. The oddities are often there, with Austro running around the neighborhood as an exchange student and poltergeists, but by 1978, the canvas has widened to include the lives of many people, fictional and historical. Lafferty is no longer writing idea-stories so much as trying to say what it is like to live day after day, year after year, until decades pass. What is it like to be a part of the green tree? He is thinking about the people who filled his own life in Tulsa, or figures standing in for them, and bringing his historical imagination to bear on the politically momentous years of his own lifespan. I agree with Heavisides that the story sequence is novel-like, and that, as a result, anyone who wants to enjoy it has to track it as one tracks a novel. Watkin best explains why. His ideas give the core stories the structural spine of metaphysical adventure, lending the sequence greater unity—a spine that later becomes part of the generational saga of In a Green Tree. Ironically, it is really the first and second stories that are most important for the GT neighborhood. Thus, what we have in Through Elegent Eyes is one of Lafferty’s large, shaggy novel shapes. Heavisides’s account of “St. Poleander’s Eve,” with its closing recapitulations of Fourth Mansions and Arrive at Easterwine, strikes me as the best argument for the “novel in stories” thesis, apart from the Watkin structure itself. Additionally, I agree that “Old Halloweens” was revised into a weaker version of itself. Heavisides identifies what was lost: the murdered-boy rescue, the larger forebodings, and the Gothic quality of the original. The really spooky stuff. Moreover, his etymological gloss on Mary Mondo—Italian mondo joined to the Marian Queen of Heaven—is exactly right. I would add only that Mary Mondo as Marian type and Loretta Sheen’s inner sawdust have a symbolic precursor. It is as though Arrive at Easterwine’s Mary Sawdust has divided into two figures, drawn out of Epikt, and given external life in Barnaby’s world. And there are any number of characters who are Snake: FDR, communists, hippies, bad priests and bishops, the liberal managerial class. What Heavisides's essay misses at the largest level is not, finally, a matter of interpretation but of access. He works from Through Elegant Eyes without the full In a Green Tree manuscript in view. That manuscript would have given him Monica MacLish; Anselm Sheen as a substantial figure rather than a passing reference; more of John Penandrew as David Penandrew’s older brother, with the Orcutt Lake drowning behind him and his personal history; the source of “Barnaby” as Monica’s pet name for the young Bernard; Rita Palacios as the painter of the portrait; and, complicating his instinct about Loretta, the manuscript’s own paternity-doubt subplot, carried through a “subliminal whispering” device. For those who want the nuts and bolts, some notes: "The All-At-Once Man" (23 January 1970) "The All-At-Once Man" introduces five-man company (Sheen, Drakos, O'Donovan, Benedetti, Penandrew) plus the narrator "Laff," the Harrow Street setting, the Augustinian formation at Monica Hall, and John Penandrew's project to become all-at-once-man by acquiring from Prester John in Ethiopia the secret of simultaneous existence in all his ages. In a Green Tree (GT) keeps the doctrine and big idea, with Penandrew saying to Pat O'Trassy, "I am the all-at-once-man, and as the all-at-once-man I will live forever in all my ages at the same time"; the term aeon survives without the Gnostic plenoma. Monica Hall is named throughout GT with its Augustinian identity; the four-man company (Sheen, Drakos, O'Donovan, Benedetti) carries forward. The novel reimagines Penandrew biographically: born in Crucifixion Parish with a brother David, he is already something of a young occultist in the grade-school chapters and is shot dead by Robert Bucket with seven silver bullets in the spring of 1960. The three external nephews are transposed into four internal faces: Carsun Bogle, Master Hyde, Catedratico Jekyl, Sinear; Zoe Archikos is dropped (or more accurately grafted onto) Helen Anastasis Penandrew as her middle name; Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; Sheen appears as "Bernard" through the grade-school chapters before settling to "Barnaby." The Ethiopian journey survives stripped of its Prester-John-of-Mogadore framing, with Penandrew bringing back a missing datum from Ethiopia for his live-forever work; the Guna-Slopes recruitment likewise survives as the exchange-person Austro, though the term Aethiopia Cerebralis is dropped. Absent from GT: the Gnostic plenoma, Tanquerey's integrity, F. J. Sheed's aevum, Barnaby's sphere-and-speck cosmic thesis, the post-mortem Harrow Street haunted-house sequence (though Helen's silent/magic horn becomes a major motif in its own right), and the closing "Five Little Wise Men" couplet. The novel adds the Robert Bucket murder, the four-faces internalization, the Welsh "changeling or monster or morphic clans" (with Penandrew glossed as a Latin-Greek bastard formation meaning "barely man" or "almost man"), and a retrospective gloss naming James Tyrone, Old Pat O'Trassy, Basil Drakos, Cris Benedict, and their spouses as approaching the all-at-once state more nearly than Penandrew himself. "Mud Violet" (2 January 1971) "Mud Violet" opens the Watkin-inflected stories, with Lafferty’s metaphysical color cosmology, the nine basic colors, three authorities (God, Iris, E. I. Watkin), hylicon as the ultra-violet wave-band, and the doubled term "mud-violet" naming both the finest and the crudest seeing of one color—and tells, through Laff's "crude sensibilities," of Edmund Weakfish's classroom assignment, Weakfish asking the students to die in order to carry it out, of Loretta Sheen's compliance and the six dispatch deaths that follow, the supernatural rappings, Father John's exorcisms, the Symphony of the Seven Spooks in the barn, and the narrator's closing resolve to turn the knife on Mary Mondo over the supper table. In GT relocates the sequence into the "When the Music Breaks" chapter, opening with Weakfish's identical speech but attributing it to Roy Mega's total recall rather than to Laff, and carrying through all seven named victims, the rappings, and the exorcisms. The novel reimagines the central image, which is Loretta’s dead body: the body in Barnaby's study in the novel has sawdust insides because Doll—given to Loretta in infancy by Helen Penandrew, long an inhabited member of the household ("'doll' is inhabited by a fragment of a splinter of myself")—has displaced the buried Loretta in Barnaby's perception, with Peggy Marie and BeeBee maintaining and repairing the figure (cedar and redwood sawdust from Pat O'Trassy's mill) even as they recognize among themselves "how can so wise a man as Barnaby not see that 'doll' is never 'doll'?" Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict" (novel: "the family name had been Benedetti until just one year before this"). The nine basic colors, hylicon, the mud-violet split, the three authorities, the ultra-violet camera apparatus, the primordial-versus-recycled dust doctrine, Topashi the Inferior Devil, the Symphony of the Seven Spooks, and the narrator's closing turn against Mary Mondo are absent from GT. The novel adds Doll's pre-history and Barnaby's perceptual displacement, the cardboard-man arc with the Royal Order of the Holy Wild Onions verse "Oh spare us, Lord, and spare our place, From flannel-mouth with cardboard face" and the November 1960 election that fulfills it, Pat O'Trassy's juice-sucker speech at the Builders Meeting, the mechanical-monkey conversation in which John Penandrew lays out his four faces, and the chapter's close at the December 1960 Quinquennial National Convention of Itinerant Piano-Tuners in Galveston announcing that "true tone has disappeared from the world"; the related Pitchblende-murder subplot in which Weakfish is named among the seven who drew lots. "Barnaby's Clock" (11 June 1972) "Barnaby's Clock" opens with two disclaimed beginnings—an uncle-and-nephew dialogue and a cosmologist-and-wife scene on faulty radiometric clocks, each followed by the narrator's self-cancellation—before settling, in §III, on Sheen's moveable-walls study, and tells of Barnaby's magic clock that reads any object's age by shape, texture, and essence, of Mary Mondo's wooly-wonder/sunshine-kid prophecy of a demiurge coming with his message "drawn and written on stone," of the clock's identification of an Australopithecus tooth as coming "from Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala, on the Guna Slopes," and of Austro's emergence from behind a partition in a bartender's jacket before Sheen's eminent-scientist visitors Velikov Vonk, Ergodic Eimer, and August Angstrom. GT absorbs Austro directly—the Guna Slopes survive, "Carrock" has really become his signature, the connection to Sheen's seismographic work is identified—and fulfills Mary Mondo's prophecy in incident without quoting it: "drawn and written on stone" becomes the Rocky McCrocky comic strip hand-carved on slate-rock and circulated weekly. The novel reimagines Austro's biography in a few ways: no longer a prophesied figure but "the very bright son of a leading native family of the slopes," member of the crocodile clan with the croc as his totem animal, dresser in Eton jackets and pearl-gray derby hats, inventor of the sound neutralizer, and offhand copout-speaker ("Carrock! I'm only a twelve year old kid"). The Australopithecus timeline is rewritten: where the magic clock keeps the species ancient with one tiny surviving colony, the novel compresses the whole flourishing to "nearer to three thousand years ago" and adds that "they hadn't stopped flourishing." Drakos drifts from "George" to predominantly "Basil"; Doll, already inhabited from infancy, is de-animated by Austro on the morning of his departure for Africa, told to "go to sleep now, 'doll', and continue to sleep" for a thousand years. The two disclaimed openings, the Shakespearean epigraphs, the magic clock itself and its unveiling, the shape-texture-essence cosmology, the catalogue of failed radiometric clocks, Mary Mondo's wooly-wonder prophecy in any quoted form, the eminent scientists Vonk, Eimer, and Angstrom, Willy McGilly and Arpad Arkarbaranan, the partitioned side-room, the taboo sofa, and Magdala itself are absent from GT. The novel adds the crocodile-clan totem-identification, the full Australopithecus society (farmers, poets, mathematicians, philosophers, quick-line comics), the Eton-jacket dudery, the slate-rock Rocky McCrocky comic strip, the sound neutralizer, and the Doll-sleep bookend that closes the talking-doll arc begun in "Mud Violet." "And Read the Flesh Between the Lines" (19 August 1972) "And Read the Flesh Between the Lines" opens with a rumbling in the unused room over the garages at Sheen's place; the four men plus Laff, reunited after eighteen months, climb up and find their old boyhood clubroom with its layered specialties and trunks of comic books, and across four scribbled epigraphs attributed wholly to cycle figures (Penandrew on the wall, Rocky McCrocky in cartoon balloon, Mary Mondo medium unknown, Loretta's motto from rubble and dust) the story develops two doctrines. “Flesh Between” (§2) names Austro col carraig, exadelphus, rock cousin—a kindred whose name has been expunged from Irish, Greek, and Dutch, with the Two Magdalas and the Hebrew Migdal Watch-Tower etymology levered in as the adjacent toponym thread. The compressed-history thesis (§3) reads consensus history as a coiled spring of suppressed events: Velikovsky's six hundred years must be added rather than subtracted (and added six times over), Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais reconstructs three Roman Kingdoms/Republics/Empires, the Lower Middle Ages contain a thousand-year gap with the Devil bound, John Braintree Adams and Cow-Moose Party President Parkinson have been excised, and libraries (as magazines in both senses) periodically explode. In §4 the room kablooms, Austro's eye is permanently blasted askew, his wink goes crooked, and he speaks his first complete English sentence ("Carrock, carrock, we bust the crock")—with the closing revelation that Rocky McCrocky was John Penandrew's boyhood comic-strip creation that took flesh in Austro. GT absorbs Austro at his already-fluent stage, inherits the comic strip but reassigns its authorship wholly to Austro himself (with the spelling drift to "Rockey"), and keeps "Carrock" as his offhand copout. Drakos drifts from "George" to "Basil"; "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict." The Flesh Between, the kindred-etymology canvas, the Two Magdalas with the Migdal Watch-Tower etymology, the compressed-history thesis entire, Velikovsky, Atrox Fabulinus and his suppressed Romans (Humerus Maximus, Nothus Nobilis, Anserem Captator, Capripex Ferox), the Lower Middle Ages with their bound Devil, the libraries-as-magazines pun, John Braintree Adams, Cow-Moose Parkinson, the mutually-exclusive-boyhoods doctrine, the four cycle-character epigraphs, the rumbling room, the boyhood clubroom over the garages, the kabloom, Pluto Water, Sullivan Seven-Passenger Family Balloons, Austro's first complete English sentence, his crooked wink, and his permanently askew eye are absent from GT. The novel's within-territory addition is the reassignment of Rocky McCrocky to Austro's single authorship, lifting the character out of the Penandrew-boyhood origin that FBL §4 revealed. "Animal Fair" (3 December 1972) "Animal Fair" opens with Mrs. Bagby's complaint that Austro the "anarchist" makes her grass and trees shaggy in the wooded draw between the Sheen and Benedetti properties (the §I Eco-Log epigraph furnishes the phrase "an anarchist of shaggy trees"), and across four sections framed by paired epigraphs — three pairings of external authority plus Eco-Log quatrain (Eisely §I, Watkin §II, Orthcutt §IV) flanking an internal "Song of the Shaper" plus Eco-Log pairing at §III—tells of Chiara Benedetti, between ten and fifteen, blue-black-eyed, possessed of "Really Eyes" that change what she looks at, who summons a magical Animal Fair in the wooded draw, a parliamentary Congress of Creatures seated as the Broader House facing the four men's Upper House, with Austro scribing for the animals and Laff for the lords. The story develops Drakos's arche/Logos/anarchy etymology lecture, Seminator the seed-man (one of the sons of Tellus, carrying leatherly leaf pouches of seeds and fish roe), Cris's retelling of Chiara's reading of Chesterton's truth-from-the-beginning plant, and a closing §IV in which Mary Mondo pours Lethe over the lords, the animals, and the brook so that no one is left remembering that the Fair happened. In a Green Tree preserves the property—"two and a half acres" verbatim—but transposes the magical Fair into Rita's 1958 portrait of Chiara at fourteen "in a sort of deer park or zoological garden without cages," reduces the parliamentary animals to Pat O'Trassy's carved stone bench at a bus-stop fountain rampant with shouting bears, bellowing buffalo bulls, buck deers, and coons, and softens the Really-Eyed reality-shaper to "Nature Girl" with "rapport with the beasts." Chiara's biography is preserved and extended: five days old in Peggy Marie's introduction, fully named "Chiara Margarita Marie Benedict" (Italian for Clara, after Cris's grandmother, with "Margarita Marie" a disguised tribute to Peggy Marie Pitchblende), shown with her cub bear and monkey at the bus-stop fountain, and courted by sixteen-year-old Roy Mega when she is ten—"the real thing between them." "Benedetti" appears as "Benedict" throughout the family; Drakos drifts from "George" to "Basil"; the one-off "Edmond Weakfish" of AF §I reverts to "Edmund" in the novel. The dual-epigraph structural innovation, the in-cycle epigraph voices (Eco-Log and Song of the Shaper), Eiseley and Watkin and Orthcutt as named authorities, the Upper House / Broader House parliamentary frame, the magical Animal Fair itself, Mrs. Bagby and her anarchist-of-shaggy-trees complaint, the arche/Logos etymology lecture, Seminator and the sons of Tellus, the seven forming eyes, the Really Eyes, Chiara's reality-shaping power, the Lethe-pouring resolution, the Chestertonian truth-from-the-beginning plant, the Mary-Violet compound name, and the Augustinian and Stevensonian tag-quotations are absent from in GT. The novel adds Patricia Rowley Benedict, Chiara's mother—a major character preserved from the grade-school chapters through to near the close of the novel—and Roy Mega's courtship of ten-year-old Chiara. "The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos" (19 December 1972) "The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos” opens with Doctor George Drakos displaying the home-made mice he has manufactured in his laboratory and, across eight unnumbered scenes prefaced by a single Eco-Log quatrain ("There was a crooked man / And he made some crooked mice: / And crooked fire and plasma ran / By thunderous device"), tells how Drakos's demiurgic claim "I have created animal life" is corrected by Barnaby ("You've not created life, man . . . you have projected life, your own, a little"): the mice have no DNA, they eat wind and electricity, they nibble the toes of the Acroceraunian Mountains, and they mock the cohort one by one. The storm climax in §8 brings ball lightning into Sheen's cluttered study through the chimney, windows, and registers; the lightning balls—Mary Mondo's familiars—devour every plasma mouse, Drakos suffers a pectoral pang of life returning to its source, Mary Mondo poses the Pilate question "What is life?", Austro turns the room's last drawing into "next week's Adventures of Rocky McCrocky," and the closing line drops the cycle's setting for the first time: "You have to expect such violent storms when you live in Oklahoma." GT develops the same ball-lightning-as-carrier-of-spectral-presence doctrine in a separate scene at Pitchblende Manor — ball lightning carrying the distorted image of a man beheaded at Tyburn Prison in the reign of Bloody Queen Bess, generating thirty thousand volts and croaking "Oh bloody planks of Tyburn Prison, tell me where my head reposes"—and supplies the in-text rationale for the cycle's Drakos name-drift: "Drakos would be called 'George' rather than 'Basil' in the army," after which the novel uses "George" in military and military-adjacent contexts (Fort Sill, the Pitchblende benefactor, the Loretta-doll consultations) and "Basil" elsewhere. The weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip—UMD §8's "next week's"—is confirmed in the novel as "circulated every week," with the spelling drift to "Rockey." The plasma-mouse experiment itself, the demiurge/projection exchange between Drakos and Barnaby, the DNA-less mice eating wind and electricity, the Acroceraunian Mountains, the Rat King, Brookhaven, the Lady of Salette reference, Austro's eschatological cartoons, Drakos's pectoral pang, the Pilate "What is life?" in this form, the Eco-Log "crooked man" quatrain, and Oliver Benedetti the family dog are absent from GT. The novel adds the Tyburn / Bloody-Queen-Bess provenance of the ball-lightning ghost and the army-nickname rationale that the cycle stories left unexplained. "The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti" (24 December 1972) "The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti" opens with two front-matter epigraphs—a Psalmic prayer ("Save me from the lion's mouth, / And my lowness from the horns of the unicorns") paired with a Cantos Llantos quatrain attributed to the in-story Clement Goldbeater ("The Lion had two heads on him; / The Unicorn was polled")—and across the unfolding narrative tells, beginning "Professor Cristoforo Benedetti made a lion. He made it a little better than he had intended. He hadn't meant to make a literal lion; only a literary lion," of Cris's "Hanging Judas, No!" outburst, of his Athens-of-mid-America lecture placing Goldbeater in a genealogy of eleven Irish writers (Boucicault, Standish O'Grady, Carleton, Le Fanu, Banim, and others) with Joyce dismissed, of Roy Mega's introduction of the non-person doctrine ("The Putty Dwarf showed us how easily a non-person can operate. I believe that the great Clement is another non-person"), of Goldbeater's airport arrival and the tay at Barnaby's, of Goldbeater's theologically pointed retort to his maker ("God made me up. You're in His image, but weakly so. You did not make me up, man."), of the second Goldbeater (Clement T. of Howth) bursting through the door with a Jacob/Esau allusion against the first (Clement S. of Clontarf), and of the closing blackthorn fight in which both cousins beat each other and Cris with their sticks while Mary Mondo asks "What is life?" like jesting Pilate. In a Green Tree develops the Putty Dwarf substantially across eight pages as the ectoplasmic-mask non-person of the dirty comic strip that circulates among the teenagers, barred from the Grasshopper Bar and Grill alongside Edmund Weakfish and Cloud McKay ("only a man wearing an ectoplasmic mask and mantle . . . not a true ghost"); extends the non-person doctrine to twentieth-century literary culture ("Camus and Sartre and non-persons like that . . . Neither was Joyce . . . those two fakirs were invented by a tableful of drunk French-African soldiers"); confirms Roy Mega's biography—electronics genius, projector of the dead Alfred Pitchblende as an electronic ghost, knew Loretta and Violet Lonsdale at Cains Ballroom, has total recall; literalizes the Cantos Llantos quatrain in Alice Pitchblende's actual Polled Unicorns in Tulsa ("Show me a City of Tulsa ordinance against keeping Polled Unicorns"); anchors the jesting-Pilate formula in the Week-End Library 1930 anthology containing Aldous Huxley's Jesting Pilate; and places the blackthorn walking stick in a Catholic-patient annual-equipment list ("a new fur hat, a new blackthorn walking stick, and a new prayer-book"). "Benedetti" remains "Benedict" throughout; the titular "Professor" attached to his name is story-only, though the novel describes Cris as "a college professor"; the full Italian "Cristoforo" first name is story-only, with the novel using "Cristofer." The Cantos Llantos, the two-headed-lion / literary-lion / literal-lion distinction, the two Goldbeater cousins of Clontarf and Howth, the eleven named Irish writers, the "God made me up" retort, the blackthorn fight itself, the Jacob/Esau allusion, the taibhsiuil and deamhan Irish-ghost vocabulary, Cead mile failte and Ta failte romhat (Austro's sudden Irish), the "Hanging Judas, No!" outburst, the Athens-of-mid-America joke, the Unicorn student magazine, and the cycle's first cross-story callback ("Drakos himself had been a little bit sour for several months") are absent from GT. The novel adds the ectoplasmic-mask-and-mantle specifics for the Putty Dwarf, the Grasshopper Bar exclusion, Alice Pitchblende's literal Polled Unicorns in Tulsa, and Roy Mega's Pitchblende-ghost electronics projection. "The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan" (30 December 1972) "The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan" (Story 8, 30 December 1972) opens with "Harry O'Donovan had made an apparatus. Being political, he had made a political apparatus: and the essential of this was that it should look and walk and talk like a man"—under a single Eco-Log quatrain ("Four pieces needed in this plan / To make the flaming rocket man: / A mask, a pitch, a brain to whiz it; / The fourth—well, what the Devil is it?")—and across the unfolding narrative tells of Harry's serial selection of David Concourse the Mask, Ennis Hardhandle the Pitch, and Baxter Hungerman the Brain (recruited on Twelfth Street and Coyote Trail out west of Sand Springs, the cycle's first Tulsa-by-name geography), of Hardhandle's dissection of the JFK Inaugural Address as written by "an open-minded idiot who must here be nameless out of common decency" and delivered by "that near-perfect mask, Kennedy," of the Mysterious Stranger's arrival via a painting-disguised door to ratify the Faustine deal with the visible signature of black lightning, of the campaign-rocketing in which the three principals merge into one flaming creature, of the closing dual exorcism (Cris's Vulgate Latin "Ego praecipio tibi, exi ab eo" from Mark 9:25 joined with Austro's polyglot older rite combining Carrock with Greek kalos, coined exitexto, Yiddish or Anglo-Irish kabosh, and the particle ghim) expelling an eight-inch homunculus, and of Mary Mondo's unqualified "What is life?" completing the UMD / CRB / HRH three-iteration arc. GT supplies the cycle's Harry with two GT-side biographical anchors in Henry O'Donovan's school Catechism—the Latin family motto Vir Semper Hostem (with his father's flattering "The Man over his Enemies" reading) and "Politics is the art of the impossible" (Bismarck-inverted, glossed by the Tulsa Klan reality that prevents his father from running for mayor)—preserves "black lightning" as the Devil's Unconscious-signature ("Oh, it's like black lightning, going from the east to the west; it proclaims itself in all its deliriums"), instantiates the Faust legend in Gounod's opera at the Paris Opera House, treats Kennedy variously across four passages (the Tulsa Kennedy Building, the 1968 candidates in Strategos's pockets, RFK on Juneteenth, the Kennedys as "a weaker variation of the Gracci"), and carries Sand Springs across thirteen mentions spanning the first half of the novel. The novel uses "Henry O'Donovan" in childhood and "Harry O'Donovan" in adult contexts—the cycle's fourth documented name-drift after Sheen, Drakos, and Benedetti, with the same developmental rationale. The "Hellaceous Rocket" itself, the four-piece political-apparatus scheme, David Concourse, Ennis Hardhandle, Baxter Hungerman, the Mysterious Stranger, the Faustine vocabulary, the quaternity doctrine, the eight-inch homunculus, the dual exorcism with its Vulgate Latin and polyglot older rite, the JFK Inaugural Address dissection, the painting-disguised door, the campaign-rocket merger, and Austro's comic flight as Harry tries to recruit him for the marsh-gas Guna-Slopes rocket are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the Catechism-classroom origin for the Vir Semper Hostem motto and the "art of the impossible" doctrine, the Gounod-operatic instantiation of the Faust legend, and the four-passage Kennedy iconography that HRH §3 reaches retroactively to include. "The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen" (31 December 1972) "The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen" opens "Barnaby Sheen made a world"—completing the cycle's made-paradigm four-man arc—under a single Beddoes epigraph from Death's Jest Book ("I have a lot of Fiat in my soul / and can myself create my little world") and across four editorially imposed scenes corresponding to the four card-playing nights (pitch, Michigan, high five, no cards) tells how Barnaby's rocky model of the world is taken over by Mary Mondo's nine successive Latin Fiat-utterances—anima, imber, nubes, fulmen, tonitrus, pluvia, terrae motus, eruptio, and finally the macaronic Fiat volcano—each of which produces the named phenomenon, so that Phantasmopolis (the ghost-city, founded by Mondinus in Year Four Anno Mary Mondo) rises within the dome; how the partnership extends to Austro, who confesses he has carved real-tiny mammoth skeletons in the Dawson Limestone and Pulex fleas which Mary's ghost-hands transport into the model (his first cycle blush registered: "the leather-colored kid was capable of a blush"); and how the §4 volcano blows the dome, the fleas escape to bite Barnaby, and sulphur-and-brimstone close out the story. GT supplies the cycle's deepest biographical anchor for Barnaby across seven pages of seismograph material, including the Rosetta-stone line "Barnaby Sheen had met him [Austro] and his people while doing seismographic exploration work on the Guna Slopes in East Africa"; grounds the creator-class doctrine in the Catechism scene's "God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things"; gives the Fiat-by-speech an English counterpart in John Penandrew's "the same grand gesture of his right hand as God used when he said 'Let there be light!'"; extends the HRH sulphur-and-brimstone Faustine signature across further pages (including the Pitchblende specter's "odor of either sulphur or brimstone"); and lists the cycle's card-game culture in a roster that covers pitch and high five (Michigan is unnamed). The "Wooly World" itself, the Beddoes epigraph, the nine Latin Fiat-utterances, Phantasmopolis, Mondinus, the Anno Mary Mondo dating system, Pulex the fleas, Dawson Limestone, "Let's fake it, kid" (Barnaby's whisper to Austro), the real-tiny carving partnership with Mary's ghost-hands, the volcano-blows-the-dome climax, the Austro blush, the coarse / uncircumcised / gamey-eared hearing-trifecta, and Michigan as evening-card-game are absent from GT. The novel adds John Penandrew's "Let there be light!" gesture at the cycle's territory and the Catechism classroom scene that grounds the creator-doctrine. "St. Poleander's Eve" (10 February 1973) "St. Poleander's Eve" breaks the late-1972 burst with a 41-day gap and opens the cycle's 1973 expansion in three numbered authorial sections (the cycle's first since AAOM) under three epigraphs (the cycle's first three-epigraph configuration): a Lafferty pastiche of Inferno III.9 attributed to "Cristofero Dante Benedetti" ("Lasciate ogni donna, voi ch'entrate!"), a Chesterton couplet supplying the title (the speaker from Castlepatrick losing his sleeve-heart on St. Poleander's Eve), and an eight-line stanza from Kipling's "Conundrum of the Workshops" ending "It's pretty, but is it Art?" §I opens with Daisy Flavus already on Barnaby's payroll as self-appointed "artistic secretary," against whose pressure to expand the cohort Barnaby offers the cycle's first naming of its cohort structure ("a group of men who have become one and will remain so . . . unchangeable and unsunderable") and stages the cycle's most extensive art-theory debate—Roy Mega's idealist-selective "Garden of What Ought to Be," Barnaby's pneumatological Holy-Spirit-outpouring, Cris's dialectical-Manichean struggle, the Putty Dwarf's (via Mary Mondo) anti-incarnational "art was smoke without fire . . . all flesh should be of cardboard," and Kipling's skeptical refrain — over the distribution of needle implants. §II stages April 30 St. Poleander's Eve—a Walpurgisnacht-coded date in the cycle's chronology—when the Rushlight Theatre play opens, three of the four men's wives appear (Helen Drakos cabinet-maker, Judy Benedetti pianist-wineshop, Catherine O'Donovan redhead potter-weaver), the thousand-year era ends, the Devil is released, "hairy goat songs from langue d'oc eight hundred years ago" intrude on the polyander, the three wives merge with Daisy, Mary, and Loretta into a succubus, Chiara Benedetti is sacrificed to Moloch by her own mother Judy, and the Putty Dwarf throws Catherine through the high window. §III brings three shoes dropping (Helen, Judy, walking-dead Catherine), effector-picture revenge from Catherine that splits Harry's head, and the cycle's first Australopithecine moral refusal—Austro completing the effector pictures of Daisy and Roy with Laff's parenthetical protest unheeded, then refusing Catherine's escalation when she asks to enhance the pictures further ("No, no, Catherine, don't do that! . . . That's a little too much"). GT preserves Roy Mega across more than a dozen pages (Resurrection grade-school student; total recall Cains Ballroom on North Main Street with Violet Lonsdale and Loretta; next-generation cohort children list); develops the Putty Dwarf as ectoplasmic-mask non-person paired with Edmund Weakfish and the dissident priest Cloud McKay; supplies a Cardboard Man category culminating in "In November of 1960, a cardboard man was elected President of the United States"; develops Violet Lonsdale including her hacksaw suicide with Barry Limus and the seven-tin-eyed-people death cluster; rewrites Helen Drakos as Edith O'Melody Drakos with full Troubadour-cultist biography (Languedoc Love Court, Maxfield Parrish portrait at age ten, "perversions of Languedoc"); rewrites Judy Benedetti as Patricia Rowley Benedict across more than forty mentions; develops Father Cloud McKay's Holy Spirit heresy ("Father McKay is both the Holy Spirit and the Christ of the Second Coming") as the doctrinal backdrop for §I's art debate; and places Austro's Rockey McCrocky comic strip ("nine or ten copies . . . each carefully hand carved . . . circulated every week"). Catherine O'Donovan has no exact novel counterpart—the novel's Catherine Drakos is George Basil Drakos's daughter married to Tony Benedict—the cycle's most explicit cross-generational name-reassignment. The three numbered sections, the three epigraphs (Cristofero Dante, Chesterton, Kipling), Daisy Flavus, the polyander naming, the Rushlight Theatre, the Mustel Celesta, "Garden of What Ought to Be," "Conundrum of the Workshops," Castlepatrick, the needle implants, April 30 / Walpurgisnacht, Moloch and the child sacrifice, the succubus formation, the thousand-year era's ending, the high-window death of Catherine, the effector-picture revenge mechanic, Harry's splitting headache, the five-art-doctrine debate as such, the Symphony of Seven Spooks post-death phenomenon, Austro's Australopithecine moral refusal, the explicit Laff naming, the mud-violet title-callback to Story II, and the Watkin-spectrum integration are absent from GT. The novel adds Edith O'Melody Drakos's Troubadour-cultist biography, the Cains Ballroom Tulsa landmark for the next-generation cohort, the November 1960 cardboard-man-elected-President line, Father Cloud McKay's Holy Spirit heresy, the next-generation cohort children list, and Violet Lonsdale's hacksaw-suicide death cluster. "Rivers of Damascus" (23 June 1973) "Rivers of Damascus" opens after a 133-day gap from SPE as the cycle's longest story (9,391 words) in three numbered authorial sections (the cycle's first back-to-back three-section pair after SPE) with zero front-matter epigraphs replaced by six attributed quoted passages in §II, and tells how the polyander cohort is dissolved (only Cris Benedetti carries over) and replaced by the Landwitch Covenant team—John Dragon dean of soft sciences, Joseph Waterwitch the Shawnee Indian dowser, Abel Landgood the eidolon man, and Cris—who from Sheen's electronics works on Six-Shooter Road (the cycle's first named Tulsa street) launch the first para-archeological probe and observe the Damascus 635 AD events. §I stages the caravan clowns coming to "the oldest town in the world" in March of "Restored Salvation 635," leaving their rickety scaling-ladders on the sand, walking sideways through the east gate along the street named Straight (Via Recta / Souk-el-Taouil), the basket-wall where St. Paul was once let down, and the council-room rafters in the Byzantine commandant's chamber. §II reorganizes epigraphic apparatus as in-narrative material—Arpad Arutinov's essay from The Back Door of History on the impossibility of the Islamic conquest ("there is no way that those events could have happened"), four signed Landwitch Papers statements from the team (Dragon, Waterwitch, Landgood, Benedetti), and Ignace Wolff's passage from The River Inside—supplying Arutinov's subjective-religious-rapture diagnosis, the Pharpar / Abana / Baroda inner-river doctrine, the patina-as-living-precipitate-of-time doctrine, the heterodyning two-thousand-year-reverberation theory, Cris's recreated-secondary-world doctrine ("we are the anomalous ghosts"), Pauline blindness as recurring historical type ("Paul was not the first nor the millionth man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus"), Khalid ibn-al-Walid called up from 635 AD as the cycle's first coeval-agent resurrected ghost, and the mind-worm doctrine. §III brings the team's discrediting and the closing TV-spectacular hijack of "The End Of The Crackpots." GT gives a different passage from The Back Door of History on a treasure-cave with painted bulls, hens with multicolored eggs, and foxes that wash in fire; supplies the cycle's deepest single-page doctrinal anchor with the same plum-color patina analogy ("the same color, the color of plums . . . That is the patina . . . a very thin staining that forms on the stones and clays"), spoken by Nils Handelamand the project director; supplies the eidolon's sympathetic-magic anchor in "reacting-clay effigies" and in the Cyclops-decoy effigy with nine rifle bullets in it; transposes Pauline blindness to Tulsa, where the GT next-generation cohort member John Barry Colmo (from the parent-cohort children list that develops SPE's polyander structure to the next generation) is "driving west on East Eleventh Street, coming back into town from a weekend on Lake Tenkiller" when "hit in the face by a ball of light" and blinded for three days; develops religious rapture across four pages (Tyrone / O'Bogue "Rapture for Two," Helen's night raptures, the absolute rapture in the sewers, Major Brass's "rifleman in a rapture"); cites Belloc across three pages (Belloc's History of England (5 vol.), "Chesterton and Belloc and Maurice Baring and David Goldstein," the "great massif of Bellocian Europe"); develops Austro across eight pages including the Rockey McCrocky slate-rock comic strip and the "anomalous Irish face" that supplies the lexical anchor for Cris's "we are the anomalous ghosts" doctrine; and develops Roy Mega across thirteen pages, with ROD itself the cycle's fifth named Roy Mega appearance after MV, BC, TLCB, and SPE and the first to develop his ambivalent allegiance. The three numbered sections, the two fabricated authorities (Arutinov's Back Door of History passage in this register, Wolff's River Inside), the Landwitch Covenant compact, John Dragon, Joseph Waterwitch (the cycle's first Native American character), Abel Landgood, Khalid ibn-al-Walid and his resurrection, Six-Shooter Road, the caravan clowns and the east gate, the Anti-Lebanon mountains, the basket-wall ladder-assault and the council-room rafters, Souk-el-Taouil and "Restored Salvation 635," the Damascus Seven, the Pharpar / Abana / Baroda inner-river doctrine, the patina-as-living-precipitate framing, the heterodyning theory, the eidolon-as-dowser-inside-out doctrine, the mind-worm doctrine, the recreated-secondary-world doctrine, the §III TV-spectacular hijack of "The End Of The Crackpots," and the ilm (Holy Arabic Science) vocabulary are absent from GT. The novel adds Nils Handelamand as patina-doctrine spokesman, the Tulsa transposition of Pauline blindness onto East Eleventh Street, John Barry Colmo's three-day blindness and conversion, the four-page rapture vocabulary, and the Bellocian Europe / Church Militant Catholic literary milieu. "Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes" (12 March 1974) "Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes" opens the cycle's 1974 expansion, finished after a 262 gap from RoD. The cycle's epigraphic apparatus is suspended in favor of Mary Mondo's opening "Yah, yah!" and the refrain "they don't make them like they used to" recurring six times to introduce each new Halloween story; the polyander cohort is fully restored after RoD's reduction; Mary Mondo becomes the cycle's heaviest single-story ghost presence and operates for the first time as a standalone cycle ghost no longer requiring Violet Lonsdale as host; and Austro warns of the doublepeople—the cycle's first explicit demon-class—who come on the year-night to twist the inner monkey sideways with their air-not-iron monkey-wrench. The climactic three-visitor reveal brings Roy Mega as the white-bearded Paracelsus (with the genuinely real, thong-attached beard he has grown for the night), Chiara Benedetti as the evil consort Morgana (her first cycle appearance outside a theatrical frame after SPE's within-play Chiara), and Heavenly Days McGee the wino friend as the Unnameable One who pours a bowl of Kiboko (Swahili hippopotamus) blood over Austro's head—revealed at last as Ike's Chili Parlour chili—at Austro's twelfth-birthday golden-anniversary party, twelve calculated by Egyptian astronomy from the Dog Star's rising (called "helical" in the story, properly "heliacal") and the Sothic period. In a Green Tree preserves Mary Mondo across nine pages as Violet Lonsdale's invisible-friend split-off (a "little ghost-girl" portrayed in the Pitchblende Gallery, always passive curiosity-phenomenon attached to a living host); preserves Chiara Benedict across seven pages with the cycle's name-drift now extending hereditarily across two generations (cycle Cris / Chiara Benedetti versus novel Cris / Chiara Benedict, with the implication that Cris's grandmother was also Chiara); supplies Austro's species anchor in "Austro belonged to the race of mankind called Australopithecus . . . The Australos . . . had actually flourished nearer to three thousand years ago, and they hadn't stopped flourishing"; supplies Austro's age in "Austro, a twelve year old person from the Guna slopes of Africa" and the verbatim "Carrock! I'm only a twelve year old kid" cop-out; supplies the Roy + Chiara coupling in the casual-romantic register "Roy was also running around a little bit with Chiara Benedict (Nature Girl herself)" which the cycle mythologizes into Paracelsus + Morgana; develops John Penandrew's talking monkey, ghost-monkey, and mechanical monkey across three pages as the cycle's function-reassignment of the story's O'Brien-family monkey to the Penandrews (with the O'Briens absent from the novel entirely); anchors Ike's Chili Parlor among the original Tulsa restaurants (with the British / American Parlour / Parlor drift); supplies the Orpheum vaudeville-circuit setting that grounds Bittle McLittle's biography; carries Sand Springs across eight pages as the Dumbarton-refinery anchor (the family itself wholly cycle-side); shows the place-name drift on Orcutt (cycle Orcutt Park on the Dumbarton-streetcar terminus / novel Orcutt Lake where David Penandrew drowns); and supplies the sole novel-side Halloween anchor in a Monica Hall gymnasium horse-and-buggy "Halloween Dance"—recreational-romantic, not species-ritual. The single-section narrative break, the suspended epigraphic apparatus, the "Yah, yah!" opening and the "they don't make them like they used to" refrain, the three embedded retrospective sub-stories, the doublepeople demon-class, the monkey-wrench compound, Kiboko blood substitution, the Sothic-period age-calculation with the Dog Star's rising, Australopithecine Halloween priority, Australopithecine doorbells with lead-sulphuric-acid batteries, the three-visitor year-night framework with Paracelsus / Morgana / the Unnameable One, white-beard-on-demand, the sander-effect ghost-trap, Heavenly Days McGee, Bittle McLittle, Zoe Archikos, the Kalbfleish / Paldeen / Dumbarton families, the pit-pumpkin disaster, the paternity-suit prank, and the streetcar derailment are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the multi-generational hereditary implication for the Benedetti / Benedict name-drift, the recreational-romantic Halloween Dance at Monica Hall, McGee Funeral Home as the surname's novel-side referent (against the cycle's wino McGee), and the Orcutt-Lake-and-Penandrew-drowning context that grounds the cycle's Orcutt Park terminus. "What Big Tears The Dinosaur's" (5 October 1974) "What Big Tears The Dinosaur's" was finished after a 68-day gap from BFS—the cycle accelerating into late 1974—as a single continuous narrative (cycle's shortest since AAOM at 3,397 words, resetting from BFS's three-section configuration) with zero front-matter epigraphs and zero internal quoted passages, and tells how Doctor George Drakos's opening announcement of a dinosaur hunt in Arkansas (with horse races at Hot Springs as side-attraction) draws Cris Benedetti's "Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths" and Barnaby bellowing for Austro—the dinosaur (a tyrannosaurus rex sighted by two hundred witnesses, moving across Arkansas at fifty miles a day with a one-hour twenty-five-mile burst from Fort Smith to Sallisaw OK after eating the bridge across the Arkansas River at Fort Smith) drives the cohort to Sheen's house, where Drakos develops the atrichos doctrine (museum-hairless dinosaurs as scientifically unjustified), retrofitted at story's close by Austro's salt-water explanation; Cris says the Valley of the Dinosaurs by modal-realist necessity against Drakos's geographic skepticism, Austro laconically affirms "I know a rich hidden valley," and Drakos classifies the creature in passing as Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus. The reveal: the dinosaur is Austro's dog, telepathically bonded across the ocean, peeled bald by salt water during the swim, drawn by Austro at two-thirds his own height under the Guna-Slopes drawing convention where canvas size encodes importance rather than physical magnitude. The dawn arrival wedges the dog's head into the room below Austro's floor; the dog whoops "Carrock" and the inarticulate "Aw-aw" and "Ow-wow-wow"; and the closing three kids—Barnaby with the boy left in him, Austro, and the dog itself—weep together, the cycle's first sustained pathos register and first weeping-Barnaby on the big-animal-yearning / cosmic-disappointment doctrine that no truly-biggest-animal exists in the modern world. In a Green Tree supplies the rare dinosaur anchor in only two passages—Patrick O'Trassy's drawn "bears with dinosaur's necks and devils' heads" from the blue brick-clay, and the burial-clay-figurine transformation into "elephants, three-mouthed tigers, dinosaurs, ocean whales walking on their hind legs" (both drawn or transformed, never alive); supplies Hot Springs as horse-race destination (Pitchblende's racing trips with handicapping theories); supplies Fort Smith as the seat of Federal Marshals and the gateway to Lost City "where children were lost and never found again . . . You could hear the cries of the lost children ringing"; carries Arkansas across fifteen mentions, primarily as the Arkansas River that defines Tulsa's geography; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages with the in-absentia equipment-provider configuration anchored at his electronic-mantle and "Brains for Rent" passages; preserves Austro across nine pages (same set as OHGS and BFS); supplies the Penandrew talking-monkey framework that WBTD extends to the cycle's first talking dog; and supplies the drawing-doctrine corpus in two pre-WBTD modes (Patrick's direct-transcription; Austro's slate-rock cultural-tradition) that the Guna-Slopes importance-encoding mode is added to. Carrock continues as the standing Austro register, here non-deflectively deployed as general-purpose vocalization (and at one moment uttered by the dog itself). The dinosaur hunt premise, the living tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus as species name, the atrichos doctrine and salt-induced hairlessness, "Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths," the Valley of the Dinosaurs and its three-layer modal-realist / geographic-skeptic / laconic-affirmation dialogue, Roy Mega's truck-mounted explosive-shell gun in absentia, the two hundred witnesses with photographs and footprints, the fifty-miles-a-day bridge-eating cross-Arkansas motion, Sallisaw, the telepathic boy-dog cross-ocean communication, the Guna-Slopes importance-encoding drawing convention, the dog's dawn arrival with head wedged into the room below Austro's floor, the dog's "Aw-aw" and "Ow-wow-wow" inarticulate vocalizations, the cycle's first speaking dog, Barnaby's big-animal-yearning grief, and the three-kids-weeping closing pathos are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the drawn and transformed status of all novel-side dinosaurs, Patrick O'Trassy as direct-transcription anchor figure, and Lost City at Fort Smith with the ringing cries of the lost children—the frontier-justice menace-aura that the cycle's bridge-eating dinosaur visits. "And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish" (1 December 1974) "And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish" was finished 57 days after WBTD—the cycle's fastest inter-story tempo since the late-1972 burst—in two numbered authorial sections each headed by a four-line epigraph from the cycle-fictional Rocky McCrocky comic strip (the cycle's first internal epigraph source: §I's "by our fathers' busted bones / We'll fight with dint and doggy" supplying Austro's later oath; §II's "all the skies are full of fish, / And all the fish are smelly" supplying the title and previewing the fish-fall climax), and tells how a club reorganization—Austro is still twelve but Chiara Benedetti has just turned thirteen and must resign (the cycle's first character-aging-out), nominating Austro to take her place; Ivan Kalisky has also turned thirteen and nominates his little, fat, freckled, glasses-wearing sister Susie Kalisky, whom the narrator immediately notes resembles "Susie Kalusy" in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip (the cycle's first cycle-fictional / cycle-character fractured-plane doubling)—produces the Local Anaesthetics, the cycle's first organized children's gang, at war with the aesthetic willow-dance children (seven psychokinetic pure-hearted antagonists, all wearing glasses). Across §I the polyander cohort gives doctrinal speeches on prayers-for-rain, cities-vs-countryside, fish-from-heaven / showers of proteid matter, weather-broadcaster Dean / Keen ritual-prayer, and children's special powers; Amelia Corngrinder gives the pure-rain demonstration at the Donners' frontyard birdbath; and the willow-dancers stage their "Sunshine and Showers" demonstration at the Civic Center Open-air People's Area before Mayor Topmann and three Commissioners. §II brings the overnight sarcodic skyfall, the Civic Center showdown where Susie cracks the willow-dancers' glasses (and through them their psychic carapaces and their science itself), the Local Anaesthetics' counter-sorcery of Tertiary-sky paleobotanical fall (180-foot crinoid stems, macrotaenopteris fronds, wielandiella ferns, monstrous ichthyoids), the narrator's gloss "Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time," the Pauline-reveal of "scales from the eyes," Austro's Australopithecine alien-species defense against Commissioner Kalisky's anti-poster ordinance, and the closing Sheen's Ravine fish-fry where Sheen concedes the fractured-plane equations he supposes he will have to accept (and on which he can have Roy Mega review him). In a Green Tree supplies the cycle's largest single first-name doubling across twenty-nine pages of Susie Peterson—the nominally twenty-one-year-old flapper (actually about eighteen) / "dumb-blonde sort who was affairs-smart" / private secretary of seven of the twelve persons for whom Pitchblende set up decoy companies / perfect-secretary essential whom Prince Dmitri the dog loves (against the cycle's twelve-year-old fat-freckled spectacle-cracker); supplies the literal source of the spectacle wordplay in Jan Dooper's saying that "two glasses and she makes a spectacle of herself" (the oculist's daughter Blanche) which the cycle extends to literal spectacle-cracking power; preserves Chiara Benedict across seven pages with the standing cycle/novel name-drift now extending to the daughter, with AATSF's just-turned-thirteen falling between the novel's five-day-old and fourteen-year-old waypoints; develops Rocky McCrocky as Austro's slate-rock activity at the Guna Slopes that the cycle now elevates to authorial-frame epigraph status; supplies the comic-strip framework across six pages (Spanish strips, Anagram Girl Detective, Alpha-Person / Beta-Shadow duality, Putty Dwarf, Rocky McCrocky) within which the cycle's fractured-plane doubling operates; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages (returning to personal appearance after WBTD's in-absentia); preserves Austro across nine pages with the standing Australopithecine framework (here legal-civic-shielded) but with Carrock at 0× — the cycle's first Austro-without-Carrock story; develops prayer across eight pages and drought across two pages; and carries Tulsa as setting throughout. Mary Mondo and Loretta Sheen both remain at 0×. The title, the two-section binary structure and its two Rocky McCrocky epigraphs, Susie Kalisky and her Susie Kalusy comic-strip alter-ego, the Local Anaesthetics gang, the seven named willow-dance children (Amelia Corngrinder, Aldous McKeever, Horace Wickiup, Margaret Grainger, Adrien Chastel, Alice Whitetoken, Rolland Clatchby), the Civic Center Open-air People's Area, Sheen's Ravine, the Donners' frontyard birdbath, Mayor Topmann and Commissioners McPhillips, Corngrinder, and Kalisky, the "Sunshine and Showers" demonstration, the overnight sarcodic skyfall, the spectacle-cracking power, the fractured plane of reality doctrine and Sheen's concession, "Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time," the inhabited-rain-vs-empty-water doctrine, the Tertiary-sky paleobotanical fall, the monstrous ichthyoids, the Ka-whoosh and Ka-whish onomatopoeia, Austro's alien-species defense against the anti-poster ordinance, the anklebone non-correspondence skepticism toward WBTD's Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus, and Chiara Benedetti's status as the cycle's first character-aging-out are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the dense Susie Peterson novel-side biography, the Jan Dooper / Blanche oculist-daughter source for the spectacle wordplay, and the Alpha-Person / Beta-Shadow duality that the cycle's fractured-plane concession formalizes. "Two For Four Ninety-Nine" (17 February 1975) "Two For Four Ninety-Nine" opens cycle's 1975 expansion, 78 says after AATSF was finished. It is a as a single continuous narrative restoring the cycle's single-section default (between AATSF's binary and FFM's three-section), with the standing twelve-year-old anchor affirmed for the last time before FFM breaks it and Carrock at 0× again after AATSF—confirming the AATSF break is becoming a new pattern—and tells how Selene O'Keene arrives at the new Big Star Detective Agency (Austro and Roy Mega's first business entity, "more properly the Astro Mega Detective Agency," affiliated with Rocky McCrocky Publications, with stone-slab advertisements Austro distributes himself and the rate "Mysteries and crimes solved as cheap as one penny") and submits as opening-day first customer to the preternatural reading protocol—Austro reading her at height, weight, Osage County, blood type, military service ("Afghanistan, but not, I believe, with the Ninth Mounted Fusiliers"), breakfast, and grandfather; Roy Mega refining to three-ounce granularity with the fuzzy-outline-from-Bang-Crystals diagnosis. The opening-day pricing of "two cases for four ninety-nine" forces Selene to recruit second customer George Artless (sly jewel dealer arriving with the strong-room amethyst-for-gravel 99-to-100-to-99 theft case) into the combination, and the two cases prove tied—John U. Daw is Artless's missing amethyst-buyer and Selene's Party Without Walls corpse; Rusty, the male grackle who arrives via chimney as Austro's third client with red-ruby earnest, is the cross-case actor working with female-grackle Dusty as window-distraction decoy. Mary Mondo (matching OHGS's heavy ghost presence as the agency's oracle) supplies the backstory paragraph naming herself as the split-off personality of dead Violet Lonsdale who "refused to die" and "became an unclassified ghost," and delivers a five-question oracle session under amplified-trumpet-blast prescription that resolves both cases as no-malice accidental Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex) overdose plus jewel-thief-on-jewel-thief grackle-accomplice theft (the 94% Precept that jewel-thieves steal from other jewel-thieves). Rat Rattigan (Ratsel Rattigan, the police detective, full name disclosed, Mary-Mondo-audible) issues a five-citizen klinker imprisonment as comic reversal, and the closing eight rhetorical loose-ends questions are deferred to the upcoming Rocky McCrocky comic strip's "Full Disclosure Issue." Barnaby Sheen is at 0×—the cycle's first Sheen full-absence—and the polyander cohort is fully absent except for Mary Mondo, anticipating FFM's complete-absence configuration. GT has the cycle's first ungated SHARED-backstory delivery (Mary Mondo's prior cycle appearances supplied the backstory in parenthetical asides) at ten pages of Mary Mondo—"the little ghost-girl who says she's a split-off personality of Violet Lonsdale," "Mary Mondo was a split-off of the girl Violet Lonsdale," "the Mary Mondo ghost-spinoff of dead Violet Lonsdale"—alongside the source-personality at sixteen pages of Violet Lonsdale (living-then-deceased novel-side, deceased throughout cycle-side); supplies the largest novel-side conceptual framework at eighty-one pages of ghost; develops party across forty-nine pages as the social-narrative mechanism that the cycle's Party Without Walls extends as continuing-venue institution; resists at thirty-two pages of monkey, against which the cycle's "not a monkey in any way" doctrine asserts that Austro is "a twelve-year-old person of the Australopithecus Race" sometimes called ape-men but never monkeys; develops the detective framework across fifteen pages (Helen Anastasis / Helen Anagram Girl Detective and the scattered investigation scenes) that the cycle's first business-entity establishment leverages; preserves Roy Mega across thirteen pages and Austro across nine (the standing anchor sets); supplies the Australopithecus anchor at the Guna Slopes; and provides single-page anchors for Kendall (Artless's mother's teaching post at the Old Kendall School), soot, and license (the unlicensed-employment-agency framework). The "Two For Four Ninety-Nine" title, the Big Star / Astro Mega Detective Agency and its Two-for-$4.99 pricing, Selene O'Keene, George Artless, John U. Daw / Jack Daw, Rat Rattigan / Ratsel Rattigan, Rusty and Dusty (the grackle accomplices), Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex), the Party Without Walls, the Without-X idiom cluster, Pax-Max as cycle-fictional peace organization, the Stone-Dealer's Hundred 100-which-is-107 arithmetic, the Beta-Phase Furnace, the stone-slab advertisements and stone-age shorthand, the preternatural reading protocol, the Astro / Austro name-pun, the fuzzy-outline dexahexakrex diagnostic marker, the amethyst-for-gravel 99-to-100-to-99 exchange, Rex Soul's auger field autopsy, the Owl-Face gnomic register, Mary Mondo's amplified five-question oracle session, the 94% Precept, the no-malice Bang Crystals ruling, the five-citizen klinker imprisonment, the eight rhetorical loose-ends questions deferred to the Rocky McCrocky "Full Disclosure Issue," and Sheen's complete absence are absent from In a Green Tree. The novel adds the dense ten-page Mary Mondo biography and sixteen-page Violet Lonsdale source-genealogy that the cycle now treats as the shared canonical backstory. "The Funny Face Murders" (29 May 1975) "The Funny Face Murders" opens after a 101-day gap from TFNN as the cycle's longest single story in three numbered authorial sections with Austro at cycle peak (83×) and Roy Mega at cycle peak (32×) and the polyander cohort at complete absence—the cycle's first full polyander absence since the cohort was named, with Cris, Drakos, Harry, and Mary Mondo all 0× and Barnaby Sheen at 1× offstage as the cycle's lowest Sheen ever ("had made the two young geniuses move their agency out of his electronics laboratory"); the twelve-year-old anchor is broken at 0× for the first time since OHGS framed the register, and Carrock returns at 1× in lowercase exclamative form—and tells how Judy Kingfixit fills a paper sack with bundles of paper money and goes down to Broken Bench Lane on the outskirts of T Town (the cycle's first Tulsa-suburb setting, visible to "Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow" through verdant haze) for the Lane's "new face every morning"—a Diversified Investment Procedure According to Educated Whim—buys $100 of Clay-Eaters Enterprises stock, drinks a Trouble-Dissolver, and meets the Lane's inventiveness ecosystem: Great Heart Harkte's Discovery grass (sprouting from the buried inventor's posthumous root system), Quentan Whitebird's Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, the Mokka-Chokka post-coffee stand, the Big Star Weed Rider hovering six inches above grass-top, and Roy Mega and Austro's Big Star Detective Agency at its new standalone Broken Bench Lane office ("Interesting murders solicited. Tedious murders solved grudgingly. Skip tracing done. Husbands found cheap"), where Austro hands out cards for seven cases. §1 climaxes with the Wax Museum first murder under Madame Gussaud's proprietorship; §2 brings the Murder-Will-Out multi-voiced siren chaos and the gift-shop Second Sight helmet; §3 stages three wives' confession (Judy, Ophelia Izobret, Edith Thornbush, under Confession Compulsion Machine influence), the dismantling of False Face Flaherty and Cornelia Falselove as composite corporate persons (revealing the Three Engineering Companies cluster: Plant Engineering's Zombie Plants and walking-talking plants, Animal Engineering's Basic Ape with rubber blood, Human Engineering's Basic Person coordinated humans with denatured personality and brains), the Anthropino Haima vs. Kaoutsouk Haima Greek-Language Blood Doctrine, the Four Wine Cups / Monkey Wine paradigm, Austro's Owl-Face gnomic register and rabbit-front-feet grift, the Mexican Standoff resolution, the closing media frenzy, and Professor Austro. In a Green Tree supplies the cycle's largest single first-name overlap at sixty-eight pages of Edith O'Melody (the novel's prettiest little girl alongside Monica MacLish, five-going-on-six with Bernard Sheen—against the cycle's Edith Thornbush at fourteen occurrences); supplies the cycle's first surname-doubling at the preacher "Hiram John Kratest Fundamental Hardtack" (a tobacco-chewing preacher at the Tulsa Coliseum) against the cycle's police detective Otis Hardtack; supplies the standing novel-side detective-fiction framework in Helen Anastasis's "Helen Anagram Girl Detective" (later "Ellen Anagram, a startling precursor of Wonder Woman") at fifteen pages, against which the cycle's Big Star Detective Agency operates as cycle-real commercial enterprise; develops clay across forty pages with the wax-museum-clay integration anchored verbatim at "it is wax and clay mixed, not merely wax, that the best wax museum figures are made of" that grounds the Lane's adjacent Clay-Eaters Enterprises and Wax Museum; develops invent / inventor across thirty-six pages (Cleopatra Quirke, John Penandrew's invented voice) against the cycle's civic-economic Lane-inventiveness; develops zombie across five pages that the cycle extends to Plant Engineering's Zombie Plant component; preserves Roy Mega across fourteen pages and Austro across nine (standing anchors), the Australopithecus single-page anchor at the Guna Slopes, and Carrock at the standing exclamative; develops horse across eighty-four pages, corporation across five, rabbit across nine, Professor across seven, and comic strip across six (the Rocky McCrocky framework, now extended in the cycle to Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup commercial product); and provides a single-page adulation anchor at the Teilhard de Chardin progressive-priest confrontation. The "Funny Face Murders" title, Broken Bench Lane and the nine-street suburban cluster, "Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow," Judy Kingfixit and Harry Kingfixit (the cycle's first cycle/cycle name overlap with Harry O'Donovan), False Face Flaherty and Cornelia Falselove, the Izobrets, Edith and Edgar Thornbush, Otis Hardtack, Madame Gussaud, Hedwiga Pompey / Seraph Wideditch / Lavinia Firstlight, Great Heart Harkte and the Discovery grass posthumous root system, Quentan Whitebird and Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, Dirky Dave and the Dirky Dave Roulette six-rubber-five-steel game, Honest Goof Gomez and Junky Joe, the Stringer of the International Universal World Press, Funny Faces Incorporated, the Corporate Person Doctrine and Three Engineering Companies cluster, Basic Ape and Basic Person and Zombie Plant and walking-talking plants, Anthropino Haima vs. Kaoutsouk Haima, the Four Wine Cups / Monkey Wine paradigm, the Confession Compulsion and Murder-Will-Out Machines, the Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit, the Mokka-Chokka Post-Coffee Paradigm, the Trouble-Dissolver, Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup, the Mexican Standoff resolution doctrine, the Big Star Weed Rider, the rabbit-front-feet grift, the gift-shop Second Sight helmet, the body-switch sleight-of-body, the Wax Museum first murder, the three wives' confession, Professor Austro, the polyander full absence, and Sheen's lowest-ever 1× offstage status are absent from GT. The novel adds the dense Edith O'Melody childhood-prettiness register that grounds the cycle's largest first-name overlap, the Hiram John Kratest Fundamental Hardtack preacher figure that anchors the cycle's first surname doubling, the Helen / Ellen Anagram detective-fiction framework that the cycle's commercial agency leverages, and the wax-and-clay-mixed wax-museum doctrine that the Lane's adjacent Clay-Eaters and Wax Museum extend. "Slippery" (6 June 1976) "Slippery" opens after a 374-day gap from FFM—the cycle's longest story-to-story gap, pausing through the rest of 1975 before the 1976 resumption—as a 3,519-word single continuous narrative across three implicit movements (workshop demonstration, town-wide chaos with Sheen's midnight arrival and the General's breakfast interrogation, and the Africa cutaway with empathic-web revelation and closing three-cartwheel cascade), with the Big Star Detective Agency dropped, the polyander cohort and Mary Mondo absent, Barnaby Sheen RESTORED to active in-person presence after two-story attenuation (TFNN's 0× and FFM's 1× offstage), Austro at cycle-second-highest 69×, the twelve-year-old anchor restored across a line break with the cycle's first aging-extension ("going on thirteen"), Australopithecines deployed in plural-form for the first time, and Carrock at 0× again after FFM's 1× return, restoring the AATSF–TFNN 0× pattern, and tells how Austro announces in his workshop the invention of a super-glycerine mist combined with species-juice—"the slickest thing in the world"—and demonstrates the friction-abolishing effect on Roy Mega, whose own patented no-slip shoes fly out from under him as he turns three complete cartwheels with "Damn your monkey-face, Austro!" The slippery-gip mist spreads town-wide; Barnaby Sheen arrives at the midnight workshop claiming the Sheen Immunity ("Because I'm Smarter Than You Are"); General Gamaliel and Doctor Halefellow interrogate over breakfast and the locator tracks backwards; the Africa cutaway brings the plane-mounted lab racing nine thousand miles in less than an hour to the Guna Slopes (cycle's first explicit identification of the Australopithecine homeland and cycle's first African-action setting), the empathic-web revelation that all ninety-nine Australopithecines are connected (the ninety-eight on the slopes physically pratfalling from the targeted spray while Austro in T Town feels their distress as visions), Austro's cosmic-threat doctrines (cortex-cerebellum friction, mantle-of-the-world strata-sliding), the laying-on-of-hands "Bishop" protocol for species-juice immunity transfer, the cycle-fictional Rocky McCrocky comic-strip character Monkey-Face Muldoon, Oliver Clatter, Austro's pivot to Super-Slick Industries (the blackmail-to-blue-sky-promotion commercial vehicle for slippery-gip stock), and the closing three-cartwheel cascade in ascending odd-number sequence (11 from the Major's deliberate spray after Austro learns his lesson / 15 attributed by Gamaliel to a "carry-over effect" after the Super-Slick stock pitch / 17 attributed by Sheen deadpan to "a little bit of the stuff left in the sprayer" after Austro's get-rich-quick extension). GT has the cycle's largest novel-side character anchor across one hundred seventy-four pages of Sheen (Barnaby Sheen at ninety-four of those pages as the novel's eponymous central figure); concentrates the cycle's most condensed cycle/novel character-cluster in a ten-page band where Austro's entire novel-side identity overlaps—species (Australopithecus), age (twelve-year-old), homeland (Guna Slopes), nickname (monkey-face), and standing exclamative (Carrock)—with one five-element master page and one five-element Carrock-anchor page; supplies the slip / slid / slick combined pattern across forty-four pages that the cycle's slippery-gip extends; develops General across forty pages and Doctor across twenty-nine; supplies Bishop across fourteen pages (Bishop Kelly back in Oklahoma, Bishop's Kansas City Waffle House) that the cycle's "The Bishop" laying-on-of-hands ecclesiastical naming extends as performative-functional rather than ordained; develops Africa across twenty pages of historical-mission context that the cycle activates as action-locus; anchors friction in the relational-tension sense ("invisible frictions between Francis and herself") that the cycle extends to physical-scientific; anchors glycerine at the crocodile "crying glycerine, not tears"; anchors patent at the Cork gentleman drawing up patents of nobility and gentry; and anchors "world is coming" at "our world is coming to an end, or at least to a great diminishing." The "Slippery" title, slippery-gip and its super-glycerine + species-juice composition, the empathic web and the ninety-eight slope pratfalls plus Austro's visionary participation, the cortex-cerebellum friction and mantle-of-the-world strata-sliding cosmic-threat doctrines, Austro's Super-Slick Industries blackmail-to-blue-sky pivot, Monkey-Face Muldoon, Oliver Clatter (cycle-internal only, with no novel-side overlap—the GT Clatter matches all belong to the unrelated Clatterback family), General Gamaliel and Doctor Halefellow, the plane-mounted lab racing to the Guna Slopes, the locator-tracking-backwards revelation, the Sheen Immunity, the "going on thirteen" aging-extension, the Australopithecines plural-form deployment, the laying-on-of-hands "Bishop" protocol, and the three-cartwheel sprayer-residue cascade are absent from GT. The novel adds the pervasive eponymous Sheen biography, the relational-tension friction register, the crocodile-tears glycerine joke, the Cork patents-of-nobility framework, the Bishop Kelly/Bishop's Kansas City Waffle House historical-clerical Bishop register, and the "great diminishing" world-ending doctrine. "Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence" "Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence" is narrated by Laff, and tells how on Halloween night 1924 Anselm Sheen—the cycle's first father-Sheen character—takes his son Barnaby plus three other ten-year-olds (Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk, and Laff) out to Electric Park in his Overland touring car for the last and highest-stake night of the dog-racing season at the old track south of Tulsa between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River (palmy days 1920 to 1928, grandstands seating eight thousand until the 1925 east-side collapse). The boys encounter Captain John Diehard (the cycle's title figure under triple naming, with patronymic dog, ghost-dog scriptural appearance, mantic bones, the Resurrection Reveille bugle, Royal Hanover Brandy, ankle-bone dice, Confederate dollar-bill chromatic-decay, the ten-thousand-skeleton resurrection vision, and the Roan Rex horse resurrection), Amos Centenary Black, Dirty Dugan and his unfulfilled future-trick promise (the cycle's first unfulfilled-future-debt structure, deferred at one week, one year, or five years), the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle armament tradition (Coopertown Coppersleeve, Leadbelly's Lead Mold, 95-percent-lead silver-bullet, white-powder injunction), Yves Denis Montalba's 1850 steam-rabbit history, the Devil's Handshake Dune, the dead-man initiation and dice game, the lightning sign and the Gray Ghost's appearance, and the singing ride home—the closing four-mile-distant Resurrection Reveille bugle still audible after the boys return to the Sheen residence. 1924 established as the cycle's temporal floor. GT supplies the cycle's deepest cycle/novel SHARED character integration to date in Anselm Sheen at twenty-seven pages (twenty full-name + seven partial-Anselm forms, exceeding TFNN's Mary Mondo at ten and Violet Lonsdale at sixteen)—anchoring Anselm Bernard Sheen as the father of "young Berny Sheen (whom Monica MacLish was sweet on and liked to call Barnaby)" who started an electronics factory, his marriage to Adriana Tyrone, his romantic-suitor competition with Joe O'Bogue who "built 'Electric Park' which was the name of the old dog track in Tulsa," his well-invested status via daughter-in-law Monica MacLish's Pitchblende-distribution channeling, his "funniest looking man" identification, the Old Sheen House / Young Sheen House residential configuration, and his terminal-disease late life—and supplies the cycle's largest thematic anchor at father across one hundred eighty pages of dual biological / priestly substrate; develops the Sheen biography across one hundred seventy-four pages, Tulsa across one hundred ten, Barnaby across ninety-four, remember across one hundred four (the cycle's reminiscence-frame substrate), ghost across eighty-one, Indian across fifty-seven (the Amos Centenary Black heritage substrate), and South across forty-seven (the Confederate substrate); and supplies single-page anchors for Electric Park and dog race (overlapping at one page), Halloween (the Monica Hall gymnasium dance), 1924 (the Crucifixion School schoolyard context), 1925, and reminiscence. The "Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence" title, Captain John Diehard and his entire cluster, Amos Centenary Black, Dirty Dugan (cycle-internal only, with no novel-side overlap—the novel's "Dugan" matches all belong to Brother Clarence Dugan, matching SLIP's Clatter / Clatterbach configuration), Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk, the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle and its silver-bullet apparatus, Yves Denis Montalba's 1850 steam-rabbit history, the Devil's Handshake Dune, Dirty Dugan's deferred future-trick promise, Anselm's tickets-or-burial-grounds choice, the Overland touring car, the dead-man initiation and dice game, the closing four-mile-distant Resurrection Reveille bugle, the named narrator "Laff" first-person reminiscence frame, and the cycle's late-cohort total absence by 1924-anachronism are absent from GT. The novel adds the dense twenty-seven-page Anselm Sheen biography, Joe O'Bogue as Adriana's rival suitor (with Anselm Sheen) who built Electric Park, the cycle's largest thematic anchor at father in dual biological-and-priestly register, and Monica MacLish's "called Barnaby" naming that explains the cycle's standing Barnaby nickname for Bernard Sheen.

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth.— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh." — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose [Advanced Lafferty. What follows supplements my earlier post on the Laughing Christ and what Lafferty does with it in East of Laughter. The argument, in brief, is that East of Laughter rejects three accounts of Christ’s laughter: the tradition that Christ never laughed; Chesterton’s compromise, in which Christ’s laughter exists but is hidden from human eyes; and the Gnostic Laughing Christ, whose laughter despises the flesh. In their place, the novel projects a new future in which there may be a public, sacramental, yet comic Christ. Laughter becomes an epistemic and spiritual check against demiurgic fraud, its warrant drawn from antecedent sources: Gospel wit, medieval feast, Erasmian and Rabelaisian holy folly, and the end-of-the-world comedy Lafferty specializes in.] There are two Apocalypses of Peter. The first, and by far the better known, had a long influence on Western thought and art. It is usually called simply The Apocalypse of Peter. It makes for gristly reading. A typical passage: And again behold two women: they hang them up by their neck and by their hair; they shall cast them into the pit. These are those who plaited their hair, not to make themselves beautiful but to turn them to fornication, that they might ensnare the souls of men to perdition. And the men who lay with them in fornication shall be hung by their loins in that place of fire; and they shall say one to another, "We did not know that we should come to everlasting punishment." This is the kind of pelvic theology Pope Francis abhored. The document was accepted by some early Christians, and most of it is in this intensely imagined brimstone vein, a chastening vision of Hell that Christ gives to St. Peter. It is the earliest known depiction of the Hell thumped from countless pulpits in the Christian tradition, to inspire imperfect contrition with fear of punishments that reflect the nature of the sins punished. This pattern later flowers into art in Dante’s Divine Comedy. My favorite instance of this in Dante’s work can be found in what happens to the fortune tellers in Inferno. They have their heads twisted backwards and stumble, with tears running down their bare backs and between the cleft of their ass cheeks. Grimly comic stuff. There is not one iota of humor in the famous Apocalypse of Peter. There is torture as punishment. The other Apocalypse of Peter is called the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. It was discovered at Nag Hammadi and is gnostic. Very different, it is an apocalypse purporting to show the evil of materiality and the knitted body. Its most astonishing moment arrives when Peter sees the agonized flesh of Christ nailed to the cross. At the same moment, Peter is shown the Laughing Christ above the cross, who mocks those who crucify his body. Though the body and spirit of Christ had previously been united in Jesus Christ, they are separated begire the crucifixion: the man Jesus is a patsy who undergoes the Passion, while the real Christ spiritually laughs from above the cross at the tortured body. It confuses poor St. Peter: When he had said those things, I saw him apparently being seized by them. And I said, "What am I seeing, O Lord? Is it you yourself whom they take? . . . . Who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing? And is it another person whose feet and hands they are hammering?" Quite a schizo-gash. As I noted in the last post, Chapter 4 of East of Laughter really sets the plot in motion after cranking the novel hard like a truculent Model T for three chapters. It also brings the Laughing Christ into view, setting up Chapter 7 and others, and gives us Lafferty’s term of art for demiurgic deception (“Snuffles” and others): Demiourgikos Pneuma Apatelos. Counter to it is the spirit of creative truth, what we can call Pneuma Demiourgikēs Alētheias. The reader East of Laughter must move between these two spirits, embattled, learning to discern fraud from truth. That is easier said than done, but we do have Mary Brandy Manx to help us. One related puzzle is how to distinguish the several Laughing Christs handed down by tradition; how to situate them within, and sometimes against, the proto-orthodox and orthodox tradition for which any artistic image of Christ laughing at the life affair might be theologically scandalous. I will not try to settle here exactly where Lafferty comes down on the matter, not least because the novel keeps that question somewhat unclear, though I’ll hammer out a position in my wrap-up on the book. Still, the direction of East of Laughter seems plain enough. It rejects two inherited accounts of Christ’s laughter. The first is the hidebound orthodox tradition, found in the patristic period and throughout the Middle Ages, that Christ never laughed, a view made notorious for modern readers by Umberto Eco’s brilliant international bestsellerThe Name of the Rose. The second is Chesterton’s gentler version: that Christ’s laughter existed, but remained hidden from the eyes of men for the reason of scandal. Suffering for us, and Christ’s suffering, makes Christ’s laughter intellectually discordant. Most people in hospice wouldn’t be comforted by such an image. It jars against the reality of pancreatic cancer, murder, and crib death. The world Lafferty imagines after the end of the world that had been scripted by Atrox and the other Giants differs from both of the takes. For the giants chosen from the Group of Twelve, the laughter of Chris will not be buried. Yet world merely has to mature into a fully comic vision. Hence, East of Laughter. We can start putting it together, I think, like this: The vertical line that runs down the middle is obviously the time axis. The dates are set into it: first century AD; second–third centuries; fourth–sixth centuries; thirteenth–fifteenth centuries; sixteenth–seventeenth centuries; 1908; twentieth century. Behind the line is a band running the full height of the chart, with the rotated label “buried—in the ground of Italy, and in the mind.” This is the zone of Atrox and Denis, our forgers of fraud and truth, and the underground location of the buried Laughing Christ in Lecco. The band stands for the Laughing Christ, present but subterranean throughout history, mostly safely out of sight. People do not want to see the laughing face of Christ, and it perhaps wise to recall that Atrox says Christ told Atrox to bury him, as if the issue of potential scandal were prudent to defer to in Pauline fashion. The fullness of time for Christ’s laughter had not arrived. Maybe it won’t ever arrive. Is Denis’s act of making premature? The Lafferty gamble is that it isn’t, and it can be faced. The old structure is dying or dead as the Timbuktu giant. The right and left columns function like seismographs, registering the subterranean laughter that breaks the surface in Rabelais and returns, at last visible, in Lafferty. Rabelais could be funny about the sacred; he could not depict Christ himself laughing. In the eyes of the sixteenth-century Church, that would have looked like unambiguous blasphemy. Now, the left column, point by point, starting from the beginning. Luke 6:21. The locus classicus. Jesus says that those who weep now will laugh later. The point is that, in the Gospel, laughter is promised for heaven, while weeping belongs to the Christian task in this life. Laughter is deferred to the afterlife. That is certainly how the patristic period largely understood it. Clement of Alexandria. Clement, an early Church teacher, says in the Paidagogos that Christians should barely smile and should keep laughter under discipline. The point: laughter must be restrained. John Chrysostom and the ascetics. Chrysostom, the famous bishop, was the first to say, or at least the first to say in a form that survives in the textual record, that Jesus never laughed. The Desert Fathers, the monastic rules, and the “weeping virgins” made the avoidance of laughter part of religious self-denial. The point: by this stage, laughter is pushed almost entirely out of holy life. Aquinas and the medieval feasts. In the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, laughter returns. Father Kirkpatrick (Father Irish Chuch) in East of Laughter says the 13th was the holiest of centuries. Aquinas treats good humor as a virtue; the old term is eutrapelia, something I have written about elsewhere on the blog. The risus paschalis was Easter laughter raised in church. The Feast of Fools and Corpus Christi produced feast-day revels and plays centered on the body of Christ. The point: laughter comes back into the Christian tradition, attached to the body, the feast, and the sacraments. The Reformation. In much Reformation thought, the Eucharist was treated less as Christ’s bodily presence than as a sign, and laughter was reduced to controlled and cerebral forms: wit, irony, satire. That simplifies the matter, but it gives the general shape. The point: laughter is pushed out of worship again and moved into the head. Christian humor is wintry. Chesterton, 1908. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton calls joy the Christian’s deepest secret and suggests that Christ kept his mirth hidden. The point: an orthodox writer recovers the idea of a joyful Christ, but leaves that laughter unseen. The note “a glimpse, not a surfacing” serves to distinguish Chesterton's figuration of Christ from Lafferty's. Chesterton refuses to bring the laughing Christ fully into the open, so the Laughing Christ is both Lafferty's continuation of Chesterton but his response to the end of the world that he thought Chesterton inhabited. It was past time for the laughter to be heard. Here I want to pause. The New Testament never says that Jesus laughed; it records him weeping, not laughing (John 11:35; Luke 19:41), which is why John Chrysostom and others concluded that Jesus Christ never laughed at all. What the Gospels do show is Christ’s humor, almost all of it verbal. There is irony, exaggeration, wordplay, mockery, nicknaming, and comic image. Much of it is hyperbole pressed to absurdity: the camel squeezing through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:24), an image Lafferty always loved, which orients Not to Mention Camels and reappears in East of Laughter as the incorrigible camel nosing into every tent, which is finally the spirit of the real Riant Giant, Lafferty’s Lord. There is the man fussing over a speck in his neighbor’s eye while a plank juts from his own (Matt. 7:3–5), the Pharisees straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:24), which Lafferty wrote a poem about, the lamp lit only to be hidden under a bed, and the slapstick of the blind leading the blind into a pit. Christ also likes puns and names. Simon is renamed Peter, “rock,” in the play on petros and petra (Matt. 16:18); James and John are dubbed Boanerges, “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17); Nathanael is greeted as an Israelite “in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47), a joke that could get someone in trouble with the ADL. Then there is what critics have pointed out: the pervasive diasyrm. The religious authorities are “whitewashed tombs” and “blind guides” (Matt. 23:24, 27), and Herod is “that fox” (Luke 13:32), all passages that Lafferty draws on in his own work, as we see in stories such as “Thou Whited Wall” and “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire.” Christ’s wit appears in argument as well. He turns hostile questions back on his questioners, first over John’s baptism (Mark 11:27–33), then over the coin owed to Caesar (Mark 12:17). He trades wit with the Syrophoenician woman in the exchange about the children’s bread and the dogs’ crumbs (Mark 7:27–28). The parables are full of humor. The point is simple: Lafferty thought this humorous part of the tradition needed to be brought forward, and so he brought it forward in his own work. It is funny, and it can look cruel, but Atrox literally means cruel in Latin. Christ as clown. In the twentieth century, theologians such as Harvey Cox took all this and imagined Christ as a clown, while Hugo Rahner, Karl Rahner’s Jesuit brother, wrote of God at play, Deus ludens. I think Lafferty would have rejected the first view and qualified the second. Even so, the point is clear: laughter is reinfected into religion in the period when Lafferty is writing his fiction, but mainly as play and, against Lafferty's own sensibility, as humanistic therapy. Now to the other side of the diagram. The Sethian milieu, first century. Early Gnostic groups held that spirit is good, matter is corrupt or imprisoning, and the true God is hidden above the flawed maker of the world. Lafferty seems to have been more interested in Valentinian Gnosticism than in Sethian Gnosticism as a source for fictional inspiration, but the Laughing Christ of the Gnostic tradition is a Sethian image. The point: Gnostic religion despises the physical world. The laughter of the Gnostic Laughing Christ is not earthy in the least. In fact, the Gnostic Christ that laughs hates the flesh and laughs down spiritual folly. The Gnostic texts, second–third centuries. In these writings, Jesus keeps laughing. In the Apocalypse of Peter, as I mentioned, the "real" Christ laughs while only his physical body is nailed to the cross. In the Hypostasis of the Archons, the spiritual Eve laughs; the Old Testament creator-god Ialdabaoth is mocked; and gnosis, saving knowledge, is figured as derisive, mirthless, recognitive laughter, the “ha-ha” meant to be gnosis's “A-ha! You goddamned idiots.” The point is that there is a Laughing Christ here, but one that laughs unsacramentally. Condemnation and silence, fourth–sixth centuries. The Church condemned Gnosticism as heresy, and its books disappeared from public view. The dashed line down the Gnostic side, labeled “tradition silenced,” marks the long span in which this strand leaves little record until it is recovered in the 20th century. Nag Hammadi, 1945. A buried library of Gnostic texts was discovered in Egypt, and the Gnostic Laughing Christ is read again. The point: the suppressed tradition resurfaces by accident in the twentieth century. Lafferty will know both Chesterton’s version of the Laughing Christ, who laughs alone far from the eyes of men, and the Gnostic Christ, who reveals his laughter to certain enlightened men. Lafferty will make the laughter open through many Gnostic comedies. The dotted ties. Two faint links run from the central band to the Chesterton entry and to the early Gnostic entry. They mark the two moments in which each tradition catches sight of the buried figure. First surfacing: Erasmus and Rabelais, c. 1500–1553. This box sits on the central band between the Reformation and Chesterton. It marks the first clear emergence of the buried laughter. The placement also fits Lafferty’s own work: in Past Master, he sends a Renaissance humanist into the future; in Fourth Mansions, he gives us his most Erasmian holy fool, Freddy Foley; and in East of Laughter, he writes his most Rabelaisian comedy about affirming life through gargantuan appetite. Erasmus found the laughter of Jesus in the Gospels as irony and sacred mockery; the rhetorical term is diasyrm. He revived the idea of holy folly: Paul’s “foolishness of God,” and the Silenus, the image of something ugly on the outside but precious within. He also made Lucian, the pagan satirist, usable for Christians. Rabelais turned this recovery into open comedy in defense of the faith, condemning the agelastes, those who never laugh. The point: the Christian humanists bring the hidden laughter of the Laughing Christ into the open. Lafferty in the book will bring him squarely into view. And, as always in East of Laughter, the question is, what does forgery as making mean in a Christian cosmos?

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdom, Vogelsprachekund . . . wie Salomo: bird-language-wise, like Solomon. The phrase has little to do with ornithology but much to do with a Romantic and folkloric belief that children, sages, and mythic figures can still hear meaning in the sounds of nature. That is one place to find the Romanticist in Lafferty. A contemporary 1866 essay on “Die Vogelsprache” used Rückert’s lines as its motto and explained the broader idea as the translation of birdsong into human speech. For Lafferty, the phrase carried the music of sacramentality. It also surfaces allusively in Not to Mention Camels. Who was Friedrich Rückert? He was a German poet, translator, and scholar, born in 1788 in Schweinfurt, Bavaria. He studied languages and literature, became known for patriotic poems during the Napoleonic Wars, and later won fame for his knowledge of Eastern languages, including Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. Much of his poetry turns on love, childhood, nature, grief, and spiritual wisdom, often blending German Romantic feeling with forms and ideas from Asian and Middle Eastern literature. Rückert taught Oriental languages at Erlangen and Berlin, and his translations helped introduce German readers to non-European poetry. He died in 1866, leaving behind a vast body of poems, translations, and scholarly writings. English readers have mostly forgotten him. Lafferty's translation.

“It almost seems that we are no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing,” Gorgonius hazarded. “It’s an idea that I try to chase away by throwing rocks at it, and it squawks and flies right back to me.” “It is more likely that we are all no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that God is writing,” Mary Brandy said, “and perhaps Atrox and some of his friends are permitted to write a phrase or two in it now and then.” With Chapter Four, “Monday at Sora,” the setup chapters are behind us, and the action begins. The Group of Twelve holds a private video-world-conference, which inadvertently sets off a global panic (the etymology of panic is significant) when eavesdropping observers take its discussion of the “Tests of Atrox Fabulinus” as proof that the world is a dream. To evade the Panic Marshals, the authorities charged with suppressing panic, the Group ends the broadcast and agrees to meet in person. By rapid modern transportation, they converge on the hidden Italian villa of Leo and Perpetua Parisi, near Sora, where a lavish and eccentric feast has been prepared for the midnight gathering: roasted bear stuffed with trout and eels. During the feast, a warning arrives. Local residents tell them to appease Atrox Fabulinus by setting out a plate and giving him utensils fit for a Giant, including a wine glass that holds six gallons and a funnel through which he can swallow eels. Sure enough, an ethereal outline of Atrox appears at the table, bolts down the food, and converses with the Group. Some of the characters, including Denis Lollardy and Solomon Izzersted, debate whether Atrox is a genuine supernatural entity, a manifestation of creative fraud, or an illusion cast by someone in the Group. Before vanishing, Atrox warns them about mockery, which leads Mary Brandy Manx to conclude that the illusion was at least partly a hoax perpetrated by Jane Chantal Ardri. As the night goes on, the Group debates the sensation that their world, down to its atomic structures, is fundamentally unreal. They compare their existence to characters in a sprawling novel whose details have been poorly filled in. Then they begin exploring the villa’s vast, catacomb-like reference library, which miraculously manifests any desired work or wine. It also houses bodies, some decayed and some perfectly preserved. Seeing the need for advice, Hieronymous Talking-Crow awakens the spirit of Alexander the Great and speaks with him. Alexander offers a brief disquisition on the historical existence of “unreal” lands and dismisses Atrox Fabulinus as prolific but untalented, powerful but temperamental. Throughout the chapter, Jane Chantal feels that something murderous is afoot. The Group also receives dire warnings from two local villagers, both tied to the Kabouter, Siog, and Little People material. They say that Atrox is furious, that there will be violent murder, and that an earthquake will bury the villa. Leo Parisi dismisses these predictions as the baseless superstitions of magical, non-human beings. The chapter ends deep in the night, with Jane Chantal Ardri isolated in a dark room and screaming in apparent terror, a reaction Mary Brandy Manx recognizes as a famous musical scene. Lafferty writes: Then Jane Chantal began to scream in a way that would move the very stones to compassion. Several of the party rose to go to her, but Mary Brandy Manx laughed. “Oh, don’t you recognize it? It is the wonderful screaming scene in Ludendorf’s End of the World Agony. Listen, her screaming tumbles over four full octaves. What an artist Jane Chantal is!” Where should one begin with Chapter Four? Perhaps with Mary Brandy Manx, the oldest member of the Group of Twelve. We have already learned that she is sixty, but that she still swims out over the Spanish Depths. There she submerges herself and hangs her linen-and-wool balloon dress on a knob of rock five fathoms down. At once, she becomes a sixteen-year-old sea goddess. When she goes ballooning more than a mile above the earth, she removes the same dress and weighs it down in the wicker gondola with five sandbags, lest it fill with air and sail away. Then she becomes a sixteen-year-old low-sky goddess. Lafferty describes the metamorphosis in the previous chapter: And whenever Mary Brandy went higher than a mile in her balloon, she took off her balloon dress, put it in the bottom of the wicker gondola, and put five sand-bag ballasts on it (less than five wouldn’t do it, for it loved to fill itself with air and sail independently of Mary Brandy), and thus Mary Brandy would become a low-sky goddess, and they also are always exactly sixteen years old. Throughout the novel, Mary Brandy Manx is worth watching closely. She is one of the sharpest observers of what is happening, and Lafferty clearly cares for her. At times, she speaks for him. Later in the novel, when the Illacrove Giant says that she is the only one who can replace him, Mary Brandy agrees. Of the seven named Giants in the novel—Atrox Fabulinus, Der Alpenriese, the Hsiang Giant, the Sanrio Giant, the Timbuktu Giant, the El-Khatar Giant, and the Illacrove Giant—the Illacrove Giant is the most mysterious, at least in name. What could Illacrove mean? Look it up, and one finds nothing in the usual sources. But the name can be worked out, and it connects to Mary Brandy Manx’s unique relation to what I have been calling the verticality of the novel’s imaginary cosmos. Mary Brandy speaks a variety of Gaelic, we are told, which ties her to the Irish world. Crove is a locality in County Donegal, and the word in Lafferty probably comes from the Gaelic craobh, pronounced “kroov,” meaning tree or grove. Illa is Catalan for “island.” So Illacrove means something like “tree island” or “grove island.” Mary Brandy Manx is herself tied to Catalan through the place where she becomes a sea goddess in the Spanish Depths. The first climax of the novel will take place in the chapter centered on her location, and she is, I think, clearly a figure into whom Lafferty places some of his own wisdom. Several other points are worth noting. In the first appearance of Atrox Fabulinus, we see a version of the novel’s ending: a (half) forged projection. We also learn about the competing histories of the Laughing Christ, with disagreement over whether it was buried for 1,500 years or forged and buried for 15 days. That difference anticipates the time ratios that become important at the end of the novel, in the ninth day of the week, when its minutes stand in a strange relation to ordinary hours. We see that Solomon Izzersted is already anticipating how he can be separated from John Barkley Towntower. Prince Leonardo comes from the “Exterior Darkness,” the outer darkness mentioned three times in Matthew. There is also an allusion to Atrox as the least of the Giants in some meaningful sense, which recalls Matthew 25:40. Hanging over the entire chapter is the puzzle that eighty percent of the world’s people are solid and apparently not dreaming. Mary Brandy Manx adds an important qualification to this, and it sounds very much like Lafferty himself. When the public reaction to the video-world-conference is discussed, the distinction between the masses and the elite Twelve is made clear: Strangely, strangely, the wide-awakes amounted to eighty percent of the audience. They did not panic, they were not impressed, they lost interest and left the conference. But quality sampling showed that the wide-awakers were those of inferior minds. “They are the canaille, they are the lumpenproletariat,” said Jane Chantal Ardri. “But try to get along without them,” said Mary Brandy Manx the Mayor of Port Saint Mary. “They are the solid ones. We rarified ones are those filled with air.” On this point, the Sheryl Smith–Lafferty correspondence is interesting. Smith once argued that art is not meant to be didactic, and that only a small minority of people possess the emotional capacity to experience real tragedy. This seems close to the view held by most of the Group of Twelve, especially Jane Chantal, who has praised herself as a wonderful artist from Chapter 1 and will be the first of the Twelve to die. Lafferty rejected Smith’s position by countering that science fiction, of all genres, is inherently a literature of ideas, a form designed to convey concepts. From elsewhere in the nonfiction, we know that Lafferty thought that science fiction, when done well, was just Story with a capital "S," so didacticism can be taken transitively as something that, when done well, does not damage but enhances all story art. And on human emotion, the capacity for it, he told Smith, has the matter upside down. Drawing on one of his private-vocabulary words, he speaks of the fellahin, whom he here defines as the ninety-seven percent of common humanity. They, he argues, possess the full emotional range and experience true tragedy in their daily lives. It is the weightless “elite” who lack authentic feeling. They need the “toy tragedy” of theatrical drama and opera as a substitute for real encounter. We might say that they need Gorgonius Pantera's Piano Castle to feel tragedy. It is a short step from this to what the airy Twelve. Mary Brandy Manx has taken the Lafferty position. And I would add that the final home of the Laughing Christ in the novel, once it is removed from Lecco, is to be found at that seat of art, Piano Castle in the Alps. There are no doubt many ways to read the chapter, but I find it especially interesting as a metafictional reflection on Lafferty’s approach to character. His characters are often called one-dimensional, though that description is misleading. They are one-dimensional because he uses them to open onto other dimensions. That is why I think of them as closer to classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern types than to characters in the novelistic sense. If, for Lafferty, the novel had reached its end with the unstructuring of the world, then much of the older novelistic machinery had presumably reached its end as well: above all, the machinery that gave characters rich interiorities corresponding to the structured societies in which they lived. In “Monday at Sora,” thinness of character becomes the subject of the Group’s own anxiety, as though characters judged by a novelistic standard of realism looked at themselves and wondered why they had been sketched by Rabelais rather than Flaubert. This appears in their suspicion that they are “no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing.” The dread comes from their sense of insufficient detail. Solomon Izzersted and John Barkley Towntower feel that they are living in “somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea” of the United States. The joke is that Atrox, having died fifteen hundred or so years ago, would have had to imagine the place. As Hieronymous Talking-Crow suggests, this explains the problem. Atrox never visited places like Oklahoma, so he represents his American characters as “sketchy and silly,” lacking the richness he gives to his beloved Italy. Hieronymous laments this geographic disparity in the Giant’s imagination “He has a centuries old love for Italy and all its little towns. But he had never even been in beautiful Down-Town Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and he represents us as sketchy and silly. Oh, that’s only a subjective feeling, of course. How would a fabulous giant really have anything to do with it?” On the metafictional plane, Lafferty is also commenting on the conversion of Rome and on the European historical imagination he found in writers such as Belloc. Something similar happens with Prince Leonardo the Great. Hilary Ardri observes that Leonardo appears to be a “sketchy and imperfect idea” of a panther, perhaps made by an author who has not seen a great cat in fifteen hundred years. Leonardo agrees. The joke is the old one about lions and other great cats in medieval manuscripts: creatures drawn by artists who knew the name, the tradition, and the symbolic value, but not the animal itself. The Twelve’s intuition that they are poorly drafted fictions is later confirmed by the spirit of Alexander the Great. Alexander says that Atrox has a “second class” mind and entirely “lacks the talent for creating characters,” leaving his creatures to feel like nothing more than a poorly realized, “grubby lot.” The resurrected Alexander delivers this verdict on Atrox’s artistic powers: “He has a very great bulk of things in his head, and he pours it out indiscriminately onto vellum or parchment. But he has no talent at all, though he reckons himself as one of the giants of literature. In particular, he lacks the talent for creating characters. Oh, his folks are a grubby lot! He has staying power, but that’s all. His mind is altogether second class.” How can one not read this as Lafferty joking about his own thousands of characters? In a healthy novelistic world, and in a structured world that supports novel writing, Alexander’s verdict would be damning. But Lafferty thinks that world is gone. If there are to be new characters for a new world, the old machinery of the novelist will have to change. The ghost of Alexander the Great offers good advice on this point: “I was listening to some of you talking before you opened my stone box. You worried about the detailed unreality of small units. But it is in these smallest units that these unrealities begin, and then they spread to the larger units. One adage for you then: reality is not something that one has the right and title to. It is something that must be earned. And I never spent much time in unreal lands. If you conquer one such land, what have you conquered? And if you die there of the unreality disease, you are really dead.”

But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn’t yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed andreveled and studied. They learned that a quest for reality is possible. Chapter 1 of East of Laughter begins with a quiet explosion: the quotation from the Alpine giant explaining that reality is sustained by twenty-one “Pillars,” which sets up the novel’s exigency of replacing the Scribbling Giants, those life-weary, often melancholy, and often blood-hungry writers of the world’s history. They somehow write our being, and they can be wantonly destructive. It then introduces two vividly imagined primary characters, Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri, members of the Group of Twelve. Hilary will be far less important to the ensuing narrative than Jane Chantal, but both are selected for a mysterious global service through the Concerned Circus, along with the rest of the cohort of twelve plus three. Using tests devised by the giant Atrox Fabulinus, tests collectively called the web of validity, Hilary and Jane Chantal realize that their world is unreal. What is one to do about that? Let’s begin with the obvious. This first chapter breaks a sound rule for selling fiction that Lafferty had been given by his old editor, Frederik Pohl: begin a novel with action. No bang is too loud, so shake the earth by starting thunderously. It is how Lafferty readers got that firecracker Chapter 1 of Past Master. Instead of beginning with pyrotechnics, East of Laughter delays all plot-progressive action until the reader ruminates through its twelve sequentially numbered character vignettes. The expository material takes up Chapters 1-3. Only in Chapter 4 does a book that looks as if it could be become a conventional novel zing off. Of course it isn't a conventional novel. It is late Lafferty. I read chapters 1-3 as a moseying prologue to what follows, but also as a reorientation device for rereading. Lafferty lovingly places each of his twelve, plus three, onto the game board. He takes his sweet time. For readers not smitten with this cast, the road ahead will be long. As I mentioned above, Chapter 1 profiles the first three members of the Group. Hilary exploits the unreal physics of the unreal world to harvest nonexistent fish through a poltergeist-inhabited computer. It makes him rich. Jane Chantal, prolific artist and part-time huntress, delegates the labor of her pursuits (and even, it seems, artistic inspiration itself) to her own sprite-operated machine, raising the question of what it means to be an artist. Finally, there is the unforgettable parasitic pair of John Barkley Towntower and Solomon Izzersted. John is a human mathematician and ventriloquist whose body hosts Solomon, an aggressive, sentient belly growth, right on his navel. Solomon is an egomaniac and superior mathematical genius who dominates Towntower, even forcing John to adopt Solomon's name legally as the two develop “advocacy mathematics” and their ventriloquist act. Later, we learn Solomon is the son of Iofel, a trickster watcher who impregnates goyim with Jewish offspring. How he showed up on Towntower’s stomach flab is never really explained, but he may have been inadvertently baptized. In this first post on the chapters of East of Laughter, I want to pause here to say that there is no natural place to start with this unruly book. One could begin almost anywhere, provided one kept rereading. My preferred way of rereading it is out of order. In time, one owns the work, as readers always own a book they have internalized. One of my old profs was at Princeton in the early 1960s, and his prof (a monument man) drew two gingerbread man outlines on the board. Slowly, he filled in the small gingerbread man with things the students knew: saddle shoes, Playboy, Ann-Margret, etc. Then he filled in the big gingerbread man with things like Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Faulkner. Then he turned around and said in a venomous southern drawl, you here boys are that little gingerbread man; I’m the big gingerbread man. I like that anecdote because the aim is always to be the big gingerbread man if one thinks a work is important. His lesson I assume was that reading is about the enlargement of one’s inner world, making the gingerbread man bigger. I think East of Laughter is a book that wants to enlarge the reader. It is full of detail that will do it. Like any work with this kind of ambition, East of Laughter is also not a book meant to be read once. No one can internalize it in one reading. Too many events. Too much detail. Lafferty said this about all his novels, but it is especially true of this one. It is one of the ways that Lafferty, who snorted at academics and literary pretense, is literary and academic. That is bad news for the reader who wants to storm through it for cheap thrills, because a first reading is likely to yield only a series of brilliant set pieces, pieces of microfiction, and isolated wonders. When Gene Wolfe wrote his essay about it, he had many warm things to say about Lafferty, but one can see how measured he was in his praise of East of Laughter. He praised the man, not the book. I suspect he thought it was a wise dud of a book. In Chapter 1, the microfictions would include the computerized fish set piece, the hunting-horn computer set piece, and the Solomon Izzersted-Towntower shtick, a minor masterpiece. Almost everyone has the experience, on a first reading, that the East of Laughter gestalt is smaller than its microfictional parts. That is why I want to propose a way of reading it that will lead to a greater whole, because I think most people get the novel's figure-ground wrong. It is a double figure-ground relation. One recurring claim of this blog, following Lafferty himself, is that every Lafferty reader must assemble his own Lafferty. So with East of Laughter, I am just going to say how I read it, though that may not be how another reader wants to read it. Still, this is the double figure-ground reading that has made the novel rewarding for me. It requires a double act of reading. That understates its complexity, which is fractal, but it is what I see as being primary. On one level, inside the novel, one reads about a hierarchy of dream and reality, with dream as figure and reality as ground. Dream and unreality, at the level of narrated events, correspond to fiction at the meta-level: dream simply is the status of the fictional as fictional. Within the novel, questions keep arising because on the fictional plane the fictional does not seem fictional, just as the dream does not seem dream when dreamt, and just as the fictional segments of one’s own life feel real. These issues in the book concern what is real and what is unreal; where the real begins and ends; whether there is a delimitation; whether someone unreal can become real; when and how a forgery can surpass its original and so become, in some sense, more real than its original; whether to be real is to be perfected; and what ontological status belongs to forgeries that have no originals but the efficacies of the real. I don’t believe there is any answer to this inside the novel except through the Laughing Christ, who is both a Lafferty character and Lafferty’s God. Without this one is caught in a network of derealization. So, on my reading, the novel is meant to push one back to reality and its ultimate ground as an act of inspired writing. That reality is Atrox’s avowed most prized thing: Christological knowledge. For this reason, when I read East of Laughter, I read every word of it through a double act. I read it slowly as if Lafferty is imagining in real time, dredging from the Oceanic to intimate a shape that can only be filled out by logos. There is R. A. Lafferty writing his weird book, imagining his strange cast of characters, being surprised by what these eccentric, unreal people say, and making them probe their own ontological status. He pressures them hard, slipping his finger into the open wounds he himself slices into them. Hilary Ardri brings the primal logic into view at the jump: “Atrox Fabulinus, in a very curious new chapter The Web of Validity, givesone-hundred-and-one tests to determine whether one is dreaming or not,” HilaryArdri said to his wife Jane Chantal Ardri at breakfast one morning. “This may bea major new chapter from Atrox, but all of the recent ones seem to be major.” Lafferty can reach into the book, kill his characters, and bring them back to life. His hovering ghostly authorial hand will look like the hand of Atrox from the characters’ in-fiction perspective. Within the storyworld, they die by being impaled on the Giants’ enormous feather-quills. They bleed profusely. On the metafictional plane, Lafferty is killing them with his own pen as he scratches them into life and out of it. What is blood inside the novel is ink at the level of authorship. What is within the book is a plot problem becomes on the meta level a theory of fiction, authorship, and created beings. Again, the first chapter sets this up. Hilary Ardri’s computerized world can draw anything from the ambient, which is why he can pull nonexistent fish from Tenkiller Lake, a lake with no fish. Lafferty explains the mechanics of this unreal extraction: To take one example, the one that he did take, he learned that in an unreal world, the amount of fish that may be taken out of a lake has no connection withthe amount of fish in the lake. The amount of fish to be taken out is relatedonly to the amount of fish that the computer programs to be taken. It does not matter whether or not there are any fish at all in the lake. In an unreal world, the ambient is never restrictive. Tenkiller Lake, Oklahoma Why not restrictive? In part because this is what every creative writer does in drafting a story or novel: he begins with the unreal ambient of the blank page and brings things forth from it. Where there were no fish, there are fish. Contradictions may be intolerable in reality, but they do not break fiction. Tenkiller Lake can have no fish, and yet Hilary’s company can supply fish from Tenkiller Lake. Words make it so. This metaphysical awareness of writing lies near the center of the novel. The reader is invited to experience the work from Lafferty’s side, as if watching him make the book in a way unique to his canon. In Chapter Four, “Morning at Sora,” we discover that the characters are, in some way, even aware of their own unreality as literary fictions. They speak of their sketchiness and blame it on Atrox, but Atrox is himself a figure behind whom Lafferty stands. To read East of Laughter well, then, one must keep one eye on the authorial plane—Lafferty creating fictional worlds and testing his act of creation itself, talking to himself about it—and the other eye on the characters, who know they are fictions yet, by the law of the fiction, remain “somehow” real within their own plane, authored there by Atrox Fabulinus and the other Scribbling Giants. If you were told you were fiction and could prove it, you would be in their situation. This becomes relevant to a second theme established in Chapter 1: creations escape their makers if they are lively inventions. If the book requires a double act of reading, and if it enacts real authorship through Lafferty while staging his own fictional authorship through his surrogate Atrox and the other Giants, then much of the drama lies in watching created things run beyond the intention that made them. As I pointed out in my first post, the book has an Eden theme, and running ahead is what those people did. Atrox experiences this with his own creations, the Twelve plus Three, seven of whom will replace the old Giants. He is surprised when his characters do not act as he thinks they should, though he has authored them. At the level of real authorship, this same pattern helps explain some of the novel’s confusion. Lafferty presses his characters until they say things they could not have been expected to say, and until they surprise even him. When the characters are magically whisked from one location to another and complain about landing hard on a road in Ireland, the novel offers only a perfunctory in-world explanation: “ . . . we are two hours earlier than at Sora in Italy. And it was a slow and old, preter-historical really, shuttle that brought us here, not instantaneous likethe shuttles they have now. But I forget how long the trips take, that broughtus here and dropped us so rudely into the street. The street must be six orseven feet lower than it was twelve hundred years ago.” Part of the joke is surely that Lafferty, the real author of these unreal persons, has unceremoniously dropped them onto the streets of Ireland. Chapter One also establishes one of the novel’s major concerns: created persons getting ahead of their maker. After we meet Hilary Ardri and Jane Chantal Ardri, and after Lafferty gives us Jane’s parody of what it means to be an artist in an unreal world, we meet John Barkley Towntower and his belly-growth, Solomon Izzersted. We also learn about their advocacy mathematics and their ventriloquist act. The advocacy-mathematics material offers a mock-explanation for pulling fish out of the ambient in an unreal world, and so it links the two halves of the chapter: the two Ardris on one side, and the two-in-one Towntower/Izzersted on the other. In the account of Izzersted, we learn that Solomon usurps the very ground of his being, as it were, in the body of John Barkley Towntower: It was, in fact, the ventriloquist’s figure Solomon Izzersted (the stronger-willed of the two persons in the association) who compelled John Barkley Towntower legally to change his name to Solomon Izzersted, though permitting him to keep John Barkley Towntower as his stage name . . . Should the John Barkley Towntower name ever be used in any non-theatrical way, the bellyvoice (Solomon was the belly voice and person) would immediately begin that horrible screaming “My name is Solomon Izzersted! My name is Solomon Izzersted!” This is the novel’s first instance of a created figure refusing to stay in place, and it anticipates the ending, where Solomon Izzersted tries to usurp the headship of the Scribbling Giants. The comic horror of Solomon taking over John Towntower is an inset image of how the characters in the novel work as a whole. It is grotesque, certainly, but one can imagine Lafferty looking at his characters much as Towntower looks down at his own belly, where Solomon’s head shouts, “My name is Solomon Izzersted!” That image conflates the two levels of the double reading, but it also establishes the problem the novel keeps returning to: in such a world, where is the substratum of reality? That question will open, finally, onto larger questions about history, fiction within history, the World of Fact, and, after the World of Fact, the Quest for an Acceptable Metaphor. It will also lead into the philosophy of history. In the World of Fact, the law of the aggregate holds: the world is the sum of the facts, and there is one history of the world. Lafferty’s post-novel is an attempt to write about a world that is not like that. There are many pasts because the past underdetermines its transcription. What one needs, then, is not a tally of facts but the right metaphor. By the end of the book, if one doesn’t know the metaphor, has the Quest for Reality failed? Of all candidates for a world metaphor, it seems obvious to me what Lafferty proposes: the world is a forgery. Much more on this later. I’ll close by saying that East of Laughter should not be read only as a bedtime story, with the reader settling in and letting the world fall away. It is not a safe fantasy projected onto a screen, but one that pokes its author (self-dramatically and funnily) and the reader in the chest. If you are lucky enough to have a copy, let it light up your brain over and over. It should be a pantographic projection, one of its own metaphors, but also otherwise. One sees more if one reads every word as though Lafferty were calling nonexistent fish from the ambient of the white page, then interacting with what he trawled, getting himself into deeper and deeper fictional difficulty as he works toward the substratum that grounds his own reality, the Laughing Christ. One formula for this is that East of Laughter is a participating apocalypse of authorship and readership, an intimate prose experiment so coded that its intimacy can be elusive. Chapter 1 teaches the reader to read East of Laughter as a fiction of fictional beings discovering their own fictionality, while their author uses them to think toward the ground of reality, which the novel finally grounds Christologically. In other words, the characters in East of Laughter seek reality from inside the book; Lafferty seeks reality by writing the book; the reader participates by reading the book as a doubled transposition. A fuller appreciation of Prime is the aim. But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect ⟦something they half-trust is telling them this, and the hints are leaking in from outside their world from their real author, RAL⟧, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms ⟦some things are more real than others; the most real places are the ones drawn in full detail⟧. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn't yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed and reveled and studied ⟦near it, never at the center; the same "close but never touching" again⟧. They learned that a quest for reality is possible ⟦and it is possible. Not because they can reach the real from inside the story, but because Lafferty, who is real, is writing the quest from his side as he thinks through what reality is. The quest is his act of thought about Prime, and they are that thought given characters and names. So the seeking does reach the real, because it is happening in a real mind, even though the seekers never reach it themselves, being the things sought-with rather than the seeker. They are objectifications of his thinking about reality. The quest is real because the thinker is real, and they are what the thinking looks like from inside.⟧.

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel; it ridicules scholasticism, legalism, war, social pretension, and religious folly. Lafferty “critic talk” likes Bakhtin, but Bakhtin misses the conservative yet humanistic logic of carnival, and he enlists it as a “leftist” politicized desire for this-worldly political emancipation, as good as he might be on the battle within the body of head and what happens below the navel. In other words, his brilliant insight is subordinate to his take that, Stalin. Start with Book II, Gargantua, if you are new to it. 1907–1912 — The Catholic Encyclopedia. Herbermann, Charles G., Edward A. Pace, Conde B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne, eds. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907–1912. Multi-volume reference set. A major early-20th-century Catholic reference work, covering doctrine, church history, biography, theology, liturgy, institutions, and related fields. It contains more than 10,000 entries. Lafferty devoured it, and it shows up in his work everywhere. He rejected its interpretation of Rabelais (“As a whole [Rabelais] exercises a baneful influence”) but frequently drew on ideas such as occult compensation, and whenever writing about a location, he looked it up in here. Anyone who loves Lafferty should know its entries on Gnosticism and Origen. A treasure. 1931/1932 — The Bow in the Clouds. Watkin, Edward Ingram. The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience. London/New York: Sheed & Ward, 1931/1932. A philosophical and religious essay on integrating different dimensions of human experience—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual—within a Catholic framework. It is impossible to understand The Men Who Knew Everything sequence without having mastered its contents. Grolier’s. Any of the early editions. An illustrated geography and world-cultures reference set, arranged by regions and countries, with maps, photographs, and descriptive accounts of peoples, places, economies, and customs. Lafferty breathed it as a boy and said he knew it eidetically. He did. 1938–1942 — A Companion to the Summa. Farrell, Walter, O.P. A Companion to the Summa. 4 vols. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938–1942. Volumes include The Architect of the Universe, The Pursuit of Happiness, The Fullness of Life, and The Way of Life. A popular-language exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, designed to make the structure and argument of the Summa accessible to non-specialist Catholic readers. This is the orthodox Lafferty, a baseline for his flights of fancy. 1949 — Israel and the Ancient World. Daniel-Rops, Henri. Israel and the Ancient World: A History of the Israelites from the Time of Abraham to the Birth of Christ. Translated by K. Madge. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949. Related U.S. title: Sacred History. New York: Longmans, Green, 1949. A Catholic narrative history of ancient Israel and the biblical world, running from the patriarchs through the period leading to the birth of Christ. How Lafferty understood sacred history as history. He told Sheryl Smith he took it as the limit of what people could historically say about the Old Testament. 1951 — Songs of the South Country: Selected from the Poems of H. Belloc. Belloc, Hilaire. A short selected-poems volume rather than a full collected edition, representing Belloc’s lyric, regional, religious, and occasional verse. Fragments of Belloc show up frequently in Lafferty. One should also read The Jews and Belloc's late essay, where he defends himself against the charge of anti-semitism. Strong evidence that Lafferty knew the volume, in which Belloc’s apologia appeared, and Lafferty embraced its variety of defense in his own case. Rational (unlike full Holocaust denial) but forever controversial. Rational, I say? 1952 My Way of Life. Farrell, Walter, O.P., and Martin J. Healy. My Way of Life: Pocket Edition of St. Thomas; The Summa Simplified for Everyone. Brooklyn: Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 1952. Current reprint: TAN / Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 2014. 638 pp. ISBN 9781618908339. A compact, devotional, reader-friendly digest of Aquinas’s Summa, presenting Thomistic theology in short, manageable sections. Lafferty’s view of how to live a good life. 1954–1958; extended later — A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer et al.: Oxford: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1954–1958 for the original main volumes; later volumes extended the set. A major scholarly multi-volume history of technology, covering tools, agriculture, metallurgy, engineering, machinery, transport, industrial processes, and scientific-technical development across civilizations. Lafferty’s crib for historical technology. 1963 — Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. Peck, Harry Thurston, ed. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963. Reprint of the late-19th-century Harper edition, first issued in the 1890s; the standard edition runs about 1701 pages with illustrations and maps. A comprehensive reference dictionary for Greek and Roman literature, mythology, biography, history, geography, religion, and material antiquities. If Lafferty is going to draw on classical myth, bet your bottom dollar he has looked it up here. 1967 — Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. Molnar, Thomas Steven. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. 245 pp. A philosophical and political critique of utopian thinking, treating utopianism as a recurring heresy or temptation in religious, social, and political thought. He means heresy. A book Lafferty recommended and a clear articulation of his view of utopia, though Lafferty would have disagreed with him about Thomas More. Remember it when anyone talks about Lafferty and the utopian, so that no one sells you the Brooklyn Bridge. 1994 — G. K. Chesterton, Collected Poetry. Chesterton, G. K. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 10: Collected Poetry, Part I. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. ISBN 9780898703917. Note: an earlier related title, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, appeared in London in 1927 and in New York in 1932. This is the first of several volumes of a collected presentation of Chesterton’s poetry, including religious, comic, political, narrative, and occasional verse. Better than the older Collected Poems for Lafferty’s favorite writer. One should read as much Chesterton as one can enjoy, but most of Chesterton is brilliant ephemera. In the poetry, one will find all of Chesterton the man.

“Jump, jump, jump!” they called, and others took up the cadence “Jump, jump, jump!” People came from the hills and the lake and from all the luxury cabins around there. The “with-it” people came, and the sectarians, and all of the “Kill Aurelia Now League.” Even the strong partisans of Aurelia were caught up in the moment and cried “Jump, jump, jump!” Aurelia jumped. She lept out into the golden air, and she plummeted the thirty meters to the ground, a modified plummet, for she had her own style. And would she have her own style in death also? There is something electric about the long moment when the leaper is in the air. In the case of Aurelia, there was something doubly electric about it, and something triply long. It wasn’t that time stood still. It was that Aurelia fell slower than other persons would. For she came down light and easy. Barefoot and easy, she came down softly. There had never been much weight to her. By the bird-bones of her and her aerated flesh, she did make a soft landing! Then she laughed and ran, and the people followed her. Her peripateticus had begun. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry, has his horns polled and gives them to two teenagers, a girl and her dark counterpart, who then blow them. On a riverboat, shadowy figures play a card game called brag (anagram of grab), which somehow ties into global politics and the unfolding action of the novel. What can seem like a picaresque mash-up of events culminates about two-thirds of the way through, when people scream at the young woman to jump to her death, and she does, leaping from a tower with her golden hair trailing behind her. Because her bones are hollow, she lands softly and begins her peripatetic course, giving, over a triduum, four homilies each day, one at each corner of the day. The whole thing ends in anticlimax, with the boy and the girl dying. At the gravesite of the young girl, who is completely forgotten, an ailanthus tree grows, along with a pair of antlers, because before she died, she had swallowed both: They buried her there without a grave-stone. Her only monument was certain unfading words on water Preserve her Name. Her Name is Aurelia. [ . . . ] After Aurelia had been dead for a year, an ailanthus tree did grow there. It did smell funny, but it was pretty. [ . . . ] A set of branched antlers also grew out of the ground there, and people do stop to look at them. A beautiful passage. It brings together the epitaph of the too-soon-dead poet Keats, the names written in the Book of Life, the waters of baptism, and the living water flowing from Christ's side into the new creation of the heavenly city. Keats said that his name was “writ in water,” and Lafferty takes that image and joins it to Scripture’s image of names written eternally in the Lamb’s Book of Life (Revelation 13:8; 20:12–15). Through the waters of baptism, one passes from death into life (Romans 6:3–4), and from the pierced side of Christ there flowed blood and water, signs of the Church’s birth and of the new creation (John 19:34). In the heavenly Jerusalem, the river of the water of life flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Revelation 22:1–2), where every redeemed name is remembered forever. This kind of typological compression is pervasive in Aurelia and necessary to understand why Lafferty bothered to write it. It is a demanding work that pretends to have bones as light as Aurelia’s. Over the next few posts, I want to think aloud about Aurelia. Of the thirty-plus novels Lafferty wrote, it is one of the more challenging. The difficulty lies partly in its internal coherence: making sense of its many incidents, its symbolic economy, and especially its handling of horn and antler, white and black, high and low. It is simply a book that places an unusual cognitive demand on the reader. For its length, it is perhaps a unique one in the Lafferty canon. Lafferty writes the novel as though the default reader were not especially knowledgeable about the Christian tradition. He was right about that. Yet that is the reader most likely to miss what gives the novel coherence. It is both exceptionally esoteric in its construction and daringly exoteric in its homilies. It is pure Lafferty, as if he has polarized the didactic and pamphlimpantic. Anyone who reads Aurelia will recognize its messianic theme. Spelling out how that theme works is difficult because Aurelia is not a messiah. Lafferty is not doing the usual science-fiction or fantasy maneuver in which the false messiah simply becomes a parody. The novel itself has an unusually clear shape, with a hard break at the tower leap and then Aurelia’s teaching. Yet, in my mind at least, it feels very light, almost like a novella rather than one of Lafferty’s long-form experiments. Unlike most of the late novels, it is easy to summarize, though any summary will miss much of what it does. If you have not read it, Aurelia follows a naïve, clumsy fourteen-year-old girl from the highly advanced “Shining World,” who is sent to govern a backward, Earth-like planet as a high school assignment. Readers are never told that the planet she comes from is Camiroi (despite that 10th-grade assignment), the subject of two great Lafferty short stories, but Lafferty readers will catch the connection immediately. Still, it is probably wise not to say, hastily, that Aurelia is from Camiroi, because Lafferty doesn’t, a mistake I have made. Just as the reader is never directly told what planet Aurelia is on (it is whispered in Aurelia’s ear, and there are many clues), the reader is left in suspension. When Aurelia crashes planet-side in her noisy, poorly constructed spaceship, she inadvertently gathers a chaotic traveling carnival of followers: mobsters, cultists, con men, and a rival “dark counterpart” named Cousin Clootie. After the tower leap come the three philosophy- and theology-filled days structured around Roman mealtimes. Aurelia, cheerfully for the most part, dispenses her homilies on happiness and law. She performs haphazard miracles and confounds the cynical locals who plot to exploit or assassinate her. Ultimately, she and Clootie are both killed in a bizarre accident involving a strange weapon, a yin-yang yo-yo double-dart, fulfilling a prophecy about a worm shooting a gun. Thus, within a matter of days, Aurelia, who is likened to a bolide, ends her brief, bright governorship. What this summary misses is how the book works on the reader. Consider, for example, a set piece near the beginning of the novel: They all heard the little space-ship, all horns blowing and all lights flashing, come down like a shouting and howling star. [ . . . ] There was someone or something lurking there when Aurelia climbed out of her ship. [ . . . ] ‘Nah,’ the thing said. ‘Get off the coy, kid. Come here.’ And then the thing definitely assaulted Aurelia, a bad beginning on this planet . . . The thing or person was twice her size and musky strong, but something was wrong with it. It was unable to take care of itself, and Aurelia apparently damaged it. She may even have killed it. Her unintentional victory prompts a rapid-fire sequence of encounters. Local groups converge on the crash site. First, a group of millennial sectarians comes from their caves to hail her significance: Aurelia, girl, have you ever done any rodeo announcing,” one of those horse-herders asked her as he cantered up. [ . . . ] “And you being from off-earth, we can bill you as the Shining Angel who has had experience with those great rodeos in the sky. They are followed by a chaotic, “with-it” multimedia crowd. One of its members is turned into a ghost by the ship’s defense mechanisms when he tries to play its horns. Another fuzzy-brained woman tries to get Aurelia to sign a merchandising contract on a leaf. Next comes a wealthy tycoon, pitching a corporate partnership, only then followed by two horse-herders, aging rodeo wranglers, who canter up and try to recruit her. Finally, two opportunistic young men from a local tow-truck service offer to haul her ship away, a problem Aurelia solves by tying a string to the vessel so that it can follow the truck obediently, like a pet. A reader who does not see how much this set piece draws on Scripture will have a hard time with the novel. Although the action I have described takes only a few pages, a great deal is being remixed. What one is reading is a compressed Nativity. It draws on the Gospels and Revelation at once, with the seven horns sounding the apocalyptic note one always expects from Lafferty. The ship’s descent—“like a shouting and howling star,” with “all horns blowing and all lights flashing,” its sound “like the blowing of all the trumpets of Heaven”—sets the Matthean star, “the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was” (Matt. 2:9), beside the Lukan heavenly host, “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (Luke 2:13). The seven horns themselves are from Revelation, the seven trumpets. Aurelia’s ship is somehow connected to the slain Lamb seen by St. John on Patmos, the Lamb who is also the conquering Lion of Judah, “having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth” (Rev. 5:6). Although Cousin Clootie is not mentioned in the crash-landing set piece, he has a parallel descent “like black lightning.” Lafferty pairs this with Aurelia’s arrival in an aside: (At the same time, and probably not far from there, Aurelia’s counterpart and adversary came down like black lightning, secretly and yet arrogantly. More, perhaps, of Aurelia’s counterpart and nemesis and adversary in a little while.) Cousin Clootie will not finally be a Satanic figure (he is far stranger), and any reader who knows Isaiah or the Gospels will hear Luke’s falling Satan and the Messiah’s coming: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Or take the deranged convict who arrives to kill Aurelia. He is somehow connected to Herod’s attempt to destroy the newborn Jesus: “Herod will seek the young child to destroy him” (Matt. 2:13). And the horse-herders cantering up? They are, somehow, Luke’s shepherds, with horses in place of sheep: “there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). The millennial sectarians from the caves are the populace come to hail the child. The with-it crowd, the tycoon, and the tow-truck men are the variegated visitors who, in the longer arc of the cavalcade, will give way to the named Magi—Rex, Melchior, Gaspar, Balthasar—with their pavilions and gifts: “they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh” (Matt. 2:11). And beneath the whole scene runs John’s prologue: the light come into the world, and the world failing to comprehend it. “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:10–11). This scriptural patterning governs Aurelia in a loosely analogous way to how The Odyssey governs Joyce’s Ulysses as necessary knowledge, though one needs to qualify this radically. The table below gathers some of the more important parallels, but my table is deliberately conservative: not a full account, just the minimum apparatus the novel asks of its reader, and this only with the synoptic Gospels and John, though the law and the prophets are everywhere: With this in mind, one might conclude that the task is simply to match narrative and verbal elements. Is a simple principle of equivalence at work? No, because the parallels in Aurelia do not act as equivalents. Aurelia is not all these things at once, because the novel is not an allegory. As the reader eventually learns, the Compensation, the crucifixion understood as ransom, has already happened on one of the universe’s planets. To state the obvious, in allegory, the content of A, literal or not, has its real meaning as B, and B can be restated in conceptual or argumentative terms. In the emblem-book tradition, for instance, Opportunity is often depicted with a thick forelock and baldness: the image means that opportunity must be seized when it comes, because once it has passed, there is nothing to grasp. If one reads Aurelia this way, one will get very little. One will not arrive at B. Aurelia is not an allegorical representation of Christ. Nor is she a type of Christ in the ordinary sense, because typology depends on the type preceding the antitype. Christ has already come. The Compensation has already occurred. She isn’t even a Christ figure. Aurelia is something stranger: not an allegorical substitute for Christ, and not a prior type fulfilled by Christ, but a figure whose actions echo, refract, and misalign with the scriptural pattern. Audelia is what, in an interview, Lafferty said she was: a nice girl. If this is so, then whatever Aurelia is, it is, again, not an allegory of the Bible. But the techniques by which a Catholic reads the biblical tradition are indispensable for understanding what Lafferty is doing. So a word about typology, whose importance for understanding Lafferty’s work generally can hardly be overstated. The etymology of type is so useful here that I want to bring it in. The word comes from a Greek verb meaning “to strike.” When something strikes hard, it leaves an impression. As many people have pointed out, one may think of that impression as a hollowed-out space. Later, something of a corresponding shape appears and fills that space, or rather, fulfills it. At the same time, type is not simply a metaphor. As Northrop Frye once put it, metaphor is static equivalence; typology, like causality, is temporal figuration. A type-and-antitype relation always exists in time. Causation looks backward to explain the past. Typology looks forward, but it does so from a present moment, by identifying the antecedent that has been fulfilled. It is recognition: I remember. Anti-amnesia. Anamensis. Nor is typology a metaphor in another sense. Metaphor works with any object, but typology concerns history. Its domain is the real: real events, real persons, real things. When St. Paul says that Adam was a type of Christ, he is not saying that Adam was an allegory of Christ. He is saying that Adam and Christ stand in a temporal relation to one another, and that each helps disclose the meaning of the other through what has been called escalation. The final antitype that fulfills the precursor types is somehow higher. Fuller. It is an intensification of all that preceded it, or, more precisely, its limit of meaning: Now, Aurelia is not a historical person. She is a RAL creation. That fact does not by itself defeat a typological reading, since the rhetoric of typology can still work even when one term in the relation is not historical in the ordinary sense. Many modern readers would deny Adam’s historicity while affirming that there was a historical person now known as Jesus, yet Paul’s typology remains intelligible. The difficulty of Aurelia lies elsewhere. Typology is built for a relation between two terms; Aurelia introduces a third. At any moment in a typological relation, there are the two quasi-historical terms present, though those terms can be enchained: Cain is to Esau as Abel is to Jacob; Esau is to Ishmael as Isaac is to Jacob; and so on through the brother relations in Genesis. With Aurelia, however, the relation does not quite work this way, because the fulfillment of the type has already happened. There were types of Christ, and then the Son was sent from his Shining World and fulfilled them. Those who come after Christ and resemble him are not types in the strict sense. They participate in him as his body or bride and signal analogy. We call them martyrs, saints, confessors, the cloud of witnesses. This follows from typology's nature as figuration within time. If the fulfillment of the type has already occurred, then anything that comes after the omega antitype is a participation, not an imperfect foreshadowing. That is what Aurelia is. An imperfect participation. To understand her and the novel, one must (I am afraid) know a great deal of Scripture and know how to read typologically. It is the one Lafferty novel where he unhesitatingly lets his knowledge of scripture halo everything. But, again, one must also recognize that Aurelia does not prefigure. She postfigures. Postfiguration has a meaning in posthumanist criticism. That is not what I mean here. I mean only that postfiguration is a possibility after prefiguration and fulfillment, grounded in the Christian sense of salvation history, and an eschatology that is being realized. Aurelia arrives on a world where fulfillment has already happened and has been ignored or forgotten. Everyone acts as though he were still standing inside the hollow left by the original types. The fictional world's condition is typological amnesia. It extends not only to Aurelia’s world assignment but also to Aurelia herself. Why did she put those seven horns on her ship? Why does she throw herself down from the temple to? Does she know about the seven horns of the slain Lamb in the Book of Revelation? Does she know about the seven trumpets and seven cups of Revelation? The book does not have the seven seals or the seven cups or the sea and land beasts or the whore of Babylon. These are issues of what I call phanasmetaxis within postfiguration. And those questions themselves? Not even askable on the narrative’s intradiegetic plane: there is no evidence that the Bible still exists on Gaea. There is just that vague knowledge of the Compensation. Yet Lafferty is relentless in his allusions to Scripture, which is the blueprint of Compensation. He says, you, dear reader, know what the Compensation is. He batters you, the reader, with it mercilessly, and he does it through such radical defamiliarization that many readers will miss how much he is doing, just how much biblical language and ideation is coursing through the hijinks. Most will not even see that much of the novel’s oddness at the level of event becomes clear as water pumped from an artesian well once read typologically. Before the novel reaches the didactic turn following the Tower Jump, Lafferty has already, almost invisibly, catechized every reader in the rhetoric of the Bible. Perhaps one has a bad memory, is uncatechized, or has forgetten the long tradition of transumption of biblical language, but it is a large part of the Aurelia’s meaning. One cannot see the crash without sensitivity to such knowledge. Aurelia will be a farrago for anyone who does not know things like this, who dooes not know the white stone with one’s name on it, or that goats (the Prince of Nysa, the cornutus) are tied to flocks, sacrifice, sin offerings, and judgment imagergy, or that deer (Herr Boch/antlers) are tied to beauty, longing, speed, agility, resurrection, the crucifix, and sure-footedness, panting for the Lord. The resource at the end of this post offers a crib for some of what the novel demands its readers know. I’m also including PDF notes. If any Lafferty work can be called a precursor to Aurelia, it is the underappreciated and flawed “Ishmael into the Barrens.” It is an ugly masterpiece. In writing about it, I had to bring forward the scriptural patterning that makes it intelligible, despite not liking to be a Bible thumper. What “Ishmael into the Barrens” does with the Old Testament in an amnesiac, postapocalyptic environment, Aurelia does with the New Testament. In each, the amnestic world has forgotten Scripture, but the typological logic of Scripture has not forgotten the world. It subsumes life, giving it meaning and interpretableness. It reconfigures all possible worlds. There is no choice, says Lafferty: you, the reader, will participate in Aurelia because it is your story. So that is the first piece of advice I would give anyone who wants to read Aurelia: understand typology, and you will begin to recognize not only the novel’s scriptural intertexts but its internal typological repetitions of quotation, allusion, and echo. The crash landing, for example, is the type of a later antitype. There is the crash descent, then the jump descent. Two falls to anti-earth. The first is rough and apocalyptic, clumsy, flighty Aurelia out of control, falling from the sky, right out of Apocalypse, displaying the seven physical keratin horns of the slain Lamb, blaring the seven judgmental trumpets of St. John, and the final horn of Judgment itself. Aurelia is from the Shining World’s perspective a screw-up. The planet-side crash fulfillment is Aurelia’s graceful, controlled, and chosen falling to the people to where she will teach, though this second descent points toward her death. The biblical allusions are spolia, with postfiguration being a forced participation without identity. That is the sacramental worldview. Interpenetration and identity through differentiation that Catholics call participation. Lafferty is always alluding to Scripture and borrowing its language. For a reader like me it is genius. Nowhere does he do so with the intensity or significance he brings to Aurelia. As always, to read Lafferty well is to become a different kind of reader. It is to recognize partially realized eschatology and the participating, rather than the panoramic apocalypse. One sees the apocalypse as if it were outside one, projected onto a screen as only spectacle, and then the screen dissolves and becomes one’s environment, because the book is about post-Christian cognition as it attempts to force one into Christian cognition. Or it doesn’t and it looks like an incoherent SF novel, and one puts it back on the shelf, a little confused but after a few laughs.

“Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “I heard you talking to Herr Boch about antlers and horns. You believe that horns are more predilected to evil than antlers are, and that is the truth of it. You also believe, from what you said yesterday, that strong and horned men are a rarity on this world. You are mistaken there. There are whole legions of them; they are dedicated to evil and destruction; and they will destroy you. But I left their company several millennia ago, and it was then that I had myself polled or dehorned. I have saved my two horns though. The evil has gone out of them by now, and they have a strong and carrying tone.” The abandoned draft that became Aurelia survives in Tulsa in the file called “To Aurelia With Horns.” It shows few signs that its Aurelia, Aurelia McDermott, was yet to be postfigured christologically; its central concern seems to have been the horn as sexual emblem. When Lafferty returned to the material, lifting large pieces and discarding others, he kept the horns but made them serve the new plot. They became more complicated, more interesting, and far more charged, until Horn is almost a character in the novel. Open the book, and one finds a horn, or some horn-related image, on nearly every page. As I noted in the first thinking-aloud post, horns appear first on Aurelia’s ship, whose seven horns roar, howl, and holler discordantly at her arrival. From there, they proliferate. They become a pop-musical fashion on Earth in the form of “Aurelia-type horn tunes.” They survive Aurelia’s death in the ballads “Bolide” and “Silly Week.” They are also worn. Herr Boch, in his youth, had horns that fell away after a year, while Dionysus once wore horns until he polled himself millennia earlier and became a magus. He preserved the pair, whose evil had by then drained out of them. One of these horns he gives to Cousin Clootie, the other to Aurelia. Aurelia blows cock-crow on hers; Clootie answers from around the bend with his. The same call-and-response returns at the climactic assault, when noisome clouds of creatures and prodigies pour forth from both. By this point in his career, Lafferty had developed his own symbolic economy of horns, visible in stories such as “Horns on Their Heads.” Yet horns had always belonged, in his work, to ritual, myth, and ordinary life. In “Horns on Their Heads,” he counterfigures them, turning devil horns into the horns of Moses, postfiguring them through the Book of Daniel. In Aurelia, however, horns are not simply counterfigured. They convey several meanings at once, the most significant of which is their negative role in the drama of salvation. They sound the meal calls at lentaculum, prandium, merenda, and the fourth-corner cena. They also release one of Lafferty’s abiding obsessions: the pleroma of being, the flesh between the lines, the Fortean damned facts that turn out to be marvels. When Aurelia sounds her goat-horn, an impossible menagerie spills out: Out of the horn came flying-dragons, flying-reptiles, sky flying fish. There were winged spiders and hydras. There were also sea-stallions and sea-cattle, and deep-sea tigers. Sea serpents also, and land-serpents. There were the ancient three humped camels of Arabia Felix. Behemoths, Leviathans, Mammoths, Mastodons! . . . There were fire-foxes and muscular apes. But mostly there were the horned animals, trumpeting and squawling. At the same time, horns carry a strong moral and doctrinal charge. They are "more predilected to evil than antlers are"; horned men are "justly under the suspicion of evil"; and the proper function of horns is "to kill." This helps explain the strange horned people, the cornutus, who encircle Cousin Clootie. Their horns are "invisible to the eyes, but sensed by every other sense," glimpsed only at the periphery of vision: The people hadn’t visible horns, except corner-of-the-eye visible when you weren’t quite looking at them. . . . Rams’ horns, goats’ horns, bulls’ horns, buffalo horns’, and all of them were unnaturally sharp. But were they unnatural? What is the nature of horns anyhow, and what is their function? Their function is to kill. Horns are thus instruments, weapons, emblems, and agencies of spiritual force. The novel also plays with horns musically and verbally. A French horn appears in the Iowa-biography passage in the middle of the novel. Another horn, given by the cave conspirators, is played by Aurelia "as if it were seven horns," in a dissonance that reveals who she is. Saint Cecilia is reidentified by the Bad Music League as "horn-lady all the way." All this is to say, Lafferty’s novel keeps returning to the same cluster of associations: Aurelia is warned that she may provoke a "horned-animal reaction"; she is said to be "the Star who horned down from the sky," "the horniest of the horns," and "the Girl Next Door blown inside-out by the power of trumpets." By the end of the book, horns have become a dangerous image: musical, apocalyptic, erotic, violent, and cosmological all at once. In Aurelia, just as important as horns are antlers. Antlers in Aurelia are the novel’s counter-image to horns. They are sprouted, theorized, shed, and finally grown out of the grave. Herr Boch develops "small, velvety, branching antlers" after meeting Aurelia and ceasing to use the blue caustic powder that had prevented their return; at the assault, he brings the fallen antlers to her and discovers that he "would not be an antlered man after all." The distinction between these parallel growths is laid out explicitly in an epigraph attributed to the fictional historian Arpad Arutinov’s The Back-Door of History: Through natural exuberance and curious mental exploration, certain men have grown into a peculiar curiosity and classification themselves, and have had a most singular sign placed upon them. This is sometimes understood to be one of the evil signs, but it is not so. Careful examination will always reveal that the two manifestations are quite different. The antler is rather the sign of excellence and achievement in a rational way, but in an unusual field of action or study. It is a sign of real discovery or rediscovery of forgotten things. While horned men are justly under the suspicion of evil, antlered men should not be. Unlike horns, which kill, antlers fall and grow again. They carry the image of renewal, and finally of resurrection. At one point, Aurelia likens Herr Boch to the deer, or odocoileus, family. By the end of the book, when branched antlers grow from Aurelia’s grave beside the ailanthus tree, the image has deepened. Antlers are no longer only a comic mark of eccentric discovery. They have become a sign that the person may branch, flower, die back, and return in another form. With this symbolic economy of horns and antlers established, the final image of Aurelia’s grave—with its antlers and ailanthus tree—comes into clear focus and we can speed through it. The setup for this image occurs late in the novel, when Aurelia’s death is imminent and the day is beginning to fragment. The planting of the tree prepares for what comes after death: A lady brought some ailanthus seeds to Aurelia. “If you set them now, some of them will grow out of your mouth after you are dead and decomposed, and there will be a large ailanthus tree to show where you are,” she said. "But doesn’t the ailanthus tree smell funny?" Aurelia asked. "Yes, it does. But it’s pretty. It’s the tree that most reminds me of you." Aurelia ate the ailanthus seeds. By eating the seeds, a eucharistic trope, Aurelia ensures her own post-mortem life. The imagery here rests on a dual foundation. First, the antler imagery, which has long been a part of the Christian tradition. It has been depicted countless times in the iconography of St. Eustace and St. Hubert, who both experienced a vision of the crucifix shining between the antlers of a stag. The antlers are the promise of resurrection, the shedding of the old and the branching of the new. But what about the ailanthus tree? Literate Americans of Lafferty’s generation would have immediately associated it with one of the most famous symbols in twentieth-century writing. It is the title species of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—the tree that can grow anywhere, out of cement and adversity. It is an invasive, stubborn, frustratingly resilient species. Its botanical name translates to the "tree of heaven." The grave image is a double promise: a theological promise of resurrection, and a terrestrial promise of Aurelia’s message. Early in the novel in the Hoffmannesque game of symbols where the powers and principalities play their card game in the Floating World plane of reality, Aurelia says that she does not want to govern ("Somehow I don’t want to dominate it, not right now," she tells her blood-singing self; "It’s like a crooked story, it’s like a crooked song, it’s like a crooked ever-blooming happening. I want to watch it, I want to taste it, I want to hear it"). The ailanthus postfigures the cross, and takes one back to the novel's major theme of governorship, which is one way of saying, What does it mean to be a lord or servant? At the beginning of the novel, the Shining World kids look down on people from other worlds as weeds. They sing a Nietzschean song: Lafferty gets in a joke about them being horny teenagers, but by the end of the novel, that joke about their horniness circulates within the symbolic economy of more than randy horns, which Dionysus abandons when he gives up his pagan horns and becomes a Christianized figure. Their horns are a grotesque libido dominandi. Lafferty had used this kind of transformational device several times by this point in his career. One of my favorite examples is what he does to Socrates in "Rainy Day in Halicarnassus." Socky to St. Peter’s Rocky. Yet from Planet Nietzsche's point of view, Aurelia is a Shining World failure. She ended up being an uncivilized weed who could not impose her will on the world. Of course, it is postfiguring someone else who was uncivilized. Paul Kingsnorth puts this well: When we read the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in fact, it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized. He did not tell us to get good jobs and save prudently. He told us to have no thought for the morrow. He did not tell us to generate wealth, so that economic growth could bring about global development. He told us to give everything away. The rich, he said repeatedly, could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not tell us to defend our frontiers, or to expand them. He told us never to resist evil. He did not tell us to be responsible citizens. He told us to leave our dead fathers unburied and follow him instead. He told us to hate our own parents and to love those who hated us. Every single one of these teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible. The weed, of course, is the ailanthus, often regarded as a weed in tree form, and by the end Aurelia is permanently associated with it. She has come very far from the horn-conquer song of the Shining World children: “We are the gardeners / They are the weeds.” Betty Smith, again, is the person behind the image. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she writes: “Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected garbage cans. It’s the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, or earth.” The novel ends with the tree of the cross and the antlers of salvation: After Aurelia had been dead for a year, an ailanthus tree did grow there. It did smell funny, but it was pretty. It was the tree that should have most reminded people of Aurelia, but there was no memory of her left to be revived. A set of branched antlers also grew out of the ground there, and people do stop to look at them.

A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to rest, with biographical coloring. Petersen asks a different question: what monstrous ecological world is this, and how might we become metaphysically imaginative enough to inhabit it? What does Lafferty teach us about being human in such weird world—and how do we know it is weird since we only have this world—a place where we both find and make ourselves, yet remain cognitively blind? How does he make a brain fizz? Montejo’s question is how can Catholicism help us understand Lafferty, which is near my interests, but he does not seem to see Lafferty as an Augustinian artist who delights in Catholic discomfort. Like Flannery O’Connor, Lafferty is, for me, a savage artist of Catholic discomfort. O’Connor will always have her artificial nigger and her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Milledegville, and Lafferty will always have his Jews and funny uncles. It doesn’t make her less of an artist. Same for him. Her ironies always verge on the Manichaean, his the gnostic. O’Connor makes the reader pass through the Manichaean nightmare. Lafferty makes the reader pass through the gnostic nightmare. One ought to keep both in view. My own question is, what happens when a Catholic artist of counterfeit worlds counterfeits reality at the very moral points where reality matters, and yet still gets so much artistically right? What canons of interpretation did Lafferty hold himself accountable to? Are those the ones that would make him the most intelligible?

Telez: Obviously, you know men, how evil they are. Only God is good. Cambreau: But the good in man is God, Telez. Telez: Only God is good. Only God can forgive. They stole my crucifix, Cambreau. Without it, I’m lost. I’m afraid. Cambreau: A crucifix is a piece of wood, Telez. Only a piece of wood. The miracle is not in the wood, but in the heart. — Strange Cargo (1940) Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history—the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can’t seem to keep in our collective memory. — Belloc A short post. Much of the material in “Strange Cargo” becomes fully relevant only in hindsight, as one moves deeper into the narrative. The chapter introduces several new members of the Group of Twelve, those fictional persons now beginning to wonder whether their existence is only a dream, a theory supported by the philosophical metatexts supplied within the world by the Giant Atrox Fabulinus. The chapter first presents Caesar Oceano, a former pirate turned shipping magnate, who receives a talking golden panther named Leonardo the Great. The epigraph explains why Oceano takes the panther to be a divine intermediary and why he decides it is wise to make Leonardo his business partner. Per Atrox Fabulinus: Philip the Arab who was the first Christian Roman Emperor had a lion at his court that was famous for its discourses and its rectitude and judgement. Philip himself believed that the lion was an angel unaware... I myself believe that Philip’s lion was an angel; and I believe that angels can and often do come among us in the forms of giants and waifs and bears and wolves and dogs. So entertain them and feed them if they come to you, but do not entertain them uncritically. Caesar is pleased with their success, but Leonardo becomes melancholy, opens a counseling service, and is trailed by a black panther-shadow. That shadow will matter later, in one of the novel’s most puzzling uses of Christian iconography, as Leonardo becomes a Judas figure, invested with counter-figured crucifixion imagery. The chapter also introduces Drusilla Evenrood, a British para-biologist who remains pragmatically absorbed in her work despite the Group’s growing doubts about its own existence. The roll call continues with Denis Lollardy, an immensely important figure: an Italian master forger capable of recreating ancient manuscripts, artworks, and large financial checks with perfect fidelity. Denis becomes troubled when his recent forgery, the Laughing Christ discussed in previous posts, begins performing real miracles. The statue creates mirth in those who stand before it, but mirth occurs inside the person; it is indefeasible and nearly impossible to corroborate. So Lafferty gives us the kind of miracle the Church could confirm. A woman’s nose becomes right—right in the sense that it furthers her life—by being adjusted one millimeter. The narrator describes the bizarre precision of the event: It changed the horrible nose of a Roman lady and made it a thing of joy instead of a thing of horror. But really, it had changed the configuration less than a millimeter. And it happened that such was enough to make it into a good-natured and pleasant member instead of a horrible member. It was still not a beautiful nose, but the lady accepted it with pleasure and glee. Next comes Mary Brandy Manx, a favorite character of mine in the book, the mayor of Port Saint Mary on the Isle of Man, who often appears as a local nature goddess, whether swimming or flying her hot-air balloon. As the members of the Group try to coordinate a global video conference in response to their destabilizing reality, Leo Parisi proposes admitting a thirteenth member, Hieronymous Talking-Crow. Leo argues that the Group may eventually need a replacement for its inevitable Judas, a remark that casts a backward shadow over Prince Leonardo. He explains the necessity of this to Jane Chantal: “But with the Prototypical Group of Twelve, there was a second twelfth, to replace Judas, remember, who dropped from the twelve.” “Oh, will we have a Judas, do you suppose, Leo my little lad?” “I believe it nearly certain. Symmetry or floating justice or ultimate compensation or something almost requires that we should have a Judas in our group.” Amid these introductions, a coordinated physical threat against the Group of Twelve begins to take shape. Several members, including Hilary Ardri and Mary Brandy Manx, suffer nonfatal gunshot wounds. Leonardo the Great is viciously mauled by his dark panther counterpart. The characters suspect that they are being tracked and assaulted by their “shadows.” Yet Hilary and Jane Chantal do not despair over the violence. They find reassurance in it. The presence of an active, plotting intelligence trying to harm them seems to prove that they exist in reality, rather than as dream stuff. Hilary explains this comfort at the chapter’s close: “There’s a mind behind this,” said Hilary, “and not a dreaming mind. That’s reassuring.” “Would it be reassuring if the mind-behind-it got us all killed tomorrow, Hilary?” “Sure it would. That would mean that we had been alive to be killed, a thing presently in doubt.” But of course this is only the plot beginning. It is about to accelerate with an intensity rare even in Lafferty’s novels. What, then, has the book established? It has heightened the menace that will drive the rush through the nine days of the week. Lafferty moves from leisurely assembly to frenetic action. In the first three chapters, the reader has learned the rules of this non-novel. The first is that the in-world characters now understand themselves, at least intermittently, as fictional persons. That self-conscious unreality licenses Lafferty’s radically fecund invention as well as the intrusion of reality. The novel's ultimate symbol of reality will be the Laughing Christ. Lafferty will leave it up to the reader to decide how to decode the Laughting Christ, but his point seems to be that if one rejects it, one ends up with a nihilistic metafiction, history as forgery all the way down. The most important line in the chapter belongs to Dennis. Any reader who does not pick up on it, I think, is not reading the work Lafferty is writing: the forger speaks truth despite himself. At one point, he finds himself in the same ventriloquial relation that obtains between John Towntower and Solomon Izzersted: “Why do you say that we live in a Forgers’ World, Denis?” “I honestly don’t know, Jane Chantal. It was as if somebody else said those words out of my mouth.” Characters who find themselves speaking words not their own are nothing new in Lafferty. The best-known example is surely the way the Programmed Persons in Past Master use their “snakes” to speak through the mouth of Thomas More. Here, however, Lafferty gives us the reverse of that scene. In Past Master, More is deluded because his inner space has been infested by the devils of that novel. In East of Laughter, the question is different: who has made Denis say these words? I hazard the same Christ that occasioned his "fogergy" of the Laughing Christ, or so Lafferty implies. Within the novel, there are only two strong possibilities: Atrox Fabulinus or R. A. Lafferty. As I read the novel, I see this as its central drama. Atrox is the fictional surrogate through whom Lafferty enters into metafictional relation with his characters. The bits of reality that fall from the sky under Atrox’s name, above all the bloody writing quill, are also images of Lafferty’s own pen. I therefore read Denis's utterance as Lafferty placing into his mouth what he takes to be the truth about the consensus reality of the Twelve: it is a forgery. But a forgery can become a myth, and a myth, as Lafferty said in an interview, is only a way of getting at the truth.

And the story FAITH SUFFICIENT is tied in with the Ministry business. I am a strongly believing Catholic myself, and one sentence of Christ that I never forget is "Other sheep I have that are not of this flock." He also says (through Saint Paul) that we should preach the faith 'in season and out of season.' But the manner of the preaching is left to each one. There is lots of grotesque preaching done, and I believe that it may be a subject of humor. And John Salt and his friend the Mouse also believed that it was or might be the subject of humor. The mouse, for his weight, was one of the finest missionaries in the world. “Camel’s Nose,” the second chapter of East of Laughter, deepens Lafferty’s world-as-dream premise by entangling it with fairy tale, history, and anthropology, then passes each through one of his favorite scriptural passages: Christ’s mysterious statement in the Fourth Gospel that he has other sheep (John 10:16). It was an endlessly generative passage in Lafferty’s hands. It licensed bridging the fantastical and the real. John 10:16 has always invited questions. What did Christ mean? Conservative exegetes usually say that Christ speaks here of the Gentiles, who will be brought into the fulfilled covenant, which makes the image is one of unity in the human world. All who belong to Christ will become one living flock under one shepherd. Lafferty did not accept that explanation, or at least did not find it sufficient. Instead, he preferred to treat John 10:16 as profoundly mysterious, as though it pointed toward beings like those scattered through Irish folklore; as though it referred to creatureliness both other than the heavenly host and outside of the recension of fallenness. What he never took seriously, however, was the notion that Christ’s other sheep might be aliens. He was quick to emphasize that he set the probability of alien life at just about zero, if not zero. It can seem strange, but this difficult combination of ontological openness and extreme skepticism about alien life is one signature of his imagination. One finds it in his incandescent contempt for science fiction as usually written. He explains why he puts the possibility so low in “More Worlds Than One?” In that essay, he imagines how his hostile view will be received by True Believers: Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction. It is, isn't it? And persons will not defend the tenets of a fiction as stubbornly as they will defend the beliefs of their core institutions. They won't, will they? Then why are all those people picking up jagged rocks when I give my belief that our Earth is very likely unique, that our carbon-based life is almost certainly unique in our universe and is the only life there is, and that our human species is absolutely unique and its equal is not to be found in all of material creation no matter how many billions of billions of planets are examined? Why are you people cutting my ham-string muscles and breaking my thighbones? Oh, to immobilize me and make it easier to stone me to death, your aim not being very good. And why are you putting out my eyes with those whetted knives? His full explanation in the essay comes down to the cosmological argument and a rejection of abiogenesis as a teleological non-starter. Yet I am inclined to think he equally disliked the numbing idea of plenitude as merely numerical plenitude. The bad infinite. Imagine a universe vast enough, and SF can become pinning butterflies or conducting a cosmic census, or what he called heroic tedium. Lafferty obviously enjoyed imagining aliens. He made much of the fictional game of pretending that such beings might exist. But fiction is not life. What appealed to his deeper imagination was not plenitude spread thinly across space as additional taxa. It was moral plenitude superimposed upon itself. A topological plenitude not spatialized like apple butter across a cosmic piece of toast but knotted until no abyssal bottom could be seen by mortal eye. In Lafferty’s fiction, plausible figurations of the “other sheep” show up often. They include beings such as the returnees (if they can be redeemed), the puka, the dorg, that heart-attack inducing gnome, or the creatures in this chapter, the shoga. In his later work, Lafferty increasingly turns away from the generic conceit of the SF alien and toward the fabula of fairy tale. The change makes sense: a fairy tale always says that the world has wondrous depth beyond what the innocent imagination can gin up on its own. In East of Laughter, this aspect of the novel first appears in the Giants in Chapter One. It then begins to be rounded out in Chapter Two. Chapter Two also introduces five more members of the company known as the Group of Twelve, while pressing more firmly on the presence of Atrox Fabulinus, the ancient, supposedly dead Giant-writer who still shapes the modern world. We meet Laughter-Lynn Casement, a marine biologist and artist of Irish and Dutch-Friesian descent. Through a dense sequence of academic and mythological paratexts, the largest such cluster in the novel, we begin to see how wide the world’s dream is as fiction and as a displaced correlate of Prime. Laughter-Lynn explains that she has Kabouter blood, which caused her to pass through a human larval stage known as a Shoga. She spent fifty-five years developing underground inside a giant goose egg, though those fifty-five years amounted to only a single day in ordinary world-time, and emerged as a fully formed sixteen-year-old genius. For Lafferty readers, the episode is a private reward, since it returns to one of the most memorable passages about Atrox in The Fall of Rome, a variation of something like the interrupted stairway sequence in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards’ span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: "Here it becomes necessary to recount to you the history of the world up to this point." Over the course of the chapter, Lafferty sets up another one of his vertical cosmologies. Beneath the earth are the Little People, who frequently breach the upper world: these are beings like the one in “Rang Dang Kaloof,” or like what protagonist of “For All Poor Folks at Picketwire” becomes, or what the protagonist of “Funnyfingers” simply is. The paratextual documents and excerpts that establish this lower realm offer a shaggy, often contradictory body of lore about the Shoga, also called Siog, Kobalds, Kabouters, or fairies. If this is the novel’s lower floor, the upper floor (in the novel found in attics or up stairways) belongs to the Scribbling Giants. It is therefore fitting that, at the end of the novel, the usurping Solomon Izzersted stages his appearance as a projection in the sky, from a multistoried building where he has set up the East of Laughter publication racket and his little production studio. All that comes later in the book, and it merges with the Fortean sea above from which objects fall, objects such as giant feathers, or, in the upside causal structure of the cosmology, the skyward source of the world’s scenarios. So, right here, early in the novel, Lafferty first gives us an elaborate account of the Little People. According to these varied sources, the Shoga have a pre-human mythological origin. They were exiled from their own Eden, Gaire, eleven years before the biblical human exile, and they survive the Flood as antediluvian beings sealed within provisioned mountain caves. Biologically, however, Lafferty’s invented authorities, figures such as Peter Tompkinson and Hieronymous Talking-Crow, classify the Shoga not as a separate mythic species but as an exceptionally rare human larval stage. Lafferty returns to one of his old themes: childhood as qualitatively different from adulthood. Butterflies are more like caterpillars than adults are like children. In East of Laughter, children enter this pupal state at age ten for as many as 250 “larval years” and emerge either dead, given a ninety-percent mortality rate, or as graceful geniuses. This human-larva theory is then contradicted by other texts Lafferty invents. The Enniscorthy Chronicle treats the creatures as chromosomal proof that fairies are a species of monkey, while townspeople and historians describe them as subterranean pests to be trapped underground by ritual arrangements of stone. People arrange the earth, or their own ambients, with rocks that pin plenitude down, insulate their consensus reality, and keep the Oceanic invisible. This, in turn, allows the Giants to impose their master narratives onto the ambient, the rules that people like you and me must live by. As The Back Door of History notes: . . . .in all these places of the belt there are families who renew the rocks so they say, who keep the piles of rocks in their ritual arrangements that compel the Sioga-Kobalds to remain underground. But in reality these families make new arrangements of the rocks which still keep the Sioga-Kobalds underground, but let far worse peoples than the Sioga-Kobalds come to the surface. And in these places also were families of giants who renew the tales so they say, who maintain the giant writing on the cliffs: but in truth they introduce new giant writing which all the people will have to obey.’ Lafferty also plants deliberate inconsistencies in the demographic and temporal data. His sources disagree about whether the Shoga occur once in a million births or once in a hundred thousand, and they note that Shoga “larval time” may be either incredibly brief or drastically extended in relation to ordinary world-time. The texts finally add that, despite their intermediate developmental state, Shoga can mate and produce outwardly normal human infants, whom historical populations called changelings. Eventually, we learn that this kind of temporal anomaly belongs to the ninth day of the week, which can occur on any other day and last only minutes. After this background, which establishes the presence of the Little People throughout the novel, the chapter turns to Leo Parisi, a teenage nuclear scientist who underwent in utero learning experiments and retains vivid memories of life before birth. All the characters profiled in the chapter, apart from Laughter-Lynn, have Catholic names that point toward the history of the Church: Leo, Perpetua, Monika, Gorgonius. Leo is frustrated because he knows that the atoms of the physical universe, the fiction Lafferty is drawing from the ambient of the white page, are “empty boxes.” They lack the intricate interior detail he remembers them once possessing: “Yes, to all appearances, the atoms are empty boxes,” he would rant. “They lack detail. They contain only such scribbles as a three-dimensional cartoonist might make . . . I remember every atom as having a totality of interior detail equal to the total detail of the universe exterior to it. Someone has short-changed me.” His scientific pursuits are interrupted when he discovers a bloodied, nine-foot-long feather that he determines belongs to Atrox Fabulinus. And importantly, Leo does not bother to examine it. Had he done so, he would have verified that the instrument of writing, if not the scenario he is in, is constituted by detailed atoms. Leo's wife, Perpetua, who will eventually become one of the Scribbling Giants, is a behavioristic logician who meticulously arranges her husband's daily environment to predict and trigger his scientific breakthroughs; she relies on her symbolic logic to manipulate his routines and believes she can similarly influence God's actions. She herself is a kind of fictioneer who scripts Leo’s days. The final two characters detailed in the chapter are Perpetua’s parents, Gorgonius and Monika Pantera. They live in a vast estate in the German Alps known as Piano Castle. Gorgonius is a centuries-old craftsman and composer who builds massive player pianos from rare Klavierholtz wood. He uses hundreds of them simultaneously to perform his continuous musical suites. At this point, Lafferty takes us deeper into the world of fairy tale, for Gorgonius’s seventh wife, Monika, oversees the estate's layout, which includes several secret rooms that cannot be opened with conventional keys. To enter the rooms, Monika must perform supernatural rituals, which sometimes means she has to kill an Alpine eagle for its wing-bone and temporarily resurrect Gorgonius’s deceased wives from beneath the floorboards to forge tools or recite magical passwords: Allerdings, allerdings, allerdings, all! Machen die Pforte auf immer fur mich! Weil sie aufmachen nicht, breche ich mal, Breche das Zimmer und breche ich dich! [However, however, however, all! Open the gate for me forever! Because they do not open it, I will break it, Break the room, and I will break you.] And, here, in the second chapter, the book becomes more metafictional, with Lafferty pointing out that the giant is forcing his way into the text: It is plain by now that Atrox Fabulinus has intruded his slurpy wet Camel’s nose into the tent of this account and soon will own the place. Within the chapter, this is reified as the bloody quill that Perpetua and Leo hang in their kitchen at Sora and that Leo does not investigate, but metafictionally, it is Lafferty heightening the fictional plane while dropping clues that his greater interest lies in what the novel calls the substratum of reality itself.

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was buddies with both Gene Wolfe and Lafferty; one of Wolfe’s best-known characters is based on him, as you might know from Wolfe's dedication to Knight; and Lafferty kept a picture of Knight near his bed in Broken Arrow after his final strokes. Anyone who has spent time in the Tulsa archive will know that, by far, the largest and most revealing body of Lafferty’s personal correspondence is with Knight. I believe our best view of Lafferty as a person interacting with other people is the Knight-Lafferty friendship. The other contenders are the letters by Sheryl Smith and Virginia Kidd. All Lafferty readers owe him a great debt. Which brings me to the reason for this post. I noticed the other day that a second-hand dealer was asking $150 for Boomer Flats Gazette, so I wanted to point readers to the place where you can get the rare Knight publications from Knight himself, most of them signed by Lafferty, without the fantastically inflated prices. As I understand it, he still has boxes of them. Anyone who wants to own some of these materials should get them directly from Knight. He is not out to gouge anyone. But Knight isn't self-promoting. You will never see him posting second-hand copies. They are all mint and in boxes at his treasury in Canada. At the same time, you aren't likely to access that treasury without knowing the man himself, so I wanted to share how to get the materials. You can find the link here. It seemed worth pointing out because of things like this: