Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon  (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk that swallowed the trussed creature in a single gulp, thirty-meter-long tentacles that reached blindly for more prey, the big eye in the middle mad and livid with malevolence. Past Master , Chapter 6 The three of them were onto the hydra before it thunderously shattered the water as it fell back from its great surge. They went with snake-like knives for the hydra eye and the brain behind it, feverish in their haste before the terrible tentacles could be brought to defend and to attack. Hysterical battle, hooting challenge, high screaming triumph. – Chapter 6 "You ever cook any Devil brains yourself? Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. Paul and the green-robe cooked the brains. They cased them in a ball of mud, and set it into a quickly-started and explosively hot fire of oil-dripping vines." – Chapter 6 Now, I don't know what a dromedary is, I don't know what a sand dune is, and I sure don't know what a Syrian is. The name was hung onto me, I believe, because I have a beak instead of a nose. The world will end again tomorrow. Watch then for a Syrian and a sand dune. – Chapter 13 There would be wild stories, the prodigies, the old wives' tales—such as nine snakes slithering out of the severed head; such as the most beautiful woman of Astrobe going up the scaffold and boldly taking the head in a basket, and being turned into an old woman when she came down with it. – Chapter 13 One of the most intriguing details in Past Master  is the sudden appearance of George the Syrian in its final chapter. You may have come across The Golden Legend , Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th-century hagiographic compilation, which popularized the tale of St. George and the Dragon, or seen St. George depicted in Christian art. De Voragine presents George as a knight who saves a city terrorized by a monstrous serpent. According to the legend, the dragon demanded human sacrifices, and when the king's daughter was chosen, George intervened, subduing the beast with the sign of the cross before slaying it. The grateful citizens converted to Christianity. The dragon that St. George slays is no ordinary beast; it is often interpreted as the great dragon of the Apocalypse, the serpent of Revelation 12:9, "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world." In the medieval tradition, the slaying of the dragon is the triumph of good over evil, of divine order over chaos. This connection makes George not just a hero of legend but a figure in a larger cosmic struggle, a warrior against the same primordial adversary that appears at the end of time—an appropriate presence in Past Master 's apocalyptic ending. St. George is famed as England’s patron saint, but fewer realize he is also the patron of Syria. There is even a legendary tradition claiming that he was not born in Cappadocia but in Syria itself. In St. George of Cappadocia in Legend and History  (1909), Cornelia Steketee Hulst wrote: “In later centuries the combat with the dragon came to be one of the most romantic stories of Europe, and St. George as a romantic hero surpassed the great national heroes such as Cid, Orlando, King Arthur, Ogier the Dane, and Red Beard. Each nation that touched his story left its mark upon it, and most of the nations touched it. Swedish and Danish, German and Norman French ballads and tales of St. George and the Dragon are numerous between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Seven Grecian cities claim the honor of Homer’s birth, but more than seven countries claim the honour of St. George’s birth and struggle with the dragon, some placing it in Cappadocia, some in Libya, others in Syria . . .” This theme of the legendary slayer appearing at times of upheaval recurs throughout Past Master , most memorably in the legend Scrivener’s grandmother tells him. In Chapter 6, the slaying of the devil hydra is another instance of this pattern, foreshadowing the novel’s climax, where the true hydra manipulating Astrobe—the Nine Programmed Persons—is finally brought down. The novel also presents this idea through George the Syrian, who tells a story about how, after the world ends, there is always a hill, a Syrian, and a camel. Though George ultimately falls—and though he doesn’t know why he has his name, what a Syrian is, or what a dromedary is—the echoes of a world that ended two temporal sequences ago still shape the novel’s present. St. George, like St. Thomas More, met his end by decapitation. His feast day is coming up on April 23—tip a glass to him. “The programmed guards got George and Maxwell and Rimrock and added their blood to the transcendental yeast that was beginning to work.”

Lafferty's published fiction comprises roughly 2,836,500 words and features around 80,000 unique word forms. What stands out is the remarkable lexical richness, which contributes significantly to the informational density of his work. Some of the Most Frequent Words in the Corpus: said  (13,799), man  (8,089), world  (6,357) , like  (6,251), know  (5,994), people  (5,767), little  (5,304), time  (5,162), old  (4,392), things  (4,162), come  (3,935), just  (3,766), oh  (3,719), way  (3,394), asked  (3,263), good  (3,194), came  (3,084), years  (2,996), men  (2,956), it’s  (2,917), great  (2,806), new  (2,792), really  (2,742), day  (2,715), went  (2,629), make  (2,492), yes  (2,481), right  (2,391), believe  (2,329), say  (2,241), long  (2,189), dead  (2,171), big  (2,111), place  (2,067), Duffey  (1,997), person  (1,992), told  (1,964), persons  (1,940), Finnegan  (1,889), I’m  (1,888), going  (1,888), left  (1,870), life  (1,849), tell  (1,845), knew  (1,823), night  (1,809), look  (1,753), real  (1,720), young  (1,710), quite  (1,691), want  (1,675), let  (1,641), sure  (1,640), eyes  (1,611), Dana  (1,591), high  (1,589), think  (1,575), got  (1,568), away  (1,517). Average Words Per Sentence Highest: The Fall of Rome  (20.8) Half a Sky  (18.0) The Reefs of Earth  (17.4) Okla Hannali  (16.6) Apocalypses  (16.1) Serpent’s Egg (15.9) Sindbad, The Thirteenth...  (15.4) Annals of Klepsis  (15.3) Not to Mention Camels  (15.0) The Elliptical Grave  (14.0) Lowest: Space Chantey  (11.6) Dotty  (11.8) Fourth Mansions  (11.8) The Devil Is Dead  (12.5) Archipelago  (12.9) Past Master  (12.9) The Man Who Talled Tales:...  (13.0) Arrive at Easterwine  (13.2) Aurelia  (13.2) The Flame Is Green  (13.6) Readability Index (Coleman-Liau) Highest: Half a Sky  (13.411) Arrive at Easterwine  (9.688) Space Chantey  (9.487) The Elliptical Grave  (9.387) Sindbad, The Thirteenth  (9.380) The Fall of Rome  (9.052) Fourth Mansions  (8.984) The Flame Is Green  (8.960) Serpent’s Egg (8.740) Okla Hannali  (8.018) Lowest: Not to Mention Camels  (4.885) The Devil Is Dead  (6.446) Archipelago  (6.484) The Reefs of Earth  (7.029) Annals of Klepsis  (7.045) Past Master  (7.173) Dotty  (7.211) Apocalypses  (7.278) More Than Melchisedech  (7.723) Longer sentences usually indicate more complex sentence structures, while readability scores measure how difficult a text is to decode based on word and sentence length, not conceptual depth. Comparing both gives you a rough sense of which novels have more intricate sentence construction and which are more mechanically accessible, though this doesn't do much to account for interesting forms of narrative complexity. For example, it's amusing that—knowing nothing else but the readability index—this would make Not to Mention Camels  the one to hand the kids.

“You go on home, King!” one of the kids called to the dog from inside the park. “They won't let dogs inside the park this year. Or stay with Mr. Hunt if you want to."   A short post today on Lafferty’s “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” Lafferty makes most of us laugh. This is a story that makes me laugh more than once. It follows Elroy Hunt, a perpetually forty-nine-year-old carnival enthusiast who sees himself as a perpetual kid. One day, Elroy is barred from entering Whizzer's Amusement Park. The park’s new, highly scientific doors open for everyone else, from children and adults to trucks and horses. They slam shut at Elroy. After failing to get in through several entrances, Elroy teams up with a bull terrier named King, who is also denied entry. He grows increasingly frustrated. Lafferty dials up the slapstick. The reader meets some unimaginative people who have authoritarian streaks. The park staff insists the doors are infallible and designed to keep out dogs. And the story ends memorably. That does nothing to capture the energy or comic timing. The action takes place in a single setting and plays out like a vaudeville routine or a scene from early slapstick. When the Lafferty family left Neola, Iowa, for Oklahoma, Lafferty was four. They settled in Perry, the birthplace of Buster Keaton, and the story plays like a Keaton set piece. So the bull terrier named King decided to stay with Elroy Hunt and hook his fortunes to Elroy's. They had been acquaintances but not close friends. Now they looked at each other. They plotted a small plot together in a lightning meeting of minds. Both rushed at the door with absolute shouting-and-barking confidence that it would swing open for them if only they had faith. And both cracked themselves jarringly on the closed adamant door (it was really made out of wood and chrome and glass). One little kid (hardly more than a toddler) approached the door, and it swung wide open. The little kid padded in, and Elroy and King (rushing for the momentary gap) hit the closing door so hard that they both bounced. Frustrated, they both went over and sat on the bench that was only three long steps from the door. King licked his bruised foreshoulder. Elroy licked the heel of his hand that was bloodied and scraped. As for the highly scientific door itself, such doors have mattered in science fiction at least since H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes  (1899). Sliding automatic doors entered American life in 1954, when Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt invented them using a mat actuator. By the time Star Trek  premiered in 1966, they were a reality. In the 1960s, the invention of the Gunn diode made motion detection practical: its compact microwave oscillators allowed doors to sense movement. The Gunn diode, named after physicist J. B. Gunn, is a semiconductor device that exploits a negative resistance effect to generate high-frequency microwave oscillations, making it useful in radar and motion-sensing applications. By the 1970s, microwave-based sensors were in widespread use. These systems emitted continuous microwave signals that shifted in frequency when reflected by a moving object, triggering the mechanism. Lafferty finished the story in May 1974, during the heyday of the Gunn diode, but also at a time when he was thinking about Charles Fort, with Forteanism being an element of "Oh, Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry" (October 1974) and "Bequest of Wings" (January 1975). I’d place “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door” among Lafferty’s Fortean tales for the way it critiques scientific classification. Like Fort’s own work, it satirizes classification systems gone haywire, taking aim at the “damned data” science doesn’t know what to do with. In this case, the damned data is Elroy Hunt. One of the finest things in the story is the behavioral comedy of Elroy and King—it would make an excellent series of illustrations. It also feels very much alive, and it reminds me of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic  (1900), Bergson wrote that comedy arises when the mechanical appears in the midst of the living. We laugh when life takes on the stiffness of a machine, when spontaneity gives way to habit or automatic behavior. Laughter is corrective. It steers us back toward vitality, freedom, and creativity. It reminds us what it means to be alive: to stop acting like machines. If "The Doggone Highly Scientific Door" has a didactic edge, it is something like this. Along the way, Lafferty also slips in some great puns. The ending loops back to the beginning, with Elroy’s simple love of candy, and through the middle, where Lafferty writes, “Hey, King, I won you a dog bowl,” the boy Curtis shrilled. “I won it throwing lopsided baseballs at wooden milk bottles. I sure am good at hitting those bottles.” He gave the fine bowl to King. The bowl had KING  written on it in red letters, and King’s day was made, in spite of the humiliation of being excluded from the amusement park. Of course, Elroy  is just Spanish for the king .

For months, I have wanted to write about some remarks Lafferty made to Robert Sirignano concerning the Devil. They’re plainly important for understanding the nature of antagonistic forces in his fiction. I started thinking about them again when I happened to read Harlan Ellison’s short story “Grail” (1981). It’s a fun, straightforward moral fable, written by someone who doesn’t believe in real devils. So we get a devil like this: It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him. Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall. The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name. Ellison wants to say something about the sacrifices people make in pursuit of idealized, perfect fulfillment. His main character ends up with a disappointing trophy whose real power lies in revealing the futility of the quest itself. The story wants the reader to think about the tragic, bittersweet nature of chasing an abstract ideal as if it could be won like a prize. Thanks, Harlan. Lafferty did believe in devils, so he didn’t treat them as monsters, but as devils. That’s one reason I don’t take Ouden seriously as a character. I read Past Master  as a novel in which the Nine Programmed Persons manipulate the people of Astrobe with Ouden, much in the manner the Great and Powerful Oz tries to manipulate Dorothy. Now seems like the right moment to bring it in, especially because it opens onto the oceanic, Lafferty’s master trope for the unconscious. The following is from “Introduction to Ringing Changes” by Robert Whitaker Sirignano, published in Feast of Laughter , Volume 5 (2020).   “I believe in the Devil,” said Lafferty at a convention. “He’s right here in this room.” When some of the laughs died down, he continued, “I’m serious!” I asked him a number of months later to write it out, and he wrote: “Sure, I consider the Devil-Satan as a real person or presence or species. I don’t know to what extent individuality is a quality of that species. “Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons. “Well, there is something rampant in the collective unconscious, and if we ask “What is it?” we’re naming one of its names. As God several times in scripture gives Himself the name of the ‘I am’ or the ‘I am who I am’, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the ‘What is it?’ or the ‘Who is it?’ An African tale begins ‘The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.’ This particular who-is-it seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning to read him as if reading a morning newspaper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that’s a problem. Before being cast into Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either ‘My name is legion’ or ‘Our name is legion’, seeming a multiplicity of guises for an individual, or a multiplicity of individuals in the species. “Well, this diabolical species-person cannot read human minds and cannot invade the human individual, except in a few doubtful cases. But he can invade the human species, which he does by invading the group unconscious. There is the devil in the cellar of the mind. He-they-it does have some influence on persons, or all persons. “There are likely other unbodied beings and mentalities, some of them more good than bad, if the qualities good and bad pertain to them, and some of them neutral spirits in a direct sense.“Yes, I did let the answer to that be a long one, and I did say anything I wanted to say either.” What does this mean? Lafferty tells me that there is a part of his mind that says there is a conflict with the Devil-Satan (or devils) in all the stories he writes, be it very directly implied, as it is in The Argo Cycle, or somewhat off the scene, lurking behind in the shadows, as in “Eurema’s Dam.” It is a significant part of the totality of Lafferty. (p. 164–166). In the Oceanic Novels, the diabolical often appears within the Core Conflict box, meaning it is confronted directly rather than left implicit. Continued . Here is a worked example, drawn from Past Master  (1968). It differs from the Past Master diagram in the Oceanic section of this blog by addressing diabolical elements that the general model leaves unspecified.

Sheryl Smith did not write much about Lafferty, but everything she wrote is worth looking at closely. Here is her most groundbreaking essay on him, along with diagrams illustrating how she views myth in his fiction.

In thinking about Lafferty's denial of the Jewish Holocaust, one of the more curious items in the Tulsa archive is a letter sent to Lafferty by a founding member of the Remnant of Israel. At the time Lafferty received the letter, the small Jewish group was based in central Kentucky. It opens a window onto an interesting corner of religious life: the world of Jewish converts to Catholicism. The Catholic Church has long described itself as Israel or the Israel of God. Yet it’s worth remembering that it approached the modern State of Israel cautiously. Diplomatic recognition by the Holy See came only on December 20, 1993, leading soon after to the establishment of a Vatican Nunciature in Israel and an Israeli embassy in Rome. While this development was civic and political, it was not without drama. Behind it lay centuries of theological debate, and more recently,  Lumen Gentium  (promulgated on November 21, 1964), the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. There, the Church declares that Christ “instituted this new covenant, the New Testament, that is to say, in His Blood; calling together a people made up of Jew and Gentile . . . this messianic people has as its head Christ . . . and finally reaches its perfection in the glory of heaven. The people, therefore, is the new Israel.” This is the context in which I read parts of Nostra Aetate  (promulgated October 28, 1965) that, for good and ill, reflect the time in which it was written, as the Church moved toward clarity. Here, one thinks of passages that might now be written differently while transmitting the same Magisterial authority, ones such as “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; (13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.” So how did Lafferty come to donate money to the Remnant of Israel? To answer that, one must look to the 1960s and a Bay Area hippie commune where Lafferty’s writing was being read. The commune was led by a man named Hal Barton, who eventually concluded that the commune should formally convert to Catholicism. Some of the hippies took the step of becoming third-order Dominicans. From this transformation came several significant developments, including the creation of Catholics United for Life. Without getting too much into the weeds, among Hal Barton's commune were several Jewish members. The commune's chaplain was  Father Arthur B. Klyber , a gifted Jewish Catholic priest who was not part of the commune. Father Klyber would also play an important role in the separate life of The Remnant of Israel , which included several people who had been a part of the commune. Klyber founded the apostolate Remnant of Israel in 1975. In thanking Lafferty for his donation, the letter from The Remnant of Israel includes the following lines: "The person who wrote to you was asked to leave our group in 1987. We have changed much since then." The most likely author of the original letter to Lafferty was Barton himself. For anyone trying to understand Lafferty’s views on Jews and Judaism, it is another data point, one of the more unusual episodes recorded in the archive, and a reminder of how complicated the relationship between Jews and Catholics can be, with Jewish Catholics themselves being a central part of the story. A new friend introduced me to the term universal Judaism as being a synonym for Roman Catholicism. That sounds exactly right.

“Who’s playing? This is for real.” First published in If  in March 1962, “Seven-Day Terror” is one of Lafferty’s better-known stories. It belongs to an unpublished cycle he set aside in the late 1950s. As a group, these stories show him hovering between slick fiction and genre writing. The pieces all center on a family named the Willoughbys—light entertainments and some of my personal favorites—satirical fables about a Catholic household both eccentric and happy, chaotic and fiercely loving. Throughout, the domestic life of the Willoughbys continually tips into crises that spill over into their quiet neighborhood. In each story, the family’s intuitive, illogical strength careens into the rigid systems of the outside world. Law, science, social convention, and bureaucracy all get the Willoughby treatment. This is Lafferty at his clearest, celebrating domestic chaos with one fixed idea: the family is stronger than the fragile order beyond its doorstep. This is all very Catholic. As the Catholic Church puts it, “The family is the original cell of social life,” and by the principle of subsidiarity —“it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for higher bodies to take over what lesser ones can do. The Willoughby household bears the first responsibility, with larger systems assisting but not supplanting that work. And if the systems don’t get that, they ought to watch out. It’s an idea that the cycle has a lot of fun with. The Willoughbys will probably never get much attention. I had hoped they might turn up in In a Green Tree , but they don’t. I like them a lot, so I thought I’d post the notes and graphs I made while thinking about them.

"The principal difference is that Lafferty plays them for laughs and sheer absurdity—his mode is the tall tale. If Paul Bunyan had not come first, Lafferty would have made him up." So here's a late-night Saturday rant after a nightcap or two. Once again, someone explained Lafferty to everyone in the Facebook Lafferty group, and it was what one would expect. Lafferty, teller of tall tales. Over there, that's Paul Bunyan. It puts me in mind of a savage moment from Douglas Nash Bush. Reviewing a book, he said, I have been unable to find one new fact. This is not about condescension. It’s a demand for a writer you care about: be smarter. Here are a few reasons people might want to rethink this tiny box Lafferty gets placed in and consider why he might be an artist who appears to tell tall tales, and why the tall tale toe scuffle is a bit like saying that Mark Twain writes local color. Myth, not mere exaggeration. Serious philosophical scaffolding. Wildly experimental forms. Coherent long-game world building. Ethical and theological gravity. Precision under play. Alternate logics with rigor. Global, not just American resources: Irish, Biblical, etc. Characters as communities. Genre range that breaks the tall tale box.

Lafferty’s In a Green Tree  contains the titles of many works and makes allusions to others. Here is a partial Green Tree  reading list: Adams, Henry:   T he Education of Henry Adams Appleton, Victor:   Tom Swift books Arlen, Michael:   The Green Hat Belloc, Hilaire:  Multiple works including History of England  and The Servile State Benet, Stephen Vincent:   "The King of the Cats" Bennet, Arnold:  Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Biggers, Earl Derr:   Seven Keys to Baldpate Bruns, Friedrich:   Book of German Lyrics Burckhardt, Jacob:   The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Burroughs, Edgar Rice:   Tarzan books Byrne, Donn:   Blind Raftery Caesar, Julius:   Caesar's Commentaries Cather, Willa:   Death Comes to the Archbishop Chardenal, C. A.:   Complete French Course Chesterfield, Lord (Philip Stanhope):   Letters, Sentences, and Maxims Chesterton, G.K.:   Multiple works including The Man Who Was Thursday Cobb, Irving S.:   Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Conrad, Joseph:   Youth Cook, Albert Stanburrough:   First Book of Old English Corvo, Baron (Frederick Rolfe):   A History of the Borgias Dana, Richard Henry Jr.:   Two Years Before the Mast Daniell, Alfred:   French Scientific Reader Defoe, Daniel:   Moll Flanders Descartes, René:   Philosophical Writings Dickens, Charles:   Bleak House Dieker (Davis):   Elements of Surveying Doyle, Arthur Conan:   Adventures of Sherlock Holmes  and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Dreiser, Theodore:   An American Tragedy Dumas, Alexandre:   The Count of Monte Cristo  and The Three Musketeers Duncan, J.:   Applied Mechanics for Engineers Ellis, Havelock:   The Dance of Life Farrell, James T.:   Studs Lonigan series Ferber, Edna:   Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Finn, Father Francis J.:   Tom Playfair , Percy Wynn , Harry Dee Fitzpatrick, Benedict:   Ireland and the Making of Britain Génicot, Édouard:   Theologia Moralis Gibbon, Edward:   The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gogol, Nikolai:   Taras Bulba Gross, Milt:   Dunt Esk Hemingway, Ernest:   Men Without Women Herodotus:   The Persian Wars Hills, E.C. and J.D.M. Ford:   First Spanish Course Horn, Alfred Aloysius (and Ethelreda Lewis):   Trader Horn Hubbard, Elbert:   Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book Hudson, W. H.:   Green Mansions Hueneker (Huneker), James:   Painted Veils Hugo, Victor:   Mentioned as an author of works about the sewers of Paris . Huxley, Aldous:   Jesting Pilate Jeffers, Robinson:   Roan Stallion and Other Poems Joyce, James:   Finnegans Wake Lawrence, D.H.:   Mentioned in the context of inventing sex as a literary theme. Lawrence, T.E.:   The Revolt in the Desert Livy (Titus Livius):   The History of Rome Ludwig, Emil:   Napoleon Machiavelli, Niccolò:   The Prince  and The Discourses Marquis, Don:   archy and mehitabel  and "The Revolt of the Oyster" Maugham, W. Somerset:   Of Human Bondage Melville, Herman:   Mardi , Omoo , Typee Mencken, H.L.:   Prejudices Sixth Series Mommsen, Theodor:   The History of Rome Morley, Christopher:   Where the Blue Begin s Newman, John Henry:   Apologia Pro Vita Sua  and Grammar of Assent Noyes, Alfred:  " The Highwayman " O'Casey, Sean:   Mentioned as a playwright whose work was seen. O'Neill, Eugene:   Mentioned as a playwright whose works were read. Pascal, Blaise:   Pensees  and The Provincial Letters Patten, Gilbert (as Burt L. Standish):   Frank Merriwell books Poe, Edgar Allan:   The Complete Works of Poe Polo, Marco:   The Travels of Marco Polo Prescott, William H.:   History of the Conquest of Mexico   and History of the Conquest of Peru Rabelais, François:   Alluded to through his characters Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rambaud, Alfred:   Civilisation Française Rice, Elmer:   Mentioned as a playwright whose works were read. Saki (H. H. Munro):   The Short Stories of Saki Scott, Walter:   Rob Roy , Kenilworth , Old Mortality Shakespeare, William:   The Complete Work s Skeat, Walter W.:   A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language Stall, Sylvanus:   What A Young Boy Ought To Know Steinbeck, John:  Mentioned. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle):   The Charterhouse of Parma Stephens, James:   Deirdre Stephens, John L.:   Incidents of Travel in Yucatan Stevenson, Robert Louis:   Travels with a Donkey  and An Inland Voyage Stowe, Harriet Beecher:   Uncle Tom's Cabin Stripling, T.S. :  Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Sue, Eugene:   Mentioned as an author of works about the sewers of Paris. Sutting:   Primer of Navigation Sweet, Henry:   Anglo-Saxon Reade r Symonds, John Addington:   Renaissance in Italy Synge, John Millington:   Mentioned as a playwright whose work was seen. Tarkington, Booth:   The Magnificent Ambersons Thackeray, William Makepeace:   Vanity Fair  and Barry Lyndon Van Vechten, Carl:   Parties Vasari, Giorgio:   Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects Verne, Jules:   Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Wallace, Edgar:   Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Walsh, James J.:   T he Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries Wells, H.G.:   T he Time Machine and Other Stories West, Nathanael:   The Day of the Locust Wilder, Thornton:   The Bridge of San Luis Rey Wiseman, Nicholas:   Fabiola Wolfe, Thomas:  Mentioned. Wood, De Volson:   Principles of Elementary Mechanics Wood-Allen, Mary:   What A Young Girl Ought To Know Wordsworth, William:   "My heart leaps up when I behold." Xenophon (ed. Clark):   Anabasis Young, G.F.:   The Medici Other Alluded-to Creators (Historians, Philosophers, Theologians, Cartoonists, etc.) Burton, Robert:  Quoted for " A fabis abstinete! " (from Pythagoras). Congar, Yves :  Called a "pop Catholic writer." Fox, Fontaine:  Alluded to as the creator of the T oonerville Trolley  comic strip. Keynes, John Maynard:  Alluded to through the term "Keynesian." McIntire, O.O. :  Mentioned as the writer of the column "New York Day by Day." Murray, John Courtney :  Mentioned as a "pop Catholic writer." Opper, Frederick Burr:  Alluded to as the creator of the Happy Hooligan  comic strip. Plato:  Mentioned by name. Pythagoras:  Quoted via Burton. Suenens, Cardinal Léon Joseph :  Mentioned as a "pop Catholic writer." Tacitus:  Quoted: " Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appelunt ." Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre:  Mentioned as a "pop Catholic writer." Ziff, William B. :  Quoted directly on the subject of Palestinian Arabs.

My Messy Living Room A friend of the blog asked which books have shaped me. It’s not an easy question. The first time I read with real focus was at the age of fifteen. For Christmas, I’d asked for everything James Joyce wrote, along with some critical studies, including the well-known Ellmann biography (now the subject of a biography itself), which our family dog chewed to pulp, leaving the last hundred pages soaked in slobber. That year, I read mostly Joyce, books about Joyce, and books Joyce read. The next year, maybe out of impatience with Joyce, my father gave me the full Princeton edition of Kierkegaard, and a new cycle began. What follows is a list of books and writers that have mattered to me, grouped loosely by theme.   The Desert Island Scenario The Douay-Rheims parallel with the Latin Vulgate and the unrevised King James On the Nature of Animals  by Claudius Aelianus (not a boring page) The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri (my lifetime book) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Summa Theologica  and the Catena Aurea  by Thomas Aquinas Gargantua and Pantagruel   by François Rabelais (Sir Thomas Urquhart translation) The Anatomy of Melancholy   by Robert Burton The Collected Works of Jeremy Taylor (the "Shakespeare of the Divines") The Oxford English Dictionary   Criticism I Return To   I’ve been fortunate in my education. It started at a traditional private high school, continued through an undergraduate program that blended science and language study, during which I worked as a geology TA and later conducted fieldwork in Spain, and culminated in graduate school, where I learned from folks ranging from the methodologically conservative to the radically experimental. Along the way, I had the chance to meet critics I admired and others working in areas I will never connect with. I came of age in the post-theory era, when it was still assumed that everyone should be familiar with literary theory. Even so, my critical tastes have always leaned toward the old-fashioned, which, I suppose, is only natural for someone drawn to the eighteenth century, a subfield long known for attracting traditionalists. In that sense, it’s a bit like the old joke about medievalists: there are medievalists, and then there are those Chaucerians. Charles Whibley   (1859–1930) – An English journalist and literary critic known for his conservative essays and contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine , most of which were anonymous. If he is remembered today, it’s for being T. S. Eliot’s mentor. But he was a tussler. To enjoy him, you need to immerse yourself in the politics of the day. Much of his best writing was done anonymously; in public, he was far more polite than he truly was.   Desmond MacCarthy  (1877–1952) – A British literary critic and journalist, Desmond MacCarthy was prominent in the Bloomsbury Group, though not quite of it. More pitied now than read. Best known for his essays and editorial work, he’s largely forgotten. He rather perfectly embodies Cyril Connolly’s line: “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” To me, he represents the last true gasp of the traditional English man of letters. Most of his work remains uncollected, but it’s all well above the average. If I could write like anyone, it would be MacCarthy.   Ernst Robert Curtius  (1886–1956) – A German literary scholar renowned for his work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages , which explored the continuity of classical traditions in medieval literature. It is still essential to read if you want to take the royal road to understanding that tradition, which is the tradition.   Hugh Kingsmill  (1889–1949) – A British writer and journalist known for his biographies, essays, and satire. He was quite a piece of work, one of those self-professed hacks who frequently operated at a genius level and wasted it on ephemera. A brilliant anthologist. If he’s remembered, it’s likely for his biography of Charles Dickens, a favorite book of George Orwell’s. Kingsmill is always fun to argue with, and reading him feels like being sharpened. He was also one of the last great editors of Punch . Typical Kingsmill: "Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude."   F. L. Lucas  (1894–1967) – An English literary critic and classicist, brilliant intelligence officer, terrifying polemicist, and towering snob, he’s best known for his book Style and his groundbreaking editorial work. There is no way mere humans can live up to Lucas’s standards, but it’s obvious to me that he has the correct ones.   Erich Auerbach  (1892–1957) – A German philologist and literary critic, acclaimed for his seminal work Mimesis , who also wrote brilliantly about Dante. One can take or leave even the best literary criticism, but  Mimesis  changes everyone who reads it closely.   Northrop Frye  (1912–1991) – A Canadian literary theorist and critic, Northrop Frye is best known for The Anatomy of Criticism , though his work is remarkably wide-ranging. I own his collected works and enjoy his writing style more than that of almost any other critic. It’s not flashy, but you always know where Frye stands. He once said that his prose was modeled on George Bernard Shaw’s, which makes sense. As much as I dislike Shaw the man, he perfected the classical style in English: prose with the force and consistency of a riveting gun that won’t stop. Shaw's Collected Prefaces  are a case study in how every sentence can be wrong, but every word perfectly placed. Frye writes like that.   Guy Davenport  (1927–2005) – An American writer, translator, and illustrator, best known for his essays and fiction that blend scholarship with storytelling. Davenport is someone who opens doors to places you did not know existed. I first read him in my early teens and have always been grateful that I came across his work.   A Few Books About Imagination   My interest in Lafferty doesn’t stem from a deep engagement with genre fiction, though I’ve always loved great fantasy, especially when it’s understood more broadly than the marketing category shaped by Lester Del Rey and others. The stuff in the fantasy and sf section of the bookstore does very little for me. When I turn to genre for escapism, it’s usually to mystery or crime procedurals.. Deutsche Sagen , 2 Volumes (1812–1815) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – Their early collections of German legends and folklore, distinct from the later fairy tales, rank among the greatest compilations ever assembled. It’s something of a crime that they’ve only been translated into English once. These two volumes are pure German joy, along with Johann Peter Hebel’s  Treasure Chest  and a copy of  Simplicius Simplicissimus . The closest English writing that feels like this to me is Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas , which Lafferty apparently loved. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the Spain section of The Flame is Green , where it served as a major influence. (As an aside, Smollett’s version of Don Quixote  is, in my overopinionated view, the only enjoyable one in English.)   Khaled: A Tale of Arabia  (1891) by F. Marion Crawford – A "fantasy" novel set in an Arabian Nights-inspired world, exploring themes of love and transformation by the unjustly forgotten F. Marion Crawford. He picked a fight with Henry James over posterity, and he didn’t win. This is ironic because the cultured Americans that James loved to write about were far more like F. Marion Crawford than James himself was.   Marcel Schwob  (1867–1905) – A French symbolist writer known for works like The Book of Monelle (1894) and Imaginary Lives (1896), blending historical fiction with philosophical themes. Fortunately, he is now in print. One of the secret masters. No Schwob, no Borges.   Lady into Fox  (1922) by David Garnett – A novella about a woman who transforms into a fox. This is slick fantasy, but it has so much edge that it belongs to a fantasy tradition that doesn’t quite have the right name, one that overlaps with Lafferty in many ways. It shocks without being offensive. Perfection in what it does.   Devil’s Tor  by David Lindsay – I’m in the minority in thinking this is his best novel. Not for everyone.   Tros of Samothrace  (1934) by Talbot Mundy – Talbot Mundy is my favorite of the Argosy  crowd, just edging out writers like Harold Lamb. Tros of Samothrace  is a historical adventure set in ye olde ancient times, following the exploits of the titular Greek hero. Of all his books, King of the Khyber Rifles  is probably the one I enjoy most. Mundy reads like a pulpy, left-leaning version of John Buchan. Regarding Buchan, I’d bet money Lafferty was very familiar with Prester John . Mundy was a theosophist and a nutjob, but he could tell a yarn.   Henry Treece  (1911–1966) – A British author best known for his historical novels for young readers, particularly the Viking Trilogy — Viking's Dawn  (1955), The Road to Miklagard  (1957), and Viking's Sunset  (1960). Much of his finest work is illustrated by the astonishing Charles Keeping. I’ve spent more time than I probably should thinking about this much-neglected writer. Like Lafferty, his imagination circles apocalyptic violence and the death of worlds. I hope someone writes a book about him.   Gormenghast (1946–1959) by Mervyn Peake – A gothic fantasy trilogy comprising Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), depicting the lives of the Groan family in a decaying castle. It’s something I return to every few years. I'm also a huge fan of Peake's art and nonsensical verse.   The Collected Jorkens  by Lord Dunsany – A three-volume collection of short stories featuring Mr. Joseph Jorkens, a raconteur who tells fantastical tales in a London gentlemen's club setting. This is one of my favorite genres, and it was fun to see Lafferty pastiche and mock it in Space Chantey .   Philosophers Who Shape My Thinking G. W. F. Hegel  (1770–1831) – A German idealist philosopher, best known for Phenomenology of Spirit. Taking classes on German Idealism—especially Kant and Hegel—had a major influence on me, not least because they demanded real stamina and were taught by a leading scholar. While German Idealism doesn’t appeal to me personally, it’s been invaluable for understanding later philosophical developments. Hegelian ideas like the inverted world stick with me.   Arthur Schopenhauer  (1788–1860) – A German philosopher of pessimism who saw the world as driven by irrational will and deeply influenced existentialism, psychoanalysis, and literature. He was probably the first philosopher I read seriously. It was a good choice because he writes well.   William James  (1842–1910) – An American psychologist and philosopher, William James was a central figure in both pragmatism and functional psychology, and is widely known for his letters and major works such as The Varieties of Religious Experience . I return to James at least once a year, drawn by the warmth of his style and his approach to life. My favorite of his works will probably always be The Principles of Psychology , which has little to do with his pragmatism. His essay on the “PhD Octopus” was prophetic.   R. G. Collingwood  (1889–1943) – An English philosopher and historian, R.G. Collingwood is best known for his work on the philosophy of history and art, and for his idealist view that we understand the past through imaginative re-enactment. His ideas shaped how I thought about historical understanding before I fully committed to philosophical realism. I first read him in my early twenties, at just the right time. When I think about history, he’s usually somewhere in the background, still shaping how I feel it, even if not how I understand the workings of historical imagination.   Ludwig Wittgenstein  (1889–1951) – An Austrian-British philosopher who fundamentally reshaped analytic philosophy with works like Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  and Philosophical Investigations . I’ve never regretted the time I spent reading him. His deep appreciation for Tolstoy also made me a lifelong admirer.   Michael Oakeshott  (1901–1990) – A British political philosopher who championed a skeptical, tradition-based approach to politics and critiqued rationalist models of governance. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly good man, and if you hear much about him outside conservative circles, it’s likely in connection with his treatment of Iris Murdoch and others. Still, his views on liberal education align almost exactly with mine. Like Richard McKeon, he’s someone I read not only for the sharp analytic insight but also because of a deep temperamental affinity.   Donald Davidson  (1917–2003) – An American philosopher influential in the philosophy of language, action theory, and mind, Donald Davidson is best known for his theory of anomalous monism and his account of radical interpretation. When I know I’m speaking with someone fundamentally opposed to my deepest commitments, Davidson and the tradition that loosely follows from him are usually where I begin. Like Kripke’s idea of rigid designation, his work is useful for deflating overextended claims about metaphor and meaning, which are common in my professional circles. Much of what passes for theory in these contexts often feels to me like a thin, stylized version of counter-Enlightenment thinking, Vico or Herder repackaged in the vocabulary of whichever continental framework happens to be fashionable.   Reinhart Koselleck  (1923–2006) – A German conceptual historian who pioneered the study of historical semantics and emphasized the temporal structures of political and social concepts. The value of his work is tied to German, which is a shame.   Niklas Luhmann  (1927–1998) – A German sociologist and systems theorist, known for his highly abstract theory of social systems as self-referential, autonomous networks. If I didn’t believe in God, I would be tempted to see social systems the way Luhmann does. Although I disagree with many of his presuppositions, his histories of ideas like intimacy and the art world get much right, in my mind, and he is someone I often think about.   Raymond Geuss  (b. 1946) – An American philosopher critical of liberal political theory, influential in political realism and the Frankfurt School tradition. He writes the smartest essays I have read that have a view on things just about as far from mine as is possible. One of my favorite thinkers for his intellectual acuity and brilliance with language. The best living philosopher who is also great writer.   Robert Brandom  (b. 1950) – An American philosopher working in the tradition of analytic pragmatism, especially known for inferentialism and his interpretations of Hegel and Sellars. He is not someone anyone is going to read for his style, but he is the most interesting living philosopher to me outside the Catholic tradition. Without faith, I would probably be very convinced by his project; and I think he is correct about how normative commitments work in language, even if I disagree about why.   Collected Works That Are Important to Me   These are writers whose complete works I own and have read, mostly, if not entirely. They feel like good friends, like books sometimes do when you’ve lived with them long enough.   Samuel Butler (1612-1680) Alexander Pope  (1688–1744) Samuel Johnson  (1709–1784) Laurence Sterne  (1713–1768) Henry Fielding  (1707–1754) Walter Savage Landor  (1775–1864) William Hazlitt  (1778–1830) Thomas De Quincey  (1785–1859) Thomas Babington Macaulay  (1800–1859) – The real inventor of modern English prose. Lytton Strachey  (1880–1932) William Faulkner  (1897–1962) – My favorite American writer who is not R. A. Lafferty.   Private Obsessions   Death’s Jest-Book  (1850) by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) – A gothic drama blending Renaissance tragedy with macabre humor, reflecting Beddoes's preoccupation with mortality and the supernatural. It is, finally, shifty and inscrutable.   William Barnes  (1801–1886) – An English poet and philologist known for his poems in the Dorset dialect; he is a largely forgotten literary genius who captured sounds one can only here in his work. Something similar can be said about another favorite work, The Eneados , Gavin Douglas's 1513 Scots of Virgil's Latin Aeneid.   Mór Jókai  (1825–1904) – Mór Jókai is something special. Told by the Death’s Head is probably the place to start. There was a brief fashion for translating him into English in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, it died out.   The Dawn in Britain  (1906) by Charles Montagu Doughty (1843–1926) – An epic poem exploring the early history and mythology of Britain. This one would take a long time to describe. There is simply nothing like Doughty’s English. He decided that Shakespeare had ruined the English language and went from there.   Uncle Stephen  (1931) by Forrest Reid (1875–1947) – The first in the Tom Barber trilogy. Reid was a friend of C. S. Lewis, who enjoyed his works. He was gay, something apparent in all his novels. Like Denton Welch, a brilliant stylist.   Caleb Catlum’s America  (1936) by Vincent McHugh (1904–1983) – This one follows Caleb Catlum across America. Full of satire and folklore. I would pair it with Constance Rourke .   Neither Man Nor Dog  (1946) by Gerald Kersh (1911–1968) – A collection of short stories, this one shows Kersh's versatility in genres ranging from crime to the supernatural. Kersh was Harlan Ellison’s favorite writer, and Ellison was right about how great the stories are. A favorite, right up there with the short stories of Robert Aickman.   Manservant and Maidservant  (1947) by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) – All of Ivy Compton-Burnett is like Lafferty: all of one piece. If you like her work, which is mainly dialogue-driven and about as wickedly funny and darkly comic as writing gets, you’re in luck because there is a lot of it. Jane Austen if Jane Austen had absolutely zero sentimentality.   I Capture the Castle  (1948) by Dodie Smith (1896–1990) – A coming-of-age story narrated by a teenage girl living in a decaying English castle; a longtime favorite novel.   Mr. Weston's Good Wine  (1927) by T. F. Powys (1875–1953) – An allegorical novel where Mr. Weston visits a village to offer his "good wine," with themes of grace and redemption. I enjoy very, very few writers as much as T. F. Powys. He is my British R. A. Lafferty, though he is not nearly as hopeful. As with Lafferty, his short stories are a good place to start.   An Armful of Warm Girl  (1953) by W. M. Spackman (1905–1990) – Spackman sees straight through Americans. The comic book work of Carl Barks (1901–2000) – Perfection in its category. If you think you’re too grown-up to enjoy Barks, you’re missing out on one of the great American storytellers.   Maurice Richardson ( 1907–1978) – Richardson is remembered mainly because of J. G. Ballard, but Ballard was wrong about him. His best work was written for newspapers and has never been collected. It is brilliant, biting, and forgotten. He also wrote a scathing memoir of his time at Harrow, which includes a sharp portrait of one of the fascinating literary eccentrics of the coming age, the endlessly self-pitying E. H. W. Meyerstein. Meyerstein is hard to find, but worth seeking out, especially for his novel Tom Tallion  (1952) if you want something very different.   Yvor Winters  (1900–1968) and the Stanford Poetry Tradition – Not the syllabus version of the Stanford poets that makes the rounds in writing programs. The other one—the one that includes Edgar Bowers and J. V. Cunningham . The one where form matters, epigram counts as thought, and style is a kind of ethics. My favorite American poets of the 20th century are John Crowe Ransom and James Merrill .   Favorite 20th-Century Poet   David Jones  (1895–1974) – British poet, painter, and modernist. My favorite 20th-century poet. He isn't easy, but he is the real thing. The Sleeping Lord is the place to start, and having a crib's more than helpful. Video introduction.   Catholic Thinkers   Patriaric Fathers Thomas Aquinas  (1225–1274) John Henry Newman  (1801–1890) Léon Bloy  (1846–1917) –The original pilgrim of the absolute and perhaps the most difficult Christian you will ever encounter—one who is, unnervingly often, right. Pope Francis startled the Catholic world by quoting him. Flannery O’Connor once said she wished he would be the iceberg to her ship. You can be certain that, at some point, he has said something to offend every person capable of taking offense. “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” G. K. Chesterton  (1874–1936) Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange  (1877–1964) Ronald Knox  (1888–1957) Romano Guardini  (1885–1968) Christopher Dawson  (1889–1970) Hans Urs von Balthasar  (1905–1988) (With some serious reservations.) Jean-Pierre Torrell Servais Pinckaers Thomas Joseph White   (b. 1971) – My favorite living theologian. Andrew Willard Jones     Reference Works I Lose Myself In   Etymologies  by Isidore of Seville – An early medieval encyclopedia aiming to summarize all existing knowledge, often through etymological explanations. Oxford English Dictionary  and its essential companion Dictionary of Untranslatables : A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin – Explores philosophical, literary, and political terms that resist easy translation. Percy’s Anecdotes  by Sholto and Reuben Percy – A collection of varied anecdotes. Lord Byron called it the only thing you needed to look educated in England. The Classical Tradition  – A comprehensive work on the reception and influence of Greco-Roman antiquity,  edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis. Full of mini-essays with information everyone should know. I nformation: A Historical Companion   A Dictionary of the Underworld  by Eric Partridge (1949) – A lexicon cataloging British and American criminal slang, offering insights into the language of the underworld. The Fun Shelves

But for to speke of vertuous beautee, Thanne was she oon the faireste under sonne; For povreliche yfostred up was she— No likerous lust was thurgh hir herte yronne. Wel ofter of the welle than of the tonne She drank, and for she wolde vertu plese, She knew wel labour, but noon ydel ese. "The Clerk's Tale" Somehow Griselda had remained one of the really good-lookers. "For All Good Folks at Picketwire" Picking up from “Dorg,” I want to look at Lafferty's “For All Poor Folks At Picketwire.” The two stories have a connection: the weird notion of eating rocks and how that might hurt or help humanity. But “Picketwire” is the harder of the two. Its plot goes as follows. Lemuel Windfall could be a great inventor, yet he holds back. He knows his inventions will become obsolete, which demotivates him. Furthermore, he wants primordial working conditions, which are impossible. He wants to invent outside of time and space. His wife, Griselda, just wants him to make some money for their family and give her a trip to Paris. The years go on. The number of kids in the family grows. For some service rendered, Jasher Halfhogan gives Lem a land deed to a remote spot on Picketwire Creek, Colorado. Years later, as an old man, Lem strikes a deal with Jasher to make earthy materials that weren’t possible before—things like edible sediment. He then goes away. When edible earth begins to appear for free, Lem's former financial backers come to see his wife, Griselda. She immediately sees the value in what Lem is doing. She visits a sibyl to learn more about where Lem is, and then goes to see him at Picketwire. At first she does not recognize him. He has become so bent and gnome-like. After they talk, he gives her a patent for a new substance he is teaching the poor folks at Picketwire to make— orichalcum. The story ends with Lem telling Grissie that all she has to do is think of Paris and she will be there. She does, and the story ends happily. What’s going on in this story? Over a decade ago, MPorcius wrote a response to it that gets at the main hurdle. Here is his take, a useful way in. “A few days ago I was very pleased to find the anthology Epoch in a Missouri flea market. Edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg and published in 1975, Epoch, which contains 24 original stories, purports to be a sample of 'the state of the art in science fiction' and 'the definitive SF book of this decade.' The front and back covers are full of such charming declarations ('the culmination of centuries of imagination'?!) Anyway, the first story I have read in Epoch is R. A. Lafferty’s ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire.’ This is another folksy downhome tall tale adorned with jokes that didn’t make me laugh. I don’t really care for this sort of thing, but I try to keep an open mind and give writers a chance to grow on me. (I always have in the back of my mind the knowledge that I was unimpressed by the first books I read by Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance, both of whom I now consider among my very favorite writers.) This story is about a backwoods inventor, a super genius who doesn’t care about money. All his life he has dreamed of being able to develop and manufacture items in a perfectly neutral environment, one without gravity, temperature, UV rays, etc. If I am interpreting the clues correctly, the inventor makes a deal with the Devil (or maybe some demon or angel) who allows him to start inventing and manufacturing in Purgatory, with a legion of kobolds and goblins as workmen – these kobolds and goblins are, in fact, the souls of the dead who are working off their sins. The inventor’s big new invention is edible rocks and clay, which is perhaps some Christian symbolism which is escaping me. Before the inventor got to Purgatory the kobolds and goblins were creating coal and petroleum. The story includes allusions to Virgil and Dante; there is a Sibyl, for example, and Purgatory is accessible through caves on the Earth’s surface. Immediately after reading ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire,’ I thought it deserved to be ranked as merely average, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. The story is a sort of puzzle that I am still trying to figure out, which is a good sign that it was a worthwhile read. So I’ll have to give ‘For All the Poor Folks at Picketwire’ a thumbs up and continue scrounging the libraries, used bookstores and flea markets of the Middle West for the stories of R. A. Lafferty.”   MPorcius is right to describe “Picketwire” as puzzle-like. I recently wrote about two modes in Lafferty’s work, why it’s useful for readers to notice them, and how each creates a different kind of defamiliarization. One mode is didactic. It asks to be decoded. The other mode is palimphantic. It moves by association and asks to be reconstructed. In laying out that argument, I focused on “Puddles on the Floor” because it is dramatically palimphanic. This contrasts with “Picketwire,” which is didactic primarily, though both modes are, as usual, in play. In approaching the puzzle, three pieces seem especially important. 1. Two medieval notions shape the story and must be held in equipoise. Yes, this is a Purgatory story, but it is a purgatory story within a Patient Griselda tale, which makes it a marriage trial story. Patient Griselda comes from medieval folklore and is best known from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1353) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Clerk’s Tale" in The Canterbury Tales  (c. 1387–1400). She is remembered for her inhuman patience and obedience under terrible pressure, including losing her children and being cast out by her husband, the Marquis of Saluzzo, all because he wants to test her loyalty. The cruelty doesn't occur to him. She endures. Without complaint. In Lafferty's story, the patience/impatience theme is explicit in lines such as “Lem, everything that you've ever sold, you've already had it on the shelf for at least fifteen years,” Griselda would say with weary patience. “She had always been an impatient woman.” and perhaps more subtly in “The changes are all made without surgery. They are made, in fact, without the . . . ah . . . patient being touched in any way.” Patient Griselda stories are slippery. Often, they are made to divide readers. That is part of why they are slippery and part of what makes them appealing. In the 14th century, this took the form of the writer deciding how far to press the allegory. The more Griselda becomes a symbol for the soul, the less Griselda looks like a human victim of domestic abuse. Needless cruelty becomes virtuous longanimity. In the late Middle Ages, European writers played variations on this. Boccaccio (1313–1375) is characteristically wry about Griselda's suffering. Petrarch (1304–1374), writing shortly after Boccaccio and dying in 1374, emphasizes the allegorical Griselda who stands in for the soul’s steadfastness toward God. Chaucer (c. 1340s–1400) complicates Griselda by placing her tale in The Canterbury Tales  (c. 1387–1400), which also has the Wife of Bath. Then he complicates it further by making the teller a scrupulous clerk, slightly impatient but still respectful toward Petrarch’s high-mindedness. The result is a tale that leaves open where allegory ends and literality begins. What does Lafferty do? This is the first piece of the puzzle. It can easily wrongfoot the rea der because of how tempting to see Lem as the main character. His role is extraordinary. MPorcius reads the story that way, not mentioning Griselda. But this is to focus on Marquis of Saluzzo only. Lafferty does not hide the Griselda story structure, nor does he front-load it. The story begins with a massive emphasis on Lem's eccentricity and his Gnostic wish to evade the material constraints of nature to invent new material wonders, but each of the story’s three sections ends with Griselda. By the end, it's her story. She goes to Paris, still affectionate toward Lem but largely free of him. Getting the shape of the story right in one’s mind means taking this into account.   2. The story also plays with the concept of suffrages for the dead. Its title might look like a dedication, but it is a suffrage. One might ask what is for those poor folks at Picketwire? The answer is, "A suffrage is. It's for the poor souls in Purgatory." So, unsurprisingly, Lafferty does a lot with Purgatory in the story. Take the name Picketwire. This is the real-world Picketwire River, also known as the Purgatoire River, which flows through southeastern Colorado. “Purgatoire” comes from early French explorers who called it Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire —“River of Souls in Purgatory”—a reference to a local legend. Over time, English-speaking settlers adapted the name to “Picketwire,” a phonetic corruption of “Purgatoire.” In Lafferty, Picketwire is one of the gates to Purgatory. This is quite Irish of him, the best-known earthly passage to Purgatory being the first, the legendary cave portal said to have been opened by St. Patrick on what is now called Station Island . Here, it is worth slowing down. First, in the great Catholic debate over whether Purgatory is a condition or a place, or both, Lafferty splits the difference. He gives the reader just enough in this story to feel that it is a place, continuous with the material world, in the way that St. Patrick's cave is continuous with Station Island, but also a sense that it is somehow outside of space and time and therefore a condition. This matters because of the Communion of Saints: the living and the dead in Catholicism are connected in a way that is entirely alien to Protestantism. Unlike MPorcius, I do not see a connection to Dante beyond this one. Lafferty is firmly on Team Dante in making Purgatory feel intensely physical and continuous with the material world. In The Divine Comedy , Purgatory is on the other side of the world. It is a mountain. A real mountain. Made of rock. That physical sense of Purgatory belongs to a pre-Reformation and pre-Counter-Reformation imagination, and Lafferty keeps it alive in his way. You can beat a trail from your front door to Purgatory's entrance. Ulysses tried to do this in Dante Canto 26 of The Inferno . Later, in Canto 27 of Paradiso, Dante the pilgrim looks down from the heavens and sees the following: I saw that, from the time when I looked down before, I had traversed all of the arc of the first clime, from its midpoint to end, so that, beyond Cadiz, I saw Ulysses’ mad course and, to the east, could almost see that shoreline where Europa was sweet burden. Lafferty recapitulates this in the last sight of Roadstrum at the end of Space Chantey : Alas, we have the terminal report of him! The coded chatter gives the sighted mort of him, How out beyond the orb of Di Carissimus His sundered ship became a novanissimus . Dante's Purgatory At least four aspects of Purgatory are significant in the story: i. Purgatory is the antechamber of heaven because everyone in it will eventually arrive there. Once they do, Purgatory will be no more. That’s why it isn’t one of the final things and why it isn’t eschatological. It's a half-hogan, a half-house. Everyone ends up going the whole hog eschatologically. “No, not consciously I didn't invent him, Grissie. And yet I did invent him a little bit, I suppose. And he me. We are all formed by feedback and interaction. We see more than there is in other people, and we ourselves are seen for more than we are. And we grow to match our seeming. Don't you like Jasher [Halfhogan]?” “I've never met him, Lem. Every time I've seen him he was scurrying away like some night ghost that was afraid of being shone on by sunlight. Well, if he's a Halfhogan, what would a Wholehogan be?” “You really don't know, Griselda? Sometimes you astonish me,” Lemuel said. ii. Thomas Aquinas and others argued that Purgatory is in the earth and that its purifying fire is continuous with the torturing flames of hell below it. In Lafferty's story, this matters for what he draws from Plato: the red light of orichalcum. iii. Many of the story’s obscure jokes turn on the history of how Purgatory developed in sacred doctrine, from debates over whether one could earn merit while there (think of the value of Lem’s work) to the whole mini-history of Purgatory Lafferty gives the reader twice, doubling down on its significance for understanding the story.   “Jews, close your ears!” a prairie dog barked. “Greeks, harden your hearing!” a rattlesnake voiced. “Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!” a bull-bat spoke in a series of little booms. Here are the three major historical strands in the development of the doctrine of Purgatory. The prairie dog points the reader back to the patrological tradition of Purgatory. The rattlesnake points to the Greeks at the Council of Florence (1431 to 1449), where the Eastern and Western Churches formally split over the issue, especially over how the Roman Church had begun elaborating the doctrine. Most of the Greeks were not entirely against the idea of a post-life purgation, but they resisted its formalization. The bull-bat points to the Convanters (whose belief in double predestination eliminated the basis of Purgatory) and the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563), which issued the decree that would shape the Church’s approach from that point on: do not elaborate. Purgatory exists. That is enough. Little booms. Or as the Tridentine Decree on Purgatory put it: But let the more difficult and subtle questions which do not make for edification and, for the most part, are not conducive to an increase of piety (cf. I Tim. 1:4), be excluded from the popular sermons to uneducated people. Likewise they should not permit opinions that are doubtful and tainted with error to be spread and exposed. As for those things that belong to the realm of curiosity or superstition, or smack of dishonorable gain, they should forbid them as scandalous and injurious to the faithful. It’s this dialing down on Purgatory that came with the Counter-Reformation that, ironically, gives Lafferty license to let his imagination run wild with the details. Could Purgatory be an engine of matter-creation? 4. Lafferty spins medieval folklore by way of Gnosticism and quantum physics. What Lem wants (his gnostic pride) for a workshop is a quantum vacuum, which brings him as close as possible to conditions of creation ex nihilo . I suspect the story also draws on ideas from quantum theory, such as quantum entanglement, seen in the connection between Jasher and Lem, and bilocation, as when we get the double location of the Picketwire. Lafferty maps it onto real rivers named for Purgatory. It is a classic Lafferty move. Finally, I see a strong connection to Einstein’s " spooky action at a distance ," not just in the idea of Lem’s quantum lab, but also in the way he and Grissie shrink: It was a queer, refractory sort of place, but Griselda had adjusted to it in everything except her eyes and her mind. Her dinner date had been getting smaller, and the cafe-restaurant had been getting stranger and more intimate. and in Grissie's line "I hardly know how to say this, but there is something very spooky about the place." Those are the main puzzle pieces, as far as I can see, although a few smaller things stand out. For instance, the sibyl in the story comes straight out of Virgil’s Aeneid , but Lafferty probably also knew that the much less familiar Sibylline Oracles   were once used in arguments for the existence of Purgatory. He would have found that if he looked up “Sibyl” in his beloved Catholic Encyclopedia . The names Jasher and Lemuel are drawn from the more mysterious parts of the Old Testament for the same reason: no one knows who King Lemuel was, and no one knows much about the lost Book of Jasher . And the red sweater that Grissie says she will send to Lem is a variation on the red cap worn by kobolds in the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen , as well as a twist on the fires of hell that once flamed up into Purgatory being turned down a little after the Council of Trent. So, where does this leave the reader? With permanent, and seemingly author-intended, options that remain provocatively irreconcilable. As a cultural symbol, Patient Griselda is overdetermined. She is many things: moral exemplar and moral ambiguity; the good wife and the ridiculous wife; victim of cruelty and paragon of second-order virtue; political allegory and spiritual allegory. Some of that applies here. Allegorically, Lafferty’s Impatient Griselda may have died, moving from Purgatory into heaven, journeying after death from Lem’s quantum cave to her long-dreamed, heavenly Paris. Or she may still be alive, having left Purgatory to walk the Haussmann-planned streets of real Paris, now filthy rich, like the exploitative sharks who begged her to find Lem. Lafferty keeps it wide open: “I'll send it, Lem, I'll send it!” Griselda cried. She kissed him, or perhaps she missed him. She thought Paris.