The only encouraging statistics I can think of is that "Believers on the average have six times as many children as atheists." — Letter Your fertility rate is pathetic. You barely double in fifty years. Your medicine, adequate in other fields, is worse than childish in this. We find that some of the nostrums peddled to your people actually impede fertility. Well, get in the Surgeon General and a few of the boys and we'll begin to correct the situation. — "Guesting Time" Lafferty finished “Guesting Time,” one of his classic early stories, in September 1960. A few months earlier, in May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had changed America forever by approving Enovid, the contraceptive pill. There may be no direct connection between the two, between Enovid and Skandia, but in hindsight they bear on the shape of Lafferty’s career. “Guesting Time” is light and funny. It dares to be silly about something that mattered deeply to him, skewers population-panic fiction, and belongs unmistakably to his early genre period. It is hard to imagine Lafferty writing a story about fertility as light as “Guesting Time” once the sexual revolution had become one of the central fronts in the culture war. He will the write stories like “Ishmael into the Barrens.” It will surprise no one that Lafferty was pro-life. Nor is it hard to see why he would regard the sexual revolution as one sign of Flatland and amnesia, a cultural movement centered on what he regarded, to use one of his own words, as the grubby. As the 1960s went on, fears of population explosion entered public consciousness more forcefully, reaching a popular peak with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted worldwide famine and apocalypse. What was actually happening in America, however, was the beginning of a long-term decline in fertility. I suspect that the name of the visitors’ home planet derives from the New Testament Greek word for stumbling block, skandalon. Lafferty’s point, perhaps, is that the command of Genesis, “be fruitful and multiply,” had itself become a scandal. People had the story of fertility backwards. In “Guesting Time,” Earth's immigration officials are baffled when people claiming to be from Skandia materialize out of nowhere at ports of entry across the country, here called the Amalgamated States. The population of these visitors geometrically multiplies. It soon reaches ten billion within two days and overwhelms the planet's physical space and resources. Ordinary people, such as the Trux family, find their homes and yards swarmed by thousands of Skandias who cheerfully construct miniature, densely packed cities (complete with multi-story housing, factories, and entertainment venues) directly on residential properties and within existing houses. It is, of course, told in a way that only Lafferty could tell it. The Skandians themselves are friendly and polite. If there were not so many of them, they would be ideal guests. They view Earth's relatively sparse population as a tragedy and want to distribute fertility charms to the locals. People should multiply and fill the planet's empty spaces. While many everyday Earth citizens adapt to the crowded conditions and become enamored with their new neighbors, the planet's leaders view the sudden influx as a dire threat to human survival. Here, an element of conspiracy enters the story. President Bar-John of the United States and other world regents try to expel the visitors using military force before Earth's food and air supplies are completely depleted. When Earth's armed forces open fire on the gathered crowds of Skandians, the visitors are unharmed and interpret the gunfire as celebratory pyrotechnics. Shortly after the military strike fails, the Skandias begin to vanish, explaining to the crowds that their massive presence was merely a short, preliminary visit by a token force. As they depart, leaving many Earthlings feeling surprisingly lonely and eager for their return, the Skandia leaders promise to come back the following week in much more substantial numbers. They say they will bring their children next time. The difficulty of imagining Lafferty writing a story like “Guesting Time” after a certain point in his career has less to do with any change in his principles than with his sense of what had happened to the world around him. If one had to put a date on that change, at least on this issue, 1968 is decisive. The reaction within much of the Catholic Church to Humanae Vitae shaped the direction of his work in the 1970s and 1980s at least as much as the other aspects of Flatland did. Lafferty himself described the aftermath in apocalyptic terms: But the Heresy broke out in its full fury after Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) on July 25, 1968. By one count, it was exactly half of the priests of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa Diocese who signed a frothy-with-hatred letter rejecting the encyclical. This was before any of them had even read that wonderful and holy work. They already had their Covenant of Disobedience ready when they got the advance word ‘The Pope’s answer is “No.”’ Since that time I have heard only one priest of Oklahoma defend the Magnificent Document. He’s now a feeble and nearly blind resident at Franciscan Villa at Broken Arrow. That sense of betrayal helps explain the distance between the good-natured Skandians of “Guesting Time”—and the happier American Catholic world behind that pro-life fantasy—and the more complicated, angrier satire of later works such as Iron Tongue of Midnight, with its fetal homunculi.

There are nine basic colors: hylicon, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and mystes. There are persons who say that there are more basic colors than these: but they confuse hues with colors, or they list non-basic colors such as the purples and magentas and the variously named non-spectral violets and reds. To such persons we can only say, "You are mistaken." There are other persons who say that there are fewer basic colors than these listed here, that the first and last colors of our list are not visible colors at all. To such persons we can only say, “Go get your eyes fixed.” The three most knowledgeable authorities on this subject (God, a cosmopolitan; Iris, a Grecian lady; and E. I. Watkin, an Englishman) agreed that there were these nine basic colors in the bow in the clouds and that all other colors are contained in them. A totally unformed energy-matter cannot actually exist; it is mere potentiality. But the formed matter of one level becomes the matter of a higher form. Inorganic energy-matter is the matter of vital form, life in turn of spirit. — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds Probably advanced Lafferty. A great story. Lafferty fairly often returns to the possibility of nulled existence: not overpowering evil, but low-energy conditions of smallness, boredom, apathy, unimaginativeness, indifference, and negation of the duty (interviews; Aurelia) to be happy. It creates what he calls the wan wit and the tin eye. What he calls the trashed-life principle and the story blight of heroic tedium. The best-known example in the Lafferty canon is Ouden-related, the cliché. Ouden is nothingness, the principle of privation figured as an empty mouth; but Ouden is also that which exploits negation and enervation. That which kills with lies and platitudes. The latter is how I understand Lafferty’s mysterious Putty Dwarf, who is called both a devil and ectoplasmic boredom. He is Lafferty’s most pathetic devil. For me, the Putty Dwarf is also Lafferty’s most memorable image of embodied yet abandoned actualization. I find Edmund Weakfish to be far creepier than Carmody Overlark. He is perversion in its truest sense, one of the archetypes of the age in Not to Mention Camels. Matter (putty) insufficiently informed (dwarf) with the result that the breathing person sets itself against what ultimately must be pneuma or Ruach. Matter that rejects Christ’s spittle. As such, he is a figure for noetic darkening. The anti-rhythm (in the story’s language) within the person degrades into cliché and motto, appetite and routine. The self falls into das Man. (“That business about the slime of the earth and of spittle has offended many.”) Or, in Lafferty’s other image for it, into pied, disordered, printer’s type. Words become un-worded. Logos is withdrawn. Better to have never been born. It is the rejection of order Barnaby finds when, desperate to talk to her, he cuts into his dead daughter’s throat and sifts through the primordial dust extruded by her backward passage into sub-cognizable hyle. Barnaby wants to communicate with his dead daughter, but she is now this: The Putty Dwarf is the pied piper of pied type, we are told, and pied type is a nightmare. Two relations seem to be at work, what I am going to call negation and privation, so that I can talk about the strangeness. Both bear on what Lafferty takes to be the moral evil most associated with the Putty Dwarf: suicide. Understanding how negation relates to privation in Lafferty’s imagination is part of what makes “Mud Violet” so difficult, and I may be wrong about this, yet it is where I have arrived after reading the story many times. I’ll spare you my crazy theory about how Roy Mega works in the story. Big picture now. Strictly speaking, in the Catholic tradition, only privation is evil. As you know, privation is the absence of a good that ought to be present in a thing according to its nature, which is determined by its essence, which has a final cause. A stone does not have sight, but the stone’s lack of sight is not evil. It is a negation, not a privation. But Lafferty imagines what Harry in the story call the Third Realm. The Third Realm is a condition of near-nonexistence in which a person negates himself by sinking toward hyle, stopping just short of the pure and innocent potentiality of prima materia. It is not an aesthetic strength of “Mud Violet” that it equates this with rock and roll. Lafferty’s choice to enfigure his metaphysical conceit as anti-rock just distracts from it now that most people can hear what is artful in rock. This is an aesthetic blemish that one feels strongly in 2026, but that may be less of a distraction for future readers. I have called it theotropic dissonance. Lafferty knows all this is difficult stuff, and he knows he is taking a cheap but fun for him shot, so he gives the following dialogue between Edmund Weakfish and a student: “Mere matter is always invisible,” Priscilla maintained. “It becomes visible only when touched with spirit. Mere matter may recognize itself in other ways though. I have always suspected that Loretta is mere matter with none, or very little, spirit.” “I have lots of spirit,” Loretta Sheen protested. “Oh, we will tangle, girl, we will tangle!” “How is it that all of us see rocks, for instance?” Weakfish asked. “I suppose that all of us can, and surely rocks are somewhat lacking in spirit.” “I don’t know,” Priscilla said. “I haven’t worked out that part in my mind yet.” “I haven’t worked out that part in my mind” is a beautiful Lafferty line. That the prima materia is invisible is a position that goes back to Aristotle. Familiar lumber from the metaphysical tradition. It is invisible because it lacks all form, and even rocks have form. One can’t see what is absolutely formless. “Mud Violet” presses on the relation of matter and form by imagining persons who can negate themselves sideways. They do not simply rise or fall on the ladder of being. They somehow step out of it, orthogonally, into a state of near nonexistence. They do not merely lose a perfection proper to personhood the way I do when I act uncharitably to someone. They try to become the an entity for which that perfection would no longer be required. They poltergeist themselves. The sound of success is that poltering knock. What is left is not ordinary moral deformation, but something more radical: aspects of form that would make evil intelligible have been subtracted from the person. The result is a residue of personhood nearly without form, or more specifically, a new morphe with less eidos. It is less like losing sight in one eye than like losing the Pax6 gene that in-formed the eye. To underline the difference, consider ordinary suicide beside the mud-violet death trip. The latter is an ontological arrest or regression, a scrambling of form back into mud of barely shaped hyle. It is a decision to stop, to back out of the life affair by surrendering of one’s final cause. The secondary matter composing the physical body is, as it were, rewound from achieved actuality. Such an act would not simply deprive a formed organism of life. It would negate very advanced forms, presence, and actuality that make being good. Its horror lies in un-creation: the dialing down of being into something less good, less full of being, because less fully present, even if not more culpably evil. The mud violet death is an orthogonal exit that makes “Mud Violet” a cautionary tale. I think Lafferty’s point is that what presents itself as mere negation is usually privation in disguise, so that the horror of the Putty Dwarf is the presence of unrealized form that thinks itself happy to remain unrealized: the shabby face of privation masquerading as negation. In Green Tree, Lafferty has a down-home phrase for it. He calls it looking for “something with not much to it.” It is the life affair looked at through tin eyes. One can recognize it in various ways. It appears as political naivety, satisfaction with inferiority, hostility to beauty, and susceptibility to self-destruction. “Mud Violet” is the second of the Men Who Knew Everything stories, but the first to use E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds, and to ask big questions like this. I think Lafferty has the following passage from Watkin on his mind: Material energy reflects on a lower plane the energy of the will—the former informed by the order of physical arrangement, the latter by the order of divine charity. Nowhere from the bottom to the summit of the ladder of being is there a complete break. Physical energy differs from biological instinct only by lack of being; it is biological instinct minus. Similarly, biological instinct differs from rational will by lack of being; it is will minus. And the concupiscent will of natural man is in turn a deficiency of being as compared with his will of supernatural love, receptive of the Absolute Will that is Love itself. Finally the obscurity, the enigma of matter, known only by its effects in so far as they can be formulated in mathematical sequence, but itself an unknown, indeed an unknowable, mirrors the transcendent incomprehensibility of God. And its operation, electric force, in itself also an unknown quantity, becomes manifest in the light and power it supplies. The idea is to write a story about persons reduced to the lowest possible degree of being, the last point at which personhood can still be predicated of them. “The All-at-Once Man,” the first of TMWKE's stories, is a Valentinian fantasy, and its connection to the second story in the sequence is puzzling, though I suspect that the connection is matter, or hyle. In the Valentinian system, there are pneumatics, psychics, and hylics, and Lafferty’s poltergeists in the story are literally hylics, mud violet. I wonder what Lafferty knew about Heracleon. Whatever the case, Ultraviolet is the first story that argues with Watkin on color. Along the way, Watkin is named as one of three authorities, the other two being God and the rainbow itself, a Greek woman named Iris. There are more than a few allusions to Watkin’s meditation. Barnaby’s daughter, Loretta Sheen, does not die just of convulsions, but of empurpled convolutions; Elroy is beyond Violet (Lonsdale); and so forth. Running through the story’s somewhat odd three-part design is a question of hyle as matter, of matter coming into existence, or rather, of matter suspended on the edge of nonexistence, held there through the realization of form and divine conservation. It is a heavy story. After the summary, I’ll give some aspects that would (I think) be important for understanding it: Watkin, Lafferty’s criticism of youth culture, and, finally, how that criticism fits into the sociology of In a Green Tree. In a high school psychology class taught by the unappealing Edmund Weakfish, students are challenged to use "participation psychology" to understand poltergeists. That means they will need to enter the state of mind of the dead. In this section of the story, there is a philosophical discussion about the nature of matter, death, and schizo-gashing. Taking the assignment seriously, seven students—including Loretta Sheen—die through various means: convulsions, “Freudian” accidents, and suicides. Rather than disappearing, the dead teenagers seem to transition into a paranormal state existing within the "hylicon" or ultraviolet spectrum. Lafferty establishes early on that perceiving this lowest spectrum of being requires a specific, and perhaps degraded, perceptual lens: The present account is suffused with the first of these colors, hylicon. This color, lying in the wave band between 400 and 3,900 angstroms, is sometimes called ultra-violet... There are persons of the very finest sensibilities who can see this color clearly and can see all manner of objects suffused by this color; they say that it is like the finest violet color, but incredibly extenuated. There are likewise persons of the very crudest sensibilities who can see this color; they say that it is the color of mud. From hylicon, they appear to be dim, mud-violet globs, and they can communicate in some ways, through knocking, then through sub-audible frequencies, perceptible only to those possessing either these admirably noble or distinctly coarse sensibilities. The first part of the story relates the background about the teenagers, then the center subtly shifts to Barnaby Sheen, who keeps Loretta's dead body in her bedroom. It becomes a headquarters for the teenagers' spectral forms. Barnaby, along with the other men who knew everything, and Laff, who is the unnamed narrator attempts to study the entities using specialized equipment and philosophical debate. Simultaneously, the paranormal phenomenon attracts a large following of living youths who gather in a nearby barn. Roy Mega is introduced, and he uses his genius to use amplifiers so that other youth can experience the mind-altering presence of the "Seven Spooks." As the investigation continues, Loretta's physical body transforms into a doll-like husk. It is filled with what Harry O’Donovan calls primordial dust, from which Barnaby periodically uses a razor to cut out cryptic, distortedly printed messages that look like unorganized type and mottos. The end of the story centers on the narrator, who says he has the "crude sensibilities" required to see the hylicon spectrum clearly. He observes a hidden, reciprocal interaction between the living men and the dead girls, Loretta Sheen (who is pretending to be dead, according to Barnaby) and Mary Mondo, the split-off personality of Violet Lonsdale. The narrator realizes that just as Barnaby cuts into Loretta's body to extract answers, the spectral forms of Loretta and Mary Mondo are invisibly slicing into the throats and jaws of the living men to pull out bloody, cartilaginous messages of their own. Discovering that he, too, bears these unseen wounds, the story ends with the narrator selecting a coarse physical knife, intending to cut into the ghostly matter of Mary Mondo at their next meeting to forcibly extract his own answers, presumably, on how he can become a Primary person. In the deep background of this story is a scribbled note for a story idea that Lafferty wrote on August 24, 1969, from which the first third of the story seems to spring. Under the word POLTER, and next to the word “Theme,” Lafferty writes: “Seven young teenagers die violently, one by one, but in a short period of time. Most are out of the families of the fundamental barrenness [?]. Thereafter, there are manifestations. The seven have become Poltergeists. And they are [?] from the Poltergeist point of view. They come to them; they are trapped. They are a blind-end and cannot grow up, except one or two of them in an even more horrible direction.” To this story kernel, Lafferty adds the theme of schizo-gashing, already explored in “The All-at-Once Man,” and the ideas he modifies from Watkin. Watkin treats the ultraviolet, the unseen lower edge of the rainbow, as a figure for the lowest rung of being, where actuality trembles on the edge of nothingness yet is held in existence by God’s creative conservation. He emphasizes that, even at this minimum, matter is not sheer materia prima: some measure of form gives direction to the potential energy that serves as its substratum. If this minimum of form were absent, there would be nothing to perceive, a point that matters for the exchange between Weakfish and Violet Lonsdale about why stones are visible. Physics can formulate the form of corporeal matter, electron orbits and wave fluctuations, through mathematical symbolism; the underlying potential energy itself remains unknowable. This threshold between the barely knowable and the unknowable animates Lafferty’s story. Watkin himself uses the ultraviolet idea to draw a series of analogies to the supernatural order. The dance of electrons around the proton images the Communion of Saints revolving around God as Absolute Positivity. Potential energy, form, and actual energy mirror Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The continuous “ladder of being” runs without break from physical energy through biological instinct, rational will, and supernatural love, with each higher rung containing the lower as a deficiency of itself. He closes by reading matter’s very obscurity as a created reflection of divine incomprehensibility. Electric force, itself unknown, becomes manifest in the light and power it supplies, just as the Godhead is made manifest in the wisdom and love communicated to the saints. Lafferty argues with Watkin, and he introduces the uncanny. He calls this range of experience Hylicon. As it is in Watkin, it is on the far end of the spectrum from ultra-red, the color Lafferty calls Mystes, which poses its own challenge to cognition. Lafferty never wrote the Mystes story, completing stories for matter (ultraviolet), violet (“Barnaby’s Clock”), indigo (“And Read the Flesh Between the Lines”), blue (“Animal Fair”), green (the four green stories), yellow (“St. Poleander’s Eve”), and orange (“Brain Fever Season”). He retrospectively assigned “brass” to “The All-at-Once Man.” Ultraviolet is the launchpad for Watkin’s philosophical meditation, but in “Mud Violet” Lafferty turns it into an instrument of social critique. This is complicated by the fact that the Edmund Weakfish experiment has a slightly different relation to youth culture in its two tellings, “Mud Violet” and Green Tree. The short story belongs unmistakably to its moment of composition, from the first story idea in 1969 to its completion in 1971. Lafferty is criticizing the youth culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, the culture of the hippies. Now consider how Lafferty reworks the “Mud Violet” sequence of ideas in Green Tree. He pushes the "Mud Violet" events back in time. In Green Tree, the children die in the 1959 school year. It is as if the Edmund Weakfish experiment belongs to a world that precedes even the world of Lafferty's unpublished Cold War novel, Civil Blood. The events in “Mud Violet” are undated, but they seem to take place in the 1960s or early 1970s. If so, the original short story criticizes the teenagers of the 1960s as spiritless and alienated. Their youth movement seeks apathy and self-destruction. As a group, the students listen far too readily to Edmund Weakfish. They commit suicide in order to enter the dull, mud-violet limbo, which is quickly celebrated by popular culture in the story as worthy entertainment. The narrator presents this as a generational desire to escape life's vividness in favor of a blunted state. That, in turn, leads to a breakdown in communication, as the muddied young speak in fragmented, nonsensical garble and, more generally, act with narcissistic disregard for history, beauty, family, or thought. Roy Mega even comes in for some of this criticism. Perhaps the story’s master image for the younger generation is their cult-like gathering in a shed to absorb mind-numbing, subaudible noise. The scene satirizes the era’s drug and music cultures, emphasizing collective detachment over life-affirmative participation: Five hundred young persons, and numberless free spirits, crowded into the old barn or shed and enjoyed a flesh-crawling silence in glazed-eyed rapport. It was a silence that often shattered glass panes in the neighborhood and brought all the malaise of a sonic boom. It was just below the audio range, as the free spirits themselves were just below the visual range. The figure of five hundred is a bit of biblical resurrection satire, recalling St. Paul’s count of those who had seen the risen Christ. The kids get the sub-audible. But what has happened across the human community is clear: intergenerational communication has completely broken down. I read the story’s most memorable image, the pulling of language from throats, as one figure for that breakdown. Vocal dialogue is impossible; in its place comes a mutual, physical extraction of unreadable texts. The adult Barnaby cuts into Loretta’s throat with a knife and pulls out chopped-up mottos printed in deformed, mismatched lettering on scraps of dust, the pied type and mottos. At the same time, the mud-violet globes perform a corresponding act on the older generation, slicing the living men’s throats and extracting bloody, cartilaginous strands of running cursive. As the narrator observes, this grotesque harvesting of language replaces actual conversation: Two of the mud-violet globs (really, they aren’t so unseemly if you have naturally coarse eyes) were at the same time cutting into Barnaby Sheen down the side of his jaw and neck and into his chest till they came to the primordial gore of him. These two globs were, I believe, the shapes and persons of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. At the same time they were doing this, they were asking questions (not exactly in words) of Barnaby Sheen, and they were then pulling the answers out of his throat-slash. At one point in his notes, Lafferty toyed with the idea that Watkin’s color cycle might repeat itself: after each Mystes, a Hylicon. Perhaps something like that is going on here. But the image looks to me more like signal decay. Lafferty seems to be making a comment about Barnaby as a formed person, more psychic than hylic, drawing upward, while the two who chose to become hylic bits of mud-violet draw downward. However one interprets it, the image disappears when Lafferty later integrates the “Mud Violet” material into Green Tree. The throat-slashing disappears altogether. It is perhaps possible that something odd is happening: Loretta and Mary could want to escape. Mary was smart enough to take over her primary, Violet Lonsdale. Maybe Mary is leading the escape, and the question the narrator wants to ask is, “Mary, is the same principle that you used to take over Violet the same principle that you used to become a primary. I, Laff, am a secondary, I think. Can I use it to become a primary? If you are taking over being to actuality, I want to know more.” One needs to be able to thread the three-part structure together. To do that, one has to take it by the throat. What did the throat image originally mean, and why did it disappear in Green Tree? That needs to be worked through. I don’t know, so I have made a suggestion. At this point in the story sequence Mary and Loretta are not what they come to be. When Lafferty returned to “Mud Violet” while writing the related material in Green Tree, he copied some passages nearly verbatim and substantially rewrote others. In the process, the story changes shape. It moves from metaphysical horror, with its somewhat tacked-on ending in which Laff questions Mary Mondo about how he, as a secondary, can replace a primary, into a broader sociological account of cultural decline. In a sense, Lafferty returns to the original story note and brings forward what had interested him from the beginning: young people whom he thought had turned against life. The short story relies on a first-person narrator, whom later TMWKE stories identify as Laff, and it carries an esoteric cosmology of nine basic colors, primordial dust, and mud-violet beings. When Lafferty later integrates the “Mud Violet” material into Green Tree, he removes the Watkin-derived metaphysical scaffolding, adopts third-person omniscient narration, and grounds the events in 1959–1960. What happens to the young people becomes part of a public epidemic of “tin-eyed” people, the disappearance of “true tone,” the breaking of music, the coming of Flatland, and the political events of the period. We also learn that Loretta Sheen may have been meant for a religious order. The novel expands the social field, placing the episode within the larger neighborhood murder subplot that matters so much to its action and that may mark the moment when Flatland sets in. All the events of “Mud Violet” now happen in the lead-up to the election of JFK: “Oh spare us, Lord, and spare our place / From flannel-mouth with cardboard face.” The political imaginary shifts from the background to the foreground, resulting in the excision of what is most interesting about the original story's metaphysics. In its place is the story of the tin-eyed. In the novel, we learn that the “tin-eyed,” also called “pewter-eyed,” “blankies,” and “zombies,” are a generation of young people who have internally “dimmed out” and now live in darkness. They desire emptiness and tedium at the deepest level; they want experiences void of content. They idolize the empty Cardboard Man as their leader. We learn that they have ruined art and dance, that they love the tuneless music of “Rotten Rock,” and that they only later become tied to the emergence of the hippies through Beatrice Belle O’Trassy. The tin-eyed are the children of society’s “unstructuring” into tedious Flatland. Edmund Weakfish’s experiment is only one incident in a much larger sociology. Characters offer different explanations for the condition. Pat O’Trassy says the tin-eyed have a collective desire to become automatons, while Peggy Marie Tyrone says that a temporary withdrawal of special grace from the world has left the young vulnerable to it. The extreme manifestation of the tin-eyed condition is the “Mud Violet” episode, in which Harvey Clatterback, Willow Gaylord, Elroy Rain, Violet Lonsdale, Barry Limus, and Priscilla Rommel become tin-eyed just before killing themselves. This skims over interesting differences between the two versions (see below). In “Mud Violet,” for instance, the doll-thing is Loretta’s body; in Green Tree, the doll is a childhood toy that belonged to Loretta and replaces her dead body. Whatever one makes of this and other changes, the Mud Violet incident is an extraordinarily significant part of two major Lafferty projects, TMWKE and Green Tree. Lafferty’s living readers are on the other side of how he thought American youth culture participated in the cultural experiment that unstructured the world. Ask your parents, but they won’t remember.

“Say, this is not quite the speech I intended to give. Nobody is throwing fruit or vegetables or eggs at me. But in the Indo-China War things are not muddy. There is no possibility of American gain or advantage. There are just not any lootable assets for us in Indo-China. We do not need their rice crop, we do not need their fish crop. Times were good when we intervened in accord with our treaty promise, and it was our involvement that turned times bad for us. The enemy does not have any trace of right on his side. It was a naked invasion of a free people by the power of the entire Communist world [ . . . ] an item on a hellish time-table, and that time-table is being rattled. And the ‘victims’ are completely guiltless, as guiltless as anybody can be in this world. The free people of Viet Nam and the other provinces of Cochin were attacked by the biggest and rawest conspiracy in history, and we were treaty-promised to defend them from that conspiracy.” The image of soldiers receiving Communion at Mass in Vietnam is not the image the war usually evokes, but it does fit the spiritual-war perspective of In a Green Tree. War is central to Lafferty’s major projects, the Argo Legend, Coscuin, and In a Green Tree. For Lafferty, Vietnam was not merely a war. The Vietnam War was just, moral, and necessary. He wanted his readers to understand this fact, so Indochina has a vital role as part of the masterplot of Green and Red Revolution that runs through Lafferty’s imagination. The big festering point is that the Vietnam War was not merely one more heated political matter on which Lafferty held a conservative view. It drove him back to the 1840s to write his sprawling alternative political history of the nineteenth century. It became a key to how he understood Western history, his own century, and American decay; and its place in his peak writing years is a brute fact that shaped his whole project. The Vietnam War, and the American left’s response to it, came to stand for what had gone wrong with America and the world. One didactic aim of Green Tree is simply to make the reader see Vietnam as Lafferty saw it. Not many will. Not long ago, someone on East of Laughter posted a version of the June Vietnam War ads, in which two opposing lists of SF writers appeared side by side. You probably know them. One statement said that the United States must remain in Vietnam. It was signed by writers including the moth-eaten magician Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, John W. Campbell, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Jack Vance, and Lafferty. The other side opposed the United States' participation in the Vietnam War and was signed by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, and many others. The anti-war ad was organized by Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm, and the resulting hawk counter-ad turned the page into a compact snapshot of the SF field’s Vietnam-era political divide. One old Lafferty hand on Facebook replied to the post by saying that Lafferty’s conservatism was not news. Now, here is some news about the Vietnam War that might really surprise you: the United States won it. That is, the U.S. wins the war within the universe of In a Green Tree, and presumably on Prime as well, if one accepts Lafferty’s version of events in 1973 and 1975. That extrapolation can be argued with. One might say that reading the work this way naïvely confuses the narrator with the author. Lafferty’s account does not read to me as satire, total fantasy, or code. He uses allegory to talk about history, then he just talks about history. It does not look as though he is playing a historical game, as he often does with his pseudo-authorities. He has a view. Thus, I do, I suppose, naïvely take the novel’s historical explanation of Vietnam as documenting Lafferty’s own views about Vietnam. The same goes for Lafferty's views on communism, Senator McCarthy, JFK, the rollout of Vatican II, and much else in the work. You can be more sophisticated. This is how it happens: The Vietnam War was won in January of 1973. Hardly anybody seems to remember how completely and solidly it was won. Those who had worked so hard to lose it still do not admit that it was ever won. It is a bad dream to them, an interlude divorced from reality. But it was won. A cease-fire was obtained from the invaders, and the means of enforcing that cease-fire were at hand. The war was won, and the Communist attempt to seize that crucial and cardinal corner of the world was balked. This was all brought about by pulling out several thousand officials and officers who wished that the war should be lost. It was brought about by taking the military moves that the "defeat at any price" faction had always insisted that it would be impossible to take. Chief among these military moves was the mining of Haiphong Harbor . . . . The complication comes next, after the U. S. won the Vietnam War. The Prince of This World brings about the betrayals that culminate in the otherwise inexplicable throwing away of victory. Then something happens that will be very familiar to readers of Lafferty: amnesia sets in. Americans forget that they ever won the Vietnam War. They fail to see that ascendant liberal traitors threw it away, the victory. You, too, might just be an amnesiac. This is spelled out at the novel’s mythic level, and there is no way to not make this sound strange. The liberal traitors are used by Strategos, the novel’s name for the Prince of This World, who is freed in the Green Tree universe during the Spanish Civil War. It is another version of the liberation of Satan that occurs in the Argonauts' legend at Yalta. All three of Lafferty’s thousand-page works treat communism as a mythic evil in league with Hell and Lafferty’s family line of devils. For the most part, Green Tree is low mimetic, but he builds this mythic level into it. It is not unrelated to the techniques of historical allegory Lafferty developed in the first two Coscuin Chronicles. Think, for instance, of the way he uses Ashley’s spiders in The Flame Is Green to summarize European geopolitics on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. On Green Tree’s mythic level, related to us by the narrator, the devil, called Strategos, is angered that none of his Democratic presidential candidates won the presidency in 1968. Instead, the Roadblock won, setting back Satan’s plans, much as the devil’s timeline is delayed in Dark Shine. The legions of Strategos then set out to make the Roadblock the most hated man on earth. In frustrated fury, the Prince of This World issues a directive: "Remove that man who is the Roadblock,” Strategos ordered. “Ruin him. Bury him in hatred and loathing. Destroy him utterly. Annihilate him. The destruction of that man now becomes of utmost urgency.” Yes, the Roadblock is Richard Nixon. In Green Tree, he is an obstructive providential figure in a spiritual war. The vast majority of Green Tree is not written in this heroic or mythic mode, obviously, but one of its wonderful idiosyncrasies is that it launches off into it, and some of its most apocalyptic passages are centered on the Vietnam War. I’m not going to say much more about how the mythic side of this works in the novel, but I do want to go through its non-mythic/historical argument about Vietnam. Not only was the Vietnam War won by the U.S., there was not really a South Vietnam or a North Vietnam at all in the way amnesiacs misremember, for “Vietnam” was just as much of an exonym as the old French colonial names were, but at least the people in the old days had seen themselves in those old exonyms. “Vietnam” is what happened because New York and London papers “had begun to write about two imaginary countries named North Viet Nam and South Viet Nam.” That loops into Lafferty’s larger view of post-WWII conspiracy, but suffice it to say that Lafferty says: remember Tonkin, Cochinchina, and Annam. Annam has disappeared from memory, and in its place there is an imaginary thing called “Vietnam,” split into halves: What, by the way, had happened to Anam, the country that had been between Tonkin and Cochin? Did ever a country disappear so completely and suddenly with less mention of the fact in the journals? Now you see it, now you don’t; and then Tonkin and Cochin, however it came about, had a common border and different names. Lafferty uses an analogy, illustrating the absurdity of the geopolitical narrative the American public swallowed: It was a little bit as if Hitler should have called France by the name of Southwest Gascony and Germany by the name of Northeast Gascony and expressed the pius wish that the two halves of divided Gascony should be reunited again; and then launched his invasion to bring that pius wish to fruition. But Hitler was not capable of such dishonesty as was shown by the leading American and British newspapers. In the novel, nine of the inner-neighborhood Tulsa kids enlist, hoping to help Cochin; six others enlist to bring the Army to total paralysis. On the mythic level, they’re out to fight the timetable of old Strategos. Every Lafferty reader will quickly see that Lafferty is anti-Communist. But why this emphasis on Cochinchina, especially? The novel does not get into this aspect in any detail, but Lafferty was certainly aware of the Catholic history in South Vietnam, which gained real political prominence amongst Catholics following the 1954 partition of the country. Hundreds of thousands of Northern Catholic refugees fled south during Operation Passage to Freedom, and it was those Catholics who formed a staunchly anti-Communist political base for President Ngo Dinh Diem. Read any mainstream history of Vietnam, and you will very quickly come across a common criticism of Diem’s regime, which is that it favored Catholics in civil service, land distribution, and military appointments. This has been seen as a sectarian bias tied to Diem’s prominent Catholic family and to the influence of his elder brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, the Archbishop of Hue. All this, along with other sectarian issues, alienated the country's Buddhist plurality, and it culminated in the 1963 Buddhist Crisis. That, in turn, led to the November 1963 military coup and the assassination of Diem. Post-coup, South Vietnamese Catholics lost their guaranteed state patronage, but they stayed hardline anti-Communists. This Catholic context, which was being covered in The National Review that Lafferty read, is one reason the Catholic neighborhood in Green Tree is so pro-Cochinchina, and it is part of why Lafferty rejects the idea of a South Vietnam that was somehow half of an atheistic and Communist north. In Green Tree's history of America, after the fall of the Proud Peasant and the assassination of the Cardboard Man in 1963 comes the Barry Lyndon allegory. Lafferty treats the 1964 election as a staging of Thackeray’s 1844 novel, just played out across television screens and town halls as an American schizo-gash. He writes: It used an interesting bit of innovation: it represented the split personality of the leading character Barry Lyndon by two different actors, one for each of the personalities, as though one of them should represent the id and one of them the ego of the main character. And it worked well. The two actors were named Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, and between them they played the broad but shallow character of Barry Lyndon faithfully. As in the novel, the ego side of the character won. Now skip forward to how Lafferty says America won the Vietnam War. In May 1972, the United States mined Haiphong Harbor under Operation Pocket Money. The mines interdicted Soviet, Red Chinese, and English supplies, and, as Lafferty tells it, communist aggression began to smother to death. A cease-fire was obtained from the invaders. The means of enforcing it were still at hand: the mines could be reactivated within hours, so for the communist forces to resume their assault would be to resume their own strangulation. "Inside America's daring plan to mine Haiphong Harbor" What happened next is Strategos and ten thousand good traitors. The mines were removed from Haiphong, and the cease-fire could no longer be enforced. Congress then passed the Case-Church Amendment, prohibiting any further American military action, and Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate by 1975. Lafferty scorches the American government: It issued a wide-open invitation to the defeated invaders to reinvade, and declared that no obstacle would ever be placed in their path again. It further declared, in words that could have no other meaning, that the invaded people would not be allowed to defend themselves, that they must stand as lambs to the slaughter. The invaders predictably invade again, now with the backing of the whole communist world. In April 1975, the war ended in total defeat. From within the Whole Lafferty, the Vietnam War is a mythically charged spiritual battle against demonic communist forces, just as one would expect from The Flame Is Green and the Argo Legend. That story runs, in In a Green Tree, into 1978, then into the unfinished fifth part. Its version of the Vietnam War is the story of a noble, hard-won moral victory deliberately betrayed and thrown away by a complicit American media, a complicit Congress, and the American public itself. So, yes, we find Lafferty on the Right, where we already knew him to be. But, as always, the matter is stranger than that, given his view of infernal powers in history. In many ways, it is recognizably Augustinian. In The City of God, Augustine treats Roman ideology and imperial history as, in effect, a demonic psy-op. Lafferty’s novels return to that pattern of devils in history again and again. In Green Tree, he does something he very rarely does, though. At one point, he imitates the sound of scripture, as if he were the voice of inerrancy, to make the point. This is rich territory. I hope that others will start thinking more about what Vietnam meant to Lafferty and how it shapes the work, rather than noting that he was a hawk on the war or that it is old news that he was a hawk. That is a dead end. We need to be many steps beyond it.

What things a man or a world believes or disbelieves will permeate every corner and shadow and detail of life and style, will give a shape to every person and personifact and plant of that world. They will form or they will disorder, they will open or close. A world that believes in open things is at least fertile to every sort of adventure or disaster. A world that believes in a closed way will shrivel and raven and sputter out in frosty cruelty. — Audifax O’Hanlon ("Ishmael Into the Barrens") The Audifaxes (2018) is a slim collected edition of Lafferty's letters written under the persona of "Major Audifax O'Hanlon (Unretired)" to Son of GPIC, the newsletter of the Tulsa branch of the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OSFW). Its full subtitle is Unworldly Philosophies: Field Dispatches of Major Audifax O'Hanlon (Unretired), and it bills itself as letters to "the second most obscure publication in the world." Putting it together was an obvious labor of love, and I’m happy to own a physical copy. You can find a PDF of it online. The collection gathers twenty-four pieces dated November 1989 through November 1991, along with a November 1992 reprint of the June 1990 poem "Hope Springs Eternal." An introduction by Warren Brown, one of Lafferty’s chief advocates and a rotating editor of Son of GPIC during its run, prefaces the edition. Brown notes the newsletter existed in print and later PDFs into the early 2000s. He also explains the conceit: Audifax was Lafferty's doppelganger-by-mail, a separate persona who arrived on onionskin in unsteady typing and never appeared in person. There are many fun, small things in it, including Susie Kalusy, but it’s most memorable to me for the material in it about the Moth. Audifax, writing from Soviet Armenia in May 1990, sets out as a triple agent against a quadruple agent rumored to have a vulnerable spot no one has ever found. He tells the editor to keep his ashes if a sandalwood box arrives. June arrives, and he reports a victory carrying an asterisk. It turns out the quadruple agent (code-named Moth, for Master of the Heliotropium) had been dead for a century, operating as a ghost. Now the Moth haunts Audifax. It takes any shape at will, impersonating Audifax's wealthier brother Bawdyfax. It tells him the time until his own death may be quite short, that he knows the precise second, though Audifax may not, and that the buzzing overhead at that moment will be the Death Moth himself having fun, after which Audifax will spend at least fifty years learning the ghost trade under exacting taskmasters, because what's time to a ghost? I found myself thinking about it again this week after reading something Lafferty wrote in a late letter from 1993, shortly before he went silent: “No, no, no, I don't want to die on January 1, 2000. That was only a passing fancy. I'm not going to be nearly ready to die on January 1, 2000. I want more time, I want more time." Lafferty wrote constantly about death, and never stopped thinking about it. As I’ve said before, I think the dead center of Lafferty is time. Lafferty said that alcoholics drink to escape time. That is a real ligature between his alcoholism and the fiction, Lafferty, the strongly a metaphysical writer whose entire output is a Death’s Jest Book. One even sees his preoccupation with death early in Antonino Vescovo, which has a brilliant set piece toward the end about the death of the old monk Nicolo. Lafferty wrote it about five and a half decades before he composed the Audifaxes ephemera. He probably wrote it before he was twenty. That is a half decade and change before he faced death in the Pacific War.

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? It was another of those extraordinary enlivening events. It got them. It got Erma Planda of the golden body, and Judy Brindlesby of the sometime incredible hair. It got Lisetta Kerwin of the now shattered serenity; it got Rushmore and Hilary and Blase. Perhaps it had been thought that connubial passion happened without regard to place or planet. Such is not the case. And the case on World Abounding was very different from the case on Gaea or Camiroi or Dahae. There was a pleasantness at all times on World Abounding, there was a constant passion of a sort, an almost pantheistic communion of all things together. But there was something else that came on much stronger at special times, that was triggered by special events without an exact time arriving, that was wild and rampant and blood-and-seed-pungent. It was the rutting reason. Ah, we deck it out better than that. It was a night, or a day and a night, of powerful interior poetry and music, of personal affirmation, of physical and moral and psychic overflowing, of aesthetic burgeoning. It was clear crystal passion. But let us not deck it out so nice that we won't know it. It was the horniest business ever, and it went on all night and all day and all night. Advanced Lafferty. “World Abounding” is one of those really hard Lafferty stories. Not hard in terms of what happens, as is sometimes the case. Hard in terms of understanding what Lafferty says about significant, complicated aspects of reality. It is full of important stuff. Sex, love, nature, grace, youth, experience, betrayal, death, communion, family, perfection, parenthood, myth, mercy, cruelty, exaltation, more sex, agony, comedy, resurrection. It radically reconfigures the orders of nature and grace, creating in me something like the perceptual alternation of a bistable image. It disorients. I think a smart reader Instinctively registers its importance and is then dizzied by it. One sees comedy, then horror; grace, then parody of grace; nature perfected, then nature grotesquely swollen beyond its bounds: nature as what Genesis calls Tov, then nature as profanely exuberant gland. Did Marrying Sam yoke Misericors and Festinatio? This is a great but difficult story. So what happens here? An expedition of seven explorers arrives on the planet Aphthonia, also known as World Abounding. They arrive to investigate why more than twenty previous missions ended with reports that defied explanation. The group lands and discovers that the planet's environment, influenced by a potent natural growth hormone called Gorgos, accelerates biological processes. It induces a state of heightened exuberance. We learn that Lafferty’s recurring character, John Chancel, discovered the planet fifty years ago and built a monument spire on a flat plain; a massive stepped plateau, known as the Terraces, has since grown to engulf the site. The crew begins excavating, uncovering layers of perfectly preserved, deceased members from prior expeditions. These earlier explorers look to have died peacefully while enjoying banquets, having been willingly buried by localized ash and lava flows from the nearby volcano, Misericors. Lafferty writes, The happy dead people had been preserved by the volcanic fill, and perhaps by the essence Gorgos or some other substance of World Abounding. They didn't feel dead. They were rather waxy to the touch; they were about as warm as the air, and they hadn't any clamminess . . . Shortly after the expedition’s arrival, and after some "heightened exuberance," the three women in the expedition experience accelerated pregnancies, giving birth to children who mature physically and intellectually within a matter of days. These World Abounding Nation (birth born) children, along with their own offspring, form a native population with a mysterious connection to the planet's ecology. They have no interest in systematic scientific study. Instead, they share a telepathic consciousness, compose music, craft sculpture from volcanic flows, and embrace the planet's intense mating periods. The World Abounding children are unusual: They were at all times in close wordless communication with their parents and with all other persons present, and they were at the same time total aliens. The children were puzzling, but they themselves certainly weren't puzzled: they were always quite clear as to their own aims and activities. While the expedition's commander, Fairbridge Exendine, first reacts with horror and tries to distance himself from the seductive environment, he is courted by and ultimately yields to the firstborn daughter of the World Abounding Nation, Least Lass. Then the story moves to its close at the end of a month on the planet. The native-born generations know that they have experienced everything Life has to offer. They say that doing a thing more than twice becomes repetitious, and that repetition is the unforgivable sin (not blasphemy against the Holy Spirit). So they assemble atop the Terraces for a last supper. Least Lass instructs a devastated Fairbridge to tell the volcano that it is the fullness of time. He conveys the message. The volcano erupts, burying the World Abounding Nation in hot ash and lava as they peacefully eat and drink lava. Fairbridge throws himself onto the smoking ground, wanting to die with Least Lass at her feet, but she refuses him. Because he is a Gaea human and not "completed" (another example of Lafferty's Thomistic view of perfection as completion) within the Aphthonian planetary cycle, she denies him: “Shall I feed you scraps from the table as though you were a dog at my feet?” Least Lass asked Fairbridge. “Go at once now. You have no business dying here. Go with them. They come in great danger and pain to themselves to get you.” Dragged away by his crewmates, Fairbridge and the original seven explorers flee to their hovercraft. Defeated, they decide to file the same kind of disgraceful, Laffery’s word, unbelievable report that the other explorers have filed. I mentioned the story being bistable. If I look at the planet Aphthonia one way, I see an environment so fertile, animated, and generous that it resembles nature as unstinting gift. But the story keeps throwing off clues that the “grace,” or whatever blows through the planet and makes it so pullulating, comes from within nature rather than from beyond it. Seen this way, the arrangement becomes coercive, as if the planet has imposed rut, or mating season, on human bodies with year-round hormonal cycles and concealed ovulation. It is as if a leering nature has encroached on the world of grace. Because Aphthonia is so terrifyingly gratuitous, grace has been effectively de-transcendentalized. The result is that nature itself, from the propagation of the little acorn to the perfection and completion of the mighty oak, becomes grotesque. The story’s account of embodied personhood becomes a distortion chamber, though it remains wisely affirmative about the unitive side of procreation. Let’s call this first view World Abounding as Pseudo-Sacramental. Then the perception alters, and I begin to think of Lafferty and his surprises. Perhaps one should simply accept that life born on Aphthonia has its own sacramental rules. Nature there is perfected. It has its own alien sacramental system, strange only because its temporal scale is so radically different from ours. Set aside, for the moment, the absence of any promise of transformation or resurrection. World Abounding may still be understood as perfecting its offspring, as fully sanctifying them as realized persons, according to its own sacramental order. It could even be read as having its own weird Trinity: the Father of Planets, the Miracle Maker, and Marryin’ Sam, named after a character in Li’l Abner. This would be World Abounding as Crypto-Sacramental. Here is the real deal, on amphetamines. My view is that “World Abounding” excels in creating this effect. Lafferty builds perceptual instability into the story as a tactical ambiguity. The ambiguity leaves the reader thinking about personhood and sexuality, about the relation of both to nature and grace, and about the relation of all of them to primal, mythic metaphors that become more than metaphor. This convergence peaks in the story's dream sequence that I quote at length because of its thematic significance: The fulfilled persons would sometimes sleep while walking or even running, especially those of the full World Abounding generations. “Are we awake or sleeping?” Least Lass asked her lover one day, or night. “That I do not know,” Fairbridge said, or thought, in whatever state he was in. “But we are together. May the Planet Plucker grant that we be always together.” “We are together,” Least Lass agreed, “and yet I am climbing and leaping on the north ridges of the Volcano Misericors, and I am sound asleep. And you are swimming in the estuary of the River Festinatio, very deep below the surface where it is ocean water below the running water, and you also are asleep. Give me your hand. There! On a false level of reality it might seem that my hand was closed on the meaty bloom of a rock crocus, but that rock crocus is a part of yourself. It might seem, to an observer of no understanding, that your own hand has closed on an Aphthonia Blue-Fish (the Blue-Fish himself is such an observer and he believes this), but that Blue-Fish is really myself with the scales still on his eyes and on his whole fishness. But the scales have fallen from our own eyes a little bit so that we may see reality. Grip my hand very hard.” They gripped hands very hard. They were together. To return to the metaphor of a bistable image, it is the same image as Lafferty's brilliant bit of rhetorical sinking, "But let us not deck it out so nice that we won't know it." I think “World Abounding” is an especially advanced Lafferty story because it intensifies the relation between satire and didacticism. Satire is usually indirect; didacticism often wants to be direct. “World Abounding” clearly has something to say, but it says it through so much comic grotesquerie, biblical allusion, planetary myth, erotic theater and phantasmagoria, and science-fiction world-building. The story is alight with biblical language: the line to Judas (“What you do, do quickly”), the crumbs or scraps from the table, the dangerous wine that bites like a serpent, Edenic abundance, the Peaceable Kingdom, the Last Supper, Eucharistic imagery (chalice and paten) and wordplay about belief and disgrace. These allusions make the story world feel Christian, the way Lafferty’s open kosmoi are open, not closed like ones found in his gnostic works, but also displaced. But this is closer to the Christian pantheism of Coleridge’s breeze. Christian patterns have been rerouted through an alien planet that is supposedly related to perfected nature (the biblical language of there being no gnawing worm or moth signifies, but World Abounding has perfected it terminally. The expedition's first encounters on the planet read like a parodic Edenic paradise. Lafferty describes the planet's flawless, protective ecology: Everything that can be chewed or swallowed here is safe to eat or drink. There is no insect or animal that bites, nor worm that gnaws, nor moth that harms. Then the story doubles down on mythogenic color and suspends ordinary realistic values. Its first climax is the dream sequence that maps Fairbridge onto the female Festinatio and Least Lass onto the male Misericors. The story reverses that pattern at the end, when Fairbridge climbs the mountain in the fullness of time to bring on the latest terrace apocalypse. From its first pages to its last, the planet runs the full spectrum from pathetic fallacy to animism to full anthropomorphism. Yet even that is not quite right, because if we enter the dream logic of the story, this is not simply figurative language. Misericors is not “like” a living volcano. He has a face, he responds to speech, and his volcanic gas plume is both a pyroclastic surge and a belch. Misericors is an aerophagic and ejaculatory person. Figurative language has moved beyond metaphor: the story treats its own mythogenic master figures as persons, not things. What would ordinarily be pathetic fallacy or personification is re-literalized within the mythogenic logic of the scene, so that the volcano’s mouth and belch are not decorative comparisons but the embodied expressions in which Misericors is enliveningly present: The cone was a ragged laughing mouth; the whole face was a distorted laugh. One eye of that face was far down the north slope, and the other eye was over in the blue-stem hills . . . The Volcano belched a bit of fire. There was something of cruel laugh in that sound: a snort, really. In reimagining the relation of nature and grace apart from the temporalities of the human life cycle, World Abounding makes it impossible to keep many other boundaries intact: living thing and environment, parent and planet, genetics and epigenetics, nature and agency, body and world. The terminality is best seen, I think, in the way the communion of the dead works in the story. Death is, as it often is in Lafferty, definalized: the dead are not simply gone, and the World Abounding Nation comes into communion with the dead of all the previous World Abounding cultures. Kora even says that the dead communicate with the native-born children more easily than with the Gaea adults, and Rushmore explains the rapport by saying that all of them share “one common parent, World Abounding.” Yet the dead generations are not one continuous lineage in the ordinary human sense. They are more like a set of stacked folders: each Terrace contains a discrete culture, a distinct genetic-cultural unit, sealed when Misericors covers its perfection in ash. The group on one Terrace is not descended from the group below it; rather, each group is generated anew from some contact between Gaea humans and World Abounding itself. Their only common lineage is planetary. This is why the communion of the dead in the story is not the same as the communion remembered by the Catholic Church on All Souls’ Day. First, the World Abounding dead are not souls still needing prayer, purification, or mercy. In the planet’s own terms, they are already “completed”; they have “done everything,” and their burial is treated as the seal of that completion. Chara Kerwin articulates this collective saturation of experience as a communal, rather than merely individual, achievement: “But I have. I have borne myself, I have borne my mother Kora, I have borne you, my grandmother Lisetta, I have borne every person ever birthed on World Abounding or elsewhere. What we do not do as individuals, we do in common. All of our nation has now done everything, as I have. So we will wind it up.” Second, their communion is not mediated by Christ, the Church, the sacraments, or the hope of resurrection, but by World Abounding itself—by place, ash, fertility, and the planet’s strange role as common parent. Something like this must be the World Abounding as a Pseudo-Sacramental view. The World Abounding as Crypto-Sacramental view would need to say something like, De dicto, the World Abounding Nation people recognize that the Father of Planets, the Miracle Maker, and Marrying Sam exist as an immanent versus economic Trinity. De re, since the Father of Planets is God the Father, the Miracle Maker is Christ, and the Lil Abner named Marrying Sam is the Holy Spirit, they know God the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. But they do not know de dicto. Third, this communion does not gather all generations into one pilgrim Church moving toward a final redemption. Instead, each terrace set arises, reaches its own eschaton, and enters waxy death, like incorruptible bodies. These terminal subcultures stack up into layers. World Abounding is a terminal planet (and not the terminal called Easterwine) because the apocalyptic exigence has become part of nature’s cycle, but subordinated to it. More provocatively, what has not happened is the perfection of nature itself that happens with the New Heaven and New Earth in St. John’s Apocalypse. The reader is told that the people of World Abounding hate repetition, but World Abounding itself is caught in a repetitious nature cycle of apocalypse because repetitious apocalypse always happens within nature on World Abounding, not to the natura of World Abounding. This cyclical dead-end is recognized by the surviving human observers, who realize that the planet's ecological loops allow for no human future: “The report will be a difficult one,” Hilary hazarded. “Just how are we to explain that a normal human settlement is impossible here? How explain that it will always end in such swift short generations? How explain that every World Abounding culture is, by its nature, a terminal culture?” It is as if the uniformitarian principles that one uses to understand nature have finally dominated catastrophism. They subsume ecological catastrophe as sex that nature buries through an eroticized sex-death cycle: each time the mountain takes the river human offspring die. This sees the story from the World Abounding as a Pseudo-Sacramental perspective, but one could run it through the Crypto-Sacramental view. Again, I hover because the story is strategically ambiguous on the orders of grace and nature. The most common Catholic way of stating the relation between those two orders is Aquinas’s formula that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. That language is in the story. Lafferty has it on his mind. The formula requires both terms: nature must have its own integrity, and grace must be a supernatural gift that elevates nature rather than arising from it. This leads to what has been called the problem of natura pura, or “pure nature.” At moments, “World Abounding” looks like a thought experiment about natura pura. The issue concerns whether human nature can be imagined as complete in itself, with its own natural end, apart from grace. This is sometimes called man’s proportionate end. The pure-nature tradition wants to preserve the freedom and gratuity of grace, but it risks making nature look closed and self-sufficient. Henri de Lubac pushed back against this by arguing that human beings are naturally ordered toward God. But think about what that means. If the desire to see the face of God belongs to one’s proportionate or natural end, then grace begins to look intrinsic to nature, since human nature would remain unperfected without the vision of God. This is the problem of the intrinsicism and extrinsicism of grace: the danger that naturewill swallow too much of grace, or that grace will swallow too much of nature. If man can be fulfilled without grace in his proportionate end, why is grace necessary? If man’s proportionate end already points to grace, have you rigged the game by supernaturalizing nature? Essentially, if nature can fulfill itself without God, what do we need God for? There are interesting ways to think through this problem, but they would take us too far afield. Besides, Lafferty’s story does not arrive at a solution but at Fairbridge’s physical and spiritual agony. Although I think the story invites the reader to hover between the Pseudo-Sacramental and the Crypto-Sacramental, I am more drawn to the former, as it seems closer to the spiritual shape of what is happening. If that reading is right, “World Abounding” turns the theological problem of grace as something given from beyond nature into a fantasy thought experiment. Aphthonia is a world where nature behaves not as if it were graced, but as if it were arrogating the grace function. The planet gives fertility, ecstatic love, immediate growth, marriage, communion with the dead, ritual meals, “mercy,” and a kind of afterlife. Is the story really presenting a naturalized sanctification through Gorgos, sex, volcanic ash, lava, and the rest? There is much that seems right about this. Nature is wonderful, and if one is a Catholic like Lafferty, one thinks that perfected nature is not finally a fantasy. It is pro-unitive and pro-procreative. The Gaea explorers seem to bring a modern outlook in which physical explanation is expected to account for nature. If that is too strong, then they at least bring a view of nature in which grace, if it exists, remains extrinsic. As a singleton, Fairbridge is the hardest-nosed of the explorers, but all of them expect ordinary biology, scientific explanation, and settlement. They have come to solve the mystery left behind by John Chancel and the other expeditions. Aphthonia surprises them by making nature monstrously miraculous, but what it creates is a naturalized correlate of grace, a counterfeit that, precisely as counterfeit, points to the real thing it parodies. Fairbridge begins the story as the character who wants to dig down to the bottom of the terraces, but in the end, he is the one who is dug through, left prone and begging to die, rather than being elevated. Least Lass calls him a patsy. World Abounding absorbs human nature into the planet’s own cycle of fertility, completion, death, preservation, and apocalypse. What it does not do is extend anything like real grace to the Gaea people. One can see this by imagining what would happen if the Gaea explorers stayed on Aphthonia. Would they move toward completion? This exclusion of grace is made brutally clear when Least Lass denies Fairbridge participation in the planet's eschatological climax: “Shall I feed you scraps from the table as though you were a dog at my feet?” Least Lass asked Fairbridge. “Go at once now. You have no business dying here. Go with them. They come in great danger and pain to themselves to get you.” That said, one could make the Crypto-Sacramental case. One could argue that this is sacramental, that the children of World Abounding are holding their Eucharistic/apocalyptic banquet. What is grace for the World Abounding Nation is not grace for the World Gaea Nation. But the denial of the scrap makes me suspicious of the scene. When Christ says to the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 that it is not meet to throw bread to the dogs, she answers, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” She asks for mercy, “Miserere mei, Domine fili David,” and Christ gives it. Christ then goes down to the Sea of Galilee and up onto a mountain, where perhaps the second-best-known banquet in the New Testament takes place in the same chapter: the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in which four thousand are fed. Compare that meal to the perfected children: All eight of the gilded youths of the World Abounding nation came at the same time to the realization that they had done everything. They called it back and forth, they echoed the information from the blue-stem hills to the orchards to the mountains. They all came together full of the information. They assembled on the top of the Terraces. They sat down at table there, and demanded that the elder World-Gaea nation should serve them. “Out-do yourselves!” Least Lass Exendine called to all those elders. “Give us a banquet better than any you ever invented before. But you may not share it with us. It is for ourselves only. Serve us. And eat ashes yourselves.” And Hot ash filled the banquet plate of Least Lass by then, and hot lava filled her cup. Smiling and easy, she ate and drank the living coals to her pleasant death. Then she had disappeared completely under the flow of it, as the rest of them had done. The Volcano covered them with another two meters of fill. Then he pushed on to have his will with the river. To go one level deeper, this is where having a Lafferty’s “world” model becomes useful. In “World Abounding,” the world is not a single thing, as it rarely is in Lafferty, and we don’t talk about this well. It can mean a physical planet, a civilization, a ruined aftermath, an imagined story-space, a future culture, or one person’s lived reality. The story asks how many habitable worlds there are, depending on what one means by “habitable” and “world.” That is the question Lafferty is always asking. Lafferty foregrounds this epistemological problem in the story's opening lines, framing the entire narrative around the instability of these very terms: How many habitable worlds there are depends on the meaning given to ‘habitable’ and to ‘world.’ Habitable without special equipment and conditioning is the usual restriction on the first. ‘Of no mean size’ and ‘of no extreme distance’ are two common conditions of the second. Red herrings. Aphthonia is first a physical world, but the Gaea explorers bring their own modern/scientific world into it. The buried Terrace peoples reveal that many previous civilization-worlds have already risen and ended there. The children born on Aphthonia first look like a future world, but it exhausts itself like a mayfly: marriage, music, drama, art, banquets, and ritual death. I usually find it helpful, when reading Lafferty, to be mindful of equivocations on the word “world.” I have written several times about my shorthand for this, and it is certainly part of how I understand “World Abounding.” Aphthonia turns part of world₁, a physical planet in the Beta system, into a dynamo of either pseudo-grace or crypto-grace. The planet’s own natural powers either imitate fertility, sacrament, communion, mercy, and final fulfillment, or somehow constitute an alien sacramental economy. This world experience takes human genetics from Gaea, from the people who make planetfall, and produces something like an evolutionary leap in their children through a counterfactual epigenetics: Aphthonia as parent, not merely as environment. All planets are somehow like this. From the world₂ perspective of the Gaean order, modern scientific reason cannot make sense of a pseudo-sacramental or crypto-sacramental micro cosmos. It looks as though there will be a thriving world₆, filled with the children of those who made planetfall, an ever-expanding World Abounding Nation. Be fruitful and multiply. But World Abounding never really creates world₆, an angel of history flying into the future looking backward on its wreckage. It resets instead, because nature on Aphthonoa has absorbed apocalypse as one of its cyclical, that is naturalized, features. Instead of world-ending followed by the new creation of a thriving world₆, there is only another world₃. That makes each terrace a terminus: a last supper and preservation with no hope of, or interest in, resurrection. It is a paralytic eschatology that never arrives at post-coital clarity. The aftermath leaves those who visit World Abounding as inhabitants of world₄. The survivors say, “You’d never believe it,” because ordinary hearers would lack the horizon needed to understand what happened. As metafiction, Aphthonia is a world₅ horror-comedy. But ask yourself, is it a metaphysical horror (with comedy) or a metaphysical comedy (with horror)? This is another version of its bistable quality. Readers who read it as I do will emphasize seeing the effects on the world₇ of a guy who was a singleton with an interest in engineering, Fairbridge’s inner world, where one might come to think that Aphthonia’s mercy is anything but merciful. But how explain that every world abounding culture is a terminal culture? A few final points. The accelerated erotiticism is obviously relevant to other difficult areas in Lafferty. Matrona and Ancilla moons are part of Lafferty’s mother-parthen complex, a curious aspect of Lafferty’s Beta system. The Fairbridge in this story has interesting connections to the version of him in Annals of Klepsis. I’m going to leave it here for now. This could be four times as long.

It has been busy around here, with the purchasing of a new house, the packing, and the end of the academic semester and angry students, one of my jobs being to pour bureaucratic oil onto troubled water. Hence, the unusual silence on the blog. It all just happened to correspond to post 400. By my heterodox count (it includes pieces such as “Claudius and Charles”), there are 265 Lafferty short stories. At this point, I have written something about all but three of them, which means that, for all its flaws, this blog-as-an-open notebook is one of the more comprehensive Lafferty resources online. Anyone interested in Lafferty can, I hope, come here and learn more about the stories, fragments, and unpublished works, albeit through the screen of my own tendentious biases. Even with the biases, my approach to writing about Lafferty has had two ongoing aims: to make arguments about Lafferty that might be wrong because they say something, even if that means being polemical, and to provide as many informational shortcuts as I can, so that people who want to go deeper can piggyback on resources and build better because Lafferty is an important writer. Coming to the end of my first pass through organizing the short stories, I have been thinking about what it means to know a writer’s work, as well as all the locked doors to the Land of Lafferty. First, there is the overwhelming importance of compositional order, which has been disastrously obscured by Lafferty’s publication dates and lack of interest in them. The first person to see this clearly was Andrew Ferguson, who did important work a decade ago in clarifying the compositional order of Lafferty’s first ten years of writing. Compositional order does not matter if one wants disconnected stories, or if one does not believe that Lafferty was engineering something large across hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels. But if one is confused by a story, the flanking stories matter immensely. So does the novel he was working on at the time. These things are essential, etc. Then there is the unavailability of the work; the modal difficulty created by Lafferty’s voracious intellectual interests; and his extreme Menippean informational compression, which is not ornamental but structural: allusions, etymologies, references, in-canon levels of reality, reduplicated characters, recurring locations, and recurring tropes. There is also the disarming orality of all those pragmatic markers, people! Yes, those are among the ways Lafferty hides his deepest thought and most intense feeling. Finally, there are the larger emergent patterns: ghost story, the Oceanic, the Fall, Flatland, prose fiction, consensus reality, and control. And there is his pervasive use of unusual techniques such as counterfiguration, along with extreme didacticism joined to equally extreme authorial secrecy. One of the reasons I started this blog was strong disagreement with a line in the SFE entry on Lafferty. It reads, “It could almost be said that his entire unknowable corpus constitutes, in the mind’s eye, either an aleph (see Jorge Luis Borges), or a basilisk, or both at once. He and Gene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common.” Lafferty would call that dog dirt. His corpus is not unknowable. It only seems so because of neglect and the accidents of publication history. One of the pleasures of this hobby project has been getting to know the whole shebang. At this point, I have read all of the stories and novels, published and unpublished, more than once. Much still puzzles me, but this is not an unknowable corpus. The unmapped is not unknowable but unmapped, so get out your clinometer. My plan is to wrap up the remaining stories and then move on to another phase. I know I want to do a full reading of East of Laughter in a series of posts, because the novel is not well understood and is one of Lafferty’s great esoteric works. It also contains one of his final large ideas: the search for a world metaphor, and the computer as a counter-fact-making machine whose inner secret is metaphor. Over the last week, I reread Rabelais with that in mind. In both writers, one finds the problem of foreground and background. Readers of Lafferty’s novels who expect the small satisfactions of foreground closure or character development will be disappointed. Background logics are essential for grasping Lafferty’s larger blueprints. I’ll add that both Rabelais and Lafferty quarrel with literary convention in a way that bears on backgrounded form at the expense of conventionalized but foregrounded forms. For Rabelais, the exhausted culture, or dead form, appeared in a double shape: heroic romance and scholastic sclerosis. Both crashed against the printing press and the new humanist education of men such as Erasmus and Thomas More. For Lafferty, the exhausted form was long-form fiction. People in a post-literate, unstructured culture still read things that looked like novels, but those things were like philosophical zombies. So that is the status quo: three more stories, then East of Laughter. After that, I want to do something larger, perhaps a chapter-by-chapter reading of In a Green Tree or the Coscuin Chronicles. Ferguson has done a good but in my view sanitized intro to Argo, which needs to take into account the funny uncle as part of Lafferty’s demiurge theme. Montejo may have things to teach me about Green Tree. I try to learn all I can from him. So it will probably be Coscuin unless by some miracle Green Tree is released before I wrap up East of Laughter. I look forward to the publication of Green Tree and have much to say about it. I have come to see it as Lafferty’s lost-in-the-wilderness work.

Idolatry is distinguished from Image-worship by an undue finality. It rests in the relative as though it were the Absolute, worships the creature, the image and vehicle of the Divine Spirit, as though it were that Spirit. — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds Here is one of the more complicated clusters in the Lafferty canon: four stories, all published in 1973, that form a sequence within The Men Who Knew Everything. The ongoing Centipede Press edition chose to break them up, a mistake that says a good deal about the level of understanding behind the project. These stories should be read together. Lafferty wrote them as variations on a single theme, and they were originally published together. On the surface, each may look self-contained, but they are in philosophical dialogue with one another about the nature of life. Doctor George Drakos creates weird mice. Cris Benedetti creates a literary lion. Harry O’Donovan builds a political animal. Barnaby Sheen models a world. The four stories are “The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos,” “The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti,” “The Hellacious Rocket of Harry O’Donovan,” and “The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” Rather than take them one by one in a series of posts, I want to consider them as a conceptual unit, with the possibility of returning to them later as part of a full introduction to TMWKE stories. Once again, Barnaby’s home is the center of gravity, this time his cluttered study in Tulsa. Our cast includes the four principals, Barnaby, Harry, Drakos, and Cris, along with the narrator Laff, Austro, and the ghost-girl Mary Mondo. Across all four story facets, the company remains constant while the relation between life and human making rotates through the hobbyhorses of the four men. Lafferty is being schematic. He gives the reader mandala through juxtaposed and irradiating partial answers to a single question: what is life, and can it be manufactured? Each story answer is found wanting, but together the create a picture of the unpredictability of life in Lafferty’s metaphysics. At this point in the TMWKE sequence, Lafferty is working most intensely with, and against, E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds, published in 1931. I am going to focus mainly on how he complements Watkin. By way of refresher: Watkin was an English lay philosopher in the Thomistic and Bonaventurist traditions, writing for educated Catholic readers between the wars. The chapter these stories draw on is titled “Green / Life,” and anyone who wants to see the underlay of the stories should read it (see below). It is clear that the Centipede editor did not do this, which is why it seemed natural to split the stories across volumes. Watkin’s Green chapter, like the others in the book, is a meditation. The subject is biological and elemental life, the “green” zone between dead matter and spirit. It is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the life that works in leaves and blossoms, moves in animals, and seems to share a secret with the elemental powers of wind, sun, water, and rock that can seem alive. For Lafferty it is a hybrid zone, and the mystery surrounding it, prompts him to press hard on the question of what counts as life. Watkin’s main argument is that once matter reaches a certain degree of complexity, life may appear in it, but the prepared material does not itself generate the living form. Rather, spirit descends. One sees this throughout Lafferty, most famously in the hope, at the end of Past Master, that life might descend upon the gel cells. Watkin’s technical term for this process is Catholic: ratio seminalis. Lafferty uses this idea in “Brain Fever Season” as well. A seminal form flashes upon prepared matter through the Divine Logos. The clearest statement of the idea in Watkin is, I think, a sentence that Lafferty copied out in his own crabbed handwriting on a set of loose notes now kept apart from the manuscripts of the Green stories at Tulsa: “Looking at evolution from below, we see emergence; from above, creation.” Here we find the double vision that fascinated Lafferty: a single event perceived either phenomenally or metaphysically, depending on how one approaches it. That is the positive side of the chapter. On the negative side, Watkin warns against idolatry, the error of resting in the creature, the image, or the vehicle as though it were the Absolute that gives life. This, too, is a major theme in the four Lafferty stories. Watkin uses the notion of image-worship to convey it. When one stands before a sacred image and worships, one honors the form as a reflection of the divine Creator. Idolatry, by contrast, treats the reflection as though it were the source. Each of the four Green/Life stories depicts one of the men who knew everything trying to make life from below. Each discovers that what he has made is not what he intended to create. At the same time, a surplus something appears. The conditions for life are prepared, and then the Life principle takes over and runs with them. That was brief, but it is enough to begin looking at what happens in each story. I am going to take them one by one, abbreviating plot so that the idea of Life as what Watkin calls “concrete actuality, a participation” comes into the foreground. That seems to me what Lafferty explores in the Green stories. “The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos" is the story in which Watkin’s argument is most plainly at work. Unsurprisingly, it was the first of the four stories Lafferty completed when he sat down to write the Green/Life mini-sequence; he finished it on December 19, 1972. George manufactures mice from gas plasma and hair and claims to have created animal life. The mice talk, count, and mimic the four Men Who Knew Everything in their own voices. Yet their little feet do not quite reach the ground. At one point, Oliver the dog does not recognize them as alive. They smell of ozone. Drakos eventually admits that he used ‘short-cuts and short-cuts and still more short-cuts,’ and that the mice came to life before he had applied all the techniques he had intended to use. He takes this as proof of success, but the story turns it into comedy. Barnaby’s judgment at the end paraphrases Watkin on reflection and idolatry: “You've not created life, man,” Barnaby said sharply but compassionately. “You have deceived yourself. You have indeed put yourself into it; you have projected life, your own, a little.” “My mice are alive, my mice are alive,” Drakos insisted. “There's no man else in the world who could have made such mice.” In the end, the mice are destroyed by ball lightning that comes down the chimney in search of them; as each is extinguished, Drakos screams as if something were being torn from him. It is as though the matter he prepared had received no seminal form from above and were instead parasitic on him. Five days after completing “The Ungodly Mice,” on December 24th, Lafferty finished “The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti.” Cris concocts a literary hoax, Clement Goldbeater, a great Irish writer born in 1890, to prove that readers talk about books they have not read. He creates fake covers for real turn-of-the-century books and sponsors a student magazine devoted to Goldbeater’s work. Then the student committee sends Goldbeater the fare, and Goldbeater actually appears, walking out of Braniff International with a blackthorn stick. He greets Austro in Irish, and he knows that Loretta and Mary are ghosts. When Cris protests, the story dramatizes the blinkeredness: “Stop this nonsense,” Cris Benedetti suddenly howled. “There is no such man as this here present. I made him up and he doesn't exist otherwise.”This wild outburst shocked not only Austro and Loretta and Mary Mondo and the kids of the Goldbeater Guild. It also shocked Harry O'Donovan and George Drakos and Barnaby Sheen and myself who were also present at the tay. Cris had popped his stopper; there wasn't much doubt of that. “God made me up,” Clement Goldbeater said with a sort of roguish dignity. “You're in His image, but weakly so. You did not make me up, man.” Then a second Goldbeater, a cousin from Howth, arrives by a different airline and accuses the first of stealing his money. Again, one sees the pattern of creation from above and below, this time through a variation on Lafferty’s fondness for doubled characters. Six days after completing “The Two-Headed Lion,” on December 30, Lafferty finished “The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O’Donovan.” Were I writing a more typical post on the story, I would want to show how fully it dramatizes the warning against idolatry that Watkin places at the beginning of his chapter. Harry tries to create a politician out of three components: a mask (David Concourse, a handsome used-car salesman with no brains), a pitch (Ennis Hardhandle, the sportswriter and phrase-maker), and a brain (Baxter Hungerman, the strategist). Lafferty lays out his Jung-inspired 3+1 pattern, as the two men debate the necessary anatomy of a manufactured creature: “There are only three pieces needed,” he said with his usual floridity. “The mask or front-man, the pitch or phrase-maker and image-maker, and the brain. [. . . ] Three things only, and I believe that I have them all at hand.” “You are wrong,” Barnaby Sheen told him. “A successful political apparatus, a successful political animal, is always a quaternity, a four-way thing. The fourth element will be there, or the thing will not succeed.” The fourth element does indeed appear. A tall, angular man in a black hat who looks like he is from another century walks up the stairs, enters the study, and transacts with the three. He is the devil in the form of Abraham Lincoln. Then black lightning strikes. The campaign ignites. Concourse goes from dead last to winning the primary in ten days. On election eve, Cris saves the day by performing an exorcism in the Latin of Mark's Gospel — exi ab eo — and Austro supplies an older rite. The story ends with an eight-inch miniature of the Lincoln/devil man scuttling away its coat-tails on fire. Concourse goes back to selling cars. One day after wrapping up the third story, Lafferty finishes "The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen." He now has the three other stories completed, and he can look back. What he does, I think, is run Watkin backward for comedy. Barnaby builds a cubic-meter model of the Earth's mantle — continent, ocean, dome — meaning only to study weathering and tectonics over geological time. Mary Mondo, looking in, asks the question that haunts the whole cycle: "Is there any life in it?" She asks it as someone who has reason to wonder about her own life. She even whispers "Let's fake it, kid" to Austro, and then begins to speak weather into being: “Fiat fulmen, fiat tonitrus, fiat pluvia,” Mary said almost inaudibly. There was a little flicker of light. “What's that?” Barnaby asked. “One of the bulbs about to blow?” There was a little rumble. [. . .] “Rain,” said Harry O'Donovan. “It's raining in your world.” Watkin quotes Hildegard of Bingen on these images, and I think Lafferty is riffing on that part of him: from thee the clouds move, the stony rock exudes moisture, and the earth puts forth the green herb. In Barnaby's study experiment, there are clouds, real rain, a miniature city called Phantasmopolis, and finally a volcano that shatters the dome and sets the rug on fire. In the end, the pseudo-world’s cosmos ends up being the fleas Mary has gathered off Austro. Stepping back from the sequence, one can see that the four Men Who Knew Everything in these stories are, in various ways, self-deceived about the extent to which they can model and control life. They’re all failed epistemologists, with the subcycle's real epistemologists being Mary Mondo and Austro. Mary asks, "What is life?" in Mice and again in Lion. Each time Lafferty’s narrator notes she is asking it the way Pilate asked what truth is. By the conclusion of Rocket, after the somber man has been driven out of Concourse, she varies the question to strike at the very heart of the sequence's central mystery: “How can you tell whether something like that is alive or whether there's just a little man inside working the pedals?” Mary Mondo asked. “It is sometimes hard to tell,” Barnaby admitted to the ghost-girl. The quartet of stories varies Watkin’s two-sided theme: first, the contrast between seeing life from above and from below; second, the distinction between life itself and idolatrous arrangements.

"No, no, you are no child of mine" Originally titled "The Multitudinous Grandmothers," "Nine Hundred Grandmothers" was a Lafferty favorite. Many of his longtime readers hold it in especially high regard. Most come to it early for at least two reasons: its title is unforgettable, and it gives its name to Lafferty’s most successful short-story collection. It might as well be the Jaffa Gate to his canon. Yet, contrarian that I am, I question its reception and am less smitten with it as a masterwork than most Lafferty readers seem to be. That is not to say it is anything less than a great short story. I have simply come to associate it with a way of reading Lafferty that I reject. A great many foolish things have been said about it. That may sound dismissive, but I take it to name a serious problem, because what I am identifying obscures where one agrees and disagrees with some of the most basic points Lafferty repeatedly makes in his fiction. It does this by being oblivious to them. For example, here is what an appreciative blogger says about the story (I quote): “Ceran, youthful and desperate for answers, journeys backward in time (metaphorically), waking the sleeping ancestors and asking each the question. But as with Borges and his library, this physical manifestation of eternity and infinity is no more forthcoming or transparent than our own.” Really? Ceran is a seeker blocked by cosmic opacity? Another reader writes: I am told little about this future fate of Ceran, but I am told enough to be prompted to ask myself: how will I respond to this disappointment? I shared with Ceran in his confusion and curiosity and frustration—will I likewise share with him in his giving up? How will I choose to live in a life the beginnings of which are obscure to me? Confusion, in fact, is not only a central feature of this story—it is a central feature of life. And it is that feature of life that Lafferty has foregrounded here, exaggerating it to the exclusion of most other “realistic” aspects. This is more intelligent than the first person, but it still proceeds as though “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” had been written by an author who did not believe Revelation and Mystery to be compatible, by someone who believed that men and women must live, always and forever, in a phenomenological fog about ultimate things. This person’s full argument comes down to the thesis that shared confusion creates shared perspective. The idea is that Ceran’s confusion becomes the reader’s confusion, and that this shared bewilderment creates immersion. The effect is artful because life itself is confusing: art that captures confusion well can reveal something true about the experience of living without clear answers. First, I find that reading shallow, though that may be only my view. You may find it profoundly insightful. Second, I do not believe that it even begins to capture Lafferty’s point. As a brute fact, Lafferty believed that the cosmos was designed and that its Creator had revealed its origin in Genesis. He did not believe that people’s confusion on this point reflected any obscurity in first or final things themselves. He was never shy about saying that he regarded human origins as known. Some examples. In “More Worlds Than One?” he writes, “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.” In his review of Mysteries of Time and Space , he wrote, “A surprising thing is that the people who are infuriated by the facts that do not fit are the same people who will not admit the possibility of design in the universe. They are in fear of anything that will not fit into their particular non-design consensus.” One may disagree with him on these matters, but he made himself plain. He did not believe in aliens. His fiction about aliens is therefore figural rather than speculative, and it springs from confidence in cosmic design and in divine revelation concerning reality. Yet many readers approach “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” as though it were offering an inscrutably smiling idol, and they fail to see how much of the problem lies in Ceran himself as a failed person. To put it bluntly, they do not laugh with the grandmothers. They stand slack-jawed before their giggling. How odd for readers to see themselves in Ceran. How odd for them to read “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” as though its universe were structured by the principle that truth is “no more forthcoming or transparent than our own,” when the grandmothers know the truth of their origin and its author thought humans had the same access. How odd that readerly confusion is read back into the story and elevated into being “a central feature of life,” as though it were somehow artful, even admirable, to feel confused. I truly do not understand why so many readers want to identify with Ceran. Then again, I am an oddball because I agree with Nabokov that identifying with a character is a terrible habit for a reader to develop. Why not recognize that Lafferty is laughing with the grandmothers? One can join in their laughter. Ceran is told how Proavitoi culture works, yet he proves himself a profaner of mystery, a liar, and a bully. No, this is not a Borgesian story. I love Borges’s work, but Borges did not believe in divine revelation. Nor is it a story about epistemic humility. Nor is it about admiring the riddle of the sphinx. It is about standing outside Revelation as traditio , and about being a complete fool about it. So Ceran Swicegood. He is a Special Aspects Man on a human commercial expedition to the asteroid Proavitus. He’s a black sheep amongst the crew. The other men, headed to Proavitus, sport macho names and tough-guy personas. That kind of thing helps one exploit worlds. Ceran, though, is different. He keeps his original name and mild demeanor. While the expedition's commander, Manbreaker Crag, wants to wring maximum profit from the alien world—mainly by targeting the chemistry behind the native Proavitoi's apparent immortality—Ceran is obsessed with discovering the origin of life. He is an intellectual. Nothing is more real to him than an idea. Lafferty shows the contrast between the two sorts, Brahmin and capitalist, when Manbreaker confronts him: "You are Special Aspects Man, Ceran," he said, "and you have been running off after the wrong aspect. [ . . . ] It don't make a damn how it began. What is important is that it may not have to end." Through conversations with his alien translator, Nokoma, Ceran learns that the Proavitoi do not die; instead, they shrink and sleep as they age. That results in hundreds of generations of living ancestors residing in the basements of their homes. Now that he has a little information, Ceran infiltrates Nokoma's home while she is away to learn about the ancient beings. He descends a series of underground ramps, moving deeper into the bedrock beneath the house. Along the way, he meets older Proavitoi. He discovers that the crew's rumors of native "living dolls" are literal. The ancestors progressively diminish in size as they age, shrinking from the proportions of small humans down to the size of dolls, then birds, and eventually insects. And the smaller the ancestors become, the sleepier they seem. They speak in older dialects and wake only briefly when disturbed: They smiled and stretched sleepily, not as humans would, but as very old puppies might. Ceran spoke to them, and they understood each other surprisingly. At the lowest level, Ceran awakens the bee-sized "ultimate grandmother" of the Proavitoi. He demands to be told about the mysterious origin of Proavitoi. The tiny grandmother explains that their beginning was a highly amusing cosmic joke, but refuses to share it. She says there is a traditional ritual where Ceran must guess the answer over three days. Frustrated, Ceran holds the grandmother between his fingers and bullies her. He says he will crush her, but his inherently gentle nature prevents him from carrying out the threat. Seeing his bluff, the grandmother denies him the secret. The joke might cause a stranger to die of laughter, a risk she playfully refuses to take: "No, no, you are no child of mine," chortled the ultimate grandmother. "Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?" And there is laughter, the giggling of a million tiny ancestors, and a laughing and weeping Ceran leaves empty-handed. On his next expedition, he changes his name. Let’s strip this one down, chop-shop style: set aside the story’s tonal subterfuge around Ceran and its satiric pathos so that the moral architecture comes into view. This is strategically flattening because of how perverse the dominant family of interpretation is. I am going to argue this with a fluorescent yellow highlighter so one can see clearly what is being missed. First, there is a joke about the sacred mystery of unitive and procreative sex, rendered through Lafferty’s tweaking of the imagery of ancestor worship. The Proavitoi are not ancestor worshippers, but that form of cultus clearly lies in the background of the story. Then there are two lines of epistemic and spiritual failure, each traced through a character. Manbreaker Crag is wrong about the final things. Ceran is, in some ways, worse, because he is not just crassly wrong about fundamental things, but arrogantly and pridefully wrong about them. He may look somewhat sympathetic beside Lafferty’s travestying of the tough-guy spaceman Crag, but Ceran is a great fool and the story’s real monster: a modern researcher who profanes the sacred. Consider how badly Ceran conducts himself. Offered a catechist in Nokoma, he abandons her. Then he violates Proavitoi culture by sneaking in alone like a grave robber. He is told that the Ritual takes place once a year, is mediated by elders, is prefaced by three days of foolish guessing, and is received through laughter. There is an Easter parallel here, but Ceran insists on having Easter on his own schedule. So he wakes the ancestors out of season, and then he lies to them. He claims that his violation of their cultus is itself a ritual. Asked whether he is one of the grandmother’s children, he lies again. The falsehood is recognized at once, which shows how completely he stands outside their sacred tradition: "I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother," one said gaily. "All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?" "Of course," said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them. Then he gets what is coming to him when they laugh at him. How dare he claim the inheritance without having been born into the tradition? And what does he do in response? He issues a threat that amounts to committing sacrilege without even having the conviction to carry it through. The Proavitoi have a living tradition. Ceran can understand tradition only as data. Here are two ways of looking at this figural crux. The first draws on the distinction between emic and etic understandings of religious culture. One may understand a culture emically, by entering into its local meanings, beliefs, and practices, or etically, by treating it from the outside and comparing it across cultures. One can imagine oneself as Proavitoi. Ceran appears to have approached the Proavitoi in a blunderingly etic fashion. But that reading does not quite work within the story’s own logic. It uses the inside/outside to draw a secularizing circle around too much. Both the emic and etic stances are within immanent frames. If one were really inside the Provatoi cultus, one would be immortal because the Proavitoi in fact do possess eternal life, and they possess a tradition transmissible only to those who keep the lineage, keep its times, and can laugh at the joke because they are inside it. Ceran thus stands outside both the little-t traditions and the big-T Tradition of the Provatoi: outside its ritual expressions, and outside the core transcendental truth those expressions mediate. He violates the first set of traditions by every procedural means available to him, and he stands outside the Tradition itself (he is not one of the "children") because he is hostile to Mystery. He does not accept the possibility of supernatural truth, truth that by its very nature exceeds finite intelligence. So why not cheat one's way through the ritualistic cruft? Ceran is a technocrat, convinced that at the bottom of everything there is data, not persons, so he ends up being smaller than the smallest grandmother. Now let’s look at the story through the right end of the telescope. On Proavitoi, ancient grandmothers live deep inside the hill, growing smaller and sleepier as they age. Normally, they wake only once a year for a tradition in which their younger relatives try to guess how their people first began. One day, a human stranger sneaks down into their deepest rooms and rudely wakes them. Instead of screwing his head on right and turning around, he further violates their sacred tradition; he throws a tantrum, demands that they tell him their secret at once, and even threatens to kill the oldest and tiniest grandmother if she refuses. The grandmothers simply laugh at him. The man breaks down, but the grandmothers keep laughing at the frustrated intruder and then peacefully return to sleep, while he runs away, crying and laughing, only to go on and behave like a macho sleaze toward another alien culture. Many Lafferty fans identify with this man and his confusion. As for the story’s satirical targets, they are all very near the surface: heroic tedium, extractive commercial civilization, technological-immortality fantasies, modern research’s posture toward traditional knowledge, and Enlightenment epistemology. I’ll close with something that gets overlooked: the lines about the odor of sanctity and sadness. This could not be more important for understanding the story. Lafferty writes, “They were kind and serene. There was an atmosphere about the scene that barely missed being an odor—not unpleasant, sleepy, reminiscent of something, almost sad.” That sadness is crucially significant to the governing image of the laughing grandmothers in “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” because it belongs to Chesterton’s image of the laughing Christ and to the Chesterton-Lafferty theology of sacred laughter, perhaps best expressed in Chesterton’s poem “Secrecy.” Readers who identify with Ceran, I suspect, are readers who do not see that for Lafferty Revelation and Mystery are siblings, and who would have little feel for the tradition of sacred secrecy found in verses such as Psalm 25:14. These are readers who have not thought through Laffery’s view of the relationship of confusion (Ceran) and wisdom (the grandmothers). Where there is, in fact, a Sacred Mystery, they will always incline to confusion. As Lafferty told Hiroshi Inoue, "I do not mean to puzzle people with my writings, though any good story is the unraveling of a puzzle. There are interactions in every 'entertainment,' and the colliding of two very serious things may be hilarity." M81, discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774. NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) )

"I examined the four walls, the carpeted floor, and the ceiling of the room. There are only six interior sides to a regular room like mine, and if they are secure the room should be secure." " . . . my girl friend Rosemary Korff told me, ‘but now you have acquired a mind without boundaries and a personality without a center.’ So I went about fixing drinks and cheeses and taco dips for my guests . . . at my own Party Without Walls." There are so many memorable birds in Lafferty’s work. Some I would not hesitate to call characters, such as Astroid Midas and Amoy. Others are memorable presences within particular stories, like the bird in “Beautiful Dreamer” and the grackles in “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street.” Still others are threats around which whole plots turn, as with the roc in “Heart of Stone, Dear” and the thunderbird in “Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight.” Then there are the birds Lafferty uses to dramatize large ideas: time in “Been a Long Long Time,” thought in “Condillac’s Statue.” Finally, there are the birds in this short story, Rusty and Dusty. It seems unfair to call them criminals, but they are thieves. “Two For Four Ninety-Nine” is one of the The Men Who Knew Everything  stories, but that misleads. It is a frolic, and the men themselves are absent. Lafferty finished it after the wonderful “And All the Skies Are Full of Fish” and before the difficult “The Funny Face Murders.” In “Two For Four Ninety-Nine,” readers get Austro, Roy Mega, and Mary Mondo. Roy and Austro have just opened the Big Star Detective Agency and, on opening day, they take on two cases: one involving a mysterious death at a chaotic party, the other an impossible locked-room jewel theft. These are the two for $4.99 in the title. Roy and Austro eventually deduce that the two mysteries are connected through the dead man. He was a crook who trained one grackle to steal Artless’s jewels by flying down chimneys and replacing them with gravel, while the other acts as a distraction. Lafferty is parodying the detective genre and having a great deal of fun. To summarize the hijinks wouldn’t capture this story, since everything is worked out through overlapping, cross-cutting dialogue (for a reconstruction of the sequence of events, see below). There are nods to the Holmes stories. These I enjoy. There are, of course, no canonical Holmes stories in which the great detective solves the case without leaving Baker Street, but Austro manages it. One point to note about the story is its preoccupation with walls. I don’t know what to do with this, but throughout walls are both flawed physical barriers and metaphors for social and psychological boundaries. Lafferty has them on his mind. They inform the character building. One of the story’s two clients is George Artless, a sly jewel seller. For him, walls are all about security: he mistakenly believes that the six interior sides of his locked strong room are impenetrable. Lafferty plays Artless's justified paranoia into physical comedy, justified because he has overlooked the vertical breach in his safe room, the chimney. Artless is Client No. 2 at the Big Star Detective Agency, but he might well be called Mr. All About Walls. The other client is a foil for Artless. She is Miss No Walls Ever, a bohemian type named Selene O’Keene who wears snakeskin shorts and red-lensed glasses. She and her party crowd reject physical and social boundaries and host what Lafferty calls the Continuing Party Without Walls, a gathering for people without boundaries or a center. The story plays a large conceptual game in which extreme reliance on walls, or the extreme rejection of them, brings the two cases together because they are, in fact, a single case. Artless’s physical walls are easily bypassed by Rusty, the trained grackle that dives down chimneys, while the boundless nature of Selene’s life leads to her, and to everyone else except the grackle Dusty and the ghostly Mary Mondy, being dragged off to jail. The case itself is a schizo-gash. There is also the strange drug dexahexakrex in the mix. For me, the story is most interesting as a formal problem that Lafferty sets for himself and solves: how to write a double mystery that is really a single locked-room mystery about two worlds, one obsessed with barriers and one obsessed with abolishing them, both corrupt. Its deft construction reveals itself when its implicit and explicit sequence of events is worked out.

I began to try to write in about 1959 and went a year or so before my first sale . . . My life has been mostly interior and that interior very shallow. . . I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it). So it stands. There isn't much of a biography. Most of my life I forgot to live. — letter to Damon Knight, September 10, 1972. In the years before Lafferty started writing seriously, he spent some time in New York. “Adam Had Three Brothers” is one of the stories that makes me wonder what he took from that New York experience, because it drops place-signals that read as New York City: Marine Park (surely Brooklyn’s Marine Park ) and the Jamaica track, presumably the historical Jamaica Race Course. The track shuttered before Lafferty wrote the story and, though it was supposed to reopen in 1959, never did. The story reads as our New York City, except for that one group. Lafferty writes, In the town there are many races living, each in its own enclave . . . Its geographers say that it has more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more Jews than Israel, more Armenians than Yerevan. But this overlooks the most important race of all . . . it has more Rrequesenians than any town in the world. There are more than a hundred of them. In this first story about the Wrecks , we learn that they are a small racial group not descended from Adam. That places them outside the judgment of Genesis 3—that man must toil for a living. The plot chiefly follows Catherine O’Conneley, a Wreck who supports herself through a series of swindles. She meets Mazuma O’Shaughnessy, a young man who shows a mastery of her “Inverted Pyramid.” He says, I learned it in my cradle. The Inverted Pyramid . . . Very good. You pick them nice for a little girl. But isn't that a lot of work for no more than a hatful of money? . . . Take my word for it and share my secret with me and give up this penny ante stuff. He then proposes indirectly. She accepts. After their marriage, the pair travels the world, conning whomever they please, until Mazuma suggests that they settle down. There are comic set pieces along the way. One moment, however, is foreboding: Mazuma lets slip an unguarded remark about a plowman. Cathrine brushes it off, and soon the two have three gifted Wreck children and a happy domestic life. Then the bottom falls out. Mazuma says that he wants to earn an honest living. Catherine faints at this decisive proof that Mazuma is an Adamite rather than a Wreck. She leaves him. The story ends with the children raised as sad, slow Adamites. The bottom had fallen out of the world indeed. The three unsolvable problems of the Greeks were squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, and re-bottoming the world. They cannot be done . . . One is a professor of mathematics . . . and the oldest one is a senator from a state that I despise. One becomes a professor; another, a senator; but all Adamites are disappointments. Catherine never quite lives down her youthful indiscretion. This was one of the first Lafferty stories I read, and it remains one of my favorites. There is much here about how Lafferty thinks about ethnos and about coding—sometimes in ways that look generous, sometimes in ways that are strategically displaced (Jews and Gypsys). I want to set that aside and name two possible readings. They exclude each other. The story’s success depends in part on keeping the two readings in suspension. Most readers seem to accept the first reading at face value. The storyworld is a tall tale, a fantasy, so one accepts its premises the way one accepts the appearance of Pan in The Wind in the Willows and does not ask why the narrator sounds so much like a con artist. Read as “in-universe facts are the facts," "Adam Had Three Brothers" asks the reader to buy magic beans: a literal branch-line off Genesis. The Wrecks are "not even children of Adam," and an "old baked tablet . . . eight thousand years old . . . gives the true story of their origin. Adam had three brothers: Etienne, Yancy, and Rreq.” The narrator gives this the force of Mosaic law: the Wrecks, "not being of the same recension, they are not under the same curse to work . . . So they do not." On this first reading, the Wrecks really are exempt. It belongs to the primordial history of the storyworld: Adam had three brothers: Etienne, Yancy, and Rreq . . . They have never intermarried with the children of Adam except once. And not being of the same recension they are not under the same curse to work for a living. So they do not . . . Instead they batten on the children of Adam by clever devices that are known in police court as swindles. The other reading I have in mind says, "Hold up a moment." The story presents a population of con men and con women (with more men than women; note the uncles' last names if you want a clue to how Wreckville society really works), and it gives these scoundrels a mythology about themselves. Why be so cautious and suspicious? Because they are Wrecks. Lafferty may be running the old Adam Had Three Brothers con on us as readers. Consider a few pieces of textual evidence. We are told of Wreckville that “its geographers say” the town has “more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin . . .” Does it  refer to ordinary geographers, or to Wreck geographers—people no doubt eager to sell you a map? The story is full of mock expertise and comic exaggeration, and it positions the reader to make a decision about the story being told. One may treat “the true story of their origin” as a Wreck game or as a real origin. In the second case, all you have to do is trust Willy McGilley/McGilly and add a few footnotes to Genesis. But I would point out that his 8,000-year-old tablet “made of straw and pressed sheep dung.” We have idioms for things made of straw and things full of shit. Perhaps ask oneself, as a reader, whether Lafferty is running the Adam Had Three Brothers con on me. Again, the story works both ways at once: credulity and suspicion. Finally, the story is Lafferty’s first use of the term  recension . First instances of major ideas are significant in Lafferty because he builds on them in later work, and they blur in hindsight because Lafferty complexifies. The more time you spend with Lafferty, the more baroque you see him to be. Something like this happened with Epikt, where "Ktistec" had a story-specific meaning about remembering the name of Chicago . That was Epikt's first appearance. Then it attracted great richness. In "Adam Had Three Brothers," recension  is used as if it meant race, or primordial race. The Wrecks are said to be not of the same recension. On a suspicious reading, Wreck is a literal recension: Wrecks have edited themselves into Genesis as descendants of Rreq. They have rewritten the primordial history of Genesis 1-11. When the narrator calls them a different recension, there is a pun. That fits the con-reading. The first use of recension in Lafferty is story-specific verbal play, as is the word Ktistec. Just as Ktistec expands in his imagination, recension  takes on meanings I’ve discussed in other posts . I’ll wrap up by saying that there are interesting points to be made about the theology of the story, from both credulous and suspicious readings, just as there are about how Lafferty uses the three Greek problems—the three classical constructions impossible to solve with a straightedge and compass: trisecting an arbitrary angle, squaring the circle (constructing a square with the same area as a given circle), and doubling the cube (constructing a cube with twice the volume of a given cube). Lafferty replaces the third, the doubling of the cube, with the “rebottoming” of the world. As early as 1959, he recognized that he was writing about the impossibility of rebottoming a world once it had ended. Although personal in scale (a World 7 ), "Adam Had Three Brothers" might be his first day-after-the-world-ended story.

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician" I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about communism. I should say at the outset that I take a measured view on the deeply flawed and often destructive McCarthy, but I am sympathetic to Laffery's view of anti-communism. After all, Soviet infiltration was a Cold War reality. McCarthy is not, in my eyes, the straightforward historical villain he is often portrayed as in popular accounts. The whole thing is just sad to me, on all sides. To put it mildly, being remotely measured about McCarthy is not popular. So, where to start with Senator McCarthy and Lafferty? Perhaps we begin with the fact that they were both proud Irish Catholics. There is a good online essay from the Jesuit magazine America  by Larry Tye that gets McCarthy and Catholicism right. Tye is a McCarthy expert who argues that McCarthy’s Catholicism was central to his identity, but not in the deterministic way later popular accounts suggest. The cartoon McCarthy is a Catholic ideologue. Yes, McCarthy was raised in a devout Irish Catholic farming family in Wisconsin. He was further shaped by his Catholic education at Marquette. It is a weird coincidence, if it is one, that, within  Green Tree , the Green Tree community converges at an Irish burial in Ireland, in the county from which the McCarthys had immigrated to the U.S. At that point in the novel, America has become in many ways politically intolerable within the novel's imaginary of Flatland. McCarthy himself was not intellectual, but even his knowledgeable detractors seem to agree that his Catholicism was sincere, habitual, and deeply, if naively, personal. McCarthy did not use Catholicism for public display. He did not want to be thought of as a Catholic ideologue. His Catholicism was old-fashioned: regular Mass, confession, prayer, and support for Catholic causes all mattered to him. Tye takes aim at one of the big McCarthy myths, the claim that Catholic leaders effectively launched McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade.. Catholic anti-Communism and Catholic voters certainly helped promote his rise, and he was often a hero of Catholics, but Catholic opinion itself was hotly divided on McCarthy, with important clergy and lay voices denouncing him from the beginning. By the end, after the Army-McCarthy hearings and his Senate censure, both his public standing and Catholic support took a nosedive. There are few political implosions in American public life quite like it. One interesting detail is that of one of the two Catholic senators who did not censure McCarthy was JFK, who was reluctant to alienate his base. In Green Tree , Kennedy is the Cardboard Man, the cardboard Catholic. McCarthy was a man whose faith was real, yet whose demagoguery overshadowed it, and who will probably always be a villain in the popular imagination. Again, he isn't getting a measured treatment anytime soon. The last serious academic attempt at partial rehabilitation was in the year 2000. Now, a complicating factor in all this is the way Lafferty’s view of communism intersects with questions of American Jewish identity, since one part of the McCarthy story involves the different responses Senator McCarthy drew from Catholics and Jews. As Tye writes, “The truth is that at his peak, McCarthy had the support of an impressive 49 percent of Protestants, which was just one point below his national rating. Jewish Americans were the one religious group who consistently and overwhelmingly rejected him, with 15 percent viewing him favorably and 71 percent unfavorably.” It is therefore not surprising that McCarthy becomes a figure in In a Green Tree  about whom Julius Brass has something to say. McCarthy’s identity in the book is called the "Proud Peasant." He is first introduced by Pat O'Trassy, who foresees a "type-man" who will lead an unorganized revolt to reverse the world's surrender to evil and slavery. "This type-man that I see," Pat O’Trassy was speaking with his hands as well as with his mouth as he tried to show the shape of the type-man, "will head an unorganized revolt. I even have a name for the phenomenon that he’ll head: ‘Remembrance of Proud Peasants.’ That’s sort of a title for something It keeps coming to me. I almost see the face of the man who will first typify it, Black Irish and Black German mixed, dark of brow and jowl, solid, honest, good. I’ll begin to see that face more clearly soon." This is where Julius Brass comes in. Because the "brotherhood" of his enemies has antennae that warn them of threats early, Julius predicts that the Proud Peasant will be thwarted: "But this ‘Proud Peasant’ will be thwarted at every stretch and turn, Pat. He will be just about the biggest bust ever. He’ll be totally destroyed. And you yourself will be taught to loathe him. The peasant-as-hero will be ruined and shot down." "Why will he be ruined, Julius un-Caesar, you un-tactician of these battles?" "OH, I’m a superb tactician in these battles, Pat. But the members of the brotherhood have antennae that you don’t know about. They can give themselves warning of a threat even before it begins . . . They’ll not allow him to be seen undistorted. He’ll be smothered in slander and booing. He’ll be savaged to death. And his fellow Proud Peasants will be gulled into dishonoring him in death and after." This is Lafferty’s allegorical take on what happened in 1954 following the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. What Americans learned led to the U.S. Senate’s 67-22 vote to censure McCarthy for conduct unbecoming of a senator. That will all happen in the novel's future. Back in Tulsa, Pat's wife Beatrice Belle has a ten-inch baked-clay statuette (from James Tyrone's archeological digs) that Julius says is the "Archetypal Proud Peasant." The connection gets cemented: In November of 1946, Beatrice Belle saw in the newspaper the picture of a youngish man who had won an election in a midnorthern state." That’s the man," BeeBee said. "He is the splitting image of his image on the buffet there." Over time, Pat O'Trassy observes that he has two effigies connected to this man, and they begin to reflect a disturbing, explosive ambivalence. The primary statuette remains true to the man's original appearance: a clear, crisp, good-looking, and honest man, clouded only slightly by concern and frustration. The secondary effigy, though, morphs: But the secondary effigy, ah, it was turning into a loathsome fellow. He was really having a foul job done in him. "Some people say that a person can see anything he wants to see in these little reacting-clay effigies," Pat O’Trassy grumbled. "But I’m seeing things in this one that I very much don’t want to see. Gah, it’s hard even to look at the loathsome thing!" As Julius predicts, the real-life Proud Peasant is targeted by what the novel calls "Loathsomizing Machines." The media and his enemies subject him to an onslaught of character assassination until his true self can no longer be seen or heard; only distortions reach the American public: But what was the man himself up to, the man that the effigies effigied? That was hard to say. The shrilling and booing and yelling and spitting against him did not really allow him to be seen or heard at all. Only distortions of him could come through. The "Loathsomizing Machines" were working on him. When last had there been such stark and violent slander and hatred! Ultimately, the Proud Peasant dies. It is the day that Senator Joseph McCarthy died: The Proud Peasant died on May 2, 1957, pretty well hated by almost everyone. Never had the death of one honest man brought so much sheer delight to so grubby a commonalty. He was still a young man when he died. It was a Murder by Slander.

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room froma great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry. “I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious. “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” is one of Lafferty’s masterpieces and one of his perfect stories, with much that is central to his art. I’ll walk through the plot and then say a little about how I understand its organization. The story begins with Christopher Foxx seemingly wandering through an altered, primal version of his city. Everything is in a fog, and Lafferty is careful in how he builds the transition, but Christopher’s urban world has been replaced by one with tall grass, buckskin storefronts, and currency made of stone and clay. In this place, he is not Christopher Foxx but Kit-Fox, the name his old friend Strange Buffalo called him. This is a "day of grass"—an intensely felt, magical, rich, violent time outside the normal calendar where people fight battles alongside armed buffalo and can work elemental dances. Above the landscape is a thundering, floating mountain. On it, ancient prophets physically wrestle with God to win these special days. Sometimes the struggle is won. Sometimes it isn’t. Severed bodies of defeated prophet warriors sometimes plummet bloodily to the earth. The story then jumps to what seems to be another plane of reality, to Christopher Foxx's prosaic reality. This is a muted and highly regulated modern city. Foxx is an academic attending a symposium at the North Paragon Breakfast Club with his academic colleagues Buford Strange, Adrian Montaigne, and Vincent Rue. Over a meal of sheldrake duck, the men debate the "days out of count," such as Indian Summer, which they hypothesize are anomalous temporal spaces distinct from the regular year. Helen Hightower, Christopher’s wife, eventually joins them, and the conversation ranges over legends of ancient prayer-men and frost giants who sweated blood in a mist to force these special days into existence, placing them on what the story calls a different "holy skin" outside of linear time. The debate escalates, and then the mountain's primal reality begins to bleed into the university room where the characters have relocated. Children enter and chant that Buford Strange is made of straw, then no one can remember the children well. Adrian Montaigne begins to undergo a transformation, becoming a mountain wrestler. He vanishes to join the cosmic battle, while a broken Buford Strange passes out and is revealed to be a lifeless scarecrow stuffed with bloody straw. Foxx's wife, Helen, assumes her alternate-world persona, Day-Torch, and screams in support. Foxx joins in. It is here that Lafferty refuses to compromise his mythic vision for the sake of realism, bringing the violent consequences of the mountain directly into the breakfast club: There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry. Day-Torch calls for the head, and it crashes through the wall of reality, exploding on the floor. Lafferty ends the story with a line of verse about the falling of bodies and the up-splashing of blood from the days of grass. My preferred way of understanding the mechanics of this story is through Northrop Frye’s idea that modes of literature displace the mythic, so that the real is not less mythic in the sense that the myth has been drained from it, but rather made more superficially plausible. The primal structures of myth are always present—stories of gods, heroes, and cosmic patterns—yet they get adapted, muted, recostumed, and rationalized as literature moves from "pure" myth toward more realistic modes. We can think of the far end of these poles as being the day of grass, which is plainly mythic, and the day of straw, which is not. The underlying shapes (quest, descent, rebirth, the dying god, the sacred marriage) rarely disappear, though there are major changes in the mythic imagination. Instead, they get displaced into forms the culture will accept as plausible. They become the de-mythicized content of academic analysis. This is too simple, as that displacement works its way through cultural time: the god becomes a legendary hero, then a romantic knight, then a realistic protagonist, and finally—in ironic modes—an anti-hero. Under it all is the same archetype. Frye calls the measure of successful displacement the "criteria of plausibility": as literature descends his modal ladder from myth through romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony, writers have some tricks up their sleeves. They motivate their material by moral, causal, or psychological realism rather than by supernatural myth. One thing that makes “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” so powerful is that it starts at the mythic pole, displaces the storyworld to a university setting, and then refuses to make concessions to the criteria of plausibility as it builds to its final explosion of sacramental affirmation and blood. Consider the mythic pole, where Lafferty gives us the Day of Grass. It is condensed, not displaced, and one interacts with greater proximity to the archetypal. Things are close to what they do, and names are close to what they name. Kit-Fox is a fox in a kit society. Day-Torch is a torch that sets days on fire. Strange Buffalo is strange and is killed among buffalo. Day-Torch tells the river, "You've got the tune wrong," so the river changes its tune. The gap between saying and doing, between nomen  and res  itself, is narrow. This becomes obvious when Lafferty writes the great passages about rite, ritual, and ceremony, where action and outcome are inextricably linked: Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. For the same reason, Lafferty’s story refuses to police lines between the animate and the inanimate, the sacred and the practical, and the liturgical and the private. Move to the other pole, and one has the day of straw, a world with the juice drained out of it. Lafferty writes, The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. The grass day is gray, but its grayness is enlivening. The day of straw, by contrast, is full of flat color, which Christopher notes is meant to be good for the nerves. There is pervasive amnesia, which is not merely forgetting but what it always is in Flatland: the enabling condition. If one wanted the story’s major symbol for what has happened, one needs look no further than Professor Timacheff, who is out of town. He is a joke on the deus absconditus , for both the day of grass and the day of straw are vertical cosmologies. The mythic mountain, with God as mist at its summit, has become the next story up in a university building, where an absent professor teaches not miracles but special effects. This displacement from mountain to classroom is the kind of barrier realism creates when it satisfies the demands of plausibility. Lafferty punches a hole through it and allows a two-way passage: down the axis mundi  for the falling bodies, which splash up blood from the mythically displaced underlay, and up the same axis for the warrior’s ascent. The blood splashing up is a violent counter jerk back to the mythic, a climaxing moment of anti-displacement. Once one sees this pattern, one begins to see the story’s many smaller games. Christopher Foxx’s transition to the name Kit-Fox, and the way Lafferty’s narrator handles it, is one of them. It parallels Christopher’s gradual psychological assimilation into the primal reality of the day of grass. At first, he feels that his name does not belong in the environment. Strange Buffalo greets him as Kit-Fox, and that greeting makes him wonder which identity is the true one. The move reverses the usual pattern from myth to displacement, because it carries him, mid-sentence, from the displaced half of the schizo-gash, Christopher, to the mythic half, Kit. Then there is Strange Buffalo’s death by buffalo in battle, which the story presents as more heroic than his later being torn apart as a man of straw, precisely because the first death does not lean toward the ironic. There are, in effect, two vertical cosmologies, one for each half of the story. The day-of-grass cosmos runs from the mythic to the heroic, with much comedy along the way; the day-of-straw cosmology runs from the low mimetic to the ironic. By the end of the story, the far ends of these poles are stretched between the highest and the lowest points: from Adoration’s ascent to the mountaintop to Buford Strange’s body of bloody straw in the university room. The shape looks something like this: The vertical cosmology is then counterfigured. The Day of Grass, the mythically higher, is figured as the underlay, or ground of being, for the Day of Straw, a displaced version transposed onto it through a temporal metaphor: the days in count and out of count happen simultaneously. This creates a double vision, in which one sees two iterations of a single vertical cosmology, the first mythic, the second ironic. That is the deeper metaphysical picture, but it is not what the reader experiences. Rather, the reader experiences displacement of literary modes, which correlate to modes of perception. In Okla Hannali , Lafferty uses Choctaw culture to reimagine the archetypal worlds of Eden and the Flood. In “Days of Grass, Days of Straw,” he does something similar but more radical: he uses Great Plains Indian culture as a mode of sacramental perception. The “good skin” is both a pun on the Bible as the “good book” and a Kiowa painted hide, because in the grass day these are not two things but one thing seen under mythic restoration. The Cahooche shadow-writing displaces Philippians 2:12’s “fear and trembling.” It becomes “in fear and chuckling.” This is one of the more interesting moments in the story because it suggests that the “fear and trembling” of the Bible is already a discursive displacement of something more direct. To state the obvious, neither the Bible itself nor its words are sacraments because a sacrament is a tangible encounter with Christ. That is why all seven sacraments in the Catholic tradition forgive venial sins when they are received with the proper disposition, whereas reading the Bible, even with the proper disposition, does not. It recalls early debates in the church about the appropriateness of the literal reading of scripture for the simpliciores . Lafferty modifies the trembling of mysterium tremendum et fascinans  with his own figure of the Laughing Christ. Or is it a mistake to attribute this to Lafferty at all? After all, it is Strange Buffalo who says it. The line is at once a joke and a Catholic reflection on “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” “Chuckling,” after all, introduces the physicality of Lafferty's Laughing Christ. The story’s two central Christian images likewise hinge on bodily contact with the divine: Jacob wrestling at the ford of Jabbok, and Christ’s seamless garment. Lafferty transcodes both. Jacob’s single night of struggle becomes the engine of the story’s sacramental logic: prophets perpetually sweating blood and risking dismemberment. The text presents this as a direct, physical demand laid upon the divine: “We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.” This act of counting coup counterfigures the noli me tangere . Lafferty then uses Christ's seamless garment as a double metaphor for time. One can view it from the mythic pole or from the displaced pole. What one sees will be competing topologies. From the displaced pole, as Buford Strange sees it, the garment has holes because he imagines it as form, that of rationalized, linear time: May 7 succeeding May 8 succeeding May 9. Seen apocalyptically, as Day-Torch, Kit, and Adoration come to see it, this is a partial vision. The displaced vision of the garment appears seamless only because what has fallen through its pockets is no longer perceived when one is in a state of straw, no matter how real it is.