“I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.” “I am a live one all right. Sign here and we’ll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you’ll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.” “Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.” “To talk to? Are you a talker? I had a talker once before. Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished talking, O Boy. I hope you can do as well.” A warning at the outset: this post begins with an early and pretty innocent Lafferty sex farce, then offers one interpretive key through the history of Greek prostitution. It then moves on to difficult questions in Lafferty as part of a broader line of thought on erotics in his fiction. I seem to be the only person interested in this topic, and I know it is not standard-issue Lafferty. “Girl of the Month” is another early story, completed in February 1958 and never published. Lafferty tried to shop it to men’s magazines of the day— Gent, Escapade, Rogue,  and Adam —as well as to The New Yorker  and Esquire . It has a spicy premise, but no one would mistake its content for titillation or crypto-erotica. Instead, it is a jokey vignette about a sexy, low IQ escort and a pedantic autodidact. The erudite jokes come from an author who was himself one half autodidact (he had that first-rate prep school education) who usually keeps his pedantry in check. The story is him showing off while making fun of showing off. The main character is Mansard Moluney. Mansard compulsively joins the niche mail-order "Month" clubs that were a mainstay of mid-twentieth-century American culture. From the clubs, he gets everything from rare books to exotic sausages. One day, while looking through material from a book club, he carelessly signs and mails an advertising card, thus inadvertently joining the exclusive "Girl of the Month Club." Mansard thinks he has subscribed to receive a monthly art photograph. In reality, it is an escort service. The pedantic Mansard failed to read the fine print, so he is surprised when a brassy young woman calling herself Ginger arrives at his door on the seventeenth day of the month. She makes her business clear: She kissed him with kindly passion, and sweeping into the room, opened her weekend bag and set out a small but select number of items: a fifth of Maryland Rye Whisky, an album of seductive records, a small but expensive portable smorgasbord, a handful of yellow jackets, and a few small objects which he did not comprehend. Are those sex toys? And then she starts to strip. Throughout, Mansard is oblivious. Ginger keeps trying to seduce him, but Mansard just sees it as an opportunity to have a captive audience: “This may be the most delightful club I ever joined. My greatest need is always someone to talk to. Many people, comical as it seems, consider me a shattering bore.” He mistakes the situation for Whore of Mensa territory. So he talks, and he talks, ignoring her sexual advances and innuendos as she repeats words like "playmate" in his relentless monologues on obscure historical topics. These include the ancient origins of sheer silk from Kos, etymological theories of early liquors, Carian burial customs, and so forth. Bored by his nattering, Ginger falls dead asleep. Mansard is fine with talking to her sleeping, scantily clad body until dawn. In the morning, Ginger wakes, takes a gratuity, and gets ready to leave. Then she pauses at the door to warn Mansard to skip his upcoming selections: “Listen, peach pie, you know when you belong to this club you don’t have to take all the selections . . . April and Mae and Junie are all right. But let August go by. And whatever you do, skip November! I wouldn’t want to be responsible for what might happen if you pulled that talking routine on her.” Those particular women, especially the November girl won’t be so easygoing with him. More vignette than story, “Girl of the Month” interests me in its use of the kind of trivia Lafferty always brings into his work, not because the story deals with sex. Sex is all over Lafferty. It is symptomatic that people miss this. The most relevant piece of trivia in “Girl of the Month” is the distinction between the pornai  and the hetairai  in classical Greek culture. There is a great deal of interpretative controversy on the issue, but the predominant view is that pornai  were ordinary prostitutes, usually lower-status, openly commercial, and often tied to brothels or pimps, while hetairai  were elite courtesans, valued not just for sex but for charm, wit, education, social polish, and cultivated companionship in male social life. In Lafferty’s story, that distinction is a big part of the joke, because Mansard casts Ginger as a hetaira  when he compares her calypso dancing in black lingerie to one “described in Greek verse”: “You are not a hetaera , are you?” “Gee, glamour boy, I don’t even know what one is.” The situation is a coarse commercial sexual appointment, closer to the pornē , except that the irony flips again, since Mansard wants conversation and intellectual companionship, which is the very thing a hetaira  was supposed to provide in addition to sex, while Ginger expects coitus. November’s girl, a real pornē , isn’t going to take it. Again, it is jokey, not titillating. One sure sign is that Ginger sits on Mansard’s lap. It is here that Lafferty’s own libidinal interests enter the story in a compromised form. The detail is small, yet it is fascinating, because this is just not how it works in Lafferty. As anyone who reads him knows, one of his recurring fantasies, to judge by how often it appears in both the fiction and the letters, was sitting on women’s laps and piggyback riding women. It also appears in many Lafferty scenes in which male characters stand on women, ride them like ponies, or are carried by them, often slung their shoulders. At times, this fantasy leads into uncomfortable territory, though he usually approaches it in so eccentric a manner that it is likely to titillate very few readers. Proof? No one thinks of Lafferty as an erotic writer. In Lafferty, the fantasy is wrapped up in playfulness and intimacy (full-body contact, power play, mock cruelty, real cruelty, powerlessness, masochism, and, usually, youthfulness) no matter who is participating. A clear extended example of it can be found in the unpublished fifth part of  In a Green Tree ,  In the Thunderbolt Mountains , which Lafferty was working on in 1987 after his retirement. In it a 1978 version of the Turnabout Party, first introduced in Part I of Green Tree , takes place, in which  the boys ride the girls and some of them wear spurs: I think this is Lafferty’s version of titillation. Sedalia Shipwake’s awareness that something is disordered about it perhaps points to a plotline involving the character Peter Lavender-McClure that Lafferty never fully developed before abandoning the manuscript. Peter is a mysterious boy with two homosexual fathers (this goes deep into the Green Tree backstory), one of whom had been married to Father Cloud McKay, an ex-priest who is presumably also a pedophile, before marrying each other. He is also perhaps an infesting poltergeist. Cloud McKay had gone all to the bad. He had had a homosexual relationship with Cletus McClure. Then he had such a relationship with Peter Alfred Pitchbende. Then he had a homosexual marriage with Peter Alfred; it was performed by another ex-priest. Then Peter Alfred Pitchblende and Cletus McClure had a homosexual marriage with each other . . . between them they were the male parent of Peter Lavender-McClure. Father McKay sues for bigamy in California. Whether the hellishness Sedalia senses is tied to all this Peter Lavender-McClure business or not, what also happens parallels other transgressive sexual material from In a Green Tree . I am thinking about Edith O'Melody Drakos's "horny parties” that involve nude parthens in set off rooms. In Thunderbolt Mountains , Lafferty writes that the grown men get their turn during the "Ponyride Hour": Peggy had had these Ponyride hours several times a week. She would get little girls, nine-to-twelve-years-old, to give grown men rides on their backs or shoulders, and the "hour" was always popular. Old Peggy and Monica and their sixteen-to-eighteen year old friends would also be "ponies" for the Ponyride Hour, and Peggy was herself still a ponyride pony there fifty years later. This material belongs to that terra incognita  of erotics in Lafferty, which readers have either not thought about or, if they have, have chosen to be silent about. When In the Thunderbolt Mountains  is published, as I understand it will be, one will see some of the stranger regions in Lafferty. The Part 5 fragment of In a Green Tree was written not to break into a market at the beginning of his career but to satisfy the needs Lafferty’s own inner world. To begin struggling with its geography, a distinction from Roland Barthes’s may be useful, that between ordinary pleasure ( plaisir ), which comforts the reader, and a more intense bliss ( jouissance ), which pushes the subject beyond cultural norms. A specifically Laffertian jouissance is present in the Turnabout Party of In the Thunderbolt Mountains . Lafferty enjoys it. It nearly takes over the manuscript’s early movement, as if one reads Lafferty’s experience of reading himself as he revisits imagery with a powerful purchase on his imagination. “Girl of the Month,” by contrast, belongs to the order of plaisir . It is a patently commercial effort, perhaps one that started as an assigned exercise, certainly one catering to the middle. The sexual subtext of “Girl of the Month,” and indeed Lafferty’s frequent prostitution theme more generally, should shock no one familiar with his work. As stereotyped plaisir , it is quite easy to understand , especially when set alongside the jouissance of ponyride hour .

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was one of Lafferty’s favorite poets. At one point, he wrote to Sheryl Smith about his experience translating him, saying, "I didn't know you translated Heine. So did I when I was a young person. So did Henry James when he was young, and Maurice Baring, and Lord Acton. Heine avoids the hoppety-hop himself, but most of his translators fall into it. I did." Heine’s “The Grenadiers” (written c. 1816) is a lyric about loyalty, honor, and the pull of national identity in the aftermath of defeat. The backdrop is the Napoleonic Wars, and the poem follows two French soldiers returning home after learning of Napoleon’s fall. Heine focuses on the psychological impact of their loss and their sense of devotion that goes beyond reason. The following is a typical example of how Lafferty translated him. It likely appealed to Lafferty for its resurrection motif and its use of the recurring “sleeping king” theme he often revisits.

Your Mephistopheles verse reminds me that I can only see that old devil as a stereotype. When I was working in the electrical business so many years, one of our most popular lines of electricians’ tools was the MEPHISTO TOOLS, with him as an old red devil with tail and hooves. Anyhow he made the best tools around . . . they had to have been forged in Hell itself. Anybody who can make tools that good can’t be all bad. — Letter So one question that may occur to a Lafferty reader is this: with all the Antichrist fever in popular culture, from Rosemary’s Baby  to the pop theology of the sixties and seventies, and given Lafferty’s religious concerns, why did he not write a novel about the Antichrist? The answer is that he did. It is one of his more difficult books, though I now think it less difficult than several of the hardest. I thought I would set down a few thoughts on the way Lafferty handles the Antichrist theme, because it is so interesting. The novel has a baroque plot that I am not going to unpack here. Instead, I will focus on the Antichrist and provide enough context to make that element intelligible. In Dark Shine , Rolo N. B. Danovitz is an eleven-year-old boy at the center of a group of eight people. They want to replace the existing world with a new one by expanding it. Rolo's first name comes from his maternal grandfather, Rolo Raingold, "the noted and award-winning genetic tamperer." We don’t learn much about the original Rolo, but we do get an amazing bit of background on his Numerology Noonan, his paternal grandfather, "that famed seer and illusionist and fraud." Hence, the N, for Numerology. The B. stands for Basil, which means King. The surname Danovitz Rolo picked himself. He says it points to his descent from the house and tribe of Dan, which is significant. As the novel's narrator explains: The surname Danovitz was selected by Rolo himself. He said that it indicated that he was descended from the house and tribe of Dan. For monniker he also used a sort of surname Dolg. He would be Dolg the Dagger, the Driven Knife. But he would always be a stubby, fat dagger, not a slim stiletto. So Rolo’s full name is a claim about who he is: King of the tribe of Dan. There are at least five ways Lafferty spins all this: the Antichrist as an in-family genetic creation, as something infernal, as an Olympian return, as a societal technological hubris, and as geopolitical espionage. A little about Rolo's crew, who are essentially pulling off what amounts to a trial run for the appearance of the Antichrist, a rehearsal that, if it works, will be the real thing. That not working out is one of the novel's jokes, for it turns out that each time the Antichrist thing doesn’t work, it sets Hell's plans back in a big way. There is Brendan Michaels, who is a master mathematician and magician. Creates the seven enabling equations that power the antichrist project. Then there is Beth Barabbas, whose name is, of course, important. She has been a centurion and wants to be one again. In Chapter 6, she presides over a court of centurions in Spacious City, which is the part of the world that is entering into ours and in effect rewriting it; in Chapter 11, she asks Rolo to fulfill his promise to put her "once more in command of a hundred," and he sends her to command "an Iron Hundred in Hell." There is Chrona Lorngold, Rolo's mother. She is an archaeologist and a member of an elite club called the Babylonians, whose women travel to the literal Babylon to give birth so their children can be proclaimed King of Babylon: "Oh, my son Rolo is the present King of Babylon. This is a cultish and ‘in’ thing only to conceal the fact that, for it is a valid thing also. Yes, Rolo was born in Babylon and was proclaimed King of Babylon. Among the archeologists and excavators, of whom I am one, there is an elite club named the Babylonians. And when any of us is to have an offspring, that one goes to Babylon for it to be born. And it is proclaimed King of Babylon." Lafferty calls her a fat love goddess, the chthonic mother, Venus-figured, and she and Rolo are called a mythic pair. She is quite simply the Whore of Babylon. Then there is Norbert Hardcore, the Knight of the Empty Seat, the Group's strong-arm. He assembles the whole operation without letting any member know. They all believed they were being assembled by inexorable fate, but in the old days, Norbert was an apprentice to old Numerology, Rolo’s grandpa. There is Hornblende Michaelson, the elegant one, and Nelly Mercury. Felicity Octave is a complicated character. She is shaped by Nelly but also implanted by the BAM monitors as a covert agent. In the novel, BAM is a group that monitors what is going on. Rolo calls himself an eight-stage rocket whose seven companions are disposable booster stages. He says seven fall away so the eighth can ascend. Now the important name. Dan is the tribe omitted from the sealed tribes in Revelation 7. Twelve tribes are sealed; Dan is not among them. The Church Fathers considered this tremendously important. Irenaeus ( Against Heresies  V.30.2) cites Jeremiah 8:16 ("The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan") and connects it to the Revelation 7 omission: the Antichrist will come from Dan. Hippolytus ( De Antichristo  14) uses Genesis 49:17, Jacob's blessing: "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider shall fall backward." In Catholic tradition, the formula is that Dan = serpent-tribe, omitted tribe, tribe of the false messiah. Serpent in the path, ambush, blade from below. All the symbols the novel plays with. Rolo knows all this, and he takes the name Danovitz to claim it. Of course, it is a Jewish name, and the really bad kid in When All the World Was Young  is the brilliant young banker Conrad “Goldfingers” Goldmeister, more complications for dealing with this aspect of Lafferty. In any case, Rolo’s moniker is Dolg the Dagger, the Driven Knife, a blade striking from the path, the Dan-serpent of Genesis 49:17. Connected to this in the novel is an important moment involving something called the I-Forget Bird in Chapter 2, a dark parody of the dove in sacred tradition. The bird explicitly warns Brendan about the entity he is serving: “A warning here though, Brendan, a warning!” the I-Forget Bird cautioned. “What you are working on and who you are working for is as crooked as a snake that bends back to his starting point. This is he who will deceive if possible even the elect. It is a trap and a trick. It is a Monkeyshine, it is a Kinderschein, it is a dark shine." This refers to the ouroboros, Dan's serpent folded into a self-consuming circle. At the destruction of Spacious City in the novel, when the whole antichrist rehearsal falls apart, Lafferty writes that the fires are "wonderful flaming visions of snakes eating themselves." Chrona makes all this very clear for the reader. She says, "My son Rolo is the present King of Babylon. This is a cultish and 'in' thing only to conceal the fact that, for it is a valid thing also." Then: "But Rolo is also King of Babylon in a deeper way than is suspected." The deeper way is Revelation 17–18. Babylon in the Apocalypse is the great harlot city, a counterfeit of the New Jerusalem. The beast of Revelation 13 and the harlot of Revelation 17 are complementary faces of this counter-kingdom. When Rolo names himself King of Babylon, he costumes himself in the role in Revelation. As I have already pointed out, Chrona herself is the Whore of Babylon as a working archaeologist. Lafferty gives the reader his version of Revelation 17:16 in Chapter 11, where the brutal betrayal of the Whore of Babylon by the beast is made literal as Rolo enters his demonic adolescence: A man came and put an iron collar around the neck of Chrona Lorngold. She howled: it was a hot iron collar. . . . A man came and branded Chrona on the left cheek with a hot branding iron. She squalled with the pain. . . . Persons came and took Chrona Lorngold to sell her in the market. This is the Revelation typology of the beast consuming the harlot in visceral, earthly terms. Then the book has many liturgical deep cuts. Each one takes a Gospel moment and runs it backward, doing something new with Lafferty’s counterfiguration strategy. Take Matthew 16:13–16. Christ asks, "Who do men say that I am?" Peter answers. The Father makes it possible to see who the Son is. At least persons participate in this, two Divine. Who do you think am I ? is the drama behind each of the synoptic gospels as rhetorical structures, which is why the are nothing like biographies. The audience is being asked the question. In Chapter 10, Rolo parodies it: “As the ‘Other’ asked ‘Who do men say that I am?’ Who do you say that I am? I am the scion of the House of Dan. I am the King of Babylon. I am the triple cube, the six-sided straight, the squares’ squares’ square. There is no way that you swingers could understand so simple and direct a person as I am. Hell, I’m just an eleven year old little boy.” Yeah. He’s 666. But Rolo does it all on his own. No Peter, no Father. The Trinitarian confession becomes a narcissistic mirror. He acknowledges what he is doing because "the Other" is capitalized just in case anyone needs help. The triple cube / six-sided straight / squares' squares' square: three self-referential geometric figures. Three degenerate images of itself. Or take John 8:58. "Before Abraham was, I am" — the ego eimi , the divine name. In Chapter 11, Rolo has fun with this: "Before Beelzebub was, I am!” He claims priority before the chief of demons, the hierarchical boasting of Hell. One more. John 10:16 is one of Lafferty’s favorite lines, recurring in his fiction and in the quotes in his letters, and is tremendously important to him. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." In Chapter 10, Rolo uses the same words to claim access to Olympus for his followers: “Other sheep I have who are not of your flock,” Rolo said, “and they also have their power. But, yes, this is a place where they cannot come to. This is Olympus. Or, if we are not in Olympus at this very moment, nevertheless we can go there instantly . . . . They are not in the right flesh to come, not till I put my special blessing on them." Lafferty also has Rolo parody the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ, having two natures, human and divine, without confusion or change. In Chapter 11, Rolo explains his dual existence with chilling clarity: “In my two natures, human and diabolical, I am not unique,” Rolo said as he realized himself more fully than he had erstwhile. “And yet there haven’t been more than a devil’s dozen of us. Just as humans have a very long infancy, we have a very long adolescence. It will be awkward and torturous, but I will garner more learning and duplicity out of it than ten thousand unmixed men will harvest in their equivalent morphic stage." There is a great deal of this kind of thing in the novel. So for the Parousia, where the Church has "I will come again" (John 14:3) and "do this in memory of me, till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:26), there is a gruesome swap in Chapter 10. Rolo admits, "Now it is only rehearsal. I will come again, with more substance, when I am older." His cultists beg for a communion of suffering: “Leave blood for us, leave token blood for us,” some of the people were asking Rolo. “Leave us only a bare liter of blood from something you kill in great pain. We keep this memento of you till you come back again.” “I will,” Rolo promised. “I will.” That is a dark parody of the Eucharist. That is probably enough to show what is going on here. So why is the novel called Dark Shine ? Immediately after Rolo's self-naming in Chapter 11, Lafferty gives the reader a faux dictionary entry: SHINE . Brightness or radiance. A beam or ray. A halo. Lustre or sheen of an object reflecting light. A mirage or projection. A show. A brilliant display. A ‘dash.’ A party, convivial gathering. A Disturbance, row, fuss, shindy, caper, trick. A fraud. A pile of cold coins. A Negro. Whisky. An appearance, seeming, deception, Nonsense. Boloney. A strong smell or stench. An addiction. There is a lot there to think about in that definition as a slide, but I’m going to stick to the antichrist angle. The semantic drift—halo through mirage and show into trick and fraud and finally stench and addiction—is the Antichrist trajectory. Dark shine is the bottom of the universe counterfigured as meretricious splendor.

Advanced Lafferty. I first read Étienne Gilson in high school. A Jesuit teacher gave me Gilson’s eloquent essay on the university, its history, what it should be, and its probable future. One of Gilson’s most accessible pieces, it made an impression on me. So did the teacher teacher who grumped, “This is from the old Norton Reader , before the Norton people let their books go to hell.” Later, I learned more about Gilson’s variety of neo-Thomism. And I learned that generations of later Thomists had made a point of driving tanks through him. But Gilson is very much worth reading. In Fourth Mansions , he plays an unusual but significant passing role. Like Jacques Maritain ’s more spiritualized ideas on art, against which Gilson argued, his own ideas were a form of radical Thomism meant to a meet art in the modern world on Catholic terms. They weren’t what I had expected. Like the university essay, his Painting and Reality  (1957) is an accessible and beautifully written work because it began as a series of lectures. Both works want to communicate to a wide but educated audience. Painting and Reality is the book Freddy Foley is found reading shortly before his entombment at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., the mental asylum known as the Bug. Lafferty places Gilson in Freddy’s simple hands: Freddy took a book from his bag. It was a rather serious book with which he intended to put himself to sleep, Painting and Reality  by Gilson, but it had one of those false jackets slipped over it. You know the kind, Safe-cracking for Pleasure and Profit , Arson Can Be Fun , Care and Feeding of the Polecat , Seduction for the Anxious Amateur . The jacket of this book was Brain-Surgery Self-Taught . Freddy read it and dozed till there was a tug on his arm. Readers of Fourth Mansions  know that art plays a large role in the novel, yet the book’s arguments about art are largely unexamined. Each Harvester/Python is assigned an artist to delineate his or her character. The toad Carmody Overlark is said to be an art collector and collector of intellectuals, but not an artist himself. Michael Fountain’s golden bowl is (in his mind) an aesthetic object. Today I wanted to work out some ideas about how Lafferty might be using art in the novel by way of Gilson. Unsurprisingly for a Catholic metaphysician, Gilson in Painting and Reality draws a distinction that is, on its face, about aesthetics but is really about metaphysics. He makes the case that realism should not be conflated with representation, and suggests that 20th-century people can best understand why it shouldn’t through the Scholastic tradition, which is Gilson’s tradition. A painting, he argues, does not represent something that already exists but is a new being, something added to the order of reality by an act analogous to divine creation. This contrasts with what he calls the picture or the image. Whenever a painting represents something that anterior thingness is always secondary to art. A picture, unlike a painting, relies on what semioticians call iconicity. It mimics, and mimicry is the measure of pictorial significance. A picture is this a sign pointing toward something already existing outside itself; it copies that thing, represents it, and substitutes for what it depicts. One could have two painted canvases and one is a painting and the other is a picture in Gilson’s ontolog. The upshot is that the painting genuinely is , while the picture refers . An artist, as a painter, adds to the sum of being, but the perfectly adequate picture maker just redirects our attention within the world of preexistent things. It is a huge claim. It is a difference between the images inside Biddy’s eyelids and the moment they become dead paint in the novel. Gilson underscores the magnitude of this aesthetic chasm by distinguishing the creation of art from the mere appreciation of nature: The most exquisite sensitiveness to natural beauty requires neither science, nor philosophy, nor even any kind of intellectual culture in general; between the charm of nature and ourselves, there is nothing, but between our sensibility and any painting that we may attempt to do, there is art. In the case of painting, art is not nature seen through a temperament; rather, it is the ability to create a new being that nobody would ever see, either in nature or otherwise, unless the art of the painter caused it to exist. Fourth Mansions  does many things as a book. At its widest horizon, it pushes Lafferty’s novel-making into the space of eschatological anagogy while still maintaining enough footing in low historical mimeticism to not be too alienating. Not that people don’t bounce off it. Contrast this with an unprepared reader’s experience of something like the more painterly (in Gilson’s sense) and representationally challenging Arrive at Easterwine  or Not to Mention Camels . Fourth Mansions  can be enjoyed as just a conspiracy novel, just an esoteric thriller about human evolution, ancient revenants, prophetic cults, magical fountains, and a naive young reporter named Fred Foley who bumbles into all that happens. Yet from its opening pages to its final question—"still the repeating cycle, or the ascending spiral?"—the novel is also organized around the distinction Gilson makes about art, applied not to canvas and pigment but to human existence. Recall that Freddy Foley has simple brains but good eyes. Biddy Bencher has those pictures on the insides of her eyelids. It is a novel about looking at art and wondering what art and reality are and how the two connect, and it asks the big question that Gilson asks of a painting, only in regard to eschatological purpose: does the integration of the four beasts (they are the tetramorph of ox, man, lion, and eagle, as we learn from Michael Fountain’s lecture) add a new being to reality, or does it repeat what is already there? Lafferty asks this of every character, every faction, and every human act in the novel. Gilson's account of painting is grounded in Aristotelian hylomorphism, specifically in the doctrine of matter and form as principles of becoming. It has been called more Aristotelian than Thomist. Matter, in this account, is what Aristotle calls a substratum, a subject that is already something. It can be something further. In Gilson’s technical vocabulary, what the artist works with is a germinal form that is somehow already materialized but latently constraining. Fulfilled form is that which, when received into matter, constitutes a new and determinate being. Here, Gilson follows Aristotle's Physics , which emphasizes that matter in some sense desires the form that will actualize it: "The truth is that what desires the form is matter, as the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful," says Aristotle. Accordingly, matter, positioned between nonbeing and full being, is constitutively oriented toward the form that will bring it to actuality. Between matter and form is that frequent Lafferty concern: Ouden or privation. It is the absence of a form that ought to be, or the absence of what should be there, so it is a deeply normative concept connected to the idea of final causation. Gilson, being a Thomist, argues that privation, unlike pure nothingness, is indexed to a determinate good form. A blank canvas is nothing but a canvas in privation of the potential painting that its nature can receive. The process of becoming a painting is the substitution of the presence of form for privation. To illustrate this potential, Gilson asks us to consider the physical starting point of the artist: Confronted as he is with his sheet of white paper, he sees it as the place of infinite poetic possibilities, any one of which can materialize precisely because none of them is already there. The same remark applies to the canvas, wood panel, or wall selected by the painter as the support of his future painting. Whatever its nature, the first care of the painter will be to prime it—that is, to lay on it a coating or preparation that will ensure its perfect uniformity and neutrality with respect to any possible pattern of lines and colors it may have later on to receive. All of this, transposed from canvas to character, is quite a bit like Fred Foley as holy fool and journalist at the opening of Fourth Mansions . He is introduced early on as being like a canvas: As all cats (and especially tigers) are loose in their skins, this Freddy Foley was loose in his face. There was room there for far more things than his winking innocence and his easy grin. There was room for multiplex character that Freddy hadn't developed yet, for expressions he had never used. It was a face unplowed, though momentarily bloodied. An unplowed face is not an empty face. It is far more like a face in privation in which one can see absence awaiting its form. Foley is already something (an okay reporter with genuine perceptual gifts), but he is constitutively incomplete. He is oriented toward forms he has not yet received. Lafferty even gives Foley matter's characteristic, magnetic orientation toward receiving form: All his life, people would be giving valuable things to Fred Foley unasked: gifts, powers, lives, worlds, secrets. Freddy is one of those people who are especially receptive to form. It is probably why Foley has a chance at succeeding where the Harvesters fail. Their brain-weave is an exercise of collective willpower aimed at producing a new human being by imposition. They are essentially secular theurgists. They seem not to understand that form cannot be manufactured by the imposition of will, but has to work with what is germinal, of which they are a part, as pieces of the tetramorph. In creation, form will follow the natural fecundity of being, received into matter prepared to receive it. Lafferty explicitly points to this failure of artificial imposition at the novel's climax: He had been called, as the patricks had not been, as the Harvesters themselves had not been, as none of the exterior creatures had been of themselves. The Harvesters, the persons of the weave, had not themselves truly mutated. They couldn't have done it; they hadn't the holy simplicity for it. Theirs was a false and premature mutation. It was Fred Foley who now became the first of the new mutation, the special sort of man. Simplicitas  is not stupidity. It is the undividedness of matter that has not predecided the form it will receive, but that awaits the integration or development of its germinal form. It is privation in its positive aspect: the readiness of the not-yet-formed. Lafferty’s recoding of the tetramorph animal natures as toad, badger, falcon, and lion is, on the one hand, Jung’s quarternity (3-1) and the reintegration of the zoon anthropikon , which is at least a partial reconstitution of preternatural grace . That takes us back to Gilson. His central ontological claim, grounded in Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, is the Latin formula omne esse ex forma est : every being is in virtue of its form. Form is that through which a thing is at all. Again, it is the principle that individuates it, separates it from nothingness and from other beings, and constitutes it as the determinate thing it is. Where form is absent or deficient, being is absent or deficient. A painting that has received its form from the artist is a new being; the picture that copies has added no new form to reality and therefore no new being. As Gilson puts it, Among the properties of form, the most striking one is its aptitude to confer being upon the matter that receives it. In the structure of being, the primitive element is the act in virtue of which a certain thing is, or exists; but existence itself is that of some actually existing thing, and since a thing is what it is owing to its form, it is through its form that it receives existence. Hence the classical position according to which existence comes to things through form. Consider what Foley is told by his colleague Mary Ann about the "flatness" of Oriel Overlark: "For what she's worth, Fred, let me tell you that she isn't worth anything to you. I've done three pieces on Oriel myself, trying to see her in three dimensions. It didn't work, though. She looks brilliant, but she's a flat person. Not even low relief. She doesn't have three dimensions." "Carmody was an art collector, you know, before he became adviser to the advisers. Oriel is a piece of art. Not profound art, but striking new art for all that. She's a novelty piece. She's been imitated and parodied, but only in a small circle." In Gilsonian terms, Oriel lacks received form. She appears  to be something. She is "brilliant," she "looks," but appearance is what Gilson calls a picture. She is like the many pictures of Carmody Overlark that Foley sorts through, puzzling over whether they are the same man. She somehow has aspects of depth, intelligence, and individuality without fully embodying them. She lacks three dimensions because, in this usage, three-dimensionality is an ontological claim: the depth that comes from form, from esse  grounded in forma . That she has been "imitated and parodied" confirms this: you imitate and parody pictures, not paintings. A painting, according to Gilson, is an individual thing that cannot be parodied. One can only copy it imperfectly. Oriel is parody-able because she is already herself a kind of imitation. She is a picture or a deficient portrait of human depth, not a realized painting. The ontological gap between the two is exactly why they cannot be judged by the same criteria. Gilson writes: A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that, being unrelated to any external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting. Auclaire's formulation to Foley tracks a similar logic: "It's like everything was doubled here, O'Claire," Freddy said. "Everything that has substance will cast shadow, Foley. My things have substance. Don't get the things mixed up. Most people's things are shadow only." That, again, is omne esse ex forma est  restated in the novel’s idiom. To have substance is to have received form; to cast a shadow is a consequence of being in the world. If we wanted to read the novel through Gilson, Fourth Mansions'  four-faction cosmology can be read as a taxonomy of failed and partial relationships to the form-matter nexus that Gilson describes. The Returnees (Toads) represent the pure mimetic position: the world of picturing without painting. They are "mimics" by their own proud admission—"it's an ancient art"—who substitute themselves for other identities so completely that the originals are retrospectively displaced. Their ancient knowledge (the jewel in the toad's head) is genuine, but it is placed entirely in service of reproduction rather than creation. Their cosmic role is to maintain the repeating cycle. As Michael Fountain notes: "We support, as expedient, all cyclic Orphism; and so we must support the effort of the returnees. But they were only shadows of ourselves. Their concern that the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth be repeated has been a good one up to this time. The returnees must at all cost keep the world in this cycle. They cannot permit the world to ascend. They cannot even permit the cycle to become a helix, a spiral." This is what the picturing impulse achieves at the metaphysical scale: perfect reproduction of the existing order, the foreclosure of genuine new being. No new form enters the world through the Toads; they are the curators of an infinite regress of copies. Let’s go through the Harvesters, whose defining traits are intentionally linked by Lafferty to specific painters. This Arouet Manion was a Reynolds piece. Having a Reynolds face, he appeared more profound than he was. But that maker touched many of his characters with his irony. Joshua Reynolds is, for Gilson, the exemplary figure of the gap between picturing and painting. Reynolds theorized the Grand Manner. He talked about the aspiration of portraiture toward the universal and permanent. In practice, he remained a portraitist, creating pictures of social reality elevated by aspiration rather than transformed by formal innovation. Manion's Reynolds face represents depth through inherited conventions of gravitas. It doesn’t have the substance that those conventions evolved to express. It is the physiognomy of the able picture-maker. This Jim Bauer was in oils, in the splotchy sort of oil-painting that Eakins did do well, that should have been sketchy in result, and wasn't. The typical Eakins portrait is neither flattering nor idealized; it is ruthlessly accurate. This places Bauer among the most honest of representationalists. Because the Eakins mode is the perfection of picturing rather than painting, Bauer is stuck within the order of the already-real. His ambition to transcend it cannot be snagged on the mode of seeing that defines him. Letitia Bauer was the pale or moon-colored, slim woman whom Burne-Jones had painted several times: as Beggar Maid, as Norse Goddess, variously. The Burne-Jones allusion is interesting because Burne-Jones's women are not portraits; their were subjects but they are abstracted types, idealized forms that hover in a space between the representational and the new, not quite landing in either. They have been cast in too many roles for any one of them to constitute their identity. Letitia's "variously" is her problem, it might be said. She is a matter that has received multiple competing forms and is therefore, paradoxically, less determined than matter in privation. She is Oriel's more dignified counterpart. She isn’t flat. She is unstable. Wing Manion reminded one of a fish done by Paul Klee: not in her actual appearance, of course, but in her style. Yet she was good-looking, and Klee never painted a good-looking fish in his life. Those Klee fishes, though, they have passion. For Gilson in Painting and Reality , Klee is one of the major examples of what modern painting achieves when it escapes the picturing impulse. A Klee painting adds new beings, charged with interior life incommensurable with anything in the natural order. Wing Manion is the most transcendent of the Harvesters, and she similarly possesses something that cannot be accounted for by her surface. We could go through the rest of them, but I think that is enough. One can see the way the book Freddy is reading before his stay in the Bug reconfigures what has happened earlier in the novel. One of Gilson's most important chapters concerns what he calls the causality of form in painting, so I want to say something about it. It is the way in which, once form has been received into matter, it constitutes a causal principle in its own right. It leads to the work's internal relations. At one point, Gilson says that this is why artists feel compelled to turn the sketch into a painting. A painting is a whole in which every element is determined in its meaning and value by its relation to every other element through the governing form. Remove any element and the whole is altered; alter any element and the whole adjusts. This internal coherence is the hallmark of the achieved work: . . . still more than it is an individual, each painting that meets the requirements of a true work of art is a completely self-sufficient system of internal relations regulated by its own laws. In this sense, paintings are mutually irreducible beings, each of which needs to be understood and judged from the point of view of its own structure. The brain-weave in Fourth Mansions  can be read as a failure of this type of artistic formal causality. The seven Harvesters are a whole: The mind of Arouet Manion had great natural energy wrapped around a void, and it contributed a new angular velocity and a mad rain of strange particles. The brain-weave would not work fully without Arouet; it would not work fully if any one of the seven were missing. Each member of the weave contributes something incommensurable with what the others contribute. For instance, there are Arouet Manion's "new angular velocity and a mad rain of strange particles," Letitia's ashen death-joy, and Wing's helical passion. The brain-weave is, in this sense, an attempt at eschatological painting. Then why does the brain-weave fail to produce the new human being it aims at? One reason might be that it confuses the formal unity of its own existence with the ability to impose that formal unity on the world external to it. Gilson's causality of form acts within  the work, not as a power projected outward. The power fantasy of the Harvesters is thus disordered. On the Gilsonian reading, their error is to mistake the formal causality of their own collective being for a tool of intentional production. They have created a painting (the brain-weave itself is a being), but they believe this means they can make it do something it can’t. Lafferty is always interested in world creation, as we know. The chapter in Gilson’s book that is most relevant is the sixth chapter, "The World of Paintings." It argues that a painting constitutes its own world, governed by its own formal laws, in which what counts as space, light, time, and figure is determined by the internal logic of the work rather than by correspondence to nature. That might look like some kind of idealism and the claim that paintings are subjective, but Gilson is a realist. He says that the being added to reality by the act of painting is a being of a new kind, irreducible to the natural order it may appear to depict. The world of the painting exists because the natural world differs from the artist's specific teleology: Artists could almost be defined as the special class of persons who do not find in nature a certain class of objects that ought to be there—namely, objects whose existence, essence, and structure are exclusively justifiable by the pleasure found in apprehending them. Paintings are not simply objects that are pleasant to see; they are objects that have been produced by artists in such a way that their sight pleases the eyes. This is the cause of their existence. Because they do not find in nature objects whose exclusive raison d'être  is the aesthetic pleasure derived from their perception, artists set out to produce such objects. Fourth Mansions  ends with a question about what kind of world has just been painted: On so small a new module it might depend. What would be the shape and direction of it now: still the repeating cycle, or the ascending spiral? Would the next Mansions be the First again? Or the Fifth? The repeating cycle is like the mimicry of pictures. The ascending spiral is akin to what Gilson’s idea of the painting produces: not a return to what already existed, not a representation of what might exist, but a new form received into prepared matter, adding to the sum of being something that was not there before. The novel ends without answering that question, whether we are trapped in the same picture or have entered a new painting, but it is one way in which Lafferty has aesthetics converge with the eschatological in the book.

“There is Cavour. He has hardly begun in the world, but look how well-developed his web is. There is Lord Acton in England. There is Montalambert. There is poor Lamennais who will officially go to Hell. There is Mordecai or Marx who has been spinning a web in Paris and other places. Notice the exceptionally long anchor lines of his web, though the body of his web will always be paltry.” — The Flame Is Green (1971) “There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean.”— “About a Secret Crocodile” Today, I want to consider John Clute’s observation that R.A.L.’s work is irradiated by conspiracies. This is so evidently true that it is surprising how rarely Lafferty’s readers have attempted to trace the logic of conspiracy in his fiction. At a certain point in reading him, it became clear to me that at least two distinct forms of Catholic-inflected conspiracy are typically at work, often in allegorized or displaced form. One version leans into 19th-century ideas about Satanic Freemasonry. This is complicated by the fact that some Catholics have viewed Freemasonry as being a crypto-Jewish organization. For instance, in The Jews (1922), Belloc makes this argument. That variety of conspiracy can be distinguished from Satanic Freemasonry where dark political and spiritual forces join in an alliance against the Church itself. Its roots reach back to the early 18th century, grounded in anxieties over the Masons' secrecy, their perceived indifference to Christological religion, and their threat to Papal authority. In 1738, Pope Clement XII issued In eminenti apostolatus , a bull that excommunicated any Catholic who joined a Masonic lodge. His successors, including Benedict XIV, Pius VII, and Leo XIII, reaffirmed and extended this ban. The theory reached a theatrical peak in the  Taxil hoax , the source of some embarrassment, but not enough to alter the Church's social teaching. In 1983, the revised Canon Law no longer named Freemasonry, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the modern continuation of the Inquisition, most recently renamed by Pope Francis as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) clarified that the prohibition still stands. Catholics who join Masonic groups commit a grave sin incompatible with Church teaching. That means they go Hell for it unless invincibly ignorant . A second version of the historically conspiratorial is less cosmic but no less threatening in its way. Here, the danger is political rather than uncomplicatedly Luciferian. This is where one finds the view of someone like Hilaire Belloc , who argued that Jews posed a persistent political threat to Christian nations, in part because they remained, in his eyes, a distinct nation living inside others. Belloc believed this led to a tragic cycle: welcome and prosperity, growing friction, antagonism, and persecution, which repeats itself through geographical relocation. A related point. With Belloc, Lafferty saw Islam not simply as another religion but as a heresy. And in his thought, he occasionally presents both Jews and Muslims as conspirators against the Catholic faith, particularly in the context of Spain in his correspondence. Sinbad: The Thirteenth Voyage  convinces me that Lafferty’s portrayal of Islam imputes infernal qualities, linking it more closely to the Freemasonic strand of my two-front theory of Catholic conspiracy. It is a Catholic view with a long, interesting history. There are also mixed modes conspiracy. This, I think, is how Lafferty understood the role of Jews and Muslims in Spain and their conspiracy against Christendom. To him, the historical alliance had an infernal tinge because it was so deeply anti-Catholic. The most dangerous historical hybrid, however, for modernity is not anything like this, but new. It is embodied by the first of his great devils, Ifreann Chortovitch ( Coscuin ) whose sons are central to Argo . It is the atheistic threat of Marxism and the Red Revolution, which Lafferty saw both infernal and Jewish (in novels and short stories, he calls Marx as Mordecai ). That conspiracy combines economic materialism with spiritual corruption. We see this idea developing in the unpublished Civil Blood  and running throughout the Coscuin Chronicles and Argo . With this two-front war model and the possibilities of historical partnerships and sublimations in place, we have a little more to work with than simply saying there is an awful lot of conspiracy in R. A. Lafferty. A good place to look at how this works in his short fiction is “About a Secret Crocodile.” It is one of the first Lafferty stories anyone should read, one of his best. It shaves off the content of real history and instead creates an abstracted comedy about the logic of historical conspiracy, making more apparent the functional traces of the two kinds of conspiracy I outlined above. The story world is secretly run by a powerful being called the Secret Crocodile. Its main goal is to “control the attitudes and dispositions of the world.” It works through a front company called ABNC and is supported by high-level agents like Mr. James Dandi and John Candor, who have gone through a kind of “catechesis.” The Crocodile is totalizing. It is the central hub where all conspiracies converge. It oversees smaller conspiracies, such as a “cabal of seven men controlling the finances of the world,” as well as opposing movements like “Ocean” (which backs Bolshevism) and “Glomerule” (which backs Fascism). Through this structure, the Secret Crocodile shapes global consciousness, making sure that major world events serve its purpose. One day, the system goes on high alert. There is a threat from “the Randoms,” a trio of people who are “unknowingly linked” and act “without program or purpose.” The group—Mike Zhestovitch, Mary Smorfia, and Clivendon Surrey—is not a counter-cabal. They are an organic anomaly. Their strength comes from raw, authentic human reactions that the system cannot fully manage: Mike’s “gesture of contempt,” Mary’s “grimace of disgust,” and Clivendon’s “intonation of scorn.” Lafferty presents these as pre-ideological weapons—graced forms of spontaneous spiritual resistance that threaten the Crocodile’s system of manufactured consent. The trio is exposed after a series of absurd office mishaps, ending when an underpaid employee, Betty McCracken, feeds her awful sandwich to the office computer. The system’s first response is to try to corrupt Clivendon Surrey. Agent Morgan Aye offers him a vast fortune. Surrey rejects it with a snort of contempt, saying, “Then I’d be one of the birds that picks the shreds of flesh from between the teeth of the monster.” After failing to corrupt the trio, the organization turns to physical violence—what it calls “the Compassion of the Crocodile.” Dandi and Candor authorize a “Purposive Accident,” a carefully planned bombing meant to neutralize the Randoms’ abilities. The attack works exactly as intended. Mike Zhestovitch’s hand is mutilated, Mary Smorfia’s mouth is disfigured, and Clivendon Surrey’s vocal cords are destroyed. By damaging the physical sources of their resistance, the system silences them. The story then moves to its real ending, where Lafferty steps in as narrator to comment on what is going on. Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the Crocodile, there is a force that can resist it. It is “the good guys and good gals,” a vague, unmapped potential for decency that exists entirely outside the logic of conspiracy. It has no structure, no control, and no program. But it “stirs a little.” How does this relate to Lafferty's imagination? The Secret Crocodile is a full synthesis of what I called the “Two-Front War.” It has institutionalized the material drive of the Jewish Financial Conspiracy within its Financial Arm and absorbed the spiritual rebellion of the Masonic Conspiracy, along with the Marxist synthesis, into its Political and Cultural Arms. By managing both the Bolshevik front, called “Ocean,” and the Fascist front, called “Glomerule,” it keeps a firm grip on everything. . . . This is an attempt to bring some of these thoughts together. On the Crocodile Org  diagram, you will see the labels material  and spiritual . This is a really gross simplification. Lafferty maintains that both fronts are always present—for example, the Devil belongs to the materialist front, matching what we find in his ideas about the Red Revolution in Coscuin and elsewhere.

A man out of a job is a species distinct from a working man. There are similarities. And there is a wide difference. The man out has a seedier appearance and longer whiskers. And he feels himself looked at queerly in the street. He is more hurried, though he has less to hurry for. He sits alone in public places such as terminals and depots and hotel lobbies and does figures on the back of envelopes, long division problems of minimal outlay into accumulated savings to give days still starvation. He walks in parks and looks angrily at concrete horses and bronze fishes. And he remembers as though dimly and from a long time ago the friends of his previous existence, those of twenty-four hours ago when he had not yet been committed to this walking solitude. There was one who turned a phrase and ate of life with a careful carelessness as though eating around a worm hole in a pretty good apple. There was one who did things with a flair, and did them over again quickly when they were rejected; who combined a duck's back with a tinker's hand and a gambler's eye. There was one with the brindled fur of a kitten and the sharp claws of a cat, a red-headed minx who had been a part of the unresolved future, and now belonged to the irrevocable past. Like Lafferty’s New York School exercise “Other Kind of Animal, ” “Red Headed Future” was not a story in which Lafferty seems to have had much faith. His index-card note tells the story: “RED HEADED FUTURE 5000. 2-18-59 N.Y. SCHOOL.” Then dead. Had he circulated the story, the card would have included other submissions, other dates. There are none, so the index card is an obit. He finished it, filed it, buried it. This verdict tempts the reader to nod, since the story at first looks like a boilerplate late-1950s office story: a put-upon middle manager, a volatile boss, a sharp office girl, and a slow erosion of civility under tinpot authority. That impression is justified but somewhat misleading, however. Beneath the quasi-realist surface lie several very odd Laffertian moments: Didgeon’s diagnosis of the boss as an adrenaline addict, a taxonomy of three kinds of drunks, Ravel’s late monologue, which reveals the crisis it has already preemptively resolved, and a title that suggests something always just out of reach or something ominous. The main character is Jimmy Allyn, who works in a stressful office environment. The experience is overwhelmingly colored by his overbearing and verbally abusive boss, Mr. King. Jimmy manages two difficult subordinates: Didgeon, who justifies petty theft by citing pet ideas, and Hoadley, who uses deceptive pricing tactics in contractor bids. Amid the daily workplace tension, Jimmy has romantic feelings for the cute, almost redheaded office secretary, Junie Jodelle. As Jimmy tries to imagine life beyond his furnished room, his imagination takes on a sensory texture, self-soothing thoughts: And the more basic and enduring thing had lately began to grow in his mind as a tangled complex of slim ankles and nearly-red hair, and a sort of sweet talk that was not a cloying sweetness. Something like burned sugar or toasted cinnamon. Despite these daydreams, their exchanges are filled with sharp banter and not a little frustration about the office atmosphere. Jimmy is a good worker. He gets his job done, but he is ruthlessly subjected to King's public insults, contradictory instructions, and unreasonable demands. The office reaches a breaking point when King accuses Jimmy of lying about project quotes and mocks his competence. That evening, Jimmy's suppressed frustrations finally boil over into a resignation letter. Unaware that his own rhetoric has begun to mirror King's venom, he drafts the document: He wrote with the snappish anger of a coward at bay, and he tore King to bloody ribbons in his mind. ‘A man who continuously talks without knowing what he is talking about is as dishonest as any other kind of liar. A man who baits for pleasure is as vicious as any other kind of sneak; a man who misuses and fouls the talents of others is as dirty as any other sort of thief. The next morning, King glances at the letter, assumes it's a routine customer complaint, and tells Jimmy to take care of it. Jimmy refuses to let this go. He won't be robbed of his confrontation. He calls out King to his face as a "fat-faced fool" and "floundering fink." As a result, Jimmy is fired, bids a brief farewell to his colleagues—receiving a quick kiss from Junie—and spends his first day of unemployment wandering the city in aimless depression. On his second day without a job, Jimmy is approached by Richard Ravel, a representative of the firm's upper management. Ravel tells Jimmy that King is scheduled to be retired the following month. Management wanted to hire an outside candidate to replace him. By quitting, Jimmy technically made himself a "freelance" outsider, so Ravel can now circumvent the mandate and offer Jimmy the managerial position that belonged to King. Ravel takes a distinctly bureaucratic delight in this technicality: “By quitting your job you have again established yourself as a freelance. And as such I can hire you for the position I have in mind. We arrive at this by a tortuous reasoning it is true, but I am much given to tortuous reasoning. Still, it was quite intelligent for you to foresee the possibility and gamble on it.” And the story exercise ends here, leaving Jimmy with professional advancement and a renewed chance at a relationship with Junie “Red Head Future” is the definition of a minor Lafferty story. It is unpublished. It would most likely interest only the Lafferty completist. The central ambiguity in the story is the title: will Jimmy go on to have a romance with Junie? Is this the red-headed future? Or is the red-headed future that becomes just like the hot-headed Mr. King, the new boss, just like the old boss? With that in mind, I think the odder story moments fall into place. Each of them works to deepen the title's ambiguity. Didgeon's adrenaline speech is the first and most important, proposing that King is essentially a rate junky who manufactures office quarrels to dose himself: “His flask is the medulla. When you get mad you lush the stuff from the gland into your blood stream, and it excites you. It's kind of fun to get mad, Allyn. But he's a drunkard on it. He has to have the excitement of that shot all the time, to keep blowing his top.” At this point, the story has planted a question it never quite asks aloud: is workplace rage of King’s kind a contagion one catches? The taxonomy of the three kinds of drunks is among the best-written parts of the story. It is Jimmy’s reversal of Walter Mittyism, as he imagines what it is like to be a man without a job. His unemployment taxonomy holds that there are men who go out in the legs, men who go out in the head, and men like Jimmy who go out in the stomach. Each is, in its own way, a way of metabolizing crisis, and each traps Jimmy in a sober, inescapable misery: But Allyn was of the race that goes out in the stomach first. For them no oblivion, only malaise; no kind drifting, no induced dreams, only queasiness and undistinguished suffering. It is a misfortune that strikes cruelly. It has kept man a poor devil, sad and sober. Taken together, these details make it hard to read Jimmy’s cold, furious resignation letter—the one in which, without quite realizing it, he becomes King-like—as the moral repudiation Jimmy takes it to be. He has caught something. Jimmy relishes unloading on Mr. King. When Ravel comes to him, Lafferty lays it all out: Jimmy’s bottoming-out experience was, from a vantage Jimmy could not see, an office coup, and it hands him King’s job. Jimmy is rewarded for his fury, which in the fantasy space of the story looks like nothing more than efficiency.

“I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The attempt to see into the world of Karl Kleber was almost a total failure. The story is told of the behaviorist who would study the chimpanzee. He put the curious animal in a room alone and locked the door on it; then went to the keyhole to spy; the keyhole was completely occupied by the brown eyeball of the animal spying back at him. Something of the sort happened here. Though Karl Kleber was unaware of the experiment, yet the seeing was in both directions. Kleber was studying Cogsworth in those moments by some quirk of circumstance. And even when Cogsworth was able to see( with the eyes of Kleber, yet it was himself he was seeing. That is one of my favorite passages in Lafferty. Karl Kleber, the forgettable peeping psychologist, prompts Charles Cogsworth to have a moment of moral reflection. One assumes that Lafferty took the view that most psychologists were peepers. Today , I read an  online essay  about Lafferty’s “Through Other Eyes” that does a lot of essayistic hand-holding. It links defamiliarization in Lafferty—implicitly understood through Darko Suvin’s now classic view of science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement—to G. K. Chesterton’s swiping of the famous Mooreeffooc anecdote about Charles Dickens from an earlier  biography : Chesteron seized this anecdote to make a lightning-fast Chestertonian paradox about the relations of words to reality and of both to realism: That wild word, ‘Moor Eeffoc,’ is the motto of all effective realism! It is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. This was a battle over the reality effect in fiction. What feels more real: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, or Ebenezer Scrooge, by Charles Dickens? G. K. Chesterton wants to say that Scrooge is more  realistic (closer to Reality with a capital R) because realism need not bow to the low mimetic to capture what is real. The low mimetic is a problem writers bring on themselves. Life is bigger than that. A great deal of this, in turn, is literary politics. Dickens was long looked down on by the great champions of the realist novel. In the twentieth century, F. R. Leavis was notorious for granting Hard Times  the only Dickens novel any serious literary status. Chesterton’s Dickens  is one of his masterpieces, written to celebrate a hero snubbed by the cultural elites. To understand the politics of this dispute, it is best read alongside its evil twin: Hugh Kingsmill’s Dickens —George Orwell’s favorite Dickens biography—brilliantly mordant and written explicitly against Chesterton, whose own life of Dickens often veers into what Wyndham Lewis savagely dismissed as Chesterton playing the great foaming Toby Jug. Chesterton’s favorite Dickens, tellingly, was the Dickens of The Pickwick Papers . Kingsmill The argumentative thrust of the Substack piece on “Through Other Eyes” is that MOOREEFFOC may have been a form of defamiliarization that reached Lafferty through Chesterton, and that Lafferty in turn produces textbook MOOREEFFOC Effects. I would happily bet my bottom dollar that Lafferty had read the Dickens biography, a book I dearly love. In reading the essay, I kept thinking how more could be done with Lafferty and the Mooreeffoc effect, but what the article does is interesting enough. The author concludes with the following: Lafferty pushes Chesterton’s principle to its limit, showing that sudden, total understanding of another consciousness may be psychologically shattering rather than ennobling. My problem with essays like this is pretty basic: there just isn’t enough thought. Instead, there is the dunnage of institutional voice—“it is perhaps not surprising,” “explores themes,” “comic yet unsettling,” “would later emerge,” “may find perplexing.” Who is this for, what is it doing for Lafferty, and what is the intellectual payoff? The payoff ends up being Hamlet telling Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth: Yet readers willing to take a gander through Lafferty’s Mooreeffoc lens may discover that reality itself—seen truly and from the right angle—is far richer, and more unsettling than they had ever imagined. One reason the conversation around Lafferty is so often uninteresting is that the secondary literature offers very little to argue with—or think alongside. Most commentary is appreciative or celebratory, or else self-sabotaging. There are exceptions, such as Petersen on the ecomonstrous and Ferguson on bibliography. The online essay might on-ramp a new reader, but its stock formulations enrich the way formaldehyde does. Do Lafferty readers really take “other minds can break us” as the uncomplicated lesson of “Through Other Eyes”? It’s certainly there, right on the surface. The story is early Lafferty. Maybe it really is that simple. Still, it puzzles me that readers who have spent much time with Lafferty would stop there. Cognitive shattering occurs, plainly enough — but ennoblement? That I don't understand. Charles Cogsworth is not trying to ennoble himself. He is trying to resolve his paranoia about the indeterminacy of translation ( “What if I am a girl to everyone but me?” )—so he creates peeper tech. Ennoblement has nothing to do with the story’s aims. Ennoblement has nothing to do with the story’s aims. It reads to me like padding that shows up when one doesn't account for what else is going on. My view is that the online essay presents Lafferty as Christian and then extracts his incisors. It set me thinking about the aspects of the story that tend to be overlooked in readings of “Through Other Eyes”: how Charles’s unethical arrogation of transparent access to other individual subjectivities usurps God’s authority. As pa rt of his Cerebral Scanner experiment, Charles is willing to lie to his friends and acquaintances to acquire their brain data. His arrogation is perverse. In the first Institute story, Charles really is a dirty peeper, yet the temptation is to read Charles through what comes later, the rest of the Institute cycle. The story warns against what we might call new forms of technologically mediated empathy and the misuse of personal data. While Valery Mok and Charles Cogsworth ultimately marry in the Institute cycle of stories, in “Through Other Eyes,” Charles’s overreach gets in the way of his shot at flawed and limited human love. Lafferty could have left it there. Once Charles sees Valery through the scanner, he can no longer see her through his own affectionate eyes and only makes his way back to a somewhat restored perspective by seeing her through Gregory Smirnov’s eyes. When Charles sees Valery as a beauty at the beginning of the story, Lafferty is in one of his rare moments of limited third-person, which he uses here to scrutinize the problem of perspective. Technique meets theme. By the story’s conclusion, Lafferty warns against the mechanical attempt to bypass the mystery of other persons. “Misunderstandings can be agreeable. But there is something shattering about sudden perfect understanding.” Fortunately, Charles Cogsworth is a man who can solve a problem. Other readers tend to see the story as saying that people are different, and that empathy and wonder are good. We have our private worlds. Qualia seem to exist. I would say, sure, true enough. But what about the criticism Lafferty levels against the invasion of privacy, and what about what he says about Prime’s disclosure of reality? We see how much the invasion of privacy repulses him: in stories like “Sex and Sorcery” and “The Casey Machine,” in the invasion of privacy on Astrobe, in peeping on the Willoughbys, in the blackmail of Duffy, and so forth. There are many instances of this trespassing on the human person in Lafferty. Charles himself recognizes the degradation inherent in his technical peering: “I am looking through the eyes of a peeper,” he said. “And yet, what am I myself?” As for being shattered by divine-only knowledge, one could point to “In the Turpentine Trees.” It, too, is a theme Lafferty revisits throughout his work. All this made me want to work out some adequacy conditions that seem to be implied in “Through Other Eyes,” since they play out in his later work. This mainly interests me because the story draws a distinction between ontological adequacy and perspectival relativity, and I think one reason the story has been so popular for a wide range of Lafferty readers is that readers tend to conflate the two. It is perfectly compatible for Lafferty to endorse his kind of semi-radical perspectivalism while still thinking that there is some hierarchical way the World is, even if there are many worlds. Note how Smirnov’s perspective is special because it touches the "bones" of reality: “The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins . . . I am looking through the inspired and almost divine eyes of a giant, and I am looking at a world that has not yet grown tired.” The billions of possible worlds in “Through Other Eyes” are not what I would call Prime in Lafferty’s work, the baseline reality grounded in his Catholic metaphysics. If that is right, then there should be a way to spell out the adequacy conditions. Because of the many ways "world" is used in Lafferty, I have a mental shorthand to keep track, which I'll quickly run through. The billions of possible worlds found in “Through Other Eyes” are versions of World 7 in Lafferty. They are personal worlds. Lafferty’s Grolier history of the world set documents Worlds 3 from within the horizon of World 2. It was an attempt to survey the entire history of humanity at a late stage in the breakdown of Christendom. Astrobe in Past Master  is a fictional, futuristic world, a World 6. Fourth Mansions  is a conspiracy fantasy, but it does not deal with Flatland; instead, it looks back to the feeling of the early sixties (note the JFK conspiracy theory material at the beginning of the novel, Freddy's failed story), and it imagines an eschatological leap from a structured World 2 to World 6 by bypassing World 4, making Freddy Foley a portal to the fourth mansion. Green Tree  begins in World 2 and ends in World 4—unless we include its fifth part, an abandoned fragment that would have taken us into a World 6 in which mountains suddenly appear. A "Through Other Eyes" World 7 is inadequate when it fails to see the life inherent in World 1 (Prime). As Valery tells Charles: “I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass.” In thinking through this, I came up with the following idea of ordering adequacy in "Through Other Eyes" along three dimensions: intensity of vital disclosure (V₁), scope of vital disclosure (V₂), and tolerability (T). It is agent-relative, varying with who is perceiving, i. e., my eyes or your eyes. No human being can maximize all three, because if they could, they would be God. The closest one can get to that is Ralph Waldo Emerson fantasizing about being a transparent eyeball. As you know, the story reaches one peak with Valery's intensity: “She has a keen awareness of reality and of the grotesqueness that is its main mark. You yourself do not have this deeply; and when you encounter it in its full strength, it shocks you . . . There is a filthiness in every color and sound and shape and smell and feel.” Let’s be frank: Valery did not consent to this. Charles has committed the epistemological equivalent of rifling her lingerie—he has read her diary. He is a pig. Euler peaks scope: “It is the interconnection vision of all the details. It appalls. It isn't an easy world even to look at. Great Mother of Ulcers! How does he stand it? Yet I see that he loves every tangled detail, the more tangled the better.” Neither of these is bearable to ordinary persons, which is one reason that I think Lafferty made Valery a Primordial in Arrive at Easterwine . Only The Lord in "Through Other Eyes" is max, max, max: “It is almost like looking through the eyes of the Lord, who numbers all the feathers of the sparrow and every mite that nestles there.” At the end of the story, we find out that Charles is busy building a mediator in the form of the Correlator, which is the ironic ending, because that is, in fact, the reality that already exists—something we glimpse early on in the subliminal-signal line: “A subliminal coupling, or the possibility of it, was already assumed by the inventor.” Charles is inventing something unnecessary because, according to Lafferty, it is what humans have always done with other humans: arrive at a consensus about what is. There is something to be said here about the Holy Spirit and the transmission of revealed truth; truth must be mediated (assuming Lafferty takes something like the view in 1 Timothy 2:5). The Correlator trades absolute, peeping-tom-level epistemic disclosure for what already exists: mediated access, negotiated reality, sacramental participation, the human-made commons of “what is” of various types of world formation below World 1, Prime. “The Correlator is designed to minimize and condition the initial view of the world seen through other eyes, to soften the shock of understanding others. Misunderstandings can be agreeable. But there is something shattering about sudden perfect understanding.” The upshot is that perceptual error really can be error, and really can be graded. This is not the kind of relativism that worried Charles Cogsworth as a child, and the story gradually builds out a picture of why Charles had nothing to worry about all along, while satirizing how Charles has gone about learning this. So what goes wrong in the article? Symptomatic absences. I would put it like this. Chesterton’s effective realism (Mooreeffoc) is a perceptual shock that re-enchants the same world; it makes the ordinary fresh. Strange words revivify a coffee room. The end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. — T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets   In Suvin's ideas about cognitive estrangement and science fiction, the novum is a rationally structured difference. It produces cognitive estrangement, which creates analytic distance. That analytic distance helps readers perceive and critique aspects of their existing worlds. Both MOOREEFFOC-style effective realism and cognitive estrangement can be understood as versions of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization: using language to make the familiar strange, thereby renewing perception. Later Russian theorists would call this the poetic function; Shklovsky simply calls it poetic language. Think of Lafferty going to town with the poetic function here, displacing Valery Mok’s first-personal experience through Charles’s funny, poetic attempt to capture it in language, an attempt in which language is playing hob with reference: “Every tree has a strong smell in her world. This was an ordinary elm tree, and it had a violent musky obscene smell that delighted her. It was so strong that it staggered. And to her the grass itself is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. The rocks are spidery monsters and she loves them. She sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them. She hugged a lamp post and her heart beat like it would fight its way out of her body.” In that sense, simple defamiliarization is the bridge between the MOOREEFFOC Effect and cognitive estrangement, since both are defamiliarizing techniques. The online article is right that Lafferty gets much of his effective realism through Chesterton. Regarding “Through Other Eyes,” however, the online article neglects how Lafferty uses the novum of the Cerebral Scanner to say something important about privacy, technology, our bounded experience of others, and God’s omniscience and man’s nescience; and by doing this, it can say less about what Lafferty does through the Mooreeffoc effect. It gives the Mooreeffoc too much credit and the novum too little. Through the Cerebral Scanner, Lafferty says, “See the world as vividly and fully as you can, given who you were made to be, but for the love of God don’t violate the worlds of others.” At the same time, it makes a statement about how perfection is graded, which explains why a mind can be shattered by peeping. There is the renovation of vision through the Mooreeffoc effect and the enablement of critique through the novum. I’ll wrap up with one way of showing it:

“Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield: that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal.” Lafferty wrote “The Polite People of Pudibundia” early, in 1959. Gene Wolfe once said that early Lafferty is Lafferty with water, and later Lafferty is straight Lafferty. “Pudibundia” falls squarely into the first category. It is also one of the dozen or so Lafferty stories whose copyrights were not renewed and that have therefore fallen into the public domain, so one can find readings of it on YouTube. Anyone encountering it for the first time will be suspicious of the ultra-polite Pudibundians, but they turn out not to be so bad. The problem is that, for them, any direct encounter is lethal. All the props of politeness in Pudibundian life—the goggles, the circumlocutions, the prohibition on the second person, the deferential ball, the rituals of self-effacement—exist for a reason. Lafferty’s Camiroi have elaborate customs, many of which seem culturally arbitrary, but the Pudibundians have customs that also function as strategies of biological survival. This is minor Lafferty, but it is more memorable than much of his lightest work. Readers have missed its perverse subtext. This time, Lafferty gives us homicide captain Marlow for the Solar Police Force, who travels to the planet Pudibundia to solve a mystery: a pattern of unexplained deaths. Over the years, young space pilots have returned from the planet with stories of the Puds’ extreme, ritualistic politeness, which includes wearing colored goggles based on social organization and speaking in circumlocutions. These pilots return only to die shortly after their return. Marlow has some intel on the aliens. For instance, he knows the Puds are shape-shifting bipeds who alter their appearance to match the humans they encounter. Marlow’s goal is to uncover the hidden connection between local customs and the deaths of pilots. Once he reaches Pudibundia, the Puds assign Marlow a local host who politely adopts the name "One-Million-Times-Lesser-Marlow" (OMTLM). To put visitors at ease, the Puds mimic one’s appearance. Lafferty introduces the reader to the quasi-Orientalist/Brahman-like way the Puds talk (“one hears of one who hears of one”) that had already passed into science fiction through the hyper-formal, comically baroque dialogue found in Jack Vance. It turns out that on Pudibundia, one can cut through much of the periphrasis by passing a differential ball back and forth. As OMTLM explains, the physical object carries an immense, unspoken burden: “For this, in private, and only in the strictest privacy, we use the deferential ball. Within it are all the formulae written minutely. You have but to pass the ball from hand to hand every time you speak, and it is as if the amenities were spoken . . . . Should you forget, I would not, of course, be allowed to notice it. But when you were gone, I should be forced to kill myself for the shame of it.” Soon, Marlow is looking more closely into what is going on on the planet, yet he finds himself distracted. He takes advantage of the Puds' metamorphic abilities by having a local female shape-shift into the likeness of an Earth woman, Irma, whom he nicknames Mitzi. Marlow then spends a week enjoying the planet's nightlife with Mitzi, which includes a visit to the underground Iris Room. It’s a club where patrons take off their goggles under heavily filtered light. Toward the end of his trip, Mitzi warns Marlow that the higher authorities have ensured he will never return to Pudibundia. Then off goes Marlow to meet with his host, OMTLM. A now frustrated Marlow says his investigation has stalled. Believing the pilots' deaths lie in the one physical feature the Puds always hide, Marlow asks to look into his host's eyes. OMTLM, bound by unbreakable rules of politeness, removes his goggles. This is when the reader learns that the gaze of a Pudibundian is fatal. All the complex etiquette and mandatory eyewear are survival techniques that prevent lethal eye contact. The host notes that at first glance, it takes weeks to kill. What follows is a climax that perfectly pastiches the hardboiled detective genre Lafferty is riffing on: “Why did you do it to me?” demanded Marlow. “You asked to see my eyes. It would not be polite to refuse.” “It takes you several weeks to kill. I can do it in a few seconds.” “You would be wrong to try. Our second glance kills instantly.” “Let's see if it's faster than a gun!” Other readers have noted the role of Orientalist-style courtesy in the story. In “The Polite People of Pudibundia,” Lafferty seems to make the case that courtesy is no longer merely a cultural overlay. It is more like a containment system for a hazard that goes beyond culture and into nature. Presumably, the Pudibundians developed their elaborate set of glasses and light-filtering rooms because the alternative was extinction. The Iris Room, the deferential ball, and the circumlocutions remain funny and are signs of a civilization that lives with a permanent threat from itself. Why the name Marlow? Since the story includes the name Conrad, it has been suggested that it knowingly plays with the colonialism of Heart of Darkness . That must be true, but I do not see the Heart of Darkness  connection as clearly as I see the connection to the other famous literary Marlowe, the detective at the center of Raymond Chandler’s sequence of stories and novels. Pudibundia  derives from the Latin adjective pudibundus , meaning easily ashamed or bashful, but it of course shares that etymology with pudendum , the external genital organs. In The Big Sleep  (1939), Chandler’s first Marlowe novel, General Sternwood hires Marlowe to deal with a blackmail attempt against his wild younger daughter, Carmen, and the trail leads to Arthur Gwynn Geiger, who runs a Hollywood rare-book store that is a front for a pornography lending library, renting illicit photographs and books to wealthy clients. I think this bears on the strange turn the story takes when Marlow has Mitzi take on Irma’s form, and on the exchanges about her body and the convolutions of her ear. Lafferty leans into the bizarre, malleable nature of desire here: “If you could only give me an idea of the convolutions of her ears,” said Mitzi, “and the underlying structure of the metatarsus. My only desire is to please. Or shall I improvise where you do not remember?” “Yes, do that, Mitzi.” And how that girl could improvise! That is to say, “The Polite People of Pudibundia” is more a fantasy of scopophilia than one of politeness. The Chandler connection brings into focus the significance of the Mitzi sequence, and that is what most needs explanation, or, at least, what most puzzles me. If the story has a mystery beyond whatever the Pudibundians are hiding, it is the question of why Lafferty wrote the Mitzi material. Why does Marlow go off on his own Pygmalion frolic in the middle of the story?  The original version of Mitzi, which is a version of Marlow as a horse-faced female, is a masturbatory mirror, one that turns him off, but Marlow has Mitzi reshape herself into something that looks like Irma, which turns him on. Working feature by feature, from a photograph and his own Tex-Avery-like hand motions in the air, where he gives her body the curves he wants, he gets a version of Mitzi he is sexually attracted to. Then he has Mitzi fill out what he cannot remember, including the convolutions of Irma’s ear and the underlying shape of the metatarsus. Mitzi becomes something more like Marlow’s limerence Irma than the real Irma, part of a fantasme : Marlow, with his hands, sculptured in the air the figure of Irma as he remembered it, and Mitzi assumed the form, first face on, then face away, then in profile. And when they had it roughly, they perfected it, a little more here, a little less there. But there were points where his memory failed him. This Mitzi, as a sex object who stands in for Irma, is the rare-book-shop-as-pornography-front transposed into a fully metamorphic medium: a body that exists to be looked at and shaped by looking. Marlow's investigation and Marlow's pleasure turn out to be related activities. Both are kinds of looking, with the Iris Room being a public version of visual disrobement. Let’s go back. What, specifically, got the young male pilots killed? We know it was the Pud gaze, but how did it work? Mitzi seems to feel genuine affection for Marlow (she tips him off), but what about the other pilots? Did they also slip into the same R&R hedonism Marlow embraces and die after looking into the females’ eyes? Were their girls like this? Lafferty leaves it unresolved. We just know you never find old pilots who have made the trip to Pudibundia. Marlow is this an archetype: he is an investigator who cannot help but look and who moves from scopophilia to socopocidal victim. What he lacks is the virtue that exactly corresponds to pudibundus : prudentia .

The metamorphosis of human children into adults is a disguised sort since children look more like adults than caterpillars look like butterflies or tadpoles look like frogs. — Letter The rest of the week was filled with great expectation. Henry dreamed it out in the mornings as he sat in the cave, and in the afternoons as he sat on top of Doolen's Mountain. The appeal of a completely untrammeled existence has always been strong. It would be perfect to be no more than a pair of eyes. To be on the highest stick of a ship and to be able to see further than anybody else in the world, that would be a new sort of ultimate. From the very top you would be able to see whole islands that nobody else had seen, to see whole ships before they came into view. Being so high, you could see the tops and the backs of the clouds, and look at the inside of the cloud rooms. You could look down and see the green whales, bigger than catfish, snoozing in the weeds. And some day you would be able to see what made the first wave. The first wave pushes the next one, and that one pushes the one you see. But nobody has ever seen the first wave that starts them all. “Saturday You Die” is powerfully semi-autobiographical. Lafferty said in an interview, "As for me: I was born November 7, 1914, in Neola, Iowa. I moved to Perry, Oklahoma, when I was four years old. With summertime visits back North again and with many relatives in both states, I have enjoyed what have been called the two most educative experiences: to be a small Northern boy in a small Southern town, and to be a small Southern boy in a small Northern town.” The interview was given long after he wrote “Saturday You Die.” “Saturday You Die” is also one of the early literary stories, and so it belongs with “The Wagons” and “The Ugly Sea.” They are all special pieces of the Lafferty canon, and one wishes Lafferty had written more like them. He never abandons the moods and effects they achieve. Instead, he smuggles them into his genre work. I’ll add that “Saturday You Die” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It is easily on my personal short list, though I would never rank it among his best. It isn’t terribly ambitious. It is simply such a personal story. Because so many of its elements recur throughout his canon, it is a tuning fork for a Lafferty reader. One could take any of a dozen threads from it and trace them through the rest of his work. For instance, “Saturday You Die” is one of his first sallies into the amoral world of childhood. Before it came the unpublished “Handful of Fire,” which shows how savage Lafferty’s children can be, but it isn’t well known. As far as I know, there are two fans: Chris Merrick and me. Then there are two earlier stories that explore what it is like to be a child living in the ambient of storytelling: “Ghost in the Corn Crib” and “Rain Mountain.” The first is an early example of Lafferty’s treatment of definalization; both stories are metafiction. But in “Saturday You Die” the guardrails are down. Readers first encounter one of Lafferty’s great images of childhood: piracy as the Laffertian correlate of the amorality of kids. Piracy is murderous and violent kid think . That reaches full form in When All the World Was Young. In Lafferty’s own pirate novel, Annals of Klepsis, the pirate theme is far less interesting than when he uses piracy to imagine the connection between the inner lives of children and the fantastical world of pirates. With kids, blood and threat are filtered through the artistic imaginations that were imprinted on Lafferty’s generation, the imaginations of people such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Howard Pyle. They are stages for confrontation. The kid think theme itself receives its most memorable treatment in The Reefs of Earth , in the dire situation of the Dulanty children, and in the novel’s secret history of the Puca. All of the best of the legendary historical pirates were Pucas simply going about their trade: “Captain Kidd and those were only earth people, and second-rate pirates. But Blackbeard and Bartholomew Portuguese and the great ones were Pucas, and our own people.” Within the threatened world of the Dulanty children, the piracy fantasy peaks when Helen Dulanty recounts a phantasmagoric night encounter with shallow-draft pirate ships sailing up the Green River, including the incredibly fast Spanish Dancer , the Vampire , and the Gigantis Transfixus , a spooky ship that uses an enslaved, spellbound giant as its mainmast. The older Elizabeth Dulanty dismisses all the pirate stuff as fiction invented by Earth people; Reefs  keeps open the theme that Earthlings modeled their legendary pirate stories on the real exploits of the Puca, but we know we are talking about the inner lives of children, and Elizabeth is leaving that behind. It still burns inside Helen. The Dulanty children are aliens. Henry, the main character in “Saturday You Die,” is just an ordinary boy who has moved from a northern town to a southern town, paralleling Lafferty’s childhood move from Neola, Iowa, to Perry, Oklahoma, where Lafferty and his family are buried. If Helen Dulanty gets to have pirate adventures, Henry gets to fantasize about them. Henry meets a group of larger, tougher local boys. It includes Howard Glass, Stanley Savage, and Clifford Welch. The older boys talk to Henry and tell him about a secret cave beneath Doolen's Mountain where they claim to bury their victims. They talk big, though it doesn’t feel exactly like bullying, though Howard Glass might be the exception here. Howard is a real jerk. In any case, the local boys have a custom where the newest boy in town is always murdered and cut up. Henry is an unusual child: he feels no fear. Instead, he is captivated by the boys’ elaborate stories about his fate. Stanley Savage tells Henry that the cave connects to a deeper cave and an underground ocean where the boys trade with pirates. He says Henry is being killed so his eyes can be harvested and traded away. Stanley explains the transaction: “They nail them to the masts of their ships. They like to have a lot of eyes on the mast. It makes the ships see better in the dark.” Enthralled by the oceanic, Henry spends the week anticipating Saturday, daydreaming about the adventures and unseen wonders he will experience as a pair of eyes traveling the world. It is a wonderful example of Lafferty in a lyrical mode, and the sentimentality avoids cloying because it is rendered with Lafferty’s genius for the grotesque. Henry's hopes are crushed on Saturday morning when he meets Baxter, a boy whose family had moved into a neighboring house the night before. Baxter has just arrived from Kansas, and Henry, in the middle of talking tough to Baxter, realizes that he is no longer the newest boy in town. Local custom will dictate that Baxter take his place and have the pirate adventure instead. This devastates Henry. Denied his grand destiny, he withdraws: Henry ran in black horror— (Baxter instead of him) —out to the edge of town— (it would be Baxter's eyes and not his eyes) —past the cave with the other cave under it— (Baxter would get to see the Islands and Whales, Henry wouldn't get to see anything) —sobbing up to the top ofDoolen's Mountain. Lafferty's children tend not to be criers, though there is a great exception in Rufinus Lifshin in When All the World Was Young , whose crying plays a key role in the novel. Refinus is the youngest child at Captain Kusman’s School for Gifted Children, and he knows how to get his way through tears, including by becoming the ruler of the world. That ends with Rufinus’s real tears, which are usually performances to get what he wants. The last tears flow after he makes a deal with the Prince of the World to get everything he wants, betrays the New World’s connection to art, leading to the awful death of his friend, the patron of the arts, Claud Cobbing, and he has to face the consequences of that deal. Cobbing holds on to the singing anchor rope that twists all the arts together: “Not the rope that I —” “Not the rope that you — no, Rufinus, not the monkeyshine rope, not the ecclesiastical rope that you yourself are involved with. Others will take care of that one and I will have no need to. And fact, there isn’t much choice left. Most of the ropes are already gone and I’d as soon see them all go quickly. The rope, the line that I’ll cut now is hardly an adversary line at all. I’ll not tell you which it is, but you have always regarded it as a bit minor.” “Cut it!” “There will be a very slight backlash when it is cut.” “Cut it!” “The backlash will kill one of your friends who will have held too long to that line.” “How important a friend?” “You have always regarded him as a bit minor.” “Cut it!” “It’s cut,” said the Prince of the World, “and the world and all its kingdoms belong to you now. You may enjoy them for the full term of your office as World Leader.” And later: “It didn’t break. It was cut,” Rufinus said. “How do you feel, Claud,” the Surgeon General asked. “I feel as if my head was going to explode, from the false resonance and the backlash of the cut line.” And Claud Cobbing’s head did explode, killing him, and forcing thick and gruty matter from his ears and eyes and nose onto the table in front of them. And also he was bleeding like fountains from his wrists. Rufinus dies crying in front of the world. Henry, though, goes off to cry alone. The story is, on a miniature scale, what one gets repeatedly in Lafferty: the ending of a world. Henry had wanted an apocalypse—the scales fallen away, his eyes opened, nailed to the mast. Instead, he goes up to the hilltop to cry. Part of it is certainly that Henry must now live in the small town. Part of it is that he will have to move away from what Lafferty, in When All the World Was Young , calls “preprimitive intellectuality.” A significant Lafferty coinage. In the novel, readers learn that the early brilliance of the kids taken in by the benevolent Captain Kusman was doomed to be temporary in the Old World. Lafferty outlines human development through Rufinus: The horrible retrogression known as “teen-ageing” will not happen to us. We will have the good fortune to miss that bleak period. This may be the greatest gain that mankind has ever made. We all start strong now. What used to be a strange period of premature intelligence that was doomed to vanish has now become a sound and early-ripening intelligence that will grow and strengthen without interruption. As to ourselves here, we have come to the new awakening and realization in just four days. We have discovered our direction and aims. And an intellectuality that will be of explosive and exponential increase is ours. Whatever that "teenage syndrome" obstacle was placed in the way of full human development is done now . . . So "teenage syndrome" creates an obstacle that hinders full human potential. All that stuff about frontal lobe development? A lie. Unlike Henry's fantasy about his eyes being opened to a wider field, it is a form of noetic darkening and amnesia. Because the plague in When All the World Was Young  eradicates everyone over the age of ten (though it is a little more complicated than this because of a major subplot involving the Prisoner of Gridley Graves), most of the surviving children see their new reality as an evolutionary triumph, though a handful want to hold onto anchor ropes or what I have elsewhere called bricospolia . Anchor ropes tie one to the past after a world has ended and are an accessible remainder of Prime. In the novel, the most important anchor rope is the Special Gift (the holy orders as apostolic succession) Bishop Muldoon left to the later assassinated boy Jimmy Rose. The either pathetic or tragic Rufinus, a steward of the Special Gift (Jimmy having given his Special Gift to Rufinus) fails: "The idea of an anchor and anchor rope are yours, for I never heard of the idea. But it's a fetish idea, that the rope is within reach and that it must be touched for security. It is a fetish idea that belongs to the New World and not to the Old." This desire both to escape from and to hold on to anchor ropes is one of Lafferty’s deepest ambiguities as an artist. Imagine extending the biographical fantasy he has written in "Saturday You Die." Henry does not die. Henry grows up and enters Flatland, as the people of Green Tree  do, and as Lafferty believed he himself had. Like the children in When All the World Was Young , Henry wants to skip adolescence through his pirate adventure, becoming eyeballs nailed to the lookout and yardarm. If that were possible, the adult problem of Flatland would never arise. But that is impossible. One of the more interesting features of Lafferty’s imaginative universe is that something like a pre-flattening of adolescence happens to everyone, and there is also the historical condition of Flatland. The connection between these two varieties of experience, lowercase flatland relative to biology and uppercase Flatland relative to Western culture, is important for understanding what he was doing in the works dealing with children versus the ones dealing with adults.

“It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent, acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.” — Sir Isaac Newton ( Third letter to Bentley, 25 Feb 1693. Quoted in  The Works of Richard Bentley, D. D. (1838), Vol. 3, 212–3. ) A straight-ahead Lafferty story. Sometime in Earth’s future, monopolistic capitalism has consolidated so much capital that a clique of six men controls all new discoveries and inventions. Four of these men, Claridge, Lone, Immermann, and Quinn, have vanished on successive days. The authorities investigate the disappearances, but the surviving witnesses will not say what they saw. In fact, they refuse to provide any useful information. They do not want to be branded insane or charged with murder, despite the absence of bodies, and so they withhold the truth of what happened. Claridge’s assistant, Gueranger, captures this shell-shocked defiance perfectly during his interrogation: “No, I don't. That's the whole point of the matter: I will not accept, and will not tell, what I saw. Certainly I know that I'm held on suspicion of murder. But where is the body? You find it—anywhere—in any shape and I'll sure sleep better.” That leaves both the investigators and the media speculating about extraterrestrial kidnappings. Meanwhile, the remaining two capitalists, Umholtz and Easter, suspect that they will be the next targets. The action starts with Umholtz being visited by an eccentric hayseed inventor named Haycock. Haycock has blue eyes speckled with gold and a mocking mouth. He comes across as sardonic, and he has a pantherine menace. He also has a fiery temper, and it turns out his previous meetings coincided with the other brokers' vanishings. Haycock is now in Umholtz’s office to present his anti-gravity device and a set of incomplete mathematical equations. He wants funding to perfect his machine over a couple of years. Unimpressed by the whole idea of antigrav technology, a standing joke in the invention industry, Umholtz mocks Haycock, and he makes a mistake. He asks for an impossible four-second demonstration. When Umholtz pushes him with a needling guffaw, Haycock explodes: “You laugh at me!” Haycock howled out. Gold fire popped from his eyes and he was very angry. The hayseed began to look like the panther. He touched his machine, and it responded with a sympathetic ping!  to the anger of its master. Following this threat, Haycock informs Umholtz that the machine is already working on him, altering his mass signature from positive to negative. Almost immediately after this, Haycock is hauled away by the authorities at Umholtz's behest. Later that evening, while walking in a park with his assistants, Umholtz (though he does not yet know it) begins to feel the physical effects of reverse gravity. Suddenly, he is terrified that he is falling upward, so he clings to a small elm tree, bear-hugging it. His assistants try to pull him back down to the ground. After all, he is only a few inches above it. But once they pry him loose, something unfortegable happens: “Throw a rope down to me! Do something!” he sobbed upsidedownly from the tree top. “I'll fall all the way, and I can't even see bottom.” The topmost branch broke, and Umholtz fell off the world.He fell upward into the evening sky, his scream dropping in pitch as he accelerated. He fell end over end, diminishing till he was only a dot in the sky. Then he was gone. Left behind on the grass, his terrified assistants agree to lie about the event to protect their own sanity. The story ends with the last clique member, Easter, being approached unannounced in his office by Haycock. A cliché about Lafferty is that there is not much science fiction in Lafferty’s science fiction. “The Man with the Speckled Eyes” is one of the stories in which he seems to answer: so what? He takes one of the hoariest novums in the genre and makes it new. He does so first through the brilliance of the dialogue, and second through the dazzling passages on what happens to Umholtz. One can even imagine the businessmen punished in the story as stand-ins for science-fiction editors. Robert Silverberg rejected “Ride a Tin Can” because it was not psychologically plausible. Of the whole rejection process, Lafferty wrote, “The reason is that editors are kind of dumb. The reason they are kind of dumb is that everybody is kind of dumb. But it all evens out.” Like zooming spaceships or FTL travel, antigravity is one of the sticky points in the genre, because gravity is only attractive. Under Newtonian gravity, it is simply a universal attractive force proportional to mass, with no “thing” one can even imagine reversing, since there is no underlying geometry to manipulate. Under general relativity, gravity becomes the curvature of spacetime produced by mass-energy, and since mass-energy is positive, that curvature bends things together. To reverse it, one would need negative mass. That would mean rebuilding the universe at a basic level. Of course, science fiction sometimes does exactly that. H. G. Wells invented Cavorite in 1901; E. E. Smith gave his heroes an inertialess drive in 1928; James Blish sent cities across the galaxy on spindizzies in 1950. Real-world history, by contrast, is a graveyard of failed demonstrations. Roger Babson’s Gravity Research Foundation in 1948; Podkletnov’s spinning superconductors in 1992; Ning Li’s disappearance after a DoD grant in 2001; NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program from 1996 to 2002, ending in defunding. In 2023, CERN’s ALPHA-g experiment dropped antihydrogen into a magnetic trap and watched it fall, not rise, ruling out the most dramatic empirical possibility that still seemed open. Reading “The Man with the Speckled Eyes” in 2026 offers new pleasures as a wish-fulfillment fantasy about the contemporary tech economy. Swap in names like Cook, Nadella, Huang, Pichai, Jassy, Zuckerberg, and Musk. Over the last few decades, we have watched innovation consolidate under a handful of mega-corporations, the Googles, Apples, and Metas whose venture arms and patent portfolios now serve as gatekeepers, deciding which technologies reach the public and which never receive a hearing. In Haycock, the speckle-eyed scourge, Lafferty gives us a ministering angel who is also an archetypal figure like Rainbird, transplanted into the conditions of late capitalism. The story is ghoulishly entertaining, and about as entry-level a Lafferty story as one is likely to find.