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Not to Mention R. A. Lafferty: A Personal Introduction
Neil Gaiman
Objectivity is a good thing. We rely on our commentators, our observers, our critics to be objective. It’s what makes a critic a good critic and a reviewer a good reviewer. We trust them to tell us about books and films, music and authors.
You cannot trust me to tell you anything about R. A. Lafferty. It would be like asking a string tuned to G to give its opinion on the strings of a lower octave. When it hears another G, it’s going to thrum in joyous recognition. That’s the way of it. It’s just how it is.
I was about nine years old, and somebody had left a copy of Judith Merril’s SF-12 in our house. I don’t know who. It might conceivably have been my father’s. Whoever owned it, I appropriated it, and proceeded to have my mind turned inside out. William Burroughs and Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller and Kit Reed, Brian Aldiss and Harvey Jacobs and John Updike and Tuli Kupferberg, J. G. Ballard and Hilary Bailey, Sonya Dorman and Tommaso Landolfi, none of them authors one would automatically recommend to nine-year-olds. I didn’t care. I read the stories and took what I could from them. I had a bunch of new favorite authors. I had new rules about what fiction could be. The Brian Aldiss short story, “Confluence,” was a dictionary. And one of the two stories by R. A. Lafferty was a school curriculum.
It was called “The Primary Education of the Camiroi,” and it was the curriculum for the schools of an alien race, who would need to learn how to create life and run planets as part of their schooling. It was really funny. It also struck several nerves with me. I was certain that they should be teaching us that sort of thing in school anyway.
The second story, “Narrow Valley,” was one of the best things in the book, and one of my favorite short stories to this day. It’s a tall tale, about a beautiful valley that’s, well, narrow. It told me things about America and Native Americans, about scientists, about ways of viewing the world, even things about magic, that spoke to me and made me happy.
When I was ten my father brought me copies of three of the Carr-Wollheim World’s Best Science Fiction collections, all the way from America. I read “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” and “In Our Block.” I read “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne.” I was in love.
I was also lucky. Why the library in the little Sussex town I lived in had, on their shelves, all the R. A. Lafferty books published in the UK in hardback by Dennis Dobson & Co is still a mystery to me. Someone who ordered books had good taste, I suppose. But they had them. I read, and loved, Fourth Mansions (a story about secret societies and animals and men with hairy ears) and The Reefs of Earth (about a family of alien children who are stranded on Earth) and Space Chantey (which is the Odyssey set in space). (All of these descriptions are at best incomplete and at worst wildly misleading.) I remember the world-shaking moment when I realized that the contents page of The Reefs of Earth, the chapter titles, actually rhymed and made a poem. I remember the joy I took in this.
I bought my own copy of the paperback of Nine Hundred Grandmothers, the first Lafferty short story collection, from Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, in Berwick Street. I made all my friends read it. As far as I was concerned, Lafferty was the most interesting author out there: I loved what he did with words. I loved the tune of the sentences, the way they sang and jigged and the sheer delight the author took in words.
For Christmas in 1978 my parents gave me a copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls and John Clute. I did not know at the time that Peter and John would, each in their own way, become close and valued friends. I did not know that I would one day, write with John Clute the entry on Lafferty for the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. All I knew was there were lots and lots of Lafferty books listed that I had not read and did not know existed. I spent years happily hunting for them, not knowing that most of them were, at the time of writing, actually unpublished, something that would drive Clute and Nicholls to distraction.
I was twenty-one, and I did not know what I wanted to do or to be, but I suspected that I wanted to be a writer. The only story I had completed by then was an R. A. Lafferty pastiche. In the back room of the same library in which I had found the Lafferty books was an Author’s Who’s Who. I looked up Lafferty in it, knowing that he would not be in there. There was an address listed, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I would never have dared to write to an agent or a publisher, but this looked like a home address.
I wrote him a letter, and with it, I sent the story.
The address was out of date, but the letter was eventually forwarded and it reached him, and to my genuine astonishment, he wrote back, thanking me for the “pretty good sketch or pastiche or something, not a short story, however, although the title page says that it is. It might be saleable, depending on the quirks of the market when you send it out. A good piece wakens a spark of recognition in every breast, so somebody once said. This, of course, wakens a special spark of recognition.” And he added, “Why don’t you write another piece or two? Things are fun to write and there doesn’t have to be any other reason.”
My favorite writer told me I should write some more, so I did.
I wanted to write an article about him, but nobody wanted to publish it, back then. Still we wrote back and forth, and I asked impertinent questions about writing and his work, and he answered them as best he could.
There are few enough authors who simply make me happy. There are authors who make me think, or who trouble me in good ways, or make me worry for their characters. Lafferty did those things, and did them so very well. But he does more than that. I start to smile with pleasure when I start reading a Lafferty story. It’s the way the tale is told, the voice of the teller, that brings me so much joy.
There isn’t anyone out there with whom it’s easy to compare Lafferty: Avram Davidson wrote unclassifiable and brilliant stories, and knew more of the world, but his stories did not feel like tall tales, nor were they such great lies told with so straight a face. The Irish novelist Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen, real name Brian O’Nolan) did the tall tales and the straight-faced lies, but he didn’t take us so far out of this world. Gene Wolfe is as deep, but seldom as funny.
I read all the Lafferty I could. I followed him as the work got darker, then more personal. I followed him from the big publishers to the small presses and the pamphlets. I read the work that I understood and the work that I didn’t (I suspected it was being written for an audience of only himself, but even then, I took joy in the sentences and the world). I have seen Lafferty’s office door, on display in a museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
What else do you ne
ed to know? And as I write that, it occurs to me that I’ve missed out all the biographical stuff, the important information I am sure you actually need in an introduction like this.
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, Ray to his friends, was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He trained as an electrical engineer and worked for an electrical supply company until he retired, aged forty-five. He was a professional writer from then until he retired again. He was Catholic (“Catholicism plays a big part in my life. Without it I would be in the gutter entirely. With it, I have only one foot in the gutter.”) and an alcoholic (“Drinking has influenced my writing all in the wrong direction. I am an alcoholic and shouldn’t drink at all. But once or twice a year I forget this and the results are usually sad. More of my writing has been ruined by my drinking than improved by it. Yet there’s always a goose there, it’s part of the ‘to seek and not to find’ motif. Somewhere, somewhere there must be this mind-expanding elixir! Such delusions are part of life. When I was younger I got a lot of pleasure and companionship out of drinking, but probably no creative impetus.”)
He was in the army in WWII, and was sent to the South Pacific, but maintained that, at twenty-eight, he was ten years too old when this happened to properly enjoy or appreciate it.
He published his first science fiction story, “Day of the Glacier,” in Original Science Fiction Stories in 1960 when he was forty-six. “I was moderately successful,” he said of his writing. “It didn’t put me on easy street, but it put me on easy alley.”
He won the Hugo Award in 1973 for “Eurema’s Dam,” which was a good story, but he lost awards with much better stories, and some of his finest stories were never noticed by the people who nominate you for awards. He retired from writing in 1984, having published over two hundred short stories and over twenty novels.
He had a stroke in 1994, and Alzheimer’s in his final years. He died in 2002, in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, twenty minutes from Tulsa.
In a brief piece he wrote to accompany a photo of himself in Patti Perret’s 1985 book The Faces of Science Fiction, he said, “When I was forty-five years old, I tried to be a writer. I became the best short story writer in the world. I’ve been telling people that for twenty years, but some of them don’t believe me.”
I believed.
It is not impossible that, once you also have read this book, you may become a believer as well.
Slow Tuesday Night
Introduction by Michael Dirda
While loosely categorized as a science fiction writer, R. A. Lafferty was—to use the old phrase—sui generis. His stories, with their surrealist plots and breathless pace, revel in excess, parenthetical asides, and gonzo bizarreness of every sort. Lafferty fans seldom have any clear idea where his absurdist tall tales are going, but who cares? We’re here for the ride.
Think back to the first time you read a “Lafferty.” It might have been “Land of the Great Horses,” which explains the origin of the gypsies and was included in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking Dangerous Visions. Perhaps you happened upon “Eurema’s Dam” in an anthology of Nebula Award winners. Or just maybe you unearthed an old issue of If in a run-down charity shop and discovered “Boomer Flats,” in which a trio of eminent scientists travel to a Texas backwater in search of the missing link and there encounter hairy giants, a gorgeous woman named Crayola Catfish, a race of near immortals, and a space traveler known as the Comet.
My own introduction to Lafferty came through Gene Wolfe, back in the early 1980s. I was interviewing Wolfe about the just completed Book of the New Sun and asked him what contemporary writers he admired. He immediately answered, “R. A. Lafferty,” so I sensibly went out and bought a copy of the Ace Science Fiction Special, Nine Hundred Grandmothers. For some reason—perhaps the title attracted me—the first story I turned to was “Slow Tuesday Night.” That was enough. I read it with the same delight I had experienced when, as a teenager, I opened Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens Remembers Africa or The Most of S. J. Perelman. You know that feeling: you just want to hug yourself with pleasure, while sometimes laughing quietly or murmuring, “This is soooo good.”
No précis can convey the sheer exuberance of “Slow Tuesday Night.” Lafferty mixes courtly diction and comic-strip names, sets up expectations and immediately undercuts them, and gradually reveals a world that now seems all too familiar. In 1965, when “Slow Tuesday Night” first appeared in Galaxy, Lafferty was obviously using the American obsession with speed to critique our idolization of wealth, status, and celebrity. Read today, the story uncannily foretells the viral culture of the internet.
In its opening scene a panhandler accosts a strolling couple: “‘Preserve us this night,’ he said as he touched his hat to them, ‘and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?’” The diction here recalls the arch formality of W. C. Fields or Popeye’s scrounging friend J. Wellington Wimpy (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”). Neither the panhandler nor the couple seem to think it unusual for a beggar to ask for a thousand dollars. We soon learn why: after removing the “Abebaios block” from our brains, people found that “things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.”
Soon everything—absolutely everything—goes much, much faster, which also means that nothing lasts for very long. That panhandler—his name is Basil Bagelbaker—“would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.”
In the course of a single evening, Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, marries again and again. Her honeymoon with newly rich inventor Freddy Fixico is utterly kitsch—“the reticulated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall.” After a luxurious hour, Ildefonsa consults “a trend indicator” and realizes that Freddy’s invention would soon be outmoded and his wealth gone, so she immediately divorces him. “Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asks herself on this slow Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, Basil has been wheeling and dealing in the Money Market. “He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage.” Naturally enough, his wife, Judy, is chosen “one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o’clock.” In such a mayfly world, plays and films run no longer than six minutes and Stanley Skuldugger can be voted “the top Actor-Imago of the middle hours of the night.” Having decided to produce a philosophical masterpiece, Maxwell Mouser is willing to devote an entire seven minutes to the task. He turns to “the ideas index,” sets the “activator” for the amount of wordage needed, and, for that extra bit of sparkle, switches on a “striking analogy blender” calibrated to his particular “personality-signature.” The resulting monograph quickly goes viral—“This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night”—but by dawn it will already be dismissed and forgotten.
In “Slow Tuesday Night” Lafferty—politically conservative and devoutly Catholic—depicts a society of meaningless flux and impermanence, where there is “no abiding city” nor any sense of the spiritual. People surrender to the passing moment, nothing seems to matter very much, no hearts are permanently broken. Yet all this meretricious shallowness is conveyed through a simple yet brilliant conceit: if you speed up the world enough, everything starts to resemble the frenetic climax of a Keystone Kops farce.
In “Seven-Day Terror” Lafferty mentions “an untidy suite that looked as though it belonged to a drunken sultan.” That’s a wonderful simile, but also a fair description of his own gorgeous, shambolic abundance. What we love about Lafferty’s stories is the joyfulness of their telling, the playful diction, the
topsy-turvy plot surprises, the knowing winks. To expect from them any logic but that of Wonderland is to miss the party. After all, as the Rabelaisian hero of “One at a Time” says, if you insist on realism and perfect sense, “you put unnatural conditions on a tale.” I’m pretty sure his creator would agree.
Slow Tuesday Night
A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.
“Preserve us this night,” he said as he touched his hat to them, “and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?”
“I gave you a thousand last Friday,” said the young man.
“Indeed you did,” the panhandler replied, “and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight.”
“That’s right, George, he did,” said the young woman. “Give it to him, dear. I believe he’s a good sort.”
So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.
As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.
“Will you marry me this night, Ildy?” he asked cheerfully.
“Oh, I don’t believe so, Basil,” she said. “I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don’t seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that.”
But when they had parted she asked herself: “But whom will I marry tonight?”
The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.
When the Abebaios block had been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 1