The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  All the deep and ever-growing side talk, “slow talk,” is in this set (All the other sets are mute.) All the final drama Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is recorded on this set and is in none of the others. There is a whole golden era of television recorded in this set. I bought this old kerosene-burning treasure from its last owner (he did not know what it was: I told him that it was a chestnut roaster) for eighteen dollars. Now, by a vexing coincidence, this last owner has inherited forty acres of land with a fine stand of chestnut trees, and he wants the chestnut roaster back. And he has the law on his side.

  I bought it from him, and I paid him for it, of course. But the check I gave him for it was hotter than a selenium rectifier on a shorted circuit. I have to make up the eighteen dollars or lose the receiver and its stored wealth.

  I have raised thirteen dollars and fifty cents from three friends and one enemy. I still need four dollars and a half. Oh wait, wait, here is ninety-eight cents in pennies brought in by the “Children for the Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley Preservation Fund.” I still need three dollars and fifty-two cents. Anyone wishing to contribute to this fund had best do so quickly before this golden era of television is lost forever. Due to the fussiness of the government, contributions are not tax-deductible.

  It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard:

  “—what poet-race

  Shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?”

  The Primary Education of the Camiroi

  Introduction by Samuel R. Delany

  R. A. Lafferty was a gadfly.

  Paradoxically, he was never a writer I “liked”—and even today I think of him as someone I am always being asked to write about. Because he’s so smart, it’s always a compliment. (The first time, decades ago, Terry Carr asked me to blurb his novel Past Master, I felt that same way.) His works are wryly humorous—though I always realize, moments after the laughter, I am the butt of the joke.

  I never met him—he was from Oklahoma and lived his life in Tulsa with his sister, while tales of his alcoholic excess at SF conventions filtered up through the SF community.

  “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” is, among other things, a story about linguistic drift as human society spreads more and more widely over more and more diverse landscapes.

  Among the surprises the story offers is a fictive revelation that the flowering of ancient Greek Civilization was an “incursion” (an invasion?) of the Camiroi centuries ago.

  Camiroi children have to learn to read more and more slowly, rather than faster and faster. (Lafferty’s tale was written in the 1950s, when a nation-wide craze for “speed-reading” courses swept the Anglophone world, among the most popular, one from Evelyn Wood. I was a slow reader—I was someone who wondered if I would not profit by taking an Evelyn Wood course…) Every once in a while in their topsy-turvy world, a familiar idea swims by (“Can you imagine a person so sick that he would desire to hold high office for any great period of time?” One of the reasons I wanted to be a writer in the first place is so that I could observe the effects of politics without being directly responsible for them.) This is in a section of text on education that ends with our learning that the Camiroi children design and construct their own school buildings.

  Lafferty had his enthusiasm—the Choctaw Indians of his local area, whom he championed in the mythic novel Okla Hannali (1972), published by University of Oklahoma Press—sadly, not a book I have read, though it comes with high praise from writers on the topic such as Dee Brown.

  Diogenes the Cynic is the philosopher who suggested, during the time of Plato, that perhaps education would go better if the teachers were beaten when their students did poorly …

  This is the tradition Lafferty’s tales emerge from. And one has a far better understanding of this after one has been a teacher and, perhaps, retired from the position, than before.

  The last half dozen pages of the Camiroi’s “primary education” are a list of courses, decided up by year, which end with a comment on what this progression might accomplish if it were “constituted” on Earth. The comment contains three recommendations as to how to accomplish these ends. Since they include kidnapping, book burning, and the murdering (“judicious hanging”) of “certain malingering students,” the tale is both witty and troubling, in the tradition of Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”

  And that is where a good bit of Lafferty’s satire originates.

  One of my favorite Lafferty anecdotes (I only discovered it on Wikipedia minutes ago) comes from David Langford in the Magazine SFX (2002): “[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton [a Catholic author whose ‘distributism’ got him compared favorably to Marx], and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: ‘You’re on the right track, kid,’ and wandered away.”

  Even while I still find the stories unsettling, Lafferty seems on the right track …

  The Primary Education of the Camiroi

  ABSTRACT FROM JOINT REPORT TO THE GENERAL DUBUQUE PTA CONCERNING THE PRIMARY EDUCATION OF THE CAMIROI, Subtitled Critical Observations of a Parallel Culture on a Neighboring World, and Evaluations of THE OTHER WAY OF EDUCATION.

  Extract from the Day Book:

  “Where,” we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, “is the office of the local PTA?”

  “Isn’t any,” he said cheerfully.

  “You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the planet, there is no PTA?” our chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief.

  “Isn’t any office of it. But you’re poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can’t frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? Go tell him you need a PTA. He’ll make you one.”

  “Perhaps the initials convey a different meaning on Camiroi,” said Miss Munch the first surrogate chairman. “By them we mean—”

  “Parent Teachers Apparatus, of course. Colloquial English is one of the six Earthian languages required here, you know. Don’t be abashed. He’s a fine person, and he enjoys doing things for strangers. He’ll be glad to make you a PTA.”

  We were nonplussed, but we walked over to the man indicated.

  “We are looking for the local PTA, sir,” said Miss Smice, our second surrogate chairman. “We were told that you might help us.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said the elderly Camiroi gentleman. “One of you arrest that man walking there, and we’ll get started with it.”

  “Do what?” asked our Mr. Piper.

  “Arrest him. I have noticed that your own words sometimes do not convey a meaning to you. I often wonder how you do communicate among yourselves. Arrest, take into custody, seize by any force physical or moral, and bring him here.”

  “Yes, sir,” cried Miss Hanks, our third surrogate chairman. She enjoyed things like this. She arrested the walking Camiroi man with force partly physical and partly moral and brought him to the group.

  “It’s a PTA they want, Meander,” the elder Camiroi said to the one arrested. “Grab three more, and we’ll get started. Let the lady help. She’s good at it.”

  Our Miss Hanks and the Camiroi man named Meander arrested three other Camiroi men and brought them to the group.

  “Five. It’s enough,” said the elderly Camiroi. “We are hereby constituted a PTA and ordered into random action. Now, how can we accommodate you, good Earth people?”

  “But are you legal? Are you five persons competent to be a PTA?” demanded our Mr. Piper.

  “Any Camiroi citizen is competent to do any job on the planet of Camiroi,” said one of the Camiroi men (we learned later that his name was Talarium), “otherwise Camiroi would be in a sad shape.”

  “It may be,” said our Miss
Smice sourly. “It all seems very informal. What if one of you had to be World President?”

  “The odds are that it won’t come to one man in ten,” said the elderly Camiroi (his name was Philoxenus). “I’m the only one of this group ever to serve as president of this planet, and it was a pleasant week I spent in the Office. Now to the point. How can we accommodate you?”

  “We would like to see one of your schools in session,” said our Mr. Piper. “We would like to talk to the teachers and the students. We are here to compare the two systems of education.”

  “There is no comparison,” said old Philoxenus, “—meaning no offense. Or no more than a little. On Camiroi, we practice Education. On Earth, they play a game, but they call it by the same name. That makes the confusion. Come. We’ll go to a school in session.”

  “And to a public school,” said Miss Smice suspiciously. “Do not fob off any fancy private school on us as typical.”

  “That would be difficult,” said Philoxenus. “There is no public school in Camiroi City and only two remaining on the planet. Only a small fraction of one percent of the students of Camiroi are in public schools. We maintain that there is no more reason for the majority of children to be educated in a public school than to be raised in a public orphanage. We realize, of course, that on Earth you have made a sacred buffalo of the public school.”

  “Sacred cow,” said our Mr. Piper.

  “Children and Earthlings should be corrected when they use words wrongly,” said Philoxenus. “How else will they learn the correct forms? The animal held sacred in your own near Orient was of the species bos bubalus rather than bos bos, a buffalo rather than a cow. Shall we go to a school?”

  “If it cannot be a public school, at least let it be a typical school,” said Miss Smice.

  “That again is impossible,” said Philoxenus. “Every school on Camiroi is in some respect atypical.”

  We went to visit an atypical school.

  Incident:

  Our first contact with the Camiroi students was a violent one. One of them, a lively little boy about eight years old, ran into Miss Munch, knocked her down, and broke her glasses. Then he jabbered something in an unknown tongue.

  “Is that Camiroi?” asked Mr. Piper with interest. “From what I have heard, I supposed the language to have a harsher and fuller sound.”

  “You mean you don’t recognize it?” asked Philoxenus with amusement. “What a droll admission from an educator. The boy is very young and very ignorant. Seeing that you were Earthians, he spoke in Hindi, which is the tongue used by more Earthians than any other. No, no, Xypete, they are of the minority who speak English. You can tell it by their colorless texture and the narrow heads on them.”

  “I say you sure do have slow reaction, lady,” the little boy Xypete explained. “Even subhumans should react faster than that. You just stand there and gape and let me bowl you over. You want me analyze you and see why you react so slow?”

  “No! No!”

  “You seem unhurt in structure from the fall,” the little boy continued, “but if I hurt you I got to fix you. Just strip down to your shift, and I’ll go over you and make sure you’re all right.”

  “No! No! No!”

  “It’s all right,” said Philoxenus. “All Camiroi children learn primary medicine in the first grade, setting bones and healing contusions and such.”

  “No! No! I’m all right. But he’s broken my glasses.”

  “Come along Earthside lady, I’ll make you some others,” said the little boy. “With your slow reaction time you sure can’t afford the added handicap of defective vision. Shall I fit you with contacts?”

  “No. I want glasses just like those which were broken. Oh heavens, what will I do?”

  “You come, I do,” said the little boy. It was rather revealing to us that the little boy was able to test Miss Munch’s eyes, grind lenses, make frames and have her fixed up within three minutes. “I have made some improvements over those you wore before,” the boy said, “to help compensate for your slow reaction time.”

  “Are all the Camiroi students so talented?” Mr. Piper asked. He was impressed.

  “No. Xypete is unusual,” Philoxenus said. “Most students would not be able to make a pair of glasses so quickly or competently till they were at least nine.”

  Random interviews:

  “How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.

  “One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.

  “On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.

  “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks.

  * * *

  “Do you know anything about Earth history or geography?” Miss Smice asked a middle-sized boy.

  “We sure are sketchy on it, lady. There isn’t very much over there, is there?”

  “Then you have never heard of Dubuque?”

  “Count Dubuque interests me. I can’t say as much for the city named after him. I always thought that the Count handled the matters of the conflicting French and Spanish land grants and the basic claims of the Sauk and Fox Indians very well. References to the town now carry a humorous connotation, and ‘School-Teacher from Dubuque’ has become a folk archetype.”

  “Thank you,” said Miss Smice, “or do I thank you?”

  * * *

  “What are you taught of the relative humanity of the Earthians and the Camiroi and of their origins?” Miss Munch asked a Camiroi girl.

  “The other four worlds, Earth (Gaea), Kentauron Mikron, Dahae, and Astrobe were all settled from Camiroi. That is what we are taught. We are also given the humorous aside that if it isn’t true we will still hold it true till something better comes along. It was we who rediscovered the Four Worlds in historic time, not they who discovered us. If we did not make the original settlements, at least we have filed the first claim that we made them. We did, in historical time, make an additional colonization of Earth. You call it the Incursion of the Dorian Greeks.”

  * * *

  “Where are their playgrounds?” Miss Hanks asked Talarium.

  “Oh, the whole world. The children have the run of everything. To set up specific playgrounds would be like setting a table-sized aquarium down in the depths of the ocean. It would really be pointless.”

  Conference:

  The four of us from Earth, specifically from Dubuque, Iowa, were in discussion with the five members of the Camiroi PTA.

  “How do you maintain discipline?” Mr. Piper asked.

  “Indifferently,” said Philoxenus. “Oh, you mean in detail. It varies. Sometimes we let it drift, sometimes we pull them up short. Once they have learned that they must comply to an extent, there is little trouble. Small children are often put down into a pit. They do not eat or come out till they know their assignment.”

  “But that is inhuman,” said Miss Hanks.

  “Of course. But small children are not yet entirely human. If a child has not learned to accept discipline by the third or fourth grade, he is hanged.”

  “Literally?” asked Miss Munch.

  “How would you hang a child figuratively? And what effect would that have on the other children?”

  “By the neck?” Miss Munch still was not satisfied.

  “By the neck until they are dead. The other children always accept the example gracefully and do better. Hanging isn’t employed often. Scarcely one child in a hundred is hanged.”

  “What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.”

  “Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading,” Philoxenus said. “He
was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.”

  “You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?”

  “The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read, or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”

  “Ah, would you call your schools liberal?” Mr. Piper asked.

  “I would. You wouldn’t,” said Philoxenus. “We do not on Camiroi, as you do on Earth, use words to mean their opposites. There is nothing in our education or on our world that corresponds to the quaint servility which you call liberal on Earth.”

  “Well, would you call your education progressive?”

  “No. In your argot, progressive, of course, means infantile.”

  “How are the schools financed?” asked Mr. Piper.

  “Oh, the voluntary tithe on Camiroi takes care of everything, government, religion, education, public works. We don’t believe in taxes, of course, and we never maintain a high overhead in anything.”

  “Just how voluntary is the tithing?” asked Miss Hanks. “Do you sometimes hang those who do not tithe voluntarily?”