#wreckville

[ralafferty]

43. Thousand Dollar Melon

Lafferty characters tend not to have backstories. I don’t mean that none of them develop; obviously many of them do: consider the series of stories involving the australopithecus Austro, or the ktistic machine Epiktistes in Arrive at Easterwine, or Okla Hannali, or the entire class of kids tracked through In a Green Tree. But unless their pasts have been explicitly shown, it’s rare for any Lafferty characters to look back, or to indicate that they have an existence dating back before the stories that involve them.

There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but maybe the most consistent is Willy McGilly. No matter what situation he finds himself in, he’s always encountered something like it before, often when he was just a boy. But even Willy doesn’t often fill in the details.

However in “Thousand Dollar Melon” we get an honest-to-God story of Willy’s younger years (or at least as “honest” as Willy ever gets). Moreover, it’s a story of Willy’s first and perhaps only love. As Lafferty readers can imagine, this must have been quite a gal to draw the eye of Willy McGilly, and she does not disappoint; as he himself says in comparing her favorably to the too-slight girls around her, girls the largest of whom “would hardly go forty inches in bosom or beam,” he says:

You can now understand with what joy I welcomed Miss Clarissa Clay. She was gorgeous. She would have made three of any of them. She was a sunny blonde with a smile as big as all summertime. She smelled like a field of sweet clover; and in area and scope the resemblance was also striking.

Willy finds that, in order to win Clarissa’s heart, he must first win the thousand-dollar prize at the local county fair for growing the biggest watermelon. Of course, he ends up doing so, and of course, everything goes wrong—and then he reveals to the admiring Clarissa his backup plan, prompting this great Laffertian exchange:

“We are saved,” said Clarissa, “how is it possible for one man to be so smart?”

“I have wondered about that also,” I said, and to tell the truth I have never ceased to wonder about it.

Anyway, the backup plan also goes awry, and Willy McGilly is left forlorn as Clarissa marries the true melon-growing champ. But life goes on, and as Willy rises in the con-man trade he sets up shop with one of the too-slight girls, a Hermione Huckle (stage name Frito), who “prove[s] to be a likeable life-mate, even if she is a scrawny crow.”

Of course, though that story ends there, there are always more; “Thousand Dollar Mellon,” which began with an innocent question about whether the watermelon was a fruit or vegetable, ends with an innocent question on whether a shrimp is a fish or a worm, and Willy winding up into another yarn; only, this time (and not for the last time), Lafferty leaves off with an em-dash, like so: “But Willy added—”

Finished August 1959. Unpublished.

[ralafferty]

18. Get Off the World

“After all, Battleby,” Willy told him, “nine thousand dollars wouldn’t keep a seaman in snuff through one watch.”

“It wouldn’t,” said his nephew, “keep a good check-kiter in pen refills through one busy Friday afternoon.”

For that is the way they talk in Wreckville.

From its inception, the telephone was regarded as an object of fear and wonder, a device that through some magic allowed voice to cross vast gulfs of distance, bringing people into conversation who could not travel to see each other in days or even weeks. Granting the existence of such a marvel, is it any wonder telephonic early adapters thought they might be able to hear voices beyond the mortal plane? Why couldn’t the telephone provide some sort of mediumistic link to the beyond? Even after such fancies faded (they have never entirely disappeared), the device maintained a certain air of unpredictability that could shade into romance or, just as easily, malice.

In “Get Off the World,” we see Willy McGilly—in yet another of his many guises—using the malicous side of the telephone to spook three powerful magnates and scare them off the trail of an employee who knows too much about their nefarious dealings. Of course, it’s not the goodness of his heart that leads Willy to get involved; that’s a background factor at best. No, Willy the Wreck is in it for the money—not the employee’s, but that of the three rich men who he can clean out while the spook is going on. The cash even becomes a sort of verbal refrain in the story, as in the quote above—an early example of what Don Webb identified as Lafferty’s use of the “prose foot,” a sort of metrical expectation built into a story. Webb, who took the idea from Yevgeny Zamyatin, characterized it as

a kind of rhythmic device that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative becomes a force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion that binds the story together in a different way than plot mechanics.

As Lafferty becomes more comfortable with and confident in this technique, he will indeed do increasingly without traditional plot mechanics—relying on voice alone, whether speaking to the reader directly through the printed page, or to the characters through a telephone in a coffin. In this story though, there is still a simple plot well managed, Willy McGilly and the Wreckville running riot, and some ghoulish humor stirred into the mix—how twelve separate mystery and suspense magazines passed on this one I’ll never understand.

Finished February 1958. Unpublished.

[ralafferty]

16. Handful of Fire

“I am half sorry to lose him. He was such a good little boy; an unspeakable monster, but a good little boy for all that. —Myra Willoughby, “Handful of Fire”

In January and early Feburary 1958, R.A. Lafferty wrote four tales about the Willoughby family; along with the earlier “Saving Grace,” these form a sort of story suite, a panoramic view of a boisterous Catholic family and the neighborhood (and especially the bar) they inhabit. In the 1958 stories, “The Vanquished” gives a picture of father Tom; “Bridlegoose” of mother Myra; and “Seven Day Terror” of the two oldest Willoughby kids, Clarence and Clarissa. “Handful of Fire” completes the set by concentrating on the youngest, Cyril, a three-year-old last seen disavowing any responsibility in the disappearer incident.

Here it seems Cyril has run away from home—hardly a crisis, as he does so every day, providing his mother with a much needed reprieve. But on this day his disappearance coincides with the delivery of a ransom note, and Myra begins to fret that he’s been taken by the boys on Greenstreet Street—mean boys like Stabber Stuckley, Killer Cohen, or worst of all Desperate Danny. As she searches, her own children, Nokomis the barman, and Hodl Oskanian the Wreckville conman stoke her fears with gruesome reports about murdered children.

Soon after Myra finds Cyril dangling over a tub of pitch, with Desperate Danny ready to fling in a torch and drop the boy into the flaming oil, it becomes clear she’s been baited all along—and she rises to it spectacularly, theatrically, in a performance so over the top it must be part of the show. As an admiring Danny catches on, he asks, “At our house nobody ever carries on like that … Do you have a lot of fun at your house?” Myra’s answer—“Of course we have a lot of fun at our house. That’s what houses are for”—captures exactly the exasperating, exuberant richness of life on display in the Willoughby household and many another like it. And as for Cyril, he’s happily reconciled to mother and family—and already planning the next day’s escape.

Finished February 1958. Unpublished.

[ralafferty]

15. Seven Day Terror

“I don’t believe I’d play with that any more,” said Nokomis. “Who’s playing?” said Clarence. “This is for real.”

R.A. Lafferty wrote children as no one wrote them before, and possibly no one will ever write them again. It’s not just that his kids are clever, cruel, ludicrously precocious, and logical along lines that adults know nothing of—it’s also that any tale of his about children proceeds along the same lines. The worlds of these tales are “make-believe” in the same sense as in Calvinball: though the rules are always in flux, they are nonetheless valid and binding while in effect, superseding even the physical laws of our own reality. So for Lafferty’s kids, what looks like mere “play” may be deadly serious, often apocalyptic, and adults ignore that at their own extreme peril.

At this early stage the apocalypse is localized and relatively short-lived. It’s occasioned by that simplest of childhood conceits, solipsism: close your eyes and the world disappears, open them, and it comes back again. Only, in this case, that power is narrowed and extended through the use of a “disappearer” capable of making items vanish for, as it turns out, the seven days of the title. (Though the neighborhood got off light—a nine-day, a thirteen-day, a twenty-seven day, and even an eleven-year disappearer are all possible…)

Yet that summary can’t convey the sheer speed with which things happen in this story, as with all of Lafferty’s best: fire hydrants, cats, and eventually whole houses and people vanish; the Willoughby kids (and who else would be behind this?) toss out one-liners as parents and city officials panic; and the inexorable logic of childhood brings everything to a moment of perfect climax that turns out only to be the occasion for an anticlimactic punchline.

And somewhere in all this is also the debut of those “eminent scientists,” Dr. Velikof Vonk, Arpad Arkabaranan, and Willy McGilly, who turn up to provide three contradictory theories and no help whatsoever—though they only get a few paragraphs here, it’s the same M.O. that they’ll deploy more fully in “Narrow Valley” or “Boomer Flats.” Reading chronologically, this seems like a role change for Willy McGilly, from conman to scientific observer—but he still serves as stand-in for the storyteller. Previously, he linked the story to the con itself; here he’s portrayed as perhaps the only adult still in touch with childhood logic: “Who would have thought you could do it with a beer can and two pieces of cardboard? When I was a boy I used an oatmeal box and red crayola.”

But all this is background to the chaos wrought by the Willoughby children—more on which in the next entry.

Completed Feburary 1958. Published in If, March 1962. Collected in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Ace, 1970.

[ralafferty]

11. Aloys

“The implications of it! Oh, the implications!”  they said as they copied it off, and the implications rang in their heads like bells of the future.

In one of its several aspects, “Aloys” is a Jekyll and Hyde tale: two personalities existing within the same protagonist, who is also the author himself.

Let me explain. In life, Ray Lafferty was a bold and brilliant writer, and a shy, retiring individual. Put him in front of a typewriter, and he’d write a story that would tear your ears off. But in the flesh, he would rarely speak, and when he did so it was in a voice so low that people had to lean in to hear, if they were able to hear it at all. 

So also with Willy McGilly and Aloys Foulcault-Oeg in this tale. The latter is linked to Ray by name (Raphael Aloysius Lafferty), and expresses something of his trepidation about public settings; the story almost seems a response to an award nomination that had not happened yet, and would not happen enough during his lifetime. But at this stage of his career, the anxiety seems to be related more to the mere writing of an SF story, much less seeing it recognized for anything or even published. After all, he wasn’t part of the exalted SF community, those writers of the Golden Age who cut their teeth in the letters columns of Amazing when they were still in high school. And he wasn’t from any of the fashionable places where SF writers and fans were in the midst of building what would become fandom. He was just a shop-counter salesman at an electrical parts supply store in a former boomtown in the Midwest.

So despite his command of the genre and its vocabulary—as depicted in Foulcault-Oeg’s lecture outline, with its 19 interlocking points packed with scientific and psychological jargon (and some outright gibberish)—he’s anxious about presenting it to that audience. And thus Willy McGilly appears, in the guise of “Graf-Doktor Hercule Bienville-Stravroguine,” to take over for Aloys and actually deliver the speech. It’s Willy who wows the learned crowd with a load of hooey (the same speech he once used to sell snake oil). It’s Willy who receives the applause, and most crucially the check. And it’s Willy who sees Aloys brought back to Wreckville, so that his undeniable talent will no longer run loose.

I’m not suggesting, in the least, that within the story, the two are one person; they are clearly separate characters. But they do demonstrate two sides of the enigma, Ray Lafferty—a dichotomy in the form of a two-man con, in a story that successfully passes off (not for the first time, and definitely not for the last) snake oil for science fiction.

Completed January 1958. Published in Galaxy, August 1961, ed. Horace Gold. Collected in Strange Doings, Scribner’s, 1972.

[ralafferty]

8. Johnny Crookedhouse

Late in his career, in an essay afterword to the three-volume novel More Than Melchisedech, Lafferty writes admiringly of “The Law of Intellectual Constancy,” which he attributes to Havelock Ellis. This thesis, he says, states that 

[A]ll persons with brains and bodies not seriously damaged are of about equal power and ability, that a guy who scratches out a slim living on two and a half acres in shantytown is as intelligent or capable in all ways as are John D. Rockefeller, or Thomas Alva Edison, or Wilhelm Wagner, or George Bernard Shaw, or Victor Hugo, or the President of the United States or of U.S. Steel, or of Alexander Graham Bell, or Henrik Ibsen. It was simply that peoples’ fancies turned to different ways of fulfilling themselves.

This might surprise readers who are accustomed to Lafferty’s cast of characters, with its oddball geniuses, child prodigies, and deeply philosophical barflies. (It might also surprise the eugenicist Ellis, who so far as I can tell was referring to Remy de Gourmont’s theory that the sum total of human intelligence was constant at all times.) But the point is precisely that these are not paragons of humanity; they’re just representative samples applying their intelligences to their own interests. “The human race,” he writes, “is made up entirely of glowing geniuses.” For a man who wrote much more often about the scratchers in shantytown than the high-lifers in the penthouse—and for one who himself lived a thoroughly unoutstanding life—it must have been an enormously powerful notion that genius is neither born, nor made, but rather exists in everyone, at all times.

Though examples are found throughout his work, the only other direct mention of the law of intellectual constancy is as the basis of the unpublished story “Johnny Crookedhouse.” Another Wreckville tale, this one starting with a bet between a factory owner and one Charley O’Malley (an alternate name for Willy McGilly?), on whether a given blockhead (the titular Crookedhouse) can demonstrate as much intelligence as any handpicked hotshot. Over the two weeks of the bet, Johnny proves a disastrous hire: whatever genius he has seems bent toward finding novel ways to screw up. But, this being a Lafferty yarn, the genius inherent in all humanity ends up shining through; this being a Wreckville tale, that genius is turned to the preferred fulfillment of Johnny Crookedhouse, Charley O’Malley, and the rest of the Wrecks: the graft from a well-worked con.

Completed November 1957. Unpublished.

[ralafferty]

6. Hands of the Man

Somewhat of a hodgepodge, the result of Lafferty revisiting the story multiple times (see history below) before finding a mix the market would take. The Wreckville characters and the confidence scheme mark it as an early production, and the interest in chiromancy could come from any point in his career, but the elements of space travel and the mentions of worlds like Astrobe, Pudibundia, Bellota, and Hokey Planet seem like later additions, giving an SF sheen to a story that in all other ways is a heist tale.

And yet, in a strange way, this genre skew—whether included in the original, or developed in later drafts—proves appropriate. Consider the heist, as the Wreckville crew themselves do after its success. It’s an old scam: there is a Setting (the titular Hands) for the Bait (an enormous offworld diamond); there is a Warning, and then a Counter-Play made when everyone’s attention is elsewhere; and finally an Innocent Disclaimer that serves as a way back out. 

Now, switching to the marketing point of view, we also have a Setting (the Hundred Planets) and Bait (the selfsame diamond, but also the tale itself); there is a Warning (the denial of any specific offworld origin) and a Counter-Play (the substitution of a heist tale for an SF one), and finally an Innocent Disclaimer, which in a particularly Laffertian gesture involves detailing the elements of the heist, as if that was what was promised all along—in the grifter’s own phrase, “I came with this, and with this I leave.”

It’s a neat trick, and in terms of the SF genre, narrowly defined, one that Lafferty would pull over and over.

Completed November 1957. Rewritten February 1958, November 1962, and July 1965. Published in the anthology Infinity One, Lancer Books, 1970. Uncollected.

[ralafferty]

4. Adam Had Three Brothers

The first of Lafferty’s Wreckville stories, and as a result the first to feature Willy McGilly (here, McGilley)—one of his most memorable creations, despite rarely being the main character of any story he’s in. Here, he’s shown in possession of a tablet detailing the origin of the Wrecks, or “Rreqs”—short for Rrequesenians, a people descended not from Adam, but from one of Adam’s three brothers, Rreq (the other two, naturally, are bachelors). Since the Wrecks aren’t part of Adam’s seed, they’re also not under the obligation to work for a living; as a result, they make their living as boisterous conmen, genially fleecing Adam’s descendants and generally having a good time of it all.

If this sounds to you like a far-fetched tale, or maybe even like the beginning of another con, then you’re starting to catch on. It’s one of Lafferty’s favorite techniques: The Big Lie. Instead of starting small and working your way up, just start with a whopper and then keep lying exuberantly; even if some among the audience call your bluff, others won’t, and they’ll be hooked forever.

In the story itself (and this serves to demonstrate one of Lafferty’s principles of story construction: he often hides the structure in plain sight by giving the reader a microscopic version of it within the story, which is then re-enacted macroscopically in the full telling), this particular con is called “The Inverted Pyramid,” and it’s done with horses. Tell 500 people you’ve got the guaranteed system for picking winners at the track, and give them as proof one to back right away (picking different horses for different groups, naturally). The next day go back to the ones who actually won. Give them another sure thing, then repeat. After five days, the ones who are with you are there for good, and you can take them for all they’ve got—except in the rare event that one of them, as in this story, takes you back.

But that sort of exception aside, it’s an excellent image of Lafferty’s own approach to writing as a career, and even at this early stage, an indication of the audience he would achieve. When Lafferty lies, he lies big, and a lot of readers just can’t take it at all. A further set of readers follow him up to a point, but eventually (often when they get to the novels) the cumulative effect proves too much, and they bail out. But a few of them stick around, intoxicated by the sheer joy of his artifice; those few—and if you’re reading this, you may well be among them—those few are his, forever.

Completed October 1957. Published in New Mexico Quarterly, Autumn 1961. Collected in Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Scribners, 1974.