From that point Kessel was my sensei, and on his recommendation I snapped up a copy of the Norton—a box of marvels that tells a novice SF writer, “You can do anything you want, as long as it’s strange.” When I flew to the Clarion West Writers Workshop that summer, also on Kessel’s recommendation, the Norton was one of the two inspirational hardcovers in my luggage. (The other was Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! for which I never will be asked to write an introduction.)
Of all the stories in the Norton that spoke directly to me, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” may have spoken the loudest. In her Norton essay, Le Guin discusses science fiction’s tendency to literalize metaphors, and Lafferty’s story precisely literalizes one of the foundational metaphors of my upbringing in rural South Carolina, where I was taught to venerate a long chain of ancestors growing ever smaller as they receded into the distance. Their secrets were closely guarded, but as I stumbled through the late twentieth century, those generations were often audible in the background, like peepers in the spring; I was pretty sure they were laughing. Moreover, all my important ancestors, the conveyors of culture and especially language, seemed to be women. Lafferty’s unforgettable “living dolls” of the planet Proavitus (Latin for “ancestral,” I’m told) embody the famous Faulkner line from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Rereading Lafferty’s story now, I wonder about the fate of the Proavitoi. What happens to them in the space between the story’s last two sentences? “With the pharmacopoeia that one could pick up here, a man need never die,” says Manbreaker Crag, who envisions his team becoming “the patent medicine kings of the universe.” Will these “slight people” survive Manbreaker’s unstranding of their organic chemistry? Consider that Lafferty was a lifelong resident of Oklahoma—a state wrested from the natives by any number of Manbreaker Crags—and many of his writings ponder the exploitation of the indigenous peoples of North America; along with language itself, it is the unavoidable theme of his great novel, Okla Hannali.
I believe Lafferty knows exactly what happens to the Proavitoi, but spares us at the end by diverting our attention to “another and much more unpleasant story.” As the ultimate grandmother might have said, was too joke a joke to tell a stranger, perhaps; Lafferty could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve.
LAND OF THE GREAT HORSES
Introduction by Harlan Ellison™
Look out your window. What do you see? The gang fight on the corner, with the teenie-boppers using churchkeys on each other’s faces; the scissors grinder with his multicolored cart and tinkling bells; a pudgy woman in a print dress too short for her fat legs, hoeing her lawn; a three-alarm fire with children trapped on the fifth story; a mad dog attached to the leg of a peddler of Seventh Day Adventist literature; an impending race riot with a representative of RAM on a sound truck. Any or all? It takes no special powers of observation to catalog the unclassifiable. But now look again. What do you see? What you usually see? An empty street. Now catalog:
Curbstones, without which cars would run up onto front lawns. Mailboxes, without which touch with the world would be diminished. Telephone poles and wires, without which communication would screech to a halt. Gutters, sewers, and manholes, without which you would be flooded when it rains. Blacktop, without which the car you own wouldn’t last a month on the crushed rock. The breeze, without which, well, a day is diminished. What are these things? They are the obvious. So obvious they become invisible. How many water hydrants and mailboxes did you pass today? None? Hardly. You passed dozens, but you did not see them. They are the incredibly valuable, absolutely necessary, totally ignored staples of a well-run community.
Speculative fiction is a small community. It has its obvious flashy residents. Knight, Sheckley, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Clarke, Vonnegut. We see them and take note of them, and know what they’re about. But the community would not run one thousandth as well as it does without the quiet writers, the ones who turn out story after story, not hack work but really excellent stories, time after time. The kind you settle back and think about, after finishing them, saying, “That was a good story.” And you promptly forget who wrote it. Perhaps later you recall the story. “Oh yeah, remember that one about…” and then you wrinkle down and say, “What the hell was the name of the guy who wrote it? He’s done a bunch of things, you know, pretty fair writer…”
The problem is a matter of cumulativeness. Each story is an excellence, standing alone. But somehow it never makes a totality, an image of a writer, a career in perspective. This is the sad but obvious thing about R. A. Lafferty’s place in speculative fiction.
He is a man of substantiality, whose writing is top-flight. Not merely competent fiction, but genuinely exemplary fiction. He has been writing for—how many years? More than six, but less than fifteen? Something like that. Yet he is seldom mentioned when fans gather to discuss The Writers. Even though he has been anthologized many times, been included in Judith Merril’s Year’s Best SF on several occasions, and the Carr-Wollheim World’s Best anthology twice, and appeared in almost all the science fiction magazines. He is the invisible man. It will be rectified here. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty will emerge, will speak, will declare himself, and then you will read another extra-brilliant story by him. And dammit, this time remember!
Lafferty speaking: “I am, not necessarily in this order, fifty-one years old, a bachelor, an electrical engineer, a fat man.
“Born in Iowa, came to Oklahoma when I was four years old, and except for four years in the army have been here all my life. Also, one year on a little civil service job in Washington, D.C. The only college I’ve ever attended was a couple of years in the University of Tulsa’s night school division long ago, mostly math and German. I’ve spent close to thirty years working for electrical jobbers, mostly as buyer and price-quotation man. During WWII I was stationed in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Australia, New Guinea, Morotai (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), and the Philippines. I was a good staff sergeant, and at one time I could talk pretty fair pasar Malay and Tagalog (of the Philippines).
“What does a man say about himself? Never the important things. I was a heavy drinker for a few years and gave it up about six years ago. This left a gap: when you give up the company of the more interesting drinkers, you give up something of the colorful and fantastic. So I substituted writing science fiction. Something I read in one of the writers’ magazines gave me the silly idea that science fiction would be easy to write. It isn’t, for me. I wasn’t raised on the stuff like most of the writers in this form seem to have been.
“My hobby is language. Any language. I’ve got at least a thousand dollars in self-teach grammars and readers and dictionaries and Lingua-phone and Cortinaphone courses. I’ve picked up a rough reading knowledge of all the languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, as well as Irish and Greek; but actually Spanish, French, and German are the only ones I read freely with respectable speed. I’m a Catholic of the out-of-season or conservative variety. As to politics, I am the only member of the American Centrist Party, whose tenets I will one day set out in an ironic-Utopia story. I’m a compulsive walker; turn me loose in a strange town and I’ll explore every corner of it on foot inside a week. I don’t think of myself as a very interesting fellow.”