Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  One multi-media device used here (it is effective this time, but I hope it is not imitated) is having the execrable press that the novel has received become (by means of media extension and ambiental pervasion) the choral anti-strophe of the novel itself. This is not in the nature of a Greek Chorus (it is most times a parrot chorus and sometimes a Gothic horror chorus); but it does illuminate the whole novel, from below, with a reeky light. The execrable press itself is puzzling. Not one of the cracked critics seems to have good credentials for judging novels at all.

  There is a strong ‘what bucket do you bring to the well?’ air to any consideration of THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS. Dismal people say that the work is dismal. Dishonest people say that is dishonest. Sordid people say that it is sordid. Morally bankrupt people say that it is morally bankrupt. None of these things is true about it, but it is the mark of a great novel that people of such different sorts all see themselves reflected in it.

  The work is interesting. It is original in its presentation. It raises, but it does not settle, the question ‘What is reality?’. It may well be a landmark novel. It is a genuine morality novel, and a requirement of a morality novel is that it be moral.

  For it does have morality, and more than vestigial morality. It has a battered but entrenched, and often rampant morality. And nothing else around has any morality at all. It has the only morality that has appeared in any American novel for a long time. As such, it infuriates the ‘Morality is Dead’ nation; and the infuriated response is to accuse it of immorality. There is always something awkward and astringent about bare morality arrived at by devious and tortuous and human means. And, devious and human though it is, this work shows the only morality in town for a long season.

  The introduction of R.W. Apple of the New York Times is silly.

  Review: The Last Western

  Willie the hero of this is equal parts of American Indian, Irish, Chinese, and Negro. He is a red-headed, slant-eyed, copper-colored Negro, and as such he is a perfectly symmetrical concept. He is a primitive picture plaited out of four kinds of straw.

  The book is unequal parts of something between satire and caricature (a sort of burlesque with mittens on; it does not have a fine touch); and the tediousness and ritual hatreds of new-church or with-it Catholicity; and all the stereotyped dishonesties of pseudo-Liberalism; and some thunderously good and absolutely inspired horse opera. Four colors of straw again, but one of them a dazzling and living green.

  The book is almost certainly misnamed, even though it begins in Sandstorm, New Mexico. There aren't any western scenes or any westerners in it. There aren't any horses in it. But, in one sweep of a hundred and fifty pages or so, there are horses' hooves as a background thunder to the incredible pace and cadence. (Somewhere in the Koran it says that God loves the sound of horses' hooves.)

  I have not heard of the author Thomas S. Klise, and no information on him is given. This may be a writing name. He may be a kid named Joe.

  As to the story, Willie is a simple-minded and slow-learning poor boy. However, he is a very good boy, and the goodness shines out of him all his life. His best friend is a Negro boy named Clio who is much smarter than Willie and much less believing (“Do you really believe all that jive?”). These two boys are wonderful athletes however and while still in high school in Houston they receive big league baseball contracts with the New York Hawks. Willie is a pitcher and Clio is his catcher.

  Willie has a miracle pitch. The miracle pitch is an archetype, though I don't know what its form is in the subconscious of boys in countries outside of the baseball area. His pitch is greater than the fadeaway ball of Christy Mathewson and the in-shoot of Frank Merriwell. He pitches perfect game after perfect game, striking out all twenty-seven opponents in most of the games. Some of Willie's teammates feel a little resentment at this since their jobs no longer mean anything.

  But Robert Regent who is the owner of the New York Hawks and the manufacturer of Regent wine treats the boys high-handedly. Willie turns his back on a sure million dollars, and Clio on half that much, and both leave baseball. Willie enters a seminary in Houston, and Clio goes to Brazil to become a revolutionary general and then, after a very few years, the conqueror of Brazil and other countries.

  At seminary, Willie fails all his classes, as he has failed every class he has ever been in in every grade of school. But he is ordained anyhow because he is so good. From priest he quickly goes to auxiliary bishop, to full bishop, to archbishop, to cardinal, and papal elector. Willie works a few miracles between the death of the old pope and the election of the new. For this reason, or just because he is so good, he is declared Pope by acclamation, though some of the cardinals do not acclaim him so loudly as do others.

  As pope he tours the world, finding everywhere the very poor people and the very rich, but none of any other sort. And wherever there is a civil war going on, Willie calls on the rebel leaders to come in and have a discussion with the government people, he himself being the guarantee for their safe conduct. The rebel leaders believe the pope and come in. And minutes after Willie had blessed the meeting and passed on, the government leaders (conservative Catholics all), break the safe conduct and murder the rebel leaders. Willie doesn't catch onto what is happening very soon because he isn't very smart.

  As a cure for poverty and war, Willie proposes a world-wide day of prayer and reconciliation. Naturally the traditionalist people and their cardinals can have only one answer to this horrifying proposal: to have Pope Willie murdered. And it is done. During his rule, Willie has depended heavily on a new Catholic religious order whose time has come. This is The Silent Servants of the Used, Abused, and Utterly Screwed Up. But one body by a manifest Willie miracle, turns Judas and gives Willie over to be killed.

  And at the same time that Willie is murdered, his friend Clio the revolutionary general is murdered in South America in another treason. Clio had ordered his forces to observe the day of prayer and reconciliation by withdrawing from battle. But the government forces, and a two-sided Judas out of them, are not so honorable. Such is the account.

  The style is pseudo-simple with very great use of the word ‘and’. As; “They went into the first of the tents and Willie sat down on a folding chair and someone handing him a thermos of hot drink and someone patted his shoulders and there were many men in the tent and many more were outside hurrying about and the men seemed far away to Willie and he kept looking at the lodge.” There are a lot of ‘ands’ in the 559 pages.

  All the rich people, wherever they may live, talk stage Texas. All the outright hypocrites maintain Fatima shrines and show great devotion to the Lady of Fatima. But who could object to so obvious a symbol of hypocrisy? There are many nice touches: “Black servants, dressed in colonial costume and white wigs…” (The novel is set a few decades in the future.)

  The best character in the book is the sinister saint Herman Felder who always smells of roses (from his constant use of a mixture of morphines and alcohols and various narcotics) who always carries in a shoulder holster the most expensive camera in the world (it cost more than a mil). There is a possibility that this magic camera is the frame in which the whole narrative is contained. The camera may be creating rather than recording the scenes around it. Felder, a member of the Silent Servants, is insane for most of the book, but every one takes great care of him in his different stages of drunkenness and stupefaction because of the very great man he had once been. He had been no less than a producer of western movies! And most of the servants guess that they are really characters in one of the Movies of Felder, in one of them that failed. Felder, of course, is Judas. But should not a producer be allowed to do whatever he wishes with his own characters?

  Hold on here! Be very careful! What happens happens quickly and with a jolt. You can very well be thrown down under the hooves. For, almost halfway through the book, something strange and powerful happens. I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't experienced it. The sticky satire and sick burlesque falls away.
The author himself seems to disappear for a couple of hundred pages while someone much more forceful takes hold. There appears a coherence and a sweep. There is real power and flow; there are the hoof-beats of a rushing narrative that has been graced and blessed for a while. The straw people are sodden with real blood from somewhere. The Spirit moves through it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself. Very often in great and sanctioned art and expression one will come to a place where the Holy Ghost makes Himself manifest. Less often the thing happens in uneven or even poor art: whatever this is, it happens here.

  There isn't any doubt that there is real inspiration appearing and infusing much of the latter half of this narrative. It's real enough. It takes one by surprise. And there's the feeling that it should be preserved and reset. Might as well throw half the book away and preserve the other half. It's good. It is maintained for a long sweep, long enough to be a self-standing book. And it won't be forgotten.

  Sure, it's the Last Western. The Holy Ghost is one of His aspects, is the Playboy of the Western World. This thunderously good and absolutely inspired part of the book will outweigh the three uninspired parts of the book. And it ends, as all good things must end, quite a while before its official end.

  For the Holy Ghost departs from this work a number of pages before the actual end. I believe it's the L-Day chants of one of the with-it cardinals (“Zap! Zing! Splat! Splash! The Holy Spirit will break their ass.” page 545) that occasions His withdrawal finally. That chant is the highest intellectual attainment of one sort of spirit, but the Holy Spirit had already left.

  And from there on the book sickens and dies.

  Pope Willie, as he goes to his death, has the look of an eighty year-old man, and he can scarcely walk. He has to be in his twenties yet. The men who were middle-aged when he was a boy are none of them old yet, but Willie is very old. Willie, for the world day of prayer and reconciliation, travels back to the United States to beg forgiveness of the one man he has wronged. This is Robert Regent the owner of the New York Hawks and the manufacturer of Regent wine. Once, when Regent had cursed Willie and called him a nigger and demeaned him, Willie had felt a twinge of resentment. So it is to atone for that that Willie, with his followers from among the Silent Servants, goes to this very rich man to beg forgiveness. And it is there, on Regent's hunting preserve, that Willie will be murdered. Many of his old friends are there, including his old baseball manager, Thatcher Grayson.

  “It is the last of the ninth, Mr. Grayson,” Pope Willie says as he totters out to his death. And that was the end of Pope Willie.

  Get it. It's worth it. There's a very good small book occupying much but not all of the second half of the big book. And even in the larger monstrosity there are things to be enjoyed, humors both conscious and unconscious. You haven't even met George Doveland Goldenblade the munitions maker yet. Or Archbishop McCool. Or Joto Toshima. Or Truman. You have barely met Thatcher Grayson and Robert Regent. There is less to all of them than meets the eye, but there is something to all of them.

  And there are several hundred pages where the Spirit does move unmistakably through this strange instrument.

  Review: Sioux Trail

  by John Upton Terrell

  McGraw-Hill

  This is an essential book in the meaning that it works through a cloud of derivatives and arrives at an essence. It is an outline of all the Sioux Indian tribes in all their ages. As such, it hasn't the verve of APACHE CHRONICLE or other books of Terrell. The tables and résumés inhibit the narrative liveliness, and yet they are handy. And a fair case is made that the Folsom and Cochise, and Hopewell and Indian Knoll and Effigy Mound and Radin cultures do all touch on peoples who were or would become Sioux. But that part is all pre-history, and it carries the crisp of most pre-history. The doubts and difficulties begin with the real history, that of the last three hundred years or so.

  The narrative works inward from the fringes of the more traveled and the more mixed of the Sioux tribes to the center where are found the stubborn and fundamental peoples of the Dakota Sioux. There is a tour of the varieties of the old Sioux who traveled to their extinctions in the areas of a dozen present states. There is a tour of other Sioux tribes who traveled just as far and refused to become extinct. These are the Poncas and Omahas and Kaws, the clever and balanced Quapaws, the Osages who can rub their hands together and make the money flow. These are the mixed-blood Indians with their hybrid vigor of spirit and brains. They are the college-educated and well-to-do Indians with their ballerinas and book-club authors and Smithsonian-hung painters. They are the Sioux Indians who live in two worlds.

  And the tour ends pretty much where the Sioux began, with the essential Sioux of the Yankton and Samtee and Teton branches, those who still might be called Dakota Sioux. Probably the most essential of them are the Tetons, and the most essential tribe of the Tetons is the Oglala.

  These are as Indian as it is possible to be. They are the oil of Indian with all its foreign matter refined out. They were and are (for essential peoples hold all their history in the present tense) the war-bonnet Indians, the noble-nosed Indians, the Indians of the old Indian-head nickels, the Indians who were named Red Cloud, and Smoke, and Man-Afraid-of-his-Horse, and Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse.

  It is a good tour. If you are an Indian buff you cannot pass it up. If you are not an Indian buff, then become one.

  The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician

  There are two kinds of Science Fiction, but I must disregard one kind completely. I do not understand it at all, and I am unable to generate any interest in it.

  Well, following the same cleavage, there are two kinds of almost everything. There are two kinds of people in the world, and that's the difficulty.

  There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone.

  There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people.

  So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn't always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others.

  “Everybody look at me,

  I'm way and out the best there be,”

  — the persons proclaim, and often groups and clots of folks, loitering and guesting clusters or clumps of people will give them the echo “Amen, Amen, you sure are!” This is mostly inexplicable to me. Many persons of the first sort do become cult figures and have followings. But it seems as though a universe with only one person in it, and a group of shadows, is too small.

  These classifications have nothing to do with the artificial categories of introvert and extrovert. A person of the first sort will see and admire himself both from within and from without. He will see himself from a series of exterior vistas set like spotlights to highlight him.

  And a person of the second sort will see the world objectively in whatever manner persons do see exterior objects and complexes. And he will also see it in a subjective and personalized way. No one can see things without putting his own personal signature on his seeing.

  I am mostly a person of the second sort. I do have a strong interest and affection for the world around me. At the same time, I have a certain affection for myself, I suppose, as I would for any other ungifted and clumsy and funny-looking person of long, if casual, acquaintance. I run into myself constantly, and so I am one of the most familiar persons around. But I wouldn't list myself among the fifty most interesting persons I know, and certainly not among the fifty persons I care for most deeply. I am not one of the beautiful or graceful people, so the temptation to make myself a person of the first sort is almost non-existent. I'm so clumsy that, as a grown man twenty-seven years old when I went into the Army, I had trouble learning to do a simple right-
face without stumbling or staggering. And I'm so unaccomplished that I could never even learn to whistle.

  But I've always been pretty much pleased and interested and even excited about the world around me. I'm inclined to be uncritical in my interests and pleasures in the world, just as the persons of the first sort are inclined to be uncritical in their interest and pleasure and adulation over themselves.

  There is not nearly enough anonymity in the world, but persons of the world-centered sort do supply most of what there is.

  From the other aspect I would suppose that there is not nearly enough egocentricity in the world, but persons of the self-oriented sort do their best to supply the lack.

  And of course a person of one sort will express himself according to his orientation: for this reason there are two sorts of everything in the world, including science fiction.

  To me, most of the great moments of SF are planet-falls: unshipping and setting foot on new worlds. And yet the experience of planet-fall is a daily thing, one that never grows stale. It happens a dozen or a hundred times a day. We live on a tolerably new world, and there is always the feeling of having just arrived on it. This is a world that is always more than ninety percent unexplored by ourselves, and we have a compulsion to get on with the exploration. It's an intricate and massive world, prodigious in detail and almost beyond numbering in its dimensions; compendious, encyclopedic, physically astonishing, prodigal in line and color, alive on a dozen different levels, of great friendliness and affection in most of its fauna and especially in its ‘superior fauna’ known as mankind. This species is more delightful than all tribbles and fuzzies that can be imagined. This world, probably a masterwork among worlds, is loaded with encounters and happenings; and do not forget that etymologically all happenings are happy.