Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
The myths we tell ourselves and each other about our favorite authors are, as a rule, misleading at best. It is a near-universal belief that Philip K. Dick was half-mad and possibly a high-functioning psychotic. Yet editors who worked with the man have told me that he was unfailingly rational. Similarly, it is commonly agreed that R.A. Lafferty was unlike any other writer, and this is pretty much true. But the truth can be exaggerated. He was not the solitary, literarily isolated genius, completely untouched by the work of others, that we have been making him out to be in the years since his death.
See if you can identify this short story. It’s by a science fiction writer who was widely esteemed in his day but is now painfully close to being forgotten, though he does have his advocates still. It’s a humorous work. Central to it is a little girl who knows how to make things disappear—including, ultimately, people. Chaos ensues. But by the end of the tale, the source of the disappearances is discovered and peace is restored.
Fans of R.A. Lafferty should have no difficulty in identifying it as his “Seven-Day Terror.”
But they will be wrong. The story in question is Will F. Jenkins’s “The Little Terror.” Here’s how it begins:
There was no crashing roll of thunder when the principles of psychological acosmistic idealism became practicalities in the world inhabited by Nancy. Her mother had no twinge of uneasiness, and her father was reading his newspaper. There was no breathless hush over the earth at the bloodcurdling instant, though possibly Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), up in heaven, was pleasantly interested. Joe Holt, who was a practicing psychiatrist and might be presumed to have a feeling for such things, hadn’t the trace of an intuition of it. The skies did not darken suddenly, nor were there deep rumblings underground. There was not even an unnatural gray twilight in which birds chirped faintly and cattle affrightedly rolled their eyes. There was no sign whatever that the most alarming moment in history was at hand. But still—
This is a marvelously overwritten paragraph and it tickled Jenkins to have gotten away with it. I know because I once visited his house, along with a professor of English literature and another student, and he showed it to us with great amusement.
In Jenkins’s story, six-year-old Nancy begs her grandfather to make a penny disappear—a trick she doesn’t understand is merely sleight-of-hand. When she asks if it’s real magic, he assures her that it is and that she can perform it herself by simply saying, “Oogledeboo.”
She does and the penny disappears without her grandfather’s assistance.
Thus begins an escalating series of disappearances: a caterpillar, half a glass of milk, breakfast oatmeal, an annoying neighbor boy.... Then, when her mother takes Nancy downtown for a parade, she makes first a crowd of people and then a frightening dragon float go away. The mother concludes that she’s had a psychotic break and, at her demand, her husband sends for a psychiatrist they know. In the ensuing conversation, the truth comes out. Nancy demonstrates her new talent. The grandfather is sent for. And the psychiatrist explains everything in terms of Bishop Berkeley’s objective materialism:
“Esse,” said Joe Holt, gulping, “is percipi. If a thing isn’t perceived by some mind somewhere, it isn’t. But when we know something is, we have to let it go at that. Nancy doesn’t. You fixed it so she doesn’t. When she says ‘oogledeboo’ at something, she’s able to think of it as ceasing to exist. So it does cease to exist. Nobody else in the world, thank God, can do that! But Nancy can!”
(Note the reassuring “Nobody else ... can do that!”—an assertion which the psychiatrist is in no position to make.)
The grandfather resolves all by telling Nancy that by saying “oogledeboo” backwards, she can restore everything that she made disappear. When she is cajoled into saying “Oobedelgoo!” and all the things and people that had been unmade reappear, the grandfather adds that, having said that word, the original magic will no longer work for her. She believes him so of course that is true and the story can come to an end:
There had been no rolling of thunder or flashing of lightning, or earthquakes when the most bloodcurdling instant in history began. But, now that everything was all over, there was a blinding flash of lightning and a reverberating roar of thunder, and the rain began to pour down again.
Normally, Jenkins credited his science fiction to his pen name, Murray Leinster. But “The Little Terror” appeared in the August 22, 1953 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, a prestigious market, and thus under his own name.
Underlying the story is a strikingly bleak ontological terror. The entire universe exists only provisionally and its contents, even the sentient ones, can be made to go away at a thought. Also, since the main point of Berkeley’s immaterialism was to prove the existence of God—things exist only insofar as they observed; yet they remain in existence even when no one’s around to see them; therefore someone or something must be observing them; and that entity can only be the Deity—innocent little Nancy has just proved the universe to be literally Godless.
Small wonder that Jenkins, who has clearly done his homework, plays the story for laughs! Small wonder that he establishes by diktat that in all the world only Nancy has the unholy power to unmake. Small wonder that he opens and closes with exaggeratedly purple prose in order to reassure the reader that the ideas upon which the story is based are not to be taken seriously.
Nine years later, in the March 1962 issue of If, R.A. Lafferty published a story with a strikingly similar premise. It is almost certain he would have read the Saturday Evening Post story (science fiction was a smaller genre then and it was still possible for a diligent reader to have read close to everything of any note) and equally sure that his own title, “Seven-Day Terror,” is a nod toward “The Little Terror,” acknowledging his debt to it.
Lafferty’s story, however, is strikingly different from the original. Here’s how it begins:
“Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother.
“A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?”
“I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t know if I can make them come back. We’d better try it on something else. Dishes cost money.”
As always, Myra Willoughby had to admire the wisdom of her nine-year-old son. She would not have had such foresight herself. He always did. “You can try it on Blanche Manners’ cat outside there. Nobody will care if it disappears except Blanche Manners.”
Where Jenkins’s comic mode is tongue-in-cheek and mock serious, Lafferty’s is deadpan and absurd. After sending her son outside to play with his new toy, Mrs. Willoughby muses, “I wonder if I have a precocious child. Why, there’s lots of grown people who wouldn’t know how to make a disappearer that would work. I wonder if Blanche Manners will miss her cat very much?”
There ensue a number of comic events, including the vanishing of a water hydrant, causing a flood that is a delight to the neighborhood children and a calamity to the local authorities. Amidst which Clarence’s 8-year-old sister Clarissa proceeds to walk into and away with the story, dropping dramatic hints, acting simultaneously childish and wise beyond her years. After a week’s chaos, she tells the mayor that she knows how to get everything back. But she will need a gold watch, a hammer, certain chemicals, a yard of black velvet, and a pound of rock candy. Having no choice, the mayor accedes to her demands.
When the materials are assembled, it is revealed that Clarence learned how to make his disappearer by reading his sister’s diary. Then comes the story’s climax:
She poised the hammer over the mayor’s gold watch, now on the floor.
“I have to wait a few seconds. This can’t be hurried. It’ll only be a little while.”
The second hand swept around to the point that was preordained for it before the world began. Clarissa suddenly brought down the hammer with all her force on the beautiful gold watch.
“That’s all,” she said. “Your troubles are over. See, there is Blanche Manners’ cat on the sidewalk just where she was seven days ago.”
Once the missing items begin to reappear, Clarissa reveals that the beer can device was only a seven-day disappearer and the story draws to a close:
“... why did you want the chemicals?”
“For my chemistry set.”
“And the black velvet?”
“For doll dresses.”
“And the pound of rock candy?”
“How did you ever get to be mayor of this town if you have to ask questions like that? What do you think I wanted the rock candy for?”
“One last question,” said the mayor. “Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?”
“Oh,” said Clarissa, “that was for dramatic effect.”
Reading the two stories, one after the other, it is obvious that the second was inspired by the first. This is fair play in science fiction or, for that matter, in any other corner of literature, particularly when the manner of telling is so different.
Jenkins’s story is far from leisurely, but Lafferty’s reads much faster. There are two reasons for this. First, it is largely told in dialogue with minimal exposition. Second, it is less than half the length of the story that inspired it. But where Jenkins emphasizes the fictional nature of his story with carefully positioned overwriting, Lafferty does the same thing with straight-faced humor. Three eminent scientists from Lafferty’s stock repertory company assemble, and one says, “Who would have thought that 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.” Which is as close as the story gets to explicating the scientific/philosophical rationale behind the disappearances. Lafferty is no more anxious than Jenkins to open that can of worms.
The problem with being labeled a genius, even a primitive one, is that it closes off areas of exploration. Nobody ever looks for Lafferty’s influences because it’s commonly believed that he had none. Yet he was involved in the science fiction community, exchanged letters and ideas and observations with other science fiction writers, and, as has been posited here, was perfectly comfortable with the genre tradition of taking an admired story and writing his own version of or response to it.
Asked for his influence on Tolkien, C.S. Lewis famously replied, “You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” This was mythmaking of the first water. But it was not true of Tolkien, nor was it of Lafferty. For all his dazzle, Lafferty wrote as other men and women do, in full awareness of what was being written by his peers and perfectly happy to borrow a few tricks from them.
Lafferty’s influences are out there to be found, hiding in plain sight. Those of us who write about the man’s work ought to be looking for them.
Michael Swanwick lives in Philadelphia.
Thank you, Michael. Well put. Now where did I misplace my beer can and cardboard?
Posted by: Rob Gerrand | 06/17/2019 at 09:38 PM