“Selenium Ghosts,” “Maleficent Morning,” and Lafferty's Originality

When Does Originality Cease to Be a Literary Virtue?

Few writers test this boundary as thoroughly as R.A. Lafferty. His sentences are unmistakably his own, his plots dizzying. He conceals key information, and he asks other writers to invent new worlds in response to the one lost in the first half of the twentieth century. Innovation exerts pressure on every level of his art, making his body of work a radical experiment.

The most important writing tends to be either innovative or thematically significant, often both at once. In his best work, Lafferty achieves this. But as his career develops, do the losses pile up? Does his relentless originality begin to eclipse artistic significance?

"Firstest with the Mostest"

The narrator in "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" (1978) has something to say on this topic. While we can’t assume a character speaks for the author, the passage raises an interesting question: how much did Lafferty himself share this view? Lafferty writes:

“The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.”

Lafferty’s commitment to originality runs deep, and some of his most insightful readers have questioned whether this has been positive for his reputation or his art.

Michael Swanwick once argued that focusing too much on Lafferty’s originality can cause us to overlook his influences. It’s a sharp observation.

Gene Wolfe raised a different concern: whether Lafferty sometimes prized originality at the expense of his art. In an unpublished letter, he wrote:

Ray (I think) values originality too highly. Suppose that I invent a new kind of poetry, in which the first word of each line rhymes instead of the last . . . . I doubt anyone has done that before, but it isn’t good. It doesn’t make us see anything more clearly.

Wolfe’s point is sound. Originality, in itself, is not a virtue unless it creates artistic clarity, even when this is clarifying what it means to be disoriented or stuck in the dark.

I do think this gets Lafferty backward. The problem is often the reverse—it is that his originality itself is not seen clearly enough. Because he is so entertaining and deceptively light in the short form, the depth of his work is easy to underestimate. In failing to see the shape of that difficult originality, we risk missing what the work is contending with, the aspects of reality it is helping us see.

If Lafferty is obscure, it is not because he is an obscurantist.

As he himself said:

“Down with Obfuscation! Up with Clarity.”

When Originality Turns Against Itself

Lafferty pursued originality because he was an original but also because he had important things to say and knew that radical new forms were necessary to express them, along with all the mysterious factors that make an artist. The innovation was counterbalanced by a formalist tendency, which I think of as being his way of constructing stories as writerly problems to be solved, where the act of telling resolves both their narratives and the formal problems they create. Often, the solution forestalls complete closure.

This brings me to his early short story "Maleficent Morning" (1960/1990), a case study in the dangers of originality. As others have pointed out, it belongs to the three-wish story family, specifically the Monkey’s Paw subcategory. Here, just as he was beginning to break out as a storyteller, Lafferty looks at what happens when the drive to be unique self-destructs.

The protagonist, Isidore (Izzie) Isom, tries to make each day unique but finds himself trapped in fatal, recurring scenarios. Each morning, he wakes up, bounces on his wife, Irene, and adds new wrinkles to the day. On this particular morning, he flirts with an elevator girl named Cornelia, rushes through his commute, and stumbles into situations, each leading to disaster. When catastrophe strikes, he wishes it “unhappened,” resetting the morning—but each version leaves a trace.

Over the course of the story, he swerves to avoid hitting a dog but strikes a woman and gets arrested. He forces a kiss on Cornelia, who threatens to frame him for assault, and in panic, he strangles her. He follows a strange couple into a taxi and gets himself shot. After his final wish, he is returned to bed. Irene wakes and finds him dead beside her in the blood-soaked sheets.

The Mechanics of the Story

A key moment of iconographic insetting occurs when Cornelia tells Izzie:

“I am going to put you in a very costly frame. Don't worry about how I will do it; we have it all set up. The elevator starter is in on it, and you never will know who else. I hope you have a lot of money, because we like a lot of money. Now I will just begin to scream, and I will claim that you assaulted me. And you'll be so flustered that you'll be perfect for the set-up. Here we are at the bottom, and wasn't that a nice ride you had on my lap? But this is where you get off, in more ways than one.”

Izzie’s descent in the elevator is a katabasis—a descent into hell. In classic Lafferty fashion, Cornelia’s threat to scream doesn’t just drive the immediate scene. It expands, shaping the wider plot, which peaks in the final moment of the story when Irene discovers Izzie's bloody corpse beside her and lets out a scream of pure horror:

Irene woke to the shot and to the blood. ‘Isadore!’ And then she began. Did you ever hear a woman who knew how to do it really scream?

Fake scream, Cornelia. Real scream, Irene.

The other significant piece of insetting occurs early in the story. It, too, shapes the plot while also serving as an artistic commentary on originality. There, Lafferty writes of Izzie:

He got his car and was on his way. He was a good driver, he had to be, the way he drove. Only a good driver can drive like a maniac and live through it. There are not too many different ways you can drive a car. There are only two sides of the street you can drive on, and only so many patterns you can follow in weaving back and forth.

Considering Lafferty’s originality, it’s fascinating that, even at the onset of his career, he was so aware of the artistic issues Swanwick and Wolfe later identify. This awareness is reflected in the contrast between maniac driving and the two lanes. The question of his originality can be thought of as both the driver and the lanes: his inventive power in motion and being bound by constraints. Is Past Master (1968) more lanes than maniac, and The Elliptical Grave (1989) more maniac than lanes?

I read "Maleficent Morning" as one of his weaker stories—ironically, because it grapples so directly and crudely with these artistic concerns, as if he were trying too hard to stay within the lanes, still resisting the maniac just a little too much. He had a story to place. Of course, science fiction would free him from much of this, and he would come to think of it as Story with a capital “S.” In that sense, "Maleficent Morning" may have been a necessary and productive failure at that stage in his writing.

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