Reading R.A. Lafferty

I’ve been wanting for some time now to write about my experiences with the works of R.A. Lafferty. Not in a particularly literary sense, mind you: I have nothing especially novel to say about their content. Rather, I want to make a personal attempt to work through an apparent contradiction: how could I have gotten so much out of Lafferty’s works despite them being so deeply influenced by his wrongheaded notions? And to what extent do I need to question or be suspicious of how they have influenced me, even when they appear positive on the surface?

(Side note: I am indebted to Daniel Otto Jack Petersen for his help in refining these ideas and proofreading this article, and in particular for his time in having two long discussions with me. My thanks also for the essays of Jon Nelson and Andrew Ferguson, which have helped me considerably in understanding Lafferty’s writing.)

Who was R.A. Lafferty?

I am aware that, outside certain circles interested in science fiction of the previous century, ‘R.A. Lafferty’ is not a name that sparks much recognition. Perhaps a brief biography is advisable.

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was born in 1914, in a small town in Iowa, but lived most of his life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His family was Irish; he grew up a devout Catholic, and would remain one all his life. He read and learned voraciously. (He particularly loved language-learning, eventually attaining a reading knowledge of some 20 languages.) He served in the Pacific during World War II, in New Guinea and the Philippines and other places. After the war he turned his attention to writing, and after essaying several genres found a warm reception in science fiction. At SF conferences he was known to be very quiet and reserved (and something of an alcoholic). He was nominated for numerous awards but won only one (the 1973 Hugo for Best Short Story; and that was a tie).

None of this knowledge, however, can begin to prepare the reader for the experience of reading a Lafferty story. His astonishing creativity and originality were overriding enough that his stories can hardly be categorised under ‘science fiction’, or indeed under any known genre at all. Theodore Sturgeon once famously said of his work:

some day the taxonomists, those tireless obsessives who put labels on everything, will have to categorize literature as Westerns, fantasies, romances, lafferties, science fiction, mysteries…

People regularly describe his stories as ‘tall tales’; there is some truth to this, but it’s far too narrow a category. They move from hilarity to tragedy to farce to grotesque horror to mordant wit, sometimes within the space of a single sentence. He gives us visions of transcendence and visions of self-destruction. Above all he focusses relentlessly (obsessively, even) on what makes us special as humans: our capacity for action and judgement, and our perception of and interaction with the world which surrounds us. Here, see if you’ve ever read anything quite like this before:

Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn’t such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn’t done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink. Velikof was always strong on the folk memory bit.

Arpad Arkabaranan screamed, rose backward, toppled his chair, and stood aghast while pointing a shaking finger at his splashing clay cup. Arpad was disturbed.

Willy McGilly drank deeply from his own stirring vessel.

“Why, it’s Green Snake Snorter!” he cried in amazement and delight. “Oh drink of drinks, thou’re a pleasure beyond expectation! They used to serve it to us back home, but I never even hoped to find it here. What great thing have we done to deserve this?”

He drank again of the wonderful splashing liquor while the spray of it filled the air. And Velikof also drank with noisy pleasure. The girl righted Arpad’s chair, put Arpad into it again with strong hands, and addressed him powerfully to his cresting breaker. But Arpad was scared of his lively drink. “It’s alive, it’s alive,” was all that he could jabber. Arpad Arkabaranan specialized in primitives, and primitives by definition are prime stuff. But there wasn’t, now in his moment of weakness, enough prime stuff in Arpad himself to face so pleasant and primitive a drink as this.

The liquid was sparkling with bright action, was adequately alcoholic, something like choc beer, and there was a green snake in each cup. (Velikof in his notebook states that they were green worms of the species vermis ebrius viridis, but that is only a quibble. They were snakelike worms and of the size of small snakes, and we will call them snakes.)

“Do get with it, Arpad,” Willy McGilly cried. “The trick is to drink it up before the snake drinks it. I tell you though that the snakes can discern when a man is afraid of them. They’ll fang the face off a man who’s afraid of them.”

“Ah, I don’t believe that I want the drink,” Arpad declared with sickish grace. “I’m not much of a drinking man.”

So Arpad’s green snake drank up his Green Snake Snorter, noisily and greedily. Then it expired—it breathed out its life and evaporated. That green snake was gone.

—Boomer Flats

Or this:

I reviewed another set of person-précis, those which I had taken as a Public Health Service at five dollars a throw. […] These gullibles were people, I quickly saw, who lived and thought entirely in catch words and narrow patterns; and beyond the catch words they had no thoughts of their own at all. I was intrigued by something else, though: the cheerfulness of these folks. What had they to be so cheerful about, slow-witted and all of a pattern? I learned quickly that it was only on the surface level that they had no thoughts of their own. Even that was wrong. They had, in fact, very real thoughts of their own on all levels; but they had no expression of their own. And they weren’t of a pattern. Skin them and you could see how different each one was.

Well, it may be that I did not really have five hundred different worlds here, but I did have five hundred different unexplored continents. I explored them. Exploration has always had deep fascination for men and for machines. Taking the briny approach, I explored their coastlines (I speak figuratively, of course, but not entirely); I followed all their wooded bays and capes, I found out their harbors (it was hard for such a deep-draft vessel as myself to enter some of them); I scanned their continental shelves, and studied the fish and shellies of their shores and beaches. Taking samples of the sweet water from their streams, of the mixed water of their estuaries, of the skunk water of their swamps, of the nitric fall of their rains, I had a good blood typing of each of them. There are (this is one of the rare things which I may have to explain to thinking machines but not to persons) male and female persons just as there are male and female continents and planets and galaxies. These people were getting more and more various, and it pleased me. I went inland to their savannas and rain forests and prairies. I learned their bald-headed mountains and their crag-mountains, their arables and their pastures. I learned the animals in them. This was the hard part to believe. Five hundred continents full (I suppose there are five billion continents full in the world) of animals that are nowhere duplicated, that are nowhere ordinary, that are nowhere ugly—except by outrageous intention. The things that are inside them! How tame a High Asia! How bland a Deep Africa!—in the face of an animal-complex that roars and gibbers inside the silliest goof that ever handed over five fish to a machine that he never saw before. What an ordinary creature is the hippopotamus, what a tame thing is the latest thesis, before the clodhoppers that raven and laugh in the least of these people! Did you know that this simpleton, for instance, who voted for Growler and who belongs to the Regal Order of the Reindeer had all that stuff inside him? I found that there are more mysterious creatures inside of every person than there are persons inside the world.

Write it down for a universal rule: There Are No Common Persons Anywhere.

—Arrive at Easterwine

I could go on and on, of course, but what would be the point? Far better to read him yourself. To start off with there are a few works of his on Project Gutenberg. Perhaps a better place to start, if you can find it, is his collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, in my opinion one of the most impressive short story collections published by any single author. It is well worth reading. (I believe a PDF is accessible somewhere online.)

On a personal note, my life was severely affected by mental health issues in 2024–25. During this time, Lafferty was one of the very few writers whose work, in all its bizarre originality, felt genuinely relevant to the bizarre position in which I then found myself; and who had insightful and meaningful things to say about how I could feel the world around me in a better way. I certainly cannot say how much I succeeded in changing in that regard, but nonetheless I consider him one of the three writers who most helped to guide and sustain me through that dark time (the other two being Ursula Le Guin and G.K. Chesterton).

This, therefore, was what had informed my perception of Lafferty leading up to the end of 2025.

Lafferty and antisemitism

Around the second half of 2025, Jon Nelson published a webpage titled Antisemitism. In it, and elsewhere on his website, he described in some detail the evidence that Lafferty had a long history of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, as well as sundry other views which could be loosely described (with considerable understatement) as ‘problematic’.

That evidence is damning. The centrepiece is a two-page typewritten letter signed by Lafferty in which, in the midst of an unrelated discussion, he embarks on a Holocaust-denialist screed (and I believe ‘screed’ is an entirely appropriate word here). I have no particular wish to repeat what Lafferty says here; you may find the full thing on the page linked above. Suffice it to say that he describes his experience discovering the infamous ‘Journal for Historical Review’ and enthusiastic agreement with its theories, adding for good measure that he ‘never did accept’ the reality of the Holocaust in the first place. The mountains of evidence of all kinds for its reality apparently did not even get a look in.

With some other writers one might be able to separate the author from their work. But with Lafferty this would be self-contradictory. In their sheer originality, Lafferty clearly made his personality and views central to his writing.

In any case, at least some of his writing is clearly antisemitic in its own right. For instance, Nelson has meticulously documented how in The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street, Lafferty not only inserted antisemitic tropes but actively intensified them as he rewrote the story. (Side note: in the previous link I do not endorse the preface on Lafferty scholars more broadly.) I am embarrassed to admit that — despite being Jewish myself — when I first read this story I failed to notice these tropes (in fact I even admired the story for its original use of language); he hid them subtly enough that I did not notice, despite their unambiguity once pointed out. This might be considered a fault in my own reading skills, but I have heard at least one long-time Lafferty reader admit that he failed to notice them too. They are subtle.

Similarly subtle is the Holocaust denial in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny — a book devoted (in allegorical form) to the horrors of 20th century history, from which the Holocaust is conspicuously absent. In 2016 Glyn Morgan wrote a PhD dissertation with a detailed discussion of this book, with the Holocaust as a central theme; he interpreted the book’s structure as Lafferty’s way of ‘avoid[ing] all of the major global traumas of the twentieth century, yet still experienc[ing] them’. He did not consider that it might actually be Lafferty’s way of denying the Holocaust, because to any right-minded person the notion is absurd. As far as I’m aware all other Lafferty scholars thought more or less the same way. Yet, somehow, it is indeed the case, and it completely changes the interpretation of the story, and our understanding of Lafferty’s intentions in writing it.

Of course, his wrongheaded opinions do not stop with antisemitism and Holocaust denial, though those are by far the worst of them. Thus, for instance, Paul Saka argues convincingly that Been a Long Long Time — one of Lafferty’s most popular stories — is in fact a coded anti-evolution tract. As before, this is amply confirmed by his private correspondence. (When one adherent of theistic evolution had the temerity to suggest that Lafferty supported it, his response was vituperative: ‘there is a cloven hoof in the boots you lick’.) Similar comments apply to his racialised view of various ethnic groups, though that at least was comparatively innocuous and he barely bothered hiding it.

Naturally, the revelation of all of the above — which I learnt at around more or less the same time as everyone else did — disturbed me considerably. That one of my favourite authors, whom I had spent considerable time reading and enjoying, was a Holocaust denier and antisemite, was bad enough; but that he had deliberately inserted those views throughout his writing, so subtly that we had hardly realised what we were reading, was considerably worse. It felt to me like some essential presumption of good faith between author and reader had been broken — that he had (at least passively) encouraged the deliberate misreading of his works, in order to get us to take in views which we would never knowingly have accepted. (Getting a science-fiction magazine to accept an anti-evolution story takes considerable chutzpah.)

So I was left wondering: what of all those positive things I had already taken away from Lafferty, and the positive changes they had effected in my life? Were they, too, irrevocably contaminated by these pervasive and massive flaws in his worldview? If so, how could I have misunderstood them so badly? If not, then why not, and how could I tell what was affected from what was not?

How do you solve the problem of Lafferty?

(with apologies to The Sound of Music)

At this point I want to note a curiosity which I find significant. Most Holocaust deniers, by and large, are rather equivocal towards the Nazis, if not actively positively disposed towards them. But Lafferty was an exception to this tendency: he was very deeply anti-Nazi. In his writing this comes out very clearly in stories like Groaning Hinges of the World. In his own life we know that he served in WWII, fighting against the Axis, and judging from the frequency with which he refers back to these experiences in his novels, he found the experience significant and meaningful. Admittedly he fought against Imperial Japan, not Nazi Germany, but it seems clear that he considered both to be symptoms of the same evil: totalitarian régimes which sought to crush human individuality under the weight of their own aims, by any means necessary, and to destroy anyone who resists the pressure to assimilate.

This suggests to me that, in some important sense, Lafferty did have a functioning moral compass. Unlike most Holocaust deniers and antisemites, he did recognise the deeply evil nature of fascism, despite badly messing up the specifics. (As Jon Nelson put it in the previous link: ‘His art is wiser than he is’.)

Relatedly: I am not aware of any reports of him mistreating anyone else based on their race or religion. By all accounts he was a quiet-spoken and respectful man. He seemed to have been wise enough to keep his opinions separate from his treatment of people.

This latter point ties in with a phenomenon which, in my head, I’ve been informally labelling ‘genteel antisemitism’, and which Nelson has called ‘virtuous antisemitism’. From a Catholic perspective (as exemplified by Lafferty himself, as well as other writers such as G.K. Chesterton), this treats us Jews as sinners and foreigners, destined to eternal divine punishment for deicide; but then again asks, aren’t we all sinners and humans? The virtuous antisemite might have a general dislike of us Jews, and go on about our supposed faults, conspiracies and foreignness, but would never do anything so crass as to be rude to a Jew; that would be bad manners. Indeed they could quite comfortably make exceptions for individual Jews who they decided were good enough for them. (Sometimes this gets summarised in phrases like, ‘how could I be an antisemite? Some of my best friends are Jewish!’)

Given their similarities in this regard, I think Chesterton makes an interesting comparison to Lafferty. (Indeed Lafferty regarded Chesterton as one of his intellectual heroes.) Chesterton’s books also have more than their fair share of antisemitism: a man who ‘hated Jews’ in the Father Brown stories, held up as ‘one of a great line of some half a dozen men who might have saved England’; ‘the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry’ in The Man Who Knew Too Much; his suggestion in The New Jerusalem that all Jews in public life be forced to wear distinctive Middle Eastern clothing; and many more besides.

Despite this overt and unconcealed antisemitism, I find Chesterton less troubling to read than Lafferty — arguably because the antisemitism is unconcealed. Unlike in Lafferty, I get no sense that Chesterton was hiding his views from me. As a reader I feel confident in knowing what point he is trying to make in any particular passage, and thereby feel confident in my ability to agree with it or dispute it. And, as someone who feels strongly that what you do is more important than what you think, I believe that Chesterton’s lessons on how to live more than counterbalance his antisemitism: again, as with Lafferty, ‘his art is wiser than he is’. (Chesterton, incidentally, was also strongly anti-Nazi, and that at a time when this was not yet mainstream in Britain.)

Comparing Chesterton and Lafferty, it is significant that they come from the same intellectual tradition within the Catholic Church. Their antisemitism correspondingly manifests in the same way: that of the ‘virtuous antisemite’, who detests Jews but whose Catholic moral code still functions. It would be one thing if that antisemitism were an inseparable part of their Catholic morality, and at other times in history or for other people that may well have been the case; but I see in Chesterton clear signs that the two are separable, and I see the same signs in Lafferty, even if they are harder to interpret in his writing. Therefore I do not believe that the positive moral lessons I took from Lafferty are significantly contaminated by his antisemitism, despite my lack of recognition of his antisemitism at the time.

(I think the argumentation above also applies to things such as his anti-evolution views — after all, even today creationism remains mainstream in the Catholic Church. I may feel a sense of betrayal over it, but I don’t think it affects his overall moral sense.)

Lafferty’s Holocaust denial is much harder to reckon with. Chesterton, of course, is no guide here (he died before WWII started). However, I believe that Lafferty’s other writings can give us the insight we need.

In particular, a recurring conviction in Lafferty’s writing is that our perception and experience of the world is to a large extent a personal and social construct. In his essay The Day After the World Ended, he stated his belief that our experiential worlds had once been structured by a consensus reality he called Western Civilisation, but that this had ended at some point between 1912 and 1962; and that we are now living in the ‘Flatland’ following the collapse, which by its nature prevents us readers from perceiving our loss; and that it is therefore incumbent on all of us to perceive the remnants of the underlying reality, and fom that actively create a new structured world in which to live (whether that be, in his words, ‘transcendence’ or ‘gosh-awful secularism’ — though obviously we see which one he’d prefer).

Of course it is very dangerous to presume that one has some insight into ‘reality’ which others don’t. I believe this is the underlying motivation behind Lafferty’s preoccupation with conspiracy theories: he seemed to like the idea that there are things manipulating us, kept hidden from us by our preconceptions. This is especially apparent in the following remarkable statement of his, as told to Robert Sirignano and highighted by Jon Nelson:

Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons. […] Well, this diabolical species-person cannot read human minds and cannot invade the human individual, except in a few doubtful cases. But he can invade the human species, which he does by invading the group unconscious. There is the devil in the cellar of the mind. He-they-it does have some influence on persons, or all persons.

Sirignano further comments:

What does this mean? Lafferty tells me that there is a part of his mind that says there is a conflict with the Devil-Satan (or devils) in all the stories he writes, be it very directly implied, as it is in The Argo Cycle, or somewhat off the scene, lurking behind in the shadows, as in “Eurema’s Dam.” It is a significant part of the totality of Lafferty.

I strongly suspect that this same impulse is what led directly to Lafferty’s Holocaust denial. I can easily imagine him, having been confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, immediately being suspicious that there might be ‘something more’ behind it than Nazis hating Jews; and thus being receptive to the arguments of Holocaust deniers when he first encountered them. Holocaust denial may not be a conspiracy theory in the usual sense, but it certainly requires the same thought processes: the evidence that the Holocaust did happen is so voluminous and well-documented that, if it were false (which of course it is not), it would have to be due to someone, or something, with an interest in manufacturing evidence on a vast scale and manipulating the whole population of the world into believing it. In other words, something either conspiratorial or supernatural (or both; in Lafferty’s work the two are rarely entirely separate).

So it is fortunate for my peace of mind that I never cared much for Lafferty’s conspiracies in the first place. In fact I still remember the first time I read Past Master, and how I found myself rather disappointed that this supposedly great work of Lafferty’s ended up relying so much on a devilish conspiracy as the solution to its problems, rather than trying to make some more universal point. (Incidentally, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Delany’s Trouble on Triton were both directly inspired by Past Master, but resolve this problem in a considerably more satisfactory way.) Furthermore, none of my favourite works of his involve conspiracies in any significant way. Therefore, if I am correct in connecting Lafferty’s Holocaust denial to his general conspiratorialism, I don’t think I need to worry about his Holocaust denial contaminating or influencing me through reading his books: I can already recognise when he’s going wrong and reject it.

(Returning to Chesterton for a moment, it’s worth pointing out that conspiracy theories do not form a major part of his writing. Sure, there is the odd secret society, especially in his detective fiction, but those are rather harmless in the grand scheme of things: they do not have the all-encompassing manipulative influence that Lafferty’s conspiracies do.)

More speculatively, let me address Lafferty’s formal and ontological inventiveness. This was, from the first, a key part of his appeal to me. I think this creativity is, in itself, neutral: it makes his stories vivid, unusual and memorable, and that’s a thing which can be put to ends both good or bad (and indeed Lafferty spans the full spectrum). Still, I think it is related to his general contrarian stubbornness — someone less convinced of their own rightness would, perhaps, not feel as comfortable going their own way. I like how Terry Pratchett puts it (in his book Carpe Jugulum):

[…] the philospher might have marveled that such a four-square people could give the world so many successful magical practitioners, being quite unaware that only those with their feet on rock can build castles in the air.

Thus, for instance, only someone very sure in the fundamental principles of his faith are could dare to suggest something as theologically radical as this from Past Master:

The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix?

It may well be, then, that having an author with such wrongheaded opinions was simply the price we had to pay for having an author with such creativity. After all, Lafferty was far from the first author to say such things, nor will he be the last. (Just look at J.K. Rowling!) Nonetheless, most of those authors either keep their opinions private, or include them clearly in their writing: Lafferty tried to have it both ways, and I find that hard to stomach.

Therefore, my conclusions on Lafferty and the way I have responded to his works are as follows:

• I believe my original reaction to his best works — as stories which, as I said, ‘had insightful and meaningful things to say about how I could feel the world around me in a better way’ — remains a justified one. Given the reasoning above, I no longer need to worry that he was using those things as a pretext to get me to absorb views I loathe; the meaningful things he had to say really were present.
• At the same time, I continue to feel a sense of betrayal at how he wrote. I can no longer read any of his work with the same sense of unmixed enjoyment that I once had. When reading Lafferty, I am now continually alert for ulterior motives and embedded subtexts — antisemitism, racialism, creationism, antiscience and conspiratorialism — to be sure that I am truly understanding the intent behind what I am reading. This is a great shame; I wish he had not done it. Either he should have skipped it entirely, or, failing that, put it out in the open and knowingly suffered the consequences (as in Past Master he showed Thomas More doing). I do believe he knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote like this, and I do not believe it was a moral act.
• I can no longer gain any enjoyment from his conspiracy stories at all — though to be sure, I never really loved them in the first place. I do think they have a place as a guide to Lafferty’s own opinions, in which context I believe they have been understudied. But I can get no enjoyment from an exhibition of beliefs which lead straight to Holocaust denialism and conspiratorialism.

Above all, let this be a salutary reminder to me that even good people who teach good views have their flaws, and may espouse views which I find abhorrent; and conversely that even people with views to which I am deeply opposed are not intrinsically evil, and may yet have something good to teach me.

Finally, let me leave the last word to Roger Ebert, from his review of the infamous film The Birth of a Nation:

“The Birth of a Nation” is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.