Here’s a precursor post without a proper place, so I’ll tuck it in here.
Below are four versions of the introductory paragraph of Dotty. Here’s the text as it would eventually be published:
On a day when Pius X was Pope in Rome and Roosevelt II was president in Washington, when Murray I was governor in Oklahoma City and Slywood O’Toole was Sheriff in Jack Oak County, in the Twenty-Sixth year of the State and the One Hundred and Fifty-Eighth of the Republic, on the Fourth Sunday of Autumn (which, as you have already guessed, was October 15, 1933), a girl was born to Sheriff Slywood O’Toole and his wife, Mary Theresa. This child was to be known in History as Dotty O’Toole and later as Dotty Peisson.
This first is from a small spiral notebook, a common initial site of composition where Lafferty would right his initial draft longhand after establishing character names and an extremely rough chapter outline. Yes, his handwriting is pretty much always like this.
The second is from an early typescript, likely from the copy he would have sent out in 1961 to his then-agent. The biblical cadence is polished, and the lines have been broken into metrical units. This is the only page of this manuscript that has survived.
The third is from the surviving full typescript, the one that Lafferty sent out to Virginia Kidd and then got back from her when she determined she could not sell it. This would be the original for the carbon that then went on to United Mythologies Press in 1989. The metrical units have shifted again and become more typographically complex, even overtly prose-poetic. It’s an affectation, but not of the sort we’re used to from his work.
And then here is the first paragraph as published by UM Press. The typographical complexity proved too much: the formatting is wiped out entirely, de-emphasizing the textual rhythms, turning it into a more standard novel. (Odd since the novel’s dot-matrix art cover is anything but standard.) That’s not the only violence to the cadence, though: note how the parenthetical has expanded, swallowing the date and necessitating extra commas be placed in a passage where before they were very economical.
This isn’t at all to knock Knight, a kind and generous man who took on and actually completed a task that so defeated so many, or the booklets of UM Press, which brought us so many Lafferty works that would otherwise have sat with the rest of his unpublished archives. It’s more to say that, while this is a particularly noteworthy example, there’s definitely more of this kind of stuff in the archives, and I’m hoping eventually we’ll get the chance to take everything back to the manuscripts and have Lafferty editions that reproduce all his idiosyncrasies, and not just the ones we’ve already come to expect.
