02 Misc Laff: The Dual Novel

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s line that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even says that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he gives the day of the week, which creates several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, so he would have remembered what he was doing that day. In the plausible postwar range, that date fell on a Friday in three years: 1947, 1952, and 1958.

The year being 1952 fits with what Archipelago establishes about Finnegan's boozing. The day-of-week detail survives cross-checking, and when set beside the sister novel’s major fixed dates—February 1943, May 1946, and summer 1950—it triangulates the sailing of the Brunhilde, and therefore Finnegan’s epic blackout, to Friday, November 7, 1952.

November 7, of course, recurs throughout Lafferty’s work. He dated his retirement as a writer from his seventieth birthday in 1984. Flatland is also tied to the date: if the Tuesday on which it arrives falls on November 8, 1960, as Barnaby Sheen notes in In a Green Tree. Lafferty’s birthday fell on a Monday that year.

What set me thinking about this was an odd note in Lafferty’s papers. He writes: “The double novel, printed in alternate lines of black and orange, each set to be read separately but with sub-[?] in-feed from the other. In a way, Archipelago and The Devil Is Dead could be printed this way.” What would such a double novel look like? In the case of November 7, perhaps something like this: