02 Misc Laff: The Dual Novel

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7 fell on a Friday in three years: 1947, 1952, and 1958.

The decisive lock appears near the end of the voyage, when the Brunhilde reaches Naxos on “March 14th, Passion Sunday.” March 14, 1948, was both a Sunday and Passion Sunday. March 14 fell on a Saturday in both 1953 and 1959. Only the 1947 departure therefore satisfies both statements. The conclusion is reinforced by the intervening dates: the ship reaches San Cristobal on December 9 or 10, spends Christmas and New Year’s at Port of Spain, leaves Natal on January 18, reaches Freetown on January 26, and begins its northward passage along the African coast on February 1.

The 1947 date also fits the chronology established in Archipelago. Set beside that novel’s major fixed dates, February 1943, May 1946, and the summer of 1950, it places the voyage between the latter two. The two novels thus triangulate the sailing of the Brunhilde, and with it the blackout during which Finnegan is carried aboard, to Friday, November 7, 1947.

November 7, of course, recurs throughout Lafferty’s work. He dated his retirement from writing to his seventieth birthday in 1984. Flatland is tied to the adjacent date. As Barnaby Sheen notes in In a Green Tree, the Tuesday on which Flatland arrives can be identified as November 8, 1960. Lafferty’s birthday had fallen on the preceding day, Monday, November 7.

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: