02 Misc Laff: The Dual Novel

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead is its flat statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he supplies the day of the week, an only seemingly inadvertent calendrical lock. He would have remembered his doings on the day, for November 7 is R. A. Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in three plausible postwar years: 1947, 1952, and 1958. Of these, 1952 looks like the only year in which November 7 is a Friday and that also fits what Archipelago establishes. The day-of-week detail is enough to survive cross-referencing, and when you set it against the sister novel’s big fixed dates (February 1943, May 1946, summer 1950), it triangulates the sailing of the Brunhilde, and thus the end of Finnegan’s blackout, to Friday, November 7, 1952. Of course, November 7 shows up across Lafferty’s work, and he dated his retirement as a writer from his sevenieth birthday in 1984. Flatland is tied to it if the Tuesday it arrives is on November 8 of 1960 (Barbary Sheen notes this in Green Tree). Lafferty’s birthday fell on a Monday that year.

What got me thinking about this is 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 the latter look like? In the November 7th case, perhaps: