Identity and appearance. Magus, art dealer, writer and one of the Masters of the Argo. He identifies himself as the Boy King and King of Salem [MTM B1:15] [MTM B5:166] [MTM B13:402]. He has sorrel hair, fire-blue eyes, a solid but not oversized body, and a mouth that may begin grinning before his eyes. He habitually bangs his hands together and addresses people and even his own clay creatures with promises of immediate action [MTM B1:6]. He begins growing a beard at fifteen to look older [MTM B2:38]; in New Orleans he keeps it white and bright and wears an artist’s tie and beret for his trade [A:143]. His voice is Boston Irish with a touch of stage Yiddish. Archipelago calls him a patriarch without seed, a prophet without honor and a high-sounding brawler whose apparently universal knowledge is shared by others in the company [A:97]. The later narrator describes his uncertain age, wilfulness and spaciousness, and the unexplained restraints upon him [MTM B11:312]. His names include Michael, according to a relative whose account he disputes; Mikey; Melky; Mike Duffey on his seaman’s papers; and Melchisedech Himself [MTM B1:7] [MTM B1:9] [MTM B1:30] [MTM B12:369] [MTM B13:402]. Casey gives another modern account: Michael is his given name, and Melchisedech his confirmation name, received when confirmed at forty [A:42]. In the postscript Duffey signs himself the fifty-ninth King of Salem and says that he has always known of fifty-eight predecessors [PS:478]. He also passes through cycles of renewed youth; Stein accuses him of whitening his hair and beard to conceal their return to black [MTM B11:317-319].

Childhoods and kindred. Duffey remembers simultaneous twentieth-century childhoods in Iowa, St. Louis and Boston, behind which stands an older, continuing life as the Boy King [MTM B1:6-7] [MTM B1:15-18]. Seven Iowa places dispute his birthplace: Minden, Underwood, Beebee Town, Neola, Crescent, Avoca and Union Township. A relative says that his mother died when he was five, that he lived with kindred until twelve, and that he then entered boarding schools. These kindred include the Duffeys, Kellys, Byrnes, McGuires, Crooks, Bagbys, Haleys, Healeys, Haydens, Kanes, Whites, Hughes, Kennedys, Thompsons and Clancys. Duffey disputes both this genealogy and the name Michael, claiming to have been born without parents when already five years old [MTM B1:7-8]. One proposed explanation of the overlapping childhoods is his appropriation of his brother’s and sister’s experiences. The St. Louis childhood is associated particularly with the sister’s life, and an analyst concludes that Duffey was himself a girl during part of his childhood [MTM B1:15-16]. These explanations do not cancel the narrative’s account of the ancient Boy King, whose tents, flocks, gardens and powers are presented as more substantial than his modern surroundings [MTM B1:17-18].

Schooling and formation. Sent to boarding school at twelve, he spends four high-school years in more than one institution. The uncertain locations include Creighton, Loras, Rockhurst and a boys’ school near St. Louis University; the narrator says that at least two of these places are involved [MTM B1:20] [MTM B1:24]. Charley Murray, John Rattigan and Sebastian Hilton are his principal companions. A skilled carpenter, machinist and maker of molds and patterns, he makes Murray’s conjuring props, using his giants when ordinary tools cannot suffice [MTM B1:21-23]. He trades with Rattigan and appropriates his business judgment, Murray’s good nature and honesty, and Sebastian’s intelligence and taste [MTM B1:25-26]. An older priest accepts his account of being a magus and warns him against pride. Lily Koch’s art sales, and his reading of her mind and Sebastian’s, establish his lifelong vocation as an art expert [MTM B1:28-29].

Powers and their limits. His gifts include producing gold, entering other minds, moving within time, commanding invisible giants and forming persons through talismans; the last is initially called his greatest gift [MTM B1:5]. He appropriates the perceptions and memories of other children, sometimes knowing households he has never visited [MTM B1:16-17]. At Lake Manawa he believes that good divers return from the water as evil replacements; his mental effort to keep one underwater ends in a drowning, described as his first killing [MTM B1:8-9]. As Boy King he can remain invisible beneath an urchin disguise, summon giants, heal and animate birds [MTM B1:18]. His gold appears as sparks or coins as well as bars and engraved objects [MTM B1:5] [MTM B2:38-39]. His first major loss is the facility for making money, which never fully returns. This coincides with damage to the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle, a bridge whose failing supports become an image of his own losses; he nevertheless retains substantial wealth [MTM B4:109-110]. The gifts can diminish, be forgotten or fail to achieve what he expects. His encounter with the art giants teaches him that he will more often recognize great art than make it [MTM B2:54]. His prescience and his belief that he causes persons to exist are closely connected; he later loses the effective bestowal of talismans for a period of his life [MTM B4:120]. In another episode he returns to yesterday to meet Finnegan in the burial cave [MTM B12:374].

St. Louis. At fifteen, on the last day of May 1915, Duffey sets out on his own after selling his school businesses [MTM B2:38]. He establishes the Rounders’ Club, with food, drink, lodging, transport, music, games and imported goods, and studies at several institutions while finding more hours of activity than an ordinary day permits [MTM B2:49]. Charley Murray becomes half-owner and his business partner [MTM B2:53]. Duffey boxes, wins seven of his first nine fights, and turns to promoting fights; he also becomes the band’s banjo player [MTM B2:50-54]. Bascom Bagby is his friend, business associate and quasi-brother. Mary Louise says that Bagby shares their person; Duffey later calls him his dark object [MTM B2:61-62] [MTM B2:73]. Mary Louise Byrne is Duffey’s sister or stepsister, and their relationship includes an erotic attachment. She introduces Beth Keegan as a substitute beloved [MTM B2:54-56]. When Duffey returns from his lost years, Mary Louise has married Bagby [MTM B2:73]. Duffey joins, or in another version founds, the World-Wide Argonauts Argo Balloon Club. His balloon becomes the Argo Twelve and a Half after a powerful visitor explains that the actual twelfth voyage is still active and the balloon may serve as its pinnace. Bagby later reports ghostly excursions in it, which Duffey accepts [MTM B2:63-64] [MTM B2:66].

Marriage, Chicago and performance. A compelling moth-call brings Duffey from Omaha to Chicago in 1925. Charlotte Garfield, an adult confidence woman with a child’s appearance, helps him find the woman who will become his wife; he uses his mind-reading powers to assist her search for Aga Gonof’s hidden stash [MTM B3:77-80] [MTM B3:84] [MTM B3:88-89]. Duffey marries Letitia Koch, Lily Koch’s sister, whose formation involved the special rib-shaped talisman he had given Lily in their schooldays [MTM B1:29-30] [MTM B3:90-93]. Their rooms and shops become the heart of a near-north-side Chicago golden age. They design its people, settings and events together, with Letitia said to possess the gift even more strongly [MTM B3:100]. His Priceless Item Room houses seven representations of Christ collected and sent home during the lost years, joined by an eighth brought by August Koch [MTM B3:103-104]. Duffey and Letitia give puppet shows: Letitia works made puppets, while Duffey calls out local mice and directs them as costumed actors, accompanying the performances with his banjo [MTM B4:133-134]. His supposedly last public magic act, dated November 13, 1935, is the transport of a mule through the air; witnesses and photographs offer conflicting accounts of the giant hands involved [MTM B4:127-132]. Dr. Morris Poor challenges his powers and calls him insane [MTM B4:128]. Dr. Saul Rafelson analyzes him without declaring him cured. Rafelson’s catalogue includes divine or golden childhood, mastery of giants, kingship, successive and parallel lives, inner monsters and shadows, the power to confer life, and the belief that the world depends on him. The doctor nevertheless acknowledges extraordinary facts about Duffey and the persons said to be his creations [MTM B4:146-147].

Casey and the Crock. Duffey is a part-time partner of Casey’s father and a principal influence on Casey’s education. Casey learns more from his bookshelves than at school, and learns Yiddish, Hebrew and Irish from him. Before entering the army, Casey moves his college Crock to a little press in the back room of Duffey’s bookstore [A:156] [A:159] [A:167-168]. The narrator calls Duffey closer to Casey than Casey’s father, though he seems to shrug off Casey’s later hostile editorial [A:131]. Duffey edits the Crock while Casey serves in the army; after its takeover and Casey’s return he is excluded from it [MTM B4:138] [MTM B4:145]. The attempted takeover exposes compromising photographs of his conduct with adult women and with girls from the age of eight or ten. He disputes some appearances, calls one photograph an entrapment, and says that guilty acts have been confessed and absolved; he refuses the blackmailers’ demand for control [MTM B4:139-141]. In his wartime letter to Casey he reports that the pressure temporarily drove his wife away and left him with a broken nose and right hand, and warns Casey against gambling any stock [A:40]. The Chicago double Mike Melchiades, whose marriage suffers from acts he denies committing, insists that Duffey is only his spinoff. Duffey suspects that this may be true, and helps the double’s wife return to him while knowing that Letitia is leaving their own home for a time [MTM B4:141-144]. Casey describes Duffey as the sole member of the Catholic Center Party of America, a Centrist who favors small government and opposes what he sees as collectivist infiltration; his index lists several thousand alleged infiltrators in Catholic lay groups [A:42-43]. He writes most of the issue described in Archipelago, including material identifiable as his in “Moles at the Grass Roots,” “Fables in Fabianism” and “The Consumer, the Cooperative, and the Coefficient of Cost Constancy.” That issue also contains the Urbe et Orbe notes, the “Judgement Day” review section, recording reviews favoring Chicago jazz and a readers’ letter forum [A:41]. His Razzle Daz comic strip uses Finnegan, Hans and Show Boat among its models [MTM B5:159]. Casey’s Answer is printed on Duffey’s press, but Duffey is initially unaware of its authorship and publication [MTM B4:113-118].

New Orleans, commerce and charity. He comes to New Orleans to put Henry’s ideas into practice. Commercial printing is to support the crusading journal, with work on it continuing after the paid working day. Mrs. Duffey sells their Chicago home and household goods and brings eighteen hundred of his books; the narrator says that he commits all he has [A:117-119]. In New Orleans Duffey helps establish the Pelican Press to publish the Bark, operates the Walk-In Art Bijou and a pawnshop, and makes and plays recorder flutes [MTM B6:190] [MTM B6:199] [MTM B7:211]. With Stein and Gabrielovitch he starts the Investigator; he writes for both journals and sells books, antiques and works by the Studios and Pirates’ Alley painters. His safe holds cash, valuable art, including authentic Van Ghis, and the Infiltrates file [A:143]. He supplies the cards on which X adds information to that file [A:137]. A poem in The Devil Is Dead is attributed to Melchisedech Duffy’s The Alien Awakens [D:197]. He insists upon a flophouse and turns Zabotski’s thousand-gallon crock into a soup service, installing gas burners, obtaining a blessing from St. Katherine’s and raising money for barley; Dotty pays the gas and water bills. Archipelago gives an initial cost of one cent a bowl, eventually about three hundred meals daily with continuous staffing, and a retrospective duration of at least a quarter-century [A:126] [A:132-134]. More Than Melchisedech instead describes growth from six recipients to about six hundred after a week and then several thousand. Medical students’ apparent planting of human bones gives the pot its name, Cannibal Duffey’s Irish Restaurant [MTM B6:197]. About the mid-1950s his Bijou receives The Resurrection of Count Finnegan, with Finnegan and Joseph Hedayat pictured decades ahead and looking identical. He sells it to Hilary Hilton for twenty thousand dollars and continues displaying it at Hilton’s request [MB:550-554].

The talismanic company. Duffey maintains that he literally helped form twelve persons, with others outside or partly within that count [MTM B5:150-151]. Henri Salvatore summons him to St. Louis for the last Saturday in May, promising the assignment for the rest of his life. There he encounters the brilliant company whose members know his Crock more readily than his kingship [MTM B5:152] [MTM B5:157-158]. The list announced as twelve names Finnegan (John Solli), Hans (John) Schultz, Henri Salvatore, Vincent Stranahan, Casey Szymansky, Dotty Yekouris, Mary Monaghan Schultz, Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Teresa Piccone, Absalom Stein and Mr. X: eleven names. Mary Catherine Carruthers is separately identified as another of the creations [MTM B5:158] [MTM B5:161-162]. Finnegan and Teresa are its two central creations [MTM B5:157] [MTM B5:162]; the narrator distinguishes Finnegan as the greatest from Teresa as the finest [MTM B5:182]. Duffey says he put unusual amounts of Teras blood into his people; Finnegan’s claim to be hollow troubles him [MTM B5:170-172].

Creation, awakening and faith. The talismans are associated with the Argo’s gold filigree, the Talking Oak and the Golden Fleece [MTM B5:178]. Marie says that Duffey collects the companions and gives them settings and sparkle rather than making them; he disputes her account [MTM B5:159]. Teresa tells Duffey that he awakened the company rather than created it, calling its members back into bodies to oppose the released Devil [MTM B7:233-234]. Stein sometimes reverses the dependence entirely, proposing that they made Duffey into the magus who thinks he made them [MTM B10:304]. The Argo Masters are also described as an interdependent society whose members act upon one another [MTM B13:446]. Duffey nevertheless insists to the Devil that he can perform primary creation [MTM B10:303]. His artistic work includes perhaps ten thousand figures in clay and baked bread dough [MTM B7:228-229]. In his commentary on Casey he recalls Peleus as a good, brave companion on the Argo, and offers another explanation of his twentieth-century Animations: they serve much the same purpose as Gorshok’s artificial hosts for body lice. His creatures doubt the account, and he says he has forgotten any other purpose [PG:534-536]. A separately unlabelled passage among Casey’s collected writings proposes that Duffey’s talismans implanted the remembered ancient lives as educational devices [PG:545]. He seeks to join art, law, divine worship, kindness and charity in daily life [MTM B7:228-229]. He rejects ordinary mediocrity while insisting upon humility [A:143]. His subordination to Henry is nevertheless described as a punishment for pride: he must serve one of his own satellites [MTM B8:245]. X calls him a “toy patriarch,” fitted for crusading rather than secret work, who must find one greater than Melchisedech [A:265-266].

The Seven Lost Years. Duffey disappears for seven years and returns in 1923, wandering among his old cities before returning to St. Louis. Eleven primary talisman children are born during his absence [MTM B2:71-74]. His claims of wartime army and ambulance service are uncertain; the narrator suggests that some experiences may have been taken from Sebastian Hilton, while witnesses also recall Duffey working with an organization named ARGO [MTM B2:72-73]. The Argo travels behind this interval, but its seven years need not follow consecutively in ordinary time [MTM B2:71] [MTM B13:406]. Absalom Stein's account places his death in Neustria and says that X later returns his ashes in a Spanish king’s old receptacle [MTM B6:185]. Duffey can keep these ashes beside him while alive in New Orleans [MTM B1:6]. His account of his ancient life explicitly rejects reincarnation, though he allows that his bodily history may include successive bodies or the renovation of one body [MTM B8:250]. He later remembers his modern lifetime as a sixty-year leave from the Holy Ship, beginning with his landing in 1923; he hopes to repeat it, while Cardinal Henri warns that repeated returns delay his arrival at the other shore [MTM B12:387].

Contingencies and rival explanations. Stein considers both identification with the biblical Melchisedech and an unusual sharing of the ancient king’s memories; he also calls Duffey the man who does not have an ending. Mary Virginia conjectures that Duffey comes from a discarded creation. These are the speakers’ proposed explanations [MTM B10:291-292]. The same Stein passage alternately treats the released Devil as a minor decoy and as the Devil himself [MTM B10:291]. Seven principal contingencies confront Duffey when his life overruns the present and fractures [MTM B10:298-301]. He refuses to represent mankind in his meeting with the Devil, rejects the Devil’s demand for his services and faces the claimed mortgage upon his soul and body [MTM B10:301-303]. The seventh contingency presents an encounter with the invisible God and a possibility of personal disaster [MTM B10:301].

Bereavement and continuing bonds. Bagby’s weekly letters continue for many years after his funeral, describing an existence outside ordinary time; Duffey rereads and savors them throughout each week [MTM B8:237] [MTM B8:248-249]. When Letitia dies suddenly, Duffey first refuses to accept it, then speaks privately with a burning Elephant Ear bush and grudgingly accepts the divine will [MTM B8:253-254]. Countess Margaret proposes marriage and a long life in Transylvania, and Lily offers marriage and renewed companionship. He postpones the Countess’s offer and tells Lily that he needs everyone [MTM B8:254-257].

Later journeys and trials. In his account for House and Home Happenings, Duffey describes studying time with Zabotski and visiting the Pristine World for three or five years, returning in two days [MTM B9:267] [MTM B9:272-273] [MTM B9:284]. Duffey answers the ritual summons of the Royal Pop People, written on parchment in squid ink and nailed to his door [MTM B11:311-313]. In the fifth contingency he is seduced by the splendid people, abandons suffering friends, and only belatedly tears himself free by reversing his movement through time. Bagby condemns his pride and cowardice and demands that he recover his strength in the wilderness [MTM B12:353] [MTM B12:356-357]. After returning from the fifth contingency he fears that he has damaged time and discovers that Margaret Stone’s death has entered his own world [MTM B12:354]. In the crash year Mary Virginia takes him for a ghost; his withdrawal returns that year to the future [MTM B12:361]. He contributes magic to the intermission of the girls’ play and later travels with Carmelo Mendoza. Horace Pie's reference to Mr. Eggs alerts him that the disguised companion is X, though he subsequently claims that he always knows his own handiwork [MTM B12:366] [MTM B12:369-372]. At Hilary Hilton’s farewell party he compels Casey’s presence by projecting Adam Scanlon’s portrait of his head onto television [MTM B12:380-383]. At the end of Book Twelve, he turns the forbidden handle, falls from the green country with shattered bones into a dung heap, where vermin, dung rats, buzzards and blood snakes attack him, and discovers that God remains present in the tempest [MTM B12:392-393]. From the dung, broken objects and his own blood he joyfully begins making another company of Animated Marvels, aided by lightning. He chooses to sail again while keeping this work as his eventual delight; the last minute of his life is still unfinished [MTM B12:394-395].

Death and the Argo. The three slant-faced attackers have stalked him since he was about six; a kit-fox helps him survive a childhood knifing. After the Crock assault he kills one of them, but their number is repeatedly restored [MTM B1:12] [MTM B1:19-20] [MTM B5:150] [MTM B7:225-227]. He identifies his priesthood with an obscure oriental rite that permits marriage [MTM B13:413-414]. As an Argo Master, Duffey cures a brilliant young man’s stutter at Weinsburg on the Nechar [MTM B13:430]. Three slant-faced killers strip the flesh from his bones and kill him; three slack-faced attendants burn the stripped flesh, sinew and viscera. His bones and ashes appear in Gur’yev, where X and Kasmir Gorshok recover them. X keeps the ashes, and the bones are taken aboard the Argo [MTM B13:442-443]. God tells him that his duties do not require a fleshed body. Casey makes a golden mask, scarf and gauntlets from the Fleece, and Duffey resumes his work as pilot [MTM B13:443-444]. When he moves into earlier portions of his life, he has flesh again while the ashes remain: the text calls this the Ambiguity of the Flesh. His Chicago and New Orleans lives consequently take on the character of incursions into the past [MTM B13:444-446]. With Brannagan and Gorshok he also tries to prevent the Antichrist from boarding the ship, holding that harmful prophecies must be resisted [MTM B13:454]. In the shimmering future their resistance fails: Casey appears as the Antichristus, the ship takes him to Habonim, and Duffey, Brannagan and Gunboat Smith remain undeceived but strongly affected. They fade out of that future without knowing whether another attempt is possible; Duffey has regained flesh [MTM B13:461-463]. His Promontory Goats commentary likewise foresees disputing Casey yet giving him passage against his will. He says that he has returned from the future and beyond death but is forbidden to disclose more [PG:537]. In How Many Miles to Babylon, the fleshless, golden-masked pilot carries Finnegan, Gilberto Levine-and-O’Brien and Herman Hercules toward Mooring-Stone, and later addresses the conclave that elects Finnegan pope [MB:589-590] [MB:597].

Returns and the appended story. At twenty-three Duffey comes ashore from the Sea of Lost Years and meets a young double who tells him he has lived the lost years seven times and died seven different deaths, three ending in damnation. Duffey suggests that God employs magi to explore possible endings; the double disputes this and, after Duffey has left, admits uncertainty about whether he serves God or the Devil [MTM B13:465-466]. Another return places Duffey in St. Louis in 1923, where the child Teresa offers to give him a valid birth in the future, believing that one demonstrably real life will establish the reality of the others [MTM B13:470-473]. In the appended “Great Day in the Morning,” spelled Duffy, he encounters a world losing its containers and distinctions. Its catastrophe enacts the conditions of his own bitterly comic Bark article from a year before. Horrified that the world has taken the joke seriously, he appeals to laughter and considers another article to undo the result [GD:491-493]. He insists upon a substantial universe, talks with the damaged statue of St. Michael, and wrestles with Morpheus as they shrink into a self-swallowing single cell. Morpheus calls this a return to the beginning; the final verses then enact obliteration [GD:481-501]. Lafferty’s postscript describes these apparent endings as cross-sections of continuing lives on multiple tracks [PS:479-480]. Finnegan also names him among the friends of his normal life in The Devil Is Dead [D:90].