THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

Can I Sue Thomas Pynchon?

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Julian Benfield is the owner of Julian’s Books, a rare and used book dealer in New York since 1997. Prior to that he worked for Xerox in engineering and marketing management, and as a computer consultant. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union, and MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology. His coolest offering is currently a signed copy of Mason & Dixon.

Charity Auction booklet, 1999

In 1999 I was able to outbid other New York dealers and collectors to obtain a signed first edition of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. This was offered by The Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, where his son was in attendance. The following year, I was able to repeat the feat to obtain a signed Crying of Lot 49, again at Cathedral School’s annual fundraiser. While the books were just signed on the title page, I was told, after the auction, that Pynchon would be happy to personally inscribe the books if I so desired. Since I was buying for resale, I thought that it might be best to not request that. Some may disagree, but that was my choice.

Fast track to a few years ago, when I was negotiating with a potential buyer for Crying Of Lot 49, and mentioned that I never took Pynchon up on his offer to personalize the book. My customer, who subsequently paid $23,500 for the signed Lot 49, immediately asked if Pynchon would inscribe it to him. That’s where my saga started.
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Playing Bridge with Thomas Pynchon

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Tom Schaub has taught at University of California Berkeley and University of Wisconsin Madison. He has been Executive Editor of Contemporary Literature since 1989, and has published widely on Thomas Pynchon, including Thomas Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity, and an MLA teaching volume, Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works. He now spends as much time as possible in Maine, and tries to recollect what it felt like back then in the post-sixties lull, when the opportunities society had to offer seemed like threats to his well-being.

“This time, as a matter of fact, she has a confirmed Omar Sharif sighting, inside a tent, playing bridge and flashing that killer smile.”
Bleeding Edge, p. 406

My Initiation into The Quest

US First Edition, 1966

I read my first Thomas Pynchon novel after a day of hiking around Berkeley in 1967. Walking up Grove Street — events would soon change its name to Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd — I saw what looked like a muted trumpet spray-painted on the cement support of an overpass, and a bit further a garbage receptacle stenciled with the word “WASTE.” Someone had added periods after each letter so it looked like this: “W.A.S.T.E.” That evening when I crashed on a friend’s floor I pulled a slim book off nearby shelves titled The Crying of Lot 49 by someone named “Thomas Pynchon.” Very soon I discovered the novel’s plot revolved around the very same graffiti I had seen that day outside. Here they were again inside a novel: the once-knotted posthorn with a mute in its bell, and the acronym “W.A.S.T.E.” I fell into sleep that night wondering how much of the story inside the novel — like the graffiti — was also outside the novel, in my world.

Desperately Seeking Pynchon

My own stint as a private eye took place at the peak of the mania to find Thomas Pynchon. His first two novels won major awards, but he himself remained stubbornly absent from public gaze or interview. When Pynchon published Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, a bombshell of a novel that may have been the most unread bestseller ever, it was postmodernism’s answer to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and drew nominations for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His novels V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had produced a cult following of devoted readers and the literati, but now he was national news. Emissaries from Time Magazine and LIFE went to California but came back empty-handed. In his place, Pynchon sent a comic, Professor Irwin Corey, to receive the National Book Award at the New York ceremony. There are dozens of essays, articles, and websites about the search for Pynchon, but after fifty years, all we have of him are a few pictures. At Pynchon Conferences, movies about him have been shown in which he never appears, the footage mostly clips of places Pynchon may have been. One movie ends with film of an older bearded man looking angrily at the camera. Is that Pynchon?
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Rocket Power – Gravity’s Rainbow Reviewed by Richard Poirier – 1973

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Illus. – Charles Shields

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.
By Thomas Pynchon.
896 pages.
Viking. $15; paperback, $4.95.

This review, by American literary critic Richard Poirier (1925 – 2009), which first appeared in The Saturday Review (1924 – 1986) on March 3, 1973, is one of the first reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s third novel. It is detailed and insightful and is, in fact, a great read before tackling Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time. What I find truly amazing is Poirier’s depth of understanding of Pynchon’s 760-page novel which he’d probably had for maybe a month or so, as it was published on February 28, 1973.

From The New York Times Obituary: “Mr. Poirier (pronounced to rhyme with “warrior”) was an old-fashioned man of letters — a writer, an editor, a publisher, a teacher — with a wide range of knowledge and interests. He was a busy reviewer for publications from The New York Review of Books to The London Review of Books, and his reviews could sting.”

Poirier also wrote excellent reviews of V. (The New York Review of Books), The Crying of Lot 49 (New York Times), and Slow Learner (The London Review of Books).

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

The fantastically variegated and multi­-structured V., which made Thomas Pynchon famous in 1963 and the wonder ever since of anyone who has tried to meet or photograph or interview him, is the most masterful first novel in the history of literature, the only one of its decade with the proportions and stylistic resources of a classic. Three years later came The Crying of Lot 49, more accessible only because very much shorter than the first, and like some particularly dazzling section left over from it. And now Gravity’s Rainbow. More ambitious than V., more topical (in that its central mystery is not a cryptogram but a supersonic rocket), and more nuanced, Gravity’s Rainbow is even less easy to assimilate into those interpretive schematizations of “apocalypse” and “entropy” by which Pynchon’s work has, up to now, been rigidified by his admirers.

At thirty-six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major historical importance. More than any other living writer, including Norman Mailer, he has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical he must also be marvelously exorbitant. It is probable that he would not like being called “historical.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, even more than in his previous work, history — as Norman 0. Brown proposed in Life Against Death — seen as a form of neurosis, a record of the progressive attempt to impose the human will upon the movements of time. Even the very recording of history is such an effort. History-making man is Faustian man. But while this book offers such Faustian types as a rocket genius named Captain Blicero and a Pavlovian behaviorist named Edward Pointsman, it is evident that they are slaves to the systems they think they master.

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The Science of Vectors, Spacetime, and Light in Pynchon’s Against the Day

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NOTE: This is the first of four parts of a discussion, originally written in 2007,  of some the science the shows up in Against the Day.

Part 1: The Michelson-Morley Experiment and the Failure of Classical Physics

Introduction

Thomas Pynchon is known for his dense and often obscure references to history, pop-culture, and especially science in his novels. His novel Against the Day is set around the beginning of the 20th Century, a time when our understanding of space, time, and light, rooted in classical physics, was completely overturned and replaced by a revolutionary new perspective based on the theories of special and general relativity. Pynchon takes the science of this period and incorporates it deeply into the language and structure of Against the Day, more so perhaps than in any of his other novels. Against the Day is suffused with meditations on light, space, and time, and often plays with the tension between different perspectives in math and physics – classical physics versus relativity, or Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism described with the imaginary numbers of quaternions versus the real numbers of vector analysis. This material is not just filler – it’s critical to the core of Against the Day, a fact which has been underappreciated in early reviews of the novel. One reviewer claimed that a new generation of writers has a “grasp of the systems that fascinate Pynchon — science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology — [that] is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into how those systems work than Pynchon offers here.” When it comes to science at least, this claim is absolutely not true – Pynchon’s achievement in Against the Day proves that he is peerless at deeply and knowledgeably working the most abstract scientific subjects into the context of our common humanity that is the ultimate concern of his novels.

My goal here is twofold: First, to illustrate how Pynchon goes beyond using science as simply a backdrop, or a way to show off his amazing erudition – he weaves scientific concepts into the language and structure of his book better than any other author working today. Second, I’ll lay out a primer on the basic scientific ideas so that readers of Against the Day can make their own discoveries about the novel. I cover four main topics: (1) the Michelson-Morley experiment and the breakdown of classical physics, (2) space-time and special relativity, (3) the development of vector analysis and the eclipse of quaternions (I’ll give you my guess of the ‘Baedeker’ that Pynchon ‘looted’ for his material on quaternions and vectors), and finally, Riemann surfaces.

These four topics cover most of the scientific references in Against the Day. Pynchon, clearly being a sucker for historical trivia, is mindful of the chronological development of these subjects, so I’ll cover most of them from a historical perspective, including some famous, now-rejected explanations proposed for the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. It is also important to note the science Pynchon did not include in the novel – other important advances were being made at the time by some of the same scientists featured in the book, but Pynchon hardly mentions them – most notably those in statistical mechanics (and yes, entropy) made by J.W. Gibbs. In this book, Pynchon has chosen to focus on space, time, and light.

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Collecting Thomas Pynchon

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Collection
By Robert Nelson

If only measured by his influence on our culture, Thomas Pynchon is an iconic writer. His name is known to many who have never read a word of serious literature, and “Pynchonesque” seems to have as many interpretations as the identity of the mysterious V. in his first novel, V. Pynchon’s earliest writings leapt onto the scene to accolades rarely given to a new author, and he was hailed as one of the bright stars of a new literary generation. His first novel was a winner of major national awards and his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, nearly won a Pulitzer Prize (more on this later). His subsequent efforts have not failed that early promise.

Pynchon’s novels feature dense, convoluted plots, with wide-ranging allusions to history, science, technology, mathematics, and popular culture. One does not just “crank out” works that offer such challenges and rewards to their readers. Indeed, Pynchon has produced just eight novels over the past fifty years. Fortunately for the collector, the existence of variant forms of his novels and of many associated publications can make collecting Pynchon a challenge worthy of that found in reading his books.

Clifford Mead’s Extensive Pynchon Bibliography

Clifford Mead: Pynchon BibliographyAn essential reference for the Pynchon collector is Clifford Mead’s 1989 book, Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources.[1] Although written 27 years ago, it remains the best description of the author’s early works. In addition, it includes the first appearance in book form of Pynchon’s juvenile writings. The presence of these contributions from young “Tom” to his high school newspaper makes Mead’s work a collectable Pynchon text as well as a bibliography.

 

Technical Writings for Boeing – Aerospace Safety and BOMARC Service News

Pynchon - Boeing Bomarc NewsNotorious for keeping his personal information private, Pynchon can make Salinger look like a publicity hound. It is known that he studied at Cornell, and that Vladimir Nabokov was one of his professors. Prior to pursuing his career in literature, Pynchon served in the U.S. Navy and then worked at the aircraft company Boeing as a technical writer. The abundance of military and technical references in his books indicates how much these experiences informed his writing. Pynchon’s articles in Aerospace Safety and BOMARC Service News are not only informative, but fun to read, even given their highly technical content.[2] BOMARC Service News poses an interesting challenge for both the academic and the collector, since none of its articles are credited. Textual analysis has identified articles that can be credited to Pynchon with varying degrees of certainty and the magazine issues containing these are rare and quite collectable.

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Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale – Their Unfinished Science Fiction Musical “Minstrel Island”

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NOTE: Inside parenthetical citations: [P] = material from Pynchon’s draft; [S] = passage from Kirkpatrick Sale’s draft

“Minstrel Island” by Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale

“Minstrel Island” is an unpublished, unfinished musical (it’s also been referred to as a “science fiction musical” and “operetta”) written by Thomas Pynchon and his friend John Kirkpatrick Sale while they were attending Cornell University. The materials — one folder of handwritten and typed notes, outlines, and draft fragments from sometime in the spring of 1958 — are in the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Pynchon handwritten notes for Minstrel Island

The incomplete state of “Minstrel Island” allows us to observe something about the process that Thomas Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale followed as they tried to turn an idea into a piece of writing.  The following note sets out to demonstrate, as much as possible, the order in which the material was completed, something that allows us to discern at least one of the differences between Pynchon’s and Sale’s artistic sensibility.

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Thomas Pynchon, Newton’s Second Law and Entropy

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What does F = ma have to do with “Entropy”?

Among the books owned by the late UNIX pioneer Greg Chesson are two signed copies of Pynchon’s story “Entropy,” a bootleg edition and a first edition of the collection Slow Learner. In both copies, Pynchon did something unusual: along with his signature, he inscribed the equation for Newton’s second law of motion, F = ma, i.e., force (F) equals mass (m) times acceleration (a). In the bootleg edition, Pynchon went even further. Rather than cross out his printed name above his autograph, which authors sometimes do to emphasize their more personal signature (see the Low-Lands autograph below), Pynchon instead crossed out the word “Entropy” and wrote the equation beneath it.

Why would Pynchon write down Newton’s second law on a copy of a story about the second law of thermodynamics? One possibility is that this is a bit of an inside joke and a note of encouragement to a friend – hence the crossing out of the title and its replacement with F = ma in the bootleg copy. Intuitively, entropy suggests dissolution, a system that’s running down. Pynchon’s story muses on the negative consequences of the inexorable increase in entropy: disorder, death, and the ultimate end of the universe. F = ma suggests the opposite – a positive force, acceleration rather than loss of motion, an ability to act to alter the world, rather than simply let things run their course.

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The Daily Show – Thomas Pynchon’s Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program

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Daily Show 10-year Anniversary ProgramIn 2006, Thomas Pynchon wrote the foreword to the program for The Daily Show’s Ten-Year Anniversary Concert, held November 16, 2006 at Irving Plaza in New York City.

When Scott Jacobson, a comedy writer who put together the concert, was asked about working Pynchon, he replied:

I knew it would be difficult to get the writers to submit pieces for the program – they’re a busy bunch of folks – so I thought I’d improve my odds by getting a foreword from someone so unlikely that it’d capture the staff’s interest. I dug up the email of Thomas Pynchon’s wife, who’s a literary agent, and pitched her the idea. To my surprise and delight, it all worked out. Pynchon actually faxed in that piece. He came into the office one day, too, and stayed for a taping. I had a brief conversation with him about Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

And now… Here it is in all its glory!

The Evolution of the Daily Show — by Thomas Pynchon*

Actually, it all began with Death to Smoochy. The green light had been given to proceed with Death to Smoochy 2 on the strength of the first weekend grosses, as well as some unexpected merchandising feedback. It seemed that “Smoochy the Rhino” items weren’t selling nearly as well as those based on the evil network executive “Marion Frank Stokes,” played by Jon Stewart. This applied across the spectrum — mouse pads, lunchboxes, T-shirts, McDonald’s tie-ins (the Happy Meal being briefly eclipsed by the Anxious Meal, served in a takeout bag bearing Mr. Stewart’s likeness) — you name it. Kids started showing up at school in business suits and wearing the same peculiar fringe haircut as the Stokes character, provoking peer commentary and vice-principalistic perplexity.

In the course of reviewing star availability for DTS2, however, one of the producers suddenly recalled that toward the end of the first picture it was strongly implied that “Frank Stokes” had been done away with in a violent manner, rendering perhaps problematic his appearance in Part Two. Options such as resurrection, identical twins, and the extensive use of flashbacks were entertained and discarded. Meanwhile the Frank Stokes Armani Edition action figure was outselling G.I Joe, Darth Vader, and eventually even Barbie herself. Focus groups began to hint at the possibility of a class action suit if “M.F.S.”, as he had come to be known, did not appear in Death to Smoochy 2.

Well. Talk about dilemmas! Script development sessions became notable for long and gloomy silences, until one day, down at the far end of some all-but-forgotten conference table, a screenwriter, just back from a weekend seminar in Canoga Park entitled “Disrespect — Make It Work For You,” tentatively raised his hand.

“Yes, I forget your name, you had your hand up?”

“Let’s say that in life, in his career as a network slimebag, Frank Stokes accumulated a huge pile of truly horrible karma. So next time around, to work off this karmic debt, he gets to expose, mock, ridicule and otherwise invite contempt for the very behavior he was once guilty of in his former life. Lying, corruption, the abuse of power, so forth.”

“Hmm. If we could pitch that in shorter sentences…”

So it came about that, though the studio still owned the character of Frank Stokes, the premise of Jon Stewart as a reincarnated evildoer persisted somehow as a negotiable script element, passing from one corporate entity to another, undergoing mutation at each step, till it finally ended up at Comedy Central, Where it was welcomed with a scream of recognition.

And one thing led to another…

*Seriously, Thomas Pynchon actually wrote this.

NOTE: You can download a PDF of the entire program here.

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How to Identify a Gravity’s Rainbow First Edition – Paperback & Hardcover

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For both the original hardcover and paperback versions of Gravity’s Rainbow, the differences between the true first editions and the Book Club editions are fairly subtle, but easy to spot.

When the Viking Press published Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, it simultaneously issued 4,000 hardbacks and 16,000 paperbacks. The reason for publishing the less-expensive paperback ($4.95) at the same time as the hardback ($15.00) was due to the concern of Corlies “Cork” Smith, Pynchon’s editor at the time, that Pynchon’s readership — younger, college-educated, hipper — might balk at coughing up $15 for the novel.

From the Bookforum website: “Pynchon from A to V: Gerald Howard on Gravity’s Rainbow

Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly prohibitive for Pynchon’s natural college and post-collegiate audience. V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. […] According to a letter from Cork Smith [Pynchon’s editor] to Bruce Allen (who reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow for Library Journal but wrote to Viking complaining about the novel’s price), Viking would have had to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to break even. By comparison, V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had sold about ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? Cork himself hit on the then unique strategy of publishing an original trade-paperback edition at $4.95 and “an admittedly highly priced hardcover edition” at $15, each identical in paper stock and format, differing only in their binding. The gamble: “We also thought that Pynchon’s college audience might, just might, be willing to part with a five-dollar bill for this novel; after all, that audience spends that amount over and over and over again for long-playing records.” The other gamble was with the reviewers, who rarely took paperback fiction seriously, but as Cork wrote, “We feel — as, clearly, you do — that Pynchon cannot be ignored.”

As you may know, both editions in their first printings are quite valuable, particularly the hardcover (and even superior copies of subsequent printings of the first edition), but also the first edition/first printing of the paperback edition. However, the differences between true first editions and the subsequent Book of the Month Club (“BoMC”) (hardcover) and Quality Paperback Book Club (“QPBC”) editions of Gravity’s Rainbow, both published in 1973 (Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, Clifford Mead, p.13), are a bit subtle, but easy to identify when you know what to look for.

NOTE ABOUT VALUE: First editions of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Gravity’s Rainbow are only of significant value if they’re first printings, although later printings of both are still pricier than later editions. Printings subsequent to the first printings are clearly indicated on the copyright page, after the line “Printed in U.S.A. by the Colonial Press Inc.” If there is no indication of a subsequent printing, then it’s a first printing (assuming, of course, it meets the other criteria in this article). Both the hardcover and paperback editions went into multiple printings after the first run. BoMC hardcover editions generally go for between $100 – $300, depending on their their condition (VG to Fine). The QPBC paperbacks are not worth that much at all and should only fetch more than, say $10, only if they’re misrepresented as first editions.

GR-printings

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Chryskylodon Blues – Behind the Scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice

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Paul Thomas Anderson“Chryskylodon Blues,” a 12-minute film by Laura Colella that captures behind the scenes filming of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, is shot in grainy Super-8 color. Its name comes from the place in the Thomas Pynchon novel called Chryskylodon Institute (“from an ancient Indian word meaning ‘serenity’), an upscale rehabilitation facility in Ojai, where Micky Wolfmann is being kept.

Chryskylodon Blues from Laura Colella on Vimeo.

The narration, by Theo Green, is a selection of readings from the Thomas Pynchon novel and is similar in tone and spirit to Pynchon’s narration on the trailer for the novel Inherent Vice. The accompanying surf music — with period-enhancing ticks and pops — is by a group identified in the credits as The Growlers. They are the guys who play the Boards, a surf band in Pynchon’s novel.

From Ben Sach’s informative article on the short film:

The movie, in short, is a gift that keeps on giving—naturally, it inspired a superior making-of documentary that’s now available to watch online. Chryskylodon Blues, directed by the gifted underground filmmaker Laura Colella (Tax Day, Breakfast With Curtis), is as novel in its approach to the behind-the-scenes doc as Inherent Vice is to the literary adaptation. Shot on Super-8, it looks like it could have been made in 1970, when Vice takes place. Colella recently explained to me that Anderson, an old friend, originally intended for her to play an amateur filmmaker during the scene set at the surf-rock band’s party that Sportello crashes midway through the film, and that she’d shoot Super-8 footage onscreen. She ended up using the Super-8 camera to film Chryskylodon, rather than shooting it digitally. (When asked why Warner Bros. decided not to include her film on the Inherent Vice DVD, she declined to comment.)

It’s definitely worth checking out.

About ThomasPynchon.com

ThomasPynchon.com (formerly the HyperArts Pynchon Pages) came online in 1997. With the publication of Against the Day in 2007, the alphabetical guides to Pynchon's novels were migrated to the Pynchon Wikis.

This website is affiliated with neither Mr Pynchon nor his representatives; rather, it's aligned with the community of folks who enjoy reading Pynchon's work — and digging deeper.

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ThomasPynchon.com was designed and developed, and is maintained, by Tim Ware, a musician and composer, fan of great literature, owner of HyperArts, lover of all things tiki, and an Oakland, California, resident. You can reach him via the contact form on this website.

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Many have contributed to the content of ThomasPynchon.com and, ultimately, it's a team effort. Special thanks go to the folks at Pynchon-l at Waste.org, the long-standing list-serve dedicated to the ongoing discussion of Pynchon's works, with a shoutout to Allen "the Quail" Ruch and his seminal but, alas, departed theModernWord.com website

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