THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

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By Ali Dehdarirad

I hope I can steal a minute of your time to draw your attention to the publication of my book on our favorite writer: “From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy. The book brings together my passion for Pynchon’s work and my interest in urban and regional studies, dating back to graduate school. Ever since I came across The Crying of Lot 49, I’ve been fascinated by Pynchon’s intriguing fiction, and it is my hope that this book makes a useful contribution to Pynchon studies and the Pynchon community. It is available as an eBook (open access format) on the website of Sapienza University Press. The following is some background on how I came to write my new book. —Ali Dehdarirad

In “the City Region” with Pynchon

Let me start by sharing some bits of my “Pynchon experience.” I gave The Crying of Lot 49 as a gift to my wife eight years ago, but she hasn’t finished it yet. I think somewhere around chapter three she said something like “that’s enough.” As odd as it might sound, I myself never got to the end of the Italian translation either. On second thoughts, I’ve never read any Pynchon book in Italian because I believe no translation could ever do justice to the complexity and depth of his fiction. My first encounter with Lot 49 is abundant proof of this. I remember reading the first pages of the novel as an undergrad and wondering, What the hell is going on? But it was all exciting. Lot 49 gave me that rush of adrenaline you feel when reading a novel that offers all you need to sit down for long hours and not wanting to leave the book unless the Grim Reaper knocks on your door. Thus began my labor of love with Pynchon, as I stood with Oedipa “in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible” (CL, 1). By the time I got to the end of the book, I didn’t want it to finish, as if I had to “keep it bouncing” (CL, 112). Though the novel ended there (or perhaps it never did), it opened up a fresh horizon, enticing me to read Pynchon’s œuvre.

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Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Sample)

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Luc Herman and John M. Krafft

The following list of small stylistic and substantive differences between the 1961 typescript draft of Pynchon’s V. (held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin) and the published novel (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1963) was originally intended as an appendix to our Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2023). It is only a sample of Pynchon’s many revisions, but we hope it may satisfy the curiosity of some readers and pique that of others.

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Ray Roberts: Editor – and Collector – of Thomas Pynchon

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On May 1, 1997, Washington state bookseller Ed Smith was attending a rare-books auction at the Swann Auction Galleries in New York City. In a room full of dedicated rare-books collectors and dealers, Smith found himself seated directly in front of Glenn Horowitz, one of the best-known dealers of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, if not the world. When a U.K. proof of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., with a pristine “trial” dust jacket, came on the block, there was lively and aggressive bidding for this highly sought-after Pynchon collectible. Smith was certain Horowitz would come away with the prize but, to his amazement, he ended up winning the auction, paying $517.[1]Smith says Horowitz would’ve likely won the bidding were it not for a pretty & pierced young women seated next to him with whom he was flirting. According to Smith, “Glenn was … Continue reading

U.K. uncorrected proof copy of V. that Ed Smith won at auction

“When the auction ended,” Smith recalls, “[Horowitz] introduced himself and we chatted awhile. I ended up visiting his shop and purchasing a couple proofs, though no Pynchons.” Unbeknownst to Smith at the time, Horowitz was a close friend and trusted book-collecting advisor to Ray Roberts, Thomas Pynchon’s editor, who’d also had his eye on that UK proof of V..

Smith continues: “A day or so after returning home, I got a call from Ray Roberts. I had no idea who he was, but he said he was Mr. Pynchon’s editor, and I believed him. He’d apparently contacted the Swann Galleries to inquire about the UK proof and gotten my phone number. He asked me if I’d be interested in trading the V. proof I’d won at auction for ‘something special.’ He asked me to send him the U.K. proof and he would send me his ‘special’ item. I did as instructed and, in return, Ray, as good as his word, sent me one of the Mason & Dixon blue galleys.”

It was through this fortuitous set of circumstances that Ed Smith came to know Ray Roberts, who it turned out was not just Thomas Pynchon’s editor but also one of the most successful and respected editors in New York City, not to mention an avid and knowledgeable collector of modern first editions.

And it was through this transaction that the blue uncorrected proofs of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon came to light, proofs that quite possibly landed Roberts squarely in conflict with his desires as a collector and his responsibilities as a trusted editor.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Smith says Horowitz would’ve likely won the bidding were it not for a pretty & pierced young women seated next to him with whom he was flirting. According to Smith, “Glenn was directly behind me playing grab-ass with a young woman who was with him who had multiple face/ear piercings long before they were the fashion. Charlie Agvent, whom I knew, sat behind me too and he would remember that incident.”

Candida Donadio — The Agent Who Discovered Thomas Pynchon

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Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio

by Karen Hudes

This profile first appeared in Tin House (Volume 6, Number 4), Summer 2005.

Candida Donadio was the most powerful, gifted, and beloved literary agent of her generation. She was the sixties maverick who discovered Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and William Gaddis. Her list of clients glittered with such writers as Mario Puzo, Robert Stone, and John Cheever.

“She had an unerring instinct for offbeat talent,” says Robert Gottlieb, the former editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, and the editor of Catch-22 — the book that made the careers of Heller, Donadio, and himself.

This luminary of the publishing world possessed not only an eye for genius, but also magnetism and warmth. “If she acknowledged your existence, it was like you were knighted,” says Juris Jurjevics, the publisher of Soho Press who was married to one of Donadio’s clients, the late Laurie Colwin.

Donadio was born on October 22, 1929 — a date that may or may not have factored into the naming of Catch-22, depending on whom you believe. Her lovely, Pynchonesque name (pronounced “CAN-dida,” meaning white or pure) made news beyond the literary scene in 1998 when it appeared in a New York Times article regarding a donation to the Pierpont Morgan Library — a collection of more than 120 letters from Pynchon to Donadio, which she had sold to a private collector in 1984. Pynchon’s lawyer took immediate action, ensuring that the letters not be made public until the author’s death.

Donadio’s sale of the letters came in the aftermath of a messy professional separation between her and Pynchon, and may speak to the volatility of her character.

“People tell a lot of contradictory stories about Candida, and they’re all true,” says Neil Olson, who began as her assistant in 1987 and is now the head of the agency Donadio & Olson. “I think her true nature really was a shy, self-doubting, very smart, very sharp person who was capable of having these operatic explosions into this figure who carried on and pulled her hair and shouted other people down… But these explosions were very seldom directed at anybody, they were just going on inside of her.”

Donadio was short and round, wearing her black hair in a severe bun. Most distinctive were her beautiful, dark, and deeply expressive brown eyes.

“She looked like a creature from a Roman fresco,” says Robert Stone, her client for more than thirty years.

By numerous accounts, Donadio could be frank and forthright, as well as an embellisher of tales. She had a rich, low voice and bawdy sense of humor, flavoring her conversation with both Yiddish slang and Sicilian hand gestures. Yet she was intensely private and, like Pynchon, disliked being photographed or interviewed.

Like many of her contemporaries, Donadio was fond of martinis at lunch and scotch after work. She was also a heavy smoker. While deliberating over business, she’d take a few drags off one cigarette before stubbing it out and lighting the next. She could often be seen at the Italian Pavilion, now Michael’s, where she held a regular table.

When Olson arrived, the agency was housed in a brownstone facing the back of the Chelsea Hotel. “You could hear the opera singers, hear people screaming, throwing glass,” he says. There were two cats and a working fireplace, and electricity that always went out. Donadio would toss notes to him from her mezzanine office, letting them waft down into his hands. “Like Juliet,” he says.

Cork Smith at Ticknor & Fields, 1984
Photo courtesy of Sheila Smith and family

“She acted spectacular, but she was modest,” says Corlies “Cork” Smith, Pynchon’s first editor and a longtime friend of Donadio. He adds, “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across.”

Among her many colorful expressions: “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off.” So remembers Harriet Wasserman, who was a secretary at Herb Jaffe Associates in 1958 when she befriended Donadio, and who later worked as her assistant. Wasserman went on to become a high-powered agent herself, representing Saul Bellow, Reynolds Price, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

She recalls her mentor pronouncing her name, “Candida Donadio, a pure gift of God.”
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Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse – Helen Dudar

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Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse

By Helen Dudar, a freelance writer living in New York who writes about publishing

[Dudar, Helen. “Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse.” Chicago Tribune Bookworld 8 Apr. 1984: 35-36. Reprinted as “A Pynchon for Privacy.” Newsday 9 Apr. 1984, sec. II: 3.]

Picture this: Your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him, and legions of journalists yearn to interview him. So what will he talk about? He may talk about movies, about which, as any attentive student would know, he has a lifetime hoard of memories. He may talk, knowledgeably, about baseball. He will talk about himself, wittily and artfully, without allowing intimacy to seep into the conversation. If he is camping in your house for a spell, he may quarrel with your preschool child about the television shows they will watch; his tastes run to the sort of junk embraced by any addict committed to pop culture.

Here we have, if not a 3-D portrait, a slightly fuzzy outline of Pynchon, author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, a man widely thought to rival J.D. Salinger in reclusiveness. The fact is that any prominent person who will not confront the media is apt to suffer the label of recluse. Pynchon has never delivered himself into the hands of the working press, has not been photographed for publication since his yearbook days and lets his friends know that talking about him publicly amounts to betrayal.

But if Howard Hughes, squirreled away in a hotel with a 10-year growth of toenails, is the modern avatar of invisibility, Pynchon hardly qualifies. He has been seen; he gets around; he enjoys the company of women; he has phone pals, better than pen pals, distanced as they are by long lines.

I’m telling you all this because your neighborhood bookstore should have on hand the first Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow, that immense, dense, apocalyptic vision of the world at war, which was published in 1973, and because this new book is certain to result in a fresh set of ruminations about his so-called solitary life.

The book, Slow Learner (Little, Brown, $14.95), is not a new work, but a collection of five early stories, four written while he was still at Cornell University, all viewed with disarming deprecation by their author. For years, the stories have been turning up in unauthorized pamphlet editions, and, apparently weary of the piracy, Pynchon agreed to their publication. When the book was offered around the trade last year, it carried a Rolls-Royce price tag. Pynchon does not customarily nest on best-seller lists, but he is a campus perennial in paperback and a quality lit ornament in any publishing house. Even so, there were scattered gasps of surprise at the report that Little, Brown had paid a lavish $150,000 for it.

The collection is no Dubliners (the reference that comes to mind because Rainbow was widely greeted as an event akin to the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses), but it is a fascinating display of the feeling for style and imagined event this greatly talented, intelligent man had by the time he was 21. The stories are flabby and only marginally interesting. Maybe Pynchon’s obsessions were not fully focused; the fiction reads like the work of a man who has yet to learn how to express what is flickering dangerously at the edge of his consciousness.

For the Pynchon cultist, the real treat is his introduction, the first autobiographical notes ever to flow from his hand into print. It is relaxed and charming and sometimes alarmingly cute, an excess to be found in his fiction on occasion. Nearing his 47th birthday, Pynchon talks of the fumbling writer he was, of the sources for the stories, of the music and writings that influenced him.
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Interview with Raquel Jaramillo, aka R.J. Palacio, Designer of the Mason & Dixon Dust Jacket

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Raquel Jaramillo, 2020 – With a small selection of the many books she’s art-directed

At this point, Raquel Jaramillo is probably better known under her nom de plume R.J. Palacio, under which pen name she has written a number of successful children’s novels, including Wonder (2012) which was a best-seller.

Ms. Jaramillo lives in New York City with her husband, two sons, and two dogs. For more than twenty-five years, she was an art director and graphic designer, designing book jackets for other people’s books while waiting for the right time in her life to start writing her own novels. But a chance encounter several years ago with an extraordinary child in front of an ice cream store made her realize that the right time to write that novel had finally come. Wonder was her first novel (no, she did not design the cover). She has since written several other books in the Wonder-themed universe, including her latest, a graphic novel that she wrote and illustrated titled White Bird. She is currently working on her latest novel, to be published sometime in 2021.

Last year, I worked up the nerve to reach out to Ms. Jaramillo to see if she’d be open to being interviewed about her experience designing the dust jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon. After not hearing back from her for nearly a year I’d pretty much lost hope. Then, out of the blue, she responded to my original email, explaining that it had gotten buried in her inbox and she’d just discovered it. Fortunately, she was happy to talk about her Mason & Dixon experience!

Her talent and intuition, and collaboration with Pynchon, resulted in the perfect dust jacket for one of Pynchon’s finest novels. And she’s a lovely person, to boot!
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Gravity’s Rainbow and the Game of Go

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by Michael Denison

This article first appeared in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Volume VI, Issue 3, Fall 2014, pp. 53-57

There are indications that Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 book Gravity’s Rainbow is patterned after a traditional Oriental Go game. The game originated in China about 2500 years ago and is popular now all over Asia. In Japan, it is a national pastime and there are regular Go tournaments with all of the fanfare that we associate with international chess tournaments. There are also Go clubs and regular Go columns in the daily newspapers. A recent film, AlphaGo, covers the eventually successful attempts to design a computer program that could beat humans at Go.

For those not familiar with it, Go is a war game. It is fought on a wooden board marked with 19 and 19 crossing lines. These form 361 not-quite-square rectangles, although the game is played not on these spaces, but on the lines and intersections between them. Each player has 180 disc-shaped pieces, made of wood, slate, stone, or some more modern material, in their army. One player has all black stones and the other has all white. To win a game, the players must take turns and surround open areas with fortified walls that cannot be captured. In the end the player in control of the most space wins.

Chess has long been famous for its ability to teach strategy and tactics, but chess deals with small numbers and great differences in power between individual pieces. Go, on the other hand, deals with large numbers of equal pieces. To extend the military metaphor, the general in a chess game is fighting with infantry, cavalry, and light and heavy artillery. The general in a Go game is fighting on an open field with huge numbers of infantry.

Now for the comparison. Gravity’s Rainbow is a long book about rockets, but it is about rockets in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales. Just as an entire universe revolves around the white whale in Moby Dick, so an entire universe spins, (literally, in the last scene of the book) around the V2 rocket numbered 00000 in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Pynchon’s book has a huge cast of characters and a complex plot. It is a cyclical novel, beginning again where it leaves off at the end. It is a novel about small people caught up in great events and it is a novel about patterns in space and time and of the people who cannot see them. It is a book full of the sudden “shock of recognition” (“Oh, that Peenemünde!”) and of slowly-gathering awareness.

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Interview with Andrew Boese, Creator of The “C” Section — The Collected Unpublished Works of Thomas Pynchon

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Andrew Boese at WorkAndrew Boese is Pynchon fan and collector who in 2016 gained some notoriety by publishing, via his Optics Press, The “C” Section, a lovely hand-bound edition of the collected unpublished works of Thomas Pynchon. As Andrew writes on the website, he created Optics Press to produce high-end, extremely low-run prints of rare, unpublished, and unique works of art. Each volume is designed using only the highest quality materials, with one or two titles released annually, cased and numbered.

Tell me a bit about yourself, what your life journey looks like, and the Optics Press.

Andrew: I grew up in a printing family. Combine that with my love of reading and it was a natural progression into bookbinding. My favorite books to collect have always been limited and fine press editions. Stuff like George Macy’s Limited Editions Club really opened my eyes to how much book design, printing, and binding can go into enhancing the reading experience. Even though there’s a bunch of presses out there doing incredible work, I noticed that there was a niche of work that I’d like to see in a fine press edition that wasn’t being explored. There’s always been a healthy availability of classic works of literature and there’s some incredible work being done currently in the Sci-Fi/horror genres but there’s still so much out there that’s at risk of being lost to time, dust, and decay. I started The Optics Press as an excuse to make books that for whatever reason don’t exist that I want in my own collection. I make a handful of copies to sell at cost on the chance that there’s other collectors out there that feel the same way I do.

Are you a collector of Pynchon, a fan of his work, or both? If so, when did you get interested Pynchon and how do you interact with the community of Pynchon fans?
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Inherent Vice Diagrammed: the making of a new Pynchon resource

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A new Pynchon resource helps you keep track of Inherent Vice’s 130 characters, 37 entities, 6 gangs, 4 bands, and 1 dog. The website features color-coded diagrams, plot summaries and other resources so you can get the most out of reading Pynchon’s complex detective novel. Inherent Vice Diagrammed creator Paul Razzell explains the origins and development of this innovative resource.

THERE’S A TELLING IMAGE in the film adaptation of Inherent Vice where private eye Doc Sportello attempts to diagram the connections among 16 people involved in his intersecting cases. Using crayons, he writes characters’ names on his living room wall then draws lines between the names to show relationship, connection … or something. Why is this a telling image? 

For starters, it reminds you that Doc is trying to do exactly what you’re trying to do: see the relationships among so many characters and what those relationships can tell us about their motivations, loyalties, hostilities, and power dynamics. 

Second, the scene is the filmmaker’s acknowledgement to viewers that keeping track of all these characters and their relationships is hard work. Even a seasoned private eye like Doc, who’s had personal contact with most characters, needs a visual aid. (Doc’s diagram shows 16 characters only. There are over 50 in the film. His wall is nowhere near big enough to accommodate so many names at once nor, you are led to believe, is his mind.) 

Third, the image reveals a cognitive flaw in Doc’s diagrammatic approach: all of his lines are unlabeled. How is Glen related to Clancy? How is Coy related to El Drano? Doc’s highly generalized crazy wall doesn’t answer such questions. It carries no precise or informative meaning that would lead him—or us—from confusion to revelation. 

Inherent Vice Diagrammed brings you much closer to that revelation. This free resource helps you see through Doc’s marijuana haze with

Reading Inherent Vice is, after all, detective work. It’s about finding connections between many people, organizations, and entities with a view to solving crimes and, perhaps, seeing where America is headed.

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The Liner Notes for “Barefoot in the Head” (1990) – NOT written by Thomas Pynchon

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Liner notes by Thomas Pynchon Thomas Pynchon has written liner notes, as of this date, for two albums: Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones (1994) and Nobody’s Cool (1996) by Lotion.

Another LP — Barefoot in the Head (1990) — has liner notes that are ascribed to Thomas Pynchon but are DEFINITELY not written by Pynchon (confirmed in no uncertain terms by the author’s agent). The LP, by Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich (from Borbetomagus) and Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), borrows not only Pynchon’s name, but also its title — from Barefoot in the Head (1969), Brian Aldiss’ hallucinogenic sci-fi novel — as well as its cover art — La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) — by the German artist Max Ernst.

What follows are the faux-Pynchon liner notes which are a passable pastiche but lacking that certain je ne sais quoi…

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One night Johnson, Coley and I were sitting in the back yard with a bucket of fresh sangria and a few bongloads of some very righteous boo. I’d brought out a box of my live Sonic Youth tapes and we were arguing about Lee Ranaldo’s tongue vectors in the third quadrant of ‘Society is a Hole’ (Folk City, NYC 12/1/82) when one of T. Moore’s downstrokes caught our attention. We ran the tape back and listened to the passage a few times. The subtly monstrous and mindless GUSH with which T. Moore hit the ‘E’ chord made it obvious that his playing was not coming out of a complete spiritual void. This was a real revelation. It meant that he was capable of actually unclenching his brain and loosing demons of soul creativity.

Because we hate to see anyone lackeyed to jive-ass, pop-structure, white-man a-motionalism, a plan was immediately spun for freeing T. Moore from the shackles of Peggy Lee-descended dogshit that were obviously choking off his TRUE HUMAN FORCE. Deciding which hominid cudgels might be best wielded against these procedural chains was a lead pipe cinch. Who but Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich? These two men are the freest, loudest, swingin’est white motherfuckers to ever jaw-cleave an industrial strength reed. Their work with Borbetomagus has long been a raucous fountain of tonal explosion and aesthetic purity, as well as a black-gloved fist up the diz of all conservative musical architects. If anyone could blow the lock off of T. Moore’s creational emo-safe, Jim and Don were it.

The rest was a snap. I had my agent get in touch with all the parties. She explained the points of our proposal in no uncertain terms. The results are presented here. Two free men meet a slave. Everyone goes home barefoot. Right-fuckin’-on.

Thomas Pynchon, Somerville, MA
January 1990

So who wrote these liner notes?

The most likely suspect is the aforementioned Byron Coley, an American music critic who wrote for Forced Exposure magazine in the 1980s. He’s also written liner notes for many albums including for the 2007 deluxe edition of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. According to this interview, on the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Coley admits to making stuff up when answering written interview questions for Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

So Byron Coley is Prime Suspect here.

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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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