Pynchon History

Playing Bridge with Thomas Pynchon

September 7, 2017 by Thomas Schaub 27 Comments

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

December 8, 2016 by Albert Rolls 9 Comments

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’s 1973 Letter to Bruce Allen — and the Marketing of Gravity’s Rainbow

February 7, 2015 by TPmaster 2 Comments

On March 1, 1973, the Library Journal published a review of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, with the reviewer Bruce Allen declaring Pynchon’s third novel to be “the most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer.” But Allen also wrote to Viking, the novel’s publisher, complaining about the $15 cost of the hardback edition.

Pynchon appreciated Allen’s review but, more importantly, he understood Allen’s complaint about the price and, in a letter — dated March 25, 1973 — attempted to shed some light on Viking’s reasons as well as his own feelings on the matter. The letter (on the usual quadrille paper):
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Thomas Pynchon and Brian Wilson

October 19, 2014 by TPmaster 4 Comments

“Pet Sounds” – Released May, 1966.

In the mid-1960s, both Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson were forging new creative paths in their respective art forms. Both artists, fueled by visions partially — or significantly — enhanced by the ingesting of psychedelics, were attempting to capture these visions in their work. Pynchon, in his groundbreaking third novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and Wilson, trying to further extend his idea of “a teenage symphony to God” with the highly anticipated follow-up to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds LP (1966), were trying to bring it all together.

Pynchon was able to wrangle his deep and complex vision into an incredible novel, winning the National Book Award in 1974 and almost garnering a Pulitzer Prize (rather than select such a controversial novel, the jurors gave out no prize for literature in 1974). Wilson, however, facing pushback from his band (made up of three brothers and a cousin) and his record company, as well as a psyche increasingly destabilized by his drug intake, was unable to bring his Smile project to fruition.

Yes, these two artistic giants did meet, due to Pynchon’s enthusiasm for Pet Sounds and a Cornell classmate, writer Jules Siegel (RIP), who also knew Brian Wilson. The meeting, which occurred sometime in 1966, didn’t result in any meaningful exchange of ideas between the two; but a meeting by two such highly creative men at the height of their powers and both involved in massive projects, is noteworthy. Here’s the story….

Thomas Pynchon Hears Pet Sounds

In his March 1977 Playboy article “Who Is Thomas Pynchon…And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?” writer Jules Siegel claims that in 1966 while on assignment to do an article on Bob Dylan for The Saturday Evening Post, he visited Pynchon in the one-room apartment he rented in Manhattan Beach, California, to wit:

I told [Pynchon] about the Dylan assignment. ‘You ought to do one on The Beach Boys,’ he said. I pretended to ignore that. A year or so later, I was in Los Angeles again, doing a story for the Post on The Beach Boys [ultimately published by Cheetah magazine]. He had forgotten his earlier remark and was no longer interested in them. I took him to my apartment in Laurel Canyon, got him royally loaded and made him lie down on the floor with a speaker at each ear while I played Pet Sounds, their most interesting and least popular record. It was not then fashionable to take The Beach Boys seriously.

‘Ohhhhh,” he sighed softly with stunned pleasure after the record was done. ‘Now I understand why you are writing a story about them.’