James Merrill on Pynchon

[Circ Staff]

	A passage of interest to Pynchonomanes:

	BORNHAUSER: You give the lie to C.P. Snow's once famous theory of 
the two worlds, the conflict and uncommunicativeness between science and 
the humanities.  You do this by the novelistic intensity of your 
portrayal of the human experience of confronting difficult, elusive, and 
often abstract concepts.  Yet a person like myself is still intimidated 
by science.  What have you assimilated, and what, in order to follow you, 
must I?
	MERRILL:  I've assimilated nothing!  The tiny bit I learned about 
science in order to write a few pages of the poem -- pages meant to 
reassure a reader that something COULD be learned and wouldn't be 
irrelevant to all the "mythology" behind us and ahead of us -- came out 
of books, and sank back into them as soon as I was done.  Beginner's 
books, mostly:  I relied a lot on Asimov's two-volume GUIDE TO SCIENCE.  
So don't imagine that I know.  I like your knowing that I imagined.  The 
only lifeline to science, for idiots like ourselves who find the very 
vocabulary impenetrable, has to be the imagination.  Hence the constant 
drive to PERSONIFY throughout the transcripts -- and throughout history.  
No average person is going to feel comfortable with the idea of solar 
energy.  So a figure slowly takes shape, takes human, or superhuman, 
form, and is named Apollo or the Archangel Michael, and his words, which 
WE put into his mouth, become part of the vast system whereby the 
universe reveals itself to us.  What can you and I profitably learn from 
a neutrino?  Yet give it a human mask and it will, as Oscar Wilde said, 
tell the truth.  Read science THIS way.
	BORNHAUSER:  Have you read Thomas Pynchon's V. or GRAVITY'S 
RAINBOW?  Is there anything there that corresponds to your conceptions?  
Pynchon, of course, was trained at Cornell as a scientist.
	MERRILL:  Pynchon's enthralling.  He's ten times brighter than I 
am, yet I can recognize, in his centripetal paranoia, a lot of the same 
energy -- the same quality of energy -- that shaped the trilogy.  We've 
both made spider webs on a rather grand scale.  Something fairly sinister 
is sitting at the heart of his.  Is that because he knows things I 
don't?  Or purely a matter of temperament?  I'm not sure I want those 
questions answered.

	This passage comes from RECITATIVE, a collection of prose by 
James Merrill, an American poet who died this spring.  THE CHANGING LIGHT 
AT SANDOVER, his masterpiece, rivals the best of Pynchon, and I recommend 
it to anyone who likes Big Books.

					Andrew Walser
					University of Illinois-Chicago