Gore's rosebud

[Rodney Welch]

Craig, 

	I'm not sure whether or not I meant to imply that you have no 
right to an opinion. What I was responding to, more than anything, was 
the creeping sense of juvenile smugness that had crept into these 
anti-Vidal flames. Both you and Mr. Maas seemed to share this vastly 
ignorant belief that you are more capable of understanding Pynchon than 
Vidal. If your comments amounted to anything more than a momentary snit 
-- if your comments had substance to them, that is -- I wouldn't have 
complained. Alas, they did not, thereby raising comparisons between you 
two and Vidal: man of letters and recognized achievement versus a coupla 
white kids sittin' around talkin', or surfin', or whatever it is you two 
do.
	And now, today, comes this highly amusing new post in which 
you lecture Vidal -- and by extension all of us -- on how to read. 
Reading Pynchon "requires disciplined and informed reading, of the kind 
usually (but not exclusively) associated with the academy," we are 
told, which "suggests that Vidal hasn't come fully to grip with the force 
of Pynchon's critique of contemporary society."
	Hmm. Let me see if I have this straight. Vidal -- who has 
probably done more than anyone to explain Italo Calvino to the Western 
World, and who introduced me to the multiple complexities of Michel de 
Montaigne -- was a poor reader of GR? Just scanned it, did he? Gee; seems 
to me he read it rather carefully, if not as happily as the rest of us. 
No matter -- what's really interesting about the above statement is this 
worshipful, knee-scraping sense of awe before "tha academy," suggesting a 
youth who is stuck in it (or wishes to be stuck in it) with no desire to 
ever leave.
	"It is the essence of [Pynchon's] critique," Clark continues, 
"that the world we live is complex and multiple-layered (with the crucial 
decisions which affect us all being taken at levels deliberately 
concealed from plain sight)."
	(Aha! So you're the one who stole my copy of "How to Discuss 
Pynchon at a Cocktail Party"!) Again, Clark's color-by-number analysis 
isn't nearly as interesting as this eerily prayerful statements that 
follow: "... complex and multiple-layered readings (such as those 
associated, though not exclusively, with the academy) are essential ..."
	Oh, I see. These books "associated, though not exclusively, with 
the academy" -- are them those real smart books fer all yoo college 
ed-yoo-cated pai-pul? Dang. Here at the farm all we've gawt is that 
Critique uh Pyoor Reezon and Principia Mathuhmatica or some dumb shit -- 
I cain't hardly ruhmember the title since we stuffed it into thuh walls 
fer insulation. I shore wish the bookmobile would come by again with them 
books "associated, though not exclusively, with the academy." Last week 
we had to use the TV Guide fer toilet paper and dang if I dint miss Wall 
Street Week. Shit eef it don't make yuh question yer whole raison detter.
	
	"Pynchon's literary status surpasses Vidal's, IMHO, because Vidal 
has failed, to the best of my knowledge, to produce fictions which convey
this same sense of the complexity of the world. I am not wholly ignorant
of contemporary literature, US or otherwise, and though I concede that my 
experience of Vidal is limited, I suspect that my search for complex 
multiple-layered fictions would have led me to Vidal before now, were he 
the author of any such. I stand ready to be corrected, however. In my 
library I have (unread) copies of _Myra Breckenridge_ and _Messiah_. Any 
other Vidal titles I should read, ones which will give me a reading 
experience comparable to that produced by Gravity's Rainbow_, _V._, De 
Lillo's  _The Names_, Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_, Joyce's _Ulysses_?"
  
	There's a certain naivete at work here, and I'll try to attack it 
as well as I can (pardon me if I doze; this is a most uninteresting 
battle.)
	First of all, I don't think it's fair -- or true or just or 
honest -- to say that Vidal has "failed" to produce fictions to match 
Pynchon's. True, he hasn't produced them; he hasn't tried. He's not a 
novelist of genius; he's a novelist of talent -- at least, that's my 
experience with him. (I haven't read Duluth or Live from Golgotha, both 
presumably more experimental.) This doesn't mean his work isn't vital or 
interesting, or even that it isn't often preferable to Pynchon, just as 
Pynchon is often preferable to Joyce and Joyce is sometimes preferable to 
Rabelais and just about anything is preferable to William Gass's The 
Tunnel. 
	Your final statement says it all -- you basically think modern 
fiction isn't too much older than you are, right? The tradition of 
Hawthorne, Melvile, James and Twain were just warm-ups for TP, huh? Well, 
it's hard to argue with hidebound academic thinking, but I'll leave it at 
this: ALL truly great books -- and even most okay books, and a great many 
of Vidal's books -- require "complex and multiple-layered readings." 
Oscar Wilde said that if a book isn't worth reading a second time it 
hardly bears reading the first time.
	If you fail to understand this, you'll never understand 
literature at all. And if you don't understand literature well beyond 
your narrowly-defined scope, you'll never really "get" Gravity's Rainbow 
-- which is why most of the people who devote their lives to it always 
come away from it with something new.