Rocketmanship - the Pynchon-Potter Connection

[Evan M. Corcoran]

Rocketmanship - The Pynchon-Potter Connection

There are a number of curious coincidences and correspondences between the
work of Thomas Pynchon, a writer, and that of Stephen Potter, the immortal
Founder and codifier of Gamesmanship as an exact science.  A few are noted
below.  As research into this phenomenon is still in its early stages it
has not been possible to draw, even tenatively, any conclusions from the
data.

1) The shadowy figure of Rainer Maria Rilke forms one link between Pynchon
and Potter.  Rilke's poetry permeates the work of the former, especially
his novel Gravity's Rainbow; Potter, of course, identified and described
the practice of 'Rilking' in his 1950 text Lifemanship.  Indeed, Pynchon
can be said to have Rilked all the way through Gravity's Rainbow, and
continued to do so for quite some distance beyond it.

2) Cary Grant expressed interest in translating the findings of
Gamesmanship into a film, an idea which he never brought to fruition
(though a film was made at Ealing without Grant's participation).  Cary
Grant is mentioned in Gravity's Rainbow twice, on pages 292 and 294.  He
is identified with the character Tyrone Slothrop, whose ideas are also
never brought to fruition.

3) A key date in the history of Gamesmanship is 8 June 1931.  It was on
this day that C.E.M. Joad, playing a game of doubles tennis with his
friend Potter against a pair of undergraduates, invented and first
employed Joad's Gambit ('Would you say clearly, please, whether the ball
is in or out?').  This was the Ploy Heard 'Round the World, and it
inspired Potter to initiate his researches into Gamesmanship.  Some other
interesting things happened on that day.  Lloyd George gave a speech on
free trade - and Lloyd George is mentioned in Gravity's Rainbow, on p145.
Traffic light experiments were carried out in Oxford Street - and Oxford
Street appears in GR, p17, associated specifically with traffic.  And on
the very same day, perhaps at the exact moment Joad was uttering his
famous words, Texas Guinan landed in France to begin her tour of Europe.
The bon mot she uttered on that occasion, 'Forty million Frenchmen can't
be wrong', is of course the subject of an outrageous pun in GR, p559, and
she is directly named on p657.

4) Nineteen thirty-one was also the year in which Ramsay MacDonald emerged
as a national hero.  MacDonald is mentioned on p77 of GR.

5) A character in GR works for the Special Operations Executive.  One of
the main aircraft used by SOE was the Lysander light plane.  This plane
was built by a company in Yeovil, which was later to become the home the
of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and
Gameslifemastery, as described by Potter in Lifemanship and One-Upmanship.

6) Potter was for a time a lecturer at Birkbeck College, which is located
on Malet Street in London.  Malet Street appears on p228 of GR.  He worked
for the BBC, like Myron Grunton on p74 of GR.  For a time he lived in
Harley Street, Gr p170.  He was a member of the Savile Club and knew
fellow-member Compton Mackenzie, whose books appear on p115 of GR.

7) The term 'brinkmanship' was modelled by Allen Dulles on Potter's
'gamesmanship', and describes an aspect of relations between nuclear-armed
superpowers.  Gravity's Rainbow describes some of the processes and events
which led to a world dominated by nuclear-armed superpowers employing
brinkmanship.

8) In 1959 Potter wrote a corporate history (an important theme in GR) of
the Heinz Corporation, they of the beans.  The Heinz family originally
came from Bavaria, which happens to be the German Land most often named in
GR, scoring no fewer than twelve mentions.  Furthermore, Heinz founded his
company in 1869, the same year that Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner
the US gold market, an incident referred to on p438 of GR.  Even odder:
the keeper of Heinz's collection of ivory carvings was a man named Otto
Gruber, nicknamed 'Silent Otto' - a nickname applied to a character in GR,
on p492.  Doubters are referred to Silent Otto's appearance page 81 of
Potter's book, entitled The Magic Number.

9) Mention is made in The Magic Number of the Heinz company's invention,
for use in the second world war (the main war in GR), of a self-heating
food tin.  The thermite base of this tin was developed by ICI, the British
chemical company that appears in GR involved in somewhat more sinister
things.

10) Potter published two books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Nonesuch
Coleridge and Coleridge & S.T.C. - the latter's use of an ampersand in the
title parallelling Pynchon's Mason & Dixon).  In Coleridge's poem The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner the albatross is a significant symbol.  The
albatross is a significant symbol in Gravity's Rainbow too.

11) Potter's final book, Pedigree, was published in 1973, the same year
that Gravity's Rainbow was published.  Pedigree was published after
Potter's death; in GR, several characters act from beyond the grave.  (The
Muse In Chains, Potter's last book before Gamesmanship, was published in
1937, which some sources give as the year of Pynchon's birth.)

Clearly a consistent pattern of interconnection and mutual reference
exists between the works of these two great minds.  It is hoped that
continued efforts will reveal even more of this pattern, this 'progressive
*knotting into*'.