P writing on drugs? Re: On The Road (Destination: Starbucks)

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>OK.  I say there's no way to know if this is true or
>not, given the credibility problems of the single,
>uncorroborated source that started spreading this
>unsubstantiated rumor back in the late 1970s. That's
>why I choose not to believe it, and point instead to
>ways that Pynchon might have gained the knowledge of
>the drug experience that appears to inform Gravity's
>Rainbow and his other novels.  He could have gotten
>reports from other people, or he could based his
>accounts on personal experiences that he has had, but
>I  don't believe "he was so fucked up when he wrote GR
>that he couldn't remember what he was doing" or
>whatever that precise claim was.

Just for the record: "I was so fucked up while I was writing it that I now 
go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could 
have meant."

My take on this whole thing boils down to this:

1) Pynchon probably has some first-hand experience with drugs, and it is 
likely that he - like Aldous Huxley - took notes during or after these 
experiences.

2) Pynchon was probably "fucked up" when he wrote GR, if by "fucked up" we 
mean "troubled". The late 60es and early 70es were troubled times, after 
all, and GR is a very troubled book - and a better book for it.

3) Pynchon perhaps once in a while wrote while under the influence, and like 
those brilliant dreams we sometimes have, what he wrote may not have made a 
lot of sense to him afterwards.

BUT,

4) It is extremely unlikely that any of these senseless sequences - if they 
do indeed exist - have made it into the published novel. We know from 
different sources that Pynchon is a painstaking editor of his own work 
(Vineland and MD kept getting revised until the last minute) and if these 
sequences didn't hold any meaning for him upon editing the book, why would 
he leave them in? That simply doesn't make any sense (unless he was 
constantly blitzed, of course). GR is indeed a brilliant book, and some of 
its brilliance stems from its psychedelic sequences (Leunagasolin and the 
Moss Creature, anyone?), but I truly believe that the 'drug sequences' in GR 
are the result of hard work and constant revision rather than a rush of 
drug-induced inspiration. Art is "emotion recollected in tranquility", 
remember? Pynchon may have nailed the ambience of different drug experiences 
in GR, but the final novel is a carefully crafted work of art, and you can 
be damn sure that Pynchon knew exactly what he meant with even the most 
surreal passages.

If we take Jules Siegel on his word and suppose that he's transcribed a 
comment by Pynchon more or less verbatim, it's quite easy to see the comment 
as just one more of Pynchon's self-deprecating comments (see the foreword to 
SL for plenty more examples of these).

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