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

[pynchonoid]

--- Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

pynchonoid:
> >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 have 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.
> 

Tore:
> 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."


Thanks, saves me the trouble. 

> 
> 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.

Difficult to believe otherwise.

> 
> 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.

A book full of a young man's rage at the Vietnam War,
among others, imho.

> 
> 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.

That's certainly possible, and I'd be surprised to
learn definitively that this didn't happen.

Much of what you say below reminds me of some things
I've written here previously, you're "preaching to the
choir" as they say.

> 
> 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. 

Having recently re-read Theophile Gautier's articles,
"Le club des hachichins", "La pipe d'opium", and "Le
hachich" something like that seems to be what he did,
had the experience, wrote about it later, using all
the literary tools at his disposal to write articles
that would communicate the gist of what that
experience is like - probably exaggerating,  inventing
and shaping as necessary to provide a story line to
pull readers through (in "Le club des hachichins" this
seems obvious.)

>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.

I'm sure he was inspired in non-drug-induced creative
states, too, and that the origin of this or that idea
or phrase might have come out of the creative blue,
but I expect all of his first drafts were rewritten
quite a few times and otherwise revised and polished
in the cold light of day.


> 
> 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).
> 

Yes, at that point they were still nominally "friends"
and Pynchon would have known (I imagine) what a prick
this particular friend is (I speak from extensive
personal experience as an email correspondent, back in
'97,  of the writer in question), how jealous he was
of his reputation and writing talent as a Rolling
Stone journalist, and I imagine Pynchon would have
been careful about what he said about a book he
probably knew back then was a masterpiece, in front of
an old college buddy who hadn't managed to make much
happen yet of any lasting significance as an author
who, even then, must have been painfully jealous of
Pynchon.

Good post, thanks.

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