Prince and Pauper

[David Casseres]

I met Robert Stone once, at the home of a mutual friend.  It was at the time
of the Soviet entanglement in Afghanistan, and when the talk turned to that,
Stone quoted Kipling:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out
to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your
brains     An'
go to your Gawd like a soldier.It left an impression on me.


On 1/7/07, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Thomas Pynchon got there first. His arrival on earth preceded Robert
> Stone's by a scant three and a half months.
> His Arrival - Big A - in American literature preceded Stone's by quite a
> bit
> longer. Pynchon's first novel "V" - which some of us still think one of
> the
> authentic wonders of the literary world - appeared in 1963. Stone's superb
> but far less magisterial first novel "A Hall of Mirrors" wasn't published
> until August of 1967 (the so-called "Summer of Love," appropriately.)
>
> But that's all right. While Pynchon was lionized and contending uneasily
> with the game of literary fame and expectation that previously drove J. D.
> Salinger into lifelong seclusion (as it soon did Pynchon), Stone was a
> yet-to-be living the '60s counter-cultural life par excellence.
>
> Think of them as their literary era's Prince and Pauper, a little Twain
> fable of our national letters in one of the last century's key decades.
> Pynchon was born into relative Long Island prosperity and stability; Stone
> was the son of a single schizophrenic mother whose straits with her son
> were
> dire indeed throughout his childhood."....
>
> http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20070107/1055935.asp
>
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