Counterflying on the Pynchon drug 'connection"

[Mark Kohut]

All---
   
  As I have posted, I think TRP was working harder than 
  ever during the 17 years between published books.
   
  A-and, I also believe with much less circumstantial evidence
  that whatever drug use TRP practiced, I am willing to bet it
  was much less than even the average and never came close
  to messing up his mind and had nothing to do with the 'missing'
  17 years.   
   
  Why? Just a judgment call but.....the guy is incredibly disciplined,
  it seems, writing incredibly rich and allusive books by hand on graph
  paper, revising, revising, fact-checking, or not revising and getting it mostly
  right in the writing line by line but still fact-checking [see Slow Learner] and
  reading, reading and absorbing into his vision everything he goes after intellectually,
  encrypting it into those poetic structures of novels, learning languages and
  the slang thereof! and thinking hard and long and thinking some more every 
  minute while he writes, borrowing The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers
  from Ian McEwan and folding THAT into M & D.....and, yes, I would bet on at least
  one acid trip or a couple-three but I would also bet that the intensity of GR and the 
  depth and beauty of other books (or parts thereof) were written in full undrugged 
  consciousness...... I still wonder whether all of the coffee-drinking in M & D is supposed
  to be a good or bad thing----compared to tea.
   
  A good lit scholar/critic, Lionel Trilling, I think, once wrote an essay on the fact that
  many of the greatest American writers, Faulkner, fitzgerald, others, were ...alcoholics
  or at least drunk a lot of the time.  He "showed" that however much that was part of their
  characters, they could not write that way and didn't.
   
  Do we really think that beautiful, lyrically relentless and incredible to-the limit comic prose of 
  GR was written while his mind was 'on drugs"?.....
   
  I don't. 
   
  Just Say No,
  MK

       
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