ATDTDA 713

[Monte Davis]

 Michael Bailey sez:

> Hotel Klomser - big spy dude named Redl in "reality"
> had some major haps connected with the Hotel Klomser...
> details on Wikipedia, they are more than just pretty fascinatin'
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Redl

Double-underline this, foax -- especially if you wonder what all the
Austrian - Balkan hugger-mugger is doing in AtD. Remember also what Pynchon
wrote in the introduction to Slow Learner:

"I had grown up reading a lot of spy fiction, novels of intrigue, notably
those of John Buchan. The only book of his that anyone remembers now is The
Thirty-nine Steps, but he wrote half a dozen more just as good or better.
They were all in my hometown library. So were E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen
MacInnes, Geoffrey Household, and many others as well. The net effect was
eventually to build up in my uncritical brain a peculiar shadowy vision of
the history preceding THE TWO world wars. Political decision-making and
official documents did not figure in this nearly as much as lurking, spying,
false identities, psychological games." [emphasis mine]

The Redl case loomed as large in the Buchan and Oppenheim oeuvres -- and a
lot more Pynchon would have read in the pulps -- as, say, Klaus Fuchs, the
Rosenbergs, Burgess-Philby-McLean, and the CIA-KGB-MI5 "wilderness of
mirrors"  have loomed in fiction since WWII. Not just pulpy Fleming and
Clancy "spy fiction," but heavier hitters like Martin Cruz Smith, Kanon, le
Carre, DeLillo et al. 

Pynchon's age and childhood reading place him perfectly to see it as a
continuum. To us, Vienna as a world capital, Uskoks, fancy-dress hussars,
Tsars and Habsburgs may have a musty comic-opera flavor... but from a
Pynchonian height (depth?), to coin a phrase, "the past isn't dead. It isn't
even past."