ATD vs. V.? Overcoding or metaphor?

[Michael Bailey]

 David Morris wrote:
> I think the hollow earth segment in AtD was just a cheap throwaway.
>  It came and went without any real resonance with the rest of the book.
>   AtD needed a much more active editor.  A lot should have been cut
>  before publishing.
>

no doubt this has been mentioned before on the list, but Jackie
Onassis was his editor
at one point.  Fun was poked...

who knows what goes on behind the scenes.
Most people think that Maxwell Perkins improved Thomas Wolfe's books
immeasurably, but I've always been sort of curious about the material
that was cut.
(I think it's available somewhere, even been published,
but I haven't yet gotten that curious, I guess.)

for my part, I wouldn't cut a word of AtD.

If the Chicago scenes established the Chums and interfaced them with
the historical facts of the period in question, then the Hollow Earth
sequences set the Chums loose amid its myths and misinformation.

In between, didn't we have the Pacific sequence, with the Tesla
transmission, the fireworks and the falling-out over the figurehead?

Afterwards, don't we have their curious failure on the Vormance mission?

There's a lot of heavy lifting that could be done with that stuff, if
I felt up to it tonight.
Progressions, counterpoints, (de)cadences, singling up and casting off
of lines of flight...