eGad: Re: gaddis-pynchon letters??????

[Mark Kohut]

I want to suggest, just for talk, pure speculation founded on almost nothing, nothing at all that TRP did not read The Recognitions until after he wrote his last story---not counting that later story 'marketed as a novel' ---before he wrote V., perhaps helping him even conceive V.....that first novel so influenced by The Recognitions (in certain ways, not least ambition) as Tony Tanner first observed way back. 
 
All the learning, all the history in V. seems ........of a diffferent kind--not just scope----than the stories from one perspective. 
 
I know it is almost a stupid observation without a letter or other knowledge and I know that
TRP, voracious reader, might have read it anytime after publication but reread, studied and learned more from it when he decided to go for the longer book. Maybe just as likely that he read it while in the Navy when he might have had more time and let it ferment. Or that he 
had even started V. there or while back at school. We do know a story was reworked into it....maybe the story came out of working on V?, worked and reworked? 
 
We know he works carefully and that V. would have been fully written after he left Cornell when he went to Boeing, then left Boeing to finish it, still makes it one of his most-speedily-written works....  

--- On Sat, 12/19/09, Steven Moore <mooresteven at att.net> wrote:


From: Steven Moore <mooresteven at att.net>
Subject: eGad: Re: gaddis-pynchon letters??????
To: gaddis-l at yahoogroups.com
Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009, 7:23 AM


  




Dr. Moore is skeptical that (a) P & G ever corresponded at all, (b) that if they did, there would be enough to fill a book, and (c) that P would allow the letters to be published. Sounds like a great premise for a scholarly novel though, beginning with a young Pynchon's first fan letter to Gaddis in 1955 after The Recognitions was published.
Steve
 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: JD 
To: gaddis-l at yahoogroup s.com 
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: eGad: gaddis-pynchon letters????? ?

  

If this were real it would be relevant to both a) and b), but google conjures nothing.  Dr. Moore would know better I would assume, if this came from him I would be less skeptical.  I call shenanigans as of now.

(and while I was writing this Dr. Alberts chimed in, which sells this suspicion to me).


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Keith <keithsz at mac. com> wrote:


  




On Dec 18, 2009, at 7:38 PM, Richard Ryan wrote:

One conjures up a picaresque novel about a sticky-fingered critic 
roaming the archival landscape, raiding literary treasure troves 
under false pretenses, hoping for a whiff of the tail pipe of genius....
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- ---

Pop Quiz:

This is the

(a) Gaddis List
(b) Pynchon List
(c) Nabokov List





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