Letter to Charles Hollander

[Dave Monroe]

Dear Charles Hollander,

   It's nothing personal-- only that this year my new year's
resolutions include no complaining and no free advice to anybody about
what they should be doing with their lives, and responding to your
letters would have meant doing one or the other.

   At the same time, though, you write too well for me to be
discouraging you from it,  I just don't think you ought to be writing
about me. The sad truth is that you're giving me much too much credit.
My own research is nowhere near as deep or as conscientious as yours.
It is, in fact, as shallow as I think I can get away with, because I
don't write "novels of ideas."  Plot and character come first, just
like with most other folks's stuff, and the heavy thotz and
capitalized references and shit are in there to advance action, set
scenes, fill in characters and so forth, and the less of it I have to
do, the better for me cause I'm lazy.  Sorry to have to be the one to
tell you.  If you reverse polarity and read for mistakes, you'll see
this-- there are more, what Mr. Spock calls "errors", in Gravity's
Rainbow, for instance, than there are true facts.  And this is the
result of research habits and procedures about which "slovenly" is as
kind as one can get,

   But, there I go-- complaining again.

   So, as for collecting and publishing those old short stories, the
answer is no. It was nice of you to want to believe I had some
underlying coherent vision in mind, but I didn't. All it is is a bunch
of early attempts-- insufferably smart-assed, juvenile, and worst of
all not thought out.  Viking is also making noises about reprinting
them, and they are getting no for an answer just like you.

   As long as I've been complaining, I might as well make with the
free advice here-- you are too good to be wasting your time and energy
writing about somebody else's stuff.  You ought to be doing your own.
If your March 20th letter is an indication, you already see this and
are doing something about it, so I don't feel like that much of a
busybody telling you.

   Of course silence is hard to interpret.  If it wasn't they'd call
it "English," or something.

   Yours truly,


   Thomas Pynchon

---

Sale 2177 Lot 236

POST-MODERN MASTER COMMENTS ON HIS OWN WORK PYNCHON, THOMAS. Typed
Letter Signed, with 4 holograph corrections, to Charles Hollander,
refusing permission to write about and anthologize some of his early
stories because "[t]he sad truth is that you're giving me much too
much credit," and recommending that he instead write his own material.
With a photocopy of the Hollander letter that elicited the present
response. 1 page, 4to, yellow graph-lined paper. [New York, 1981]
Estimate $10,000-15,000

http://swanngalleries.rfcsystems.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=2177+++++236+&refno=++610669