Open letter to the P-List

[Dave Monroe]

Open letter to the P-List:

>From The Dude.

When I found how much richer reading Pynchon’s work became using the
technique of tracking his allusions, I, as reader, found the words on
the page were suddenly surrounded by resonant historical people,
places, and things.  More than finding TRP was merely name-dropping
(which would be O.K., displaying his erudition); I found that he was
building a second structure, a “counter-narrative,” often related to
the “narrative” in surprising ways.  Independent of me, a number of
critics, especially in Europe (John Dugdale, for one), seemed to grasp
this way of reading TRP, and took off on it.  They were often
flabbergasted by where they wound up because they didn’t know enough
American history.

I was of the generation that came of age and voted in my first
Presidential election in 1960.  By Thanksgiving of 1963 I was
disillusioned and could no longer “believe” in the electoral process.
I was not a Bolshevik, nor a Wobbly, nor a hippie.  I was an average
kid who grew up in suburban Baltimore, went to a highly competitive
public high-school that sent about 85% of its graduates on to college,
and as a nice Jewish boy I was lucky enough to go to college at a time
when my university (Johns Hopkins, then well known for its
undergraduate science, pre-med, and engineering curricula) was
emphasizing the humanities, balancing its course offerings by
recruiting some Liberal Arts heavyweights.  I managed to study with
some really world-class scholars, whose names are a generation out of
the mainstream.  So I won’t bore you with them.

The style in literary studies, at the time, was according to rules
laid down by The University of Chicago New Critics, whose orthodoxy
held that “only what’s in the text” mattered.  We were instructed in
close readings of various works from Chaucer to Joyce, never to touch
on their personal lives, the social issues of their eras, or the
political struggles that were afoot in their lifetimes.  It seemed to
me then, this was a capricious dogma, perhaps one that served the
political climate of the McCarthy period, which corresponded to the
period in which it came to be the norm.  It might have been Richard
Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce (1959) that struck the death knell
of The New Criticism.  I’m not sure of the ins and outs of it.  But
relatively soon (in 1966) there was a Hopkins sponsored meeting on
“Structuralism,” a week-long affair featuring many of the French
scholars who seemed to have adopted and refined the goals and
techniques of this school of criticism, that became known as “The
Baltimore Conference.”  And Structuralism was loosed upon the land.

When it came to Pynchon, certainly structuralism comes into play, and
his insistence on his privacy, his aversion to the press, forces most
critics into a New Criticism posture.  I felt I had to invent a new
way of doing “Pynchon criticism,” as the old models were either
somewhat out of touch, or out of date.  For example, I think there is
reason to believe that genre studies, following Northrop Frye (who, it
turns out, was in vogue when Pynchon was at Cornell), might be the
most helpful, along with a handful of biographical research, and the
tactic of tracking down and getting all the information one can about
the names, or half-names, blithely dropped by Pynchon on his way.

Taking these approaches in hand, I found (and might have been among
the first to harp on) Menippean satire as Pynchon’s favorite genre,
and this seems to have been the topic of a few doctoral dissertations
that support that assertion.  Now, it is almost a given.  It was not
the old Menippean satires of the Roman period that Pynchon used:
rather, it was the Menippean satire that Northrop Frye describes in
his revelatory and startling book, The Anatomy Of Criticism (1957).
Recognizing how Pynchon writes, as a consequence of following the
Menippean conventions,   clearly puts him in the category of the
Satirists.  Few critics saw him as such upon the  release of Gravity’s
Rainbow, probably the most successfully complex satire in the history
of American letters.

The next thing I found out was, I had to track down each proper noun
in the text.  The most successful and applauded of my work is my essay
on The Crying of Lot 49.  I’ve had the most flattering things said to
me at Pynchon conferences by European academics about that one,
despite what the P-List thinks of it.  It was by some subterfuge, I
think, that the Belgian Website where it had been visible is no longer
up.  I hesitate to think what that might mean.  But, nevertheless, I
find that my methods, in that instance, lead to some remarkable
insights.


In particular, the business of the post Nov 23, 1963 cover-up
conspiracy that I cite as where the allusions eventually lead, has
become the subject matter of an investigatory book titled The Legacy
of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, published by
Counterpoint of Berkeley, (2008).  The first and last chapters are
on-line and Dave Monroe has posted the URLs in a previous note to you.
[It was through Dave that I became aware of the book, and I owe him a
big thank you.  Good job, Dave, and thanks.]  The book presents a
picture with which  I don’t entirely agree, but in which you will find
a lot of things Pynchon was getting at in Lot 49: the usual suspects,
same old institutions, many of the same names; on the whole a
startling one-to-one mapping of the same general schema that Pynchon
was courageous enough to publish in 1966, albeit in deep code.
Whether the authors of Legacy are correct in each and every detail is
no longer important in a matter of such large national concerns.  It
is the overall picture of the cover-up that seems to match what Lot 49
is about on the counter-narrative level.  I think Legacy more or less
strengthens my Lot 49 essay, which, in turn corroborates my methods.

Finally, I’d like to take another look at Pierce Inverarity.  I’m old
enough to have tracked down a volume of scholarship that was still to
be found in used book shops forty years ago.  I remember it was in
1969, in a New Jersey bookstore, one that had a lot of political books
of all stripes.  This one was called America’s 60 Families, by
Ferdinand Lundberg, and it was first printed in 1937 (the year Pynchon
was born) and I would be surprised if it wasn’t to be found in
Pynchon’s father’s library.  The book was much in vogue with the
wealthy, as well as the working class, and all the classes in-between.
 It enjoyed at least ten printings that I know of; maybe more.  It is
now a 70 year old work, and it reports on lots of events that were
important a generation before.  For example:

“Percy N. Furber, president of Oil Fields of Mexico, Ltd., in 1918
told C.W. Barron that “the [Mexican] revolution was really caused by
Henry Clay Pierce,” who owned thirty-five per cent of the stock of the
Pierce-Waters Oil Company, which Standard Oil controlled through a
sixty-five per cent stock interest, and was a confidential Rockefeller
henchman. [my italics] “He wanted to get my property,” said Furber,
who continued: “H. Clay Pierce demanded of Diaz that he should take
off the taxes on all imports” to enable Standard Oil to bring in
products from the United States.  “Diaz refused ... Pierce put up the
money behind Francisco Madero and started the revolution ... neither
Clay Pierce or anybody else ever dreamed of what would follow.”

“Standard Oil’s Francisco Madero was ousted on February 18, 1913, and
was executed by Victoriano Huerta, pawn of British oil interests.  The
revolutionary movement deepened.  To the north Carranza and his
lieutenant, Pancho Villa, took the field against Huerta.  The
Caranzistas soon obtained backing from Cleveland H. Dodge [a
Rockefeller in-law] and his companion magnates. [President] Wilson
from the outset refused to recognize Huerta’s government.” p. 124

... “On April 21, 1914, American warships, upon instructions from
Washington, shelled Vera Cruz to prevent a German ship from landing
munitions consigned to Huerta.  There was loss of life and great
property damage.” p.125

So we see the Inverarity mom and dad named little “Pierce” after a
man, known as “the 4th richest man in America,” and as a “confidential
Rockefeller henchman.”  And that he was no mere real estate
manipulator in a California defense plant town.  Clay Pierce was a man
who had impact upon hemisphere-wide politics, and with the involvement
of “British oil interests” and “German munitions” ships, could be said
to be a player on the global level.

And it is by virtue of half-name allusions that Pynchon wants us to
link Henry Clay Pierce and Jay Gould (another henchman whose Erie
Railroad granted Standard Oil secret freight rebates to gain an edge
over its competitors).  And Gould’s statuette appears in Inverarity’s
bedroom, all in chapter one of Lot 49.

I know only a few things for certain.  Death and taxes.  I also know
if a bird walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, dives like a duck,
chances are it’s not a bald eagle.  I mean, how many points in
identity do two things have to have before we can say they are
identical.  I mean, how many Standard Oil henchmen do we have to
identify before we can say they likely play a large part in the
counter-narrative to Lot 49?  Especially when the half-names of
“Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph” pop up in chapter
five, standing for Standard Oil henchmen James V. Forrestal, John
Foster Dulles, and Joseph McCarthy; and those counter-narrative names
seem to corroborate understanding of Pierce Inverarity to mean H. Clay
Pierce, as Jay Gould means to corroborate illegal freight rebates.  I
mean how many people pointed to in the very first chapter have to have
such connections before we think the counter-narrative is likely about
something having to do with the Rockefellers?

Hardly a geezer is now alive who remembers how vigorously old JDR was
hated.  As John T. Flynn opened his biography, God’s Gold (1932); “For
forty years–from 1872 to 1914–the name of John D. Rockefeller was the
most execrated name in American life.  It was associated with greed,
rapacity, cruelty, hypocrisy, and corruption.  Upon it was showered
such odium as has stained the name of no other American.  Theodore
Roosevelt denounced Rockefeller as a law-breaker.  William J. Bryan,
his fellow Christian, went up and down the land demanding that he be
put in jail.  The attorney-generals of a half a dozen states clamored
for his imprisonment.  La Follette called him the greatest criminal of
the age. [my italics] Tolstoi said no honest man should work for him.
Ministers of the gospel called the money he showered upon churches and
colleges ‘tainted.’  For years no man spoke a good word for John D.
Rockefeller, save the sycophant and the time-server.”

I think those attitudes were also shared by anyone who was associated
in any way with the Old Dynasty (built on coal, steel, railroads, and
shipping money), as opposed to the New Dynasty, (built on oil,
aluminum, airlines, and defense contracts); the Old Dynasty whose
financier was J.P. Morgan through his banks, and whose closely related
ally was the brokerage Pynchon & Co.  And that’s the way I think we
have to read Pynchon.  And, I forgot to mention, in real life
Pynchon’s wife, Melanie Jackson, is the great-grand-daughter of
Theodore Roosevelt.

                       Charles Hollander

                       Baltimore, MD