Letter to Charles Hollander

[Joe Allonby]

The Crying of Lot 236.

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>