Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

[alice wellintown]

It is quite common for authors to work and re-work major ideas and
themes, characters, other elements,  as they progress as writers. So,
in a nutshell, Grover Snodd, boy genius with a few big blind spots
that his buddy Tim foils for the reader, is the education theme that P
took, in part, from Henry Adams, arguably his greatest influence early
on, and grafted on to a tale he took from Twain, an integration tale
that deals with the legacy of slavery and the great migration, with
Huck and Jim and Tom, wart and all...and this theme, education and the
conflict with the establishment, the father and the mother, be it
Slothropian education and the file that he opens that exposes his
parents, dad sells him to a Harvard experiment, mom wants him to earn
a star she can hang up and take pride in...this conflict, as Snodd
sees it, his father and he argue over Berlin (so the German period is
there in the slow learner too), his mother makes prank racist phone
calls to frighten the African Americans out of the neighborhood, has
much to do with math, or so the lad imagines it does because his view
is warped by his aptitudes, and these are in fact weaknesses, as Tim
explains, because Snodd is not smart enough to hide his talents from
those who will exploit them and him, and, ambition, even for a writer,
a sin, maybe a deadly one, as deadly as sloth, is easily exploited by
the establishment, particularly if the gifted one needs a leg up, or
funding. this theme, so obvious in AGTD, may be autobiographical to an
extent, but is a central theme in Invisible Man, in fact, chanpter
one, the battle royal, published as a short story, seems to have
influenced P, and surely the paint factory in IM shows up in GR, where
the whiteness of the whale and the whiteness of paint merge in what
is, far more important than the german themes, for these are subsets
of this larger one---labor. turn to M&D and we find the same conflict,
mason and his old man, dixon and his mentor, over work and study.
education, as P sez in that SL introduction, is a labor for  Venus.