Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?

[Dave Monroe]

Does McClintic Sphere in V. stand for Thelonious Monk?
by
Charles Hollander

Ornette Coleman Wily coyote that he is in V.(1963), Thomas Pynchon
adorns McClintic Sphere with a "hand-carved ivory saxophone," getting
us to think Sphere is somehow a stand-in for jazz great Ornette
Coleman. There was, in the civil-rights era of the '60s, much ado
about Coleman's "new sound" and his "new" white plastic sax. Like
Coleman's group, Sphere's group in V. features "no piano," plays music
vaguely expressive of "African nationalism," but (the narrator tells
us) Sphere is wrongly viewed as a "kind of reincarnation" of Bird
(Charlie Parker). A minor figure who drifts in and out of the
narrative of V., Sphere is often led by Paola Maijstral's maieutic
(O.E.D.; maieutic = Socratic) intellectual midwifery, through some
laborious dialogue, until he delivers what has come to be taken as the
novel's motto: "Keep cool, but care." (V.; 366) To whom does he speak?
For whom does he speak? To properly answer these questions, we should
figure out who he is.

Arguably the musician McClintic Sphere most recalls is another
esteemed figure in jazz history, pianist Thelonious Monk. I've
demonstrated elsewhere that one of Pynchon's favorite methods of
allusion is to use a half name of a famous person with a humorous
connecting name; Wendell "Mucho" Maas, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz, for
but two examples. In Lot 49, Pynchon means for us to summon political
figures Wendell Willkie and Henry De Lamar Clayton, on the subtextual
level. Also in Lot 49, Pynchon half-names "Secretaries James and
Foster and Senator Joseph," and similarly means for us to decrypt them
as Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. By naming his jazzman
McClintic Sphere, Pynchon signifies he wants us to decode to
Thelonious Sphere Monk in the subtext. If for Gertrude Stein, "a rose
is a rose is a rose"; for Pynchon, a Sphere is a Sphere.

Thomas Fitterling, in Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music (1997),
points out that Monk's middle name, "Sphere," derives from his
maternal grandmother, Sphere Batts. Not a hipster's cool affectation,
"Sphere" was part of Monk's given name according to family documents.
Monk didn't learn his middle name until the 1940s, when those
documents made their way from North Carolina to New York, and: "From
then on he used it as a hip accessory. He would joke that owing to his
middle name he could never be called a 'square'." (Fitterling, 20.)

Another telltale touch is Pynchon's use of disguises and aliases in
the text, like the various identities Slothrop dons during Gravity's
Rainbow. Slothrop poses as British correspondent Ian Scuffling, and as
a nameless Russian soldier; he masquerades as a pig, becomes known as
Rocketman, Raketemensch, and finally Rocky. "Ruby" is the alias
Pynchon gives the disguised Paola Maijstral while she is entertaining
and instructing Sphere. Not coincidentally, one signature tune in the
Monk oeuvre is titled, "Ruby, My Dear."

Thelonious & The Baroness Fitterling documents the widely known and
long-standing relationship between Thelonious Sphere Monk and the
Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, called "Nica" for
short. They were often seen together in public. Monk wrote songs using
her name or that of her apartment building, The Bolivar, in the
titles; "Pannonica", and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are". Being born into
the English line of the Rothschild family, growing up in Paris, and
attending a strict religious boarding school, seem to have stimulated
some rebellious streak in Nica. Being free of the usual financial
concerns allowed Nica to express her discomfort with traditional
women's roles. She became an aviator, a then-glamorous and adventurous
calling in the era of Amelia Earhart, "America's First Lady of the
Air." Soon she married fellow pilot Jules de Koenigswarter, a French
diplomat and later resistance fighter. During World War II, Nica went
on various missions for De Gaulle, which was not surprising if one
knew her brother served as Churchill's courier to the White House.
(Fitterling, 54) No ordinary woman, in the middle 1950s Nica chose to
become Monk's mistress and muse. In 1982 Monk died in the arms of his
wife Nellie, at Nica's New Jersey estate.

What, one might ask, does this have to do with Pynchon scholarship? It
is an early example of Pynchon's indicative naming. As a literary
ironist, Pynchon was likely drawn to Monk as an extraordinary
musician, a humorist, and a musical ironist (as Ronald Gray so ably
demonstrates in his article "Something in Blue-Thelonious Monk and
Henry Adams," on The Thelonious Monk Website: ). Probably Pynchon
recognized and appreciated Monk's use of irony. But Dizzy Gillespie
obviously had a humorous, ironic way about his music and his on-stage
persona. Why then did Pynchon choose Monk, not another, say Dizzy, on
which to pattern his jazzman? Pynchon chose Monk because his
well-known affair with Nica, The Baroness, suited his literary
purpose.

First, indicative naming is the use of a half-name where a fictional
character leads us to a real historical person. Second, the textual
reference leads to something extra-textual that is important for
understanding the work at hand - what I term Pynchon's misdirection.
Finally, this misdirection leads to a historical situation - though
never mentioning it in the text.

In this case, McClintic Sphere leads us to Thelonious Sphere Monk, and
Monk leads us to Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter and her life. There
are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as
V., who started her career with "'...a young crude Mata Hari act.'"
(V.; 386) Stencil remembers that somewhere along the line V. "'stole
an airplane: an old Spad...God what a flight it must have been: from
le Havre over the Bay of Biscay to somewhere in the back country of
Spain.'" (V.; 387) Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she
is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext.
Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us
to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret
agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, "The Big One, the
century's master cabal," and "the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name,"
(V.; 226) and the effect of World War II on the old-money crowd.

If McClintic Sphere somehow allusively stands for Monk, who connects
to The Baroness, then Pynchon has him speaking for the victims, the
noble remnant of the old dynasty (J.P. Morgan, The Rothschilds, etc.);
and has him speaking to those who view themselves as the disinherited,
the preterite, the passed-over in American society.

We see, then, that McClintic Sphere is not a one-to-one stand-in for
Ornette Coleman, and how and why Pynchon means Sphere to signify
Thelonious Monk and his mistress, the Baroness. We see how Pynchon's
use of irony and camouflage will mislead readers lacking the trained,
or magic, eye.

© 1999,
by Charles Hollander
Baltimore, MD

This essay is scheduled to be published in "Notes On Contemporary Literature."

http://web.archive.org/web/20110719161859/http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php