Unscrewing the navel allusion

[Ben Canard]

Well the letter to Candida is short, but P asks who Heller is. I assume
that means he'd never heard of him before.


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Great detail. Thanks. yeah, that is the question, I guess, unless we can
> know if he read parts of Catch--22 earlier, which,
> of course the first chapter he must have.....Took Heller a while to
> complete it.....Candida was sharing those 75 pages
> as early as 1958.
>
>   *From:* Ben Canard <bencanard2000 at gmail.com>
> *To:* Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Saturday, May 11, 2013 1:34 PM
> *Subject:* Re: Unscrewing the navel allusion
>
>  Lippincott sighed the contract for V. in January 1960, sight unseen;
> Pynchon wouldn't even say what it was about. It was bought on the strength
> of Low-Lands, which Lippincott placed in New World Writing. The manuscript
> was turned in in the summer of 1961 and then the novel was heavily edited
> by Pynchon (See Herman and Krafft's essay). In the letter Pynchon sent to
> Candida about Catch-22 in Nov. 1961, he sounds like he has just read the
> book for the first time. I guess the question is was Pynchon's editing
> influenced by that reading.
>
>
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  It is 1958. "Candida was delighted by [Robert] Gottleib's [S & S editor]
> enthusiasm for the Catch--18 manuscript.[[only 75 pages]. Finally,
> someone got it! "Ii thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall
> off, " she often said to describe her happiness
> when negotiations went well with an editor."   She had also received a
> positive response from Tom Ginsberg at Viking.
>
> S & S, we know, did publish Catch-22 and Ginsberg, a decade later,
> Gravity's Rainbow.
>
> I think it is clear from the stuff about Candida from this bio that
> Pynchon woudda probably read Catch-18 while he was writing
> V. as, at least I hinted at,,\ I say proudly full of myself, when I think
> I found some echoes of Heller in the early parts of V....
> Candida sent it, gave it, to about everybody.
>
> Catch--22 was not published until October 1961,  approximately 6--9 months
> before V. would have been set to be published by
> Lippincott in early 1963. (We know part of V. was published in 1961, but I
> do not know when V., finished, was offered to
> publishers, if it was...(that is, unless CD had made a deal early with
> Lippincott based on a major part of it.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
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