Unscrewing the navel allusion

[Ben Canard]

Well Joyce 2009 doesn't actually have the letters; they are hard to get,
though they are at the Huntington in Pasadena: Herman and Krafft do, they
got them from Smith; Rolls has Of a Fond Ghoul, which is expensive when it
shows up on the collectors market (only 50 were printed), and he is only
discussing the contents of the memos: the presence of the first one pushes
the delivery date back from the one Smith suggests, because Smith had
forgotten the July 10th memo. Rolls also found Mahool, who says she typed
V., maybe from the typescript at HRC. Who knows?  Rolls has a more
substantial essay on the final edits, post U.S. publication, of V. here
https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/33/72 , but Herman and Krafft's
two essays, plus a third by Herman, Krafft, and Krafft about changes to the
Galleys in late 1962, are the essays that one needs to read to learn about
the transformation of the untitled typescript into V.


On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 1:55 AM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wow, so, Ben, I was NOT following the chronology correctly. Your timeline
> is correct. Bear with me.
>
> First, let me back up to when I was re-reading my shabby yellowing Bantam
> paperback copy of V. in March of this year using Wiki, Google, etc. refs ad
> hoc to understand the novel more fully than my first reading in 1973. As
> mentioned above, Joyce's 2009 student thesis<http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf?sequence=1> slices
> and dices Ch.9 - Mondaugen's Story including discussion between Pynchon and
> his editor Corlies (Cork) Smith about reworking the narrative of the
> historical Herero genocide into the larger framework of the novel. After
> looking at Albert Rolls' 2012 paper 'Pynchon, In His Absence'<https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/27/59> that
> you linked above, I looked back at the 2009 thesis and discovered that both
> papers refer to "Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon's V. at the
> Harry Ransom Center in Austin,"<http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a6dc7fe6-bd13-4cbc-bcaf-028c269a3522%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&hid=122> by Luc
> Herman and John Krafft (linked here in PDF format (VERY interesting - 10 on
> a Pynchonista scale of 1-10)). It includes details about "the famous
> Candida Donadio" and the contract deal with Lippincott. Curiously, there is
> some back and forth between author and editor about the title of the book
> (thinking about another thread on P-list about GR's working title). Other
> working titles include "World on a String", "Blood's a Rover", "Down
> Paradise Street" and "The Yo-Yo World of Benny Profane".  Attached is
> Giorgio de Chirico's The Enigma of the Hour (c.1912) a painting Pynchon
> proposed using for the novel's dust jacket, a cause of some frustration to
> the author.
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Ben Canard <bencanard2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> The manuscript was delivered to Lippincott in June. Smith left for
>> Cleveland in July, probably the Friday before the date on the memo, which I
>> believe was a Monday. Smith met Pat Mahool in Cleveland; she never became
>> Sale. Faith (her maiden name escapes me at the moment) is the college
>> friend who married Kirk Sale, also a college friend of Pynchon's. Faith was
>> working at Lippincott at the time; Mahool somewhere else. Pynchon did meet
>> Smith in November, apparently saying nothing about the novel.
>>
>> Pynchon had not written the novel and if I recall correctly needed the
>> money to get to Seattle; in any case, he started working at Boeing in Feb.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks Ben. That's certainly more detailed information about the letters
>>> between Pynchon and Smith than the letter from April 1962 cited in the
>>> student thesis linked above. That letter specifically regards revisions
>>> that Smith suggested to the narrative structure in Ch.9 - Mondaugen's
>>> Story.  So, if I follow correctly, the contract for V. was signed in Jan.
>>> 1960, Pynchon met Smith in Seattle later in 1960 and the first draft of the
>>> typescript was delivered to Smith in Cleveland, Ohio on July 10, 1961 at an
>>> American Library Association conference by Pat Sale (nee Mahool) who
>>> Pynchon knew from Cornell and who did the actual typing of the MS. I'm
>>> surprised by the meager $500 advance even considering those are 1961
>>> dollars.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Ben Canard <bencanard2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/27/59 Sorry I forgot the
>>>> link.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Ben Canard <bencanard2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> 1962 is an error the typescript was turned in June of 1961, as best as
>>>>> can be determined. Here's an article about a memo in which the writer
>>>>> discusses accepting it.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I love that story. The mental image conjures a cartoon by Don Martin
>>>>>> (w/ MAD magazine 1956-1988) in which a man pulls an annoying hair from his
>>>>>> shoulder with the sound effect "POINK" and his arm drops off.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> inre the publication of V. - I re-read V. in March this year and came
>>>>>> across a 2009 grad student thesis: (RE)VISIONS OF
>>>>>> GENOCIDE:NARRATIVES OF GENOCIDE IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S V. AND GRAVITY’S <http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf?sequence=1>
>>>>>> RAINBOW<http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf?sequence=1> that
>>>>>> refers to an April 1962 typescript draft of V. in letters between Pynchon
>>>>>> and his Lippincott editor, Corlies 'Corky' Smith, also, the ref. 'Smith,
>>>>>> Shawn. Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern
>>>>>> Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Routledge, 2005.
>>>>>> I'm new to this P-list so this may be old news.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:45 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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