Was Heller & V. thread

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, for serious readers. An Angela Porter, NWW editor, shared Candida's judgment, supported by the Chief
Editor. (She however did not like later parts of Catch--18 much, feeling them repetitious,as further stories, in effect) 
 
I suggested in earlier posts that it might have been thru Candida that Pynchon might have read Heller early, but
Ben Canard showed otherwise surely. There is little evidence that Helller was reading new writers much at the
time he was writing Catch -22,--Shakespeare, the Greeks; he read more than I ever thought he had--
 also mentioning that On The Road was being written by another writer outside  this circle, when the first chapter 
of On The Road was in the same issue of the mag, under a pseudonym, as Catch--18. 
 
heller did not like the Beat sensibility.
 

From: Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 9:40 PM
Subject: Re: Was Heller & V. thread



New World Writing is one connecting link btwn. Heller and Pynchon. It was owned by Lippincott. The initial chapter  oof Catch-22 was published in 1955 as "Catch-18", in Issue 7 of New World Writing. Heller's agent was "the famous Candida Donadio". Pynchon's short story "Low-lands" was first published in Issue 16 of New World Writing in March 1960. And Lippincott is where Corlies Smith and Faith Sale worked and co-edited V. When sorting out the mind-set of writers/novelists during the pre-Kennedy Assassination years, I would add Robert Stone who wrote a defining memoir/autobiography titled Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007). Stone was born in Brooklyn the same year as Pynchon, dropped out of high school, did a 4-year stint in the Navy (1954-8), did some hack writing in New York and New Orleans, ending up at Stanford where he rubbed elbows with Ken Kesey. He was literally and figuratively "on the bus (Furthur)" with Kesey and Neal Cassady and
 other ne'er-do-wells. Prime Green refers to a beach in Mexico which may be a bit like Paradise. The memoir and the generation climaxes in 1969, the year of Neil Armstrong and Charles Manson before Stone went to Vietnam as a correspondent..



On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

Heller remarked latet in his career that at the time he was writing Catch--22, Kesey was writing 
>Cuckoo's Nest, Pynchon was writing V. , Donleavy, The Ginger Man and Vonnegut Catch--22.
>He knew of the work of none of the others; he had never heard that any of them knew of each other then. 
>
>It was the sensibility turn somehow, he implies. 
>The biography author quotes Bruce Jay Friedman about this time. "In college, all the courses I took were
>about what's wrong." Associatively implying that their work tackled that. 
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