Old fans who've always been at the movies

[Monte Davis]

I have no doubt at all it was in TRP’s mind: the story was prominent in US papers at the time, and – as the largest single rocket toll -- has been at least mentioned in many accounts of the A4/V-2. (And of course by now, it’s not unlikely that the final page of GR was in Atkinson’s mind as he wrote.) 

 

But De Mille’s The Plainsman: that’s a new detail to me, knotting into Crutchfield and Whappo and more.

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Laura Kelber
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 9:05 AM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Old fans who've always been at the movies

 

Great find (of an awful tragedy)! If this isn't the source of the final sequence in GR, it's an amazing coincidence. 

 

Laura


On May 29, 2013, at 8:58 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

(Haven’t we?)

 

Antwerp, 1944:

 

“Nearly twelve hundred seats were filled in the Rex Cinema on bustling Avenue De Keyser for the Friday afternoon matinee on December 15… [for] a classic Western: The Plainsman, a Cecil B. De Mille melodrama starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane…

 

“At 3:20 p.m., just after Gary Cooper learned of Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn, a searing white light flashed across the auditorium as a V-2 – unheard and unseen, launched from a new site in Holland – blew through the roof… Recovery teams ultimately retrieved 567 bodies, more than half of them Allied soldiers, Navy gun crews,  and merchant mariners...” 

 

Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe,  1944-1945

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