Upstairs, Downstairs

[Monte Davis]

>From "Hiding Man, " Tracy Daugherty's biography of the incomparable Donald
Barthelme...; Dave Monroe and Mark Kohut flagged it here when it came out
in 2009, but I just got around to it:

During the early seventies, Pynchon lived off and on in the Sales’s
basement apartment [on W. 11th St.], below Don, when the Sales were away.
He wrote parts of Gravity’s Rainbow there. As he came to know Don, he was
impressed by Don’s neighborliness. “He disliked being alone, preferring
company, however problematical, to no company,” Pynchon recalled. The two
men hit it off; they shared a quick wit. Karen Kennerly says that one
morning, Pynchon called Don and said, “I’ve just put the cat in the
refrigerator. Do you think that’s a problem?” On another day, he sent Don a
note saying he’d thought he’d spotted Don walking around the Village, but
he didn’t approach him “on the off-chance it was Solzhenitsyn.”

For that last, see Barthelme e.g. here:

http://blog.chron.com/bookish/files/2013/09/DBbyJerry-Bauer.jpg
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