Upstairs, Downstairs

[Mark Kohut]

I especially like the Solzhenitsyn joke.

Who hid out in the Connecticut countryside--surely in plain sight of the KGB---
for a bit during these years. I know because the bookstore I worked at was owned
by Thomas Whitney, who translated some Solzhenitsyn and was part of the
circle which helped Solzhenitsyn...(The Carlisles, Olga and Henry seemed to
lead the escape forces.)

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 5:30 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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