Pynchon's project

[Mark Kohut]

i have always believed, when I learned such details, that The Crying
of Lot 49 was NOT one of the four. After all, he called it a 'short
story marketed as a novel' in Slow Learner.

That fourth novel was bruited about as 'being about Gojiro' or
equivalent (among who knows what else) which someone again said became
an embryonic part of Against the Day. maybe.

Again, I have thought three were GR, M & D and AtD. Vineland, I
believe came to him while he was working on the latter two, which
were, I still believe-- from Leonard's words about his grant,
---worked on from the end of GR until publication.



On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 7:33 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Many or most of you know about the Pynchon letters in the Pierpont Morgan
> Library, and have probably heard about the "four novels in progress" that TP
> mentions in '64.
>
> Poking around on the web I came across the Inherent Vice wiki and this:
>  In April 1964, Pynchon wrote to his agent, Candida Donadio, that he was
> facing a creative crisis, with four novels in progress, and that "If they
> come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the
> literary event of the millennium."[9] In December 1965, Pynchon politely
> turned down an offer to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that
> he had resolved, two or three years earlier, to write three novels at
> once.[10]Pynchon called the decision "a moment of temporary insanity," but
> noted that he was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of
> them."
>
> Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published a few months
> later in 1966. Whether it was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in
> progress is unknown, but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written
> that he was in the middle of writing a book that he called a "potboiler."
> When the book grew to 155 pages, he called it, "a short story, but with
> gland trouble," and hoped that Donadio "can unload it on some poor sucker."
> This would suggest that Crying of Lot 49 was not one of the four novels
> Pynchon was writing as of 1964, but no answer is certain.
>
> Now, we don't know with full certainty (TP hasn't said anythin), but can we
> really accept that the quoted parts of the letters 'suggest' that CL49 was
> NOT one of the novels? In fact, doesn't the contrary seem more likely? What
> do the rest of you think?
>
>
> ciao
>
> mc
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