Our Man in Havana: EXTRA, EXTRA: BREAKING NEWS

[Mark Kohut]

There is this anecdote in the new bio of Le Carre. Real name
David Cornwell as we know, he tells of stumbling over an
MI5 lawyer in an office with a new mint copy of Our Man In Havana....
David expresses interest.....The lawyer sez: this fellow Greene is going to
have to be prosecuted... he reveals how a station agent handles someone
he's running...so well......... "because the book is so damned good".

They did not prosecute and when David read the book he was very taken,
says the biographer, with the way the fake info could be communicated but
he had trouble with the presentation of the torturer in a comic mode.
(David
might not like all of GR, eh, despite how TRP likes his work?))


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 1:09 PM
Subject: Re: Pynchon's reading
To: ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <Pynchon-l at waste.org>


Well yeah, but when Pynchon himself namechecks one---out of so so many---I
would think too that ti is a little more direct in its influence than just
many similar others.
But, of course, I LOVE a new allusive sourcing that works so well with the
text.

Prediction: we, scholars are going to be doing that for decades, maybe
centuries if TRP
is as good as the best of his time.

Recently rereading and studying Shakespeare as I did, anyone would be
astonished to see
what the scholars can believably point to. The granularity of allusion
would blow anyone on this list
even if seen only a little---as I only saw it a little.  We all know of
many existing works of each
play he INVARIABLY made better...(the plot changes and language are his
major genius)
Only three plays were not borrowed plots.......and we learned of Ovid, so
major and Montaigne..
but they have found little two word phrases or inverted phrases in the
English translation of
Montaigne and Ovid and other stuff that is so interesting (and believable).

You, we, all have phrases, song lyrics, etc. lines from books that come
back out when we talk or write...
But his genius was almost living in the other words as much as in life, in
some sense.

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:08 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Could be, Monte, but this spy master plot is common enough in the fiction
> P read and, in the cold war life he lived through. Right?
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:27 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I've always thought that both the White Visitation's Schwarzcommando plan
>> to disturb the dreams of the Reich and its own belief in Slothrop's starry
>> map owed something to 'Our Man in Havana', in which the spymasters eagerly
>> receive and amplify a feckless informant's fabrications.
>>
>> (As a fan of  the Greene book and Guinness movie, I had anticipatory
>> doubts about Le Carre's homage/update in 'The Tailor of Panama' and the
>> 2001 movie, but both turned out well, setting a high bar for quasi-remakes.)
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Scholars, academic and independent--some of us--have
>>> explored Pynchon's elusive allusive sources in classic and important
>>> major books.
>>> Pynchon has given us or confirmed a few. A voracious reader, some books
>>> drunk deep,
>>> others, as he in SLOW LEARNER and as Paul M.reminds, just
>>> surface-skimmed for
>>> his writing needs.
>>>
>>> But we know he reads, read, many novels when brand new. See *Mumbo
>>> Jumbo. *
>>> He mentions *Our Man In*
>>> *Havana* in SL. We are pretty sure about *Catch--22.* He must have kept
>>> up with LeCarre
>>> as he published his now 26, i think again SL. Most of us assume he read
>>> the books he has blurbed.
>>> Others we know of?
>>>
>>> I imagine a steadily-working writer, who, however. with firm
>>> self-criticism, considered himself slothful, like another productive
>>> writer, Sam Johnson who would write as well s he could most days, research
>>> and plan on others and would read--and watch TV and go to the movies--many
>>> a night and weekend.
>>>
>>> Nothing special here I know, just putting it down.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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