Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Pynchon

[Monte Davis]

I can no longer read about the Navy in Pynchon without thinking of Robert
Stone (same age, USN c. 1955-1958) recalling the Norfolk street musician
whom he didn't use and Pynchon did, or rowdy liberties in Capetown, or this
"balloon goes up" passage from 'Prime Green':

Once, at Ismailia, I nearly got to fire the five-inch in anger. It was
October 1956 and we were evacuating American civilians from the Suez Canal
Zone. Mystère jets from the French carrier Lafayette were bombing the
harbor areas, sending donkeys and baskets of figs and women wrapped in
folds of cloth high in the air. Coming in, the planes would seem to be
touching our radar masts. We had a huge American flag with spotlights on
it. Our position was helpless, tied up at what they call Med Mole, a system
of docking used in many Mediterranean ports, where the fantail of the ship
is up against the pierside and a boat runs to the landing station. Each
time a plane came over we would awkwardly track it with our five-inch and
our fifty-caliber, waiting for the order to fire, really wanting to hear
it. American sailors have been known to die by mistake in the Middle East,
usually victims of Israeli fire forgetting its friendliness for a few
hours. But we in the amphib Navy were ready to start our own little naval
war with France. It would, I think, have been the second. But fortunately
none of our civilians were hurt and the French were bluffing. Egyptians
died, though, begging us for protection, and we were moored close enough to
them to take it personally. A general rage spread among all hands, a rage
of battle I had never seen before.

I had to be grateful for all that. I was. I was not going to forget the
migrating birds in the Indian Ocean or Mount Erebus smoking. Or the human
factors: my fatuousness, as I reflected more and more on it.

More than anything I was to remember the people, the Australians and New
Zealanders as they were fifty years ago, the variety of young Americans to
be found in the Navy, recruited from pre-television America, a place more
varied than younger people today imagine.

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 4:10 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Get me Rewrite: Lose that "just"...
>
> He got so many stories and characters from his Navy experience.
> And he so disses academia vs real experience.
>
> he writes that in American society in the Eisenhower years
> "there seemed to be no reason why it should all not just go on as it was."
> [notice his use of 'just']....Talk about Entropy, cultural stasis as
> entropy and a
> cultural judgment shared by many other writers and thinkers, I think.
> And how he embraced and learned from the break-out artists.
>
> (Again, one of my favorite images, not shared by many, is Phoenix having
> to walk back and forth between the walls in the master's house in The
> Master)
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:06 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just Zeitgeist synchronicity.   Just? as in merely?   What was in the
>> wind is probably more important than sources, no?
>> And more so, as Pynchon explains in that SL Introduction, once he begins
>> to gain confidence and stop all the fancy dancing kid stuff and get out On
>> the Road, a Wandering Scholar. BTW, F S Fitzgerald quit school and did a
>> stint in the army too.
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Oh wow. I never bothered to compare the publishing dates. Something must
>>> have been in the air I suppose.
>>>
>>> On Tuesday, January 19, 2016, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Mumbo Jumbo was published in 1972. I cannot easily find out what month.
>>>>
>>>> Gravity's Rainbow was published early in 1973.
>>>> Which means the GR manuscript was turned over to Viking by summer
>>>> 1972.
>>>>
>>>> Which makes the mention late in GR a shout-out to a book he likes a lot.
>>>> An incorporated blurb as it were providing a cool aside about a new
>>>> writer.
>>>>
>>>> There is evidence---Catch -22 probably---that even then Pynchon was
>>>> able to read
>>>> some new novels in manuscript or galley form. But if he couldn't read
>>>> Mumbo-Jumbo
>>>> this way, then he must have read it as he was finishing up and or
>>>> proofing GR
>>>> himself.
>>>>
>>>> If he could have read it earlier than 1972, most of GR was finished
>>>> anyway so
>>>> no major influence. Just Zeitgeist synchronicity.
>>>>
>>>> which leads to the next post.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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