Words

[Mark Kohut]

This reminds me of a Pynchon story not overtold here or anywhere that I am
aware of. Which is why it feels uncertain to me now. I somehow learned it
long before I learned of this listserve and the resources of the web for
reading about Pynchon. I see myself in a library, probably NYC or Jersey
City public.

Somebody--my shaped memory says he was a Navy doctor,-- someone who got to
check out new sailors. He wrote of seeing TRP's Naval test scores....and
not quite believing in some of them, they were very high--it is surely
fanboy memory that remembers "highest"--but what surprised him most were
they were so uniformly high---maths (as the English write it) and
English...he could see that TRP had been an engineering major before
entering the Navy, and few correlated so high in language as well....I
think I remember him writing
it was not just high vocabulary and exact grammar it was the rhythm and
natural lyricism in the prose answers that stood out to him, to tie in with
Morris's good quote.

Now, intrigued, ---and allow for false exact memory from me--I remember I
think that he, too, was a Cornell guy, or anyway, had contacts there he
called about this new sailor....
Somebody did find records then and he learned that despite his engineering
major, TRP had on record that his desire was, and had been since he was
young, to be a writer.
He was as far as this doc was concerned. And to tie in with the V Woolf
quote, "this is very profound, what rhythm is..creates this wave in the
mind".

I would appreciate learning, as in some story or other I once read, that I
have pretty much made this up from some small detail(s).
OR, how a fanboy projects.


PS. Didja know that V. Woolf herself was slow to talk as a toddler?
Compared to her precociously talkative, slightly older sister? Who became
the visual artist..
V's parents were worried she was "slow".....a good biographer has suggested
her talkative sister dominated her expressiveness at first......since it
was later reported
by her parents that Virginia was now arguing back a lot against her
sister.....



On Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 3:53 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Words:
>
> Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: "Style is a very simple
> matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong
> words... Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper
> than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before
> it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one
> has to recapture this, and set this working (Which has nothing apparently
> to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes
> words to fit it."
>
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