Exciting Pynchon news, new to me anyway: Pynchon & Algren

[Mark Kohut]

>From an old good friend:

Mark;

As you know, I've always been fond of Nelson Algren. I am now reading the
newest of three bios of him, by Colin Asher, called *Never a Lovely So Real*,
in some ways the best, in some ways not. In it, towards the end, he quotes
the young Pynchon, in a letter sent through Candida Donadio (p. 409).

I know he [Algren] is behind a great deal of what I do. I only wish I had
not read the book right at this time because it raises certain inescapable
truths about writing, being a writer in America, that I've been trying to
avoid, like knowing the number of bars in a jail cell for one thing, the
whole business of reconstruction, contrivance, as against naturalism in the
American, its best sense.

M


Wow, gang of fans and scholars. A new (?) Pynchon letter--and expressed
influence. An
old friend of mine took the time to type and send me this. He says the
letter was written
in 1964.

I associate it with Pynchon's words in *Slow Learning* about not knowing
the meaning of the word 'tendril',
even though he used it, when he was a too-young writer. Here he expressly
states he needed to know real details-- "certain inescapable truths" as a
writer.

Nelson Algren, writer of and about the preterite, a naturalist---a word now
consigned to the history of a certain time in literature,
I'd say, subsumed in the verbal binary of realism vs 'not'. Maybe, dunno?
Not realism=from hysterical to surreal.

'Naturalism' as a labelled manifest style was also strong in many other
countries, maybe most notably France but I'm
only a comparative magpie not a comparative lit scholar. But Pynchon found
it best in its American manifestation. Wonderful to know.
The solidity of the thing itself as an "inescapable" condition---and in HIS
work.

Without Algren's influence, *Gravity's Rainbow *would not be so endlessly
precise (I know it ISN'T perfect in some Cartesian irreality but it is and
we know that) , is it fair to say?

A---and, is it another possible answer to why he felt, by 1984, that  *The
Crying of Lot 49* was a failure, "a short story marketed as a novel" which,
according to Jules Seigel he started writing after the publication of* V *and
could be what he was working on when he expressed a regret at reading this
book "right at this time"? *Crying of Lot 49, =*"a reconstruction, a
contrivance"?

This is from wikipedia on Algren's most famous, because best, book, *The
Man with the Golden Arm, 1949: "*Nifty Louie owed money to politically
connected men, and finding his killer becomes a priority for the police
department. Sparrow is held for questioning by the police, and he is moved
from station to station to circumvent *Habeas corpus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus>* requirements. Eventually he
breaks down and reveals what he knows, and Frankie is forced to flee."

Probably where the number of bars in a prison cell is known by Algren on
the page.

What an exciting morning in the reading life. I may take the rest of the
Pynchon day off because I have organized counter programming to
Bloomsday---Happy Bloomsday all---an against the day daylong town
reading of* Mrs.
Dalloway*, that other revelatory day in the mind of a representative person
of the times modernist novel.

PS. Wiki sez Leonard Cohen alluded to the Algren nvel--or the movie?-- in
his first album and I remember that.

That's all, folks.