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

[jbloocher at gmail.com]

Mark

Fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing this. It has given me much to think about on this beautiful Sunday; not least because I know nothing of Algren.

Thanks again Mark. This has lit a spark of thoughts.

JB

Sent from my iPhone

> On 16 Jun 2019, at 11:04, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l