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

[Mark Thibodeau]

Beautiful, exciting stuff, Mark. Thank you for it.

This is the kind of thing for which I suspect most of us subscribe to
this email list, and which all too rarely pops up anymore (no fingers
pointed, I share the blame).

And yet, perhaps this very substantial Pynchonian nugget is all the
more special for not being part of some crazy flood of equally
interesting material? :-)

Lots of tangents to travel in your (your friend's) offering. Been
putting off reading Golden Arm for far too long. It has now moved up
my reading list to Number Four, for when I finish Beatty's The
Sellout, then Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising, then Sanders' Lincoln
in the Bardo.

Cheers!
yer old pal Jerky

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 5:05 AM 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