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

[Gary Webb]

Interesting article on Algren... None of which I was aware of ...

I heard an interesting story on Noir Alley about Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) with the great Richard Widmark and Thelma Ritter no Less! 

Anyway, 20th Century Fox had a special agreement with the FBI, Hoover being obsessed with its image in film/media... He saw a early screening of the film and had serious objections to the contents, most notably the main character being a pick-pocket, etc. Fuller told him that he would make no changes, and Darryl Zanuck backed him, thus terminating their FBI liaison. Algren reminds me of a Sam Fuller type character... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/nelson-algrens-street-cred


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 16, 2019, at 6:44 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l