Shadow Ticket—Pre-Code

Sun May 3 12:17:58 UTC 2026

Hi folks, back after many years.

My initial reaction to Shadow Ticket was mostly negative. But I couldn't stop reading the damned thing, something was bothering me, as if something obvious was starring me in the face. After reading Shadow Ticket six times in a row, this was my reaction. 

Pre-Code

. . . In 1931, the year of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, young Tyrone was visiting his aunt and uncle in Lenox. It was in April, but for a second or two as he was coming awake in the strange room and the racket of big and little cousins' feet down the stairs, he thought of winter, because so often he'd been wakened like this, at this hour of sleep, by Pop, or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay of dream into the cold to watch the Northern Lights.

They scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?

But this was a spring night, and the sky was gusting red, warm orange, the sirens howling in the valleys from Pittsfield, Lenox, and Lee—neighbors stood out on their porches to stare up at the shower of sparks falling down on the mountainside . . . "Like a meteor shower," they said, "Like cinders from the Fourth of July . . ." it was 1931, and those were the comparisons. The embers fell on and on for five hours while kids dozed and grownups got to drink coffee and tell fire stories from other years.

But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at . . .

GR, 29

If I were to attempt such a thing as a unified field theory of Thomas Pynchon, or at least a collection of interconnected and repeated leitmotivs, I'd start with family. There’s William Slothrop, echoing William Pynchon in his pacifist rejection of Calvinist values. The William Pynchon story is historically important, as his critique on Puritanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritanism, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meritorious_Price_of_Our_Redemption, published in London in 1650, was burned on Boston Common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Common by the Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Colony after the book made it back to Boston. The Puritans pressed Pynchon to return to England, which he did in 1652. The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meritorious_Price_of_Our_Redemption was first book to be Banned in Boston, in this case not due to salacious content but due to the promotion of a more loving and less judgmental God.

When “Against the Day” came out a friend of my wife, a history teacher, gave me six books on American history, much of it focusing on Wall Street. I was looking for citations of Pynchon and Company, as the enterprise was flourishing during the time span of Pynchon’s novel. As it turns out, out of more than 4,000 pages, there was only one citation about it, in “America in the Twenties” by Geoffrey Perrett, page 442:

. . . It was not until the spring of 1931 that Wall Street, where legend has it that the Depression began, saw its first serious collapse. For a year and a half brokerages weeded out the players who had lost (known in the parlance of customer’s men as “pushing the dead ones overboard”). The market was not as exciting a place as it had been, but the commission on selling was the same as the commission on buying. Contrary to cherished folk wisdom, it was as safe as it had ever been to walk down Wall Street; there was little danger of being struck on the head by a falling stock broker. But in April 1931 Pynchon and Company, one of the biggest, most respected firms, went bust. To many on Wall Street this was almost as stunning as the crash itself . . . 

The history of the losers, as Pynchon always reminds us, tends to get buried. From a “Time” magazine article of May 3, 1931:

“ . . . It came into existence 36 years ago in Chicago as Raymond, Pynchon & Co., a Board of Trade house and moved to New York the same year. Once thought to be its prize customer was Benjamin F. (“Old Hutch”) Hutchinson, greatest of the grain manipulators, who cornered wheat in 1888. Perhaps one reason for the move to Manhattan was that at that time potent Chicago speculators, including John W. (“Bet-a-Million”) Gates and Col. John Adams Drake, were transferring activity to Wall Street. Later the firm played a big part in James R. Keene’s operations in United States Steel. Broker for some big Hartford insurance companies. Pynchon became intrenched in New England. Legend has it that James Goodwin Batterson Jr., son of the founder of Travelers Insurance, once cleared $1,000,000 in a year’s operations through the firm.

In 1917 the firm became Pynchon & Co. Its senior partner is George Mallory Pynchon, whose great hobby is yachting. He lives near the water in Greenwich, Conn., has never ceased active participation in his firm’s business. The day of the suspension he was in his office. So was his aviation-conscious son George Jr.

In recent years Pynchon & Co. entered the field of issuing securities. It has sponsored Utilities Power & Light of which Harley Clarke is president, also General Theatres Equipment. Inc. another Clarke-managed company. The recent decline in the shares of these two companies and of Fox Film Corp. are thought to have brought Pynchon & Co. to the breaking point. Other companies with which its name is associated include Consolidated Aircraft, American States Public Service, American Brown Boveri, Servel. As usual, Pynchon & Co. gave hope to creditors that not one cent would be lost, that even at present prices assets can meet liabilities. The extent of the money tied up is estimated at $40,000,000, establishing the failure as the biggest yet on the New York Stock Exchange . . . “

Business & Finance: Fall of Pynchon https://time.com/archive/6747137/business-finance-fall-of-pynchon/

Willam Fox of Fox Films was an interesting, sometimes duplicitous, character. A lot of this information comes from the Wikipedia article on William Fox: Vilmos Fried was born in Tolcsva Hungary, January 1, 1879 to Michael Fuchs and Anna Fried. The family immigrated to the United States when William was nine months old and settled in New York City. To help the family financially William found a job selling candy and newspapers in Central Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park. He also found employment in the garment industry. In 1900, at the age of 21, Fox started his own company, which he sold in 1904 to purchase his first nickelodeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_(movie_theater).  Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, he concentrated on acquiring and building theaters. He formed the Fox Film Corporation February 1, 1914, and made a star of Theta Bara.

Perhaps most significantly, in 1925–1926, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Harrison_Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors (Josef Engl (1893–1942), Hans Vogt (1890–1979), and Joseph Massolle (1889–1957)), and the work of Theodore Case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Case to create the Fox Movietone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movietone_sound_system sound-on-film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film system, introduced in 1927 with the release of F. W. Murnau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise:_A_Song_of_Two_Humans. Sound-on-film systems such as Movietone and RCA Photophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Photophone soon became the standard, and competing sound-on-disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-disc technologies, such as Warner Bros. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros.' Vitaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaphone, became obsolete. 

William Fox (producer) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fox_(producer)

Sound on film initiated the era of the talkies and what we now call the pre-code era of filmmaking. 1920s Hollywood was rocked by scandal. Presbyterian elder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian_polity#Elder Will H. Hays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_H._Hays was enlisted in 1922 to create a uniform code of do’s and don’ts in the movies. The production code was established in 1930 but wasn’t enforced until 1934. On June 13, 1934, an amendment to the Code was adopted, which created the Production Code Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_Code_Administration (PCA) and required all films released on or after July 1, 1934, to obtain a Seal of Approval before being released.

My initial reaction to Shadow Ticket approached despair. It felt so dumbed down compared to Pynchon’s other work. But I found myself re-reading it compulsively, five or six months straight. It was like the Tomacco episode of the Simpsons, something bitter but addictive. Maybe my feeling of despair has to do with our “hero” getting stranded in a strange land. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be the first time Pynchon left the protagonist, or the reader, stranded. Or maybe it has something to do with the book being about the Great Depression and the scary sensation that the current political landscape is just like 1933, only different.

Part of my disappointment had to do with not finding an anticipated thread in the novel.

Until I did.

“. . . Thessalie happens to have worked as a stage mentalist, till talking pictures put the whammy on vaudeville, “And now I’m reduced to this. You think it isn’t humiliating? All this carnal-relations stuff? Typing ‘penis’ every day? Not that I have a choice. A shot at anything, any toilet anywhere, any death trail from here on south of the border—say, wouldn’t I jump at it. But you see what’s happening to vaudeville, they’re even tearing down the Majestic now, for Pete’s sake, it’s the double whammy, the talkies arrive exactly the same time as the Depression. . . “

37/38

When I read that Pynchon’s Ninth novel was set in 1932, the first thing that came to mind was the collapse of Pynchon & Company's in 1931.

Reading a New York Times article of April 25, 1931 concerning the failure of Pynchon and Company, this stuck out:

". . . The difficulties of Pynchon & Co. grew out of the sharp depreciation in the market value of a number of stocks in which the firm and its customers were interested, but its troubles are understood to have been due largely to the declines in the securities of General Theatres Equipment, Inc., and of the Fox Film Corporation. . . "

I used to have a copy of “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox”, this is from an excellent New Yorker article from 2020:

“The first part of “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox”—the good part, carrying Fox from childhood through the crisis of 1929—runs a scant hundred pages. The rest of the book, another two hundred and fifty pages and more, is a work of near-madness—it’s Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, narrated by a Jarndyce. Its impenetrable forest of meetings and maneuvers, conspiracies and counterplots, seems rather like raw material for a novel or movie of paranoiac frenzy. As presented by Sinclair, Fox’s desperation and fury suffuse a wild round of negotiations and humiliations, lawsuits and hearings, city and state and federal dealings. Historical figures flit through in jolting cameos, including Will Hays of the Hays Code (Fox takes credit for installing this minor official from President Warren Harding’s scandal-ridden Administration in his censorious post, only to be betrayed by him in a moment of need), John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Henry Ford, Bernard Baruch, and even a shadowy figure aptly named Pynchon.”

The Hollywood Story of Upton Sinclair and William Fox | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-hollywood-story-of-upton-sinclair-and-william-fox

The article contains a link to “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox”. An awful lot of Fox’s problems came out of the format wars of sound-on-film technologies and the very steep costs of implementing those new technologies. VHS vs. Beta comes to mind. The brokerage house of Pynchon & Company invested heavily in Fox, and when Fox went down, Pynchon & Company went down, with the remains picked up by the E. A. Pierce Brokerage house. Pages 310 and 311 of “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox” describe the fall of the house of Pynchon, with George M. Pynchon reduced to handing one of his partners his last $7 in lieu of a $20,000 a year annuity.

The lady psychic is always right in Pynchon’s novels, the cute ‘n’ sexy oracle is infallible—"it’s the double whammy, the talkies arrive exactly the same time as the Depression.”

Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox : Upton Sinclair : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/uptonsinclairpre017746mbp/page/310/mode/2up

Shadow Ticket’s epigraph comes from Universal's 1934 Hit "The Black Cat":

"Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not."—Bela Lugosi

Directed by B-Movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer, FWIW. There's a good-looking dub on one of those Russian free streamers. Very low budget in appearance, with Bela OTT as a victim and "Karloff" as demonic evil incarnate. Also, Mystery writer Peter Alison (David Manners), newlywed husband of Joan Alison (Jacqueline Welles), both terrorized by Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) and more than a little threatened by wild-eyed Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). It all ends up with a Satanic ritual inspired by Aleister Crowley followed by a massive explosion at Poelzig's cult headquarters. All sorts of pre-echoes of the Rocky Horror Picture Show going on here.

Obviously, Pynchon has seen this movie. Did you notice how much the imagery and situations in Shadow Ticket emerge from the imagery and situations of movies from 1932 or thereabouts, that is to say Pre-Code movies? The Novel starts out with hardboiled noir, mobsters, explosions and P.I.s. Things shift into spycraft and international intrigue, with plenty of Marxist comedy in between. Eventually we land in Transylvania and witness acts of magic that go far beyond prestidigitation. On the way from Milwaukee to Fiume we land in Chicago, New York, London, spend some time on a luxury liner drinking cocktails with British Spies, eventually wind up traveling down ruined roads on the sidecar of a motorcycle in a place that might still be Hungary, perhaps not. The dialog is mostly terse but echoes the sounds of the Talkies, the descriptions of the scenes are pretty detailed. Reads like a shooting script more than any of Pynchon's other books, though Inherent Vice (featuring a lot of Raymond Chandler echoes) comes close. There’s a mention of the “French 75” cocktail in ST, which makes me wonder how many conversations TRP and PTA have had during the development of ST.

To get to the larger point, I’m not claiming any causation here, but there’s a whole lotta correlation goin’ on in Shadow Ticket, beginning with the title and book cover. “Shadow Ticket” suggests, first off, a ticket to a movie, particularly with the book’s cover of the theater district of Budapest, right around the time the novel is set. The neon sign for the Radius cinema, circa 1937, in the theater district of Budapest, is right there on the dust jacket’s spine. I skimmed through the novel looking for references to pre-code (with a scattering of pre-pre and post code) movies, found at least 65, with lots of characters in the Novel doing their best to emulate their favored movie stars, household furnishings copying movie sets, and a lot of the author’s usual themes concerning the social impact of mass media on display throughout.

My ‘take’ on Shadow Ticket had “Pre Code Cinema” pop out from the background. Once that happened other elements emerged, like the way the past and present overlap in this novel, as it so happens in all the other Pynchon novels. But I focus on the Pre Code aspect because it is a constant presence—the Mise-en-scène—of the novel, a historically unique feature of the era, that interregnum between 1930 to 1934 before the Hays code really kicked in. Also, because of the connections between William Fox, sound on film, Pynchon & Company’s demise and the great Depression. Like the lady sez, the talkies arrive exactly the same time as the Depression.

>From the Columbia Press website:
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934, Thomas Doherty: 
“In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.”
Pre-Code Hollywood | Columbia University Press https://cup.columbia.edu/book/pre-code-hollywood/9780231110952/

>From “First Family, Second Life” by Joshua Cohen:

“Here’s another intrigue from the Internet, though this one is verifiable: William Pynchon’s magistrate son, John, was a friend of the colony’s road surveyor, Miles Morgan, “the hero of Springfield,” who in 1675 defended the town against the Wampanoag tribe, and was the forefather of J. P. Morgan (Pynchon was the presiding official at Miles Morgan’s wedding). The Pynchon and Morgan families would go on to maintain business ties for the next 300 years, until the stock market crashed the country into Depression. By that time, Pynchon & Co. had become one of America’s most prominent brokerages (and the publisher of pamphlets surveying investment prospects, including Electric Light and Power: A Survey of World Development). According to Charles Hollander, writing in the journal Pynchon Notes, Pynchon & Co. was destroyed by its brief liaison with Chase Bank — the Rockefeller bank — in what might’ve been a speculation trap aimed at damaging this close associate of the Morgans. The Pynchon family had to auction off their property and furniture and, in debt from a reclamatory lawsuit, senior partner George M. Pynchon Jr. committed suicide. In Hollander’s reading, much of Pynchon’s fiction plays out as revenge against the Rockefellers and their dismantling of the Morgan economy of steel, coal, and railroads in favor of an economy of plastics, oil, and weaponry.”

First Family, Second Life, by Joshua Cohen https://harpers.org/archive/2013/10/first-family-second-life/

“ . . . Inverarity owned that too,” Metzger said. “Did you know that?”

“Sadist” Oedipa yelled, “say it once more, I’ll wrap the TV tube around your head.”

“You’re really mad,” he smiled.

She wasn’t really. She said, “What the hell didn’t he own?”

Metzger cocked an eyebrow at her. “You tell me.”

CoL49, 27/28

I had a number of messages sent back and forth via e-mail to Charles Hollander in 2007. My reading of Against the Day had me pursuing links to Pynchon and Company as the company was experiencing its peak years during the timeline of that mega-novel. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that I was entering the realm of professional research, that I had to be patient and expect that a lot of the research will lead to dead ends. One of the things I’ve noticed is that most of the New York Times articles concerning George M. Pynchon are on the sports page, he was famous for yachting, so there’s lots on boat racing and boat building. “Single up all lines” and all that, lotta them ships in his books, and note if you will the central role nautical vessels of various stripes play in Shadow Ticket. A number of the NYT posts concern Pynchon and Company, some are on the society page.

Deep in the weeds I find this, from September 3 1921:

GREENWICH, Conn., Sept. 3.—a supper dance held at the Field Club last night was attended by about 100 prominent society people. Supper was served on the lawn, which was lighted with Japanese lanterns. An orchestra furnished the music. Among those present were Mr. and Mrs. William A. Rockefeller. Miss Hope Lincoln, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall C. Bacon, Mr. and Mrs. O. B. James, J. R. Coffin, Mrs. Walter Birge, W. L. Ryder, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Maxwell Moore, Mrs. Colby M. Chester Jr., Mr. and Mrs. H. B. Slayback, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin B. Close, Mr. and Mrs. George Carhart, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Truesdale, W. F. Gray, L. V. Lockwood, George M. Pynchon, George W. Helme, T. H. Perkins and William Hayes Jr.

Dance at Greenwich Field Club. - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1921/09/04/archives/dance-at-greenwich-field-club.html

If Thessalie is right, and I’m sure she is, there’s a very close correlation between the Great Depression and the emergence of Talkies. The mostly unwritten history of Pynchon and Company has a large role to play in that story.

On a more speculative level, there is one more way Shadow Ticket is “Pre-Code”:

. . . Beyond this, the plaintext rapidly proves elusive. An encryption that cannot, must not, be broken, allowing Alf only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it. Which will no doubt mean a death sentence for any poor blighter unlucky to have broken it.

ST, 235