Uncollected Works of Thomas Pynchon

Created by antimist 12/05/14

Contents

Uncollected Fiction

- Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

From Cornell University’s Spring 1959 Epoch, this is one of Pynchon’s first short stories.

- Voice of the Hamster

A fiction serialized in four issues of Pynchon’s high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1952-53.

- The Boys

Another piece from Pynchon’s high school newspaper. A short, humorous piece on Pynchon’s band of high school chums, a shadowy group whose secret membership is finally revealed when they are photographed for the first time...!

- Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight

Another piece from Pynchon’s high school newspaper. A short Arthurian parody.

Essays

- A Journey Into the Mind of Watts

The New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966. This article is a psychological profile of the Watts neighbourhood of L.A. and the racial tensions that gave rise to the infamous riots.

- Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?

The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984. This essay discusses the history of the Luddite movement and the many ways it has resurfaced throughout the years.

- Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993. This essay, part of their “Seven Deadly Sins” serial, focuses on Sloth.

Reviews

- The Gift

Reprinted from Holiday, December 1965, this is a review of Oakley Hall’s western, Warlock. (Pynchon was asked to select a favorite “neglected” book.)

- The Heart’s Eternal Vow

The New York Times 10 April 1988, this is a long and compassionate review of Gabriel García Márquez’s “shining and heartbreaking” novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Introductions

- Introduction to Fariña

An introduction to his friend Richard Fariña’s 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

- Barthelme Introduction

The introductory essay from The Writings of Donald Barthelme

- Introduction to 1984, George Orwell

For their “Orwell Centennial” editions, Plume asked Thomas Pynchon to pen a new foreword to 1984. The result is an insightful look at Orwell’s contemporary mindset, the Orwellian methods that modern governments use to maintain control, and the possible optimism found in the novel’s oft-neglected appendices.

Uncollected Fiction

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

Epoch (Cornell University) Spring 1959, Vol IX, No. 4

By Tom Pynchon

Just as Siegel got to the address Rachel had given him it started to rain again. All day rain clouds had hung low and ragged-edged over Washington, ruining the view from the top of the Monument for the high-school kids on their senior trips, sending brief squalls which drove tourists squealing and cursing in to find shelter, dulling the delicate pink of the cherry blossoms shich had just come out. The address was a small apartment building on a quiet street near Dupont Circle, and Siegel dove into the lobby, in out of the rain, clutching the fifth of scotch he was carrying as if it were a state secret. There had been times—during the past year, in the Avenue Kleber or the Viale delle Terme di Caracalla—where there had been a brief case where the fifth was now, clutched under the same tweed-clad arm against rain or a deadline or some bureaucratic necessity. And most of these times, especially if he were hung over from the night before, or if a girl fellow junior diplomats had sworn was a sure thing had turned out to be so much more than sure that in the end it had not been worth even the price of drinks, he would shake his head like a drunk who is trying to stop seeing double, having become suddenly conscious of the weight of the briefcase and the insignificance of its contents and the stupidity of what he was doing out here, away from Rachel, following an obscure but clearly-marked path through a jungle of distrainments and affadavits and depositions; wondering why, in his first days with the Commission, he should have ever regarded himself as any kind of healer when he had always known that for a healer—a prophet actually, because if you cared about it at all you had to be both—there is no question of balance sheets or legal complexity, and the minute you become involved with anything like that you are something less; a doctor, or a fortune-teller. When he was thirteen, a little less than a month after his bar mitzvah, his cousin Miriam had died of cancer and perhaps it was then—sitting shivah on an orange crate in a darkened room high over the Grand Concourse, gaunt and looking a little like a John Buchan hero even at thirteen, gazing fixedly at the symbolic razor slash halfway up his black necktie that this awareness had begun to grow, because he still remembered Miriam’s husband cursing Zeit the doctor, and the money wasted on the operations, and the whole AMA, crying unashamed in this dim hot room with the drawn shades; and it had so disquieted young Siegel that when his brother Mike had gone away to Yale to take pre-med he had been afraid that something would go wrong and that Mike whom he loved would turn out to be only a doctor, like Zeit, and be cursed someday too by a distraught husband in rent garments, in a twilit bedroom. He would stand, therefore, out in some street, not moving, hanging on to the briefcase and thinking about Rachel who was 4’ 10” in her stocking feet, whose neck was pale and sleek, a Modigliani neck, whose eyes were not mirror images but both slanted the same way, dark brown almost to fathomlessness, and after awhile he would drift up to the surface again and be annoyed with himself for worrying about these things when the data inside the briefcase should have been at the office fifteen minutes ago; and realize, reluctantly, that the racing against time, the awareness of being a cog, the élan—almost roguery—of the playboy element in the Commission which went well with his British staff officer appearance—even the intradepartmental scheming and counterscheming which went on in jazz cellars at two in the morning, in pensions over brandy and soda, were, after all, exciting. It was only when he forgot to take vitamin-B pills the night before to ward off a hangover that these funky periods would come at all. Most of the time the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Siegel would assert himself and then he would look on the funky days as only brief aberrations. Because when you came down to it it was fun to manoeuvre. In the army he had lived by a golden rule of Screw the Sergeant before He Screweth Thee; later in college he had forged meal tickets, instigated protest riots and panty raids, manipulated campus opinion through the school newspaper; and this was the part of him inherited from a mother who at the age of 19 had struggled with her soul one night in a railroad flat somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen and, half-drunk on bootleg beer, had ended up refuting Aquinas and quitting the Roman church; who would grin fondly at her husband and refer to him as an innocent slob who never had a chance against her female cunning, and advise Seigel never to marry a shiksa but to find himself some nice quiet Jewish girl because at least there you were given a running start. For this his roommate at college sophomore year had called him Stephen and taunted him mercilessly about the still small Jesuit voice which kept him from being either kicked around or conscious of guilt or simply ineffective like so many of the other Jewish boys on campus seemed to Grossmann to be. “Also, Grossmann,” Siegel had retorted, “it perhaps saves me from being a schmuck like you.” Grossmann would laugh and stick his nose back in a textbook. “It is the seed of your destruction,” he would murmur. “House divided against itself? You know.” Well, here he was, 30 and on the way to becoming a career man, and not particularly aware of destruction mainly because he was unable to give it a name or a face, unless they were Rachel’s and this he doubted. With the bottle under his arm he climbed up two flights of stairs, the few raindrops which had caught him glistening in the shaggy tangle of his tweed coat. He hoped she had said sevenish—he was pretty sure but it would be awkward if he arrived too early. He rang the buzzer in front of a door that said 3F and waited. It seemed to be quiet inside and he was just beginning to wonder if maybe she hadn’t said eightish when the door opened and a wild-looking, rangy man with fierce eyebrows, wearing a tweed coat and carrying what looked like a pig foetus under one arm, stood staring at him, an empty room behind him, and Siegel, annoyed, realized he had goofed and that 30 years was a long time and that this might be a first indication of senility. They faced each other like slightly flawed mirror images—different patterns of tweed, scotch bottle and pig foetus but no discrepancy in height—with Siegel experiencing a mixed feeling of discomfort and awe, and the word Doppelgänger had just floated into his mind when the other’s eyebrows shot up into twin parabolas and he stuck out his free hand and said, “You’re early but come in. I’m David Lupescu.”

Siegel shook hands, muttering his own name and the spell broke; he looked at the object under Lupescu’s arm and saw that it really was a pig foetus, caught the faint scent of formaldehyde and scratched his head. “I brought some booze” he said. “I’m sorry about this, I’d thought Rachel said seven.” Lupescu smiled vaguely and closed the door behind him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I’ve got to put this thing someplace.” He motioned Siegel to a seat and picked up an old-fashioned glass from a table, a chair from nearby, dragged the chair to the entrance of what Siegel presumed was the kitchen, stood on the chair, took a thumbtack from his pocket, stuck it through the umbilical cord of the pig foetus and tacked it onto the molding over the entrance, hammering with the bottom of the glass. He jumped down off the chair and above him the foetus swung dangerously. He looked up at it. “I hope it stays there,” he said, and then turned to face Siegel. “Fetching, isn’t it?” Siegel shrugged. “Dada exhibit in Paris on Christmas eve, 1919,” Lupescu said, “used one in place of mistletoe. But ten to one this group won’t even notice it. You know Paul Brennan? He won’t.”

“I don’t know anybody,” Siegel said, “I’ve been sort of out of touch. I just got back from overseas last week. All the old crowd seems to have drifted away.”

Lupescu stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around the room, brooding. “I know,” he said grimly. “Big turnover. But the types are constant.” He moved toward the kitchen, glanced in, paced back again to the French windows, then suddenly turned and shot out a forefinger at Siegel. “You,” he almost roared. “Of course. You’re perfect.” He advanced toward Siegel menacingly, stood looming over him. “Good grief,” Siegel said, cowering a little. “Mon semblable,” Lupescu said, “mon frère.” He gazed at Siegel. “A sign,” he said, “a sign, and deliverance.” Siegel could smell alcohol fumes on Lupescu’s breath. “I beg your pardon,” Siegel said. Lupescu began pacing around the room.

“Only a matter of time,” he said. “Tonight. Of course. Why. Why not. Pig foetus. Symbol. God, what a symbol. And now. Freedom. Deliverance,” he screamed. “Genie. Bottle. Century after century, until Siegel, fisher of souls, pulls the cork.” He began running around the room. “Raincoat,” he said, picking a raincoat up off the sofa, “shaving gear.” He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, came out with an overnight kit in his hands wearing the raincoat. He paused at the door. “It’s all yours,” he said. “You are now the host. As host you are a trinity: (a) receiver of guests”—ticking them off on his fingers—“(b) an enemy and (c) an outward manifestation, for them, of the divine body and blood.”

“Wait a minute,” Siegel said, “where the hell are you going?”

“The outside,” Lupescu said, “out of the jungle.”

“But look, hey, I can’t make this. I don’t know any of these people.”

“All part of it,” Lupescu said airily. “You’ll pick it up fast enough,” and was through the door and out before Siegel could think of an answer. Ten seconds later the door opened again and Lupescu stuck his head in and winked. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” he announced owlishly and disappeared. Siegel sat staring at the foetus. “Well now, what the hell,” he said slowly. He stood up and strolled across the room to where the phone was and dialed Rachel’s number. When she answered he said, “Fine friends you have.”

“Where are you?” she said. “I just got back.” Siegel explained. “Well I’m glad you called,” Rachel said. “I called your place and you weren’t in. I wanted to tell you, Sally’s brother-in-law’s sister, a winsome little brat of fourteen, just blew into town from some girls’ school in Virginia and Sally is out with Jeff so Iv’e got to stay here and entertain her till Sally gets back, and by the time I’m able to get away the liquor will be all gone: I know Lupescu’s parties.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Siegel said irritably, “this is ridiculous. If Lupescu’s friends are anything like him this place is about to be invaded by a horde of raving lunatics, none of whom I know. And now you’re not even coming.”

“Oh it’s a nice crowd,” she said. “ A little curious maybe but I think you’ll like them. You ought to stay.” The door was suddenly and violently kicked open and through it lurched a fat florid adolescent in a sailor suit, carrying a girl piggy-back. “Lewpayskew,” the sailor shouted. “Whay aw yew, yew mothuhlovin Roumanian.”

“Hold on,” Siegel said. “What was that again,” he asked the sailor, who had deposited his passenger on the floor. “Mayun ah said whay’s Lewpayskew,” the sailor said. “God,” he babbled into the phone, “they’re coming, they’re filtering in already. What do I do, Rachel, they can’t even talk English. There is some nautical looking type here who is speaking no language known to man.”

“Darling,” Rachel laughed, “stop acting like a war flick. That’s probably only Harvey Duckworth, who comes from Alabama and has a charming southern accent. You’ll get along wonderfully, I know you will. Call me tomorrow and let me know everything that has happened.”

“Wait,” Siegel said desperately, but she had already said “Bye-bye,” and hung up. He stood there holding the dead receiver. Harvey Duckworth was stomping around in the other rooms, yelling for Lupescu; and the girl, who was very young and had long black hair and big hoop earrings and was wearing a sweatshirt and levis—who seemed to Siegel a perfect parody of the girl bohemian of the Forties—stood up and looked at Siegel. “I want to go to bed with you,” she intoned dramatically and all at once Siegel cheered up. He put the receiver back on the hook and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said suavely, “but statutory rape and all that, you know. Can I get you a drink?”

He went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer and found Duckworth sitting on the sink trying to open a wine bottle. The cork popped out suddenly and the bottle slipped and Chianti splashed all over Duckworth’s whites. “Gaw damn,” Duckworth said, staring at the purple stain. “Mizzable Guineas can’t even make wahn bottles raht.” The buzzer rang and Siegel called, “Get that would you, beautiful,” and picked the Chianti bottle up off the floor. “Still some more,” he said cheerfully. He was beginning to feel jovial, irresponsibly so; a lightheadedness which he realized might be one of the first stages of hysteria but which he rather hoped was some vestige of the old nonchalance which had sustained him on the Continent for the past two years. In the other room he heard what sounded like a chorus of roaring boys, chanting dirty limericks. The girl came in and said, “My god, it’s Brennan and his friends.”

“Oh goodo,” Siegel said. “They seem to be in fine voice.” Indeed, they were. In his suddenly amiable state it seemed to Siegel that this account of the young fellow named Cheever who had an affair with a beaver took on Deeper Human Significance, was gilded with a certain transcendental light which reminded him of that final trio from Faust, where the golden stairs come down and Margarethe ascends to heaven. “Really lovely,” he mused. The girl looked with disgust at Duckworth and then smiled brightly at Siegel. “By the way,” she said, “I’m Lucy.”

“Hi,” Siegel said. “My name is Cleanth but my friends call me Siegel, out of pity.”

“Where’s David anyway. I ought to give him hell for inviting that oaf Brennan.”

Siegel pursed his lips. Hell, this was impossible. He had to trust somebody. He took her hand and led her into the bedroom and sat her down on a bed. “No,” he said quickly. “Not what you’re thinking.” He told her about Lupescu’s sudden departure and she shrugged and said, “Maybe it was a good thing. He would have cracked sooner or later, he was going native.”

“That’s a strange way to put it,” Siegel said. After all, going native in Washington, D.C.? In more exotic places, certainly, he had seen that. He remembered a Peter Arno cartoon in the New Yorker he had always liked, showing a girl in Apache costume, sitting on the lap of a depraved-looking Frenchman in a sidewalk cafe; and the girl’s friend, obviously an American tourist, armed with camera, shoulder-bag and guidebook, saying, with a scandalized expression, “But Mary Lou, you mean you’re not going back to Bryn Mawr, ever?” Still, stranger things had happened. In the two semesters he spent at Harvard Siegel had witnessed the gradual degeneration of his roommate Grossmann, a proud and stubborn native of Chicago who denied the presence of any civilization outside of Cook County and for whom Boston was worse even than Oak Park, was in fact, a sort of apotheosis of the effete and the puritan. Grossmann had remained unmarred, majestically sneering, happy-go-lucky, until one Christmas eve he and Siegel and some friends and a group of Radcliffe girls had gone carolling on Beacon hill.

Whether it was the booze they had brought along or the fact that Grossmann had just finished reading not only Santayana’s The Last Puritan but also a considerable amount of T. S. Eliot—and so might have been a little more susceptible to tradition in general and to Christmas eve on Beacon hill in particular—or merely the bothersome tendency Grossman had to get sentimental in the company of Radcliffe girls, he had still been touched enough to inform Siegel later on that night that maybe there were a few human beings in Boston after all. And this had been the first tiny rent in that Midwestern hauteur which he had carried up to now as a torero carries his cape; after that night it was all downhill. Grossmann took to strolling in the moonlight with only the most patrician of Radcliffe and Wellesley girls; he discovered a wonderful make-out spot down behind the minuteman statue in Concord; he began carrying a black umbrella and gave away all his loud clothes, substituting flawless and expensive tweeds and worsteds. Siegel was mildly disturbed at all this but it was not until one afternoon in the early spring, when he entered their rooms at Dunster and surprised Grossmann standing in front of the mirror, umbrella under one arm, eyebrows raised superciliously and nose ached loftily, reciting “I parked my car in Harvard yard,” over and over, that he was struck with the extent of his roommate’s dissipation.

The strong nasal r’s Siegel had secretly admired there now eneverated and pallid; and in that classic shibboleth, Siegel recognized poor, innocent Grossmann’s swan song. A year later Siegel got a letter, the last: Grossmann had married a Wellesley girl and they were living in Swampscott. Sit tibi terra levis, Grossmann. But Siegel wondered how in the hell it was possible for anyone to sink roots in a town at once as middle class and as cosmopolitan as Washington. You could become bourgeois or one of the international set but this could happen in any city. Unless it had nothing to do with the place at all and was a question of compulsion—unless there was something which linked people like Gaugin and Eliot and Grossmann, some reason which gave them no other choice; and this was why, when it had happened in Boston and now maybe even in Washington, for God’s sake, Siegel felt uneasy and unwilling to think about it too much. This little Jesuit thing, this poltergeist, would start kicking around inside his head just as it had done with the briefcase, and call him back to the real country where there were drinks to be mixed and bon mots to be tossed out carelessly and maybe a drunk or two to take care of. It was doing that now. So all he did was look at Lucy quizically and say, “Well I don’t know. He seemed sort of under the weather. Also maybe a little neurotic.”

The girl laughed softly, not trying for rapport any more, not even the bedroom kind; but anxious now for thoughts of her own which Siegel was neither ready to be curious about nor confident he would be able to cope with. “A little neurotic,” she said, “is like being a little bit pregnant. You don’t know David. He’s well, Siegel, he’s the only one of us who is.” Siegel smiled. “I shouldn’t talk,” he said, “I’m a stranger. Look Lucy, would you help me out a little with this group?”

“Me help you?” Suddenly weak, she answered with something that was so curiously both impotence and scorn that he began to wonder how well she was herself. “All right, I’ll make a deal. Mutual aid. The truth is I need a shoulder to cry on.” Siegel threw a quick glance behind him out into the kitchen, a glance which she caught. “Don’t worry about them,” she smiled, “they’ll take care of themselves for awhile. They know where the liquor is and everything.” Siegel smiled in apology, pushed the door shut and settled back on the bed next to her, resting on one elbow. A Klee original was on the wall facing them; two crossed BAR’s, hunting rifles and a few sabres hung around the other walls. The room was sparsely furnished in Swedish modern and carpeted wall to wall. He looked down at her and said, “OK, cry away.”

“I don’t really know why I should be telling you about this,” she began and it was as if she had said. “Bless me father for I have sinned,” because Siegel often thought that if all the punks, lushes, coeds in love, woebegone PFC’s—the whole host of trodden-on and disaffected—who had approached him with that opening formula were placed end to end they would surely reach from here back to the Grand Concourse and a timid spindleshanked boy in a slashed necktie. “Except,” she continued, “that you look like David, you have the same kind of sympathy for anybody who gets kicked around, I feel that somehow.” Siegel shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s Brennan. Brennan and that bitch Considine.”

And she went on to tell how apparently this female economics expert named Debby Considine had returned a week ago from an expedition to Ontario and right away Paul Brennan had started chasing her again. There was a tree outside her apartment house on P St. and Brennan had climbed up this tree and waited for her to come out and whenever she did he would proclaim his passion for her in loud and improvised blank verse. Usually a small crowd would collect and finally one night the cops came with ladders and hauled him down and dragged him away.

“And who does he call to come down to the precinct to bail him out,” Lucy said. “Me, is who. Right before payday too. The bastard still hasn’t paid me back. And to make matters worse he already had a record. Krinkles Porcino, that’s Paul’s roommate, got engaged to this girl Monica back around February. The two kids were really in love, and Paul was fond of both of them, so that when Sybil—she was living with David at the time—started running after Krinkles and threatening to break the thing up—well anyway she finally threw this big bitch scene with Paul in the lobby of the Mayflower and Paul ended up slugging her with a vodka bottle he happened to be carrying, and they got him for assault. And of course David had a bad time of it because he hates to get involved in anything, but Sam Fleischmann, who’s hated Paul’s guts ever since Paul sold him $100 worth of phony uranium stock, felt so sorry for David that he started writing poison pen letters to Sybil, dumping all over Paul. He’d write them in the morning right after we got up, while I made breakfast, and we’d both laugh and laugh because it was so much fun.”

“Oh,” Siegel said, “ha, ha.”

“And then when Paul got out,” she went on, “what should happen but Harvey had to fly into a rage at Paul because he knew I was in love with Paul and was sending him cigarettes and cookies and things while he was in stir, and he chased Paul for seven blocks through the theatre district one night with a boatswain’s knife. That was sort of funny too because Harvey was in uniform and it took four SP’s finally to bring him down, and even then he broke the arm of one of them and sent another to Bethesda Naval Hospital with severe abdominal wounds. So Paul is out on bail now and threatening to get Monica because she’s living with Sam but what the hell else can she do when Krinkles has been out of town for weeks trying to kick the habit and all. The trouble is that damn junkie doesn’t know how really good she is, Siegel. She pawned Krinkles’ baritone sax only a couple of days ago because poor Sam had just lost his job at the Smithsonian and was actually starving before she found out about it and took him in. The girl’s a saint.”

She went on in the same way for fifteen minutes more, layng bare, like a clumsy brain surgeon, synapses and convolutions which should never have been exposed, revealing for Siegel the anatomy of a disease more serious than he had suspected: the badlands of the heart, in which shadows, and crisscrossed threads of inaccurate self-analysis and Freudian fallacy, and passages where the light and perspective were tricky, all threw you into that heightened hysterical edginess of the sort of nightmare it is possible to have where your eyes are open and everything in the scene is familiar, yet where, flickering behind the edge of the closet door, hidden under the chair in the corner, is this je ne sais quoi de sinistre which sends you shouting into wakefulness.

Until finally one of Brennan’s friends, whom Lucy introduced as Vincent, wandered in and informed them that somebody had already walked through the French windows without opening them; and Siegel realized wearily that it was going to be that kind of a party, and having committed himself anyway by the very act of lying next to a girl he did not know and playing the role of crying towel for half an hour, resolved in true British staff officer style to bite the jolly old bullet and make the best of a bad job.

In the kitchen were a couple seated on the sink making out; Duckworth, horribly drunk, lying on the floor and hurling pistachio nuts at the pig foetus; and a group of four or five people in Bermuda shorts sitting in a circle playing Prince. In the other room somebody had put on a cha cha record and a few couples were improvising freely. Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the room with the false brightness of heat lightning: in the space of a minute Siegel caught the words “Zen,” “San Francisco,” and “Wittgenstein,” and felt a mild sense of disappointment, almost as if he had expected some esoteric language, something out of Albertus Magnus. Beside the pig foetus there was only one other really incongruous note in the whole scene: a swarthy looking person in torn khakis and an old corduroy coat who stood in one corner like some memento mori, withdrawn and melancholy. “That’s Considine’s latest,” Lucy said, “an Indian she brought back from Ontario. Boy, what a hunk.”

“He looks sad,” Siegel said. Somebody handed Siegel an ambiguous mixture in an old-fashioned glass and he sipped it automatically, grimaced and set it down. “His name is Irving Loon,” she said dreamily.

“Irving what?” said Siegel.

“Loon. He’s Ojibwa. Oh there’s Paul. Talking to Considine, the bastard.” She led him over to a corner where a diminutive junior executive type was eagerly haranguing this serpentine brunette with heavily mascaraed eyes. At his first glimpse of Debby Considine Siegel drew in a low whistle and let the four fingers of his left hand wobble to and fro a few times, forgetting about Irving Loon, Prince players and drunken sailors. ’”Marrone,” he whispered. Lucy glared at him. “Not you too,” she said furiously. “Goddamn all these sex machines.” He was introduced and after awhile Lucy managed to haul Brennan away on some pretext or other and Siegel was left alone with the lady economist.

“And how were the boondocks of Ontario,” he said. She looked at him from under lowered lashes. “So fascinating,” she murmured in a husky, detached voice. “Do you know the Ojibwa?” Seigel began flipping over a stack of mental IBM cards frantically. There was something he knew, something he had had in college. It irritated him not to be able to call the information up because most of the courses he had taken had served no other function—at least such had been his undergraduate protests—than to provide material for conversation at parties like this one. Ojibwa Indians. Somewhere in Ontario. Something weird, even funny, but he was damned if he could pin it down.

“You look compassionate,” Debby said suddenly. “Is there somewhere we can talk?” and Siegel, pulled away from the IBM cards, thought Jesus Christ, here we go again. He led her into the bedroom, which was beginning to look like some perversely-decorated confessional, and wondered whether this had been David Lupescu’s place for listening to bent souls. He had a hunch it was. She stood close to him and played with his Challis tie and gave him the demure bit with the eyelashes again. “You’re the same,” she whispered, “you have this monumental Lupescu coolness. You’re sure you’re not his doubleganger.”

“No,” Siegel said, “I’m not sure. Go ahead.” She hesitated and he prompted her: “Bless me father ….”

The eyelids flew open. “David said that too. Who are you, Siegel?”

“For the moment, a father confessor. What seems to be your trouble, my child.”

“It’s Irving Loon,” she said, sitting on the bed and playing with the empty highball glass she had brought in with her, ignoring the irony, “he was so happy back in Ontario. At ricing time, you see, all the families are together, everyone happy, Togetherness in Ojibwa land. Blasts, brawls, sex orgies, community sings, puberty rituals. All kinds of wonderful local color to fill up notebook after notebook with. And Irving Loon, ten feet tall with fists like rocks and enough to make even a jaded heart like mine uneasy.” Then, surprisingly—and, for Siegel, embarrassingly—she began reeling off a list of the affairs she had had in all the underdeveloped areas she had visited for the State Dept.; several pages of unofficial statistics which sounded a little like the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

It seemed she had this habit of picking up male specimens wherever she went and bringing them back with her and dropping them after a few weeks. Her exes either assimilated in with The Group or found a niche in some other group or dropped out of sight completely and forever. But Irving Loon, she insisted, was different. He had this brooding James Dean quality about him.

“He’s been standing in the same corner all evening,” she said. “He hasn’t spoken a word for two days. I feel”—and her eyes gazed over Siegel’s shoulder, out into God knows where—“that it’s not only nostalgia for the wilderness, but almost as if somehow out there, in the hinterlands, with nothing but snow and forests and a few beaver and moose, he has come close to something which city dwellers never find all their lives, may never even be aware exists, and it’s this that he misses, that the city kills or hides from him.” I’ll be damned, thought Siegel. This broad is serious. “And this is just what I can’t tell Paul,” she sighed. “He makes fun of Irving, calIs him ignorant. But it’s a divine melancholia and it’s what I love about him.”

Good grief, that was it.

Melancholia. Just by accident she had used that word, the psychologist’s term, instead of “melancholy.” Little Professor Mitchell, perched like a sparrow on his desk in anthropology lecture, hands in his coat pockets, a permanently sarcastic smile twisting one side of his mouth, talking about psychopathy among the Ojibwa Indians. Of course. The old memory bank was still functioning after all. “You must remember that this group lives forever at the brink of starvation,” Mitchell said in that deprecating, apologetic tone which implied that for him all cultures were equally mad; it was only the form that differed, never the content. “It has been said that the Ojibwa ethos is saturated with anxiety,” and simultaneously 50 pens copied the sentence verbatim.

“The Ojibwa are trained, from childhood, to starve; the male child’s entire upbringing is dedicated to a single goal: that of becoming a great hunter. Emphasis is on isolation, self-sufficiency. There is no sentimentality among the Ojibwa. It is an austere and bleak existence they lead, always one step away from death. Before he can attain to the state of manhood a boy must experience a vision, after starving himself for several days. Often after seeing this vision he feels he has acquired a supernatural companion, and there is a tendency to identify. Out in the wilderness, with nothing but a handful of beaver, deer, moose and bear between him and starvation, for the Ojibwa hunter, feeling as he does at bay, feeling a concentration of obscure cosmic forces against him and him alone, cynical terrorists, savage and amoral deities”—this time a smile in self-reproach—“which are bent on his destruction, the identification may become complete. When such paranoid tendencies are further intensified bv the highly competitive life of the summer villages at ricing and berry-picking time, or by the curse, perhaps, of a shaman with some personal grudge, the Ojibwa becomes highly susceptible to the well-known Windigo psychosis.”

Siegel knew about the Windigo, all right. He remembered being scared out of his wits once at camp by the fireside yarn image of a mile-high skeleton made of ice, roaring and crashing through the Canadian wilderness, grabbing up humans by the handful and feeding on their flesh. But he had outgrown the nightmares of boyhood enough to chuckle at the professor’s description of a half-famished hunter, already slightly warped, identifying with the Windigo and turning into a frenzied cannibal himelf, foraging around the boondocks for more food after he had gorged himself on the bodies of his immediate family. “Get the picture,” he had told Grossmann that night, over mugs of Würtzburger. “Altered perception. Simultaneously, all over God knows how many square miles, hundreds, thousands of these Indians are looking at each other out of the corner of their eye and not seeing wives or husbands or little children at all. What they see is big fat juicy beavers. And these Indians are hungry, Grossmann. I mean, my gawd. A big mass psychosis. As far as the eye can reach”—he gestured dramatically—“Beavers. Succulent, juicy, fat.”

“How yummy,” Grossmann had commented wryly. Sure, it was amusing, in a twisted sort of way. And it gave anthropologists something to write about and people at parties something to talk about. Fascinating, this Windigo psychosis. And oddly enough its first stages were marked by a profound melancholia. That was what had made him remember, a juxtaposition of words, an accident. He wondered why Irving Loon had not been talking for two days. He wondered if Debby Considine knew about this area of the Ojibwa personality.

“And Paul just won’t understand,” she was saying. “Of course it was a bitchy thing to complain to the police but I’d lie awake nights, thinking of him crouched up in that tree, like some evil spirit, waiting for me. I suppose I’ve always been a little afraid of something like that, something unfamiliar, something I couldn’t manipulate. Oh yes,” she admitted to his raised eyebrows, “I’ve manipulated them all right. I didn’t want to, Siegel, God knows I didn’t. But I can’t help it.” Siegel felt like saying, “Use a little less mascara or something,” but was brought up short by an awareness which had been at the back of his mind since Lupescu had left: a half-developed impression about the role Lupescu had occupied for this group; and it occurred to him that his double would never have said anything like that. You might give absolution or penance, but no practical advice. Tucked snugly in some rectory of the mind, Cleanth Siegel, S.J., looked on with approval. “Changing the subject for a moment,” Siegel said, “do you know, has Irving told you anything about the Windigo?”

“It’s funny you should mention that,” she said, “it’s a nature god or something, that they worship. I’m not on the anthropology end of things or I could tell you more about it. But the last time Irving was talking—he speaks English so well—he said once ’Windigo, Windigo, stay by me.’ It’s this poetic, religious quality in him that’s so touching.” And right about here Siegel began to feel really uneasy, to hear this tiny exasperating dissonance. Poetic? Religious? Ha, ha.

“I’m afraid,” she was saying. “I get so depressed, so exhausted. Even as a little girl I used to be scared of being hit by a meteorite, isn’t that silly? This terror of the unfamiliar, this sort of arbitrary Act of God or something. It got bad, very bad, two years ago and I tried to straighten everything out with an act of Debby Considine, by taking rather more than the prescribed amount of Seconal. Then when it didn’t work I rode up on another crest and I’ve been there for two years and I guess now I’m about due for a trough again.”

Siegel sat up suddenly and glared straight ahead of him, at the crossed BAR’s on the wall. He was getting fed up with this. Lupescu was wrong: you did not pick this sort of thing up quickly at all. It was a slow process and dangerous because in the course of things it was very possible to destroy not only yourself but your flock as well. He took her hand. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to meet Irving. Say for your penance ten Hail Mary’s and make a good Act of Contrition.”

“Oh my God,” she murmured. “I am heartily sorry… .” and apparently she was, but probably only because the interview had been cut short. They threaded their way between several inert bodies in the kitchen. The cha cha side had been replaced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Siegel smiled grimly because of its appropriateness; because he knew he could listen to anything else but this mad Hungarian without getting bugged, but at the sound of an entire string section run suddenly amok, shrieking like an uprooted mandrakes trying to tear itself apart, the nimble little Machiavel inside him would start to throw things at the mensch who had just cast off adolescence and who still sat perpetual shivah for people like Debby Considine and Lucy and himself and all the other dead, trying to goad it into action; and he wondered if perhaps Lucy’s diagnosis of Lupescu’s trouble hadn’t been correct and if someday he, Siegel, might not find himself standing in front of some mirror with a pig foetus under one arm, reciting Freudian cant at himself to get the right inflection.

“Irving Loon,” Debby said, “Cleanth Siegel.” Irving Loon stood motionless, seemingly unaware of their presence. Debby put her hand on the Ojibwa’s arm and caressed it. “Irving,” she said softly, “please say something.” Damn the torpedoes, Siegel thought. Full speed ahead. “Windigo,” he said quietly and Irving Loon jumped as if an ice cube had been dropped down his neck. He looked intently at Siegel, probing suddenly with black, piercing eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to Debby and smiled wanly. He put his arm around her waist and nuzzled her cheek. “Debby,” he murmured, “my beautiful little beaver.”

“Isn’t that sweet,” Debby said, smiling over her shoulder at Siegel. Oh my God, Siegel thought. Oh no. Beaver? Now wait a minute. Somebody was tugging at Siegel’s coat sleeve and he turned swiftly, nervously, and saw Brennan. “Can I see you alone for a minute,” Brennan said. Siegel hesitated. Irving Loon and Debby were whispering endearments to one another. “Sure, okay,” Siegel said absently. They crunched over the broken glass from the French windows and went out on a small balcony, which was just as well, because Siegel was beginning to get a little sick of the bedroom. The rain had dwindled to a light mist and Siegel pulled his coat collar up. “I hear you’re a pretty sympathetic guy,” Brennan began, “and I guess you know how it is with me and Debby. The truth is I’m worried about that Indian.”

“So am I,” Siegel started to say and then caught himself. This theory about why Irving Loon was not talking was based only on suspicion; and this whole absurd, surrealist atmosphere had after all been working on an imagination known occasionally to go off the deep end. So instead he said, “I could see where you might.” Brennan turned crafty. “I think he’s using hypnosis on her,” he confided, darting quick glances back inside to see if anyone was listening. Siegel nodded profoundly.

Brennan went on to explain his side of the tree-climbing episode and by the time he was through Siegel, who had not been paying attention, was surprised to find, on looking at his watch for the first time that evening, that it was almost eleven. A few people had left and the party was showing the first signs of slowing down. Siegel wandered out into the kitchen where he found half a fifth of scotch, and made a scotch on the rocks; his first drink, as a matter of fact, since he had arrived. He stood in the kitchen, alone, trying to assess things. First stage, melancholia. Second stage, direct violence. How much had Irving Loon been drinking? How much did starvation have to do with the psychosis once it got under way? And then the enormity of it hit him. Because if this hunch were true, Siegel had the power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them a very tangible salvation. A miracle involving a host, true, but like no holy eucharist. He was the only one, besides Irving Loon, who knew. Also, a sober voice reminded him, he was apparently the only one who had the Windigo psychosis as his sole piece of information about the Ojibwa. It might be a case of generalization, there might be any number of things wrong with Irving Loon. Still, perhaps … a case of conscience.

Vincent came up to him and wanted to talk but he waved him off. Siegel had had about enough of confessions. He wondered how his predecessor had managed to remain as father confessor for as long as he had. It occurred to him now that Lupescu’s parting comment had been no drunken witticism; but that the man really had, like some Kurtz, been possessed by the heart of a darkness in which no ivory was ever sent out from the interior, but instead hoarded jealously by each of its gatherers to build painfully, fragment by fragment, temples to the glory of some imago or obsession, and decorated inside with the art work of dream and nightmare, and locked finally against a hostile forest, each “agent” in his own ivory tower, having no windows to look out of, turning further and further inward and cherishing a small flame behind the altar. And Kurtz too had been in his way a father confessor. Siegel shook his head, trying to clear it. Somebody had started a crap game in the other room and Siegel sat down on the kitchen table, swinging one leg, looking in at the crowd. “Oh you’re a fine group,” he muttered.

He was beginning to think that maybe he should tell all these people to go to hell and go drop in on Rachel after all when he saw Irving Loon come dreamlike in under the pig foetus, eyes staring straight ahead, unseeing. Siegel, paralyzed, watched Irving Loon go into the bedroom, drag a chair over to one wall, stand on it, and unhook one of the BAR’s. Rapt, entirely absorbed in what he was doing, the Indian began rummaging around in the drawers of Lupescu’s desk. Gingerly Siegel edged himself off the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Irving Loon, still singing to himself produced with a smile a box of .30 caliber ammunition. Happily he began putting rounds into the magazine. Siegel counted the rounds as he put them in. The magazine would hold 20. All right, Siegel, he said to himself, here it is. Moment of truth. Espada broken, muleta lost, horse disembowelled, picadors sick with fear. Five in the afternoon, crowd screaming. Miura bull, sharp horns, charging in. He figured there were about sixty seconds to make a decision, and now the still small Jesuit voice, realizing that the miracle was in his hands after all, for real, vaunted with the same sense of exhiliration Siegel had once felt seeing five hundred hysterical freshmen advancing on the women’s dorms, knowing it was he who had set it all in motion. And the other, gentle part of him sang kaddishes for the dead and mourned over the Jesuit’s happiness, realizing however that this kind of penance was as good as any other; it was just unfortunate that Irving Loon would be the only one partaking of any body and blood, divine or otherwise. It took no more than five seconds for the two sides to agree that there was really only one course to take.

Quietly Siegel strolled back through the kitchen, through the living room, taking his time, unnoticed by the crap shooters, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him. He walked downstairs, whistling. At the first floor landing, he heard the first screams, the pounding of footsteps, the smashing of glass. He shrugged. What the hell, stranger things had happened in Washington. It was not until he had reached the street that he heard the first burst of the BAR fire.

Juvenalia

“Voice of the Hamster”

“Voice of the Hamster” is a fiction serialized in four issues of Pynchon’s high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1952-53, begun when Pynchon was only 15 years old (he graduated high school at 16). The text is taken from Clifford Mead’s Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Elmwood, IL: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1989), and according to both Mead and our own investigation these stories are in the public domain.

Remarkable for juvenilia, Pynchon’s high school fiction features many of the stylistic flourishes and literary themes he employs to this day: surreally silly names, paranoia, copious drug use, and an oddball sense of humor. These stories were published under pseuodnyms, such as “Roscoe Stein,” “Bose,” or no name at all.

By Thomas Pynchon

Purple and Gold, 13 November 1952, 2. “The Voice of the Hamster.”

Dear Sam,

You may remember me—I don’t know. I met you at that party in Huntington last August. I was the squat individual with the red crewcut who was doing the imitation of Winston Churchill. Anyway, you expressed interest in this school I go to and asked me to get in touch with you. So, here I am.

Hamster High is located on a rock about a half mile off the South Shore, and not a very big rock at that, as anybody can tell you who’s been there at high tide. Nobody seems to know why they call the place Hamster High, other than the highly debatable rumor that its founder, J. Fattington Woodgrouse, had a strong liking for the fuddy little creatures. There is a statue of J. Fattington Woodgrouse in front of the school. He is a little bald-headed man with a pot belly, and he looks like a cross between the last Martian and a hungry barracuda. Last Hallowe’en someone wrote on this statue a very nasty word in bright orange paint. There was a big scandal. I was suspended for four weeks.

Maybe the fact that we’re fairly well isolated accounts for why Hamster High is—well, not exactly crazy, but—slightly odd. Take for example our trig teacher, Mr. Faggiaducci. He’s a quiet respectable young man who wears thick glasses with chartreuse rims. He also wears peg pants, satin shirt, cool cardigan, and bop beret. He tears around in a long, baby-blue hotrod sedan, and he’s always telling be-bop jokes in class. There’s nothing actually wrong with him, it’s just that he used to be a bop drummer, and now he wishes he were back with the boys at Birdland and Eddie Condon’s. He talks to himself a lot and I’ve heard rumors he takes heroin. A real “gone guy.”

Then of course there’s our principal, Mr. Sowfurkle. This boy also has music leanings—he plays the bagpipes. The bad thing about it is that he uses school hours to practice. He’s very devoted to the bloody instrument. He locks himself in his office for about an hour every day to play it. Somehow one gets the idea he doesn’t like interruptions. He was born in the hills of Tennessee, and he still carries a shotgun with him, a nasty thing with a sawed-off barrel. Anyway, one day the chemistry teacher somehow wandered into his inner sanctum and started banging on the door, and old Furk got real excited. Poor Miss Phipps. We had to get a new door, too.

You might think we’re pretty limited as far as sports go, being out on a rock like we are, but that isn’t so. Of course, we can’t have our own football or baseball fields, so we use the ones in the nearest town, Riverhampton. I feel sorry for Coach Willis. He turned down a chance to coach Football at one of the Big Ten colleges and came to Hamster High instead. Coach Willis drinks a lot.

He smokes like a fiend, too, so that the Alumni Association is screaming to fire him for setting a bad example for the boys. Coach Willis claims that it’s the teams that have driven him to drink. He says: “What can you do with a football team that consistently runs the wrong way, a basketball team which refuses to dribble the ball, and a track team which is afraid to high jump, and throws the shot-put underhand?” In a way, I think he’s right, about football at least. In the past three years we’ve lost every game except one, and that was a tie with some grade school. The only reason we were able to tie them was because the grade school team was continually being penalized for unnecessary roughness.

But still the crowds come out and cheer for our boys, so colorful and manly-looking in their brown fur football uniforms, and they cheer our loyal little team mascot, Talleyrand the Hamster. We keep Tallyrand muzzled and on a long leash, for he is a vicious little monster. This hamster has razor sharp fangs which must be at least an inch long. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the scars where Tallyrand autographed my wrist.

But now I must say so long because I am getting tired, and I have a lot of trig homework to do. Not that it has to be done for tomorrow, as chances are Mr. Faggiaducci won’t be there; he’s out on another binge. Remind me sometime to tell you about the time the State Education Inspector came to Hamster High. Poor fellow—he’s in an institution now. And remember me to Beer-belly MacPherson and the rest of the mob.

Your drunken amigo,

Boscoe Stein.

Purple and Gold, 18 December 1952, 3. “Voice of the Hamster.”

Dear Sam,

In your last letter you mentioned that you wanted to hear about the time the State Education Inspector came to Hamster High. Well, it was sort of ironic since the grandfather, J. Fattington Woodgrouse, founded our school. This guy was little and fat, like the original, and he wore a stupid-looking pork-pie hat. Mr. Sowfurkle greeted him warmly and proceeded to take him on a tour of the school.

It seems the first class he went to was Miss Phipps’ chemistry class. I don’t take chemistry myself, but I got this straight from Sid Scully, who is at present engaged in an exhaustive study of the physiological effects of complex nicotine compounds upon the human body. He is also a chain smoker. Anyway, Crazy Harrigan was doing some work in the lab with unstable plutonium isotopes. You remember Crazy—the guy who blew up the Farmingdale Bank. Just as Mr. Woodgrouse opened the lab door, out tore Crazy, yelling at the top of his lungs, and he cannonballed into the inspector. It’s a good thing he knocked the inspector down because a minute later there was a terrific explosion from inside the lab, and half the wall came down on him. Crazy had got away down the hall, and it seemed that Mr. Woodgrouse was the only casualty. He took him down to the infirmary and patched him up.

Then all through the day, little accidents kept happening to him. It’s fantastic, but it always happens when somebody we don’t want comes wandering around. He saw more of the infirmary than anything else. First, in Mr. McGinty’s physics class, a ten-pound weight rolled off the desk and hit him on the foot. Then in the cafeteria someone bumped him and knocked his meal all over his new Brooks Brothers suit, ruining it quite permanently. Around the first period he mistook the door to the dumbwaiter shaft for the men’s room and took a quick trip from the third floor to the cellar the hard way. He was in pretty bad shape when we found him, so we took him down to the infirmary. Then he wandered into Mr. Faggiaducci’s class while Mr. Faggiaducci was giving us an exhibition of bop drumming. Mr. Faggiaducci’s hand slipped. The inspector looked awful funny with that drumstick halfway down his throat. After that, he wandered out onto the archery course, which was a mistake in the first place, since we had loudspeakers warning people that Crazy Harrigan’s archery team was practicing. I pity the U. S. Army when those guys get drafted. Let Crazy even see any kind of a lethal weapon and he goes “nuts.” I guess that Mr. Woodgrouse couldn’t hear the warnings through the bandages on his head. A rescue party arrived just in time to see him being pursued by a band of madmen, an arrow through his pork-pie hat and another in his shoulder. We took him down to the infirmary again.

He would have left then, but Coach Willis wanted him to watch football practice. Everything went O.K. until Coach Willis caught wind of the fact that Mr. Woodgrouse had played collegiate football. Before the poor inspector knew what was happening, he was in the quarterback position, the ball had been snapped, and he was watching eleven stalwart specimens of American manhood charging at him with blood in their eyes. I think he had one last fleeting moment of sanity before they hit him, and then he went down beneath a mountain of brown fur football uniforms. And to top it all, Talleyrand the Hamster got loose and bit him. We dragged him down again to the infirmary and fixed up the wound—which required two stiches—and the other injuries he had acquired. I think there was also a couple of vertebrae misplaced.

He went away quite peacefully with the men in the white coats; they didn’t even need a straitjacket for him. He was talking happily to himself and laughing. He was singing a little song, too: “First the wall fell, then all the arrows, then the mob in the hamster skins, then that (here he said a very uncouth word) bit me but I don’t care. They set off an atom bomb on me, they dropped things on my feet, they rammed things down my throat, but I’m stilI happy. They set booby traps on me but I don’t care anymore hahahahaha!”

Poor guy. Every week Mr. Faggiaducci goes over to see him and cheers him up with a drum rendition. Sometimes I think that Mr. Faggiaducci is—but never mind. They say that Mr. Woodgrouse will be out in another month. He was a good guy really. One sad note: somehow he lost that cute little pork-pie hat.

Well, I guess that’s all for this time. Tell me how it’s doing at O.B. H. S., will you?

Be seeing you,

Roscoe Stein.

Purple and Gold, 22 January 1953, 2, 4. “Voice of the Hamster.”

Dear Sam,

Sorry I haven’t written sooner, but I’m in the midst of recovering from a party I attended New Year’s Eve. It was what can only be called a riot, and that’s about what it ended up as. The party was thrown by Sid Scully’s sister Marge, and there must have been over a hundred people there. Everything was quiet until Crazy Harrigan, with some mob from Queens, started a conga line sometime around 1:30 in the morning, and that was about all it took to start an argument. Marge objected to the noise, and Sid agreed with her. Sid got pretty mad and started shoving Crazy around, Crazy threw a punch at Sid, Sid threw one back, Crazy hit Sid over the head with the punch bowl, and pandemonium broke loose—before we knew it we had a full scale free-for-all on our hands. Marge was crying, Sid was sitting on the floor clutching his head and swearing a blue streak, and their St. Bernard, O’Malley by name, was gaily romping through the whole mess and wrecking chairs, lamps—anything that happened to be in the way. The men from Queens, evidently suffering from delusions that they were musketeers or some thing, were happily dueling [sic] with the curtain rods, with Mr. Scully’s imported Oriental drapes as cloaks. Crazy Harrigan was dashing around with a chair like a lion tamer, screaming some nonsense about how he was a jolly good fellow and if anyone denied it Crazy would bash his head in. About that time the men in blue arrived, and we started to calm down a bit—all, that is, except Moe Klonk, who climbed up on a chair and started yelling about how that was capitalistic oppression and bourgeois tyranny, etc. Finally he got acquainted with the business end of a nightstick the hard way, and that sort of put an end to the party. Sid had to have two stitches taken and there were a lot of split lips and bloody noses, and Marge was almost in hysterics. Happy New Year!

In your last letter you said you wanted to know more about Mr. Rafael Faggiaducci, who teaches “trig” at Hamster High. For Christmas our “trig” class gave Mr. Faggiaducci a necktie with an inscription that lights up in the dark. The first day after Christmas vacation, Mr. Faggiaducci came into class with a large red mark across his face, but he refused to tell us what had happened. We also gave him a gold-plated drumstick inscribed “To Coolcat Faggiaducci from the Boys.”

The “Boys” (note well the capital B) are a peculiar and very select group. They occupy the rear seats. Officially they are there to learn trigonometry. Actually they are engaged, under the leadership of Crazy Harrigan and Big Bob Woods, in a fascinating experiment in psychology entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by psychoanalytic deletion of the super-ego. In other words, we are trying to see how much Faggiaducci can take before he flips his lid.

And you may be sure we are succeeding, although Faggiaducci does not exactly appreciate this. Already, he screams, his psychologist says he is getting delusions of persecution; that is, he is imagining that there is a conspiracy against him. You know the funny thing about it? There is!

For one thing, Faggiaducci hates the song “High Noon”—he goes “nuts” every time he hears it. So, John Trodsky brings his guitar to class, and we all sing, “Do not forsake me, Faggiaducci,” etc. He gets very, very peeved sometimes. I can show you a scar where I was hit by a compass Faggiaducci threw in a blind fit of rage. We also have the habit of laughing unexpectedly. It may be during a test, when the whole room is quiet—all of a sudden there is a huge roar from the back of the room. Every time Faggiaducci jumps as if he had sat on a mousetrap. Sometimes that happens too. We also pulled a real cool bit a few weeks ago. At a prearranged signal, the whole class started rocking from side to side. Faggiaducci said, “Stop that rocking!” and Sid Scully laughed and said, “What rocking?” Faggiaducci got mad and called the principal, Mr. Sowfurkle, and said, “My class is rocking back and forth. Come up and do something about it.” So, the inevitable happened; when Furk came into the room, we stopped rocking and sat perfectly still. The conversation which followed between Faggiaducci and the principal I leave to your own imagination.

Well, Sam, I guess that’s about all for now. Write soon and tell me if you have any teachers like Faggiaducci at Oyster Bay High.

As always,

Bose.

Purple and Gold, 19 February 1953, 8. “Voice of the Hamster.”

Dear Sam,

Did it! Passed trig! I was taking it half-year, you know, with The Boys, and we finally succeeded in getting Faggiaducci to the point where he was completely fed up with us. He got so mad that the day of the Regents he refused to proctor the exam. So we were stuck with some neurotic Czech who screamed instead of talked.

Anyway, we started singing, “Do not forsake me, Faggiaducci,” and he got purple and screamed—screamed, mind you, not yelled like Faggiaducci—“Shut up or I’ll kick you all out!” Then he started swearing and insulting us and throwing things until finally he got us pretty riled. Now you know there’s one thing meaner than The Boys, and that’s The Boys riled. Sid Scully called the Czech something very uncomplimentary; Crazy Harrigan hit him from behind with a ruler; and Bob Woods tripped him with a chair when he swung at Sid. He headed out of the room, intending to call the principal. That did it! En masse, The Boys arose, surrounded the Czech, picked him up bodily, stuffed him in the dumbwaiter, and left him there until we could finish the exam in peace.

Faggiaducci had said that the best mark he had expected was somewhere in the low 60’s; as it was, there was no mark lower than 92. (Don’t ask me how we did it!) This, of course, had a severe psychological effect on Faggiaducci. He hasn’t been to school in a week. I hear he had a breakdown. The Czech? Well, nobody uses that dumbwaiter shaft anymore, and so we decided to leave him there. They may find him some day—I don’t care much—he gets fed twice a week.

Must go now

Arrivaderci,

Bose.

“The Boys”

“The Boys” is a short, humorous piece that appeared in Pynchon’s high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1953, a few months before Pynchon graduated at the age of 16. “The Boys” is what Pynchon called his group of friends and fellow members of the school Math Club (of which Pynchon was a founding member, it seems). The following piece relates the story of how the shadowy, secret group was finally outed, when a photo of them was published in the high school yearbook.

The text is taken from Clifford Mead’s Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Elmwood, IL: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1989), and according to both Mead and our own investigation these stories are in the public domain. Mead’s book also reproduces a number of photos from Pynchon’s yearbook, and the only group photo that Pynchon smiles in is, sure enough, the Math Club.

By Thomas Pynchon

Purple and Gold, 19 March 1953, 8. “The Boys”

In the past few weeks at O. B. H. S. there has arisen a newer, brighter star in the already brilliant constellation of our extracurricular activities. This organization evolved slowly and painfully; many factors contributed to its maturity (for lack of a better word). One has been the natural psychological manic phase prevalent in most seniors coupled with a compulsive-obsessive complex to apathy concerning schoolwork; in other words, goofing off and fooling around. Another has been a certain series of articles in the P. & G. which has fired the imagination of the group of students comprising this society.

“The Boys,” for so this group is called, had heretofore been working in the shadow of anonymous immunity, and their names and faces were unknown save to their own compact enclave. But now the secret is out, for “The Boys” have finally reached a peak: they have gotten their pictures taken for the yearbook of ‘53.

This singular event took place at the beginning of sixth period on Thursday, February 26. This date is significant; it marks the beginning of a new era of student-teacher relations. Quietly, efficiently, a few couriers infiltrated the halls and classrooms. A whispered sentence, a tap on the shoulder, and another silently left class. Finally, the entire organization was assembled on the front steps of the school, the camera set up, the picture ready to be snapped. But wait! No Mr. X! (Mr. X, of course, being the math teacher). Shouting enthusiastically, “The Boys” gathered under his classroom window, and began chanting, “We want X! We want X!”

Slowly, Mr. X approached the window, peered out through his horn-rimmed glasses and retreated hastily. The shouts grew louder; finally, timidly, Mr. X raised his hand, and said, “All right, all right. I’m coming.” A roar went up, as “The Boys” cheered en masse, and finally Mr. X appeared, resplendent in bow tie and bop cardigan. The picture was snapped, and history was made.

“Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight”

This piece by Pynchon appeared in his high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1953, a few months before Pynchon graduated at the age of 16.

The text is taken from Clifford Mead’s Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Elmwood, IL: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1989), and according to both Mead and our own investigation these stories are in the public domain.

By Thomas Pynchon

Purple and Gold, 19 March 1953, 2. “Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight”

“Ridiculous!” roared King Arthur, slamming his beer mug on the Round Table. “Purple, you say?”

“All purple, my liege,” said Sir Launcelot, nervously wiping the foam from his face, “head to toes. Completely.”

“I say! Most irregular. Well, what does he want?”

“He wants audience with you, my liege. It seems he’s done ole Cholmondesley in.”

“Cholmondesley?”

“With an axe, your grace. A purple axe. He says he’ll do the same to us all if we don’t send a challenger to fight him in fair battle.”

“Well?”

“Well, he—he’s—twenty feet tall.”

“Twenty! Oh, I say! Ghastly business! Who’ve we got crazy enough to fight him? How about you, Launcelot?”

“Oh, no, my liege. Cut my finger last night peeling potatoes. The pain is beastly.”

“Rotten luck, old chap. Well,” he addressed the knights of the round table, “there’s a big purple idiot outside who’s looking for a fight. Who’s game?”

Then up spake Sir Bushwack, a sturdy youth with a broad beam and a low center of gravity: “Where is the bloke? I’m not afraid, even if he is twenty feet taII!” Sir Bushwack had been drinking.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Launcelot, telling him to bid the knight enter. And Launcelot did this, and the horns sounded, and in staggered a tremendous giant, perhaps four feet in height, dragging behind him a ten-foot purple axe. He had a vast quantity of purple hair which fell down over his eyes, and was clad in purple armor, and his feet in purple sneakers. He led a noble steed, also purple, which resembled a cross between a Shetland pony and an armadillo.

King Arthur whispered to Launcelot, “I thought you said he was twenty feet tall.”

“That’s what he told me, your majesty.”

“That’s what he what? Why you …”

The rest of King Arthur’s tirade was drowned out by the purple giant, who was bellowing in a mighty voice:

“Okay, I can beat any man in the house! I ain’t scared of nobody ‘cause you’re all … “ he hiccoughed “ … chicken to fight me! Come on, who’s first?”

Up spake Sir Bushwack, shouting, “I challenge thee, Sir Knight!” The purple knight laughed. “Look what’sh challenging me! You slob, I can,—hic—can lick you with, —hic—one hand tied behind my back! Come ahead!” Then did the purple knight pick up the purple axe and begin to whirl it about his head, faster and faster. Sir Bushwack waddled up dubiously with sword in hand, feebly attempted to parry, then quickly retreated. The purple knight stood and laughed.

“Chicken, all of you! Scared to fight me! Har! Har!”

Suddenly, the horns sounded and into the hall rushed a very brave and manly knight, Sir Stupid.

“I say!” he shouted to all and sundry, “Old Fotheringay’s run amok! He and his horse fell into that newly-pressed grape juice up at the distillery, and …”.

Then he caught sight of the purple knight and stopped short. King Arthur started to laugh hysterically, spilling beer hither and yon.

“I say, old Fotheringay’s gone and fallen into the wine vat! Old Fotheringayl Haw, Haw, Haw! Old Fotheringay’s got high on grape juice! Haw! In the still of the knight!”

Old Fotheringay stood digesting this in silence. Then slowly he began to chuckle and whirl that axe.

“Oh, oh,” Sir Stupid whispered to Arthur, “here he goes!” With a savage yell, Old Fotheringay charged the Round Table, swinging his axe. In an instant, the hall became the scene of a free-for-all. The purple knight was in the thick of the whole mess, smashing furniture, beer kegs, and anything else that happened to be in his way. The hall resounded with the clanging of swords, the splintering of wood, and the demonaical chuckling of the purple knight. In the midst of the noise and confusion, Sir Stupid buttonholed Bushwack.

“Noble knight,” he said, “art thou truly dedicated to thy leige?”

“Yes.”

“And wouldst thou suffer discomfort to rid thy liege of this menace?”

“Surely,” Sir Bushwack said absently, as he ducked a flying beer mug.

“That’s all I wanted to know! Fotheringay! You feeble-minded halfwit cretin! Over here!”

Infuriated, the purple knight whirled toward Sir Stupid and raised his axe. Sir Stupid lifted the protesting Bushwack and hurled him bodily at Fotheringay. There was a loud, splintering smash as the purple knight went down, and then all was silent, except for the gurgling of beer from a shattered keg. Sir Stupid stood over the horizontal Fotheringay.

“Now, thou proud knight,” roared Sir Stupid triumphantly, “now what hast thou to say?”

Slowly, the purple knight looked up and sneered. “CHICKEN,” he said.

Essays

A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

By Thomas Pynchon

June 12, 1966

Los Angeles

The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angeles policemen, Caucasians, succeeded in halting a car driven by Leonard Deadwyler, a Negro. With him were his pregnant wife and a friend. The younger cop (who’d once had a complaint brought against him for rousing some Negro kids around in a more than usually abusive way) went over and stuck his head and gun in the car window to talk to Deadwyler. A moment later there was a shot; the young Negro fell sideways in the seat, and died. The last thing he said, according to the other cop, was, “She’s going to have a baby.”

The coroner’s inquest went on for the better part of two weeks, the cop claiming the car had lurched suddenly, causing his service revolver to go off by accident; Deadwyler’s widow claiming that it was cold-blooded murder and that the car had never moved. The verdict, to no one’s surprise, cleared the cop of all criminal responsibility. It had been an accident. The D.A. announced immediately that he thought so, too, and that as far as he was concerned the case was closed.

But as far as Watts is concerned, it’s still very much open. Preachers in the community are urging calm—or, as others are putting it: “Make any big trouble, baby, The Man just going to come back in and shoot you, like last time.” Snipers are sniping but so far not hitting much of anything. Occasional fire bombs are being lobbed at cars with white faces inside, or into empty sports models that look as if they might be white property. There have been a few fires of mysterious origin. A Negro Teen Post—part of the L.A. poverty war’s keep-them-out-of-the- streets effort—has had all its windows busted, the young lady in charge expressing the wish next morning that she could talk with the malefactors, involve them, see if they couldn’t work out the problem together. In the back of everybody’s head, of course, is the same question: Will there be a repeat of last August’s riot?

An even more interesting question is: Why is everybody worrying about another riot—haven’t things in Watts improved any since the last one? A lot of white folks are wondering. Unhappily, the answer is no. The neighborhood may be seething with social workers, data collectors, VISTA volunteers and other assorted members of the humanitarian establishment, all of whose intentions are the purest in the world. But somehow nothing much has changed. There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.

The killing of Leonard Deadwyler has once again brought it all into sharp focus; brought back longstanding pain, reminded everybody of how very often the cop does approach you with his revolver ready, so that nothing he does with it can then really be accidental; of how, especially, at night, everything can suddenly reduce to a matter of reflexes: your life trembling in the crook of a cop’s finger because it is dark, and Watts, and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less. Both of you are caught in something neither of you wants, and yet night after night, with casualities or without, these traditional scenes continue to be played out all over the south-central part of this city.

Whatever else may be wrong in a political way—like the inadequacy of the Great Depression techniques applied to a scene that has long outgrown them; like old-fashioned grafter’s glee among the city fathers over the vast amounts of poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to them—lying much closer to the heart of L.A.‘s racial sickness is the co-existence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.

While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly—the economy of the area in fact depending on it—the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen—and can afford—to ignore. The two cultures do not understand each other, though white values are displayed without let-up on black people’s TV screens, and though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.

On the surface anyway, the Deadwyler affair hasn’t made it look any different, though underneath the mood in Watts is about what you might expect. Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, to an anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer. Yet in the daytime’s brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it real, no plastic faces, no transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfied landscaping or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, like the police substation, one command post for the white forces last August, pigeons now thick and cooing up on its red-tiled roof. Or, on down the street, vacant lots, still looking charred around the edges, winking with emptied Tokay, port and sherry pints, some of the bottles peeking out of paper bags, others busted.

A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass—not that you’d ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It’s part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste. Traditionally Watts. An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a little piece of the neighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the street rails. But Simon Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates.

A few blocks away, other kids are out playing on the hot blacktop of the school playground. Brothers and sisters too young yet for school have it better—wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not the crowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the rest of L.A., giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you don’t especially feel like being inside.

In the business part of town there is a different idea of refuge. Pool halls and bars, warm and dark inside, are crowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to a ball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildings—low, faded stucco boxes that remind you, oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. it is easy to see how crowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For the moment, it all only waits in the sun.

Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.

From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts—and, in a curious way, besieges it—looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the “action” everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.

Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast, a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went, too.

Since the August rioting, there has been little building here, little buying. Lots whose buildings were burned off them are still waiting vacant and littered with garbage, occupied only by a parked car or two, or kids fooling around after school, or winos sharing a pint in the early morning. The other day, on one of them, there were ground-breaking festivities, attended by a county supervisor, pretty high-school girls decked in ribbons, a white store owner and his wife, who in the true Watts spirit busted a bottle of champagne over a rock—all because the man had decided to stay and rebuild his $200,000 market, the first such major rebuilding since the riot.

Watts people themselves talk about another kind of aura, vaguely evil; complain that Negroes living in better neighborhoods like to come in under the freeway as to a red-light district, looking for some girl, some game, maybe some connection. Narcotics is said to be a rare bust in Watts these days, although the narco people cruise the area earnestly, on the lookout for dope fiends, dope rings, dope peddlers. But the poverty of Watts makes it more likely that if you have pot or a little something else to spare you will want to turn a friend on, not sell it. Tomorrow, or when he can, your friend will return the favor.

At the Deadwyler inquest, much was made of the dead man’s high blood alcohol content, as if his being drunk made it somehow all right for the police to shoot him. But alcohol is a natural part of the Watts style; as natural as LSD is around Hollywood. The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe so much in escape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L.A. Scene makes accessible to him so many different forms of it. But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some calm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough for that. Especially good at the end of a bad day.

Like after you have driven, say, down to Torrance or Long Beach or wherever it is they’re hiring because they don’t seem to be in Watts, not even in the miles of heavy industry that sprawl along Alameda Street, that gray and murderous arterial which lies at the eastern boundary of Watts looking like the edge of the world.

So you groove instead down the freeway, maybe wondering when some cop is going to stop you because the old piece of a car you’re driving, which you bought for $20 or $30 you picked up somehow, makes a lot of noise or burns some oil. Catching you mobile widens The Man’s horizons; gives him more things he can get you on. Like “excessive smoking” is a great favorite with him.

If you do get to where you were going without encountering a cop, you may spend your day looking at the white faces of personnel men, their uniform glaze of suspicion, their automatic smiles, and listening to polite putdowns. “I decided once to ask,” a kid says, “one time they told me I didn’t meet their requirements. So I said, “Well, what are you looking for? I mean, how can I train, what things do I have to learn so I can meet your requirements?’ Know what he said? ‘We are not obligated to tell you what our requirements are.’”

He isn’t. That right there is the hell and headache: he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do because he is The Man. Or he was. A lot of kids these days are more apt to be calling the little man—meaning not so much any member of the power structure as just your average white L.A. taxpayer, registered voter, property owner; employed, stable, mortgaged and the rest.

The little man bugs these kids more The Man ever bugged their parents. It is the little man who is standing on their feet and in their way; he’s all over the place, and there is not much they can do to change him or the way he feels about them. A Watts kid knows more of what goes on inside white heads than possibly whites do themselves; knows how often the little man has looked at him and thought, “Bad credit risk”—or “Poor learner,” or “Sexual threat,” or “Welfare chiseler”—without knowing a thing about him personally.

The natural, normal thing to want to do is hit the little man. But what, after all, has he done? Mile, respectable, possibly smiling, he has called you no names, shown no weapons. Only told you perhaps that the job was filled, the house rented.

With a cop it may get more dangerous, but at least it’s honest. You understand each other. Both of you silently admitting that all the cop really has going for him is his gun. “There was a time,” they’ll tell you “you’d say, ‘Take off the badge, baby, and let’s settle it.’ I mean he wouldn’t, but you’d say it. But since August, man, the way I feel, hell with the badge—just take off that gun.”

The cop does not take off that gun; the hassle stays verbal. But this means that, besides protecting and serving the little man, the cop also functions as his effigy.

If he does get emotional and say something like “boy” or “nigger,” you then have the option of cooling it or else—again this is more frequent since last August—calling him the name he expects to be called, though it is understood you are not commenting in any literal way on what goes on between him and his mother. It is a ritual exchange, like the dirty dozens.

Usually—as in the Deadwyler incident—it’s the younger cop of the pair who’s more troublesome. Most Watts kids are hip to what’s going on in this rookie’s head—the things he feels he has to prove—as much as to the elements of the ritual. Before the cop can say, “Let’s see your I.D.,” you learn to take it out politely and say, “You want to see my I.D.?” Naturally it will bug the cop more the further ahead of him you can stay. It is flirting with disaster, but it’s the cop who has the guns, so you do what you can.

You must anticipate always how the talk is going to go. It’s something you pick up quite young, same as you learn the different species of cop: The Black and White (named for the color scheme of their automobiles), who are L.A. city police and in general the least flexible; the L.A. county sheriff’s department, who style themselves more of an élite, try to maintain a certain distance from the public, and are less apt to harass you unless you seem worthy; the Compton city cops, who travel only one to a car and come on very tough, like leaning four of you at a time up against the wall and shaking you all down; the juvies, who ride in unmarked Plymouths and are cruising all over the place soon as the sun goes down, pulling up alongside you with pleasantries like, “Which one’s buying the wine tonight?” or, “Who are you guys planning to rob this time?” They are kidding, of course, trying to be pals. But Watts kids, like most, do not like being put in with winos, or dangerous drivers or thieves, or in any bag considered criminal or evil. Whatever the cop’s motives, it looks like mean and deliberate ignorance.

In the daytime, and especially with any kind of crowd, the cop’s surface style has changed some since last August. “Time was,” you’ll hear, “man used to go right in, very mean, pick maybe one kid out of the crowd he figured was the troublemaker, try to bust him down in front of everybody. But now the people start yelling back, how they don’t want no more of that, all of a sudden The Man gets very meek.”

Still, however much a cop may seem to be following the order of the day read to him every morning about being courteous to everybody, his behavior with a crowd will really depend as it always has on how many of his own he can muster, and how fast. For his Mayor, Sam Yorty, is a great believer in the virtues of Overwhelming Force as a solution to racial difficulties. This approach has not gained much favor in Watts. In fact, the Mayor of Los Angeles appears to many Negroes to be the very incarnation of the little man: looking out for no one but himself, speaking always out of expediency, and never, never to be trusted.

The Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency (E.Y.O.A.) is a joint city-county “umbrella agency” (the state used to be represented, but has dropped out) for many projects scattered around the poorer parts of L.A., and seems to be Sam Yorty’s native element, if not indeed the flower of his consciousness. Bizarre, confused, ever in flux, strangely ineffective, E.Y.O.A. hardly sees a day go by without somebody resigning, or being fired, or making an accusation, or answering one—all of it confirming the Watts Negroes’ already sad estimate of the little man. The Negro attitude toward E.Y.O.A. is one of clear mistrust, though degrees of suspicion vary, from the housewife wanting only to be left in peace and quiet, who hopes that maybe The Man is lying less than usual this time, to the young, active disciple of Malcolm X who dismisses it all with a contemptuous shrug.

“But why?” asked one white lady volunteer. “There are so many agencies now that you can go to, that can help you, if you’ll only file your complaint.”

“They don’t help you.” This particular kid had been put down trying to get a job with one of the larger defense contractors.

“Maybe not before. But it’s different now.”

“Now,” the kid sighed, “now. See, people been hearing that ‘now’ for a long time, and I’m just tired of The Man telling you, “‘Now it’s OK, now we mean what we say.’”

In Watts, apparently, where no one can afford the luxury of illusion, there is little reason to believe that now will be any different, any better than last time.

It is perhaps a measure of the people’s indifference that only 2 per cent of the poor in Los Angeles turned out to elect representatives to the E.Y.O.A. “poverty board.” For a hopeless minority on the board (7 out of 23), nobody saw much point in voting.

Meantime, the outposts of the establishment drowse in the bright summery smog: secretaries chat the afternoons plaintively away about machines that will not accept the cards they have punched for them; white volunteers sit filing, doodling, talking on the phones, doing any kind of busy-work, wondering where the “clients” are; inspirational mottoes like SMILE decorate the beaverboard office walls along with flow charts to illustrate the proper disposition of “cases,” and with clippings from the slick magazines about “What Is Emotional Maturity?”

Items like smiling and Emotional Maturity are in fact very big with the well-adjusted, middle- class professionals, Negro and white, who man the mimeographs and computers of the poverty war here. Sadly, they seem to be smiling themselves out of any meaningful communication with their poor. Besides a 19th-century faith that tried and true approaches—sound counseling, good intentions, perhaps even compassion—will set Watts straight, they are also burdened with the personal attitudes they bring to work with them. Their reflexes—especially about conformity, about failure, about violence—are predictable.

“We had a hell of a time with this one girl,” a Youth Training and Employment Project counselor recalls. “You should have seen those hairdos of hers—piled all the way up to here. And the screwy outfits she’d come in with, you just wouldn’t believe. We had to take her aside and explain to her that employers just don’t go for that sort of thing. That she’d be up against a lot of very smooth-looking chicks, heels and stockings, conservative hair and clothes. We finally got her to come around.”

The same goes for boys who like to wear Malcolm hats, or Afro haircuts. The idea the counselors push evidently is to look as much as possible like a white applicant. Which is to say, like a Negro job counselor or social worker. This has not been received with much enthusiasm among the kids it is designed to help out, and is one reason business is so slow around the various projects.

There is a similar difficulty among the warriors about failure. They are in a socio-economic bag, along with the vast majority of white Angelenos, who seem more terrified of failure than of death. It is difficult to see where any of them have experienced significant defeat, or loss. If they have, it seems to have been long rationalized away as something else.

You are likely to hear from them wisdom on the order of: “Life has a way of surprising us, simply as a function of time. Even if all you do is stand on the street corner and wait.” Watts is full of street corners where people stand, as they have been, some of them, for 20 or 30 years, without Surprise One ever having come along. Yet the poverty warriors must believe in this form of semimiracle, because their world and their scene cannot accept the possibility that there may be, after all, no surprise. But it is something Watts has always known.

As for violence, in a pocket of reality such as Watts, violence is never far from you: because you are a man, because you have been put down, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Somehow, sometime. Yet to these innocent, optimistic child-bureaucrats, violence is an evil and an illness, possibly because it threatens property and status they cannot help cherishing.

They remember last August’s riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from the realistic viewpoint of Watts, was so abnormal? “Man’s got his foot on your neck,” said one guy who was there, “sooner or later you going to stop asking him to take it off.” The violence it took to get that foot to ease up even the little it did was no surprise. Many had predicted it. Once it got going, its basic objective—to beat the Black and White police—seemed a reasonable one, and was gained the minute The Man had to send troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardly a person in watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it happened—unless he lost somebody.

But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.

“Sure I did two stretches,” a kid says, “both times for fighting, but I didn’t deserve either one. First time, the cat was bigger than I was; next time, it was two against one, and I was the one.” But he was busted all the same, perhaps because Whitey, who knows how to get everything he wants, no longer has fisticuffs available as a technique, and sees no reason why everybody shouldn’t go the Niceguy route. If you are thinking maybe there is a virility hangup in here, too, that putting a Negro into a correctional institution for fighting is also some kind of neutering operation, well, you might have something there, who knows?

It is, after all, in white L.A.‘s interest to cool Watts any way it can—to put the area under a siege of persuasion; to coax the Negro poor into taking on certain white values. Given them a little property, and they will be less tolerant of arson; get them to go in hock for a car or color TV, and they’ll be more likely to hold down a steady job. Some see it for what it is—this come-on, this false welcome, this attempt to transmogrify the reality of Watts into the unreality of Los Angeles. Some don’t.

Watts is tough; has been able to resist the unreal. If there is any drift away from reality, it is by way of mythmaking. As this summer warms up, last August’s riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man’s power, either with real incidents or false alarms.

Others remember it in terms of music; through much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights; everybody knowing what to do and when to do it without needing a word or a signal: “You could go up to anybody, the cats could be in the middle of burning down a store or something, but they’d tell you, explain very calm, just what they were doing, what they were going to do next. And that’s what they’d do; man, nobody has to give orders.”

Restructuring of the riot goes on in other ways. All Easter week this year, in the spirit of the season, there was a “Renaissance of the Arts,” a kind of festival in memory of Simon Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heart of Watts.

Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely from found objects—found, symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.

In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna on top; inside where its picture tube should have been, gazing out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was “The Late, Late, Late Show.”

Thomas Pynchon is the author of the highly praised novel “V” and of the recently published “The Crying of Lot 49.”

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

By THOMAS PYNCHON

October 28, 1984

“As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into “literary” and “scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever “beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, “If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such “intellectuals,” for the most part “literary,” were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be “natural Luddites.”

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, “people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

HISTORICALLY, Luddites flourished in Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It isn’t clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C. P. Snow’s use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined as the counterrevolutionaries of that “Industrial Revolution” which their modern versions have “never tried, wanted, or been able to understand.”

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in “Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution,” Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial “revolution,” in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in “Luddite” they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and “in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking- frame was found sabotaged - this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 - folks would respond with the catch phrase “Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick - every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it’s important to remember that the target even of the original assault of 1779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He’d show up at her place. “Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.” “What, again?” After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let’s imagine logically and coolly, vowed to in vent a machine that would make the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete. And he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted cleric’s frame “was so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years.”

Now, given that kind of time span, it’s just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault. But the words “fit of insane rage” are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery - especially when it’s been around for a while - not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work - to be “worth” that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass - the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero - who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. “Are you not near the Luddites?” he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. “By the Lord! if there’s a row, but I’ll be among ye! How go on the weavers - the breakers of frames - the Lutherans of politics - the reformers?” He includes an “amiable chanson, ” which proves to be a Luddite hymn so inflammatory that it wasn’t published till after the poet’s death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.”

If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein’s creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. “I resolved …,” Victor tells us, “to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large,” which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor’s own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. However much of “Frankenstein’s” longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor’s account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details, but we’re left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale’s galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.

This is one of several interesting similarities between “Frankenstein” and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, “The Castle of Otranto” (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelley’s preface was written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to “Frankenstein” in her own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.

THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind “with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.” Walpole had awakened from a dream, “of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle … and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”

In Walpole’s novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle’s resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein’s creature, is assembled from pieces - sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite oversized - which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud’s slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in “Frankenstein,” are non-mechanical. The final assembly of “the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude,” is achieved through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto’s patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after “The Castle of Otranto” was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake’s dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible - remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however “irrational,” to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. “Gothic” became code for “medieval,” and that has remained code for “miraculous,” on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and the comics, down to “Star Wars” and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.

TO insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes: “Well, the airplanes got him.” “No … it was Beauty killed the Beast.” In which again we encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological.

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature - of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself - then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on “Frankenstein,” which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart.” The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, “But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label “escapist fare.”

This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system - which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution - had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become - among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies - conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns - exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions - most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of “human” as particularly distinguished from “machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age - curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the “future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk - realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

THE word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

So we, boys, we

Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

By Thomas Pynchon

June 6, 1993

In his classical discussion of the subject in the “Summa Theologica,” Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, one of the seven capital sins. He said he was using “capital” to mean “primary” or “at the head of” because such sins gave rise to others, but there was an additional and darker sense resonating luridly just beneath and not hurting the power of his argument, for the word also meant “deserving of capital punishment.” Hence the equivalent term “mortal,” as well as the punchier English “deadly.”

But come on, isn’t that kind of extreme, death for something as lightweight as Sloth? Sitting there on some medieval death row, going, “So, look, no offense, but what’d they pop you for anyway?”

“Ah, usual story, they came around at the wrong time of day, I end up taking out half of some sheriff’s unit with my two-cubit crossbow, firing three-quarter-inch bolts on auto feed. Anger, I guess… . How about you?”

“Um, well … it wasn’t anger… .”

“Ha! Another one of these Sloth cases, right?”

“… fact, it wasn’t even me.”

“Never is, slugger—say, look, it’s almost time for lunch. You wouldn’t happen to be a writer, by any chance?”

Writers of course are considered the mavens of Sloth. They are approached all the time on the subject, not only for free advice, but also to speak at Sloth Symposia, head up Sloth Task Forces, testify as expert witnesses at Sloth Hearings. The stereotype arises in part from our conspicuous presence in jobs where pay is by the word, and deadlines are tight and final—we are presumed to know from piecework and the convertibility of time and money. In addition, there is all the glamorous folklore surrounding writer’s block, an affliction known sometimes to resolve itself dramatically and without warning, much like constipation, and (hence?) finding wide sympathy among readers.

Writer’s block, however, is a trip to the theme park of your choice alongside the mortal sin that produces it. Like each of the other six, Sloth was supposed to be the progenitor of a whole family of lesser, or venial, sins, among them Idleness, Drowsiness, Restlessness of the Body, Instability and Loquacity. “Acedia” in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned away from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in to the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.

But Sloth’s offspring, though bad—to paraphrase the Shangri-Las—are not always evil, for example what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the Mind, or “rushing after various things without rhyme or reason,” which, “if it pertains to the imaginative power … is called curiosity.” It is of course precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers are known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with luck can be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do. We sell our dreams. So real money actually proceeds from Sloth, although this transformation is said to be even more amazing elsewhere in the entertainment sector, where idle exercises in poolside loquacity have not infrequently generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

As a topic for fiction, Sloth over the next few centuries after Aquinas had a few big successes, notably “Hamlet,” but not until arriving on the shores of America did it take the next important step in its evolution. Between Franklin’s hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville’s doomed scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America, consolidating itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.

Philadelphia, by Franklin’s time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal. (Dickens, visiting in 1842, remarked, “After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”) Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity. Sloth was no longer so much a sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible—that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.

Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his distaste for Sloth. When he was not merely repeating well-known British proverbs on the subject, he was contributing Great Awakening-style outbursts of his own—“O Lazy-bones! Dost think God would have given thee arms and legs if he had not designed thou shouldst use them?” Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity. “You may delay, but time will not.” And Sloth, being continual evasion, just kept piling up like a budget deficit, while the dimensions of the inevitable payback grew ever less merciful.

In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard’s day, where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In Frances M. Barbour’s 1974 concordance of the sayings, there is nothing to be found under “Dreams,” dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as their frequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of things to purchase 20 hours of productive waking. During the Poor Richard years, Franklin, according to the “Autobiography,” was allowing himself from 1 A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonwork block of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, “What good have I done this day?” This must have been the schedule’s only occasion for drifting into reverie—there would seem to have been no other room for speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to be nonfiction.

BY the time of “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robber-baron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, “I would prefer not to.” While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener—this writer!—who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? “Bartleby” is the first great epic of modern Sloth, presently to be followed by work from the likes of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and others—take your own favorite list of writers after Melville and you’re bound sooner or later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time.

In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920’s and 30’s being perhaps Sloth’s finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price, a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The compulsive pessimist’s last defense—stay still enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will pass by—Sloth is our background radiation, our easy-listening station—it is everywhere, and no longer noticed.

Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is of course incomplete without considering television, with its gifts of paralysis, along with its creature and symbiont, the notorious Couch Potato. Tales spun in idleness find us Tubeside, supine, chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in, re-enacting in reverse the transaction between dream and revenue that brought these colored shadows here to begin with so that we might feed, uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins in parallel, eating too much, envying the celebrated, coveting merchandise, lusting after images, angry at the news, perversely proud of whatever distance we may enjoy between our couches and what appears on the screen.

Sad but true. Yet, chiefly owing to the timely invention—not a minute too soon!—of the remote control and the VCR, maybe there is hope after all. Television time is no longer the linear and uniform commodity it once was. Not when you have instant channel selection, fast-forward, rewind and so forth. Video time can be reshaped at will. What may have seemed under the old dispensation like time wasted and unrecoverable is now perhaps not quite as simply structured. If Sloth can be defined as the pretense, in the tradition of American settlement and spoliation, that time is one more nonfinite resource, there to be exploited forever, then we may for now at least have found the illusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time—even imagining that we can escape it. Sins against video time will have to be radically redefined.

Is some kind of change already in the offing? A recent issue of The National Enquirer announced the winner of their contest for the King of Spuds, or top Couch Potato in the United States, culled from about a thousand entries. “‘All I do is watch television and work,’ admits the 35-year-old bachelor, who keeps three TV sets blaring 24 hours a day at his Fridley, Minn., home and watches a fourth set on the job.

“‘There’s nothing I like more than sitting around with a six-pack of beer, some chips and a remote control… . The TV station even featured me in a town parade. They went into my house, got my couch and put it on a float. I sat on the couch in my bathrobe and rode in the parade!’”

Sure, but is it Sloth? The fourth television set at work, the fact that twice, the Tuber in question mentions sitting and not reclining, suggest something different here. Channel-surfing and VCR-jockeying may require a more nonlinear awareness than may be entirely compatible with the venerable sin of Sloth—some inner alertness or tension, as of someone sitting in a yoga posture, or in Zen meditation. Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended? Another possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at all, but that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue, television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments—who knows? computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities—ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the cheap.

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth—defiant sorrow in the face of God’s good intentions—was a deadly sin.

Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems increasingly to define us—technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite technology’s good intentions, there we’ll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth’s good old days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

Book Reviews

The Gift

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking) has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. It is Blaisdell’s private abyss, and not too different from the town’s public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Holiday vol. 38, #6

December 1965, pp. 164-5

The Heart’s Eternal Vow

By Thomas Pynchon

April 10, 1988

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.

LOVE, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It’s about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life’s limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love “forever,” but actually to follow through on it - to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one’s alloted stake of precious time where one’s heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s new novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

In the postromantic ebb of the 70’s and 80’s, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love’s vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For Garcia Marquez the step may also be revolutionary. “I think that a novel about love is as valid as any other,” he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (published as “El Olor de la Guayaba,” 1982). “In reality the duty of a writer - the revolutionary duty, if you like - is that of writing well.”

And - oh boy - does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:

“From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.

“They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone’s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.”

This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality - youthful idiocy, to some -may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of fiction, Garcia Marquez shows us how it could all plausibly come about, even - wild hope -for somebody out here, outside a book, even as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and corruptive world.

HERE’S what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla - as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officially mapped. Three major characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both carnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, a “beautiful adolescent with … almond-shaped eyes,” who walks with a “natural haughtiness … her doe’s gait making her seem immune to gravity.” Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passionate and secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the girl’s father has found out and taken her away on an extended “journey of forgetting.” But when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a 19th-century novel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless.

For Florentino, love’s creature, this is an agonizing setback, though nothing fatal. Having sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until she’s free again. This turns out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies, chasing a parrot up a mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart. “Fermina,” he declares, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out of the house. “And don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you… . I hope there are very few of them.”

The heart’s eternal vow has run up against the world’s finite terms. The confrontation occurs near the end of the first chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbino’s last day on earth and Fermina’s first night as a widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years of the Urbinos’ marriage and Florentino Ariza’s rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. The last chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentino, now, in the face of what many men would consider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to win her love.

IN their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el colera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la colera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, “always the same war,” is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any politics that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting public health measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, death’s well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to 622 “long-term liaisons, apart from … countless fleeting adventures,” while maintaining, impervious to time, his deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the end he can tell her truthfully - though she doesn’t believe it for a minute - that he has remained a virgin for her.

So far as this is Florentino’s story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and lovers’ refuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during a night-long bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santander’s exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks up at Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local asylum. Olimpia Zuleta’s husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint. His lover’s amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: as he learns by the end of the book, his River Company’s insatiable appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that once bordered the Magdalena river system, leaving a wasteland where nothing can live. “With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river.”

IN fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through as the intensity or purity of his dream. The author’s great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which Garcia Marquez is not especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation of the rights of others. Indeed, as we’ve come to expect from his fiction, it’s the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms like those of cholera, it is his mother, Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any traditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching need to be loved. Women go for it. “He is ugly and sad,” Fermina Daza’s cousin Hildebranda tells her, “but he is all love.”

And Garcia Marquez, straight-faced teller of tall tales, is his biographer. At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” in which a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. “Gosh,” exclaimed Garcia Marquez, using in Spanish a word we in English may not, “that’s just the way my grandmother used to talk!” And that, he adds, is when novels began to interest him. Much of what come in his work to be called “magic realism” was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that grandmotherly voice.

Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from Macondo, the magical village in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversation with the living: we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having spoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty Garcia Marquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of moving “beyond” “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but clearly Garcia Marquez has moved somewhere else, not least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, “nobody teaches life anything.” There are still delightful and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor - presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whose pursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. But the predominant claim on the author’s attention and energies comes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about “reality” in which love and the possibility of love’s extinction are the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become, if not quite peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement.

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera - all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel - but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author’s ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.

In translating “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Edith Grossman has been attentive to this element of discipline, among many nuances of the author’s voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isn’t perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. It is a faithful and beautiful piece of work.

THERE comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. It’s no use, the young man protests -“Love is the only thing that interests me.”

“The trouble,” his uncle replies, “is that without river navigation, there is no love.” For Florentino this happens to be literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last, by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs “Love in the Time of Cholera,” this shining and heartbreaking novel.

Photos of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his parents, Gabriel Eligio Garcia and Luisa Marquez de Garcia (AP; Courtesy El Espectator)

Introductions

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina

In a dim way, I had been aware of Richard Farina before I actually met him. It was the winter of 1958, toward the end of the school semester, and I was a junior editor on the Cornell Writer, which was the campus literary magazine. At some point these stories and poems began to arrive. It was a radically different voice, one that seemed to come from the world outside, surer, less safe, of higher quality than the usual run of submissions. Not many of the staff could tell me much about this “Farina” character, except that he’d been away from Cornell for a while, out traveling around.

Soon, in the back spaces of classrooms I happened to be in, I would sometimes detect this dangerous presence, not wearing a jacket or tie, more hair than was fashionable, always sitting with the same group of people. Quiet, but intensely there, checking things out. Eventually I connected him with the other, literary presence.

We ran with different crowds, so our paths only crossed now and then. One day in the spring I was crossing the Arts Quad and spotted Farina, reclining on the green grass with an open book. We nodded, said hello. “Listen,” Farina said, “I’m having a party Saturday night at my place on College Avenue, if you want to fall by.” Which was how I first encountered his remarkable gift of civility. As we chatted, a strange thing was also happening. Coeds I had lusted after across deep lecture halls were actually altering course, here, out in the daylight, to stop and talk to Farina. He was inviting them to his party too. Oboy, I thought to myself, oboy.

1958, to be sure, was another planet. You have to appreciate the extent of sexual repression on that campus at the time. Rock ‘n’ roll had been with us for a few years, but the formulation Dope/Sex/Rock ‘n’ Roll hadn’t yet been made by too many of us. At Cornell, all undergraduate women were supposed to be residing, part of the time under lock and key, either in dormitories or sorority houses. On weeknights they had to be inside these places by something like 11 P.M., at which time all the doors were locked. Staying out all night without authorization meant discipline by the Women’s Judiciary Board, up to and including expulsion from school. On Saturday nights the curfew was graciously extended to something equally unreal, like 12 midnight.

Curfews were not the only erotic problem we faced—there was also a three- or four-to-one ratio of male to female students, as well as a variety of coed undergarments fiendishly designed to delay until curfew, if not to prevent outright, any access to one’s date’s pelvic area. One sorority house I knew of, and certainly others, had a house officer stationed by the front door on date nights. Her job was to make sure, in a polite but manual way, that every sister had some version of a Playtex chastity belt in place before she was allowed out the door. Landlords and local tradesfolk were also encouraged to report to the Administration the presence of coeds in off-campus apartments, such as Farina’s. In these and other ways, the University believed it was doing its duty to act in loco parentis.

This extraordinary meddling was not seriously protested until the spring of 1958, when, like a preview of the ’60s, students got together on the issue, wrote letters, rallied, demonstrated, and finally, a couple of thousand strong, by torchlight in the curfew hours between May 23rd and 24th, marched to and stormed the home of the University president. Rocks, eggs, and a smoke bomb were deployed. Standing on his front porch, the egg-spattered president vowed that Cornell would never be run by mob rule. He then went inside and called the proctor, or chief campus cop, screaming, “I want heads! … I don’t care whose! Just get me some heads, and be quick about it!” So at least ran the rumor next day, when four upperclassmen, Farina among them, were suspended. Students, however, were having none of this—they were angry. New demonstrations were suggested. After some dickering, the four were reinstated. This was the political and emotional background of that long-ago spring term at Cornell—the time and setting of Richard Farina’s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Not that this is a typical “college” novel, exactly. Farina uses the campus more as a microcosm of the world at large. He keeps bringing in visitors and flashbacks from the outside. There is no sense of sanctuary here, or eternal youth. Like the winter winds of the region, awareness of mortality blows through every chapter. The novel ends with the death of a major character.

Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one’s own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well. It is Exemption—in a sense which Farina interestingly broadens here—that so perplexes and haunts the novel’s main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis.

For Gnossos, Exemption is nothing he can either take for granted or have illusions about. His life is a day-to-day effort to keep earning and maintaining it. In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he’s left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool. “Immunity has been granted to me,” thinks Gnossos, “for I do not lose my cool.” Backed up by a range of street-wise skills like picking locks and scoring dope, Cool gets Gnossos through, and it lies at the heart of his style.

There was a similar element of reserve to Farina’s own public character. When he spoke, one of the typical expressions on his face was a half-ironic half-smile, as if he were monitoring his voice and not quite believing what he heard. He carried with him this protective field of selfawareness and instant feedback, and I never did see all the way through it, although I got to know him a little better during the ‘59 school year. We were never best friends, but we did like each other, and each other’s writing, and we hung out some, at parties, at beer outlets on campus like the Ivy Room, or at Johnny’s Big Red Grill (called Guido’s in the book), which was the usual nighttime gathering place.

The eats and atmosphere at Johnny’s were pretty much as Farina describes them. From time to time there’d be live l music. Peter Yarrow, later of Peter, Paul and Mary, had a standing gig there, maybe one of his earliest. He alternated with a rock ‘n’ roll group, all of them related, from the grocery across the street. In a few years these same two currents, modern folk and working-class rock, would flow together in what we remember now as the music of the high ’60s. Farina’s ear was taken not so much then by pop music as by more traditional American forms like jazz, and especially blues, both country and black. To the now canonized Buddy Holly he listened with some ambivalence—evident in the novel—but he did pay close attention to “Peggy Sue.” It seems now that in the guitar break of that recording he may have caught something others didn’t, some flash of things to come—but this could also just be my own retro-fantasy. Two albums of the period I know he was crazy about were Mose Allison’s “Back Country Suite,” also mentioned in the novel, and the English version of Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.

When it came to dancing, Farina went for Latin music. He was blessed, and knew it, with a happy combination of heritages. His mother was Irish and his father Cuban. He had relatives in both countries and had visited with them. It happened that in ‘58 and ‘59 there were a number of students from Latin America in the School of Architecture, and their circle was one of several that Farina could move in with some intimacy and ease. Their weekend parties were regarded as the best around. Farina danced a strange paso doble I’ve never seen since, and whose authenticity I can’t confirm. But the women he danced with, though now and then puzzled, were certainly enjoying themselves, which was the whole point.

Each year on St. Patrick’s Day, the tradition in the Architecture School was to construct a giant, what seemed like hundreds-of-feet-long, Chinese dragon, get as many folks under it as possible, and go running around the campus, in and out of classes and lectures, hands emerging from underneath the critter to grab and fondle the nearest coeds, many of whom had their hair tinted green. Everybody whooped it up all day long with oceans of beer dyed the same color. This was the one day, close to the Spring Equinox, when Farina’s two ethnic sides swung into balance, and he could indulge both. He would end the day with a crowd of dragon personnel, all spattered green, dowrs at a venerable bar called Jim’s, standing up on a table with a mug of green beer, quoting Garcia Lorca’s “Verde, que te quiero verde….” This would produce a long series of toasts to everything green, cervezas verdes, conos verdes. “El barco sobre la mar,” Farina hollered, “y el caballo en la montana!” Years later, in California, around sunrise on the morning of his marriage to Mimi Baez, we happened to stagger into each other in somebody’s front yard, both hung over. It was somewhere out in the country, in the hills near Palo Alto. We then managed to have one of those joirit epiphanies. Farina was staring up one of the slopes nearby. A white horse was standing out on this very green hillside, looking back at us. Of course Farina and I were both thinking of Lorca’s horse on the mountain.

Sometimes at college we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author. I suppose by then I was learning from Farina how to be amused at some of my obsessions. Also in ‘59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest of American novels, Warlock, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West diction. This may have appealed to Farina partly as another method of maintaining Cool.

The first time I read Been Down… was in manuscript, an early drafts in the summer of 1963. I remember giving him a lot of free advice, though I’ve forgotten what it was exactly. But fortunately he didn’t take any of it. He must have wondered if I thought we were still back in writing class. Later, having rewritten it, ten pages from the end of the final draft, his hand went out on him. “Did you hear about my Paralyzed Hand?” he wrote in a letter. “Why Tom old boy”—Warlock talk—“I woke up this here otherwise promising morning with a clump of inert floppy for a hand. Lentils. Lentils and some kind of exhaustion known only to nits in sedentary occupations. Me, the once hunter after restless game gone to seed in a J. C. Penney armchair covered by a baby blanket…. But the hand came back by pins and needles after a month and I got done….”

When I first read the book, I was comparing it with my own experience of the same place, time, and people. It seemed then that Gnossos and Farina were one and the same. It was also great fun recognizing the real-life counterparts of the other characters, being tickled by what he’d done with and to them. Now, nearly twenty years later, seeing a little further into his method, I think maybe it wasn’t so simple. He didn’t just take things that had happened and change names. He really worked his ass off, but the result is so graceful that the first time around I was fooled completely.

For many of the characters, Farina seems to have begun with the key traits that in their Cornell originals appealed to him most—Drew Youngblood’s decency, Juan Carlos Rosenbloom’s manic bravado, Judy Lumpers’s build—and then from these cores gone on to develop each of them more fully. Presently, as characters will, each took on an inside the-novel life, separate from whoever they’d been outside it. There isn’t much point Naming Names here—they know who they all are and they walk among us, even today.

Gnossos himself is not Mr. Perfect, by any stretch. He has a short temper and a low tolerance for organized religion, national mythologies, incompetence, resignation, anybody from the American South, racist or not—the list of resentments goes on. He is susceptible to the thrill of vendetta or karmic adjustment, an impulse I suspect isn’t entirely absent from why Farina wrote the novel. Gnossos uses drugs and alcohol injudiciously, and gets publicly abusive with women, something I never saw Farina do. His own approach to women was never less than courtly and sensitive, though not without perhaps one or two jiveass moments.

The wolf story, for instance. This is one of Gnossos’s encounters with homicidal animal life, the other being the monkey demon of Chapter 14. In the book, Gnossos tells the wolf tale to Kristin McCleod, a young woman he’s falling in love with. He puts it in the form of a dialogue, in which Kristin, and we reading, are asked to provide the sense data—the cold, the squeak of the snow, the Adirondack visuals. It is Farina’s most perfected version of a piece whose early tryouts many friends first heard at Cornell, some more repeatedly than they really wanted to. He was in fact dismayingly successful with the wolf story, which he was using then mainly to hustle coeds, often those on whom one had sort of had one’s own eye. Most of them, as I recall, went for it. Each time he told it, of course, he rewrote, so it got better and better.

The monkey demon or mandrill-at-the-window story didn’t play as well. Some only thought he was being dramatic, others thought temporarily insane. When winter boredom set in there was always a chance of entertainment in sneaking up to Farina’s window at unlikely hours and making what we imagined to be mandrill faces and sounds, in hopes of some reaction. But he would only half-smile, and shrug, as if to say, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

But it remains one of the most effective of the many dark scenes in this novel. The darkest of all, and I think the best written, is the sequence that takes place in revolutionary Cuba, in which Gnossos’s best friend is accidentally killed. Although a few pages of campus rioting come later, the true climax of the book is in Cuba. Back in his Hemingway phase, Farina must have seen that line about every true story ending in death. Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window. The cosmic humor is in Gnossos’s blundering attempts to make some kind of early arrangement with Thanatos, to find some kind of hustle that will get him out of the mortal contract we’re all stuck with. Nothing he tries works, but even funnier than that, he’s really too much in love with being alive, with dope, sex, rock ‘n’ roll—he feels so good he has to take chances, has to keep tempting death, only half-realizing that the more intensely he lives, the better the odds of his number finally coming up.

Close to the end of his last term at Cornell, Farina seemed to grow impatient. He had a job waiting in New York, and they didn’t care, he said, if he got his degree or not. There may also have been some romantic disaster involving Kristin McCleod’s original, though we never talked about it and all I heard was vague gossip. We were in one class together that term, and studied for the final at Johnny’s Big Red Grill over bottles of Red Cap ale. Next day, no more than half an hour into the exam, I was scribbling away at an essay question, caught a movement, looked up, saw Farina handing in his exam book and leaving. He couldn’t have been finished. As he came past I raised my eyebrows and he gave me that smile and that shrug. This was the last I saw of him for a while.

He went to New York, to Cuba, married Carolyn Hester, got a career in music going, toured overseas, lived in London, Paris, got divorced—then it was back to California, Boston, California again. Sometimes we wrote letters, sometimes—not often enough—we’d run into each other. We talked on the phone the day before he died. His book had just come out. We arranged to connect in L.A. in a few weeks. The next evening I heard the news over an AM rock ‘n’ roll station. He’d been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road, where a prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must have been doing ninety, and failed to make a curve. Farina was thrown off, and killed.

I called his house—no answer. Called the AP in Los Angeles—they couldn’t confirm anything for sure. It never occurred to me to call the hospital up there. I didn’t want to hear what they’d say. The only person I found in that night was a long-distance friend who’d also known him at Cornell. She didn’t have any more solid news than I did. Both still hoping, hope fading, we talked for a long time, into the middle of the night, about Farina and the old days, in our voices the same mixture of exasperation and love most of us had always felt whenever his name came up. Finally, toward the end of the conversation, she laughed. “Just thought of something. If that fucking Farina,” she said, “has only been seriously hurt—if he goes up to the edge of It, and then comes back, you realize—we’re never going to hear the end of it.”

Thomas Pynchon

The Writings of Donald Barthelme

Though to all appearances a gathering of odds and ends, what this volume in fact offers us is the full spectrum of vintage Barthelmismo-fictions thoughtfully concocted and comfortably beyond the reach of time, reactions less exempt from deadlines and rent payments to news of past moments that nonetheless remain our own, not to mention literary send-ups, intriguing recipes, magisterially extended metaphors, television programming that never was, strangely illuminated dreams, elegant ranting, debonair raving, and more, much more.

The do-it-yourself hypertextualist will get a chance to browse and recombine, often with striking results. Scattered about in here, for instance, are half a dozen or so pieces that, taken together, define a single vexed meditation upon the Watergate Affair of the seventies, which could profitably be consulted by future historians seeking to understand that Byzantine daytime drama. This is assuming that Barthelme got it by way of the Tube, right in the lateral geniculates like the rest of us, in which case readers might then also like to refer to “And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!” a good general rundown on Don. B.‘s viewing procedures, as well as evidence of the radiant quality of his attention.

Trying to describe Barthelme’s politics is as dodgy as trying to label his work, but Watergate sure did get him revved up. Nixon by then had already mutated into a desperate and impersonal force, no longer your traditionally human-type President, but now some faceless subgod of folly. Barthelme, perhaps as a species of anarchist curse, just calls him “the President.” The rage behind it, provoked by the ongoing spectacle of national politics in the U.S. as presided over by anybody, is natural enough if you look at the regimes Barthelme happened to be working under. Among many sad consequences of his passing is that we won’t know what he might have done with Bush as a subject, although “Kissing the President,” in its consideration of Reagan, may give off premonitory hints.

Another combination of interest is the interchapter material from Overnight to Many Distant Cities, which furnishes an instance of Barthelme’s way with dream material. One out of several humiliating features about writing fiction for a living is that here after all is just about everybody else, all along the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body parts according to time-honored custom and usage, while it’s only writers, out at the fringes of the entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to sell their dreams, yes dreams these days you’ll find are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it, though, in most cases it doesn’t present much moral problem since dreams seldom make it through into print with anything like the original production values anyway. Even if you do good recovery learning to write legibly in the dark and so forth, there’s still the matter of getting it down in words that can bring back even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience. So it’s a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to stay untranslated and private after all.

Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight “reality.” What he called his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting together pictures” bears an analogy, at least, to what is supposed to go on in dreams, where images from the public domain are said likewise to combine in unique private, with luck spiritually useful, ways. How exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for that matter pictorial, form, kept the transitions flowing the way he did and so on, is way too mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I probably wouldn’t share it even if I did know. The effect each time, at any rate, is to put us in the presence of something already eerily familiar … to remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities and haunted forests, that the ancient faces we gaze into are faces we know….

Of course Barthelme could work in more daylit modes as well. The parodies of works that for one reason and another gave him the pip, though wicked, are straightforward enough. “Two Hours to Curtain” is a closely observed and affectionate piece of reporting. The radio plays and pieces like “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” suggest how much sheer fun he must have had writing dialogue. You can feel him sometimes getting lightheaded with it. It could be generational, the result of coming up during the “golden age” of radio drama, when speech, music, and sound effects had to fill the audience’s attention and carry the whole show. I imagine him working on the Batman piece trying not to laugh too much at his own work because that might get in the way of maintaining the idiotically slow pulse he wanted, not at all his usual narrative tempo, which ran between frenzied and warp drive.

There are also pieces too free of form to be parody, too funny to be simple invective, that express Barthelme’s deep annoyance with any number of selected offenders„the federal government, Thanksgiving, just about anything from California, not perhaps geographical so much as psychological California, with its reputation for granting asylum to, call them wishful thinkers, seeking to deny, in mostly unorthodox ways, the passage of time, and what time brings in the way of aging, the evils of history, the turns of Fortune. Like most writers who are serious about what they do, Barthelme could not afford any such luxuries, and so had little patience with anyone who appeared to him to be indulging them.

See, for example, “The Teachings of Don B.” Though it has the look of a writerly reflex to some piece of industry gossip about Carlos Castaneda’s deal with Simon & Schuster for the first Don Juan book, Barthelme is also here enjoying a surrender to annoyance with the parties involved, the book itself, and the culture of eternal youth that has allowed it to flourish. The operative text here would seem to be from II Corinthians, “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.” Wise satirical practice requires the sensitivity and skill of a fugu chef at controlling toxicity, that is, knowing how long to suffer, and how gladly, and when to give in to rage, and the pleasure of assaulting at last the fools in question. Barthelme’s timing in this regard was flawless, though unfortunately he was prevented from becoming a worldclass curmudgeon on the order of, say, Ambrose Bierce, by the stubborn counter-rhythms of what kept on being a hopeful and unbitter heart. Much of this journeyman impatience with idiocy concealed a tenderness and geniality which always shine through whenever he drops the irony, even for a minute. That, and, of course, his inescapable sadness. That elegaic voice„“The wives of the angry young man are now married to other people„doctors, mostly.” That “mostly.” You think of the music of Dietz and Schwartz, of Fred Astaire singing Dietz and Schwartz, just that combination of grace and disenchantment, darkish lyrics and minor modalities.

Melancholy. As any Elizabethan could tell you if they all weren’t dead, melancholy is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor. Barthelme’s was a specifically urban melancholy, related to that look of immunity to joy or even surprise seen in the faces of cab drivers, bartenders, street dealers, city editors, a wearily taken vow to persist beneath the burdens of the day and the terrors of the night. Humor in these conditions leans toward the anti-transcendent„like jail humor and military and rodeo humor, it finds high amusement in failure and loss, and it celebrates survival one day, one disaster, to the next.

But behind Barthelme’s own slick city-sophisticate disguise still lounged, alarmingly, this good old Dairy Queen regular in some conspicuous hat, around in whose backseat opened containers had been known to roll, harboring the mischievous daydreams of a Texas rounder, not to mention a lengthy stretch of DNA dedicated just to locating and enjoying various highly seasoned pork products. On the principle that you can take the boy out of the country but not vice versa, Houston, Texas, his hometown before New York, must have caused Barthelme some lively internal discomfort over the course of a love-hate affair with the place that went on, it seems, for most of his life. From what I remember of Houston at about that same time, it could have provoked the one emotion just as easily as the other, and in Texas-size quantities, too. The Astrodome was brand new in those days. Air conditioning in the city was ubiquitous. There were schemes afoot to put a dome over part of downtown and air-condition it, creating what today we would call a mall. Entire boulevards were dedicated to churches, side by side, one after another, allowing you to drop the family car in low and actually cruise places of worship. The nearest venue for dope, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, then as now, was Austin. The new NASA space center out by Buffalo Bayou was hiring heavily, while from the marshlands around it, mosquitoes were busy spreading an encephalitis epidemic. Sir John Barbirolli had fashioned of the Houston symphony an exquisitely first-rate instrument, while teenage musical heresy focused on California surf culture„though the Gulf only had surf during hurricanes, all kinds of kids could still be observed driving around with some stick in some woody, flaunting boards that never caught a wave, as if trying to make it all be Califomia. Anyplace but what it was.

Whatever psychological traces of Houston he may have retained, Barthelme fortunately also brought along his Southwestern food consciousness to New York, though the theory of Tex-Mex eats he found there must have alarmed him, based as it was on tomato sauce, and tasting like Italian food made with Tabasco. The recipes reprinted in this volume may thus have developed out of some nostalgic necessity.

Those recipes. That oxtail soup mix. That “burgoo,” with the frozen ducks in it? A notable moment in chef psychopathology, to be sure„yet such is Barthelme’s genius that even the most porkophobic or duck-intolerant among us is drooling, unashamed, by recipe’s end. His ingredients tend to come from outside New York, back in the U.S., brand names always good for some evocation of his native region, mostly canned or otherwise preserved, food meant to sit on shelves or in freezers for months before being used, each meal, each can opened or dinner defrosted, being an occasion for sadness, because, like using a dream or a memory in a piece of writing, it’s taking something back inside the passage of time that otherwise might have continued on, suspended, exempt. This is a cuisine of solitude, suggesting too many nights of unfamilied boredom and eating over the sink, a life-style that was certainly not for Don B. He disliked being alone, preferring company, however problematical, to no company. In cities such a willingness to socialize can lead a man up peculiar streets indeed, anything from all-out Uzi-toting misanthropy to a full Dickensian embrace of human diversity, foolishness and all. But to move in that direction, to open up instead of shut down, meant risking the possibility of finding spiritual dimensions sooner or later hiding inside a space he thought he owned and knew, and what would the next step have to be after that? Herbs, crystals, astrology? California?

Nevertheless, here are two illustrated stories, “The Photographs,” about the scientific discovery of the soul, and “The Dassaud Prize,” about a competitive search for God, and what are we to make of them? Two British scientists, after getting into another of those stupefyingly stretched-out exchanges, agree to destroy their photographs of the soul. Their French counterparts, failing to discover God, generate as a by-product this museumful of madinventor gear. In both stories reachings after the transfinite fall apart, into twit dialogue, into eccentric technological dreaming, reentangled with Earth and the earthbound. In a writer less attendant upon the given world, this might have been occasion for some cheap glee. But this being another luxury Barthelme couldn’t afford, he was obliged to stick with reliable melancholy a less dramatic mode but one he struggled for and came by honorably.

Not to try to make any case for Barthelme as any heavy-duty metaphysician. Heaven forfend. He was too connected to calendar dates and named streets, too engaged with the quotidian„like Garcia Marquez’s magician Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “in spite of his immense wisdom and mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life.” Because his verifiable miracles are all literary in nature, Barthelme is probably not about to make saint anytime soon, either. But along with his published work, his other great gift to us is precisely his melancholy, presented, if we will but look, as praxis and example, a way to get us through, trading off time for spectacle, now and then even providing, as they used to sing at the end of Hee Haw, “a smile and a laugh or two.” If this is not exactly a guide for the perplexed, it is still a good honest push back against the forces that favor tragedy, and who of us wouldn’t like to have left something like that behind us?

All things, in any event, will be set right when the biopic or Donald Barthelme Story is aired at last. This will be a made-for-cable-TV miniseries starring Barthelme lookalike Luke Perry in the title role. Paul Newman, in his first small-screen appearance, will have a cameo as Norman Mailer, for which he will win an Emmy. In the picture, Barthelme will return, sometime in the final installment, to Houston. Neighbors from long ago will bring him casseroles, Kiri Te Kanawa and Willie Nelson will come sing medleys of country classics to him in a vividly lit Astrodome before a sellout crowd. Ravishing Texas tomatoes of all shapes and sizes, played by starlets who think they have to be kind to the second assistant director, will fling themselves upon the person of Don B., cooing, squealing, gaga. Bartenders in sorrowful-looking crossroads saloons, where the records on the jukebox are all from Barthelme’s youth, will fix him perfect city drinks such as martinis and Singapore slings, and everything will be on the house.

He will go sit in out-of-the-way Mexican eateries scarfing all afternoon and evening on chef specials not available to the average customer, featuring chiles you need a Department of Energy permit even to plant, and so forth. He will get the key to the city and a ride on a fire truck. Reviewers who trashed his work years ago will now fly into town, paying the full fare out of their own pockets, to apologize abjectly. All his books will show up again on the bestseller lists. Mike Ovitz of CAA will call from Hollywood with high-budget movie plans for some story the author has forgotten he wrote, and Barthelme will put him on hold while he goes to the fridge for another beer.

As catastasis yields to catastrophe, shots of Barthelme are gradually replaced with shots of people talking about him, and shots of the city, parkland, sunsets, hospitals, and the like. The last we get to see of him, Barthelme is driving some gray primercoated outlaw’s dream of a Trans-Am, pulling onto some freeway, softly thundering away into the evening humidity, Lightnin’ Hopkins on the soundtrack singing “Baby Please Don’t Go,” the camera pulling back into a helicopter shot, swooping upward as credits roll„production, technical, Houston and New York second units, dialogue coaches, duck wranglers. Lights beginning to come on all across the crowded prairie. Album is available on Rounder Records. Studio logo. Two seconds of quiet, neutral darkness. Then a promo for the news at ten.

Thomas Pynchon

1984 by George Orwell

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, a small town in Bengal near the Nepalese border, and in the middle of a highly productive opium district. His father was there working as an agent for the British Opium Department, not arresting growers but supervising quality control of the product, in which Britain had long enjoyed a monopoly. A year later, young Eric was back in England with his mother and sister, and did not return to the region until 1922, as a junior officer of the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma. That job paid well, but when he came home on leave in 1927, much to the distress of his father, he decided to chuck it, because what he really wanted to do with his life was be a writer, and that is what he became. In 1933, with the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he adopted the pseudonym of George Orwell, which was the name he was known by from then on. Orwell was one of the names he had used while tramping round England, and may have been suggested by a river of the same name in Suffolk.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell’s last book – by the time it came out, in 1949, he had published twelve others, including the highly acclaimed and popular Animal Farm. In an essay from the summer of 1946, ‘Why I Write’, he recalled, ‘Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.’ Shortly after this, he was at work on Ninteen Eighty-Four.

In a way, this novel has been a victim of the success of Animal Farm, which most people were content to read as a straightforward allegory about the melancholy fate of the Russian revolution. From the minute Big Brother’s moustache makes its appearance in the second paragraph of Nineteen Eighty-Four many readers, thinking right away of Stalin, have tended to carry over the habit of point-for-point analogy from the earlier work. Although Big Brother’s face certainly is Stalin’s, just as the despised Party heretic Emmanuel Goldstein’s face is Trotsky’s, the two do not quite line up with their models as neatly as Napoleon and Snowball did in Animal Farm. This did not keep the book from being marketed in the United States as a sort of anti-communist tract. It arrived in the thick of the McCarthy era, when ‘Communism’ was damned officially as a monolithic, worldwide menace, and there was no point in even distinguishing between Stalin and Trotsky, any more than for shepherds to be instructing sheep in the nuances of wolf recognition.

The Korean conflict (1950–53) would also soon highlight the alleged Communist practice of ideological enforcement through ‘brainwashing’, a set of techniques said to be based on the work of I. P. Pavlov, who had once trained dogs to salivate on cue, as the Soviet technocrats after him were conditioning their human subjects into political reflexes that would be useful to the State. The Russians were supposed to be sharing these methods with their puppets, the Chinese and North Korean Communists. That something very much like brainwashing happens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in lengthy and terrifying detail, to its hero, Winston Smith, did not surprise those readers determined to take the novel as a simple condemnation of Stalinist atrocity.

This was not exactly Orwell’s intention. Though Nineteen Eighty-Four has brought aid and comfort to generations of anti-communist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell’s politics were not only of the Left, but to the left of Left. He had gone to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco and his Nazi-supported fascists, and there had quickly learned the difference between real and phony anti-fascism. ‘The Spanish war and other events in 1936–7,’ he wrote ten years later, ‘turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it.’

Orwell thought of himself as a member of the ‘dissident Left’, as distinguished from the ‘official Left’, meaning basically the British Labour Party, most of which he had come, well before the Second World War, to regard as potentially, if not already, fascist. More or less consciously, he found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin – both, he felt, were movements professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power. The masses were only there to be used – for their idealism, their class resentments, their willingness to work cheap – and to be sold out, again and again.

Now, those of fascistic disposition – or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong – will immediately point out that this is pre-war thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one’s homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it’s for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument – let alone a prophecy – in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One could certainly argue that Churchill’s war cabinet had behaved no differently than a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.

Orwell’s critique of England’s official Left was to undergo some modification in July 1945, when, at the first opportunity they got, the British electorate, by a landslide, threw out their wartime rulers and put in a Labour government, which would remain in power till 1951 – beyond what would be left of Orwell’s lifetime – during which period Labour finally got its chance to reshape British society along ‘socialist’ lines. Orwell, being a perpetual dissident, must have been delighted to help the party confront its contradictions, notably those arising from its wartime acquiescence to, and participation in, a repressive, Tory-led government. Once having enjoyed and exerted that sort of power, how likely would Labour be to choose not to extend its scope, rather than stick to the ideals of its founders, and go back to fighting on the side of the oppressed? Project this will to power four decades into the future, and you could easily end up with Ingsoc, Oceania and Big Brother.

What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell’s despair over the post-war state of ‘socialism’. What in Keir Hardie’s time had been an honourable struggle against the incontrovertibly criminal behaviour of capitalism towards those whom it used for profit had become, by Orwell’s time, shamefully institutional, bought and sold, in too many instances concerned only with maintaining itself in power. And that was just in England – abroad, the impulse had been further corrupted, in immeasurably more sinister ways, leading at length to the Stalinist gulags and the Nazi death camps.

Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. ‘For somewhat complex reasons,’ he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘nearly the whole of the English Left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as “Socialist”, while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by “Socialism” in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like “democracy” can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously.’

We recognize this ‘sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking’ as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse – the identification and analysis of doublethink. As described in Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a dangerously subversive text outlawed in Oceania and known only as the book, doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all Party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. Others like to call it ‘compartmentalization’. Some, famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius. For Walt Whitman (‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself’) it was being large and containing multitudes, for Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger’s cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time.

The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink – repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites – as if some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism, whose fundamental koans are the three Party slogans ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’ were being applied to evil purposes.

The consummate embodiment of doublethink in this novel is the Inner Party official O’Brien, Winston’s seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer. He believes with utter sincerity in the regime he serves, and yet can impersonate perfectly a devout revolutionary committed to its overthrow. He imagines himself a mere cell of the greater organism of the State, but it is his individuality, compelling and self-contradicting, that we remember. Although a calmly eloquent spokesman for the totalitarian future, O’Brien gradually reveals an unbalanced side, a disengagement from reality that will emerge in its full unpleasantness during the re-education of Winston Smith, in the place of pain and despair known as the Ministry of Love.

Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries that run things in Oceania – the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named ‘the Department of Defense’, any more than we have saying ‘Department of Justice’ with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present ‘balanced’ coverage, in which every ‘truth’ is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed ‘spin’, as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time – it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.

Besides the ambivalence within the Left as to Soviet realities, other opportunities for doublethink in action arose in the wake of the Second World War. In its moment of euphoria, the winning side was making, in Orwell’s view, mistakes as fatal as any made by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Despite the most honourable intentions, in practice the present division of spoils among the former Allies carried the potential for fatal mischief. Orwell’s uneasiness over the ‘peace’ in fact is one major subtext of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

‘What it is really meant to do,’ Orwell wrote to his publisher at the end of 1948 – as nearly as we can tell early in the revision phase of the novel – ‘is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of Influence” (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran Conference) …’

Well, of course novelists should not be altogether trusted as to the sources of their inspiration. But the imaginative procedure bears looking at. The Teheran Conference was the first Allied summit meeting of the Second World War, taking place late in 1943, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in attendance. Among the topics they discussed was how, once Nazi Germany was defeated, the Allies would divide it up into zones of occupation. Who would get how much of Poland was another issue. In imagining Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, Orwell seems to have made a leap in scale from the Teheran talks, projecting the occupation of a defeated country into that of a defeated world. Though China had not been included, and the Chinese revolution in 1948 was still in progress, Orwell had been in the Far East and knew better than to ignore the weight of Eastasia when arranging his own Zones-of-Influence scheme. Geopolitical thinking in those days was enchanted with the ‘World-Island’ idea of British geographer Halford Mackinder – meaning Europe, Asia and Africa considered as a single landmass surrounded by water, ‘the pivot of history’, whose heartland was Nineteen Eight-Four’s ‘Eurasia’. ‘Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,’ as Mackinder had put it, and ‘Who rules the World-Island commands the world,’ a pronouncement not lost on Hitler and other theoreticians of realpolitik.

One of these Mackinderites with connections in intelligence circles was James Burnham, an American ex-Trotskyist who around 1942 had published a provocative analysis of the world crisis then current called The Managerial Revolution, which Orwell discussed later in a lengthy article in 1946. Burnham, at the time, with England still reeling under Nazi assault and German troops at the outskirts of Moscow, argued that with the conquest of Russia and the global heartland imminent, the future would belong to Hitler. Later in the war, while serving with the OSS, with the Nazis headed for defeat, Burnham changed his mind in a lengthy afterthought, ‘Lenin’s Heir’, in which he now argued that unless the United States did something about it, the future, actually, would belong to Stalin and the Soviet system, and not Hitler after all. By this point Orwell, who took Burnham seriously but not uncritically, may have sensed that the man’s thinking was sort of on the flighty side – nevertheless traces of Burnham’s geopolitics can be found in the tripartite world balance of power of Nineteen Eight-Four, with Burnham’s victorious Japan becoming Eastasia, Russia, the pivotal heartland, controlling the Eurasian landmass, and the Anglo-American Alliance transmogrifying to Oceania, which is the setting for Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This grouping of Britain and the United States into a single bloc, as prophecy, has turned out to be dead-on, foreseeing Britain’s resistance to integration with the Eurasian landmass as well as her continuing subservience to Yank interests – dollars, for instance, being the monetary unit of Oceania. London is still recognizably the London of the post-war austerity period. From the opening, with its cold plunge directly into the grim April day of Winston Smith’s decisive, act of disobedience, the textures of dystopian life are unremitting – the uncooperative plumbing, the cigarettes that keep losing their tobacco, the horrible food – though perhaps this was not such an imaginative stretch for anyone who’d had to undergo wartime shortages.

Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell’s case. There is a game some critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn’t ‘get right’. Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of ‘law enforcement’, familiar to us from countless televised ‘crime dramas’, themselves forms of social control – and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to ‘interactive’ cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. ‘Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?’ ‘Orwellian, dude!’

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own – the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour Party, like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

What has steadily, insidiously, improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith’s era. In ‘our’ 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the Internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.

On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such exotic developments as the religious wars with which we have become all too familiar, involving various sorts of fundamentalism. Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the Party. Big Brother’s regime exhibits all the elements of fascism – the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective – except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in Nineteen Eighty-Four is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.

Much has been made recently of Orwell’s own attitude toward Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little – Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.

As close as Nineteen Eighty-Four gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing Julia and O’Brien, the other two major characters. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalized into anything racial. The strategy of pitting race against race does not seem to be found in the Party’s tool kit. ‘Nor is there any racial discrimination,’ as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book – ‘Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party …’ As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism ‘one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism’, and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the European nationalisms he was used to somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel’s general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.

Besides the unexpected presence of racial tolerance in Oceania, the class structure is also a bit odd. It should be a classless society, but it isn’t. It is divided into Inner Party, Outer Party and the Proles. But as the story is being told from the point of view of Winston Smith, who belongs to the Outer Party, the Proles are largely ignored, much as they are by the regime itself. Despite his admiration for them as a force for salvation, and his faith in their eventual triumph, Winston Smith doesn’t seem to know any proles himself – his only personal contact, and that indirect, is with the lady singing outside the room at the back of the antique shop where he and Julia have found their lovers’ refuge. ‘The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department.’ By Winston’s Inner Party poetic standards, the tune is ‘drivelling’, ‘dreadful rubbish’. But Orwell quotes it three times, almost word for word. Is something else going on? One cannot be sure – one likes to imagine that Orwell, a songwriter in disguise who loved writing verse that rhymed and had a beat, also came up with an actual melody for this lyric, and that while he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four he went around humming or whistling it, perhaps for days on end, driving those in his vicinity crazy. His own artistic judgements were not those of Winston Smith, a bourgeois of the late forties projected into the future. Orwell enjoyed what we now call pop culture – his allegiance, in music as in politics, being to the people.

In a New Statesman review from 1938 of a John Galsworthy novel, Orwell commented, almost in passing, ‘Galsworthy was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.’

Orwell was amused at those of his colleagues on the Left who lived in terror of being termed bourgeois. But somewhere among his own terrors may have lurked the possibility that like Galsworthy he might one day lose his political anger, and end up as one more apologist for Things As They Are. His anger, let us go so far as to say, was precious to him. He had lived his way into it – in Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan Pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists – he had invested blood, pain and hard labour to earn his anger, and was as attached to it as any capitalist to his capital. It may be an affliction peculiar to writers more than others, this fear of getting too comfortable, of being bought off. When one writes for a living, it is certainly one of the risks, though not one every writer objects to. The ability of the ruling element to co-opt dissent was ever present as a danger – actually, not unlike the process by which the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four is able perpetually to renew itself from below.

Orwell, having lived among the working and unemployed poor of the 1930s Depression, and having learned in the course of it their true imperishable worth, bestowed on Winston Smith a similar faith in their Nineteen Eighty-Four counterparts the proles, as the only hope for deliverance from the dystopian hell of Oceania. In the most beautiful moment of the novel – beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just able to be borne – Winston and Julia, thinking they are safe, regard from their window the woman in the courtyard singing, and Winston gazing into the sky experiences an almost mystical vision of the millions living beneath it, ‘people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!’ It is the moment just before he and Julia are arrested, and the cold, terrible climax of the book commences.

Before the war, Orwell had his moments of contempt for graphic scenes of violence in fiction, particularly the American hard-boiled crime fiction available in pulp magazines. In 1936, in a review of a detective novel, he quotes a passage describing a brutal and methodical beating, which uncannily foreshadows Winston Smith’s experiences inside the Ministry of Love. What has happened? Spain and the Second World War, it would seem. What was ‘disgusting rubbish’ back in a more insulated time has become, by the post-war era, part of the vernacular of political education, and by 1984 in Oceania it will be institutionalized. Yet Orwell cannot, like the average pulp writer, enjoy the luxury of unreflectively insulating the flesh and spirit of any character. The writing is at places difficult to stay with, as if Orwell himself is feeling every moment of Winston’s ordeal.

But in a detective novel, the motives – for writer as well as characters – are usually financial, and often low stakes at that. ‘It is not funny that a man should be killed,’ Raymond Chandler wrote once, ‘but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.’ What is not so funny is when this financial motive is altogether missing. You can trust a cop who’ll take a bribe, but what happens when you run into a law-and-order zealot who won’t? The regime in Oceania seems immune to the lure of wealth. Its interests lie elsewhere, in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire and language as a vehicle of thought.

Memory is relatively easy to deal with, from the totalitarian point of view. There is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has become a commonplace circa 2003 for government employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialize truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don’t learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes – or best of all that it doesn’t matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour’s entertainment.

Controlling desire, however, is more problematic. Hitler was known for some unconventional sexual tastes. Heaven knows what Stalin was into. Even fascists have needs, which, at least so they dream, the enjoyment of limitless power will allow them to indulge. So although they may be willing to attack the psychosexual profiles of those who threaten them, there may at least be some moment of hesitation before they do. Of course when all the machinery of enforcement is assigned to computers, which do not, at least as presently designed, experience desire in any form that we would find appealing, why then it will be another story. But in 1984 that hasn’t happened yet. Because desire in itself cannot always be easily co-opted, the Party has no choice but to adopt, as an ultimate goal, the abolition of the orgasm.

The point that sexual desire, taken on its own terms, is inherently subversive is pursued here by way of Julia, with her cheerfully lustful approach to life. If this were really only a political essay disguised as a novel, Julia would most likely have been obliged to symbolize something – the Pleasure Principle or Middle-class Common Sense or something. But because this is a novel first of all, her character is not necessarily under Orwell’s firm control. Novelists may wish to indulge the worst kinds of totalitarian whims directed against the freedom of their characters. But often as not, they scheme in vain, for characters always manage to evade one’s all-seeing eye long enough to think thoughts and utter dialogue one could never have come up with if plot were all there were. It is one of the many joys of reading this book that we can watch Julia turn from a tough-cookie seductress into a loving young woman, as it is one of the chief sadnesses when her love is dismantled and destroyed.

The Winston–Julia story, in other hands, might have degenerated into the usual love’s-young-dream sort of rubbish – just like something a Ministry of Truth novel-writing machine would produce. Julia, who works in the Fiction Department after all, presumably knows the difference between rubbish and reality, and it is through her that the love story in Nineteen Eighty-Four is able to keep its grown-up real-world edge, though at first glance it seems to be following the familiar formula of boy dislikes girl, boy and girl meet cute, first thing you know boy and girl are in love, then they get separated, finally they get back together. This is what transpires … sort of. But there’s no happy ending. The scene towards the end where Winston and Julia meet again, after the Ministry of Love has forced each to betray the other, is as disheartening as any in fiction. And the worst of it is, we understand. Beyond pity and terror, we are not really surprised, any more than Winston Smith himself, at how things have turned out. From the moment he opens his illegal blank book and begins to write, he carries his doom with him, consciously guilty of crimethink and only waiting for the authorities to catch up. Julia’s unexpected arrival in his life will never be quite miraculous enough for him to believe in a different outcome. At the moment of maximum well-being, standing at the courtyard window, gazing into endless expanses of sudden revelation, the most hopeful thing he can think of to say to her is, ‘We are the dead’, an assessment the Thought Police are only too happy to echo a second later.

Winston’s fate is no surprise, but the one we find ourselves worrying about is Julia. She has believed up till the last minute that she can somehow beat the regime, that her good-humoured anarchism will be proof against anything they can throw at her. ‘Don’t be too downhearted,’ she tells Winston, ‘I’m rather good at staying alive.’ She understands the difference between confession and betrayal. ‘They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’ The poor kid. You want to grab her and shake her. Because that is just what they do – they get inside, they put the whole question of soul, of what we believe to be an inviolable inner core of the self, into harsh and terminal doubt. By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined.

But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’. We remember that back on page 6 we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don’t – we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, as a condition of acceptance by the Club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, ‘A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing … I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run.’ Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, Why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past – as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.

In his 1946 article ‘James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution’, Orwell wrote, ‘The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.’ In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending – sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.

There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so – it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger – his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith ‘believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 …’. Richard Blair was born 14 May, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was imagining a future for his son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good, and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted – a faith so honourable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.

Thomas Pynchon

References

George Orwell, An Age Like This 1920–1940: Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose 1946–1950: Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography.

Table of Contents

Contents

Uncollected Fiction

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

Juvenalia

“Voice of the Hamster”

“The Boys”

“Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight”

Essays

A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

Book Reviews

The Gift

The Heart’s Eternal Vow

Introductions

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina

The Writings of Donald Barthelme

1984 by George Orwell