The Kraus Project (21 page)

it’s like the bitter irony of my picking up
Gravity’s Rainbow
when I can’t write these days, oh what a mess, I find Bloom’s style revolting in hindsight, his Manifesto a travesty like late Nietzsche, but I recognize Pynchon as my major precursor, the better he is the more I want to hate him but the less I can, a strange state of affairs, such as my reading list of novels in the last five years respectably large yet somehow managing to avoid all Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Austen, Stendhal, Mailer, my God, you’d think I’ve hardly read a thing, what fear what fear, my suitcase stuffed with more irony, you name—Derrida, Bloom, Burke, Jameson twice, Lacan, Marcuse, Lukacs, Barthes—it, but how many novels?
just one, of course, cover reading “The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer,” influence, why fight it?
does Irving?
well, it hardly matters with Irving, but there’s almost nothing he does in
Garp
that Pynchon doesn’t do better, or Heller, and it seems that Pynchon’s Irving is just one among a dozen tricks the book is pulling off, how can you
write
in America anymore?
how keep going without big genius?
well, I hear you saying, who knows that one or both of us isn’t a genius, who says you have to be the best?

[…]

You scowl from my picture of you in your black tank top, arms as fluid and smooth as air, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
I hope you’re thinking, oh come on Jon, take it easy now, it’s all the same letter (call it V., title of Pynchon’s oh god great first novel, how could he?
how could he?—“THOMAS PYNCHON is known almost exclusively through his writing.
In all other respects, he craves and guards his privacy.
The public facts about his life are few and far between”—from the blurb About the Author at the back of Bantam Book #0-553-14761-7, His Most Highly Praised Novel.) You still scowl.
I know, I know.

[…]

I’d almost swear that this is a Pynchon toxin numbing my spirit.
Why else do I want to go back to p.
321, where I left off reading after lunch?

A year earlier, my departmental adviser had suggested that I apply for a Fulbright grant for study in Germany.
My chances of getting one were good: the German government, understandably intent on promoting international cooperation after the Second World War, contributed heavily to the Fulbright program, which, as a result, gave nearly as many fellowships for Germany as for the rest of the world combined.
To make sure I went to Germany’s most interesting city, Berlin, I crafted a proposal, consisting almost entirely of bullshit, to use certain archives in Berlin to study expressionist theatrical productions.
My letter of acceptance arrived on the same day and in the same mailroom where V, with whom I was falling in love and would soon be sleeping, got her letter of rejection from the Fulbright people.
She’d applied to go to Italy—unlike Germany, Italy was cool!—but so had a thousand other people.
      
I don’t remember what prompted me to propose to V, six months later.
Probably I’d said something wrong (I was always saying the wrong thing that summer) and wanted to make her feel better.
We were living with throngs of cockroaches in a sublet at the corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in New York; I’ve still never seen thicker Lucite security partitions than the ones in the liquor store downstairs from us.
To throw my mother off the scent of my relationship with V, I’d told her that a whole bunch of my college friends were living in the apartment, not just V and me.
My mother had met V only once, at our college graduation, and had conceived an intense disapproval of her.
(“She’s very intellectual” was the nicest thing she ever managed to say about her.) To my lie about our living arrangements I soon added concealment of our engagement and of my intention to spend my Berlin year working on a novel; my mother considered the idea of my becoming a novelist a dangerous and irresponsible fantasy.
I pretended to her that my Fulbright would set me up to be a journalist, a lawyer, an international banker, or, at the very least, a German professor.
She, for her part, hoped that, while in Germany, I would develop a taste for blond, sharp-cheekboned, un-V-like women along the lines of the daughters of her good Austrian friend, Ilse.
      
Where was my father in this?
He was retiring, that summer, at the age of sixty-six and a half, from his forty-year career as a civil engineer.
Admiring him was not a problem for me, but surpassing him was: I’d heard it said that he was the best railroad bridge and track engineer in the United States.
I also had a troubling sense of false paternity.
My father was a formidable intellectual arguer and a good, clear writer, but he knew and cared nothing about literature.
He was a tower of honesty and integrity, whereas I was an inveterate concealer of pertinent information, sometimes even an outright liar, and was intending to make a career of writing stories that weren’t factually true.
My best near-term option for surpassing him was to be more deferential to a woman, more solicitous and sympathetic, than he was to my mother.
Longer term, I would have to become the nation’s best at what
I
did—hence the insane magnitude of my literary ambitions at twenty-two.
To get anywhere with the long-term project, I needed the example of a different kind of father.
      
A few days after I left for Berlin, my mother was hospitalized with a near-fatal pulmonary embolism.
I now think that it’s a mistake to metaphorize illness, and certainly my mother’s long troubles with blood clots weren’t aggravated by her emotions the way other of her ailments were, but back then the timing of her hospitalization seemed to me inescapably significant.
Her youngest child had just flown the nest for good, and for the first time in her life she had my father at home with her, being depressed and generally forcing all the marital issues that his busy work life had allowed them to suppress.
I was constituted to feel responsible for this, and I began to make the argument, first privately and then to V, that I couldn’t break the news of our engagement until my mother’s health was better, for fear of worsening it with the shock of the news.
      
Of course, being twenty-two, I typically thought about my parents only when I felt obliged to write them a letter; they were mostly a distraction from the important subject of me.
But my daily anxiety levels were very high.
I self-medicated with cigarettes, a habit I not only concealed from my parents but was attempting to hide from my host family by sneaking around outside their house.
In the great tradition of Fulbright anxiety (a phenomenon treated most comically in Ben Lerner’s novel
Leaving the Atocha Station
), I felt anxious about the weird impression I was making on my host family, anxious about concealing my engagement, anxious about chaining myself to my portable typewriter and writing self-referential letters instead of improving my German and gathering exotic material, anxious about committing myself to marriage before I’d sampled the charms of blond, sharp-cheekboned women, anxious about the new buildup of tactical nuclear weapons on both sides of the German border, anxious about being a smoker, anxious about my laziness as a scholar, anxious about finding a place to live in the extremely tight low-end Berlin housing market, anxious about the many ways in which I half knew that V and I weren’t right for each other, and anxious about the badness of the story I was writing as an exercise, a fluffy confection that concerned a young man named Wallace Wallace Wallace and was so steeped in my recent reading of John Irving that there was even a bear in it.
      
Harold Bloom, however, was telling me I was supposed to be anxious about Pynchon:

I’m a great sublimator.
Not finding an apartment, the simple raw fear, becomes not finding an apartment when you and I are poor, in two years.
This fear gives way to the worry that you’re not the Practical Type.
Worry about Practical Types practically stops the typing: how can I sit in here when my thoughts should be flooding outward?
But what is this worry, if not pynchon-anxiety?
since pynchon appears to have done almost everything in the world, he’s just bursting with details that can be had only through experience.
But why pynchon-anxiety?
Why decide he’s the Major Precursor?
Because of the style-crisis I’m locked in with the Wallace story and with these letters.
As you’ve been seeing, I’m to the point where I’ll destroy style rather than imitate someone else’s.
But style-destruction is, if only momentarily, a very anti-literary thing to do to oneself; it sounds like it might be connected to the doubts I’ve been having about our neat lives as authors.

     
Gravity’s Rainbow
seemed to me a novel of dizzying capability.
Its melding of the gonzo and the literary was so effortless and brilliant it felt inevitable, and it dealt squarely with the two contemporary issues that weighed on me the most: the nuclear peril and the impenetrably complex modern System that rendered individuals powerless.
Pynchon’s narrative voice was scarily authoritative the way my father’s was, and the street wisdom of his entropic proto-hippie antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, was like that of my much older brother Tom, whom I revered.
I was doubly a little pisher, and the book pushed all my buttons in this regard.
      
To defend myself against it, all I really had was my engagement to V.
The engagement was conventional, for one thing, and I already had some awareness that I was destined to live and work within convention, both because it had served me well (I’d known how to play the game of getting a Fulbright) and because I’d seen how my brother’s unconventionality had estranged him from my parents.
The engagement was also predicated on achieving a relationship of equals with V, one that fully respected her subjectivity.
Gravity’s Rainbow
was an absolute boy-novel, a rockets-and-erections book, its female characters fundamentally sex objects.
When, in subsequent letters to V, I experimented with riffs that mimicked the novel’s raunchy tone and attitudes, she wrote back sharply to register her moral distaste, and the lesson I drew was that you couldn’t write like Pynchon and sustain an I-Thou relationship with a woman.
I had to reject Pynchon’s sexism the way I rejected my father’s.
It also quickly became apparent that Pynchon’s turn on novelistic convention—reading every coincidence as evidence of conspiracy—was a trick without a future.
Pynchon wholly owned it, and there was no point in competing with him on his turf:

What astounds me is how easy it is to make up a plot like that, and that no one before pynchon ever did it.
But now no one else can do it.
He is, as Lee Devin told me two and a half years ago, the Master of Paranoid Conspiracy.

[…]

The pynchon-anxiety has diminished, by the way, since Sunday morning (yesterday); the anxiety that remains is strangely antipynchonesque: ominous coincidences, but no chance of a conspiracy behind them.
For instance, the end of a sentence near the bottom of page 404: “… a repulsive black gob of the foul-smelling substance wrapped in a scrap torn from an old
Enbeski Qazaq
for 17 August of last year.”
Not the best spot of writing in the book, but at least all the details seem reasonable,
except
for the date [August 17 is my birthday], which appears nowhere else in the first 535 pages, which seems to have been planted as a sign for watchful me, a message from pynchon to the effect, “I KNOW YOU’RE READING THIS AND I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”
I have come to expect coincidences like this, though.

[…]

I haven’t given up on this idea of how susceptible we, or at least I, are to the toxins in the things we read.
I only read GR for about two hours yesterday, three at most.
But the whole night was filled with it.
It really is as Weasel Bloom describes it: influenza.
And far more dangerous when it happens with a novel than with a critical theory.
It could cripple you for life.
So to read, or not to read?
“He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.”
This is why I’m having such a hard time with the man.
Heller or Vonnegut I can live with, because they’re about as stylistically interesting (or annoying) as a translation of Chekhov.
But not pynchon—who also provides us with a tour de force through every sexual act ever dreamed of (shit-eating, piss-drinking and incest included (hardly appealing, you say, but—)), who wants us to know he knows exactly what a brick of hash looks like, exactly what WWII Europe was like, down to the minutest detail (V[ ], he was
two
when the war started, eight when it ended), exactly what it feels like to have destroyed yourself with cocaine, exactly how much chemistry, math, physics, and Pavlovian psychology he has mastered—it goes on and on, stealing names, phrases, techniques and making them so totally his own that the universe of possibilities seems
distinctly
smaller for his having written one book, one lousy book.
It’s so BIG.
That’s the problem.