Slow Learner: Early Stories

Some tiresome heavy-handed symbolism and quite a few contrived narrative choices here and there, thus leading to an overall inconsistent and flawed collection of short stories, but even when Pynchon's juvenile impulses are at their worst, he still manages to conjure up vivid epiphanies that leave one aghast, as if consumed with some rare, hallowed knowledge. However, in order to experience this, do yourself a favour and leave his renowned autobiographical introduction for last—as tempting it may be to go through the man's sole direct account of his own artistic process and influences, his merciless, coruscating self-ridiculing remarks about his early prose would probably just lead you to believe that these stories should have never seen the light of the day, let alone be published under the author's real moniker.

Really a fascinating glimpse into a portrait of the artist as a young, furiously creative and unrestrained man, which contains—in nuce—all his fixations and fetishes, together with a whimsical preoccupation for zany character names (Meatball Mulligan might just be my very favourite). The Secret Integration, in particular, might feature some of Pynchon's most candid, unexpectedly fragile and heart-rending writing yet.

nice intro to the latest Pynchon. but the most interesting in this intro is Pynchon's intro.

So, I gave up 300p. into Against the Day but Pynchon-mania is still on the agenda. I originally gifted this to my mum in French, she liked the preface but gave up on the first story. To be fair, “The Small Rain” is a bit rough (it’s his first published story), it takes place in the army (not a setting she likes) and the main character Levine seems a little bit too much like a self-insert. Which means that I kind of understand the author’s sentiment looking back on his youthful oeuvre:

“You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn’t dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then.”

My beloved snarky Pynchon. Just for the sake of this 20p. introduction where Pynchon FINALLY talks about himself, getting the book is worth it for the average Pynchon fan. He spends most of it laminating his younger self, which is both very entertaining and insightful.

About his spy story (which I found wonderful, maybe the best of the bunch):

“Readers may also feel shorted because of how, more than anyone, the masterful John le Carré has upped the ante for the whole genre. Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here. Most of it, happily, is chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated sucker – it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude.”

Yes PLEASE more chase scenes!! We don’t need every book to be deep! Ah, all that wasted potential. Those puerile scenes from his later books are my favorite parts, the more cartoonish the better. Thinking in particular of The Duck in Mason & Dixon and the Austrian Archduke in Against the Day, top comedy, brings me to tears.

Some reflections also strike a chord with me because I am barely older than the Pynchon who wrote these stories, and just getting out of that “I know everything” age:

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything – or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story.”

Onto the stories:

The Small Rain (3/5): liked the setting, the navy camaraderie. Didn’t think the hurricane was so necessary, or at least it did not make as big an impression as the first pages, even though it dealt with heavy topics. A nice metaphor originally about the army which also applies to social media bubbles:

“What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.”

Low-lands (4/5): The kind of story whose setting is so memorable and bonkers, it stays with you for years. The house:

“Dennis and Cindy Flange had lived in this curious moss-thatched, almost organic mound for the seven years of their marriage and in this time Flange at least had come to feel attached to the place by an umbilical cord woven of lichen and sedge, furze and gorse; he called it his womb with a view and in their now infrequent moments of tenderness he would sing Cindy the Noel Coward song, half as an attempt to recall the first few months they were together, half as a love song for the house.”

And then the completely surreal garbage dump and its maze-like geography and subterranean inhabitants… really makes you think of his later books. It’s genius.

Entropy (3/5): The most famous one, which I had already read in an anthology. I liked the party atmosphere and the entropy metaphors (most of which probably went over my head), though I don’t understand why this one, specifically, is the most famous.

Under the Rose (5/5): So, so much fun. Spy story set in Egypt with mysterious players.

“Mildred was in Egypt, she soon informed Porpentine, to gather rock specimens, being daft for rocks in the same way Sir Alastair was for large and ancient pipe-organs. He had toured Germany the previous year, alienating the populations of various cathedral towns by recruiting small boys to toil away half-days at a clip keeping the bellows going: and then underpaying.”

And some deep thoughts:

“Fate, it occurred to him then, chooses weird agents. Moldweorp somehow could love and hate individually. The roles being, it seemed, reversed, Porpentine found it necessary to believe if one appointed oneself savior of humanity that perhaps one must love that humanity only in the abstract. For any descent to the personal level can make a purpose less pure. Whereas a disgust at individual human perversity might as easily avalanche into a rage for apocalypse.”

The Secret Integration (4/5): Pretty fun, unusual setting with all the protagonists being kids playing pranks. I couldn’t help but think that ubersmart Grover might be a younger Pynchon:

“Grover Snodd was a little older than Tim, and a boy genius. Within limits, anyway. A boy genius with flaws. His inventions, for example, didn’t always work. And last year he’d had this racket, doing everybody’s homework for them at a dime an assignment. But he’d given himself away too often. They knew somehow (they had a “curve,” according to Grover, that told them how well everybody was supposed to do) that it was him behind all the 90s and 100s kids started getting. “You can’t fight the law of averages,” Grover said, “you can’t fight the curve.” So they went to work earnestly on his parents to talk them into transferring him. Someplace. Anything.”

“Expert though he might be on every school topic from igneous rocks to Indian raids, Grover was still too dumb, as Tim saw it, to cover up how smart he was. Whenever he had a chance to show it, he’d always weaken. In a problem like somebody’s yard’s a triangle, find the area, Grover couldn’t resist bringing in a little trigonometry, which half the class couldn’t even pronounce, or calculus, a word they saw from time to time in the outer-space comics and was only a word.”

And also: ““Ultraviolet fluorescence,” Grover said, having obvious fun with the words.” Having fun with words, huh, very suspicious!

Part of what I love in these stories (and in Pynchon’s books in general) is how much he relies on spoken language for a kind of realistic, unpretentious style. I’m sure other writers must do it too, but I’ve never found anyone so successful at it. He briefly talks about it in the introduction:

“By the time I wrote “The Secret Integration” I was embarked on this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality.”

Slow Learner shows Thomas Pynchon’s development as a writer from his earliest short story “The Small Rain” up to “The Secret Integration,” published just after The Crying of Lot 49. For Pynchon obsessives, the introduction, written by Pynchon in 1984 during the 17 year break between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, provides an essential window into the mind of the author as the only sustained commentary from Pynchon on his own writing and background.

As the title of the collection indicates, Pynchon seems embarrassed by the awkwardness and immaturity of these early works, with the exception of “The Secret Integration.” Most of the stories overlap thematically and stylistically with V. and The Crying of Lot 49, especially “Under the Rose” which was originally published on its own but later included as a chapter in V. “The Secret Integration” stands alone as an unflinching look at racism in 1960’s suburban America. This story showcases the maturity and moral clarity that characterizes Pynchon’s work that came after. I recommend this collection for fans of Pynchon or anyone interested in the craft of writing.

pynchon is funny. no, no, he's very funny. no, no, no, actually, pynchon is mocking-funny. yes, he's a mock-comic writer. but, this book as a high form of pynchonesque mocking art topples even his expectations. no, seriously. he's just so good at it that he surpassed himself in this book. there are five early short stories of pynchon in this book, but, imho, that introduction is actually the best one. yes, real events as story. he catered it like that. and, in a very funny way, goddamn him! now, the stories clearly showed if pynchon didn't change his narrative style, english literature would've forgotten him easily. but, there are clear traces of pynchon fun in the stories but due to his the then literary inexperiences, it fell apart, sometimes. so, the actual rating of this book is 3.5 stars but a half star is also alotted for the applause of how pynchon knows the art of self-mocking (i may be wrong)! it takes a lot of guts to publish your failure in the peaktime of your success. but, then again, the art of self-mocking is very much underrated.

Insomma, io ce l'ho messa tutta. L'ho letto fino alla fine, sperando sempre in un riscatto, che però... niente, non c'è stato!
Non sono riuscita ad entrare in risonanza con la frequenza di Pynchon. Non mi ha preso. La lettura mi sfuggiva di mano. Leggevo, ma i personaggi non mi trattenevano. Mi giravano intorno e non si fermavano.
Sembra che P. sia un grande della letteratura americana. Ma io non l'ho capito.
E così le stelline si sono spente un po' alla volta...
Al racconto 'Entropia', che ho letto per primo, ne avrei forse potute dare tre, per la sua assurda scientificità, attorno a cui ruotano personaggi malati: diversi modi di reagire all'attesa della morte finale dell'Universo.
Ma per il resto...

Newton's Fourth Law tells us that modesty is just as thoroughly digested as arrogance is. That the line "it was no big deal" is swallowed just as readily as "it's really big deal". In case you find yourself having trouble remembering all of his laws (or heaven forbid, confusing them with Leibniz's theorems), here's a pneumatic pneumonic I use (I came up with it all by myself - yeah it's a big deal):
Obi-Wan Kenobi moves things with the FORCE
While Yoda lectures at the Jedi MASS
Which Luke Skywalker wishes he would ACCELERATE
Because he's got to tell Padme he's OPPOSED
To her dying from being MODEST

Anyways. The introduction to this book was written by Pynchon after (supposedly) looking back on the stories for the first time in years, and he spends a great deal of time critiquing them. Which, by Newton's Fourth Law, made me feel as though they were probably garbage stories. That they were "no big deal". That they were only worth reading to feed an ever growing feeling of superiority I have over everyone else who has never read Pynchon.

But actually, these were rather wonderful stories that were funny and well-written and enjoyable and classic Pynchon (although, perhaps even more enjoyable than classic Pynchon because they actually had a solid ending). Highly recommend. Although not too hard. Cuz I still have to be a snob. Newton really should've had a law about snobs.

This one's probably for the hardcore, although with the caveat that aren't too many casual Pynchon fans, unless you're that one person who thinks he should have started and stopped with "Vineland" (and yes, I'm aware there's a good chance it is someone's favorite). A writer of large difficult books who has close to zero media presence but isn't angrily aggressive about it (he's lent his voice to "The Simpsons" at least once, so its clear he has some sense of humor) he's managed to stay fairly anonymous by basically just not appearing anywhere. The most recent verifiable photographs of him are from the 1950s and while he's done more PR for his books in recent years (relatively speaking, since almost anything is more than zero) he's not about to hit the talk show circuit to chat it up.

Its worked out well for him over the decades. Now in his eighties, there is a very good chance he could pass you on the street and you wouldn't know who he was (it seems reasonably likely that he's lived in Manhattan for a while) although most of the authors I like would fall into that category. But he's also managed to win the National Book Award once (for "Gravity's Rainbow"), almost the Pulitzer for Fiction (also for "Gravity's Rainbow"), seen one book made into a movie ("Inherent Vice") and has influenced quite a few writers, although the results can sometimes be mixed (um, Neal Stephenson . . . although he's gotten better!)

And while its easy enough as a reader to respect his privacy, you can't but sometimes be a little curious about the guy. With so little known about him almost any nugget of info that dispels the cloud of mystery is fascinating in itself, like collecting puzzle pieces scattered all over the country, trying to put them together despite having no idea what the picture is even supposed to look like.

Which is why this collection is so surprising. Not because it exists . . . by the mid-eighties when this was published he was probably just well-known enough to justify it and with his novels coming out very infrequently (his next novel, "Vineland" wouldn't come out until 1990, seventeen years after "Gravity's Rainbow") it was no doubt worth putting out some kind of stop-gap collection just to see if the audience was still out there. It's not even that big of a collection . . . collecting only five stories that he wrote mostly before his first published novel (for completists there's one other story that for some reason didn't make this collection . . . go track down "Epoch" Vol 9 #4!) it gives fans a chance to get a peek at his more embryonic state when he wasn't exactly Thomas Pynchon in all caps, but some random writer publishing off-kilter short stories in various magazines. So for that reason alone there's some value in it.

But what puts this over the top is that Pynchon himself writes the introduction to the collection. And not in a "Here's stories I wrote when I was young, hope you enjoy them despite me not knowing what I was doing" fashion but a legitimate twenty plus page preface where he dissects each story at decent length and talks about his life to a lesser extent. Its remarkably candid and weirdly chatty from someone who's gone to great lengths to avoid having any sort of presence beyond sort of blending into the background of the general public. What prompted it I have no idea (its not like he's prone to commenting) but its an unexpected bonus and definitely worth a read if you're interested in how he looks at writing in general.

The stories themselves are, as Pynchon himself says (repeatedly), the work of someone who is just getting started. Now considering that the someone just getting started would eventually turn into a person who wrote at least one book that regularly makes "Best of Twentieth Century Novels" lists you hope that the stories would be better than average, even if it'll be clear that wasn't a genius right out of the gate.

For the most part that's a fair assessment. When you only have five chances to wow people its hard to forgive even one bad story, even if the subtitle of the collection as "Early stories" feels like its setting expectations just a bit lower (its probably also there to prevent people from assuming its new material, considering it had been a decade since his last novel at that point) . . . but fortunately all of them are at least readable, with the end result that its somewhat reassuring that Pynchon was human after all and didn't produce five masterpieces right out of the starting gate.


We get the so-so one out of the way fast. Published while he was still in college, "The Small Rain" draws upon the experience of the friend of his who served in the Army (Pynchon himself was in the Navy). It details the experience of an soldier stationed in the New Orleans area who has to help clean up an island that was hit by a hurricane. Its an interesting story, marked by dialogue that sounds like everyone is being written by an English major while ending a bit less than neatly, almost like we're in a truncated version of someone's life. Despite the setting being fairly authentic what's striking is how normal this seems. The dizzying cascades of prose and odd angles are nowhere to be found here, not even within sniffing distance. Read in a vacuum, its okay.

"Low-lands" gets us into weirder territory, even if its clear that Pynchon is still figuring out how to harness the weirdness to tie into his themes. Characters start to have more strangely evocative names, like Pig Bodine and Rocco Squarcione and there's a decent amount of quirky bonding as lawyer Dennis Flange hangs out in a dump with the aforementioned Pig Bodine and his garbage man after his wife insists they get out of her sight. This leads to a slight sense of unreality just as the ending comes around and things get a bit surreal. Again, its interesting but doesn't hit with much weight . . . at times it seems like Pynchon is circling what he wants to say without necessarily quite knowing how to nail it.

By the time we get to "Entropy" its clear we're starting to get somewhere and it actually becomes kind of fun watching him improve and refine from story to story, picking up on what he's done before and taking it a little bit further. This one starts to touch on topics that will become near and dear to him later, specifically the title concept, centering around a wild lease breaking party that seems to have everything going on at once. Here he starts to cram in wacky events and whatever scientific theories he's interested in so that everything feels in a constant state of controlled disarray, a sky machine falling apart one piece of its misshapen contraption at a time. It’s the world shoved into a box and then turned up a few notches, a soup of sights and sounds where once in a while coherent scenes emerge from the murk before dissolving again, with a final scene that for once has a bit of weight to it, an act and image frozen into itself, not quite striking the heart but a colder place next to it that you had forgotten existed.

Then we have "Under the Rose". This one feels like a leap, even if Pynchon didn't think he was quite there yet. Two British spies, Porpentine and Goodfellow, are hanging out into Egypt. Its the years before WWI, when Europe was at least sort of pretending that countries could still be civil to each other. The two of them are trying to foil a plot by their arch-nemesis Moldweorp, but they're not even sure what the plot is. This one feels like its got a bit of the secret world in it, the sense of the action that goes on behind the scenes where the people who are behind the scenes seem to believe that there are engines that lurk behind even them. This one is fast paced and shot through with a strange aching melancholy, as if the story is aware what year it is and what's coming and it soaks into all the car chases and spy hijinks, like what they're doing now is a game that in a decade or two is just going to be a fond memory of children playing when things start to get really serious. It’s a mood he hasn't hit before in the collection (although it’s a note he would hit harder in the novels, especially "Against the Day") and he pulls it off with surprising effectiveness, catching that note when your enemies have grasped the changing times earlier than you have and almost start feeling sorry for you. It finishes with the realization that the world can't be avoided and if it feels a bit too on the nose (something that marks a lot of these stories, he hasn't mastered a certain kind of heartstopping ambiguity yet) it still feels like he's capturing something that lurked just outside the stories previously.

Which brings us to "The Secret Integration". The only one published after he published his first novel (and probably his highest profile story, appearing in "The Saturday Evening Post") it also feels the most natural, as if he's not struggling anymore but has become confident in what he can skills with his skills at that particular moment. It features kids and even if its not autobiographical it comes the closest to being pulled, maybe not from strict memory, but from the memory of what memory was like. A group of kids have organized themselves into a secret club that plans elaborate pranks (they often discuss how to disrupt a PTA meeting) and most of the story is focused on how they tumble through their world, with all the legends and myths that come with being children, fantastical as they might be. In the background, as if being behind an erected sheet and silhouetted darkly, the world is lurking, as their parents seem to be bent on harassing any African-American family that tries to move into the neighborhood.

What's amazing about this one is how he captures the simultaneously sense of real and unreal that comes with being a child, where weird impossible things can be true and very much possible and the world itself is refracted into some new language. They react as serious children do, both unserious and completely committed (a centerpiece of the story is a couple of the kids, one of whom has been through AA, sitting with someone in a hotel who's trying not to drink and who also can't believe that the only person available to help him is a child), perceptive but maybe not perceiving everything completely, filtering it through their own logic. In its own way it captures the feeling of being a child through the eyes of a child (the closest comparison I can think of is Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life", although this didn't feel as, um, portentiously universal?). It has a strange bouncy disappointment to it, as if everything has already been corrupted and they're obliviously holding it off for just one more day, or lying to themselves as to why they're doing it. About the only off note is the state of one of their friends, which again feels a bit too obvious in making the themes clear (he does a better job sticking with the misunderstood calculus metaphor of the title) but by that point the story feels like it could ride off forever and do it all again the next day.

And that's all of them. Going through all five, I think its clear that Pynchon was never going to be a master of the short story form. His power derives from being able to stretch out at great length (unless it’s the feverish compression of "The Crying of Lot 49", which he only tried to pull off once) and let all the sentences and themes and situations accumulate until its nearly overwhelming. So none of these are perfect but he was also still very new at this. Maybe if he decided to focus purely on short stories he might have been able to pack all he was trying to do in a very small space. But I prefer him expansive, frankly, and while these are good they're not going to win him too many new converts as literally nothing else he's written are anything like these. So maybe they're a good bite-sized introduction for the cautious before diving into the deeper waters. For the rest of us, though, these are a pleasant side trip. The real stuff is elsewhere.