The Uncollected Works of Thomas Pynchon

Contents:Introduction..........................................................................................................................................................1

Nearer, My Couch, to Thee......................................................................................................................................2Love in the Time of Cholera ....................................................................................................................................5Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?.......................................................................................................................................8The Gift..................................................................................................................................................................12A Journey Into The Mind of Watts ........................................................................................................................13Letter to the Editor .................................................................................................................................................18Mortality and Mercy in Vienna..............................................................................................................................19

IntroductionThis collection was assembled with the best of intentions. For years, the minions of Pynchon faithful have

eagerly purchased his books and pondered about his existence during the years in between. We delighted when SlowLearner , his collection of early short works, appeared in 1984. Not just for the stories. I, and I suspect many likeme, purchased the book more for the introduction than for the body text. It was the first evidence, at least since hisintroduction to Farias Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, that there was a real man behind the writing.

More and more in recent years, he seems to have come out of his shell. It is now known that he has settled inNew York City, is married and has a son. Either he got tired of hiding as a lifestyle of choice, or he realized therewas no longer much of a limelight zigzagging across the country, seeking him out, to hide from.

It continues to surprise me how many educated people have never heard of Pynchon, or Gravitys Rainbow .Even more disheartening is when the mention of his novel V . elicits the response, You mean that awful TV mini-series.

Nearer, My Couch, to Thee

IN HIS CLASSICAL DISCUSSION OF THE SUBJECT in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, oneof the seven capital sins. He said he was using capital to mean primary or at the head of because such sinsgave rise to others, but there was an additional and darker sense resonating luridly just beneath and not hurting thepower of his argument, for the word also meant deserving of capital punishment. Hence the equivalent termmortal, as well as the punchier English deadly.

But come on, isnt that kind of extreme, death for something as lightweight as Sloth? Sitting there on somemedieval death row, going, So, look, no offense, but whatd 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 sheriffs unit withmy two-cubit crossbow, firing three-quarter-inch bolts on auto feed. Anger, I guess.... How about you?

Um, well ... it wasnt anger....Ha! Another one of these Sloth cases, right?. . fact, it wasnt even me.Never is, slugger say, look, its almost time for lunch. You wouldnt 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 SlothHearings. The stereotype arises in part from our conspicuous presence in jobs where pay is by the word, anddeadlines 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 writers block, an affliction known sometimes to resolveitself dramatically and without warning, much like constipation, and (hence?) finding wide sympathy amongreaders.

Writers block, however, is a trip to the theme park of your choice alongside the mortal sin that produces it. Likeeach of the other six, Sloth was supposed to be the progenitor of a whole family of lesser, or venial, sins, amongthem 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 theprocess, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and depression, eventually pushing us to wherewe will do anything, in the way of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.

But Sloths offspring, though bad to paraphrase the Shangri-Las are not always evil, for example whatAquinas terms Uneasiness of the Mind, or rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, which, if itpertains to the imaginative power... is called curiosity. It is of course precisely in such episodes of mental travelingthat writers are known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal problems, getting advice fromBeyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with luck can be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of theessence of what we do. We sell our dreams. So real money actually proceeds from Sloth, although thistransformation is said to be even more amazing elsewhere in the entertainment sector, where idle exercises inpoolside 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. BetweenFranklins hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melvilles doomed scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of earlyAmerica, consolidating itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last stages of its shift over froma spiritual to a secular condition.

Philadelphia, by Franklins time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started offwith. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and servicescoming 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.) Spiritualmatters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin againstGod 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-knownBritish 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 therubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put offnow had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity. You may delay, but time will not. And Sloth,

Adam DooganNote(Rubato - The temporary disregarding of a strict tempo to allow an expressive quickening or slackening,usually without altering the overall pace.)

Adam DooganNoteineluctable - unable to be resisted or avoided, inescapable

being continual evasion, just kept piling up like a budget deficit, while the dimensions of the inevitable paybackgrew ever less merciful.

In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richards day, where every second was of equal lengthand irrevocable, not much in the course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted theungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In Frances M. Barbours 1974 concordance ofthe sayings, there is nothing to be found under Dreams, dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as theirfrequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithedback 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 l A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonworkblock of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, What good have I done thisday? This must have been the schedules only occasion for drifting into reverie there would seem to have beenno other room for speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to benonfiction.

BY the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religiousreverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron capitalism, the titlecharacter develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keepsmaking choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on WallStreet repeating, I would prefer not to. While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs andsubstance, 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 interactinganymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person whocollaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, orone who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? Bartleby is the first great epic of modern Sloth, prese ntly tobe followed by work from the likes of Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and otherstake your own favoritelist of writers after Melville and youre bound sooner or later to run into a character bearing a sorrow recognizableas peculiarly of our own time.

In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing theintroduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920s and 30sbeing perhaps Sloths finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction andnonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can wenot 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 ofmortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price, adeliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of quotidianlusts, angers and the rest. The compulsive pessimists 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 nolonger noticed.

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

Sad but true. Yet, chiefly owing to the timely invention not a minute too soon ! of the remote control andthe 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 assimply structured. If Sloth can be defined as the pretense, in the tradition of American settlement and spoliation, thattime is one more nonfinite resource, there to be exploited forever, then we may for now at least have found theillusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time even imagining that we canescape 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 oftheir contest for the King of Spuds, or top Couch Potato in the United States, culled from about a thousand entries. All l do is watch television and work, admits the 35-year-old bachelor, who keeps three TV sets blaring 24 hours aday at his Fridley, Minn., home and watches a fourth set on the job.

Adam DooganNoteorthogonal: of or involving right angles.

statistically independent. variates that can be treated as indendent

Theres nothing I like more than sitting around with a six-pack of beer, some chips and a remote control.... TheTV station even featured me in a town parade. Th ey went into my house, got my couch and put it on a float. I sat onthe 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 re clining, suggest something different here. Channel-surfing and VCR-jockeying may require a morenonlinear awareness than may be entirely compatible with the venerable sin of Sloth some inner alertness ortension, 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 onlyretreated 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 formto 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 Slothwill continue to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was theHoly Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagementdeep and fatal. The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth defiant sorrow in the face of Gods 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 technologys good intentions, there well sit with our heads in virtual reality,glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back inSloths good old days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.

The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it getsstranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenlycaught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. Its about then that we may begin to regard lovesongs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with anincreasingly 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 thatdegree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on lifes limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not onlyto swear love forever, but actually to follow through on it to live a long, full and authentic life based on such avow, to put ones alloted stake of precious time where ones heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of GabrielGarcia Marquezs new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

In the postromantic ebb of the 70s and 80s, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid aboutlove, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in lovesvernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously that is, as well worth thosehigher forms of play that we value in fiction. For Garcia Marquez the step may also be revolutionary. I think that anovel about love is as valid as any other, he once remarked in a conversation with his friend, the journalist PlinioApuleyo Mendoza (published as El Olor de la Guayaba, 1982). In reality the duty of a writer the revolutionaryduty, 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: theGarcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed newresources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praiseand 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 deIndias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and theatrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devouredby 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 iguanasraised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyonesshouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of thehouses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles ofclothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to themfrom the basket of the balloon.

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

Heres what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamedbut said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla as well, perhaps, as cities of the spirit less officiallymapped. Three major characters form a triangle whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love bothcarnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet ofpaddle-wheel steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls forever in love with Fermina Daza, abeautiful adolescent with . . . almondsshaped eyes, who walks with a natural haughtiness . . . her does gaitmaking her seem immune to gravity. Though they exchange hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on apassionate and secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the girls father has sound out andtaken her away on an extended journey of forgetting. But when she returns, Fermina rejects the lovesick youngman after all, and eventually meets and marries instead Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a I9th-centurynovel, is well born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch nonetheless.

For Florentino, loves creature. this is an agonizing setback, though nothing fatal. Having sworn to love FerminaDaza forever, he settles in to wait for as long as he has to until shes free again. This turns out to be 51 years, 9months and 4 days later, when suddenly, absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies,

chasing a parrot upon mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone else has left, Florentino steps forward with hishat over his heart Fermina, he declares, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeatto you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. Shocked and furious, Fermina orders him out ofthe house. And dont show your face again for the years of life that are left to you . . . I hope there are very few ofthem.

The hearts eternal vow has run up against the worlds finite terms. The confrontation occurs near the end of thefirst chapter, which recounts Dr. Urbinos last day on earth and Ferminas first night as a widow. We then flash back50 years, into the time of cholera. The middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the years ofthe Urbinos marriage and Florentino Arizas rise at the River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. Thelast chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentine now, in the face of what many men wouldconsider major rejection, resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing what he must to winher love.

In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el clera, the fataldisease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la clera, defined as choler or anger, whichtaken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for victims of theother. War, always the same war, is presented here not as the continuation by other means of any politics that canpossibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this darkground, lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance, even of sworn opposition, todeath. Dr. Urbino, like his father before him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting publichealth measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in herchosen role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe perimeter for her family. Florentinoembraces Eros, deaths well-known long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually add up to622 long term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures, while maintaining, impervious to time, hisdeeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the end he can tell her truthfully though shedoesnt believe it for a minute that he has remained a virgin for her.

So far as this is Florentinos story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we find ourselves, as he earns the suspension ofour disbelief, cheering him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age and death, and in thename of love. But like the best fictional characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything lessambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and loversrefuges of this city with which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disastersfrom which he remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borderson criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated to make happy, seduces him during anightlong bombardment from the cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santanders exquisitelyfurnished home is burgled of every movable item while she and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks upat Carnival time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the local asylum. Olimpia Zuletashusband mu rders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on herbody in red paint. His lovers amorality causes not only individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: ashe learns by the end of the book, his River Companys insatiable appetite for firewood to fuel its steamers has wipedout 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 timehe 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. Theauthors great affection for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent subversion of the ethic ofmachismo, of which Garcia Marquez is not especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation ofthe rights of others. Indeed, as weve come to expect from his fiction, its 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 hismother Transito Ariza, who pulls him out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for anytraditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching need to be loved. Women go for it. He is ugly andsad, Fermina Dazas 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, theyoung writer underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of Kafkas Metamorphosis, inwhich a man wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Gosh, exclaimed Garcia Marquez, using inSpanish a word in English we may not, thats just the way my grandmother used to talk! And that, he adds is whennovels began to interest him. Much of what come [sic] in his work to be called magical 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 OneHundred Years of Solitude where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in everyday conversationwith the living: we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into warand pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted less by individual dead than by a historywhich has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having sopoken, or having spoken gone unheard, orhaving been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a dutyGarcia Marquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be presumptuous to speak of movingbeyond One Hundred Years of Solitude but clearly Garcia Marquez has moved somewhere else, not least intodeeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes to learn, nobody teaches life anything. There are stilldelightful and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same unblinking humor presences at the footof the bed, an anonymously delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor character, whosepursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. But the predominant claim on the authors attention and energiescomes from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about reality in which love and the possibility ofloves 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 noless clement.

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitudethere might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap operaall genres, by the way, that are well represented in thisnovelbut not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level ofunderstanding, is an authors ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the fullextent 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 authors voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned. My Spanish isntperfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of hiswriting, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. Itis 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 theproblem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company. Its no use, the young man protests Love is the onlything that interests me.

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

The New York Times 10 April1988

Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?

As if being 1984 werent enough, its also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snows famous Rede lecture,The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West wasbecoming 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 oftechnology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-cultureformulation that got peoples attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplifiedpoints, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, givingthe 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 ofdata more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping outof all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try tohide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever beyond the reach of a layman. Anybodywith the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he mayneed. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library ormagazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has reallybecome how to find the time to read anything outside ones own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexesof 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 a long-ago high-table chitchat,may have helped form the subtext for Snows immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, If we forget the scientificculture, 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, its hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literaryintellectual, though it doesnt sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, people who read and think. Beingcalled a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking thatwould cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is aLuddite, 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 sworeallegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It Isnt clear whether they called themselves Luddites,although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C.P. Snows 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 beimagined as the counter- revolutionaries of that Industrial Revolution which their modern versions have nevertried, wanted, or been able to understand.

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, aviolent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an acceleratedpassage 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 Rootsof the Industrial Revolution, Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam m engine (1765)) may havebeen overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive hadalready long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the ideaof a technosocial revolution, in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven ofuse to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that In Luddite they havediscovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the sametime.

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

But its important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of theIndustrial 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 inlove with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. Hed 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 NedLud, in any fit of insane rage, but lets imagine logically and coolly, vowed to invent a machine that would make thehand-knitting of hosiery obsolete, and so he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted clerics frame was soperfect 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, its just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt whatpeople admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single- mindedness of his assault. But the words fit ofinsane rage are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Luds anger was not directed at themachines, 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 thequizzical 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 hereis the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work forwell over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the machinescoming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no Germanphilosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about themachines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate thatgrows up between humans and machinery - especially when its been around for a while not to mention seriousresentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was theconcentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certainnumber of humans out of work - to be worth that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Badcharisma, 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 forcesmany times more powerful, dont 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 over whelm us? Of course,the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, usingthe 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 maidenspeech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressivemeasures, to make frame- breaking punishable by death. Are you not near the Luddites? he wrote from Venice toThomas Moore. By the Lord! if theres a row, but Ill be among ye! How go on the weavers the breakers offrames the Lutherans of politics the reformers? He includes an amiable chanson, which proves to be aLuddite hymn sop inflammatory that it wasnt published until after the poets death. The letter is dated December1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with theShelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as ithappened, 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, andthose who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankensteins 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 proportionately large, which takes care of Big. The story of how he gotto 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 Victors own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer RobertWalton. However much of Frankensteins longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, whotranslated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as forthe much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which arenocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victors account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be alittle vague about the details, but were left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (thoughnothing like Whales galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and AlbertusMagnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite thecommonly 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, bothauthors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelleys preface was written byher husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction toFrankenstein 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 admitauthorship.

THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. MaryShelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature beingbrought to life, the images arising in her mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. Walpolehad been awakened from a dream, of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancientcastle... and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a gigantic hand in armour.

In Walpoles novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despitehis epithet, the castles resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankensteins 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 justmaterialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freuds slow return of the repressed. The activatingagencies, 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 ofOtrantos patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religiousyearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. I ways more and lessliteral, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were nolonger so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had oncebeen true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blakes dark Satanic millsrepresented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularizedinto Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation bodilyresurrection, if possible remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only twosectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry aswell as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give upelements of faith, however irrational, to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what itwas 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 comics, down to Star Wars andcontemporary 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 wishthat living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendentdoings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue inthe movie, you recall, goes, Well, the airplanes got him. No... it was Beauty killed the Beast. In which we againencounter 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 bigone, mortality itself then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being seriousabout these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortalchildren they must deal with. Looking back on Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelleysaid, I have affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words whichfound no true echo in my heart. The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survivaltoward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confinedto 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 whodunits, murder, being apretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In science fiction, where entire worlds may be generatedfrom simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of thesecases we know better. We say, But the world isnt 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 themost remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as theBeat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a fewexceptions 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 ourtime, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of theIndustrial Revolution had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocketprogram and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these threecurves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watch nuclearweapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy.An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust [///] eight-figure body counts has become [///] particularly since 1980, havebeen guiding our military policies conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modernLuddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the mostirresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction ofthe Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. Thehardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns exotic cultural evolutions and socialscenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions most of it sharing, as the criticalliterature has amply discussed, a definition of human as particularly distinguished from machine. Like theirearlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age curiously, the same Age ofReason 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? Willmainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptionsare stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the mostunreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keysinstead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a prettystraightforward 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 theirSnovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the future in their bones. It maybe only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hopeof miracle has now come to reside in the computers ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do themost good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves fromnuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk realize all thewistful pipe dreams of our days.

THE word Luddite continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especiallythe 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 apermanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEOs, up against whom us average poorbastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didnt put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquiland allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any ofthe 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 thecurves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. Itwill 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 Byrons mischievouslyimprovised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Ludditesand our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads oer the seaBought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,So we; boys, weWill die fighting, or live free,And down with all kings but King Ludd!The New York Times Book Review , 28 October 1984

The Gift

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where Americanvirtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OKcorral 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 agunfighter 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 citizensexpressly 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, butalso, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. It is Blaisdells private abyss, andnot too different from the towns public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with the rebellion of theproto-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 inescapableHorror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed outand assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlockone of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapperinto the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Halls to remind ushow far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Holiday vol. 38, #6 December 1965

A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angelespolicemen, Caucasians, succeeded in halting a car driven by Leonard Deadwyler, a Negro. With him were hispregnant wife and a friend. The younger cop (whod once had a complaint brought against him for rousting someNegro kids around in a more than usually abusive way) went over and stuck his head and gun in the car window totalk to Deadwyler. A moment later there was a shot; the young Negro fell sideways in the seat, and died. The lastthing he said, according to the other cop, was, Shes going to have a baby.

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

But as far as Watts is concerned, its still very much open. Preachers in the community are urging calm-or, asothers are putting it: Make any big trouble, baby, The Man just going to come back in and shoot you, like lasttime. Snipers are sniping but so far not hitting much of anything. Occasional fire bombs are being lobbed at carswith white faces inside, or into empty sports models that look as if they might be white property. There have been afew fires of mysterious origin. A Negro Teen Post- part of the L.A. poverty wars 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 withthe malefactors, involve them, see if they couldnt work out the problem together. In the back of everybodys head,of course, is the same question: Will there be a repeat of last Augusts riot?

An even more interesting question is: Why is everybody worrying about another riothavent things in Wattsimproved any since the last one? A lot of white folks are wondering. Unhappily, the answer is no. The neighborhoodmay be seething with social workers, data collectors, VISTA volunteers and other assorted members of thehumanitarian establishment, all of whose intentions are the purest in the world. But somehow nothing much haschanged. There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seema terrible vitality.

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

Whatever else may be wrong in a political waylike the inadequacy of Great Depression techniques applied to ascene that has long outgrown them; like an old-fashioned grafters glee among the city fathers over the vast amountsof poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to themlying much closer to the heart of L.A.s racialsickness is the coexistence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.

While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized follythe economy of the area in factdepending on itthe black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence anddeath, which the whites have mostly chosenand can affordto ignore. The two cultures do not understand eachother, though white values are displayed without let-up on black peoples TV screens, and though the panoramicsense of black impoverishment is hard to miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive atleast twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for achange, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind ofbeginning. But Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem atpresent willing to travel.

On the surface anyway, the Deadwyler affair hasnt made it look any different, though underneath the mood inWatts is about what you might expect. Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, toan anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm eveningthis summer. Yet in the daytimes brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everythingseems so out in the open, all of it is real, no plastic faces, not transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfiedlandscaping, or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, likethe 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 emptiedTokay, 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 glassnot that youd ever know. These kids are sotough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. Its part of their landscape, both the real andthe 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 theneighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should havebeen: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next tothe Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the steel rails. ButSimon 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 sisterstoo young yet for school have it better wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not thecrowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the restof L.A. giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you dont 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, arecrowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to aball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildingslow, faded stucco boxes that remindyou oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. It is easy to see howcrowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For themoment, 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 underthe approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; throughthe 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 Wattsand in a curious way, besieges itlooks like thosejets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the massmedia. 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 whiteScene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims ofRobert McNamara, to the action everybody mills along the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they andtheir 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 onlyillusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was supposedto 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 offthem are still waiting vacant and littered with garbage, occupied only by a parked car or two, or kids fooling aroundafter 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 ownerand his wife, who in the true Watts spirit busted a bottle of champagne over a rockall because the man haddecided 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 betterneighborhoods like to come in under the freeway as to a red-light district, looking for some girl, some game, maybesome connection. Narcotics is said to be a rare bust in Watts these day, although the narco people cruise the areaearnestly, on the lookout for dope fiends, dope rings, dope peddlers. But the poverty of Watts makes it more likelythat if you have pot or a little something else to spare you will want to turn a friend on, not sell it. Tomorrow, orwhen he can, your friend will return the favor.

At the Deadwyler inquest, much was made of the dead mans high blood alcohol content, as if his being drunkmade it somehow all right for the police to shoot him. But alcohol is a natural part of the Watts style; as natural asLSD is around Hollywood. The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe so much inescape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L.A. Scene makes accessible to him so many differentforms of it. But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for somecalm, 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 theyre hiring because theydont seem to be in Watts, not even in the miles of heavy industry that sprawl along Alameda Street, that gray andmurderous 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 oldpiece of a car youre driving, which you bought for $20 or $30 you picked up somehow, makes a lot of noise orburns some oil. Catching you mobile widens The Mans horizons; gives him more things he can get you on. Likeexcessive 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 whitefaces of personnel men, their uniform glance of suspicion, their automatic smiles, and listening to polite put-downs.I decided once to ask, a kid says, one time they told me I didnt meet their requirements. So I said: Well, whatare you looking for? I mean, how can I train, what things do I have to learn so I can meet your requirements? Knowwhat he said? We are not obligated to tell you what our requirements are.

He isnt. That right there is the hell and headache: he doesnt have to do anything he doesnt want to do becausehe is The Man. Or he was. A lot of kids these days are more apt to be calling him the little manmeaning not somuch 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 than The Man ever bugged their parents. It is the little man who is standingon their feet and in their way; hes all over the place, and there is not much they can do to change him or the way hefeels 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 riskor Poor learner, or Sexualthreat, or Welfare chisler 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? Mild, respectable,possibly smiling, he has called you no names, shown no weapons. Only told you perhaps that the job was filled, thehouse rented.

With a cop it may get more dangerous, but at least its honest. You understand each other. Both of you silentlyadmitting that all the cop really has going for him is his gun. There was a time, theyll tell you, youd say, Takeoff the badge baby, and lets settle it. I mean, he wouldnt, but youd 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 the gun; the hassle stays verbal. But this means that, besides protecting and serving thelittle man, the cop also functions as his effigy.

If he does not get emotional and say something like boy or nigger, you then have the option of cooling it orelseagain this is more frequent since last Augustcalling him the name he expects to be called, though it isunderstood you are not commenting in any literal way on what goes on between him and his mother. It is a ritualexchange, like the dirty dozens.

Usuallyas in the Deadwyler incidentits the younger cop of the pair whos more troublesome. Most Wattskids are hip to whats going on in this rookies headthe things he feels he has to proveas much as to theelements of the ritual. Before the cop can say, Lets see your I.D., ; you learn to take it out politely and say, Youwant to see my I.D.? Naturally it will bug the cop more the further ahead of him you can stay. It is flirting withdisaster, but its the cop who has the gun, so you do what you can.

You must anticipate always how the talk is going to go. Its something you pick up quite young, same as youlearn the different species of cop: the Black and White (named for the color scheme of their automobiles), who areL.A.. city police and in general the least flexible; the L.A. county sheriffs department, who style themselves moreof an elite, 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 timeagainst the wall and shaking you all down; the juvies, who ride in unmarked Plymouths and are cruising all over theplace soon as the sun goes down, pulling up alongside you with pleasantries like, Which ones buying the winetonight? or, Who are you guys planning to rob this time? They are kidding, of course, trying to be pals. But Wattskids, like most, do not like being put in with winos, or dangerous drivers or thieves, or in any bag consideredcriminal or evil. Whatever the cops motives, it looks like mean and deliberate ignorance.

In the daytime, and especially with any kind of crowd, the cops surface style has changed some since lastAugust. Time was, youll hear, man used to go right in, very mean, pick maybe one kid out of the crowd hefigured was the troublemaker, try to bust him down in front of everybody. But now the people start yelling back,how they dont 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 beingcourteous to everybody, his behavior with a crowd will really depend as it always has on how many of his own hecan muster, and how fast. For his Mayor, Sam Yorty, is a great believer in the virtues of Overwhelming Force as asolution to racial difficulties. This approach has not gained much favor in Watts. In fact, the Mayor of Los Angelesappears to many Negroes to be the very incarnation of the little man: looking out for no one but himself, speakingalways 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 stateused to be represented, but has dropped out) for many projects scattered around the poorer parts of L.A., and seemsto be Sam Yortys 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 anaccusation, or answering oneall of it confirming the Watts Negroes already sad estimate of the little man. TheNegro attitude toward E.Y.O.A. is one of clear mistrust, though degrees of suspicion vary, form the housewifewanting only to be left in peace and quiet, who hoped that maybe The Man is lying less than usual this time, to theyoung, 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 helpyou, if youll only file your complaint.

They dont help you. This particular kid had been put down trying to get a job with one of the larger defensecontractors.

Maybe not before. But its different now.Now, the kid sighed, now. See people been hearing that now for a long time, and Im just tired of The Man

telling you, Now its 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 peoples 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 or 23), nobodysaw much point in voting.

Meantime, the outposts of the establishment drowse in the bright summery smog: secretaries chat the afternoonsplaintively away about machines that will not accept the cards they have punched for them; white volunteers sitfiling, 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 theproper 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. Gladly, they seem to besmiling themselves out of any meaningful communication with their poor. Besides a 19th-century faith that tried andtrue approachessound counseling, good intentions, perhaps even compassionwill set Watts straight, they arealso burdened with the personal attitudes they bring to work with them. Their reflexesespecially 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. Youshould have seen those hairdos of herspiled all the way up to here. And the screwy outfits shed come in with, youjust wouldnt believe. We had to take her aside and explain to her that employers just dont go for that sort of thing.That shed be up against a lot of very smooth-looking chicks, heels and stockings, conservative hair and clothes. Wefinally got her to come around.

The same goes for boys who like to wear Malcolm hats, or Afro haircuts. The idea the counselors push evidentlyis 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 reasonbusiness is slow around the various projects.

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

You are likely to hear from them wisdom on the order of: Life has a way of surprising us, simply as a functionof 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 povertywarriors must believe in this form of semimiracle, because their world and their scene cannot accept the possibilitythat 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 itthreatens property and status they cannot help cherishing.

They remember last Augusts riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from the realistic viewpoint of Watts, wasso abnormal? Mans got his foot on your neck, said one guy who was there, sooner or later you going to stopasking 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 objectiveto beat the Black and White police seemed a reasonableone, and was gained the minute The Man had to send troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardlya person in Watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it happenedunless he lost somebody.

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

Sure I did two stretches, a kid says, both times for fighting, but I didnt deserve either one. First time, the catwas bigger than I was; next time, it was two against one, and I was the one. But he was busted all the same, perhapsbecause Whitey, who knows how to get everything he wants, no longer has fisticuffs available as a technique, andsees no reason why everybody shouldnt go the Niceguy route. If you are thinking maybe there is a virility hang-upin 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 canto put the area under a siege of persuasion:to coax the Negro poor into taking on certain white values. Give them a little property, and they will be less tolerantof arson; get them to go in hock for a car or color TV, and theyll be more likely to hold down a steady job. Somesee it for what it isthis come-on, this false welcome, this attempt to transmogrify the reality of Watts into theunreality of Los Angeles. Some dont.

Watts is tough: has been able to resist the unreal. If there is any drift away from reality, it is by way ofmythmaking. As this summer warms them up, last Augusts 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 theaction, a scattering of The Mans 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 remarkableempathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights: everybody knowing what to do and when to doit without needing a word or a signal: You could go up to anybody, the cats could be in the middle of burning downa store or something, but theyd tell you, explain very calm, just what they were doing, what they were going to donext. And thats what theyd do; man, nobody had 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 aRenaissance of the Arts, a kind of festival in memory of Simon Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heartof Watts.

Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirelyfrom found objectsfound, symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the riotinghad left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honestrebirths.

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

Letter to the Editor

NYTBR, July 17, 1966, pp 24, 26To the Editor:In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name Genghis Cohen from a novel of his to

use in a novel of mine, The Crying of Lot 49. Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen fromthe name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believeshimself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely,perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.

Thomas Pynchon,New York City.

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

Just as Siegel got to the address Rachel had given him it started to rain again. All day rain clouds had hung lowand ragged-edged over Washington, ruining the view from the top of the Monument for the high-school kids on theirsenior trips, sending brief squalls which drove tourists squealing and cursing in to find shelter, dulling the delicatepink of the cherry blossoms which had just come out. The address was a small apartment building on a quiet streetnear Dupont Circle, and Siegel dove into the lobby, in out of the rain, clutching the fifth of scotch he was carrying asif it were a state secret. There had been timesduring the past year, in the Avenue Kleber or the Viale delle Termedi Caracallawhere there had been a brief case where the fifth was now, clutched under the same tweed-clad armagainst rain or a deadline or some bureaucratic necessity. And most of these times, especially if he were hung overfrom the night before, or if a girl fellow junior diplomats had sworn was a sure thing had turned out to be so muchmore than sure that in the end it had not been worth even the price of drinks, he would shake his head like a drunkwho is trying to stop seeing double, having become suddenly conscious of the weight of the briefcase and theinsignificance of its contents and the stupidity of what he was doing out here, away from Rachel, following anobscure 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 hadalways known that for a healera prophet actually, because if you cared about it at all you had to be boththere isno question of balance sheets or legal complexity, and the minute you become involved with anything like that youare something less; a doctor, or a fortune-teller. When he was thirteen, a little less than a month after his barmitzvah, his cousin Miriam had died of cancer and perhaps it was thensitting shivah on an orange crate in adarkened 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 Miriams husband cursing Zeit the doctor, and the money wasted on the operations, andthe whole AMA, crying unashamed in this dim hot room with the drawn shades; and it had so disquieted youngSiegel that when his brother Mike had gone away to Yale to take pre-med he had been afraid that something wouldgo wrong and that Mike whom he loved would turn out to be only a doctor, like Zeit, and be cursed someday too bya distraught husband in rent garments, in a twilit bedroom. He would stand, therefore, out in some street, notmoving, hanging on to the briefcase and thinking about Rachel who was 4 10 in her stocking feet, whose neck waspale and sleek, a Modigliani neck, whose eyes were not mirror images but both slanted the same way, dark brownalmost to fathomlessness, and after awhile he would drift up to the surface again and be annoyed with himself forworrying about these thi ngs 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 elanalmost roguery of theplayboy element in the Commission which went well with his British staff officer appearanceeven theintradepartmental scheming and counterscheming which went on in jazz cellars at two in the morning, in pensionsover brandy and soda, were, after all, exciting. It was only when he forgot to take vitamin B pills the night before toward off a hangover that these funky periods would come at all. Most of the time the brighteyed and busy tailedSiegel would assert himself and then he would look on the funky days as only brief aberrations. Because when youcame down to it it was fun to manoeuvre. In the army he had lived by a golden rule of Screw the Sergeant before HeScreweth Thee; later in college he had forged meal tickets, instigated protest riots and panty raids, manipulatedcampus opinion through the school newspaper; and this was the part of him inherited from a mother who at the ageof 19 had struggled with her soul one night in a railroad flat somewhere in Hells Kitchen and, half-drunk on bootlegbeer, had ended up refuting Aquinas and quitting the Roman church; who would grin fondly at her husband andrefer to him as an innocent slob who never had a chance against her female cunning, and advise Seigel never tomarrv a schickseh but to find himself some nice quiet Jewish girl because at least there you were given a runningstart. For this his roommate at college sophomore year had called him Stephen and taunted him mercilessly aboutthe still small Jesuit voice which kept him from being either kicked around or conscious of guilt or simplyineffective like so many of the other Jewish boys on campus seemed to Grossmann to be. Also, Grossmann, Siegelhad retorted, it perhaps saves me from being a schmuck like you. Grossmann would laugh and stick his nose backin 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 mainlybecause he was unable to give it a name or a face, unless they were Rachels and this he doubted. With the bottleunder his arm he climbed up two flights of stairs, the few raindrops which had caught him glistening in the shaggytangle of his tweed coat. He hoped she had said sevenishhe was pretty sure but it would be awkward if he arrivedtoo early. He rang the buzzer in front of a door that said 3F and waited. It seemed to be quiet inside and he was justbeginning to wonder if maybe she hadnt 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 athim, an empty room behind him, and Siegel, annoyed, realized he had goofed and that 30 years was a long time andthat this might be a first indication of seni lity. They faced each other like slightly flawed mirror imagesdifferentpatterns of tweed, scotch bottle and pig foetus but no discrepancy in height with Siegel experiencing a mixedfeeling of discomfort and awe, and the word Doppelganger had just floated into his mind when the others eyebrowsshot up into twin parabolas and he stuck out his free hand and said, Youre early but come in. Im David Lupescu.

Siegel shook hands, muttering his own name and the spell broke; he looked at t