‘How do you know this?’ Anthony Burgess and Thomas Pynchon
To celebrate Thomas Pynchon's 87th birthday, we explore Anthony Burgess’s writing about the renowned American novelist.
At first glance, Anthony Burgess and Thomas Pynchon might appear to be very different writers. Pynchon is known for his dense, chaotic comedies that satirise the tenets of American society, from stories of the founding fathers to the military-industrial complex. Burgess, on the other hand, often makes his novels out of literature, music, history and theology. Despite these differences, there are numerous connections between the two.
Burgess first encountered Pynchon’s work in the 1960s, and was impressed by his first novel, V, describing it in The Novel Now as a ‘remarkable epic fantasy’ which demonstrates many of the main themes of the contemporary novel. He wrote: ‘The novelists we admire most have little optimism of Walt Whitman in them; the America they observe is not an expansive land of opportunity, liberalism, liberty.’ This is also true of Pynchon's other novels. The America he presents is a paranoid and confusing place, riven with secret societies, or controlled by government agencies, corporations and wealthy elites. Pynchon’s protagonists are often everyman-figures, thrust into conspiracies made bewilderingly complex by a surfeit of information.
V also impressed Burgess as a novel in which the narrative escapes the confines of America and engages with the wider world, including places such as Egypt, South-West Africa, Italy and Malta. Some of these feature as locations in Burgess’s writing: Malta, in particular, is one of the settings of Earthly Powers, and it also forms the basis of a fictional Caribbean island called ‘Castita’ in MF — a novel in which the influence of Pynchon is in the foreground.
Burgess lived in Malta from 1968 until 1974, and he suffered under the strict censorship laws. When his library arrived on the island, it was examined by the office of the Postmaster General, who confiscated 47 of his books on the grounds of obscenity. Among them was a copy of Pynchon’s V, which is partly set in Valletta, and depicts Strait Street (popularly known as ‘The Gut’) as a haven for drunken sailors and whores. Burgess successfully appealed against the confiscation of his copy of V, and a letter from the Postmaster General informed him that the novel had been released ‘for your own personal use.’ The rest of the confiscated books, including literary fiction by Angela Carter, Kingsley Amis and D.H. Lawrence, were driven under police escort to the hospital and incinerated.
Burgess continued to follow Pynchon’s career, and the library of his books at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester includes further copies of V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Vineland (1990): in short, all the novels Pynchon released during Burgess’s lifetime. This enthusiasm for Pynchon was shared with his second wife, Liana, who translated Pynchon’s first two novels into Italian.
Burgess met Liana in 1963, while she was translating V. By the time they were married in 1968, Liana had completed her translation of The Crying of Lot 49. The books that Liana used to undertake this work are in the Foundation’s archive, and they include her hand-written annotations. The Crying of Lot 49, a first edition with embossed muted post horns on the front cover, includes a typewritten sheet with Liana’s translations of songs from the novel. Her draft version of Pynchon’s song ‘Hymn’ (sung to ‘the tune of Cornell’s alma mater’) reveals the care she took to preserve the complexity of the original:
High above the LA freeways,
And the traffic’s whine,
Stands the well-known Galactronics
Branch of the Yoyodyne.
To the end, we swear undying
Loyalty to you,
Pink pavilions bravely shining,
Palm trees tall and true.
Alta sulle autostrade di Los Angeles
e il lamneto del traffico
s’erige la ben nosta Galactronis
Filiale della Yoyodyne.
Per sempre vi giuriamo fedeltà,
o padiglioni rossi chiari e belli,
palme alte e schiette.
Burgess went on to include Gravity’s Rainbow in Ninety-Nine Novels, his 1984 survey of the best novels in English since 1939. Pynchon’s novel, about the hunt for a Nazi rocket more deadly than the fearsome V2, is a wild, exhausting and fragmented work. At its heart is Tyrone Slothrop, a US Army Lieutenant who has undergone Pavlovian conditioning to make him aroused in the presence of ‘Imipolex G’, the fictional plastic used in the manufacture of the rocket. Slothrop is sent to ‘The Zone’, a Wonderland version of Germany in the months following VE Day, to search for the rocket. Here, after meeting strange characters and indulging in intimate relationships (possibly inspired by his Pavlovian conditioning), he gradually comes apart.
It is difficult to summarise the complicated nature of Gravity’s Rainbow, and Burgess struggles to do so. While he calls the novel ‘the war book to end them all’, he overlooks the complexity of the novel’s plot and structure. He also states that ‘the subject of the novel is clearly the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) of the Second World War.’ Although much of the action of the first part of the novel is set in wartime London, this is a small part of a sprawling and often bewildering book which romps across Europe with interludes in America, and contains around 400 characters, including African-German Troops, actresses, witches and Russian spies. Burgess’s review focuses on a relatively minor character called Pudding, who appears in the first section but vanishes for the majority of the novel, only to appear again, very briefly and in spectral form, in the final pages.
Burgess’s copy of Gravity’s Rainbow helps to explain the lopsided focus of his review. He was reading the first American edition of the novel, published by Viking, but a binding error in his copy rendered the novel incomplete. In 1975, Burgess wrote an article for the New York Times about long books, and he confessed that his reading was limited: ‘I tried to read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, hampered by a freak of binding which gave me pp. 1-200 twice but missed out on pp. 200-400.’
A single undated letter from Pynchon to Burgess survives in the Burgess Foundation’s archive. Pynchon responds to Burgess’s claim that, in V, ‘Pynchon gives us Malta without having been there’ by asking ‘How do you know this?’ It is likely that he was responding to an interview with Burgess published in the Paris Review in 1973, in which Burgess had said: ‘Probably (as Thomas Pynchon never went to Valletta or Kafka to America) it’s best to imagine your own foreign country.’ Intriguingly, Pynchon’s letter neither confirms nor denies that he had visited the city.
With the Thomas Pynchon papers having recently been acquired by the Huntington Library in California, further connections between these two major writers may be revealed when the collection is opened to researchers.
Find out more
We discuss Gravity’s Rainbow on our Ninety-Nine Novels podcast, with special guest Simon Malpas: