Authors: Thomas Pynchon
I don't mean to make light of this. Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in '59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it — occasionally, as here, offset to a more colorful time and place.
So, if only for its feeble good intentions, I am less annoyed with "Under the Rose" than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear. Thanks to the relentless efforts of the Public Broadcast System, everyone these days is hyperfamiliar with the furthest nuances of English as spoken by the English. In my day I had to depend on movies and radio, which as sources then were not 100% reliable. Hence all the pip-pip and jolly-ho business, which to a modern reader comes across as stereotyped and inauthentic. Readers may also feel shorted because of how, more than anyone, the masterful John le Carré has upped the ante for the whole genre. Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here. Most of it, happily, is chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated sucker — it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude.
Attentive fans of Shakespeare will notice that the name Porpentine is lifted from Hamlet, I, v. It is an early form of "porcupine." The name Moldweorp is Old Teutonic for "mole" — the animal, not the infiltrator. I thought it would be a cute idea for people named after two amiable fuzzy critters to be duking it out over the fate of Europe.
Less conscientiously, there is also an echo of the name of the reluctant spy character Wormold, in Graham Greene's
Our Man in Havana
, then recently published.
Another influence in "Under the Rose," too recent for me then to abuse to the extent I have done since, is Surrealism. I had been taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention. Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, "One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful."
I was to get even worse at this, as is evident from the junkshop or randomly assembled quality to many of the scenes in "The Secret Integration." But because I like more than dislike this story, I sometimes will blame it more on the cluttered way that items accumulate in the rooms of memory. Like "Low-lands " this is a hometown story, one of the few times I tried to write directly out of the landscape and the experiences I grew up with. I mistakenly thought of Long Island then as a giant and featureless sandbar, without history, someplace to get away from but not to feel very connected to. It is interesting that in both stories I imposed on what I felt to be blank space a set of more complicated topographies.
Perhaps I felt this was a way to make the place a little more exotic.
Not only did I complicate this Long Island space, but I also drew a line around the whole neighborhood, picked it up and shifted it all to the Berkshires, where I still have never been. The old Baedeker trick again. This time I found the details I needed in the regional guide to the Berkshires put out in the 1930's by the Federal Writers Project of the WPA. This is one of an excellent set of state and regional volumes, which may still be available in libraries. They make instructive and pleasurable reading. In fact, there is some stuff in the Berkshire book so good, so rich in detail and deep in feeling, that even I was ashamed to steal from it.
Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me. Displacing my personal experience off into other environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.
Then again, maybe another factor in it was just claustrophobia. I wasn't the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to step out. It may have gone back to the sense of academic enclosure we felt which had lent such appeal to the American picaresque life the Beat writers seemed to us to be leading. Apprentices in all fields and times are restless to be journeymen.
By the time I wrote "The Secret Integration" I was embarked on this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality. I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about. These towns and Greyhound voices and fleabag hotels have found their way into this story, and I am pretty content with how it holds up.
Not that it's perfect, understand, not by a long shot. The kids, for example, seem in some areas to be not very bright, certainly not a patch on the kids of the '8o's. I could also with an easy mind see axed much of the story's less responsible Surrealism. Still, there are parts of it I can't believe I wrote. Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it. As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was "The Crying of Lot 49," which was marketed as a "novel," and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then.
Most likely, much of my feeling for this last story can be traced to ordinary nostalgia for this time in my life, for the writer who seemed then to be emerging, with his bad habits, dumb theories and occasional moments of productive silence in which he may have begun to get a glimpse of how it was done. What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock'n'roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.
OUTSIDE, the company area broiled slowly under the sun. The air was soggy, hanging motionless. The sun glared yellow off the sand around the barracks that housed the company's radio section. There was no one inside except an orderly leaning drowsy against the wall, smoking, and an inert figure in fatigues lying on a bunk, reading a paperback. The orderly yawned and spat outside into the hot sand and the figure in the bunk, whose name was Levine, turned a page and rearranged the pillow under his head. Somewhere a big mosquito was buzzing against a windowpane and somewhere else there was a radio tuned to a rock'n'roll station in Leesville, and outside jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs were scurrying or rumbling back and forth constantly. This was Fort Roach, Louisiana, back around mid-July of '57. Nathan "Lardass" Levine, specialist 3/C, has been assigned to the same battalion, the same company, the same bunk, for 13 months now, going on 14. Roach being the kind of installation it was, this circumstance might have driven more ordinary men to the point of suicide or at least insanity; indeed, according to certain more or less suppressed army statistics, it often did. Levine, however, was not quite ordinary. He was one of the few men outside of those bucking for section eight who actually liked Ft. Roach. He had quietly and unobtrusively gone native: the angular edges of his Bronx accent had been dulled and softened into a modified drawl; he had found that white lightning, usually straight or else mixed with whatever happened to be coming out of the company Coke machine at the time, was in its way as agreeable as scotch on the rocks; he now listened to hillbilly groups in bars in the neighboring towns as raptly as he had once dug Lester Young or Gerry Mulligan at Birdland. He was well over six feet and loose-jointed, but what certain coeds at City had once described as a plowboy physique, rawboned and taut-muscled, had run to flab after three years of avoiding work details. He had a fine beer belly now, in which he maintained a certain pride, and a large behind which he was not so proud of, which had earned him his nickname.
The orderly flipped the butt of his cigarette out into the sand and said, "Look who's coming."
"If it's the general tell him I'm sleeping," Levine said. He lit a cigarette and yawned.
"No," the orderly said, "it's Twinkletoes." He leaned back on the wall again and closed his eyes. There was a patter of little feet on the porch and a Virginia accent said, "Capucci, you worthless bastard." The orderly opened his eyes. "Get laid," he said.
Twinkletoes Dugan the company clerk came in and approached Levine with an ill-natured pout on his lips. "Who's got that whore book after you, Levine," he said. Levine, who was using his helmet liner for an ashtray, flicked his cigarette. "The GI can I reckon," he smiled. The pout became a thin line. "Lieutenant wants to see you," Dugan said, "so get off your lard ass and over to the orderly room." Levine turned another page and started reading. "Hey," the company clerk said. Levine smiled vaguely. Dugan was a draftee. He had busted out of the University of Virginia after two years and like many company clerks had a sadistic streak in him. There were a lot of other nice things about Dugan. He held as self-evident truths, for example, that the NAACP was a Communist cabal dedicated to 100% intermarriage of the White and Negro races, and that the Virginia gentleman was in reality the
Übermensch
, come at last, prevented from fulfilling his high destiny only by the malevolent plotting of the New York Jews. Mainly on account of the latter he and Levine did not get along too well.
"Lieutenant wants to see me," Levine said. "Don't tell me you got my leave papers already. Hell—" he looked at his watch — "it's only a little after n. Congratulations, Dugan. 5½ hours ahead of time." He shook his head admiringly. Dugan smirked. "I don't think it's about your leave. In fact you might have to wait awhile on that."
Levine put the book down and stubbed out his cigarette in the helmet liner. He looked up at the ceiling. "Jesus Christ," he said quietly, "what did I do now. Don't tell me they're going to put me in jail. Not again."
"It's only been a couple weeks since your last summary, hasn't it," the clerk said. Levine knew this gambit. He figured Dugan had given up a long time ago trying to make him sweat. But guys like that, he supposed, never gave up. "So get out of your bunk, is all I'm saying," Dugan said. He pronounced "out" like "oot." This irritated Levine. He picked up the book and began to read. "All right," he said, flipping a salute. "Go back, white man." Dugan glared at him and finally went away. Apparently he tripped over the orderly's M1 on his way out, because there was a crash and Capucci said, "God, you're an uncoordinated bastard." Levine closed the book, folded it in half, rolled over and stuck it in his back pocket. He lay there for a minute or so watching a cockroach following some private maze across the floor. Finally he yawned and dragged himself off the bunk, dumped the butts and ashes out of the helmet liner onto the floor and put the helmet liner on his head, canted down over his eyes. He squeezed the orderly's head as he went out. "What's shaking?" Capucci said. Levine squinted into the bright heavy air outside. "Oh, the Pentagon, again," he said. "Just won't let me alone."
He shuffled through the sand, feeling the sun already through the helmet liner, toward the building where the orderly room was located. Around the building was a fringe of green, the only grass in the company area. Ahead and to his left he could see the line for early chow already forming by the mess hall. He turned onto the gravel path leading to the orderly room. He expected Dugan to be outside or at least at a window looking for him but when he entered the orderly room the clerk was at his desk in back, typing busily. Levine leaned on the railing in front of the first sergeant's desk. "Hi, Sarge," he said. The first sergeant looked up. "Where the hell were you," he said, "reading a whore book?" "That's right, Sarge," Levine said, "I was studying for sergeant." The first sergeant scowled. "Lieutenant wants to see you," he said.
"So I heard," Levine said. "Where is he?" "In the day room," the first sergeant said, "with the rest of the men."
"What's going on, Sarge, anything special?" "Go on in and find out," the sergeant said peevishly. "Jesus Christ, Levine, you ought to know by now, nobody ever tells me anything."