/lit/ - Literature

What interests us is what we don’t see:
the unapparent, the work that goes into a thing
before it is broken. Consider William Gaddis
crouched into the shape of a penguin,
likely drunk in the late gray afternoon,
a draft of Carpenter’s Gothic on his desk at home.
Did he speak of Muriel as he ate, who
in some other Village bar contemplated
the first years of a love she’d come to think of
as “a mere decade alcoholic haze?”
What letters did he carry in his jacket,
& from whom? & what of Pynchon’s absence,
the unseen man who’d been accused
of not existing? “Somewhere between coasts,”
he’d written, if indeed it’d been his hand
that signed the note. At dinner someone
must’ve glanced across their meal at Gaddis
& wondered, Could he’ve pulled it off?
In the photograph, Pilar & Shelly lean easily
against the wall as their husbands shift
weight from one heel to the other,
positioning themselves to appear comfortable
in the face of eternity. Consider them:
the Gasses, Hawks & Coovers, Barthelmes
& Abishes, Gaddis & Vonnegut, standing
naked & old in front of their closets,
selecting this white shirt, those gray slacks,
the long black skirt draped like a shadow
among its mates; how arbitrary is history.
Just months before, Steven Moore
suggested that Pynchon was “a pseudonym
for Gaddis!” He’d called it a rumor,
but still he’d said it. & then in April,
Wanda Tinasky’d claimed, though she herself
had been a prank, “the novels of William Gaddis
& Thomas Pynchon were written
by the same person.” Years later the typewriter
on which the Tinasky letters were written
would be discovered in the barn of a failed writer
who’d killed his wife & then himself,
but for now these letters added another layer
to the myth of Pynchon’s living ghost.
How many times had even Barthelme seen
his friend in the flesh, or was this famous dinner
organized to draw out the game, the man,
& catch him in a snapshot for the world?
Maybe Barthelme, too, had begun to pull the string--
To what extent can any of us know our friends?
Beside Vonnegut, who stands behind the rest
as though on a horse, a point of light exerts itself
from between a tuft of leaves. It is 1983
& Postmodernism has been supplanted
by Minimalism. How appropriate then,
that this single point of light be representative
of the missing man, the shadow, the private eye.