Notes on Robert Anton Wilson and Pynchon's Vineland

The perennial enigma of influence or coincidence?

As I write, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film based on Vineland, One Battle After Another, and Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket, are rolling out to the public. Many of us are amazed Anderson tackled Pynchon once again; almost all of us are in wonderment that Pynchon still has his marbles, mightily, at 88.

(This is the cover of my edition.)

A long, long, looong discussion has gone on in disparate, heterogenous quarters around who Pynchon was influenced by. In his Introduction to Slow Learner (1984), we got a precious, rare glimpse of Pynchon discussing his own writing. He mentions “The Waste Land,” A Farewell To Arms, “Howl,” Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, “Kerouac and the Beat writers,” Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, Philip Roth, Mailer, Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages, science, jazz and rock music, Playboy, The Human Use of Human Beings, The Education of Henry Adams, Baedecker Guides, Machiavelli, Edmund Wilson’s To Finland Station, Graham Greene, Spike Jones, and, intriguingly (to me, at least), Pynchon mentions growing up reading spy novels that were in his local library: John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps (“but he wrote half a dozen more just as good or better”), and names spy novelists E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen MacInnes, and Geoffrey Household. All these spy novelists were stocked in rooms in remote English countryside areas where American OSS librarians, professors, and other bookish types were being hot-housed and trained as spies (including how to kill with their bare hands) in the war against the Nazis. It seems that modern espionage as a craft was largely invented by novelists, and these same British novelists and their books are mentioned in Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, by Elyse Graham (2024, see pp.40-45.)

It looks like young Pynchon had inadvertently schooled himself in OSS-MI6 espionage tactics at a young age.

Of course, for every one of the names and titles Pynchon cites in his Intro to Slow Learner, there must be 50 or 200 more books, as anyone who’s read his oeuvre and at least some of the scholarly swirl around him, can surely attest. His erudition staggers us.

He has never mentioned Robert Anton Wilson. (I have not been to the Huntington Library to read Pynchon’s archives, and it seems they would have nothing to do with me, as I have have no PhD after my name.)

Recently, a post at my friend Tom Jackson’s blog brought the Pynchon-RAW matter back up, so I decided to weigh in. I have no “proof” that Pynchon has been influenced by RAW, but spectral links will continue to arise, and maybe one day someone will dig up something definitive. I’m not about to try to bother Pynchon on this: word is: he doesn’t dig that sorta thing. To put it mildly…

Six weeks or so ago I read Erik Davis’s history of blotter LSD, and reviewed it in these spaces. There was some dispelling of a rumor that almost all acid that appeared after it became illegal in 1966 was diluted with speed, strychnine, and worse. I took a bunch of hits of blotter in the years around 1977-1981 and thought it seemed fine. I don’t know how “pure” it was. Davis writes that the quality of LSD pills began to degrade in the late 1960s, as acid had become a lifestyle symbol that gradually became detached from the idealism, ritual, sacrament of the 1960s and the promise of political change. There was a profit motive and concomitant impurities and additives. Davis quotes from Lee and Shlain’s epochal Acid Dreams about this aspect (p.117 of Acid Dreams), and I noted a possible connection to Pynchon’s thesis question of Vineland: what happened to the promise of the Sixties? How did it become Nixon, Reagan, then Bush? (See Davis, Blotter:The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, pp.24-25)

(This book contains the most spirited defense of Timothy Leary that you will ever read.)

This also reminded me of a story RAW told: he was reading his poetry at the U. of Wisconsin in 1970, and someone gave him a hit of acid, and he had a wickedly bad trip (“a monstro-bummer”), from which he learned a lot. He wonders why he trusted just anyone in this situation, but he had been growing frustrated at his very well-paid job writing the Playboy Forum and, at the end of his trip he discussed with his wife Arlen quitting Playboy and writing full-time as a freelancer. She supported him. Bathtub acid made by C-student chemists with a profit motive may have influenced RAW to go freelance. Maybe. (see The Starseed Signals, pp.119-120)

Recently, while doing research around Paul Krassner (who published RAW in 1959), I found out his wife Nancy Cain was a founding member of Videofreex, a collective that used Sony Portpaks for countercultural video projects, 1969-1978. Characters who seem to have made themselves psychotic from TV watching in Vineland are called Tubefreex in at least one passage. Frenesi Gates, who’s at the epicenter of the question for Pynchon in Vineland: what happened to the idealism? was part of a guerrilla group of film students with counterculture aims, called 24fps in the novel.

This is merely RAW adjacent-adjacent and proves nothing, but I found it interesting.

After Vineland came out (1990), 17 years since his last novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, RAW wrote a letter to his dear friend Robert Shea’s anarchist ‘zine, No Governor, July 1990. Apparently Arthur Hlavaty had asked RAW what John Barth thinks of his novels, and RAW doesn’t know the answer, but says he enjoys “Barth’s books enormously. I think his Sabbatical covers the malaise of our time better than professional spy-thriller writers like Ambler and Le Carre have ever done.” The letter is interesting throughout, but more to our point, RAW writes this:

Sometimes, I find it astounding that we have lived under fascism for 40 years whole continuing the rituals of democracy — and that hardly any “major” novelist has tried to grapple with this issue. I salute Barth for his subtlety and the eerie atmosphere he creates in describing our increasingly Machiavellian world. To be brutally frank and eschew false modesty, I think only Mailer, Pynchon and myself have captured the terror of the situation as well as Barth did in that book. (see p.7 of this PDF of No Governor.)

Prominent Pynchon scholar Steven Weisenburger, in an essay on Pynchon and the 20th century, writes mostly about Vineland and fascism. Pynchon originally thought computers and Internet would be liberatory, circa 1984 and this includes Pynchon’s Foreword to Orwell’s novel 1984 and his essay, “Is It Ok To Be a Luddite?” in October, 1984, which ran in the New York Times. Weisenburger traces Pynchon’s increasingly jaundiced take on Internet, and by 2003 Pynchon acknowledges the acceleration of chip technology can lead to fascism, long dormant, and the acceptance of authoritarianism by 2013’s Bleeding Edge; Vineland is in the middle of this timeline. (see Weisenburger’s essay in Thomas Pynchon: In Context, ed. by Inger Dalsgaard, pp.89-95.)

Note: RAW in 1990 has the US as “fascist” by 1950. He basically had always linked it to the National Security Act of 1947, which, among many other things, provided for the CIA and its for-all-intents-and-purposes, unlimited budget. Pynchon doesn’t give interviews, much less say outright when we lost democracy, but for scholars like Weisenburger it seems to have been between 1984 and 2013, but Vineland in 1990 has a We Lost It vibe for me.

Neither Pynchon nor Wilson ever gave up hope, though. And they both retained a cosmic, goofy sense of humor.

RAW and Shea read The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) while they were writing Illuminatus!(1975, but mostly finished by 1971); RAW has been asked at least three times about any links to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). In an interview with KPFA radio in Berkeley, RAW in 1983, he was asked about this, and said that he and Shea had basically finished Illuminatus! and hadn’t read Pynchon. They both read Crying of Lot 49 and added a little bit in editing. RAW then read V. He and Shea were done with their novel and then read Gravity’s Rainbow and were astonished: “Partly coincidence and partly Pynchon seems to have turned on at the same time we did to this particular mythology.” (RAW’s interview inside a car in a rainstorm, in the hills of Santa Cruz? with KPFA, 1983: around 32 minutes.)

From a lost (now found) Playboy interview with Timothy Leary about his time in the California Archipelago:

RAW: Did you really go under the code name “Charlie Thrush”?

Leary: I was sent to Sandstone Federal Prison by a police agent, who, against my wishes, had be booked under this weird name. It was a set-up. This agent, a flamboyant kook of the Liddy school, had previously threatened that if I displeased him in any way he’d put me in the mainline of a prison with the reputation of a snitch. That virtually amounted to a threat that he’d set me up to be murdered. He also leaked rumors to the media claiming that my life was in danger from the Weather Underground. This flake, who has since retired from law enforcement, would have loved Vetter’s invention about my walking around Sandstone with a black bag over my head. I have not now nor have I ever had a black bag over my head, folks. (originally nixed by Playboy, but found and printed in 2020 by Hilaritas Press in RAW’s Starseed Signals, pp. 391-391

This “police agent” sure sounds like he was made from the same mold as Brock Vond in Vineland, eh?

None of this is a slam-dunk. Not even close. It’s merely interesting to me. And suggestive.

Pynchon and RAW, like many novelists, put their friends in their novels. How do we know this (or much of anything?) about Pynchon? At times, people who knew him have said some things to reporters. EX: Andrew Gordon, who wrote “Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir” spent a night with TP in Berkeley in June, 1967. He said Pynchon did this. So did TP’s friend from Cornell, Jules Siegel. RAW used Neil Rest and Franklin Rosemont, anarchist-surrealist friends from his Chicago days, for “Simon Moon,” who haunts every novel RAW wrote. (the Gordon essay is collected in Vineland Papers, pp. 167-178; see Jules Siegel, Lineland: Mortality and Mercy on the Internet’s Pynchon-L@Waste.Org, in which he drops hints of TP’s friends in his books. See p.172, for example, where Siegel links a character in Gravity’s Rainbow to Pynchon’s and Siegel’s lover, Christine Wexler. See Viking ed. of GR, p.36)

This seems unremarkable: Maybe most novelists do this sort of thing?

Pynchon was born in 1937 to a fairly prominent family, and grew up in Oyster Bay; Wilson was born into poverty to a family struggling during the Great Depression in 1932, and grew up in Gerritsen Beach, 37 miles from Oyster Bay. Both men studied Engineering, then turned to Literature. Both lived in northern California, in or near the Emerald Triangle. Both seem to be prodigious cannabis users. On and on. Both seem to have stumbled upon alternative postal services as an idea around the same time, on and on.

Both were raised Catholic. Wilson dropped his Catholicism by age 14, if not earlier. Pynchon might still call himself a Catholic, but we don’t know. If he does, he’s some sort of Liberation Theologist. Probably. Actually, both guys have a fascinating and long background with Religion. RAW never stopped writing about religion and gnosticism. Of particular note, see “A RAW Rant On Organized Religion,” which was originally a letter to Edward Babinski. This looks like the work of a post-God Theologian, but it’s from 1986 and RAW is flexing his Swiftian chops and setting off the sorts of “dialectical sparks” his readers know so well from books like The New Inquisition and Natural Law.

As for Pynchon, there is much non-Catholic theology sprinkled through all his books, including kabbalah, Buddhism, and just about any religion you can think of. In the Summer of 2023, Alan Jacobs put forth a long argument that Pynchon is America’s Theologian.

In Vineland, Frenesi Gates’s family seems similar to Simon Moon’s: Wobblies, anarchism, strikes, etc. Frenesi’s parents worked in Hollywood and had to deal with HUAC and anticommunist hysteria. Scholar Katherine Hayles finds an “extensive parallel” to the “snitch culture” we see in Vineland (and the death of 1960s idealism) and Don DeLillo’s encyclopedic novel, Libra. “It may not be too strong to say that Libra is an intertext for Vineland, alluded to throughout but never mentioned directly.” Libra: 1988; Vineland: 1990. (Hayles quote found for footnote #2 in The Vineland Papers, p.29)

Hayles has always seemed like a careful scholar to me. To the extent she’s accurate here, Pynchon seems to have stayed quiet about his reading and intertextual use of the earlier Libra. Hell: quiet about almost everything. But you already knew that. Could there be many other texts that work in similar ways in Pynchon’s novels?

I’ll end this speculation with a final bit. If the big idea behind Vineland amounts to something like: how did the golden moment of optimism for change in the US 1960s devolve into Nixon/Reagan/Bush 41? At what point did Pynchon recognize that All That was over?

There’s one writer who seemed to know by 1974, possibly 1973, and was writing about the halcyon days as already bye-bye. His name: Robert Anton Wilson. Videlicet:

The Hedonic Revolution of the 1960s was surprisingly benign in most of its manifestations. Recall girls putting flowers in M.P’s rifles at the Pentagon demonstration, the mass-mind anarchist harmony of Woodstock, the generosity behind the Civil Rights and peace movements. The reaction of the authorities was one of such violent hatred and persecution that what is left of the counter-culture exists in a kind of embittered shell-shock today. The very mechanism of authoritarian society — the restriction of consciousness to the reward-punishment circuits — was threatened, we can now see, and it almost appears that Dr. Leary’s persecutors, like Dr. Reich’s, will not be satisfied until the heretic is not only caged but killed. - p.111, The Starseed Signals (1974)¹.

To be sure, there were “it’s over” writings about the horrible 1960s from the Right as early as 1974. But there were few from the countercultural Left, or anarchists, that early, and if there was anyone writing like that, there was no one whose overall outlook was so similar to Thomas Pynchon’s. Or so I have argued here.

1. The Starseed Signals was a lost book, found by Dr. Robert Newport in Discordian co-founder Greg Hill’s archives, heading for a dumpster. It was rescued by Newport and handed over to Adam Gorightly, who contacted the Wilson Family Trust, but the story is more complex than this and is told by Richard Rasa in the “Publisher’s Note” of Starseed, pp.xi-xiv.