By Stuart Mitchner
Looking out the window first thing Monday morning, there it is, as predicted; you saw it falling at midnight and later when you went to bed, but not this, nothing like this. While your wife is thinking Dr. Zhivago, you’re thinking Dr. Seuss. Because what looked like poetry a week ago looks whitely, massively, incoherently goofy this morning.
Meanwhile, I’m almost halfway through a novel I gave up on 30 years ago when it was brand-new and so beautifully packaged that I never felt comfortable reading it. Thankfully, the volume I have at hand seems like an old friend even though it’s the same text, same size, same pagination (773!) and type, the main difference being that it’s bound between soft, smooth, supple covers that give a sense of flow to the reading experience.
At this moment, the big book is spread out face-down on my desk open to page 284, wherein George and Martha Washington are singing a duet on the “Transit of Venus,” the cosmic event haunting the first two hundred pages of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Holt Picador 1997). When George forgets the words (“She’s the something something…”), Martha supplies “Goddess of Love — Shining above.”
An Irresistible Convergence
When I riffed on love and Valentine’s Day last week, I had yet to read an earlier passage in which the 18th-century astronomer Charles Mason peers through a seven-foot telescope and discovers the face of his wife, dead two years past (“tis a Face though yet veil’d, ‘twill be hers, I swear it. I stare till my eyes ache.”). It’s the astronomer’s “midnight Duty to go in, and open the shutters of the roof, and fearfully recline, to search for her, find her, note her exact location, measure her. On his back. And when she was so close that there could remain no further doubt, how did he hold himself from crying out after the stricken bright Prow of her Face and Hair, out there so alone in the Midnight, unshelter’d, on display to ev’ry ‘Gazer with a Lens at his disposal? He could not look too directly . . . as if he fear’d a direct stare from the eyes he fancied he saw, he could but take fugitive Squints, long enough to measure the great Flow of Hair gone white, his thumb and forefingers busy with the Micrometer, no time to linger upon Sentiments, not beneath this long Hovering, this undesired Recognition.”
“Get On With It”
The love of a woman. That simple. My moment of Desired Recognition as a reader — the moment I knew there would be no turning back from on this decades-long-delayed reading of Mason & Dixon — came down to that Sentiment. When Mason tells Dixon his dead wife Rebekah has come to him marks a crucial moment in the developing relationship between the title characters: “Damme, she was here . . . Was it not her soul? What, then? … If an actor or a painted portrait may represent a Personage no longer alive, might there not be other Modalities of Appearance, as well?… No, nothing of Reason in it….Oh, Dixon, I am afraid.” At this, Dixon places his hand on Mason’s shoulder, and when Mason asks “what shall I do?” he is told “Why, get on with it!”
Moments as human and real as this one stand out in Pynchon, certainly given my previous failed reading of this novel, which Harold Bloom calls his “late masterpiece.” Told to get on with it, Mason says, “Easy advice to give,” to which Dixon remarks, “Even easier to take, Friend — for there’s no alternative.” Emboldened, Mason comes on strong: “Do you believe what you’re saying? How has Getting On With It been working out for you, then? You expect me to live in the eternal Present, like some Hindoo? Wonderful. — my own gooroo, ever here with a sage answer. Tell me, then, — what if I can’t just lightly let her drop? What if I want to spend, even squander, my precious time trying to make it up to her? Somehow? Do you think anyone can simply let all that go?”
The chapter ends with Dixon beaming sympathetically, telling Mason to “break thy Silence, and tell me somewhat of her.” The chapter that follows was the book-bonding turning point for this reader, to go from the wind-haunted island of St. Helena to England and the annual cheese-rolling at a parish church “a few miles the other side of Stroud.” And it’s not just the cheese that’s “rolling,” it’s the author as he takes on the “much-rumored Prodigy, styled ‘The Octuple Gloucester,’ — a giant Cheese, the largest known to the region, perhaps in the Kingdom.”
Pynchon’s Prose Poetry
In the 2009 AV Club interview during which Harold Bloom refers to Pynchon’s “late masterpiece,” he adds “If I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century … it would probably be Mason & Dixon… Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected.”
All too true, it’s due to those Unexpected Marvels that I’m writing at the halfway point, page 340, rather than waiting until I finish, sometime this side of July 4, 2026. For all the fun to be had on Planet Pynchon, the ultimate marvels for me have been the prose cadenzas he performs when he’s on a roll. At this point in my reading, the idea of performance brought to mind Richard Poirier (1925-2009), the author of The Performing Self (1971) and landmark reviews of V and Gravity’s Rainbow.
Pynchon needs five pages to get the “Quincentenariduodecuple Gloucester” to the church on time. Nearly “four tons in weight when green, and even after shrinkage towering ten feet high,” when the Cheese was “at last carefully rolled into publick View,” a “small body of Light Cavalry” was on hand. Hauled in “a gigantic Cotswold Waggon, painted brick red and sky blue,” like “some dangerous large animal, it was secured with stout Cables in an erect position.” Cheering crowds followed its progress to the church (“Girls blew kisses”), and of course Pynchon gave the scene a song (“Here’s to the great Octuple boys! the monster Cheese of Fame”).
Mason found himself in danger when the “Octuple’s Waggon” was rolling down “the Hill” and the “drag Shoe in one side broke away, causing the conveyance to slew, and slip down the side of a hummock, and at last tip over, launching the Cheese into the Air,” which “hit the Slope perfectly vertical — bouncing once, startlingly orange aganst the green hillside, and beginning to roll, gathering speed. The first peripheral impression Mason had of it was of course a star-gazer’s, — thinking, Why, the Moon isn’t supposed to be out, nor full, not quite this bright shade of yellow, nor for that matter to be growing in size this way.” Realizing “belatedly where he was and what was about to happen,” he “threw his arms in front of his Face and succumbed before the cylindrical Onslaught, with a peculiar Horror at having been singl’d out for Misadventure … The Victim of a Cheese malevolent.”
Rescued “by way of a stout shove,” he heard “through his belly the homicidal Ponderosity roll by without interruption of a flatten’d Mason to divert it from its destiny.”
Where in all this cheesy Chaos is the dead wife he was going to tell Dixon about? The stout shove that saved him having been preceded by “an energetick Rustling of Taffeta,” the Star-Gazer found himself staring at a woman, “the shape of her mouth, her Lips slightly apart, in an Inquiry that just fail’d to be a Smile.” Recalling for Dixon that his savior might bear “somehow her fate in her Face,” yet Rebekah’s “innocence of Mortality kept ever intact … she saw nothing that May-Day but Life ahead of her.”
It’s Snowing in Philadelphia
I landed in America dazed by the equivalent of Pynchonian jet lag after feeling at home in Mason’s Stroud, where our best friends lived in the mid-1970s, and Dixon’s Durham, where my wife, son, and I spent a month in 1979. The arrival of Monday’s massive snow seemed a preview of Mason and Dixon snowbound for days at a Philadelphia inn called the India Queen. During another playful bit of brotherly quarreling on the subject of Mason’s continued widower’s Melancholy of Rebekah, Dixon suggests “You’re not getting out enough,” and Mason says, “‘Out! Out where?’ Gesturing at the Window, “White Mineral Desolation, unvarying and chill, — ”
Looking Forward
Here it’s still a sunny bright toss-up between Seuss and Zhivago, with more to come, and I’m thinking of all that got left out of this column because I was snowbound in Pynchon. Quite a group arrived on this day, February 25, George Harrison (1943), Meher Baba (1893), and Enrico Caruso (1873). All I can do is look forward to celebrating the 250th with the second half of Mason & Dixon.