By Stuart Mitchner
When I finished Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon on Good Friday, April 3, 2026, the moment was the realization of a New Year’s resolution. I don’t use the word “finished” lightly, having given up on the reading I began in the summer of 1997 when the 773-page novel was shiny and new. As I explained in my February 25 dispatch (“Drawing a Line Halfway Through…”), the main problem, in addition to navigating Pynchon’s remaking of 18th century English, was the object itself: resplendent in its glassine wrapper, but, as I also said then, so beautifully packaged that I never felt comfortable reading it, at least not between hard covers. An email friend who has voyaged deep into Pynchon’s work says that he found M&D impenetrable until he, too, took up the soft cover edition.
200,000 Printed
Mason & Dixon’s first appearance on the June 1997 Times bestseller list was in sixth place. A week later it was ninth. After that, it was gone. No surprise, for a book listed as “The story of the two British surveyors who drew the boundary between the North and the South in the 1700s.” How many people not only finished but actually read this novel when it was published, with a first printing of 200,000 copies? On my first try, I didn’t even come close.
Misery Loves Company
Before embarking on my return journey, I checked online to see who else might have struggled. The stories change, but it seems that even people who have read and comprehended the complexities of Gravity’s Rainbow couldn’t get into Mason & Dixon. One reader says that after half a dozen tries “my interest wanes, my mind wanders and I put it back down. Then I try again later, same results every time.”
What finally put me on board was Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998), who, before he died in October 2019, said “the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected,” calling it “Pynchon’s late masterpiece,” and adding, “I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century … it would probably be Mason & Dixon.”
April 8
A Book of Days for the Literary Years offers no births and deaths of note for April 8, an entry that spans 550 years. In 1341, “Petrarch is crowned Poet Laureate on the steps of the Capitol in Rome.” In 1819, “because gallstones have made the physical act of writing impossible, Sir Walter Scott, 47, begins to dictate his current work, The Bride of Lammermoor.” And in 1891, “Robert Louis Stevenson, 21, takes a walk with his father and tells him he is abandoning a career in engineering to devote himself to writing.”
The Lost Eleven Days
Speaking of time spans, in Chapter 56 of Mason & Dixon, Charles Mason recounts to his surveying partner Jeremiah Dixon what happened when he found himself the solitary explorer of the eleven days, September 3-14, 1752, removed when Britain transitioned from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian and the day after September 2 became September 14. While the act of Parliament imposing this temporal derangement and the resulting confusion and inconvenience actually happened (viz. the English Calendar Riots of 1752), it’s easy to imagine an author of Pynchon’s transformative powers dreaming up such a caper on his own and brilliantly exploiting it.
Thus the surge of energy driving Mason’s account of the experience — “’Twas as if this Metropolis of British Reason had been abandon’d to the Occupancy of all that Reason would deny. Malevolent shapes flowing in the Streets. Lanthorns spontaneously going out. Men roaring, as if chang’d to Beasts in the Dark. A Carnival of Fear. Shall I admit it? I thrill’d. I felt that if I ran fast enough, I could gain altitude, and fly. I could become one of them. I could hide beneath Eaves as well as any. I could creep in the Shadows. I could belong to the D—–l, — anything, inside this Vortex, was possible. I could shriek inside Churches. I could smash ev’ry Window in a Street, Make a Druidick Bonfire of the Bodleian. At some point, however, without Human prey, the Evil Appetite must fail, and I became merely Melancholy again.”
I quoted the passage in full because after 560 pages it was a joy to read Melancholy Mason Unplugged and Unbound. Fondly known as “Mopery” to his dead wife Rebekah, whose face he searches for in the stars 14 years later, Mason finds her waiting for him alive and well and frisky on September 14, 1752: “First I heard the voices of the Town, then at the edges of my Vision, Blurs appear’d and Movement, which went suddeny a-whirl, streaking in to surround me, as in the mesh of prolong’d Faces, only hers stood firm — And when I join’d her again, before I could think of what to say, she kiss’d me and declar’d. — ‘Somebody got in late last night.’”
Looking for Her Face
Back in the novel’s present (1767), the girl who kissed him on September 14, “brazen as a bell,” is dead and Mason is praying “to see her Face in the new Comet,— each night, this time, in terror of not seeing it. He tries to will it there, yet is amaz’d that for some Minutes now, he cannot even remember her Face” — a possibility intimated when he’s accosted by her spirit one night with an ultimatum, “You must leave Mr. Dixon to his Fate, and attend to your own…. If we are a Triangle, then must I figure as the Uknown side…. Dare you calculate me? Dead-reckon your course into the Wilderness that is now my home, as my Exile? Show, by Projection, Shapes beyond the meager Prism of my Grave? Do you have any idea of my Sentiments? I think not. Mr. Dixon would much prefer you forget me, he is of beaming and cheery temperament, a Boy who would ever be off to play. You were his playmate, now that is over, and you must go back inside the House of your Duty. When you come out again, he will no longer be there, and the Dark will be falling.”
By the time Mason tries and fails to see her face in the comet, the reader has reached Part Three, “Last Transit,” 50 pages from the end, which even so seems a long time coming, although Pynchon brings it all together with the finesse of an old-fashioned post-modern novelist attending to the music of the final movement, life and death, Dixon dead, Mason dying, his second wife Mary in England with the younger children, while Rebekah’s sons will be Americans looking forward to starry skies, fishing, Indians and Magick.”
This Week
While the Book of Days lists no literary births or deaths for April 8 (with one exception to be mentioned), this week includes the births of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (April 5, 1837), journalist Lincoln Steffans (April 6, 1866), poet William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770), poet Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821), and Irish man of letters AE (George Russell) on April 10, 1867. The deaths include “the first great French prose author” François Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) “on or about” April 9, 1553, and British novelist Evelyn Waugh, April 10, 1966.
Finally, as noted in the Book of Days, there’s Maurice Bowra, born April 8, 1898, among whose “classical Greek translations will be Pindar’s Pythian Odes.” Bowra being virtually an unknown quantity to me, I turned to Wikipedia and found that he’s said to be the model for a character (Mr. Samgrass) in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and that although he “saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes,” he was “never accepted as a serious poet himself,” his output consisting of “sharp satires, in verse, on his friends (and sharper still on his enemies).”
ccording to his friend and literary executor, “his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable,” with the eventual exception of New Bats in Old Belfries (2005), a collection of satires on friends and enemies written between the 1920s and 1960s. He was knighted in 1951 and died of a heart attack in 1971. Among the choice, occasionally off-color quotations by Bowra closing out his Wikipedia page: “Where there’s death, there’s hope.”