When I was on the cusp of adolescence, I had a smart but deviant group of friends. We weren’t the kind of kids who got straight A’s in math class or anything like that. We were smart in other ways, sneaky ways, like we knew how to pick the lock on the janitor’s closet, hoswto steal excuse notes and forge a teacher’s signature, how to throw food in the lunchroom and convince the monitors that the kids at the table behind us did it, and how to steal cookies in the cafeteria by sliding them under our hamburgers. We also learned how to dial a pay phone without getting charged, what neighbors dumped their old porn magazines in the trash so we could take them and look at them in the woods, as well as what supermarkets were best for shoplifting cigarettes. We had an extensive knowledge of obscene words in three languages , and we were often seen popping out of the forest to moon cards passing by in the moonlit night. Oh yeah, and we hated school. We conspired to blow it up because one of my friends heard from his cousin’s best friend who had a girlfriend in St. Louis or Evanston or something that told a story about a gang of students who wadded up paper towels and flushed them down the school toilets all at the same time. This cause the pipes to burst and the building blew up so the students had to stay at home for two months while construction workers repaired the whole mess.
That was our grand conspiracy. We made our plans and almost got around to doing this once, but only two of us showed up at the meeting place, the boys room at the corner of halls and 2. We decided to try anyways, but a teacher was in there and we decided to try for another time. Hey Kris, Tom, Mark, Pat, Phil, Keith, Tommy, and Mike, if you’re out there somewhere I just want to say you guys were the greatest even if our conspiracy was a total flop.
But this is why I could relate so much to the boys in “The Secret Integration” in Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner. This volume collects five stories and an essay, the stories all being early works written and published before any of Pynchon’s novels. This isn’t the best of Pynchon’s writings, the introductory essay was written to say as much, but fans of this author should find it interesting because it predates the themes, characters, and Pynchonisms to be found in the more developed later works.
The last and best story in this collection is “The Secret Integration” about a secret club of boys in the fictional town of Mingeville. Here we are introduced to the kind of word and name play that Pynchon is famous for as “minge” is a British obscenity roughly equivalent to how “cunt” is used in America as a reference to the vagina or as an insult. The club is led by a precociousand morose, but sometimes trouble-making, boy named Grover. Another member of the group is an African-American boy which is significant in terms of the club’s reasoning and purpose. The boys have plans to sabotage the town’s development as it sprawls like a soulless suburban cancer through the wilderness areas they love. Part of their plan is to blow up their school. As Mingeville continues to grow, the adults are faced with integration; when an African-American family moves into a track house, the white people of the town harass them and try to chase them out. This is the crux of the conflict as the boys, on the verge of adolescence, want the town integrated and the racist adults, including their parents, don’t. Here we are introduced to a major theme in Pynchon’s novels: the conflict between the sick-minded corruption of the powerful ruling classes and the innocence of the oppressed underclasses. Despite this story’s dark humor and amusing look at youth, there is a simmering undercurrent of rage at the establishment and the world of adults that stayed with me long after I finished reading. “The Secret Integration” is the most powerful story here and also the clearest and most direct expression of Pynchon’s world view that I know of so far.
The second best story is definitely “Lowlands”. Dennis Flange is having a party with his friends, some wine-drinking bohemians and mischievous sailors, the kind of people a husband’s wife hates to have around the house. When Flange’s old friend, Pig Bodine, shows up ready for a day of debauchery while on shore leave from the navy, Flange’s wife ends the party and kick everyone, husband included, out of the house. Their friend who owns a garbage dump agrees to let them stay at his shack. First they need to get mattresses to sleep on, so they descend into the garbage dump, located inside a massive pit, to find what they need. All the while, their friend tells them to be careful because his shack is being watched. After they all fall asleep, Flange learns what this is all about as he gets led away in the night by a three foot tall Romani woman who wants to marry him. She takes him through secret tunnels in the garbage pit to her bedroom, explaining that a community of Romani people live in the dump, but only come out at night. The story ends abruptly there.
It has the feel of a novel’s beginning, but unfortunately it is a novel that never got written. It reads like magical realism with realistic characters in surreal situations. It also has some important Pynchonian themes with the secret underground tunnels, conspiracies among the underprivileged, paranoia, and a highly intelligent but highly unmotivated protagonist. Flange’s friends are also a prototype of the Whole Sick Crew in his first novel V. The execution of this story is vivid and brilliant, even if it doesn’t get around to actually saying anything.
The other three stories are less spectacular. “Entropy”, the third story in Slow Learner, examines another major theme in the works of Thomas Pynchon, the balance between order and chaos that is necessary to keep a system functioning. While a party takes place in a house on Long Island, a man lies in bed with a woman while holding a dying bird against his chest. He tries to keep it alive by having the woman monitor the temperature in the room in relation to the temperature outside the window in the cold winter weather. Meanwhile, the party continues downstairs while people talk, play music, argue, play chess, and get sick until a group of sailors show up, thinking the house is a bordello. The house is a transmission ground for the exchange of energies and the party is symbolic of the ebb and flow of order and chaos. This isn’t really a story so much as it is an illustration of Pynchon’s understanding of entropy in thermodynamics and communications theory. In the introductory essay, Pynchon criticized “Entropy” as a mistaken attempt at starting with an abstract idea and dressing up characters as representations of aspects of that idea. His self-assessment is accurate.
In “The Small Rain”. Nathan “Lardass” Levine is a soldier in the army who gets sent on a mission to clean up dead bodies in a lagoon after a hurricane hit a farming island in Louisiana. Lardass is another progenitor of Pynchon’s later characters being equal parts intellectual and lazy. He wants to make a career out of being an army officer because it allows him to spend a lot of time doing nothing. As Lardass goes with his crew to clean up the dead bodies, it starts to rain. While waiting for a work assignment to be given, he drinks beer at a bar and picks up a coed from the nearby university for a one night stand. The story has no definite plot and it is more of a character study of Lardass than anything else. It is fair to call it style over substance, but is is interesting to see how the style foreshadows an element in the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow. The encroaching rain and the entry of Lardass into the territory filled with dead bodies is a lot like the encroaching winter storms and V2 rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow that bring mass death into the city of London.
The least exciting story is “Under the Rose”. Set in Egypt during World War II, a British spy named Porpentine is in pursuit of his nemesis, a German master spy named Moldweorp. He circles around Egypt in search of the other while his colleagues and the compatriots of Moldweorp interact with each other. The writing is labored and dull. It just felt like a chore to read it. This story would later be rewritten as a passage in V.
Slow Learner is far from being the best of Pynchon’s work, but it should be of interest to those who want to see the rudiments of his later genius. A lot of the prose is clumsy and obviously written by an author with little experience. It isn’t amateurish though. I’m sure that Pynchon’s college professors could see in these writings the germination of a literary giant. Aside from being early experiments with prominent themes that would reappear in his later writings, some of his most significant characters are also brought to life, most specifically Pig Bodine and Tyrone Solthrop. These characters in Slow Learner bear little resemblance to the characters they are in Pynchon’s classic works, Tyrone Slothrop is a doctor in this book, but it is interesting to see how Pynchon is beginning to play around with them, later to resurrect them in new forms for his masterpieces.
Slow Learner is not a good book for everyone and certainly not an appropriate introduction to Thomas Pynchon. It was probably published as contract filler during Pynchon’s dry spell from the early 1970s to the 1990s when he didn’t produce anything new. But that was a good time to release this volume after he had found success as a novelist with his first three early classics. Slow Learner gives readers a chance to go back and see where Thomas Pynchon was coming from before he got famous. These are his most stripped down, raw, and direct writings. It’s definitely a good read if you take it for what it is.
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