A college-aged Thomas Pynchon was characterized by Lewis Nichols, a New York Times columnist, as “a constant reader—the type to read books on mathematics for fun . . . one who started the day at 1 p.m. with spaghetti and a soft drink . . . and one that read and worked until 3 the next morning” (Nichols, “In and Out of Books”). And what better testament to Pynchon’s reading than his own novels: like the far-reaching, historical, surreal, mixed-bag plots of V.
One book in which Pynchon found thematic accord was The Education of Henry Adams, authored by the grandson and great-grandson of the two Adams presidents. Pynchon, describing the themes behind his early stories, cites Adams, saying “Given my undergraduate mood, Adams's sense of power out of control, coupled with Wiener's spectacle of universal heat-death and mathematical stillness, seemed just the ticket” (Pynchon, Slow Learner). Scholar Javaid Qazi suggests the narrative arc of Herbert Stencil in V. bears a strong resemblance to the personal biography of Henry Adams: Herbert’s “desire to discover what or who V. is, his obsession with the past, and his assumption of various identities are similar to the efforts of Henry Adams, who also wants to find the connection between energy and history, between the virgin and the dynamo” (Qazi, "Source Materials for Thomas Pynchon’s Fiction"). Pynchon, himself, even likens the two men in V.’s third chapter: “Herbert Stencil, like small children at a certain stage and Henry Adams in the Education, as well as assorted autocrats since time out of mind, always referred to himself in the third person” (V., p. 62). Pynchon, seemingly, is not afraid to show a card or two from his poker hand; he lets the reader glimpse his sources, track his own education. “But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever,” says Pynchon, at the end of his Introduction to Slow Learner.
Another major source for V., especially the novel’s historical chapters—or Herbert’s “yarning”—was the 19th-century travel guide writer, Karl Baedeker. Pynchon remembers a prolonged writer’s block during his undergraduate degree, ultimately broken by the discovery of Baedeker’s guides: “Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of a time and place I had never been to, right down to the names of the diplomatic corps” (Pynchon, Slow Learner). He used Baedeker, in particular, to write his early short story, “Under the Rose,” which was later adapted into Chapter 3 of V., Porpentine’s assassination. And, just as Pynchon alludes to Adams, Pynchon also includes several tongue-in-cheek references to Baedeker in V. In Chapter 3: “An Egyptologist was he, or only reciting from the pages of his Baedeker?” wonders one character, questioning Bongo-Shaftsbury’s legitimacy. In Chapter 9: “He [Mondaugen] shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust of the South, however relative a region that might be,” Pynchon writes, to characterize and satirize Kurt Mondaugen. In Chapter 14: “V. at the age of thirty-three (Stencil's calculation) had found love at last in her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig” (p. 408). Pynchon is a highly self-referential, and ironic narrator—dependent on, yet also critical of, his sources, like Karl Baedeker.
In Chapter 7, “She hangs on the / Western / wall,” we see another medley of references. For example, characters regularly refer to the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli. Of Machiavelli, Pynchon has said: “Much later I got around to two other mighty influences, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Machiavelli's The Prince, which helped me to develop the interesting question underlying the story—is history personal or statistical?” (Pynchon, Slow Learner). This theme—of history being either personal or statistical—has a great presence in V., and is often on the minds of Pynchon’s characters; for example, Sidney Stencil, who says, “Short of examining the entire history of each individual participating […] short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation? It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery” (V., p. 470). But, Pynchon is not only inspired by literary sources: consider Chapter 7’s chase scene, in which Hugh Godolphin flees from the Italian police. Pynchon admits he “remain[s] a dedicated sucker” for chase scenes, saying “it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude” (Pynchon, Slow Learner).
Lastly, we might look at how Pynchon’s personal life has shaped his writing. For example, consider that Pynchon served in the US Navy before graduating college; Pig Bodine, in fact, is inspired by a real Navy sailor—Pynchon and his shipmates would “pass the time telling sea stories,” of which Pig Bodine’s real-life counterpart was a regular character, “figur[ing] in a wide body of shipboard anecdote” (Pynchon, Slow Learner). Another example of Pynchon mining his personal life for material is: one of Pynchon’s college friends, Jules Siegel, in an article written for Playboy, describes a drop-in visit with Pynchon, while Jules was working for a research agency; Siegel’s employer bears a remarkable resemblance to Pynchon’s fictional company of Anthroresearch Associates, where Benny Profane works as a night watchman in V. Siegel writes:
I remember another visit shortly after I was graduated from Hunter and was working for a public-relations agency. The firm was soliciting an account in the field of atomic research that manufactured plastic mannequins called radiation dummies, made of materials designed to absorb radiation in exactly the same way as the human body. One model had a human skeleton. The other was all plastic. Both had clear skins of something like Lucite and were eerily beautiful. I had the literature at home. Tom took some of it with him when he left. I was not to see him again for more than five years (Siegel, “Who is Thomas Pynchon…”).
Surely, these “plastic mannequins called radiation dummies” are prototypes of Pynchon’s SHROUD and SHOCK, the scientific dummies with whom Benny Profane indulges in existentialist conversation.
To end, it may be fitting to use Pynchon’s own words—his own opinion on finding material for stories. In describing his early literary attempts, Pynchon says:
Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live (Pynchon, Slow Learner).
