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When the destroyer USS Hank passed eastward through the Strait of Gibraltar sometime in 1956, Thomas Pynchon was aboard as a serving sailor. The warship, a veteran of the Pacific and Korean wars, was beginning its annual deployment to the Mediterranean1. Perhaps Pynchon was seeing that sea in person for the first time. If so he’d have noted the blue transparency of the surface waters; possibly he knew their colour and clarity to be attributable to the Mediterranean’s poverty of animal and vegetable plankton. When combined with the lack of coastal shelving for sea creatures to inhabit, this means that, like the also clear blue Sargasso Sea, the Med isn’t blessed with an overabundance of life, a few fertile bays, lagoons and fishing-grounds excepted2. Though an invitingly warm sea it is also one of typically lean harvests. But of course, that hasn’t kept it from being the most contested sea in history. The Med would have another chapter added to its long history of conflict in the autumn of that year of ‘56, when Britain and France would use its eastern basin as a staging area from which to launch (along with Israel, attacking through Sinai) an invasion of the Suez Canal zone in Egypt. It seems that by that time—late October—the Hank was docked at Valletta, capital of Malta. The destroyer was only a small part of the naval force Eisenhower had ordered to the eastern Mediterranean, a veritable armada which included the entire Sixth Fleet, plus two other aircraft carriers besides, making four carriers in all. The situation was judged to be grave. So grave, in fact, that the Navy had been ordered to prepare to execute emergency war plans3.
At some point during the Suez Crisis Pynchon almost certainly went on ‘liberty’ shore leave at Valletta; if so he must’ve explored streets that still bore many signs of the devastation wrought by German and Italian bombing over a decade earlier4. Assuming he had this experience, I wonder whether it was the beginning of that constellation of obsessions—the Second World War, aerial bombardment, the letter V—which would in time generate Mindless Pleasures (retitled Gravity’s Rainbow shortly before publication). Whatever the case, the Hank’s stay in Valletta provided material that would be central to Pynchon’s first book, the 1963 novel that once again concerns us. And there’s clearly a certain continuity of obsessions across Pynchon’s first three books, the first and third especially, making V. something of a prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow.
As much as V. herself, it is Malta you find at the heart of Pynchon’s first major fictional labyrinth. Part 2 of Songs in the Key of V, and at least the next part after that, will therefore be concerned with the role Malta plays in the novel. Note that, unlike part 1, these installments will assume the reader is familiar with V. If the reader hasn’t read Pynchon’s debut, I recommend part 1, my spoiler-free introduction. Needless to say, the current essay does give away some plot points. They’re not minor spoilers either, as Malta dominates a key middle chapter of the novel (eleven), plus the last two chapters (sixteen and the epilogue). This topic—that of the archipelago’s role in the novel—also gives me occasion to explore what I’ve come to think of as “the Malta mystique”. What is it about these few small islands in the centre of the Mediterranean that has fascinated writers as diverse as Christopher Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett, Winston Churchill, and—of course—the esteemed descendent of William Pynchon, founder of Springfield, Massachusetts?
Incidentally, if the reader’s been wondering about the image accompanying this post, it shows the interior of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Surprisingly, given the pounding the Maltese capital took during the Second World War, the building is the 16th-century original. Having been only slightly damaged by Axis bombs (total destruction was but narrowly avoided), the cathedral was finally restored during the late Eighties and early Nineties. The works of art inside are also original—they were transferred to a safe site before the outbreak of hostilities5.