Talking with the editor of Illuminatus!

Back in the early 1970s, before it was published, Illuminatus! was a manuscript of hundreds of pages, sitting in a corrugated cardboard box in the offices of Dell Books in New York City.

The Dell editor who edited Illuminatus! (or at least did most of the editing -- see below) was a guy named Fred Lawrence Feldman. About a couple of years ago, I tracked him down and he agreed to let me interview him.  As you're about to read, Feldman also is the guy who introduced Wilson and Shea to Al Zuckerman,  who became their agent. (Mr. Feldman is not a philosophy professor or a Marxist activist, so he is neither of the “Fred Feldman” listings in Wikipedia.)

Although Dell editor David Harris apparently made the decision to separate the book into three parts, turning it into a fantasy/SF trilogy, a format familiar to readers of the genre, most the editing of the book apparently was done by Feldman. At of this late date, my interview with him apparently is the best record of how much editing (and cutting) was done.

Unfortunately, one question that my interview doesn’t answer is who acquired the manuscript for Illuminatus! When I interviewed David Hartwell, he thought it was Feldman. Feldman, however, insists that someone else had acquired the book before he began work on editing it.

I interviewed Mr.  Feldman in November 2010, recording the interview using Google Voice. I am sorry that it has taken to so long to publish highlights of the interview, but transcribing interviews is a long, hard task. This is not the whole interview, but I’ve attempted to transcribe everything that would be of interest to RAW scholars.  I hope you will enjoy it as a look at the Illuminatus! editing process, and how the books fit into the publishing world of the 1970s.

For more insight into the editing of Illuminatus!, see my interview with David Harris. For other interviews with editors who worked with Robert Anton Wilson, see my James Frenkel and David Hartwell and Teresa Nielsen Hayden interviews.

Feldman has written a number of novels and now works with nonprofits in their fund-raising campaigns.

“It’s a fancy way of saying I’m responsible for a lot of the junk mail you get,” he said.

His latest book is How to Save the World on $5 a Day.

I opened my interview by asking Feldman how he became the editor who handled  Illuminatus!

Tell me just a little bit about yourself. When did you work at Dell, and how did it come about that you published these books?

I graduated from college in '72 and traveled for awhile. Had some friends in New York. I knew kind of that I belonged in New York.

I was always a writer/English major kind of guy. So I went to New York and looked for some jobs -- you know, first job out of college, real job. The one that I got was an entry level position as publicity associate at Dell Books. I worked there for about a year, publicity, and became friends with a guy named David Harris, who was a science fiction editor there at the time.

I've interviewed Mr. Harris, too.

Cool. I think he must have acquired the Illuminatus! manuscript because it was there when I got there. But anyway -- David told me -- I'm pretty sure we became friendly. I think we ate lunch together. It was so long ago. I’m pretty sure we became friendly. He told me was about to leave Dell, was planning on leaving Dell.

I made it known -- I had gotten pretty close to some of the editors. They were kind of mentors to me. They were older guys but they were  mentors. I said I would be interested from moving from publicity to editorial. I got that job, I got David's job.

This is interesting, because I had understood you were the acquiring editor --

No, no, it was definitely there. It's my recollection that it was there. When David was showing me around his office, which was going to be my office, which was windowless  and like an elevator… he was showing me around and he said, "And then in this box, there's this." It was like God only knows, 1,500 pages of manuscript, Illuminatus!.

I can't tell you how that book got to Dell. I really do not know.

Is it possible that literary agent Henry Morrison's wife bought it when she was running the department? 

Who was she? What's her name?

I think her name may have been Gail.

I'm trying to think of who was running the editorial department. I think it was a woman named Robin Kuriakis [I'm guessing at the spelling here, can anyone help? -- Tom] , for some reason, rings a bell..... I can name some of the editors there. There was a guy named Bill Gross. There was a guy named John Boswell. Bill might have been senior executive editor.

I can't tell you. I really don’t know.  I just seem to remember there was a box, there was a corrugated cardboard carton on the floor. There were a lot of pages in this thing.  We need another source to explain that deal.

Mr. Harris told me that he did a lot of the production work. He told me he made the decision to split the book  into three parts.

I don’t who who did that.

I’ll tell you this. Obviously, there was no way a book like this, a genre book, would be published this large.  The largest book at the time, and it was precedent setting, it was the history of Germany, I can’t remember the title -- “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

Here’s the deal -- you have to remember back then how this business worked, the mass market paperback business. There were approximately 26 titles a month put out. That sounds like an incredible number of titles. We put out that many. There were tons of category books.  Again, you have to remember -- no Internet, no Walkman, no alternative portable entertainment except the paperback book. And they were cheap. 95 cents, a buck and a quarter, a buck fifty. You could buy them in multiples even then.

Men bought science fiction, westerns, mysteries. I don’t mean to generalize, but the market being what it is, men bought those kinds of books, more masculine books, soft core, risque, R-rated kinds of books. Women tended to go with historical romances, Regency romances. And this was how you filled out your list. You had a lead title, you had several secondary titles, you had one each of these titles.

And publishers had to do this to protect their rack space.

Today, when you go to the supermarket, Pepperidge Farms might have 18 different kinds of bread. They don’t have those 18 kinds of bread because they want to have those 18  kinds of bread. They have them because they have to protect their shelf space. If they don’t fill up their quota of shelf, other brands will encroach upon them.

That’s how the paperback business worked. There were no Borders, no Barnes and Nobles. We had third party distributors who would take books on consignment.

And they’d send out salesmen who went around to drugstores and what have you, and  filled up what they called pizza racks, which were these rotating racks with paperbacks, and at the end of the month, they’d come back and take them back. You sometimes used to see, you don’t see it much anymore, paperback books with no front cover. Because you didn’t really need to send back the whole book to get credit from the publisher. All you had to do was send back the cover. And sometimes, less than scrupulous people would resell them on the secondary market.

In one of those pizza racks, if you tried to put, I’m looking at my three copies here, you could maybe get two or three copies of a book like Illuminatus! in.  Those two or three copies may or may not sell, but once they were gone, nobody would remember what was there. To protect ourselves, and to get a sufficient number of copies of the book into  the wire rack, we had to make it thin enough to fit multiple copies. So that’s why we did it, and also it filled up space. If you can get three months of science fiction product out there, versus one month, that’s what you do.

Mr. Harris, when I interviewed him, he remember clearly making the decision to divide it up into three books.

He may well have.

He said he had to argue with Robert Anton Wilson to persuade Mr. Wilson that publishing reality being what it was, that was the only way they could do it.

I suspect he’s right when he said that. Robert Anton Wilson was not trusting -- I don’t think he was happy .... I seem to remember it was a struggle to get him to get on board with the way we were going to produce the books.

Do you remember if you had to make cuts in the manuscript?

Oh yes. I remember that. I dove into that with all of the enthusiasm of a guy like a first lieutenant. I dove in. I was totally confident I could do it. I felt very good about my abilities. I just felt I could do it, I felt like I was the right guy to do it. I had hair in those days and I was in the counterculture with the rest of them. I felt like, I’m the guy to do this. I don’t remember having any qualms about doing it. I just felt that I had to shape this into a story -- a beginning, middle and end story. I felt that very strongly. I may well have looked to advice from some of the guys who were mentoring me, like I told you. I remember definitely cutting, and I think that might have been a sore point with Robert Anton Wilson, not so much Robert Shea.

I introduced both of these guys to, at the time, a new agent who I had become very close to ----

Would that  be Al Zuckerman? 

Al Zuckerman, right.

Now, of course today, Al is one of the premiere agents in the business. He had a new client at that time, a young untested British guy by the name of Ken Follett. That seems to have worked out for them. Of course, Al has many other very important clients, a thriving agency, Writer’s House, and I think is a patriarch of the business at this point.

But at the time, he didn’t have any clients. At the time, believe it or not, I’d sometimes vacate my office for a little time so he could use my phone. It was just a different time. He was just starting out. He got his first office, Writer’s House, and I remember going over to see it, I was so pleased. He’s older than me. He came from an academic background.

But anyway, I introduced them both. I remember Bob Shea remembered doing a couple of historic Japanese sagas with Al that did very well, and then I kind of lost track of him.

[As I wrote in this blog post on August 29, 2012, I eventually got Zuckerman on the phone and asked the famous literary agent who bought Illuminatus! He replied, “Fred Feldman.” When I explained that Feldman said it was there when he got there, Zuckerman said, “Then I don’t know.”]

Do you remember what changes you made in the book or what you felt you had to cut to shape it into a publishable work?

Do I remember?

Do you remember what kind of changes you made -- 

I think I was probably motivated, as I said, by  trying to develop some sort of momentum, a plot momentum, so that it had a plot. I probably felt that I needed a beginning, middle and end, so that if somebody bought the first one,  they’d want to buy the second one, and the third one, to know what was going to happen.  I think that was probably the weakest part of the raw manuscript, of forward story momentum.  I probably tried to bring a little of that to it.

You have to understand, when one does this, one has page limits. There are so many signatures you can have. I was probably driven by working with the copyeditors to make sure each book fit into the quota for paper. You have to buy paper. You just can’t go on forever. There’s a certain amount of paper you have.

I was probably driven by both practical and aesthetic reasons to edit the way I did. But specific editing choices I made, I could not tell you …..

When you read the book in places, it reads like sort of like a late Robert Heinlein novel. The characters are giving some pretty long speeches and lectures. 

That’s part and parcel of what it is. It’s a philosophical, it’s like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you know what I mean. It is a fairly didactic book, as I flip through it. I probably tried to keep it moving, but  I wasn’t going to change what those guys wanted to say, although I probably rewrote a little bit. I can’t remember. I won’t say I rewrote.

It’s the nature of line editing, which is what I did. I was not a copyeditor. We had a whole staff of folks who knew like i before e except after c, and where the colon goes, and all that stuff, when it’s a semicolon, when it’s not. I don’t know any of that stuff, I never did.

I was the guy who would, you know, go out, buy a paperback original, punch up the sex scenes, punch up the violence. That’s what a line editor does. A line editor makes it a good read.  There are other folks who do the proofreading and the queries and make sure that it’s fairly close to real English. A lot of times they want to change it into real English, and a guy like me, the line editor, the acquisitions editor, says no, this is how  we want it to be, because it’s a better read this way.

Do you remember at this late date, and of course it’s been more than 30 years, whether you had to make really substantial cuts and take a lot out of it, or just a little bit.

I seem to remember there might have been some arguments with those guys. I don’t know if both guys, or just Wilson. But  I do think I probably had to make significant cuts. I won’t say substantial but significant.

Do you remember anything at this point about whether Mr. Shea was easier to work with than Mr. Wilson? 

I don’t remember Mr. Shea being even that involved. I do think I met him once or twice. I seem to think I did.  I probably took  him out to lunch  because that’s how I ate. I was making like nine grand a year, but I did have an expense account.  So I tried to book as many lunches as I could ….

What do you think about the fact that this book that you worked on so long ago has remained in print? You could probably go to your local Borders and there’d be a one volume omnibus of it. What do you think of the fact it’s been able to last for so long?

I just think it’s funny. Your know, it’s ironic. Go figure. You never know what’s going to work out. I take pride in it. I take pleasure.

I rarely run into anybody who knows about it. It’s a cult thing. It never comes up in my life. I never run into anybody who knows about it.

Amazing.

I just never have. I’m touched by your letter to Al Weatherhead, I think you said people know who i am, attached to this. It never even occurred to me anybody would have know who I was.

I gather by the time the books you came out, you were the guy in charge, and Mr. Harris had left.

Harris left before we started editing, as far as I know. Now if he says differently, he’s right. I’m only telling you to the best of my memory something that was a long time ago, and was not that significant at the time.

I seem to think I edited the raw manuscript. If he had already taken a chop at it,  and he says so, then he’s right.

Introducing Klaas Pieter van der Tempel

So a few days ago, Andrew Crawshaw writes to me and points out a document that Nick Helweg-Larsen pointed him to: A master's thesis by a guy named Klaas Pieter van der Tempel on Joseph Campbell and Robert Anton Wilson.

I did a Google search for the author and found his High Programming website. Click "Essays" and you'll  find the aforementioned master's thesis, and several other documents, including a piece of Aleister Crowley, an analysis of RAW's Quantum Psychology, articles on modern physics and Wilhelm Reich, an article on Timothy Leary, and a free ebook, Pause, Play: A Higher Consciousness Handbook. I have not had time to read much of this yet, but the master's thesis looked interesting when I skimmed it. I'll be reading more soon.

News from California and London

Nick Helweg-Larsen wrote to me to point out that on the official Robert Anton Wilson page, there is a link asking for donations to help pay off debts to the RAW Estate.

It's on the auction page, and I don't know how long it has been up. It says, "You can make a donation here, directly to the Robert Anton Wilson Estate bank account that will help with ending the debt load. This donation is not tax-deductible, but it is a direct link to manifesting Bob's final wishes - to help his disabled son, preserve his works, and to keep the lasagna flying! None of this can occur until we manage to eliminate the Estate debts. Any gifts received will be acknowledged by a thank you letter from the RAW Estate, and you will also receive your personal Tsar Card and a Praise Bob MAYBE decal to decorate your own reality tunnel! Much love, Christina."

Meanwhile, over in England, John Higgs has gotten a look at Daisy Eris Campbell's to bring Cosmic Trigger to the stage  (she's Ken Campbell's daughter, remember). John Tweets, "Been to an early read-through of Daisy Campbell's stage version of Cosmic Trigger. Phenomenonal."

Coincidance, Week Two

Judging from Robert Anton Wilson's introductory remarks to his article "The Motherfucker Mystique," the original manuscript of his book Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words would appear to be the great lost RAW work that none of us have ever read, or are ever likely to read.

If the corrected excerpt here is any way to judge, it would have been an interesting book. Given Wilson's apparently inability to preserve his literary papers, and his frequent moves, it seems unlikely that there is a manuscript anywhere that would allow the original book to be published.

Wilson's observation that the word "motherfucker" is often used "casually and cordially" was brought home to me years ago, when I was at a heavy metal bar in Lawton, Oklahoma (where I lived for many years). The lead singer (I am paraphrasing from memory, but this is close) said, "I think we have some drunken motherfuckers here who like to get drunk and party! Do we have some drunken motherfuckers here who like to get drunk and party?" (Loud cheers in response.) It occurred to me at the time that it was unlikely the conductor of the Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra would be likely to try to bond with his audience by saying, "Do we have some drunken motherfuckers here who like to get drunk and party?"

I'll let someone who knows more about werewolves than I do analyze Wilson's poem. I've put a photo of Werewolf Bridge, near Chanute, Kansas, at the top of this blog post, taken from this photo gallery.

Hail Eris, Sol's satellite

Eris is more than a Greek god and Ares' sister. She's also the biggest dwarf planet in the Solar System, considerably larger than Pluto. It has its own moon, Dysnomia, or "lawlessness," named after Eris' daughter.

The astronomer who named her, Mike Brown,  who has explained that he named the dwarf planet after his favorite goddess. Brown's book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, goes into considerable detail about the legend of Eris and the golden apple and the origin of the Trojan war. Brown's book title is oddly reminiscent of the subtitle of Principia Discordia, "How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."

Various links

I did not know that Thomas Paine suggested a basic income guarantee. But Michael Johnson knew. 

Michael (on a hot streak lately) also talks about a possible Pynchon movie.  And here is Michael on how visuals alter listeners' appreciation of music. ("It has always been quite an 'open secret' that the coolest-looking guitarist will always be more impressive to the fans than the guy who is not all that attractive but plays circles around the cool looking dude.")

Speaking of Pynchon, hey, take that, well-reviewed recluse! (For context, go here.)

The AP on the Leary papers collection going public.  The article answers the main question I had: "For now, the library has no plans to make the archive available online."

Van Gogh fake not a fake. Hat tip, Ted Hand.

Oz Fritz continues his series about Aleister Crowley, and brings Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary into the discussion.

'Find the others'

One of the most important features of this blog, at least for me, is that it has helped me "find the others," in Timothy Leary's phrase. When I was in college in the 1970s (University of Oklahoma) I read Illuminatus! for the first time and met libertarians on campus who also had read the book. But since then, except for contacts with with old friends from OU, I can't remember interacting with other RAW fans.

I have found it very gratifying that because of this blog, I have met other RAW fans. I hope this blog has been a vehicle for some of the rest of you to find the others, too.

In connection with that, here is a fine illustration of Timothy Leary's "find the others" rap from Zen Pencils.

Daily Grail on RAW

The Daily Grail website ("Exploring the fringes of science and history" -- it seems to have a lot of material RAWheads would like) puts up a piece about the Maybe Logic movie (and includes a video of the film.) The post, written by Greg Taylor, says, "The world is full of wanna-be leaders, teachers and sages, keen to tell you how to live. Strangely enough, in my own mental travels the closest I've come to finding one is a man who was totally antithetical to the idea of one person holding a greater truth: Robert Anton Wilson."

The site includes a blog called "Air Lasagna."

Timothy Leary news

A handsome new Timothy Leary website has just gone up, related to the new R.U. Sirius Leary biography. The "Offshoots" area, about work influenced by Timothy Leary, features an interview with Antero Alli about the Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness, as developed by Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and Mr. Alli.

The New York Public Library's collection of Timothy Leary papers is supposed to open to the public this month, and there was some sort of NYPL event Tuesday night, apparently to celebrate it, according to a series of Tweets from the Timothy Leary Futique Twitter account. More about the Leary papers when I learn more.

Jesse Walker on Illuminatus!

The Cato podcast interview of Jesse Walker by Caleb Brown opens with a question about Illuminatus, which I take the liberty of transcribing:

Caleb Brown: I guess my introduction into conspiracy theories was Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's  The Illuminatus trilogy, which for those who haven't read it, sort of wraps up all of the great conspiracy theories  effectively into one grand conspiracy theory --

Jesse Walker: Or a mosaic of conspiracies --

Caleb Brown: That have somehow been going for thousands of  years.

Jesse Walker: The great thing about that book, which is in  my book -- People sometimes say it treats every conspiracy as true.  It might be more accurate to say that it treats every way at looking at the world as equally true and equally absurd, and then sort of sees what it can tease out from that.  Those two, particularly Wilson, represent what I call in the book the ironic style of political paranoia, or the ironic style of conspiracism, I should say. That's people who, they're not interested so much in talking about conspiracy theories to debunk them, or to say hey this is one that I think that is true, although sometimes they might do that their own merits,  but just to have fun with them, to explore them.  They're this big mutant mythology. Let's find what kind of laughs we can find in there. Let's find what kind of social insights can be found in there. [I  snip the last part of the answer, which explains how Walker's book does something similar, treating conspiracy theories as folklore.]

Transcribing is a pain, so I hope Jesse forgives me for truncating his answer. The whole podcast is worth listening to (about 15 minutes) and Illuminatus! comes up again. Walker observes, "The authors have said that some of the fun pranks that they pulled, is there are some things that sound like plausible history that could be true, but they just completely made up historical details. There are other things that sounded completely absurd but are actually true that they threw in there."

'Coincidance' Week One

Here's a good sentence from Robert Anton Wilson's essay, "Synchonicity and Isomorphism in Finnegans Wake":

"Vico said that every verbal coincidence was a poem showing a new reality."

That's at the top of page 23 in my New Falcon edition, and it seems to be like a pretty good one sentence summary of the article.

I am no Joyce scholar, and I am counting on the James Joyce experts to weigh in, using the comments. I suppose everyone reading the article will have his own verbal coincidences that come to mind. Every time I see Joyce's name, I can't help think of another Joyce, a young woman I got a crush on in college at about the time I was reading Illuminatus! A verbal coincidence: Joyce's middle name is Elaine. My wife Ann's middle name is Elaine.

On page 21, Wilson mentions a Dublin bookstore named Brown and Nolan. Barnes and Noble, a bookstore with the same initials, is the last major bookstore chain standing in the U.S. -- if I had chosen to buy my copy of Coincidance at a bookstore rather than from Amazon, it's where I would have gone.

Wilson writes repeatedly of the two girls and three British soldiers who encounter H.C. Earwicker in the incident in Phoenix Park (page 10, for example); Wilson doesn't say so, but wouldn't this be an example of the Law of Fives? Also on page 10, Wilson offers the theory that the incident occurred at 11:32 a.m. When I got in my car Sunday morning to run the first errand of the day, trying to think of what I should write in this blog entry, I glanced at the clock in my car's dashboard and noticed that it was 11:32 a.m.

Wilson mentions on the last page of the essay that Ireland is divided into four provinces.  Coincidance is divided into four parts, each of which has a James Joyce essay.

Reading Wilson's essay made me aware of more holes in my reading: I haven't read Tristam Shandy or The Golden Bough. I downloaded them both and put them on my Kindle. Reading the essay also reminded me that I simply have to read Frances Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. (As he often did, Wilson misspells her name as "Francis.")

For a reading schedule for the online discussion of Coincidance, see this blog entry.

Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo' and Illuminatus!

I just finished reading Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, in the course of which I made an interesting discovery: Illuminatus! misquotes the book (or, depending on how you look it, Illuminatus! paraphrases it.)

At the beginning of Illuminatus!, on the title page for Book One:

The  history of the world is the history of the warfare  between secret  societies.

                                                              -- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo

This is what Reed actually wrote: "Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies." I'm not clear if Wilson and Shea were relying upon memory or if they felt the need to rewrite what Reed actually wrote. The Reed quote would arguably have been stronger if Wilson and Shea had actually quoted what he wrote, lopping off the first four words. Note also that the title of the book is wrong. It's  Mumbo Jumbo, not Mumbo-Jumbo. 

The resemblances between Mumbo  Jumbo and Illuminatus! are interesting; both describe the struggles between secret societies, although in Reed's work it's the white monotheists (the bad guys) versus the black polytheists (the heroes). In an interview in The Illuminati Papers, Wilson says, "I didn't read Mumbo Jumbo until about 3 years after Illuminatus! was finished. The same is true of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The astonishing resemblances between those three books are coincidence, or synchronicity, or Higher Intelligence (take your pick). I love everything Ishmael Reed writes, and I once sent him an official Discordian certificate making him a Pope in the Legion of Dynamic Discord." So the paraphrase from Mumbo Jumbo presumably was inserted late in the publishing process.

Here is a good review of Mumbo Jumbo from one of my favorite critics, Ted Gioia. I am not sure I can agree, however, with Gioia's comment that "you are best served if you come to this novel with a deep knowledge of history." Ignorance of history is helpful in many places in the section near the end of the book where Reed offers his grand conspiracy theory of history, because the narrative has many jarring mistakes. Constantine was not converted to Christianity in "the late 4th century B.C.," A.D. 378 is not the correct date for the destruction of pagan temples by Emperor Theodosius (the Alexandrian Serapeum was destroyed in A.D. 391 or so), an ancient Egyptian could not have come to South America and made contact with the Incas, and so on.

Pynchon vs. Wilson

After I wrote yesterday's post, Jesse Walker called my attention to a 2006 blog post, by one Rufus Flypaper.

Mr. Flypaper writes that

" ... many of the things that I enjoy in Robert Anton Wilson's novels- the endless array of characters and events, the silly surrealism, the corny names, and complex physics and philosophy thrown in- annoy me in Pynchon's novels. And I think maybe it's partially because Thomas Pynchon is supposed to be a great novelist, and Robt. Wilson is a "stand-up philosopher". I definitely don't think of Wilson as a great novelist; but then again, I don't think of Voltaire as a great playwright either. It's the fun of watching a deeply humane gadfly tossing out ideas that I enjoy. Maybe the reason that I like R.A.W. more is simply that I've never felt any pressure to take his books seriously in any way, while the massively overestimated Pynchon has always been presented to me as A Great Writer.

"I don't think of Pynchon as a great writer any more than I do Wilson. But, there's something deeply childish about Pynchon's novels that irritates me. They seem to have been written by someone with very little interest in humanity. Robt. Wilson is deeply humane, and I just don't get that with Pynchon, even with his sympathetic characters. Of course, a novelist needn't be humane- many of the best aren't! But, a pile of fascinating minutiae should add up to something aside from a paranoid/autistic tangle. And I'm not convinced that it ever does in Pynchon."

It seems to me what what Rufus put his finger on is that expectations play a large role in how we receive works on art; when I get around to reading Pynchon, it better be pretty darn good, or it won't live up to the hype. Similarly, I would guess that many of us have had the experience of seeing a heavily-panned movie and finding that it turned out to be pretty entertaining; it can be easier to enjoy something if your expectations originally were low. Robert Anton Wilson probably benefits from the fact that his readers are allowed to enjoy a sense of discovery. You're not discovering anyone if you read Pynchon or Don DeLillo. You're reading an author you've been told over and over again is a Great Author.