The novelist Thomas Pynchon turns 72 today, making this week an appropriate time for writing about his life. Enough biographical materials are available for a short biography, despite attempts to keep them private, and reference articles about Pynchon are generally as long as, if not longer than, those about any other author--the one in Gale's database is about 2,500 words and the one in H.W. Wilson's World Authors 2000-2005, which is far better than Gale's in my biased opinion, is over 7,500 words. Given the number of available short biographies, writing one for this space seems a little pointless, though considering a couple of anecdotes about Pynchon from the 17 year period between the publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 and the appearance of Vineland in 1990 that are passed over in the standard reference works should prove interesting for the "mainlining Pynchomane," to use Salman Rushdie's description of those who are fascinated by all things Pynchon.
The gap between novels--assuming Vineland was written quickly at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s--is occasionally explained by the effort it must have taken to write Mason and Dixon (1997), the worthy follow up to Gravity's Rainbow. The way historical detail is woven into the fabric of the work does demonstrate intensive labor: getting the language right, for example, must have been a painstaking task. "The diction," as Louis Menand notes in his review of the book, "sometimes seems a parody of eighteenth-century speech, but when you look the words up in the OED, there they are. When you read of children playing ‘Chuck-Farthing,' you're likely to assume that this is Pynchon's playful back-formation from ‘Pitch-Penny,' but the dictionary makes it clear that the etymology runs the other way."
Another possibility is that Pynchon wanted to take a break after he completed Gravity's Rainbow and put down his pen for a while. Concrete evidence to support that conjecture does exist. In January 1974, when Pynchon was living in New York, he wrote to David Shetzline and Mary (M.F.) Beal, married writer friends whom he had known since college. In the letter, Pynchon observes that he is having "what the CIA calls a ‘mid-life crisis'" and is "looking for another hustle, [because he] cannot dig to live a ‘literary' life no more." The remark could simply indicate that he was insecure about the value of his work; he had expressed such insecurities before, denigrating the Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow in other letters that have become public, or partially so. The idea of abandoning a literary life, in any case, was fleeting.
Pynchon wrote to Candida Donadio, his agent until 1982, in 1975, telling her that he was working on a novel about Mason and Dixon, and rumors floating around in the late seventies said he was also writing one about Mothra. (Bill Roeder reported on the existence of both projects in an August 7, 1978 Newsweek article, which claimed that Pynchon had "walked the 233-mile length of the Mason-Dixon line" for research purposes.) While the Mothra book never appeared, traces of it may have found their way into Vineland, as Takeshi Fumimota finds himself "standing at the edge of a gigantic animal footprint" (142) just a few hours before he meets Brock Vond; unwittingly serves as Vond's stand-in with DL; and receives the Vibrating Palm, or Ninja Death Touch, from her. (The giant-footprint episode could also have been a sly joke in response to the Mothra rumors, which returned after Mason & Dixon was published.)
An incident that happened in 1984, however, may have again put Pynchon off the idea of publishing. In the introduction to the collection of his early stories, Slow Learner (1984), he observes that at the end of "The Small Rain," "some kind of sexual encounter appears to take place, though you'd never know it from the text. The language suddenly gets too fancy to read." Explaining, perhaps justifying, that obscurity, Pynchon goes on to write, "I think, looking back, that there might have been a general nervousness [about sex] in the whole college-age subculture. A tendency to self-censorship. . . . Today this all seems a dead issue, but back then it was a felt constraint on folks's writing." The issue of using racy language, he would soon discover, wasn't quite yet dead.
In the second half of 1984, Pynchon found himself battling the entrenched conservatism of the New York Times Book Review, which pulled "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" from its pages just as the issue in which it was originally going to appear was ready to print. The problem, as Rebecca Sinkler reported in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review in 1995, was Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor; he considered the word badass too vulgar for the paper and wanted it removed. Pynchon, objecting to being censored, refused to find a more acceptable term. He won his battle with Rosenthal: the essay was published in the Book Review on October 28, 1984. But being asked to censor himself might have been a problem in itself, reminding Pynchon of the fifties and putting him off the idea of releasing new work. After all, Slow Learner's introduction is, at least in part, about why we should be glad that things--cultural and, in relation to Pynchon's own work anyway, literary--are no longer the way they were back then. Suffering a fifties moment shortly after writing that piece could have been somewhat disheartening. If such were the case, Vineland, a critique of repressive tendencies of eighties' culture, can be seen as a fitting punctuation mark for the end of the decade, Pynchon's goodbye to all that and a return to productivity, even if the repressive tendencies of American culture didn't just go away when the nineties arrived.
Everything I've written about the significance of the little-known anecdotes discussed above is, of course, pure conjecture, but the years that have followed Vineland have proven to be productive. Pynchon has released books at fairly regular intervals, taking seven years to complete Mason & Dixon, nine to write Against the Day (2006)--the complexity of which illustrates that Pynchon doesn't need 22 years to research and put together a book like Mason & Dixon--and another few years to finish the forthcoming Inherent Vice, a book that will absorb my time this coming August. Still, naysayers could point out that the last eight years weren't better, and were in many ways worse, than the eighties and ask: why publish during our more recent repressive times if earlier ones had turned him off the idea? But Pynchon turned 60 in 1997, and refraining from publishing during a repressive political/cultural climate might not have seemed such good idea after reaching that milestone.
Melissa_W
on
Ellen_Scordato
on:
Cover Stories: The Drama Years by Haley Kilpatrick...
