Wanda question

[Christopher Kelly]

Origenes at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Could someone tell me how the Wanda letters were attributed to TRP?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dominguin Meuse


According to Bruce Anderson, who speaks in that CNN piece, his
newspaper--one of those would be "alternative weeklies" that seem to pop
up in places with too many frustrated writers per capita--began
receiving these oddball, pop-culture saturated letters from a woman in
the late 1980s. The letters made fun of local poets, praised the virtues
of EL Doctorow, and were written in Pynchonian style. Bruce published
them, never once imagining it was anyone other than some local pranster. 

I spoke to Bruce Anderson last year, while working on a story about the
Wanda letters, and he claims that only after reading Vineland, and
discovering that Pynchon must have been in the area researching the
book, did he put 2+2 together and decide it must be Pynchon. He claims
that a number of literary scholars have confirmed that it is Pynchon.
I'm not so sure about that. Donald Hall, the man who outted Joe Klein as
Anonymous, was apparently considering taking a look at Pynchon, but as
of my last conversation with him (in December) it was on the back of his
burner. 

If you read the letters themselves, you may very well be persuaded by
Anderson's case. But I wasn't entirely convinced. Bruce and his partner
(a woman in Oregon, whose name I can't quite remember) struck me as real
hucksters, and their story seemed a little too pat (Pynchon's own
conspiracies are never that orderly). And the CNN piece was a bit
disingenuous. I think most academics remain quite skeptical. The best
thing to be written on the whole affair, for my money, was Rick Moody's
piece in the Village Voice. He pointed out some very basic problems with
Pynchon being Tinasky--why would TRP care, for one, about these local
poets that he goes on and on about? and also, when you read them, the
letters tend to sound more like a Pynchon imitator than TRP himself.
Moody contends that it is probably Anderson who wrote the letters--and
in considering the whole affair, I'm quite apt to agree.

All of that said, you actually can buy The Letters of WT from Barnes &
Noble, at least from the ones here in New York City. I imagine, then, it
wouldn't be too difficult to get your local B&N (wherever you are
locally located) to order it.