V.V. (14) McLintic's "bad week" at the V-Note

Doug Millison DMillison at ftmg.net
Wed Apr 18 15:51:10 CDT 2001


Hollander emphasizes what I think may be the important point re the Pynchon
family finances -- the family had come down quite a bit in the world since
its heyday as an associate of the Morgan concern.  Families that once were
rich and still live in a prestigious area with rich neighbors experience a
different sort of stress than families that were never rich in the first
place, never part of that world. You can have that Beverly Hills mailing
address (as an old girlfriend of mine did, and you find more than a few
folks down there who live in fancy leased cars and pick up their mail at a
Beverly Hills post office box), after all, and not have the "Beverly Hills"
experience.  Hollander also ponders the possibile influence of the Pynchon
family crash -- certainly that sort of thing can be experienced as
humiliation, on the part of the family, and it wouldn't be uncommon to point
a finger of blame, either. Whether this is actually the case with TRP, who
knows, and what impact it might have on the writing may be difficult to
assess, but if you're going to work Pynchon's biography into your argument
it's difficult -- and probably hypocritical -- to ignore (or castigate)
Hollander and other Pynchon scholars who have collected the relevant
biographical facts -- there are quite a few folks, in fact, who have
collected quite a bit of credible material along those lines. Dugdale has
also discussed, I believe (I haven't read his book, but somebody told me
this) the possible impact of certain embarrassments involving TRP's father
(if I remember correctly), which have also been exposed, if I remember
correctly, at the pynchonfiles.com site.


"jbor" wrote:
(Oyster Bay High?) And
> Glen Cove is pretty posh, isn't it? 




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