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

[jbor]

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>From: Doug Millison <DMillison at ftmg.net>
>

> 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.

Indeed, Jules Siegel's 1977 _Playboy_ bio-article is probably the best one
for getting some insight into Pynchon's family history and younger years. I
posted these links to it in the p-list archives last June:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9505&msg=279&sort=date
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9505&msg=280&sort=date

It's from this account that we get information that Pynchon was "raised a
Catholic" by his "anti-Semitic" mother, and that he attended Mass regularly
at Cornell. I don't know how accurate all this is, but it's quite a candid
snapshot.

Generally, biographical data on Pynchon is quite limited, and though there
has been some digging on the extended family by various commentators, much
of this has ended up fuelling some pretty far-fetched speculations (Pynchon
being "Tinasky" not the least of these). However, there are quite a few of
his own non-fiction pieces about by now and it's not too difficult to do
some cross-referencing between these and the novels. That 1969 Hirsch
letter, for example, shows how unimpressed Pynchon was by the "superficial"
and "hardly profound" connection he made in _V._ between the Herero genocide
of 1904 and the Holocaust, and gives every indication that this was
something he was intent on revising in his current novel (_GR_; which, of
course, he does). The 1984 'Intro' to _SL_ is autobiographical, and is
always handy for details of his literary influences and where his head was
at during his college and Navy days (i.e. when he was writing the stories
and novels), and for this:

    ... Displacing my personal experience off into other environments went
    back at least as far as 'The Small Rain'. Part of this was an unkind
    impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical".
    Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had
    nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly
    the direct opposite. ... (21)

He goes on to describe this type of fiction as "luminous", and how it "moved
and pleased me then as now", so it's not such a stretch to see the depiction
of Slothrop in that Roseland Ballroom as owing something to Pynchon's own
experiences/attitudes from his college years, "transplanted" in time to suit
the novel's chronology, repeating as it does both a familiar setting and the
(possible) projection of a younger, more naive "self".

I actually think this use of biography to augment interpretation of the
texts is quite useful and have never said otherwise. What I find less
defensible is that tactic of stalking Pynchon the man (and his family) as an
end in itself.

best