TRP as autobiographer

[John Bailey]

I think there is a lot of the autobiographer in Pynchon, if we include the 
autobiographer's ability to revise the past. Not to appear to negative about 
it, but if you ask whether P is being deceitful in the Intro, I'd say sure, 
as much as anyone will be writing such a personal piece like this. The 
conversational tone of most of his non-fiction is a choice, a voice, from a 
range he could have employed. We probably shouldn't take it at face value 
that this is P's only voice, as even he admits in one of the (private) 
letters mentioned in the link below that he can be "curmudgeonly, insulting, 
bigoted, psychotic and nitpicking" (thus passing the p-list entrance exam).

But anyone has a range of writing styles, and Pynchon chooses a friendly one 
for his intro. I don't know if he is a kind and generous man in real life, 
and I could well believe that he's not, but this intro paints a pretty 
positive portrait without denying some obvious failings. This is good sense. 
It's what an editor would ask you to do.

Back to autobiography...I've read elsewhere plenty of suggestions that 
Pynchon's works include a lot of his life in them. I think it's one of the 
essays in the Vineland Papers that they get called 'romans a clef' (bit of 
an overstatement). Vineland itself seems so personal and the characters so 
much more lovingly rendered that I can't help but think its in part a very 
skillfully written reminiscence, along with everything else that it is (all 
I am saying, is give P a chance).

Of course, all of the autobiography is wrapped up in other stuff, and cos we 
don't know that much of his life, is pretty much irrelevant to us.

That is all.

>
>Somebody was insisting the other day that Pynchon
>doesn't want to be an autobiographer.
>
>At the same time, Pynchon told his literary agent, in
>one of those letters that briefly surfaced a few years
>ago:
>
>" In 1978, in what might have been a response to a
>suggestion that he write his autobiography, he says:
>'As for spilling my life story, I try to do that all
>the time. Nobody ever wants to listen, for some
>strange reason.' "
>... as reported:
>March 4, 1998
>New York Times
>Pynchon's Letters Nudge His Mask
>By MEL GUSSOW
>http://home.earthlink.net/~uur/mask.htm
>
>"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.  Moreover, contrary evidence was all around
>me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the
>fiction both published and unpublished that moved and
>pleased me then as now was precisely that which had
>been made luminous, undeniably authentic by have been
>found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper,
>more shared levels of the life we all really live."
>--SL, Intro
>
>-Doug
>
>
>
>=====
><http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>
>
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