reclusive pynchon

[jbor]

on 3/2/04 1:20 AM, Malignd wrote:

>> I find much to respect in the fact that he isn't in
>> the papers every other week like all those other
>> "celebrity" authors and auteurs prattling on with
>> their opinions about things totally outside their
>> sphere of expertise, or peddling Oldsmobiles, for
>> example.
> 
> Who, might I ask, are you thinking of?

Many and varied writers, directors, actors, sportspeople etc. The specific
context of what I wrote, however, was that Pynchon has "made a deliberate
choice to shun publicity and journalists throughout his career", and he has
consistently maintained that stance. Gaddis, DeLillo and Coetzee, for
example, are often lumped together with Pynchon in the "reclusive author"
category. But they're out and out chatterboxes by comparison. Pynchon runs a
distant second to Salinger, of course. Cf.

    [...] There's
    Thomas Pynchon who has never done a single interview
    or reading. In the 1960s, JD Salinger withdrew into
    his house at the top of a fortified hill in New
    Hampshire (only briefly emerging to 'sue' his
    biographer, Ian Hamilton, in 1987). And Harper Lee is
    78 this May, but don't expect an invite to the
    birthday party.

    Heroic recluses hate pressing the flesh. JM Coetzee
    didn't bother to turn up to collect either of his
    Booker Prizes. Thomas Harris courteously refuses all
    journalists with the words: 'I really can't start
    giving interviews now.' Don DeLillo once handed over a
    postcard with the words 'I don't want to talk about
    it' to a hapless academic who tracked him down in
    Greece.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1136038,00.html

There has been never been a published interview with Pynchon (leaving aside
the Japan Playboy nonsense, which is apocryphal at best). Whatever someone
wants to call the communication between he and Hajdu, it hasn't been
published as an interview. When it is, or when either Hajdu or Pynchon
actually refer to it as an "interview", then there might be a case to be
made.

> And his penchant for blurbing of mediocre novels comes
> rather close to peddling Oldsmobiles.

In some respects, yes. Some of his blurbs are for what we might agree are
mediocre books, but I guess you could argue that that boils down to a matter
of taste, and it is the business he's in after all. The difference is that
he is a novelist, not a mechanic.

best