Watts article

[pynchonoid]

As I wrote earlier, Pynchon obviously wanted to enter
the dialogue about black/white race relations in the
US, hence he sought opportunitites to do so, in his
fiction, and in this Watts essay. No need for jbor to
twist this around and make it sound as if I said
something else -- now jbor is back to the sort of
persiflage and prevarication that's in the
Presidential campaign air, setting up straw men and
knocking them down.  Kind of sad, really, that a
brilliant mind like his can't stick closer to the
facts of what's actually been written in this thread,
but, alas, par for the jbor course on pynchon-l. 

Here's what I wrote, with not a word about "trying to
increase sales of his novels":

[...] Obviously, Pynchon wanted to take part in the
nationwide dialogue that was shaping up about
black/white politics in the US. When he had a shot at
a mass market magazine of iconic status in the
American mediasphere (said to be founded by Benjamin
Franklin, known for the Norman Rockwell paintings it
used as cover illustrations), Saturday Evening Post,
he uses the opportunity to publish "The Secret
Integration", a story about racial integration in the
suburbs, and gets his ideas out to millions of readers
across the US.  This, at a time when much of
small-town America -- the society celebrated in those
Norman Rockwell paintings -- was bitterly divided over
the racial integration issue. A couple of years later,
when he has a shot at publishing an essay in the NY
Times, a publication with relatively little nationwide
distribution (at that time, compared to the weeklies)
but with large inflluence in the US Establishment,
Pynchon addresses similar issues of black/white
politics.  He's managed to inject his ideas across the
board, from small-town America to New York City, where
they have continued to percolate through a long,
successful publishing career. [...]
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0409&msg=93658&sort=date

Perhaps jbor is still smarting and embarrassed for not
knowing that Pynchon had already reached a mass
audience, in Saturday Evening Post, before he wrote
the NY Times piece?  If so, I guess all I can say is
that facts can be inconvenient, especially when a
critic works up a big interpretation based on a fact
that turns out to be incorrect, yes I can see how that
would be embarrassing. Then again, a contemporary
critic like jbor can take refuge in the stance that
facts are meaningless when he's caught short, and not
worry about such details - that appears to be the way
jbor operates here; certainly jbor has a long track
record of lying about what other p-listers have
written in this forum. 

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> I don't believe that Pynchon's purpose in writing
> the article was to
> increase sales of his novels or to bring his name
> under wider notice, or
> even to make a quick buck (which might have been the
> case with the 'Esquire'
> and 'Cavalier' gigs.) I think that's quite a cynical
> view of why he wrote
> the piece.

Yes that would be a cynical observation; of course,
nobody has expressed it in this thread, it's merely
reverberating in the bell tower of jbor's fevered
imagination.

The notion that Pynchon has ever been motivated
primarily by money seems strange (he's never been what
I'd call a writer of commercial fiction; although he
may have had to support himself financially as a young
writer, and I'm certain his literary agent was focused
on this issue), but he does seem to have been
concerned during this early phase of his career to be
read, to find an audience.  The bits and pieces of his
letters to his agent that surfaced a while back (see
below for a reference) make it clear that P had
certain literary ambitions, even as he faced the kind
of insecurities that plague many young writers.  

jbor and I do appear to agree on one thing, that
Pynchon took the time and made the effort to visit
Watts and wrote this essay on that basis. It would
have been fraudlent for him to present the essay as he
did in the NY Times if he hadn't actually reported the
story in person.  Not sure what Malign and NeedaLife
are trying to gain by claiming Pynchon lied in this
respect, but it's par for their course, too, the two
Pynchon-l participants who can be counted on to dis
Pynchon.

http://www.salon.com/media/1998/03/10media.html
[...] The Pynchon-Esquire connection is just one of
the revelations contained in a series of letters, more
than 120 in all, that the famously reclusive author
wrote to his former agent, Candida Donadio, between
1963 and 1982. The content of those letters became
public last week, almost certainly against Pynchon's
will, when the New York Times published a wide
selection of excerpts from them. They depict a young
author veering -- as young authors are wont to do --
between braggadocio and deep uncertainty. "If they
come out on paper anything like they are inside my
head," Pynchon writes about four novels-in-progress in
a 1964 letter, "then it will be the literary event of
the millennium." At other moments, according to the
Times, Pynchon wondered whether he should give up
writing and seek another avenue of expression. [...]

Here's a link I found while searching for the above,
to an interview with novelist Charles Wright who was
represented by Donadio in the '60s:

http://www.tribes.org/cpocket/interviews/john_farris_charles_wright_0603.htm

[...] JF: How long was it after that that you wrote
The Wig?

CW: Well before The Wig I started a novel whose title
I don't remember. But this was an action-packed,
straight-forward novel, about a bunch of Black guys
who would meet in the basement of a brownstone in
midtown on Sunday afternoon all dressed in black and
the primary purpose of the meeting was to overthrow
the government. It was written in the third person and
the dialogue was as factual as any you would see in a
newspaper. And my agent--whom I simply--

JF: Who was your agent then?

CW: Canada Donadio. She took me on after The
Messenger, and at that time she was the most famous
agent in New York City. She had Joseph Heller, she had
everybody. But I did about fifteen or twenty pages and
she said, "My God, Charles--we can't publish this--"
and I was shocked. Then I said, "Oh, yes. No, we can't
publish this, because they will either put us in jail
or they will run us out of the country." And she had
all the black humor writers at the time--

JF: Like who--

CW: Oh--like Thomas Pynchon--you name them, she had
all the top names--Albert Chester--and their humor was
fantasy inside out and they knew how to get a message
across like Heller did in Catch-22. I can also tell
you an interesting little story about Joseph Heller. I
was working for Rapid Messenger Service, and one of
our best customers was Simon & Schuster. And this was
before all the noise about Catch-22. And the staff at
Simon & Schuster liked me because I was interested in
books and I was fast. Anyway, I picked up the
paperback contract from Dell that Canada and Joseph
had signed. I had written nothing. I was still a
messenger. It was two or three years before any book
came out. It was in February, cold and snowy.
Scribner's book store was at 48th Street and 5th
Avenue. There was a phone booth across the street and
I broke open and read the contract and saw that all
Heller received for the paperback version of Catch-22
was 5,000 dollars, half of which went to Simon &
Schuster and the other half he had to split with
Canada. And two years later this woman becomes my very
agent. [...] 


.

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


	
		
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