Post v Times (was Re: Watts article

[jbor]

It's worth pointing out also that the popularity of the 'Saturday Evening
Post' has gone through peaks and troughs over the decades, and that the
'NYT' had an international edition until 1967. It has certainly had wide
national distribution in the U.S. all along.

Norman Rockwell stopped doing the covers for the 'Post' in 1963; it was his
illustrations for 'Look' magazine after that which had more of a social and
political edge to them. The 'Post' remained quite mainstream and
conservative, as John K. Young correctly describes in his article.

On the whole, Young's article is well-researched and makes some solid
points. I do think it's fair to say that the two extracts from _Lot 49_
which Pynchon sold to 'Esquire' and 'Cavalier' in 1965 and 1966 were purely
money-making ventures: they're not included or mentioned in _Slow Learner_;
they're excerpted from a novel rather than self-contained stories (cf.
'Under the Rose'); and Pynchon hadn't been getting a pay check since he
finished up at Boeing. Young's article also describes the illustrations
which were used for 'The Secret Integration' in the 'Post'.

best

on 28/9/04 7:31 PM, jbor 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.
> 
> To clarify, a number of critics have suggested that Pynchon sent the _Lot
> 49_ story excerpts to 'Esquire' and 'Cavalier' in order to make money, which
> seems a reasonable surmise. John K. Young's recent 'Critique' (44.4, 2003)
> essay entitled 'Pynchon in Popular Magazines' touches on this issue:
> 
> Pynchon being Pynchon, we may probably never know why he opted
> for such popular venues following the critical success of _V._
> (And Pynchon's executors being Pynchon's executors, his surviving
> letters to former agent Candida Donadio may not answer that question
> for a long time either.) Following Jules Siegel's recollection that
> Pynchon lacked cash at the time (_Playboy_, March 1977, p. 172), it
> seems reasonable to assume that, simply put, Pynchon sold out. Not
> yet the celebrity (nor MacArthur Foundation recipient) he would become,
> Pynchon presumably turned to popular magazines for the same reason
> Faulkner, Fitzgerald and so many other American writers before him
> had; they paid well, and they carried a certain cultural caché,
> especially for male writers. (391)
> 
> I disagree with the notion that either 'Cavalier' or 'Esquire' was as widely
> read as the 'NYT Magazine', and I also don't believe that Pynchon's decision
> to write the 'Watts' piece was "opportunistic" in a comparable way to his
> submission of these two story excerpts.
>
> I accept the possibility that the circulation of the 'Saturday Evening Post'
> was greater than that of the 'NYT Magazine' in the mid-'60s. My point was,
> however, that the 'Watts' article, a piece of current affairs journalism
> which Pynchon contracted to write for the 'NYT Magazine', made clear his
> stance on the Civil Rights cause in a far more forceful way than 'The Secret
> Integration', a piece of fiction, ever could. Again, from Young's essay:
>
> The 'Post' sells its readers a particular image of America that
> Pynchon's story aims to subvert. There can be no doubt that Pynchon
> uses the 'Post' to promote his own commercial appeal, or that in
> doing so he implicates himself within the broader circuit of
> commodification that includes all the magazine's contents. In
> publishing this particular story in this particular magazine,
> however, Pynchon also compels his readers there -- many of whom
> were probably encountering his work for the first time -- either
> to misread 'The Secret Integration' altogether or to accept its
> critique of their presumed cultural values in a source that
> ordinarily confirms them. (p. 396)
> 
> With the publication 18 months later of his 'Watts' article -- exposition
> rather than fiction -- there could be no such misreading of Pynchon's
> critique. In other words, because of both the type of text and the
> publication context, the fact of Pynchon's personal commitment to the Civil
> Rights cause was made clear to a much wider audience after the publication
> of the 'Watts' article than it had been previously, and that is something
> which he must have been very aware of as he wrote the article. I don't
> see that this is controversial, or a difficult point to comprehend.