PYNCHONS LI DAYS
Ya Sam
takoitov at hotmail.com
Wed Dec 20 08:48:43 CST 2006
BY SCOTT MCLEMEE
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY
When Thomas Pynchon's sixth (and longest) novel, "Against the Day," appeared
last month, it was one of the major events of the publishing season. But for
Long Islanders, it also counts as another kind of news story: "Local Boy
Makes Good."
Pynchon was born in Glen Cove in 1937. His family later moved to East
Norwich, and he graduated, as salutatorian, from Oyster Bay High School in
1953. One of the few available photographs of the famously
publicity-avoiding novelist comes from the school yearbook.
Let the Manhattan literati take note: Long Island readers were the very
first audience to get a taste of the distinctively Pynchonian imaginative
style - with its blend of erudition, goofy names and hints of conspiracy.
All those qualities were already present in his contributions to Purple and
Gold, the Oyster Bay school newspaper.
His column, usually called "Voice of the Hamster," ran between November 1952
and March 1953. The pieces were reprinted as an appendix to Clifford Mead's
"Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources" (1989).
Most are satirical stories about life at Oyster Bay High, disguised as
letters from a student attending Hamster High - a school "located on a rock
about a half mile off the South Shore, and not a very big rock at that." One
of the characters is a math teacher, Mr. "Coolcat" Faggiaducci, who plays
bebop jazz and is rumored to take heroin. He is on the verge of a nervous
breakdown, "imagining that there is a conspiracy against him."
And, in fact, he's right. At the back of his trigonometry class sits a group
called simply "The Boys," who hatch "a fascinating experiment in psychology
entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by
psychoanalytic deletion of the super-ego." In other words, they want to see
"how much Faggiaducci can take before he flips his lid."
Silly stuff, to be sure. But also a foreshadowing - at age 15 - of the
anarchists and mad scientists in Pynchon's later books. (In "Against the
Day," the Boys are reborn as a group of 19th century balloonists called the
Chums of Chance.)
But, at the time, it was just a case of what young Pynchon called, in his
last article, "the natural psychological manic phase prevalent in most
seniors, coupled with a compulsive-obsessive complex concerning schoolwork;
in other words, goofing off and fooling around."
http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/ny-2know5021386dec20,0,6823960.story?coll=ny-features-print
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