You Hide, They Seek - By Scott McLemee

[Billy Sprangs]

You Hide, They Seek

By Scott McLemee
Working as an archival assistant at the Library of
Congress about a dozen years ago, I had the memorable
and never-to-be-repeated experience of discovering a
letter by Thomas Pynchon. It was written early in his
career, when his aversion to the public spotlight was
known only to friends — rather than being, as it is
now, a somewhat paradoxical claim to fame.
 
Pynchon has never given an interview. The most widely
used portrait of him is taken from a school yearbook.
(He was a member of the Class of 1953 at Oyster Bay
High, on Long Island.) The biographical note
accompanying Against the Day — his sixth novel, to be
published next week by Penguin — lists only the titles
of his earlier books and the fact that one of them,
Gravity’s Rainbow, won the National Book Award in
1974.

The NEW novel itself is long (not quite 1,100 pages)
and dense, sometimes brilliant and sometimes tiresome,
and occasionally very silly (the cameo appearance, for
example, by Elmer Fudd). It is also remarkably
resistant to capsule summary. Oh, what the hell. Here
goes anyway: Against the Day is a historical novel
about the secret relationship among dynamite,
photography, and multidimensional vector spaces that
treats the emergence of the 20TH century Zeitgeist
from a clash between revolutionary anarchism and the
plutocratic Establishment. See?

To discuss the book adequately would demand a seminar
lasting four months, which is also the ideal period
required for reading the book — instead of the four
days it took one reviewer, who then promptly had a
mild nervous breakdown. Something about Pynchon’s work
incites academic commentary. At least four scholarly
books have already been devoted to his last novel,
Mason & Dixon (1997). Even someone who enjoys him
without feeling the itch to exegesis will probably
feel driven, at some point, to do supplemental
reading. Partway through “Against the Day,” for
example, I found it urgent to go read an encyclopedia
article on the history of theories regarding ether,
the substance once thought to permeate even “empty”
space.

Pynchon doesn’t simply drop references to
(now-discredited) scientific concepts. Rather, he
builds them into the imaginative architecture of his
work. While reading his novels, some part of one’s
attention is inevitably kept busy drawing up a list of
remedial reading assignments.

With Pynchon, then, we have a unique combination. He
writes maximalist fiction — each page covered in the
stuff of his supersaturated brain — while maintaining
a minimalist public profile. That is no small trick,
given a culture industry constantly driven to
manufacture celebrities out of practically nothing.
(Pynchon himself has pushed the paradox a little
further by lending his voice to “The Simpsons,” in a
bit available here.)

The situation has had some curious effects, even among
academics interested in his work. Maybe especially
among them.

In the early 1990s, the story began circulating that
Pynchon had published a large number of letters in a
small-town newspaper in northern California under the
pseudonym of Wanda Tinasky, a homeless and perhaps
mildly deranged old woman with a strange sense of
humor. Learned people argued about Pynchon’s possible
authorship with great passion and total seriousness.
Covering the debate for Lingua Franca, I spoke with
one estimable literary scholar who did not so much
answer my questions as deliver a formal and exactly
worded declaration, as carefully prepared as an
official diplomatic statement about nuclear testing in
North Korea.

It was all plenty strange. The debate over authorship
turned out to be a lot more interesting than the
letters themselves, which were eventually published as
a book. While there must be a few die-hard
Tinasky-ites still around, the matter is now largely
forgotten. (For an update, check out this interesting
Wikipedia article.)

But one small detail from the debate, mentioned almost
in passing by someone I interviewed, has stuck in mind
over the years. It seems that Pynchon, while living in
California in the 1980s, had a driver’s license. Not
such a big deal, in itself, of course. But researchers
knew this because one of them had acquired a copy of
it (through what sounded like rather dubious means)
from the database of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

As one of the “Proverbs for Paranoids” in Gravity’s
Rainbow says, “You hide, they seek.”

As it happens, I was not actually seeking Pynchon when
I came across an actual letter by him, sometime around
1993. It seems to have gone undiscussed in the
secondary literature in the meantime. Consider the
following, then, a modest contribution to the
collective enterprise of Pynchon scholarship and/or
stalking.

The discovery occurred while I was processing a
collection for the Manuscript Division of the Library
of Congress. Archival processing is an activity often
best described as sorting dead people’s mail. In this
case, that was quite literally true. The deceased was
Stanley Edgar Hyman, a contributor to The New Yorker
and a professor of English at Bennington College, who
died in 1970.

He had been married to Shirley Jackson, of “The
Lottery” fame. Chances are, the library accepted his
papers mainly to get hers. A senior archivist
concentrated on organizing Jackson’s manuscripts and
scrapbooks. But I was more than content to get the job
of going through the boxes of her husband’s literary
remains.

While not particularly well-remembered now, Hyman
occupied an interesting place in American cultural
history. His book The Armed Vision: A Study in the
Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948), provided
one of the standard postwar surveys of critical
theory. (Irving Howe once compared reading it to
taking the elevator at Macy’s department store: “First
floor, symbols. Second floor, myths (rituals to the
rear on your right). Third floor, ambiguities and
paradoxes....")

Hyman had been a student of the sui generis cultural
theorist Kenneth Burke. And both were, in turn,
friends of Ralph Ellison, well before the novelist
published Invisible Man in 1952. All of them had spent
time at Bennington, drinking hard. Then they went home
and wrote him fantastic letters. My job was to sort
them, of course, not read them. But, well....

Then one day, in a mass of miscellaneous items, there
turned up a short letter of two paragraphs, typed on a
piece of graph paper. It was dated 8 December 1965,
and was signed “yours truly, Thomas Pynchon.” At that
point, he had published a handful of short fiction and
one novel, V., which Hyman had reviewed, favorably,
when it appeared in 1963.

Eyes wide, I read as Pynchon turned down the
“flattering and attractive” offer to come teach at
Bennington. He did so, he said, “with much pain, don’t
ask where” — explaining that he had resolved, two or
three years earlier, to write three novels all at the
same time. Pynchon hinted that it was not going well,
and called the decision “a moment of temporary
insanity.” But he also said he was “too stubborn to
let any of them go, let alone all of them,” and
thought that teaching would distract him, “given the
personal limitations involved.” He thanked Hyman for
the invitation, and also praised Hyman’s analysis of
V. as “criticism at its best.”

It was modest. It was polite. A few months later, he
published The Crying of Lot 49 — maybe one of the
novels driving him to distraction, maybe not.
Unfortunately there were no more letters from Pynchon
in the collection — nor did this one provide any
indication where he was when he wrote it. (The return
address he gave was that of his literary agent in New
York.)

As a clue into the mystery of Thomas Pynchon, then, it
seems like a pretty small thing. I hadn’t thought
about it at all in a long time, in fact — until a
stray reference in his new book brought it back to
mind.

As readers will soon be able to see for themselves,
Against the Day certainly feels like a man writing two
or three novels at the same time. Whole dissertations
will be written about how the different parts and
layers create a consciousness-bending structure in
four-dimensional spacetime. But it was the passing
mention of a two-dimensional surface that gave me a
slightly deja vu-like feeling. At one point, a
character reaches for “a block of paper quadrilled
into quarter-inch squares.”

Graph paper, that is, exactly like the kind Pynchon
used for his letter. More than a coincidence, but less
than meaningful? Like Oedipa Maas at the end of Lot
49, I’m really not sure.


http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/15/mclemee


 
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