This is a test ...

[Dave Monroe]

On 2/2/07, Tara Brady <madame.brady at gmail.com> wrote:

> You know what I was just thinking?
>
> This May will be the tenth anniversary of Lineland.
>
> How shall we mark the occasion?

What did Lolita think about Humbert?

By Jules Siegel, et al

Preliminary Note

This is the transcript of my second session with Chrissie, which took
place in my home beginning at about 8:30 pm, Monday, October 28, and
ending at about 10:30 pm. In order to keep things better organized than
the last session, which took place at her hotel, I had prepared all the
questions in a single document and written my own answers earlier in the
day. She came over with Robert and Faera, with a shopping bag of more
new clothing for Eli and Jesse, but they were an hour late because there
was an accident on the road and traffic was jammed up. They are leaving
tomorrow at 1 pm. She was in a terrible mood and it was hard to get her
going. Eli had set up the cassette recorder which had been working
perfectly, but after a few minutes Chrissie said crankily, "I don't want
to be on tape," and I stopped the recorder. We tried to play back the
little bit we had recorded and the tape just made a grumbling noise.

Robert and Anita and Faera and the kids picked up the hint and
disappeared into other rooms while Chrissie and I sat out in the living
room and she scowled at me. I read off the questions and then entered
her answers into a portable computer. I verified her direct answers by
reading them back to her. There was a lot of hostile digression which I
did not transcribe. Basically, I pretty much wished I had never been
born. The kids were peeping in and out and choking back giggles. Faera
and Anita and Robert snickered loudly during certain non-academic
exchanges. I thought about what a Colombian friend said to me after
coming back from seeing his ex-wife there: "La realidad quita mucha la
nostalgia." Reality sure eliminates nostalgia. Where I paraphrase her
answers, it's because there was too much going on to sit there just
typing.

Following are the questions that got answered in one form or another.

ar073@[omitted] <Brad Schreiber> wrote:

> Was Pynchon a night owl? Did he, like myself, get very upset by extraneous noise? Chrissie, when you were with him, did you sometimes get the feeling he was "brainstorming by himself", rather than being truly present in your company?

Chrissie: All of the above.

> I once had a writing teacher tell me that writers often talk the way they write: verbose, taut, florid, etc. Is this true for TRP? Was he prone to flights of eloquence, leaving those in his company wondering when in blazing hell they would squeeze a word in edgewise?

Chrissie: That's him. He was constantly talking. He talked a lot about
the prices of things. [L.L. Bean down east voice:] "Well, steak has gone
up another fifty cents a pound -- inflation, that's what it is. Have you
noticed the price of dishwashing detergent?" He was like a little old
lady. He talked on the phone for hours with Candida Donadio, his agent.
He liked to talk about how paranoid he was.

Brett Coley<bcoley@[omitted]> wrote:

> Is he a neat-freak, slob, or somewhere in between?

He was normal, dusty and neat, a bachelor. He never had a maid. He was
very upset by people cleaning his windshield. He felt people should
clean their own windshields. It was almost as if they were acting like
servants. What kind of decent person would have a slave doing their
windshields? It would be beneath your sense of decency and fair play. He
didn't actually say all these words, but it was his body language, the
sense of drama, the injustice of it all. Something as silly as that
would provoke this dramatic response.

He was very down to earth. It was almost quaint -- trying to be one of
the proletariat, saving scraps of paper, saving everything. He always
did the dishes and helped out, very, very sincere. The neighbors used to
bring their children over for him to baby sit. They always knew that in
a pinch Tom would baby sit. He was such a good solid citizen, nothing
like you'd think a novelist would be, not very dashing.

The only colors he wore were dark military green and tan, generic
clothes, and they were always baggy and kind falling off. He had a women
friend down the street, a very intellectual rich woman married to a
doctor, and she used to give him her husband's old shoes and clothing.

Bilge Ebiri <Ebiri1@[omitted]> wrote:

> Did you ever get any sense of any events/places/times in TRP's life that seemed to have shaped him or his writing, or even, his *deciding* to write? Did he ever talk about such things? For example, his stint in the Navy?

Chrissie: No, no [very impatiently], he never talked about things like
that. He never talked about the Navy. What did he care about the Navy?
It was just some stupid thing he did because he probably didn't know
what to do next. Are these really questions that people sent in? This is
why he doesn't want to do interviews. Who are these people? A bunch of
academic powder butts?

Jules: I believe he served on a minesweeper or a destroyer. He once told
me that you could only understand the Navy by living on one of these
ships -- the confinement, dreariness, boredom.

> How much research does he do?

Jules: I know that he did a lot of research, but I'm not sure that it
was always focused on something he was writing, but more like something
he happened to be fascinated by that he would then work into some
current project.

Scott Thill <MantaRay@[omitted]> wrote:

> Does TP ever express admiration or its opposite of some of his contemporary writers? What does he feel about the state of literature? Does he ever mention any other writers, like Don DeLillo, who many scholars, including myself, are sort of lumping him together, for better or worse, with?

Chrissie: They were always sending him books to read, which he read
religiously. He said that he wished he could just write plainly like
Jules. I think he thought he was too wordy. He always complimented the
writer even if he hated him.

He liked to talk about Mimi Baez and Richard Fariña. He had a big affair
with Mimi Baez. He told me all about it. He said Mimi and Richard were
living in a cabin in the woods while Richard was writing his book. They
were so poor that all they were eating was lentils and they were
suffering from malnutrition and that Fariña couldn't ever eat lentil
soup again.

Then when both their books came out, Pynchon got mad when they put him
in the same category as Richard Fariña -- same quality writing, same
subject matter, those wild and crazy hipsters, what'll they think of
next?

He wanted The Crying of Lot 49 to be heavy and about pain and
alienation. He didn't want it to be wild and wacky. He didn't see it
that way. He saw it as a black and white movie and they saw it as
tangerine-colored psychedelic pop music. They humiliated him. And then
to top it off, it was on the same level as Richard Fariña!

He loved Nabokov. He was just like Humbert Humbert in Lolita. He had a
big thing for Lolitas. That's why he went for me. But he liked hanging
out with older women. There was no male bonding. He just didn't choose
to do it. He thought they were intellectually superior to his
contemporaries. He was capable of turning on the male act. He would have
made a great actor. He was capable of fooling anyone. He had a friend
who was a stupid surfer guy and he pretended he was on his level. He
could slip into any character he wanted. He was really crafty,
methodical. He was spying on people a lot of time, just observing. He
liked to look in people's bookcases to find junky books to read.

Jules: I mentioned John Speicher, but I forgot Jorge Luis Borges, whose
"blurry Argentine Spanish" he mentioned he was reading, in a letter to
me from Mexico in 1964. I've never tried reading him in Spanish, but
Borges is one of my favorite writers, easily the most important
influence in my own writing. You always know exactly where you are in
one of his stories -- and he takes you to what at first appear to be
some very strange spaces, but then you realize you have been there
before on your own.

Juan Cires Martinez <jcm@[omitted]> wrote:

> What correspondences do you see between specific real people and characters of his. For example, which character(s) is(are) based on you? On other people we might know?

Jules: Chrissie didn't want to talk about this and got quite annoyed
when I brought it up. "This all happened thirty years ago! I was 19!"
she exclaimed. "I've talked to him maybe five times for five minutes
each since then! Why are you giving him all this free publicity,
anyway!" She said she never said anything at all to me about him as a
lover and that I made up that paragraph in my article. I told her that I
had paraphrased what she said and that I put it there because I was
trying to be nice to him. She didn't want me to be nice to him. I made
her look like an imbecile.

I had to point out to her that I made her read the article line for line
before I submitted it because I didn't want any problems later with
Playboy and that she was happy with it and told me to send it in. She
retorted that this was impossible. The article was published when we
were separated and she was living on Kauai with Gary. What did she ever
get out of it anyway? I reminded her that I wrote the piece in 1975,
when we living in the Ford House in Mendocino but that Playboy took two
years to publish it. I used the extra $1,000 that Arthur sent me when it
came out to buy round-trip tickets for Faera and her to come back from
Hawaii. I reminded her that she cashed the ticket in and brought Gary
back too.

We were now marching around the room shouting at each other and she
yelled at me, "Everyone cares about his privacy. Has anyone expressed
any concern about my privacy, about your privacy? Do you know he was a
fucking anti-semite? Should I tell them all the shitty things he used to
say about the Jews? You're just going to typecast me here like everyone
does. Oh, little Shirley Temple, the stupid little thing. Everyone picks
up on that, right?"

I tried to get her back to the question. She said there was a scene in
one of his books in which a character tells a lover that she had
thickened since having a baby by his rival, but that she could always
come to him, baby and all. She felt that this was based on a photograph
of her with Faera as a newborn by Ron Thal that appeared in my
collection, Record. She was so angry, however, that it was not clear
whether she was just talking about a scene in a book, or if something
like this had also happened between them.

She went into another prolonged rant about how all I ever did was make
her look stupid in everything I wrote about her. Finally, I got really
mad and just told her to shut the fuck up and go back to her hotel and
just get out of my life forever. I turned off the computer and started
to walk out of the room, but thought better of it, as I could hear
muffled laughter all around. Dogs were barking frantically as if
imitating us. She pulled in her horns a little and we split a Dos Equis.
I turned the computer back on and read out loud the description of her
below that I had written earlier today. Her mood changed considerably,
and she laughed excitedly when I came to the part about the Ingmar
Bergman movie, but she was still extremely out of sorts.

Bianca, obviously, is based on Chrissie, who acted like an
eight-year-old with strangers. My friends and family tried to tell me
how odd she acted, but I couldn't understand what they were saying. She
was always completely sane with me. The little-girl act was just a
defense mechanism, of which I think she was very aware. She was always
way ahead of people, real street smart. In my article, I talk about her
Shirley Temple imitations. Chrissie was the world's greatest dancer. She
won first prize in a dance contest in one of those big teen dance halls
in Manhattan Beach. She was there at the peak of the ecstasies in the
Haight and the Summer of Love. They danced like Hasidim, only it was all
naked sex, but *holy.* Man, did she dance. You saw the White Goddess in
hot flesh and teenage underwear when Chrissie danced.

She had a beautiful singing voice, but it was small, like her, otherwise
she might have been a top performer, except for her contempt for
anything that wasn't literature or art, and I mean Art. We went to see
El Topo, because I was doing a story on Alejandro Jodorowski. Well, you
guys know me by know. Mystified. Yawning. She is sitting there in rapt
concentration, a very icon of the cliché. Afterward she sums up the
movie for me in, like, six sentences. I said, "I wish you could have
told me that before we went in." So you can see how she and Tom would
have been real tight.

I also feel very strongly that she had an influence on Tom's writing
style, in the sense of bringing out his visual scene-setting skills,
which I remember as being notably absent from V., except in moments like
the clock eye and the cheval glass and some of the scenes in German West
Africa. I imagine the more concrete visual style that I perceived in
what I read of Gravity's Rainbow was mostly the result of his maturing
as a writer, but I suspect that she had an important influence.

The only way I can help you on this is to tell you how she influenced
me. Chrissie is a brilliant watercolorist, but she hardly ever paints.
She corrected my watercolor technique and she also taught me to
recognize the importance of my visual environment, to see the meaning of
things as gestalts. We were at Brian Wilson's one night and Brian said,
"Look at Bananas on the rug." It was a rich brown Weimaraner on a violet
rug. Afterward, she said, "He was communicating his ecstasy. He gets so
high, he can't really speak, and so he points with his voice to the
vision of the dog on the rug."

Chrissie was always an absolute telepath. She could just appear in my
brain. I would be sitting somewhere reading and feel her presence in my
mind and then look around and see her as if painted on the wall like a
fresco, only she was really standing there and had been for a while,
watching me read. Chrissie used words as captions under telepathic
pictures that she projected directly into your mind. I don't mean that
you saw UFOs, but that you became aware of the way things fit together
and how the light fell on a person's face, and that this had a Meaning.

It was like hanging out with Irwin Panofsky and Ansel Adams, only a lot
better, because it was this unbelievably beautiful little blonde girl
with huge green eyes and eyelashes like a moth's wings, a perfect figure
like one of the water nymphs in the Blue Danube sequence of Fantasia,
wearing a skimpy ecru cotton-knit shift and no underwear at all, an
over-sized blue man's fedora and Tom Sawyer schoolboy oxfords for girls
from the children's shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue. Maybe she'd
have on yellowing old welfare spectacles without lenses, because she was
being Miss Jolly, your favorite art appreciation teacher.

When I went to the movies or to a museum with her I saw things in a way
I never had before. Once we went with Tom Nolan to see Ingmar Bergman's
Hour of the Wolf. We were in the required state of the time to see a
movie. It was always a problem to figure out how to get out of the
house. You know, you had to get up and cross the room, open the door,
very complex actions. Then there were the street lights. Magnificent
street lights. Just stay right there and examine the workmanship of the
street lights. Why go to a movie?

Anyway, I saw the movie through her eyes. It wasn't mysterious at all.
It made perfect sense. It was a comedy. We knew all these people.
Bergman was satirizing them all, even the poor pregnant wife. When the
crazy writer (or artist, or whatever he was) shows his drawing and says
ominously, "Here is the lady who takes off her face," we had absolute
hysterics, roaring with laughter, as Nolan cringed and tried to pretend
he wasn't with us and people starting angrily shushing us. The
characters in the film were the kind of nutballs we dealt with at the
commune. We were crazy, but, gee, we weren't frightened all the time,
constantly putting everyone on attention-getting trips by being worried
about the walls turning into cake icing, or whatever.

Sometimes people have very crucial influences on each other. They don't
have to be together for a long time to learn a lot from each other. I
feel very strongly that Chrissie broke Tom out of his shell, at least
while she was with him. You would have to see a picture of her at the
time to understand what she would have meant to him. People not only
used to stop and stare at her on the street, but also comment to each
other in loud, astounded voices. I think she got into his head and
walked around in there and rearranged the furniture. This is more
important than Bianca as a character. So it was an explosive
combination.

Gardener Cady <cadyg@[omitted]> wrote:

> Does he like TV and junk food?

Chrissie: He loved junk food, but he wasn't fussy; he would just eat
anything. He used to eat pizza to comfort himself. Once after taking me
home to Jules mother's place in Beverly Hills, he was upset about our
relationship and so he stopped for a slice of pizza to comfort himself,
and while he was eating the pizza, someone was climbing in the window of
his apartment and stealing his stereo. He blamed this on me. I was a
jinx. I brought bad luck into his life. Couldn't see me any more. That
was a joke, by the way. That was his sense of humor. I wasn't supposed
to take that seriously.

Another time, he said "Let's go see Jules and confront him and tell him
that we want to live together." I had some ambivalent feelings about
that [laughs sardonically]. We had to stop and have a pizza to calm his
stomach. He was a little too shy around other people. I was shy, too. I
didn't think that was a good idea. I'd never get to meet anybody.

He broke up more than one marriage, because he was too shy to find
someone on his own. He made friends with couples and went off with the
wife. He felt that men in general are impressed with women that other
men have approved of, that there was an added attraction as a result of
this.

What bothered me about him is that he didn't seem as if he were very
brave. He was cautious. I hate that. He was not a daredevil, believe me.
You could never picture Thomas Pynchon on the highwire in the circus.
[More very loud sardonic laughter.]

Craig Clark <CLARK@[omitted]>

> Pynchon seems considerably interested in Namibian history. It is a major theme in both V. and Gravity's Rainbow. As a South African who visited Namibia while it was still illegally occupied by my home country, I wondered, has Thomas Pynchon visited Namibia?

Chrissie: He'd never have gone to Africa. It would have been too much of
an adventure.

She got up and said, "This is enough of this. Look, Jules, just send me
a fax, and I'll answer the questions in writing." By now the others were
getting tired of hiding out and everyone came out into the living room.
"I'll send you a five-page letter," Chrissie said comfortingly, as they
got ready to go. "I'm sure you will," I replied. "I'll call you on the
telephone." Robert and Faera were kind of hustling her out the door and
laughing at us. "I'll put her on the Internet with you when we get back
to the States," Robert said jovially, and we all said goodbye. Anita
went into the bedroom to go to sleep and I stayed out here editing this
into the shape you have it now.

No more questions for Chrissie, gang.

Well, maybe if someone is willing to pay me to do this again. I'll take
Thorazine first.

Let's just get back to polymorphic semiotics and syncretism and
heteronomy and all. I love academics. I am an academic. I live in an
ivory tower and I am lucky. It's all academic anyway, as I am going to
go to bed. Whew. Just like old times. And to think how depressed I was
when she left me. Do you think that Mick Jagger wants to go back and
interview Maryanne Faithfull? Trust me when I tell you that Anita Brown
is a lot cuter than Uma Thurman and Jerry Hall combined, too.
Heteronomy. This is just another term that women have made up to keep
men under control. Ron Thal once said, "They talk about being
pussy-whipped. I say, hey, *whip* me with it!"

Anita opens the bedroom door and sticks her head and half her naked body
in, blinking and frowning, all blonde curls and tawny skin, "Don't you
want to turn that light off and come in for now?" The door closes as she
slips back into the darkness. I hit Ctrl S and exit yawning.

01:15 am cst, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1996

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7406