Repost: The Big One

[Paul Mackin]

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
>           Malign:
>           So let's hear the argument behind your simple-minded formulation.
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
>
> I've infected the P-List archives with all sorts of posts on the subject,
> I'm certain you've already dumped on them.
>
> The Pynchon family name ought to be rather well known considering they had the second largest investment house to fall in the first great depression and the first book written in the New World to be burned as heretical in the New World. It is as if their family history was erased from the textbooks. I could go on and perhaps provide leads, but you have been so consistently dismissive of everything I say, I really don't see the point. 
>   

Sounds like you think there might be some kind of crazy conspiracy to 
suppress the information. Failures of business ventures of one sort or 
another were as common as mud during the Great Depression. There's no 
reason why one such failure should further clutter up our children's 
textbooks. The only reason people named Pynchon are likely to heard of 
today is that they are "related" (no matter how distantly) to the 
novelist. And the market for these other-Pynchon biographies would be 
confined mostly to the relatively few people who read him. (Students of 
early New England history are of course familiar with the name.) It 
seems quite probable that Tom himself  grew up without knowledge of the 
Pynchon Company. How many of us know our second, third, or fourth 
cousins? Tom is a digger however. I'd bet he learned of the New 
Englanders before the Wall Street Branch.  It was the former who 
provided something he could run with.

And of course I think it is pure malarkey that the grown up Tom feels 
somehow dispossessed because some sharp dealing distant cousin lost his 
fortune to some other guys of similar type. Tom wouldn't have gotten any 
of the loot.

I don't pretend to be weighing any of this stuff at all judiciously. But 
it seems to me no one else is either.



P.