Revisiting a decades-old search for Thomas Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

Revisiting a decades-old search for Thomas Pynchon


In the late 1970s, a young journalist named Robert Goolrick got it
into his head that he ought to find Thomas Pynchon, and he wrote an
article about his strange and slightly obsessive search for a
now-defunct magazine called New Times. He's the same Robert Goolrick
whose first novel, "A Reliable Wife," debuted to much acclaim earlier
this year, which may have helped writer Mark Athitakis, in turn, track
him down.

Athitakis has posted Goolrick's entire article online, which has the
kinds of turns -- including a visit to a psychic and a dark night
observing marginal human behavior -- that appear in Pynchon's novels.
And his pursuit of the famous recluse soon took on the mystical shades
of the author's work, too:

I knew that the usual roads would not find him, people a lot more
clever than I had tried them all, and that, in the end, there was
nothing I wanted to ask him; it didn’t matter in the slightest to me
how many ice cubes he liked in his drinks,whether or not he snorted
the incredibly long lines of cocaine one feels dribbling off the pages
of Gravity’s Rainbow, or where he lived now or what secret dark facts
he held about his apple-pie boyhood. So I looked for alternate routes,
ways not so trampled. I looked, I suppose, for a miracle of belief,
that some other thing existed and could be found and touched and
finally known....

In Pynchon I had chosen a love that was possible because it had no
object, merely an extended longing for a body that could not be found
or desired, having no height, no weight, no texture I would ever
know....

Now Goolrick, who went on to spend almost 30 years as an adman, says,
"I just started out calling people, and finding out what I could find
out. I wasn’t really a journalist. I’m not an investigative reporter,
so it was kind of abstract from the beginning, and it became more
abstract as it went along, as you can tell."

In 1978, he wrote:

Everything began to seem infinitely detailed. The smallest gesture,
the least meaningful sign would catch my eye as if it were all
happening just for me, had been put in front of only my eyes.
Everything in the present, all systems operating simultaneously in the
front of the mind, spreading layer after layer of infinitely textured
life in front of you. The quiddity of life, these details all we have,
the only signposts pointing in any direction, and these blurred and
contradictory....



This idea of small incidents taking on greater meaning for the
searcher, as though they're at the center of intersecting forces like
the vortex of a V, seems to burble around Pynchon.

Picking up a thread from Goolrick's article and interview, I wondered
if I could use an online database of public records to see whether
Pynchon's father was still around (turns out he died in 1995). The
search brought me to a page to links for his immediate family, and
when I tried to click through on Tom Jr.'s name -- that's what,
Goolrick says, Pynchon's mother called him -- the page didn't load.

It was as if the universe simply couldn't deliver hard information
about the author Thomas Pynchon. Or perhaps a clever cabal of
programmers had done some scripting to make sure his complete
anonymity was preserved. Either way, the not-loading Pynchon page is
so Pynchonian that I won't bother to try the search again, lest the
results be more routine the next time around.

Some time after the article was published, Goolrick says, he was at
home getting ready to head out for dinner when the phone rang.

I picked it up and said hello, and this guy said, “My name is…” I
can’t remember his name. He said, “You don’t know me, but I’m a
private investigator in San Francisco. And I happened to read your
article about Thomas Pynchon. And he said, “In connection with some
other case I’m investigating, I happened to find out where Thomas
Pynchon lives. I found out everything about him, and I just thought
you might want the information.” I said OK, so he gave me Pynchon’s
address, Pynchon’s phone number, Pynchon’s driver’s license number. He
was in California, apparently. The conversation went on for a long
time. I hung up the phone, went out to dinner, and after a while I
thought, “Who was that on the phone?” And it occurred to me that maybe
it was Pynchon himself who called.

Not that he could ever know for sure. And preserving that mystery
seems to be better than finding the man himself. "I never called or
looked up the address. It seems regrettable, all these years later,"
Goolrick told Athitakis. "But by that time I realized that there was
nothing to be gotten out of him. There was nothing for him except his
work."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/06/revisiting-a-decadesold-search-for-thomas-pynchon.html

Robert Goolrick, “Pieces of Pynchon”

http://americanfiction.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/robert-goolrick-pieces-of-pynchon/