- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Is the media's use of the phrase "white trash" discriminatory? Discuss this last bastion of media bias in Table Talk

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

The (not so) mighty Quinn
By Harry Jaffe
Washington society maven Sally Quinn has been on a mean-spirited crusade against the Clintons ever since they refused to kiss her ring
(03/09/98)

Hollywoodland
By Catherine Seipp
And the loser is ...
(03/06/98)

A bad week for the First Amendment
By Eric Alterman
Can a reporter write a book about a subject he covers?
(03/05/98)

Under the Covers
By James Poniewozik
Money magazines, reflecting our schizoid attitudes toward loot, wobble between safe 'n' sober advice and get-rich-quick fantasies
(03/04/98)

Memoirs of a shy pornographer
By Molly Weatherfield
A pornographer is taken aback when a reader takes her fantasies seriously
(03/03/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

BY MAKING HER COLLECTION OF THE RECLUSIVE AUTHOR'S CORRESPONDENCE PUBLIC, AN AGENT HAS BECOME THE LINDA TRIPP OF THE LITERARY WORLD.

BY DWIGHT GARNER| The story of Thomas Pynchon's initial disappearance has been told so often that it has passed into legend. The year was 1963; the place was Mexico City. Time magazine dispatched a photographer to bring back an image of the 26-year-old author of a promising first novel called "V." The problem was, Pynchon didn't want his picture snapped -- he reportedly felt his buck teeth made him look like Bugs Bunny. So he climbed aboard a bus and vanished into the hills, where his furtive manner and wildly overgrown mustache led the locals to dub him "Pancho Villa."

One story that's never been told -- until last week, anyway -- is how Pynchon was courted (and nearly seduced) by another national glossy, Esquire, during the late '60s or early '70s. The magazine needed a film critic; Pynchon thought he might be the man for the job. "I can be crisp, succinct, iconoclastic, noncoterie, nonprogrammatic ... also curmudgeonly, insulting, bigoted, psychotic and nitpicking," he wrote in a letter to his agent. "A boy scout's decade of virtues." Pynchon and Ebert! No one really knows why Esquire didn't give Pynchon the thumbs up, but you can bet that they're still kicking themselves about it. ("The door is always open," Esquire's new editor, David Granger, told Salon last week. "We already have a very fine film critic in David Thomson, but we're always looking for great writers. And Thomas Pynchon can certainly write.")

The Pynchon-Esquire connection is just one of the revelations contained in a series of letters, more than 120 in all, that the famously reclusive author wrote to his former agent, Candida Donadio, between 1963 and 1982. The content of those letters became public last week, almost certainly against Pynchon's will, when the New York Times published a wide selection of excerpts from them. They depict a young author veering -- as young authors are wont to do -- between braggadocio and deep uncertainty. "If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head," Pynchon writes about four novels-in-progress in a 1964 letter, "then it will be the literary event of the millennium." At other moments, according to the Times, Pynchon wondered whether he should give up writing and seek another avenue of expression.

The letters also display flashes of Pynchon's baroque wit. When "Who's Who" asked him to supply a biographical note, the Times writes, Pynchon debated replying that his parents were named Irving Pynchon and Guadalupe Ibarguengotia and that he was "named Exotic Dancers Man of the Year in 1957" and "regional coordinator for the March of Edsel Owners on Washington (MEOW) in 1961." And they certainly evidence Pynchon's obsession with secrecy: When word arrived that writer Dick Schaap was working on a piece about him, Pynchon observed that the story would almost certainly be riddled with "lies, calumnies and all-around knavish disregard for my privacy." When it did appear, Schaap's piece made Pynchon feel "sick, almost homicidal."

If Schaap's intrusions drove Pynchon to homicidal distraction, how is the Oz of American letters coping with the publication of these revealing new letters? He's not saying, of course. But the author's lawyer, Jeremy Nussbaum, told Salon that Pynchon is "very concerned and quite distressed."

Last week's Times piece sent a series of shock waves through the publishing and academic worlds. The first reason for this was simple: Biographical information about Pynchon is remarkably scarce, and these letters are likely to be a treasure trove for scholars. The other reason, however, was astonishment at the level of betrayal involved in the letters ever becoming public at all. Pynchon's correspondence surfaced after his former agent (and former friend) Donadio sold them in 1984, for $45,000, to a collector named Carter Burden. After Burden's death two years ago, his family donated his expansive literary collection -- including Pynchon's letters -- to New York's Pierpont Morgan Library. The library made them available to the Times, and plans to allow scholars access to them beginning this fall.

N E X T+P A G E+| A stunning betrayal