Re: pynchon/salinger letters in nytimes article

Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Sun, 22 Mar 1998 17:36:16 -0800 

AntiUtopia wrote:

> I really first encountered this issue when I started really studying James
> Joyce.  Many of his letters had been published before his death, but
> selectively, by Richard Ellmann.  After Joyce's death Ellmann published All
> the letters--even the erotica James wrote to Nora during their early periods
> of separation.  Much of the content of the letters was pretty embarrassing for
> the family.  I remember thinking as I was reading some of it, "Did I
> **really**  need to know that?"  I decided I didn't.  The hell with
> scholarship.  I don't need most of Joyce's letters to understand the content
> of his fiction, and his is probably more consciously autobiographical than
> that of most authors.

I agree. I'm a huge Joyce fan and I didn't consciously seek out the letters, but
Brenda Maddox incorporated them into her biography of his wife Nora, which is a
great book, so tightly, but even though it was embarrassing to read the letters I
could tell that she was trying to make all sorts of psychological connections with
his personal habits and the metastructure of his text which might genuinely be
something which might enrich the reading experience of the reader. However, some
(like me) would call it rationalization, some would call it being voyeurism. After
I finished the book I noticed that my fervor for wanting to study Joyce became
very recessed and pretty much satiated my appetite for whatever groupie
inclinations I ever had for him.

It's a very difficult thing for a creative artist to share their soul with the
world anyway, yet when the general populace believes that since you're willing to
do that that they have rights to each and every scrap of writing you ever wrote
down simply because it's words...well, that's when words become fetish objects and
you find yourself obsessing on things that is just another form of trainspotting.
And it's really not that much of a stretch from there to having the mindset of the
paparazzi and having the obsessive need to fill what one believes are the empty
holes in their lives with what they believe are the filled holes in the lives of
those they worship.

> I don't see how reading Pynchon's letters will lend
> insight into _Mason and Dixon_, and if it helps us understand other works like
> _V_ or _Vineland_, great, but I think all we'll really discover is where he
> got some of his ideas from.

> I'd come down on the side of never seeing the letters at all.

I agree. Look at this stupid Clinton flap. Isn't any amount of privacy sacred
anymore? Have we reached the zenith of our species spiritual evolution at the high
school level of whispering in the halls? And what does it have to do with the
price of rice in China, anyway?

Malcolm