Subject: Re: father, dear father, come home with me now ....
From: Otto Sell (o.sell@telda.net)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 05:15:09 GMT
Cecilia and Scotty,
of course you're both right. When I read that someone is trying to makes
money of publishing his love-letters it's no wonder that his daughter is
joining the circus. Scottie has pointed out the pretty contradiction between
his literature and his reclusive life. All this raises general questions of
the relation of writing and living.
Salman Rushdie, who is reclusive due to the well-known circumstances, but
loves to be in public, lets his narrator say in "Midnight's Children" that
family history has it's "proper dietary laws" and it seems that Peggy wasn't
aware of this.
Anyway, most of our "great" literature from the Greeks on is some sort of
family history. Even our continent is named after the object of desire of
Godfather Zeus in one of his adulteries.
I've gone through the articles on
http://www.infoculture.cbc.ca/ and on
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59395-2000Aug31.html and all
this gives me the impression that if JDS occasionally had published one of
those 15 books he's got in his safe the interest for Peggy's book wouldn't
be so great. If not for scholarly reasons to get some information about his
(published) books my morning coffee tells me that I tend to Cecilia's
opinion. But of course I will read it someday. If it's simply "a blow
beneath the belt" -what I don't believe- like Jonathan Yardley concludes it
will get pretty cheap in relatively short time . . . If Yardsley is right
there seems to be an editoring-problem here, someone who should 've
told her what is ok in a book and what is going too far.
Telling about the the sexual frequency of her parents is simply disgusting.
Another thing is the war - I assume that JDS is (or was) suffering from a
posttraumatic stress disorder as presented in the Bananafish-story.
I'm not really interested in the life of an author as far it's not important
to understand what he/she has written but "reclusiveness" was the topic
which brought me here because Peggy's book had been mentioned on the Pynchon
mailing list at http://www.waste.org/pynchon-l/. Reclusiveness is what both
authors got in common and, as the Pynchon- and the Lady Di cases prove, the
man-hunt that turns journalists into papparazzi sometimes leads to
absurdities (a postman presenting TRP's californian driver's license) and
even death. So it's absolutely legitimate for people who write or who are
somewhat VIP trying to protect at least some kind of privacy. But pushing
this to the extreme promotes opposite reactions like "Dream Catcher."
Otto
PS Jackson Pynchon is just at the age of reading Harry Potter.
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