07 June 1998

Lifestyle

Who the hell is he?

Cult American author Thomas Pynchon is famous for his attempts to avoid his own celebrity. But his legendary pursuit of privacy has only served to increase his fame. JAMES BONE set out on the Pynchon trail

TO WRITE about Thomas Pynchon is to be drawn a quasi-cult of over-educated oddballs who hold furious debates on the Internet and pass around artists' impressions of how he might look, as though they were samizdats of the Soviet era.

An extensive folklore has grown up around supposed Pynchon sightings, with the author appearing incognito at readings of his work or pacing the Mason-Dixon line for research.

A collection of letters sent by a purported Russian émigré bag lady to a northern California newspaper has recently been published in book form simply on the strength of suspicions that the correspondent, Wanda Tinasky, was in fact Pynchon - although it has been officially denied.

"Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength," Pynchon once complained to a friend.

If not a card-carrying Pynchonite, I consider myself a confirmed admirer of his work. It can fairly be said that our world is Pynchonian - cartoonish yet epic, conspiratorial, paranoid and always beyond our ken - in the same way an earlier period was considered Kafkaesque.

I became a fan the moment, 15 years ago, I read that unforgettable first sentence of his masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow: "A screaming comes across the sky."

Pynchon's canon comprises only five novels - V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and the recent Mason and Dixon - plus a collection of early fiction, Slow Learner, and a limited number of miscellaneous writings ranging from an essay on sloth for The New York Times Book Review to the liner notes to a CD by his favourite indie rock band, Lotion.

Many of Pynchon's novels share the theme of a quest, a search for what is meaningless or at least beyond comprehension. V involves the pursuit of a phantom cipher which seems to mutate from chapter to chapter, being at times a woman (named Victoria Wren in Cairo in 1898, or Vera Meroving in South West Africa in 1922, or Veronica Manganese in Malta in 1919 or just V in the Paris in 1913), and at other times appearing as Venus, Vesuvius, the Vatican, Valletta, Venezuela, a fantasy land named VheissuO, Veronica the sewer rat or Queen Victoria.

The Crying of Lot 49 pursues the traces in the present day of a medieval secret society called the Tristero. Gravity's Rainbow is a pilgrim's progress across a war-ravaged Europe in search of the mysteries of the V-2 rocket (that's right: V-2).

Mason and Dixon, his latest work, rumoured to have been in progress for 20 years, picks up the theme by describing the "westering" expedition of the 18th-century surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they try to chart the undefined border between Pennsylvania and Maryland - soon to become a fault line of history in the American Civil War.

This is one of those rare cases in journalism in which getting the story is the story. I began my quest in the obvious way. I rang Pynchon's publicist. Yes, in the post-modern publishing industry, even Pynchon has a publicist. She is Cathy Melnicki of Holt and Co, his New York publishing house.

Just 26, Melnicki confesses that she has never met her client and has "no author to serve up" to promote the latest novel. Pynchon, it goes without saying, will make no book tours and conduct no publicity interviews with the major metropolitan dailies to boost sales.

The known facts are these: Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, on May 8 1937 into an old Yankee family perhaps best categorised as nouveau pauvre. The clan has been traced back to a Thomas Ruggles Pynchon in 11th-century England, and it seems that the first Pynchons arrived in the New World in 1630 with William Pynchon, whose religious tract The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was condemned to be burned by the ruling New England Puritans.

Many generations later, Pynchon, the writer of our time, won a scholarship to Cornell University. He started to read for a degree in engineering physics, but switched to English after a spell in the US navy, studying under the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

An aspiring Beatnik, he had his first short fiction published in the undergraduate literary magazine The Cornell Writer.

By Pynchon's standards, the introduction he wrote many years later to Slow Learner is deeply revelatory. He wrote: "Like others, I spent a lot of time in jazz clubs, nursing the two-beer minimum. I put on horn-rimmed sunglasses at night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange attire. I was hugely tickled by all forms of marijuana humour, though the talk back then was in inverse relation to the availability of that useful substance."

Pynchon achieved his BA in June 1960 "with distinction in all subjects", and went to live in New York's swinging Greenwich Village. But he soon forsook Bohemia for Boeing, taking a job on an in-house journal produced by the aeronautical giant in Seattle.

V appeared to acclaim in 1963, winning the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year.

Then Pynchon effectively disappeared. When Gravity's Rainbow won a leading literary prize in 1975, he sent a comedian to tell the academy: "The Howells Medal is a great honour, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation too. But I don't want it."

It is common knowledge that Pynchon is married to his literary agent, Melanie Jackson, and that they have a young son, named Jackson. But Pynchon's whereabouts remained a mystery. Because Vineland is set in northern California, it was assumed that he was living there in some lost outpost of the counter-culture. But Pynchon surfaced fleetingly last year when New York magazine printed a photograph of him on a Manhattan street, taken from behind.

The only public celebration of the launch of Mason and Dixon in New York was a suitably Pynchonian event organised by the writer Melvin Bukiet at KGB, the smoky literary bar he owns in the East Village.

Bukiet, who paid a sly homage to Pynchon by appropriating a character from Gravity's Rainbow for his latest novel, Affair, hit on the happy idea of holding a "Pynchon Imitators Contest". Since nobody present would, presumably, ever have seen Pynchon, most of the contestants were literary mimics rather than lookalikes.

The prank brought together such a collection of Pynchonophiles as can seldom have been together in one room. (Interestingly, the age of Pynchon fans never changes. The novelist may get inexorably older, but his followers remain ever in their 20s and early 30s.) For my purpose, I had found Ground Zero of the Pynchon underworld.

Sprawled on a bar chair in the midst of the hubbub was one Dale Larson, an example of the trendy hi-tech entrepreneurs who populate the literary scene these days. Larson had a tale to tell. Back in the early 70s, Pynchon's best friend at college, Jules Siegel, had broken the code of silence observed by the writer's clique and written a now infamous article for Playboy magazine entitled Who is Thomas Pynchon and why did he take off with my wife?

Pynchon had eloped with Siegel's dazzling second wife, Chrissie Jolly, so Siegel was ready to spill the beans. Drawing on his conversations about the affair, Siegel wrote: "He was a wonderful lover, sensitive and quick with the ability to project a mood that turned the most ordinary surroundings into a scene out of a masterful film. . . Still, she found him unworldly and bookish."

Not unlike Pynchon, Siegel also fled to Mexico to escape the bulldozer of American culture. After 15 years in a retreat on an "island in an island" near Acapulco, he recently re-emerged by joining the Internet discussion group known as the PynchonList. His personal recollections about Pynchon provoked fury among the author's acolytes and Larson was planning to produce a book about Siegel's odyssey in cyberspace.

He pulled out the galleys of a book entitled Lineland (a lame pun on Pynchon's own Vineland). A pencil sketch immediately caught my eye. It was an artist's impression of Pynchon as he would look in 1997 by an illustrator named Christine Wexler - the former Chrissie Jolly.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed a towering vaudevillian character enter the bar full of Pynchon-lovers. Clad in a baggy raincoat, floppy hat and sunglasses, the man made a single circumnavigation of the crowd and went to sit on a stool at the back, disrobing down to a rumpled white dinner jacket. Although it was 8.30pm in a smoke-filled room, he kept his sunglasses on. For the merest moment, I considered the possibility that Pynchon, as the rumours hold, might have turned up in disguise. The photographer accompanying me snapped one picture before the mystery man turned away.

I should have known, of course, that the mystery man was just another Pynchonian red herring. When the photograph came back from the lab, however, it looked uncannily like Wexler's sketch of Pynchon: the hairline with the parting just off-centre, the dimpled chin, the buck mouth. He looked splendidly louche, just as one might imagine a great novelist.

I did not want to take the chance. So I tracked down the former Chrissie Jolly, now living in Texas, the wife of an oil industry executive. Wexler dated Pynchon for almost a year when she was 18 and he was about 30. Although she has not seen him in many years, she stayed in touch by calling his father's house in Long Island, New York, every year on Christmas Day, relying on Pynchon senior to pass the telephone message to his son. That arrangement ended when Pynchon père died in 1995, and she has not spoken to the novelist since.

Wexler evidently regards her former lover's reclusiveness as a foible of which he ought to be cured. She has her own theories about why he is so publicity-shy, but asked that they not be printed.

On seeing the photograph of the mystery man in the KGB bar, she immediately declared him an impostor. "Too low-rent," she said.

Pynchon would never wear a white tuxedo, she explained. His taste ran to army surplus. From talking to her, I got a good grasp on Pynchon's personality, although much of it can be gleaned from his prose - and, more importantly, his likely appearance. (It was Wexler who eventually authenticated the photograph of the author printed here.)

"He is more than highbrow," she declared. "He is the highest of broweries."

A tantalising half-sentence in New York magazine mentioned that it had located Pynchon through an "openly accessible online service". Not discouraged by the spoof in the bar, I decided to persevere, placing my hopes in the Internet. Within hours, I had a list of all the Thomas R Pynchons in America based on an exhaustive search of such public records as driving licences and birth certificates. One entry carried the name of Thomas R Pynchon Junior and gave an address in Manhattan.

Calculating that writers are creatures of habit, I decided that Pynchon probably wrote in the morning and ventured out each afternoon to pick up his son from school. Sticking a cheap point-and-click camera in my pocket just in case, I rode the subway to inspect the address I had found. New York magazine had mentioned certain local landmarks: a bagel shop, a church, a discount department store, a fruit stand. Reassuringly, all were just where they were meant to be.

Very early in Mason and Dixon, Pynchon makes a bitter reference to "one of the least tolerable offenses in that era. . . the Crime they styl'd 'Anonymity' ".

In 18th-century England, that crime was to post messages publicly without signing them. Pynchon's novels are signed, all right, but the author without a face is clearly guilty of the latter-day Crime of Anonymity.

There was I on the street corner, an improvised paparazzo, Instamatic in hand, the representative of the opposing pole of our voyeuristic culture, ready, so to speak, to bring him to book. As I loitered, I pondered the philosophical question of whether my intrusion into his life was any worse than his wholesale plunder of the lives of Mason and Dixon, who are, after all, dead and therefore unable to protect themselves.

Schools in New York disgorge their charges at 3pm. Pynchon arrived like clockwork at 3.05pm. The moment I saw his tall, ungainly frame, child in tow, gesticulating to a fellow parent, I recognised him as the elusive author.

He looks as I imagine Don Quixote would do tilting at the windmills: angular, aristocratic, but somehow clownish. He wore a black (army surplus?) anorak with the hood up despite the sunshine. (In that way, he really did resemble the police sketch on the Wanted poster for the Unabomber.) As he ambled closer, I could see his elongated snout and brush moustache, teeth asplay, like a Ralph Steadman caricature.

It struck me that there was something massively silly about a grown man mounting such a charade. I stepped boldly forward, aimed - aware that in this instant a charge would leap between our two opposite poles, not a thunderbolt, nor the force of Gravity's Rainbow, but something more profound than the simple ray of light that entered my $30 lens.

Pynchon tried to brazen it out, feigning disregard, hoping I was just another tourist in these parts. I clicked.

Panicked, he swivelled sharply and beetled away at right angles towards the kerb. I manoeuvred in front of him again and, like a boxer on the ropes, he bobbed to avoid the next blow, throwing his arm across his face.

Thus covered, a cocoon, swaddled in anorak, he strode away across the street. Again he tried to bluff that nothing had happened. But the world was already different. The game of hide-and-seek was done. The inevitable had occurred. I loafed after him across the intersection, unsure if I should consider myself iconographer or iconoclast.

My paparazzi instincts had betrayed me. I got no shots of Pynchon's flight as a professional shutterbug would have done. Yet that single click of my plastic camera trapped the first known image of Pynchon's face for more than 40 years. What would his reaction be? Would he have a comment canned, ready to be served?

Pynchon was agitated. He looked forlorn. For a flash, I recalled the expression on the faces of peasant women in poor counties when a tourist from a richer land snaps their portrait to take back home. I extended my hand to placate him, a gesture of reassurance.

At last, the great novelist spoke: "Get your fucking hand away from me," he bellowed. "I don't like people taking my picture!" - © The Times, London

‘He looks as I imagine Don Quixote would do tilting at the windmills: angular, aristocratic, but somehow clownish’

CANDID CAMERA: James Bone’s paparazzi-style point-and-snap is the first published photograph of Thomas Pynchon for more than 40 years.