Bill Buford: GRAFFITI
The literary news in New York has been of acquisitions. The most noteworthy, of course, is the acquisition of Random House by Bertelman’s.
The Pierpont Morgan library has just been given a gift of rare “American literary properties” collected by Carter Burden, a New York businessman with an interest in the media who was a manuscript and book collector and, by the time of his death last year, had collected more than 30E000 such American properties, estimated to be worth many millions.
Among the collection are a number of curiosities: the journal Tennessee Williams kept while writing Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and the early poems of William Faulkner. But the prize of the collection is a package of 120 letters that Thomas Pynchon wrote to his literary agent, Candida Donadio. Pynchon is the famously reclusive author of V, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. It’s possible that we know less about him, our contemporary, than, say, William Shakespeare. And now, suddenly, these letters.
They begin in 1963 and are postmarked London, Mexico, California, Texas. They are often about the business of writing, and reveal an author who, like most authors, has violent mood swings of confidence and self-doubt. At one point, after the publication of V, Pynchon says that he is writing four different novels at once and “if they can come out on paper anything like what they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium”. A little later, he wonders why he should be writing at all.
There are obsessions: his privacy, predictably; the movies: the man is a film nut. And a voracious reader, who is interested in the work of his peers and (an exceptional thing for an American writer) not threatened by it. Somehow, even when he was in Mexico, he was getting new novels before they were published, which he read quickly with a greedy appetite.
Pynchon is astonished by a book by John Cheever, the chronicler of the New England suburbs, as he is by a new book by Gore Vidal. And – this was a surprise for me – Pynchon is a tremendous fan of John Le Carr.
And, for all his privacy and his reluctance to promote his own work, Pynchon is always generous in what he is prepared to do for other writers, especially younger ones. The letters are full of his endorsements, his “blurbs”, his lines of encouragement.
They end abruptly on January 5 1982, when Donadio received the following: “As of this date, you are no longer authorised to represent me or my work. Cordially, Thomas Pynchon.” Donadio is curiously taciturn about the matter, claiming that she never talked about Pynchon when she represented him: “He was so terribly private.”
The statement, made last week, is surprising, given that she was prepared to sell a “terribly private” correspondence to Carter Burden for $45E000. What drove Donadio to break a professional commitment to confidentiality that, paradoxically, she seems to believe she is still upholding to this day, even though she had already egregiously broken it?
When Pynchon abandoned the services of his agent, he took up those offered by her assistant. Publishing can be a painfully intimate business; it mixes contracts and deals with the most personal matters of the soul. The heart gets involved.
My suspicion is that Donadio felt betrayed on a level that was so highly charged with strong feeling that she didn’t understand it herself: and the fact that the betrayal involved an assistant who would go on to become Pynchon’s new business partner (and was also to become his lover) reinforced the act of disloyalty.
Still, it was an extraordinary thing for an agent to do – analogous to a celebrity divorce lawyer handing over his most confidential notes. It’s just not done.
Most of this information about Pynchon’s letters I got from a long conversation with a New York Times reporter named Mel Gussow. Gussow is the only person – outside the library – who has read the correspondence. He wrote an article, from which Pynchon learned, for the first time, that his correspondence had been sold, and he dispatched his lawyer Jeremy Nussbaum to see if he could get the letters back.
The letters would not be returned: they are no longer Pynchon’s property. But the library agreed that they would be put away until Pynchon had died. Ah, shucks, I said, when I went round there last week. So I’m too late? What about a little peek?
The librarians shook their heads. Even if I take off my glasses? No, no, they chuckled.
What if I stand on the far side of the room, without my glasses, and you hold them in front of the mirror? No, the personal correspondence of Thomas Pynchon has now disappeared. And maybe that is as it should be.
*Krisjan Lemmer spent way too much time exercising his drinking arm at the Dorsbult Bar this week. His doctor has booked his arm off for a week, which prevented him from filing his copy.
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