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B I G game

Pynchon hunters find it frighteningly easy to track and catch their prey.

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BY DAVID BOWMAN

I saw a recent photo of Thomas Pynchon the other day and was shaken by the experience.

Thomas Pynchon will be considered one of the most important figures in the 20th century, if not for his writing, then for his four-decade eluding of the media. The only man who hid as well was Howard Hughes during his decline, but he was a billionaire. Pynchon, a simple novelist, has become the 20th century's last Wizard of Oz, as in "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

By the time I was 20, I'd read Pynchon's masterpiece, "Gravity's Rainbow," twice. For 20 years I've been intrigued by Thomas Pynchon and his intentionally unintentional mystique. I even met and ended up having lunch a half-dozen times with Pynchon's editor, Ray Roberts. Roberts revealed nothing to me about his Garboesque writer. Actually, Pynchon is even more extreme than Garbo. We've always known what the Swede looked like, but for Pynchon, all we have is a ridiculous yearbook photograph depicting a horse-jawed, ungainly kid. Through the years, police-style sketch artists have tried to draw what the aged hipster might look like now -- but these portraits never satisfy. There was a back-of-the-head shot published a few years ago in New York magazine, along with a full-length, long-shot photo recently published in London and South Africa. But you can't get any sense of Pynchon's countenance from these images. He might as well be the Man in the Iron Mask. The Phantom of the Opera. Batman. Then, yesterday, a video engineer from NBC gave me a videotape of Thomas Pynchon.

We've reached the point where we apparently know everything about everyone. We know about the president's crooked penis and coded love ties. This fall we'll learn (from the memoir of his former lover, Joyce Maynard) that J.D. Salinger has a thing for peas and for upchucking ice cream. Speaking of that writer, it seems absurd that anyone could have assumed Salinger was Pynchon. Remember when John Calvin Batchelor claimed he'd discovered that in the defunct SoHo News? "No one told me I was crazy when I started this investigation," I once overheard Batchelor say. "Everyone just said, 'I can't talk about it.' So I took that silence as encouragement that I was on the right track."

We know how wrong he was. Even before New York magazine "outed" Pynchon, everyone in publishing knew he was married to his agent, Melanie Jackson. That they have a son named Jackson Pynchon. That they live in the Upper West Side -- although false rumors had them in SoHo and Brooklyn Heights. But everyone knew he was a resident of New York City. Everyone knew that he did what all writers in Manhattan do: lunch. He did lunch with his editor, Roberts. He did lunch with Don DeLillo. Back when "Vineland" had just been published, critic/novelist Walter Kirn was given the assignment to do a "finding Thomas Pynchon" story for Esquire. Kirn was enthusiastic. He imagined traveling the country as a literary bounty hunter, having strange encounters. Secret meetings. Dead ends. Drama! He mentioned the assignment to a Knopf editor who opened his Rolodex and gave Kirn Pynchon's address on the Upper West Side, saying, "You don't want to do this. Leave him alone." Kirn dropped the search before he even started it. It had been too easy.

Just last month, I was talking about Pynchon to an editor (not at Knopf) who said, "Wait a minute. I have photocopies of some of his letters." The editor then sent me copies of letters written from 1960 to 1962 between Pynchon and Corlies M. Smith, the editor of "V." That correspondence unintentionally brings up the link between Salinger and Pynchon again: After biographer Ian Hamilton's miserable experience writing a biography of Salinger and being sued by his subject, it's now illegal to quote a writer's letters in print without permission (although once Salinger had taken Hamilton to court, the New York Times could quote the letters -- they'd become news). I've since discovered that these letters (which I can't quote to you) have the status of the Holy Grail to Pynchonmaniacs, who'll pay $100 to $500 for 'em.

So, as They say, the truth is out there. Pynchon's "cone" of invisibility only extends to those outside publishing circles. But some formidable forces stand out in that cold. When "Mason & Dixon" was published last year, CNN sent a camera crew to Pynchon's street to capture him on video. It was kid stuff. It only took an afternoon. "Look! There he is!" Then Pynchon saw the cameras with CNN stenciled on them and scurried away, ducking behind trees and lamp posts.

What to do? This footage must not be aired! But who in publishing was big enough to stop CNN? I've heard rumors of various ex-girlfriends of Pynchon writing tell-alls about the author that are squashed before the proposals even get circulated, but this was network television -- Ray Roberts would be little help with this. Apparently the author himself called CNN, pleading that they not broadcast the footage. Corporate phone lines sizzled around the country -- with the result that CNN only aired a half-dozen different shots of Manhattan pedestrians strolling down what the chirpy male voice-over identified as Pynchon's street. When the montage finished, the voice revealed that Pynchon himself appeared in one of the clips.

Word got out the day of the broadcast. A clerk at St. Marks Bookstore told me he had videotaped the repeat at midnight. And there it was. "If you watch it in slow motion you can see him," the young man told me. "Although my video player isn't that good. The image is grainy and it jiggles."

Ah, but I know a Pynchon fanatic who works for NBC television. He gave me a CNN tape that had been doctored using state-of-the-art technology. It slowed and magnified Pynchon with the clarity of a Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photograph.

There he was.

Thomas Pynchon appears pretty sprightly for an old guy of 60. He wears a red baseball cap with some swirling Asian calligraphy on it. He has a white mustache. His former barn door smile is apparently long fixed, but the construction of his upper palate is still askew. He sports plain wire-frame glasses. Gray hair -- a little unkempt, needs barbering. Gray jacket. Gray shirt. He's just a guy. I watched the tape over and over while a monstrous voice boomed in my head: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

Thomas Pynchon is just a writer -- hardly in the same realm of secrecy and intrigue as master terrorist Osama bin Laden. And I was both thankful and saddened by seeing his face. Now his books are less like icons, and more like books, and that's good. But it's too bad CNN had to run the man to the ground for this. And someone told someone who told someone who told me that an employee at a bank security firm is attempting to sell security photos of the novelist -- taken by Pynchon's ATM.

Now, I'm not mistaking a video image of Pynchon's face for the real thing. After all, even the Medusa could be safely glimpsed via a reflection. I wouldn't turn away if I had a chance to see Pynchon in the flesh -- like, say, we were in the same restaurant having lunch. All of us know thousands of faces intimately that we've never seen in the flesh. I now know Pynchon as well as I know Greta Garbo. Abraham Lincoln. Fred Flintsone. Which is good enough. But finally, I'm still left a little sad. For me, the 20th century is over early -- the last free man has been hunted and trussed.
SALON | Sept. 22, 1998

David Bowman is the author of the novel "Bunny Modern."