The Bushes: Back to Camelot!; No, It Wasn't Thomas Pynchon; Head for Harlem
The way its members behave, the Bush family presages a return to the Camelot years. Can any of the Bush men keep their pants on? Quite aside from the rumors swirling around Gov. Jebby and the Medusa Harris, the comportment of Jeb's sons Jorge and John remind one of the brutish cavortings of those Kennedy lads so many years ago. Can Chappaquiddick be far behind?
Jorge, who was, you'll recall, the subject in early August of adoring profiles in our national press hailing him as the bright rising star of Clan Bush, was involved in a 1994 incident described in a Metro-Dade police department report that surfaced on the Smoking Gun website. "On Dec. 31 1994 Bush showed up at 4 a.m. at the Miami home of a former girlfriend. He proceeded to break into the house via the woman's bedroom window, and then began arguing with the ex's father. Bush, then a Rice university student, soon fled the scene. But he returned 20 mins later to drive his Ford Explorer across the home's front lawn leaving wide swaths of burned grass in his wake. Young Bush avoided arrest when the victims declined to press charges."
Revisiting the Smoking Gun site, one finds that on Oct. 7 of this year Gov. Jeb's other young'un, John "Jebby" Bush, was caught humping away in the front seat of his Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of a Tallahassee mall by security guards. According to the TPD report, mall security noticed "fogged up windows" and found them naked from the waists down, except for Bush, who was wearing "socks." Ah, those patrician Bushes. Breeding will out.
It all seemed to hang together. Tinasky, self-presented as an 80-something derelict bag lady living under a bridge outside the coastal lumber town Fort Bragg, wrote in an allusive, knowing, somewhat campy style that could easily be deemed "Pynchonesque." "It is a bas canard," Tinasky would screech in her typewritten letters, "or in the Queen's English, a duck fart, that I am an alcoholic escapee from a mental institution."
For Pynchon cultists it was entrancing to think of their hero commenting mordantly on the politico-literary life in Mendocino County. Scholiasts found parallels in phrases from Pynchon's novels and Tinasky's letters. Connoisseurs of the literary wars that raged through Mendocino found it irresistible to suppose that Wanda/Pynchon was weaving a master narrative of their disputes.
Close friends of mine deemed the Tinasky/Pynchon theory plausible. I was never utterly convinced, primarily because I thought Tinasky was funny, but have always found Pynchon pretty much unreadable. I've bounced off Gravity's Rainbow countless times, and even Vineland, marvelous on a few pages, was impossible to get through. Was Pynchon up to Tinasky's level?
Looking now with the advantages of new hindsight at the annotated Letters of Wanda Tinasky, published by Vers Libre press and available still through Amazon.com, one can see much more clearly that Wanda was way ahead of Pynchon. It was during the preparation of the annotated Letters that Melanie Jackson, Pynchon's wife, issued on behalf of her husband a firm denial of the Pynchon/Tinasky congruence.
The mystery is closed, solved by Don Foster, whose new book Author Unknown, published by Holt, is a must-read. Foster is the Vassar prof who nailed Joe Klein as the "Anonymous" author of Primary Colors. This investigation forms the second chapter of Author Unknown. It's fun and not flattering to Klein. But his chapter on Tinasky is far superior. In fact, for my money, it's a masterpiece of literary detective work, a true comic tragedy.
Foster establishes beyond any conceivable doubt that Wanda Tinasky was in fact Tom Hawkins, born in Arkansas on Jan. 11, 1927, and growing up in Port Angeles, WA, not far from where I write. By the 1960s Hawkins and his wife Kathleen were living in San Francisco, eager to be part of the Beat scene. Inspired by Tuli Kupferberg's Yeah, he put out Freak, an underground "little magazine." He was a fanatic admirer of William Gaddis' The Recognitions, and conceived the theory that Gaddis was one and the same as jack green, publisher of an underground Manhattan periodical called newspaper. Green issued in 1962 as firm a denial as did Melanie Jackson a generation later. Hawkins was not convinced.
Finally Tom Hawkins quit the U.S. Postal Service, and he and Kathleen relocated to Mendocino County, outside Fort Bragg. They had very little money, and Tom was into minor scams like getting replacements from manufacturers of supposedly defective products. They had no car. He grew opium poppies, and would sit in their garden shed knocking out Wanda letters on his Underwood.
Kathleen came into a little bit of money, bought an old truck for Tom and an old Honda for herself. She began to take pottery classes at College of the Redwoods, and produced plates, vases and a series of African masks that Foster tells us still show up in Northern California galleries. Her works were signed with a line drawing of a peacock.
Hawkins wrote his last Wanda letter to the AVA in August 1988. There were no signs of trouble. Foster cites speculations that he might have nursed grudges at Kathleen's newfound freedom. Or his bad back was at him. Or it was the opium poppies.
Three weeks after that last letter he bludgeoned Kathleen to death in his truck. He carried her corpse into his house and mourned over it for several days, until the body began to rot. Then on Sept. 23 he arose and set the house on fire. He got into Kathleen's Honda and drove north up Rte. 1. At high speed Hawkins and Honda soared over the cliffs at Bell Point, plunging down 90 feet onto the rocks below. His decomposed body finally turned up in the surf five miles away.
Those "coincidences" that prompt wild theories that a lefty like Oswald didn't shoot JFK? At the end of his brilliant narrative, Foster offers these final ironic correlations: "A few years ago, selections from jack green's newspaper were republished under the title Fire the Bastards! (1992), edited by Steven Moore. This was the same Steven Moore who wrote the definitive Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1982), and this is the same Steven Moore who (twist upon twist) wrote the foreword to TR Factor's edition of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky."
Moore believed that Tinasky was Pynchon, which reminds me, while I was living in Key West, writing for the AVA about Oswald making a rational leftist bet that it would help Cuba to shoot JFK, Iused to run into Gaddis' ex-wife Judith at cocktail parties. How about that?
Try to get a copy of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. So much better than Vineland, and with Foster's account of Hawkins and that ghastly finale, so much more acridly true about Mendocino County, way station not just for Hawkins but for Jim Jones and other ornaments of the national culture.