Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (18 page)
Six months had passed since he had received his MFA. Little had gone right in that time and nothing had gotten written. He finally recognized that he had a drug and alcohol problem. In February, he began going to weekly sobriety meetings. Wallace would later tell friends he enjoyed them and also that he could see that what they were asking him to do was extremely hard. He had smoked pot heavily for most of the past decade. Pot had opened the door for him as a writer. Now he was targeting it in the hopes his life, haunted by anxiety, failed relationships, and a feeling that he could no longer write well, would improve.
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One comfort was that his story collection would be out in the fall. Alice Turner had bought the Letterman story for
Playboy
and
Conjunctions
, a literary journal, had even taken “John Billy,” the Gass homage. All seemed aligned for
Girl with Curious Hair
to appear, a second book from this promising young author.
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Instead, things were about to get worse. Shortly before the Letterman story went to press, a different editor at
Playboy
had happened to watch a rerun of a Letterman show and been amazed to hear some of the dialogue from the story spoken by the actress Susan Saint James. He passed the news on to Turner, who, astonished, reported the lift to the magazine’s lawyers. For Wallace to take dialogue from a living person was a legal problem on many levels, not least because the character, also called Susan in the story, has an addiction to Xanax. (Wallace would later explain to the lawyers that the detail came from his own addiction at the time.)
The lawyers at
Playboy
told everyone to just stay quiet and hope for the best—it was too late to make changes in the story and likely no one would notice. All that happened on the
Playboy
side was Turner sent Wallace a furious letter. “Much fiction,” she wrote him, “is based on fact; as an experienced editor, I know how to deal with that.” She warned him that his reputation was at severe risk; that writers who committed plagiarism were never forgiven. “I hope this letter scares you,” she concluded. “It’s meant to scare you.”
The June 1988 issue of
Playboy
came out, the story ran, was well received, and nobody representing Saint James ever contacted the magazine.
But
Playboy
had also passed on the news to Viking Penguin that Wallace had not told them about lifting the material. Gerry Howard defended his author. (He suggested, for instance, to Turner that the whole thing was a “postmodernist prank.”) But Viking Penguin had recently suffered two expensive lawsuits and was not eager to take any chances. The publishers’ lawyers asked Howard to ask Wallace about the real-life models for stories in the collection. They wanted the source of every fact and assertion, paragraph by paragraph. Howard remembers it as “the literary equivalent of a strip search….‘Spread ’em.’”
From his parents’ house, Wallace became a writer in reverse, laying bare sources of fiction some of which he’d written two years before. He whipped off an eighteen-page response to Howard.
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He was still not sure how much trouble he was in. In his letter he tried at times to be coy:
p. 148 David Letterman has never to my knowledge said “Some fun now, boy”—at various intervals or not. It is, though, weirdly just the sort of thing he’d say.
Other places he was apologetic. He admitted he’d seen Saint James on Letterman in late 1986 or early 1987 and had thought her appearance might be
a neat device for exploring both the way Letterman’s program’s humor and interaction worked and the feelings a mildly famous person who must confront, publicly, the fact that her fame is and is deservedly mild must be experiencing.
While admitting that the essence of the story had been taken from real life, Wallace was disingenuous about the implications:
While the main character is in no way supposed to represent the person Susan St. James, her interview with Letterman, their discussion of the Oreo subject, and her way of insisting to Letterman (with
much more sarcasm than is in the story) that she did the commercials for fun is truly both a subject of the story and a purloined piece of actual public data. That this might suggest to people that the story is “about” Ms. St. James the person never crossed my mind.
He remembered Turner’s asking him where he’d gotten the dialogue for the story from but said it just “did not occur to me as a thing to tell about.” Nor had he thought to mention the source of the protagonist’s name, Susan—“a colossal boner.” There was, he admitted, giving up, “at least a line a page that’s either lifted or I just don’t remember.”
“My Appearance,” he knew, was a lost cause: “In terms of legality and fairness to editors, it’s a fucked piece of work,” he wrote Howard. But he continued to fight for the other stories in the collection, where he felt less indebted to real-life models. He annotated “Little Expressionless Animals” for Howard:
p. 11—John Updike is the name of a real writer whom the character Julie dislikes a lot.
p. 20—Some of the tics mentioned here, i.e. antipathy toward digital watches and caffeine, fear of flickering fluorescence, are tics of girls I’ve gone out with.
And when he came to his beloved “Westward,” his wit revived:
p. 260—Kierkegaard is long dead, and I think his ideas are public domain—either that or a lot of professors everywhere are doing actionable stuff.
Behind the snark there was also a germ of true confusion, of mystification. If you were exploring the nature of reality, especially media reality, didn’t you have to enfold that reality in your work? Since he was a boy, Wallace had expected to know the reason behind the rules. Why could you use the names of characters from “Lost in the Funhouse” in one story, he asked Howard now, but not incidents from a Letterman show in another? “Maybe I’m stupid; I don’t see the difference.” Howard passed on the long letter to the lawyers for Viking Penguin. The stories were riddled
with legal issues; Wallace had proven anything but reliable; short stories were not moneymakers. Though galleys had already been printed, they decided not to go ahead with publication, to its editor’s and author’s horror. “They didn’t even think they were gonna lose, they just thought they’d get sued,” Wallace complained to an interviewer almost a decade later, still appalled:
They invoked the principle of what they called the right of publicity. Not right to privacy, but a right to publicity, such that publishing the
Jeopardy!
story would be the equivalent of my capitalizing on a physical resemblance to Pat Sajak—like running around at mall openings
as
Pat Sajak, and receiving income that was rightfully his. Which seemed to me so utterly bizarre.
He had a point. What had he done besides what a writer must do? He had taken several entertainments most Americans were so familiar with that they could not see how important they were and showed why they mattered. He had pointed out toxins in the culture and warned readers against them. He had been enormously but not falsely entertaining. Far from trying to make money off Pat Sajak’s or David Letterman’s reputations, he had showed how they made money off of us, off of our flaccid idea of humor and our corrupted sense of self. And for this he had received an unceremonious dumping.
The turn of events would be a terrible blow to any writer, but to Wallace, who felt he had traveled so far in his work from
Broom
, it was particularly devastating. The demise of “Westward” was especially upsetting, as it had found no magazine publisher. He had written a suicide note that no one would ever read. But even as this debacle was unfolding, Wallace was pushing forward with his career. While he had been teaching at Amherst, he had gotten a request from the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
, a small avant-garde journal, to contribute a piece to their “Novelist as Critic” issue. Other participants included Gilbert Sorrentino and Barth himself. Wallace was to represent the younger generation, his pay $250. He found the company “daunting…but that obviously makes the whole thing an honor,” as he wrote to the editor, Steven Moore.
Wallace responded with a long essay, “Fictional Futures and the
Conspicuously Young.” For those who had read only the soufflé-light
Broom
, the intensity with which he explicated the current malaise writers found themselves in might well have come as a surprise. “Our generation,” Wallace began, “is lucky enough to have been born into an artistic climate as stormy and exciting as anything since Pound and Co. turned the world-before-last on its head.” In his view, the key force in this unstable environment was the ubiquity of television, which creative writers and their teachers had not yet grasped fully:
The American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be
lived with
, not just looked at. Our parents regard the set rather as the Flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For us, their children, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it.
There was more than a bit of self-reference in this point: if anyone couldn’t imagine life without TV, it was Wallace. But the personal was becoming the societal for Wallace, and in his cosmology, TV was an enormous force. It had already remade narrative by breaking stories up into short, palatable, and reassuring segments. Everything from our myths to our relationships was succumbing to this great dispenser of pabulum.
Wallace believed the “three dreary camps” of current fiction writers corresponded to three different responses to this insidious force. One camp consisted of the young hip brat pack writers like McInerney and Ellis, whom he defined as practicing “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-figure Uppies and their salon-tanned, morally vacant offspring.” A second camp were the minimalists. He characterized their style as “Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver.” And the third was just about every other writer he’d ever read, especially those favored by his teachers at Arizona. These writers practiced
Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words “competent,” “finished,” “problem-free”: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean
metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to “show” what’s “told”; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag [sic] on any Macintosh.
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Wallace allowed that some critics might see minimalism or postmodernism as attempts to escape the prison of modern television-shaped reality, but he argued forcefully that they were each too limited to solve the problem:
Both these forms strike me as simple engines of self-reference (Metafiction overtly so, Minimalism a bit sneakier); they are primitive, crude, and seem already to have reached the Clang-Bird-esque horizon of their own possibility.
For Wallace, the great flaw of most fiction was that it was content to display the symptoms of the current malaise rather than to solve it. Wallace wasn’t even sure exactly what fiction that surmounted television-mediated reality would look like, but he believed that any writer who figured it out would sound different from one who didn’t:
If one can stomach a good dose of simplification…there can be seen one deep feature shared by all the cutting-edge fiction that resonates with the post-Hiroshima revolution. That is its fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread. Its unblinking recognition of the fact that the relations between literary artist, literary language, and literary artifact are vastly more complex and powerful than has been realized hitherto. And the insight that is courage’s reward—that it is precisely in those tangled relations that a forward-looking, fertile literary value may well reside.
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Of course readers who knew his recent work from magazines would realize that this wasn’t a bad description of the stories Wallace had collected in
Girl with Curious Hair
, but Wallace could hardly put himself forward as an ideal anymore: he wasn’t writing and even worse, just as the article was
appearing, it was becoming clear the volume of stories his essay was meant to gloss were not going to come out. His prolegomenon would have no follow-up.
As the spring of 1988 passed, Wallace’s thoughts turned again to Arizona. If he could get back there, he became increasingly hopeful, he could return to the work and the pleasure in the work he had known during his previous stay. Even if the creative writing professors at the university there did not want him, the undergraduate writing program staff still remembered his extraordinary teaching and the award he’d gotten. They were happy to have him back as an instructor, to start in the fall. Wallace decided to go west in May, rather than spend the summer months as an overgrown child in his parents’ house. “I miss the heat and the plethora of feminine pulchritude,” he wrote Corey Washington, acknowledging that “I return less than triumphant to Tucson.”
In Tucson, Wallace first stayed with Heather Aronson’s sister Jaci, in a house with a swamp cooler. He slept in the living room, where there was a stereo, so he could listen to meditation tapes he had brought. He ate all the Pop-Tarts in the house and tried to give his hostess money for them and never unpacked his computer, saying he was worried about the humidity.
With Heather’s help, Monica’s, a local bakery, hired him. His job was to come in early and prepare the sourdough bread for baking. The proprietors loved his company, Aronson remembers—Wallace could turn on his “jus’ folks” quality when he wanted to. And he found relief in the physical labor—it requires a lot of upper body strength to stir sourdough mixture. “I mark time by the number of headbands I soak and have to put in the sink,” he wrote Nadell in July, with some satisfaction. But within he was unhappy, nervous, and felt now like whatever could go wrong would. He wanted to know what had happened to the
Jeopardy!
story that the
Paris Review
had taken almost a year before. It had been awarded the John Train humor prize and $1,500, money he could use. “Do you suppose,” he asked his agent, “they decided I was playing a joke on them with the story and decided to play an even crueler one on me?” He did not realize or had forgotten that the story had come out in the spring, while he was explaining himself to the Viking Penguin lawyers.