Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (25 page)

Or it may have been his idea of the student body at Emerson.

Though the book attracted little notice, Wallace welcomed its appearance. He was happy to have it in his hands at a moment when he had so little else to show for his work. “I’ve gone from thinking it slight and silly to something I want to send to friends,” he wrote Moore, who arranged a review of the book in the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
. Wallace was so poor that Moore gave him a free subscription so he could read the piece. Wallace asked him whether he might help him find a way out of teaching. “I am the best copyeditor I’ve ever seen,” he bragged, wondering if he could make enough at the trade to “move to the midwest and live in a hovel.” Moore responded that the Dalkey Archive at Illinois State University was looking for a publicity director. Wallace begged off, saying he “couldn’t even take prom-rejection in high school.”

The relationship with Karr was not moving forward, becoming another source of anger. Karr and her husband were still living together. She says she had cut off all contact. Still, Wallace thought if he could have Karr, his life would come together. His time in the house of the dead would be over. She worried about his tendency to what he called “black-eyed red-outs.” She took a fellowship at Radcliffe. He went to the Harvard Law Library and wrote her a note explaining how she could divorce her husband and still keep custody of their son and a share of their assets. She showed it to her spouse. One day she looked out her office window to find Wallace cursing her and demanding the return of a Walkman he’d lent her. When she threw it down to him, he took it, stomped off, and put his fist through a car window.

Several months later, in April 1991, he wrote to Markson that he had torn the ligaments in his ankle playing softball and refused the painkillers the doctors offered him, a decision that took “every shred of will I’ve got.” “What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all,” Don Gately thinks in an important scene in
Infinite Jest
, as he lies in the hospital with a gunshot wound, refusing any drugs. “But he could choose not to listen.” Real life was not so heroic: “I am not taking it well,” Wallace remarked
to Markson. “I have substituted chronic complaining for analgesic, and so far it’s worked OK.”
¹³
He walked with crutches but could not sit up, which meant he could not type, which in turn excused him from book reviewing, a relief. He read for pleasure instead, enjoying James Baldwin a lot and Thomas McGuane much less. Walker Percy gave him “the creeps.” He started
The Armies of the Night
by Norman Mailer and hated it, admitting in a letter to Markson that he found the writer “unutterably repulsive. I guess part of his whole charm is his knack for arousing strong reactions. Hitler had the same gift.” He read
Vineland
and discovered his love for Thomas Pynchon was gone, whether because he had changed or his hero had. He wrote Franzen that he found Pynchon’s first novel in nearly two decades “flat and strained and heartbreakingly inferior to his other 3 novels. I get the strong sense he’s spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV—though I tend to get paranoid about this point, for obvious reasons.” Franzen and he were continuing their bumpy version of bonding. He scolded Franzen for moving back to New York City. “The people I’ve known there who’ve led real lives there never seem quite to escape,” he wrote. In response Franzen sought to cheer his friend with a gentle cuff: “I think that eventually you’re going to start doing fiction again and that it will be even better than what you’ve done so far—as funny, as smart, but with some clearer connection to the soul.” He quoted Wallace a poem by Emily Dickinson to underscore his point:

Wallace finished up the academic year amid disappointment. He told people he and Karr were growing closer but she had decided to move with her family to Syracuse, where she had been offered a teaching job. In a postcard to Franzen Wallace recorded his amazement at her departure. “I finally told Mary I’d marry her,” he complained, “and within 3 weeks she’d decided she couldn’t divorce her husband. She’s moving away with him in August. I am not pleased, but there is literally nothing I can do. I am sad.” (She says they were not in contact.) He spent a confused summer
in Boston, pining for Karr. “Nothing is new,” he wrote to a college friend, “I go to…meetings, volunteer on their phone lines, read a lot, write a little.”

In late September Wallace moved out of the “sober house” on Foster Street and into a double-decker clapboard one on an anonymous stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington. He shared the apartment with another recovering substance abuser, probably a pairing Granada House had arranged. The man had a large collection of Tito Puente records, which Wallace called “crime jazz.” (He would work the witticism into
Infinite Jest.
) “The apartment is strange,” he wrote Franzen in October. “Most everything is still in boxes. I have a mattress on the floor and wake up with dust on my tongue.” Franzen visited and found his friend in a messy bachelor pad, cold and dimly lit, a place to pass through. Wallace bumped into Gale Walden on the T—she had a research associate position at Harvard—and when she came by, she saw draft pages of a novel spread everywhere.

When a second year at Emerson began, Wallace undertook his work without pleasure. He had increased his load to three classes to make more money, teaching “back to back in the afternoon three days a week.” “All I do is work,” he complained to Franzen in October, threatening to sell his computer for cash. He still did not like the students and sedulously kept apart from his colleagues. Some of the other teachers in turn found Wallace standoffish, odd. One thought he seemed like he had Asperger’s syndrome and remembers him as theatrical in his isolation, taking up “some position from which the staff could view him, and from his small corner of the room stage he would pose as if in deep contemplation, or emotional pain or genius.” Wallace wrote Franzen, “I’ve had to educate myself about people like Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton. Actually that’s been a blast. I had no idea they were so good. I remember reading them a little in high school and mostly wondering when they were going to get done so I could go eat something sugary and then masturbate.” Liking “the canon” was one way of signaling to Franzen his aesthetic voyage. If he could read realist fiction, maybe he could write it. “The last thin patina of rebelliousness has fallen off,” he reported proudly to his friend in the same letter. “I am frightfully and thoroughly conventional.”

For nearly two years, Wallace had been living a hectic, unbalanced life. If he was no longer a substance abuser, he was still a drama junkie, a man
afraid to be alone with his own thoughts. But Karr, around whom his every emotion orbited, was gone for good—or appeared to be so—and in early November 1991, Wallace suddenly collapsed again. It was his first breakdown since quitting drinking, and it devastated him. He was admitted to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of suicidal depression. He lay in a locked ward for several days. Afterward, Debra Spark brought him student papers, because he wanted to keep up with his grading. “The people here are crazy,” he told her. She found the ward he was in scarier than McLean, where she had also visited him, and Wallace more frightened and depressed. The doctors at Newton-Wellesley increased the dose of Nardil he was on and he began to improve. After two weeks, he was released. He would write in a later medical history that depression and desperation came and went in the ensuing months, but over time the Nardil coursing through his blood relieved his condition and gave him back hope. Immediately, he was making plans. He had called Karr just before he was admitted to the hospital to tell her he loved her; now, as Karr remembers, he called her mother to say he was going to marry her daughter. “Didn’t you just get out of someplace?” she responded.

Wallace had not forgotten his literary hopes. Throughout 1990 and into 1991 he had fought off the worry that, sober, book reviewing and essays were all he was capable of. He wrote Nadell in the spring of 1991, as much to reassure himself as his agent, that things would change:

The
Review of Contemporary Fiction
had decided to devote an issue to Wallace and Vollmann and another young writer, Susan Daitch. In a long interview for the magazine that Wallace gave to Larry McCaffery that April, he hinted how much trouble he was having writing. “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.” But by August 1991, four months later, the courage was mysteriously back. In that month he wrote Forrest Ashby that he was “slowly trying some fictional stuff, which so far is not very good, and almost completely unrecognizable vis a vis the stuff I was doing before I well, whatever,” and to his old professor Dale Peterson he spoke of “writing quite a bit and enjoying it for the first time in years.” What had helped him break through? Part of the credit should go to the
Harper’s
essay Wallace had been writing. The subject of the essay had expanded from how television changes our perception of reality to the crisis in the generation of which Wallace was a part, the two being, of course, to him, closely related. Since Arizona, Wallace had been calling for a fiction that captured how thoroughly television had altered the minds of its watchers. But since McLean and recovery, he had begun to realize that portraying such a world in fiction might be just as harmful as TV itself. There was no reason to think that limning a hopeless condition would show a way out; it might just make imprisonment more pleasant. Now Wallace reformulated his goal: American fiction was not in just an aesthetic crisis, but a moral one. Exhibit A was a writer he had once lavished a great deal of affection on, Mark Leyner, whose novel
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
he had touted when he lived in Somerville. The novel, really seventeen linked stories, is clever and almost schizophrenically scattered, embodying less a plot than an attitude toward modernity. One story—it might almost have been a set piece in
Broom
—features a character named Big Squirrel, who is, in Wallace’s words, “a TV kiddie-show host and kung fu mercenary.” In another story a father lives in his basement centrifuging mouse hybridoma. One section is entitled “lines composed after inhaling paint thinner.” When Wallace first read the book, he had reveled in its aggressive, postrealist stance, its avant-pop insistence that the overwhelming incoherence of modern culture was a joyride for the
brain. But the new Wallace, in his television essay, would call the book “a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody,” and quote the jacket copy’s claim that the book was “a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took,” a description that anyone aware of Wallace’s situation would have recognized as far from an endorsement on his part. America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied. The effect of Leyner’s fictional approach to life—mutated, roving, uncommitted—like that of
Letterman
and
Saturday Night Live
—was to make our addiction seem clever, deliberate, entered into voluntarily. Wallace knew better.

And now he was far clearer on why we were all so hooked. It was not TV as a medium that had rendered us addicts, powerful though it was. It was, far more dangerously, an attitude toward life that TV had learned from fiction, especially from postmodern fiction, and then had reinforced among its viewers, and that attitude was irony. Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say. Postmodern fiction’s original ironists—writers like Pynchon and sometimes Barth—were telling important truths that could only be told obliquely, he felt. But irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued:

That was it exactly—irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony’s most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really
upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars.
¹⁴