Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (32 page)
an almost Artaud-ish blackout-type ending…. One that might look truncated or even violently ablated…. That is to say (I am not at my clearest on this, I know), a conceived ending that’s not so much anticlimactic as aclimactic? I can (but hopefully will not) give you about 4300 thematic/theoretical reasons why an aclimactic close here will be best—e.g. resonating echoes w/themes of stasis, annulation, paralysis, undecidability, clarification of questions > solutions to questions etc.
Wallace had dealt with enough New York editors by now to worry how such high-concept talk would strike even the supportive Pietsch. He asked for help, reminding his editor that “your loyalties to readability and readerly pleasure are one of the reasons why your editorial input here and elsewhere is of value.” There was an element of flattery here—Wallace played tennis in his letters too—but also truth. He so much wanted to help the reader to a more engaged life that he feared losing him or her on the way. He went back to writing and rewriting, cutting and then adding back in more than he had cut, taking breaks only to teach his classes. He could not have worked harder, as he let Pietsch know, but even so, he saw he would not finish the manuscript by April 15 and asked for more time at the beginning of that month. His letter requesting an extension was penitent, whether from exhaustion, memories of his tangle with Viking Penguin, or the usefulness of imagining Pietsch as an unforgiving authority figure so he would get the book written:
I’m mortified to have essentially lied to you about 4/15; the date seemed an almost GOP-ishly staid and conservative projection back in January. I now want to say late April or May. I’m not saying this: I’m saying I want to say it. I canceled class for these two weeks, but now I know I won’t be done by 4/18, and then I have to make up all the classes I’d canceled.
He imagined apocalyptic consequences to being late connected to the meaning of April 15:
If I don’t file my taxes I might go to jail—though this is also a sort of late-night terror I have, about Little Brown’s parent company’s lawyers sending me to jail because of some Kafkaesque boilerplate clause I neglected to see at the bottom of the legal document I know I signed, and was given $ by you guys. I know this is just a dark fantasy.
But ever recursive in his thinking, he added:
I also know there[’s] something doubly annoying about a letter like this: it’s so anxious and cringing that it kind of forestalls a stern response
on your part, since the letter might now make a stern response seem like kicking somebody who’s already kicking furiously at himself and telling you to go ahead and kick because he’s such a dork he deserves it.
Wallace’s apology-cum-meta-apology prompted words of comfort from Pietsch, who reassured his author that everyone at Little, Brown was happy to wait for the novel and eager to read it. Wallace, relieved, wrote back with thanks for Pietsch’s “extremely analgesic letter,” while quietly claiming a little more time to work on his book:
I am writing this thing; or rather except for the last ten pages have written the whole thing, and am w/ all due haste putting it together in a seamlessly tight bag….[P]lan your own schedule for this thing hitting your mahogany by late june at the very latest. I will finish the final draft by then or be dead.
As ever, his letter contained news. (The negotiations on due dates were just to soften Pietsch up.) He had a new scheme (“I’m telling you this in advance to like prepare you emotionally”), a way to shorten the book without having to cut it beyond where it could be cut: endnotes. At the back of the book in smaller type they could stick “harder stuff—data, medical lore, 19th-century asides, ESCHATON math calculations (which I’m attached to because darn if I did find a neater and more elegant way to prove the Mean Value Theorem for integrals than anything that’s in the texts) and certain scenes.”
He went on:
I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it. it allows me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence, 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically “back and forth” in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns…5)
feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.
Aware that he was wandering back into the experimental terrain he had worked so hard to exit, he added, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.”
Finally, in late-June 1994, Wallace had the full manuscript, some roughly 750,000 words, complete with Artaud-ish ending and hundreds of endnotes. He promised to bring the bundle to New York on June 30 “handcuffed to a wrist.” He was exhausted:
If further stuff needs to be cut I’m apt not to fight but to ask for an enormous amount of help, because everything in it’s connected to everything else, at least in my head. The whole thing may be incoherent for all I know. At this point I have no idea. It’s like not knowing what your family looks like: you live right up close to something so long and it blinds you. I just want it done.
In New York, he met up with Costello and they went to see Gus, a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo whose constant neurotic circumambulations of his holding cage were attracting attention from the press, including a mention on
Letterman
. Wallace felt saddened to see the tourists gawking. He flew to Arizona on a visit, where he saw Ashby, who was surprised at how much bigger and shaggier Wallace had gotten with the years. For Wallace it felt strange to be away from a story that had kept him busy nearly night and day for three years. “I am sad and empty, as I always am when I finish something long,” he wrote Franzen, whom he saw in Chicago on the way back. He went on:
I don’t think it’s very good—some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way to describing the whole experience of writing the thing. I pray Pietsch doesn’t want major changes, mostly because I don’t want to have to be engaged with the thing again, not at all.
That summer Amy Wallace was going to be married in upstate New York. She was thirty now and had found someone to settle down with, which made Wallace feel left behind, the unmarried older brother. Amy’s upcoming wedding brought forward another fear, one he had been evading during his feverish work on the book. He wrote Franzen that he was scared that “stuff in the mss” would hurt his mother. The portrait of Avril Incandenza had considerable ferocity. She was now an arch grammarian “engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromosome.” Wallace had placed her at the center of a comic but painful scene in which, dressed in a cheerleader’s uniform, she pretends to be blowing a whistle while one of the Enfield Academy tennis players assumes a three-point stance in nothing but football helmet and jockstrap. Wallace had even put in a suggestion that Avril had committed incest with Orin, Hal’s brother, thus triggering Orin’s own satyriasis.
Wallace calmed himself with the thought that
Infinite Jest
was after all fiction and that all the “rococo lit-flourish” surrounding her portrait would make the parallels hard to see. One flourish that packed particular power for him was the dedication, which would ultimately read: “For F. P. Foster: R.I.P.,” a coded condemnation of his mother’s father. (In an earlier draft, Wallace had made the attack more emphatic: “For Fenton Foster RIP, (P) [Rest in Peace (Please!)].”)
At Amy’s wedding, in July, David was a “bridesman,” his hair gathered in a ponytail. Everyone found him in good spirits. His “dread [of] the various eddies of such a confluence” (his phrase to Franzen) did not show, and if anyone noticed that things were cool between him and his mother, no one said anything.
Wallace was looking forward to the start of the fall 1994 semester. The department was allowing him to teach an undergraduate introductory course in literature. This had been his quiet wish since coming to ISU. Now after a year of hard labor, he was to be let out of the ghetto of creative writing classes. The equation that the more he taught the less he wrote had never entirely disappeared from his mind, and it was also true that the
simpler what he taught was, the lower the impact on his own creativity; the course would grow to be a favorite of his over the years. After the formal description of the course in the syllabus, he told his students what he was really hoping to have happen:
In less narcotizing words, English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write—clearly, persuasively, and above all interestingly—about stuff you’ve read.
This was a return to teaching’s first purpose. Wallace liked to sit in his classes, flannel shirt tied around his waist, straddling a backward-facing chair, rocking, as he discoursed on character and pacing. He reminded one student of “an engineer of literature,” pulling out the building blocks of stories—voice, narrative structure, point of view. He often used writers of popular fiction—Jackie Collins, Thomas Harris, and Tom Clancy among others—for this purpose, because the components of their fiction were easy to identify and it also made the point that a story did not have to be hard to be worth reading.
Meanwhile, Pietsch was reading Wallace, while Wallace brooded and waited for a response through the months. He wrote Franzen that Pietsch kept cracking “ominous hernia-jokes.” Pietsch had in fact had the manuscript tentatively set in type and confirmed that the novel, if printed as Wallace had written it, would be almost twelve hundred pages long. To make money on it, the publisher would have to charge more for each copy than anyone was likely to want to pay. He finally wrote a note to his anxious author in October 1994 warning him that though he loved “having this monster in my head,” there was going to have to be more cutting. Also, he pointed out that there were areas that had confused him in April that having a complete draft had not clarified: the book took too long to get going, and the characters at the Enfield Tennis Academy blurred in his mind. He still didn’t buy the back-and-forth among the merged United States, Mexico, and Canada and the angry Quebecois separatists. “There is no part of the novel I’m looking forward to rereading less than the sequence of colloquys between Marathe and Steeply on the mountain,”
he wrote of the two secret agents. Then he responded to the two innovations Wallace had proposed in earlier letters: he was not excited by the idea of endnotes—footnotes would be easier on the reader, he felt—nor by the “Artaud-ish” ending. “Hundreds of pages of killer cartridges and stalking Canadians,” he objected, “and moving furniture and Avril’s affairs and James’s suicide—all those dingleberries in the air—and we don’t get to find out who or how or why?” But by the time he finished reading the manuscript a second time in December, he was cheerier. He acknowledged that he was beginning to see how tightly everything fit together. What looked arbitrary now worked. He even found the ending satisfying:
Hal’s breakdown, the one at the start of the novel, is approaching clearly enough that I finished the book guessing how he got from here to there…. The revelation that Hal’s known all along of his mom’s many affairs seems like a key to it all…I’m assuming now that this part of the story isn’t resolved more clearly…because Hal’s still avoiding it.
He added that “Gately’s hitting bottom…is gorgeous and very very powerfully sad,” and saw that endnotes might be better than footnotes—less “academic and daunting.” Maybe, he thought, Little, Brown could package the book with a bookmark so readers could keep their places.
Happier though Pietsch was, he still felt the book was too long. He wanted the same effect achieved with less. So just before Christmas he added hundreds of specific suggestions for cuts. And in February 1995, Wallace responded with a sixteen-page letter of his own, acceding, rejecting, and counterproposing, wheedling, in a bath of faux mea culpa language for having birthed such a complicated and long book. “I guess,” he wrote, “maybe I have an arrogance problem—I think I’d presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice.” But he dug in on the ending, where Pietsch still wanted more clarification: “We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?”