Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (33 page)
Some of the new round of cuts Wallace took eagerly, other times with
an undertone of reluctance. “Mugging of Joe D. in Cambridge. Cut, although it introduces three different characters and starts four different plotlines,” he groused at one point, agreeing to cut back one of the characters who dated all the way back to the Hammerhill boxes that had held some of his early attempts at the novel. Sometimes he wanted to keep a scene simply because it had been in the book for so long. Other times he threatened that if material were removed, longer, duller rewriting would rise up to plug the gap. Another of his favored tactics was to respond to a request for a cut with a condensation, turning ten pages into five or five into two, or taking the unwanted material and putting it in the endnotes, where some of his favorite passages went to make their last stand. Pietsch also hesitated to put the words “A Failed Entertainment” on a book people were supposed to buy. Wallace suggested it might go on the “frontispiece” instead. Pietsch objected that the problem with calling
Infinite Jest
“A Failed Entertainment” anywhere was “it’s not,” and it quietly disappeared from the manuscript.
The winter of 1994–95 Wallace took a major step. After almost a decade of an itinerant life, he bought a house. It was the largest asset he had ever owned and he thought of it as much as anything as a down payment on his maturity. The house had three bedrooms and a little patio in front and a yard in the back that he had fenced off for Jeeves. It was made of brick, allaying a fear of tornadoes that dated back to his childhood. The house stood at the edge of town, near trailer parks and a slaughterhouse and also open land; down the street were cornfields, much as with his childhood home in Urbana. He was particularly pleased that his mail address was “Rural Route 2,” rather than a street address. Wallace moved in with his books and manuscripts and soon letters from Franzen and DeLillo and then a copy of the Saint Francis prayer appeared on the walls.
Wallace had never owned anything bigger than a car before and he approached his new possession as if everything to do with it were a cause of wonder, a stance that also served to reassure him that though he was now a homeowner he had not totally sold out. “I bought a house,” he wrote to Don DeLillo in May,
it’s small and brick and next to a horse pasture. It has what seems like a 6-acre lawn, and I bought the house in the winter and it didn’t occur to me that the grass in this lawn grows and will have somehow to be dealt with. I haven’t mowed a lawn since I folded my childhood lawn-mowing business at 13, and I see all my neighbors mowing their own 6-acre lawns like every fourth day, and Weed-Whacking, and dispersing seed and nitrates through devices that look like enormous flour-sifters on wheels, and I am not keen on becoming a lawn-obsessed homeowner. But it’s nice to own a house and not pay off a landlord’s mortgage.
Wallace’s recovery friends were much in evidence in his new home. Many of them were handy, and they were vigilant that the impractical Wallace not get ripped off by their own. His best friend from recovery, Francis B., built his bookshelves. Another put in a cutoff switch for his main electrical cable; Francis B.’s mother volunteered to clean Wallace’s house; soon she was doing his wash, with Wallace hiding his underwear from her before she got there. She would cook for him or pick up a roast chicken at his favorite restaurant and stick it in his empty fridge while he was teaching or at a meeting. One time when the handle on his screen door came off, Wallace called Francis B.: “How much is a new screen door going to cost me?” His friend came by with a screwdriver. Wallace exaggerated his helplessness. It was at once a gesture of generosity and of selfishness. The others took pleasure in helping, and Wallace got things done that he didn’t have time or aptitude for.
In March 1995 Colin Harrison asked Wallace to go on a Caribbean cruise and write about it for
Harper’s
. He and Kymberly were split up, at least for the moment. Spring break was coming and, offered the chance to get away from the cold and the never-ending revisions to
Infinite Jest
, he accepted. Once again he would join the American hordes dosing themselves on fabricated amusements. He would sample shuffleboard, endless buffets, onboard talent shows, and whatever else came his way. But, as ever, he was unsure how to proceed. The hopes of editors always made him nervous. He asked Costello and Franzen if they would join him, but neither was
available, so alone he flew to Fort Lauderdale, from which the ocean liner MV
Zenith
—dubbed by him the
Nadir
—was slated for a weeklong circuit around the Gulf of Mexico. From the ship, Wallace called Harrison and asked what the magazine was looking for. Harrison told him to just “Be yourself. Enjoy. You’ll find the story.”
There was an immediate problem. Shipboard life was full of alcohol and Wallace didn’t drink. There would also be no recovery meetings on board. In compensation he smoked plenty of cigarettes. “Prospects for an acute and fecund belle-lettristic essay on cruising in ’95 are looking bleak,” Wallace wrote Franzen from Playa del Carmen. “Everything but the shuffleboard court is restricted. The atmosphere summons images of a floating range of Poconos.” Wallace felt lonely, awkward, and on a false footing and spent most of his time in his cabin or in the ship’s library. He was relieved when the trip was over and he was back on shore. On his way home in late March he stopped in New York, visiting Pietsch to talk about his manuscript, and stayed with Franzen for a few days in Jackson Heights in Queens, where his friend was now living. Franzen tried to get Wallace to cut back on the blondies, while Wallace made fun of the tidiness of his friend’s household. They bickered but more affectionately—work was on the whole going well for both of them now. Wallace was still wary of anything to do with cities and sophisticated city people but one night Franzen took him to a gathering hosted by
Open City
, a literary journal, at a Manhattan nightclub. It was not a scene Wallace felt very comfortable in, a party full of alcohol and drugs. During the evening he met Elizabeth Wurtzel, a writer whose memoir of depression,
Prozac Nation
, was a current hit. Wurtzel had struck a provocative pose on the cover of her book in a flesh-colored T-shirt, mid-riff exposed, and when Wallace questioned why, she told him it was what you had to do to sell a book. He demurred, citing his duty to art and other DeLilloesque objections. But Wallace was smitten by her silver lamé leotard and walked her home. In the lobby of Wurtzel’s building, as she remembers, he spent more than an hour trying to persuade her to let him come upstairs. He told her it would be a therapeutic favor. She told him if he stopped chewing tobacco he’d have a better chance.
Trivial as the encounter was, it stayed on Wallace’s mind. Wurtzel was a breathing symbol of temptation to him, Salome to Leyner’s antichrist.
He had never met anyone as self-involved as he was, someone, moreover, with a history of depression, yet whom fame and drugs had not pushed into collapse. It was another glimpse of the alternative universe he had last seen at Yaddo with McInerney in 1987, the lure that the decisions he’d made about celebrity were not the only ones possible. He quickly inscribed a copy of
Broom
to her. “Not my best thing, by a long shot, believe me,” he noted on the title page. Wallace was in a happy time in his life, but all the same Wurtzel prompted a long letter full of recursive agonizing that he wrote soon after he got back to Bloomington:
I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am—for just an example—self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I’m dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others…. It has to do with God and gods and a basic sense of trust in the universe v. fear that the universe must be held at bay and micromanaged into giving me some smidgeon of some gratification I feel I simply can’t live without. It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am—so where does that put me.
He told her how hard it was for him when he wrote to discern the difference between caring about the reader and caring that the reader cared about him:
The crux, for me, is how to love the reader without believing that my art or worth depends on his(her) loving me. It’s just about that simple in the abstract. In practice it’s a daily fucking war.
By now, the cruise ship experience had begun to cohere for him. He was merging the miserable time he had had on board into his larger
themes. He produced an overstuffed meditation, twenty-four pages in the magazine, on the mistaken American belief that pleasure can do anything other than stoke the need for more pleasure. Early in the article he declares:
I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator.
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Wallace explored the various types of cruise self-indulgence, from shuffleboard (“thanatopic,” he called it) to the daily “eleven gourmet eating ops” to skeet shooting. He told the story of having missed a clay pigeon by a wide margin and watching it sink into the ocean: “Know that an unshot discus’s movement against the vast
lapis lazuli
dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”
“Sad” became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship–goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. “Choose with care,” Marathe warns in
Infinite Jest
. “You are what you love. No?” Wallace’s cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.
To underpin this note, Wallace quoted the saddest story of all, one that had been in the news just before departure:
Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a half gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship. The news version of the suicide was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a ship-board romance gone bad. But I think part of it was something no news story could cover. There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex
in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
8
In April 1995
Infinite Jest
was back on Wallace’s desk—Pietsch had had the novel set in sample type again and realized the book was still too many pages. He sent a list of possible new cuts. To DeLillo, whom he increasingly turned to as his authority on literary matters, Wallace voiced a growing worry:
I am uncomfortable about making cuts for commercial reasons—it seems slutty—but on the other hand LB is taking a big gamble publishing something this long and this hard and I feel some obligation not to be a p.-donna and fuck them over. Maybe I’m writing because I want your general aestheto-ethical imput on this. I don’t know.
He added that he would probably wind up “cutting 40% of what they ask and making the font slightly smaller and hoping to fool them.” DeLillo wrote back that he had to follow his instincts; as Wallace summarized his advice back to Pietsch, when “you feel incipient bladder tumors at the thought of cutting something don’t cut it.”
The edits Wallace agreed to left Pietsch in, as he wrote Wallace in mid-May, “a state of editorial ecstasy…the veil lifted.” But ten days later he was back with more unwelcome news. “Here’s what happened,” he wrote Wallace, “I got to the end of
Infinite Jest
Friday a week ago and mailed that letter to you. Then over the weekend I was struck by the realization that I hadn’t actually edited the manuscript yet. Only now do I feel that I know the novel well enough to make more detailed suggestions.” Anticipating his author’s response, he added, “I know this is harrowing for you, but I
believe that this is the work you want me to do. This is my best editing, David.”
A new round of editing followed, focusing on the first five hundred pages. “I’m prepared to thumbwrestle you over every one of these cuts,” Pietsch challenged Wallace, having absorbed the latter’s language of playful combat. He chopped at endnotes, and went after more of the “interAmerican huggermugger” in the back, where Wallace had stashed it. Wallace quickly responded to the edits, as he did when agitated, with a circle signifying “total acquiescence to demand” and a dash meaning “bared teeth,” “dickering,” or that a proposed cut had to be discussed on the phone.
Pietsch was also still worried about how the parts fit together. This was a novel in which, with the possible exception of Gately’s story, the plot reaches no conclusion. You don’t know for sure if the terrorists find the lethal cartridge. The reader never learns what drove Hal mad. Is Avril Incandenza an agent for the Quebecois terrorists? There were hints that she and John “No Relation” Wayne,
9
the top player in the school, both were. Wallace insisted that the answers all existed, but just past the last page. The novel continued in time in the reader’s mind—that is, it meant for it to have the trajectory of a “broad arc” rather than a Freytagian triangle. Pietsch asked for one clarification now. He wanted some indication of the fate of Orin Incandenza, who may be responsible for sending out the lethal cartridge to get back at his mother.