Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (50 page)

And finally to my wife, Sarah, who was pushed off the dedication page by our children and who otherwise would be there, again.

Chapter 1: “Call Me Dave”

1
. Amy Wallace says that she never met “anybody who had the need for television David had.”

2
. Wallace claimed that as an eleven-year-old he traded lawn mowing with a neighbor for a tutorial on Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir
. The improbable exchange is echoed in
Infinite Jest
where Hal Incandenza offers free mowing to an “oral lyrologist” in return for information on the history of the instrument.

3
. In his first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” the protagonist says of his depression, “Some people say it’s like having always before you and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole.”

Chapter 2: “The Real ‘Waller’”

1
. The three roommates also heard the other students in the hall bathroom. Wallace said he could recognize the sounds of different people in the stalls and years later made use of these memories in a story told by the son of a men’s room attendant, “Brief Interview #42.”

2
. This story was mythologized at Amherst in later years such that Wallace so flummoxed a professor with his superior intelligence that the professor snapped shut his briefcase and left the class in the middle of a lesson.

3
. In Senior Rhetoric, for instance, Wallace wrote a story about a man who kills his own clone by pushing him out a window. The tale played off of the
Frankenstein
myth and ended with a pun, the creator arrested for “making an illegal clone fall.” The teacher told him she was disappointed in the ending but gave him an A-plus.

4
. A hint as to other stories Wallace may have been working on at the time is provided in a conversation between two characters at a publishing house in
The Broom of the System
, Wallace’s college novel, who are looking through a pile of unsolicited manuscripts for the publisher’s quarterly. The stories discussed are “The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer,” which may be a version of “The Clang Birds,” as well as “Dance of the Insecure,” “To the Mall,” “Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below,” “Love” (itself a part of
Broom
), and “A Metamorphosis for the Eighties.” Comments one character, “That last one
is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-Adulation piece. Collegiate but interesting.”

5
. Wallace’s parodies sometimes offended. A piece he wrote about cosseted students at antebellum Amherst arriving with their slaves drew a protest from the Black Student Union.

6
. Another philosophical book of the era,
Gödel, Escher, Bach
, by Douglas Hofstadter, impressed Wallace a great deal. Subtitled “an eternal golden braid,” the book investigates consciousness, logic, language, and the structures of meaning. Wallace borrowed his father’s copy and “actually shoved this book excitedly at people in the eighties,” as he remembered in an interview in
The
Believer
.
Gödel
is a predecessor to
Infinite Jest
, at least structurally. Mark Costello remembers Wallace when he was working on his novel “going on about the ‘braid’ or ‘fugue’ shape—disparate elements making a whole.”

7
. That “every love story is a ghost story” is a thought that stayed with Wallace from the beginning of his writing career to the end. The phrase appears in a letter he wrote in the graduate program at the University of Arizona, and he is still turning it over in his mind twenty years later when he slips it into a scene in which IRS examiners silently turn pages in
The Pale King
. From “Planet Trillaphon” to the posthumous
The Pale King
, moments of happy love in Wallace’s work are rare.

8
. That human connections can heal would become the centerpiece of Wallace’s mature credo. As he would write one day in
Infinite Jest
, “The truth will set you free—but not until it’s done with you.”

9
. Wallace never republished “Planet Trillaphon” in a collection, probably because it was too revealing. Also, by the time he had sufficient other short fiction for a collection, after publishing
The
Broom of the System
, the conventionality of the narrative would have seemed amateurish to him.

10
. The other students were entranced by Wallace’s recitation of the Underground Man’s monologue in the class.

11
. The other opening sentence that Wallace considered of surpassing beauty is (slightly misquoted) from a Stephen Crane story, “The Open Boat.” It sounds a similarly unsettled note: “None of the men knew the color of the sky.”

12
. Wallace claimed Lenore’s great-grandmother was loosely inspired by a real Wittgenstein disciple, Alice Ambrose, who lived near Amherst. His knowledge of nursing homes come from a stint working in one in high school.

13
. Wallace once wrote Jonathan Franzen he was glad everyone focused on his debt in
Broom of the System
to Pynchon, because it meant they didn’t see how much he had taken from DeLillo.

14
. I owe this observation to Marshall Boswell, in his book
Understanding David Foster Wallace
.

15
. Reading his former roommate’s manuscript in the spring of 1985, Mark Costello noticed that Lenore seemed like an idealized projection of Amy Wallace, especially in her manner of speech—“the dry wit and the tendency to repeat in less inflated terms what someone has said to her.”

Chapter 3: “Westward!”

1
. He wrote on his Iowa application that he had also applied to the Johns Hopkins MFA program, where the postmodernist John Barth taught. Unfortunately, the school has no record of an application. If Wallace was rejected, it would lend a more personal slant to his later intense antagonism toward the writer.

2
. Containers of waste appear regularly over the years in Wallace’s writing and reach an acme in
Infinite Jest
. Most critics would trace the leitmotif to his affection for Pynchon, for whom waste was also a central symbol, but personal exposure certainly played a role.

3
. This fascination with spiders would appear in
Infinite Jest
, where the three Incandenza generations that precede Hal fear them. For instance, Hal’s great-grandfather refuses to stand under palm trees out of concern they will drop on his head. And the ferocity of the female may have played a part in the portrait of Avril Incandenza, Hal’s mother, a venomous widow herself.

4
. When “Forever Overhead” was chosen for
Best American Short Stories 1992
, Wallace dismissed it in his contributor note as “straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be.”

5
. When Mary Carter died in 2011, many of Wallace’s fellow classmates were surprised to find that she had been in her sixties at the time she ran the writing program.

6
. “I completely deny ever once kissing any part of my sister’s feet at any time whatsoever,” Wallace wrote in his contributor note for “Forever Overhead” in
Best American Short Stories 1992
, setting that record straight at the same time as he claimed the “excruciatingly shaming” trauma of panicking on the top of the high dive for himself, when the person who froze atop the high dive, according to his family, was actually his mother.

7
. Though never a Zumbye, Wallace enjoyed singing songs from their album in the shower, especially “Tears of a Clown” and “Since I Fell for You.”

8
. Minimalism was political too, practically the literary world’s univocal response to the Reagan era, as if the cuts in budgets had trimmed countless words and emotions from writers’ vocabularies at the same time.

9
. When Wallace brought up Derrida and De Man, from his literary theory class, to support his respect for brat pack writers, Elman said he didn’t care. He derided him as Herr Doktor Wallace, as Wallace’s face flushed and his voice rose. Afterward, Wallace worried that he had transgressed and speedily wrote Elman an apology, explaining he was “passionately interested in this stuff, and I’m afraid I sometimes forget where I am and whom I’m talking to.”

10
. The evident comic appeal of the excerpt is why Wallace’s agent Bonnie Nadell later suggested that he begin the book with it, rather than the original opening, a conversation between Lenore and her great-grandmother that was eventually cut.

11
. Wallace’s readings in literary theory hang heavily over the story, especially his fascination with Derrida. For Wittgenstein language was speech and without a speaker there could be no meaning. By contrast, Derrida insisted that writing was no less fundamental to language and the absence of the speaker/author was precisely what allowed the reader to assert the meaning of the written words—Derrida’s famous dictum that “there is nothing outside the text.” In creating a character who is all disembodied speech in a written narrative, Wallace was joining the two approaches.

12
. These are Penner’s notes. He says he would in the actual class have expressed himself more diplomatically.

13
. Penner told Wallace that the fantastical ending of “Solomon Silverfish” was too short, the rest too long, showing he was a more complicated reader than Wallace gave him credit for. All the same, the students had no doubt where his heart lay. “Penner,” Robert Boswell remembers, “was really uptight about what was and what wasn’t a story; he was the worst person to work with David.”

14
. Penner has a different interpretation of these words. “As I interpret them,” he says, “they mean we’d hate to lose him as a real writer, hate to see him sink to a trivial level. I don’t remember telling David that, but I certainly felt it.”

15
. A small print run of hardcovers, now extremely valuable, was also planned, under the Viking imprint.

16
. Soon after selling the book, Wallace confessed to Corey Washington his fear that “only me and Mom will buy the book…and my name will be economic and literary mud—even shit.”

17
. “…so that word and reference are unified…in absence,” Wallace noted to Nadell happily.

18
. “He was very polite in ignoring me” is Howard’s too-modest memory of his editorial interactions with Wallace. He told Leon Neyfakh of the
New York Observer
after the writer’s death, “I’m sure I may have changed a comma to a semicolon or maybe fixed a couple of words in
Broom of the System
but yeah, he knew what he was about, David, even if I didn’t.”

19
. The name of another musician from Placebo Records, Michael Pemulis, would later attach to an important character in
Infinite Jest
.

20
. Wallace appended a note on the copy of the story he circulated in his workshop apologizing if the story offended and asking if the grotesqueries seemed unnecessary, because “that would obviously be bad narrative news.”

21
. Carter made no effort to hide who her favorites were at the event. While she walked Wallace around, she asked Heather Aronson to serve hors d’oeuvres.

22
. Julie’s autistic brother lives in Tucson. The two children are premature adults, abandoned by their parents and largely ignored by their foster parents (pun surely intended). The setup suggests how upset the fracture in his parents’ marriage may have left Wallace.

23
. There may also, as ever, have been an element of parody to the story, Wallace trying out the sort of heartfelt encounter that teachers like Penner admired. (If so, it did not work. When he submitted it to his fiction workshop the instructor, Buzz Poverman, another teacher who favored realism, told him, others in the class remember, that it was “not a story.”)

24
. In the interview Wallace gave to Larry McCaffery, he made a try at explaining the dynamic of his surprising public success: “I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.” He cut the comment before the interview was published in 1993.

25
. The story went through a number of intriguing titles before settling on “My Appearance.” Wallace called it at various times “40,” a reference to the actress’s age, “All Things to One Man,” “Lettermania,” and “Late Night.”

26
. Wallace’s acceptance to Yaddo showed some of his academic sleight of hand. Richard Elman was one of his recommenders. “I’ll shine your shoes for a week,” he’d written his old teacher, asking for his help. He’d also asked Jonathan Penner, who wrote a glowing endorsement.

Chapter 4: Into the Funhouse

1
. Wallace may have first encountered the poem in the famous early advertisements for a farm implement, which he knew:

2
. The fried roses, whose “noisomely oily smell” Wallace confirmed on the family stove, was central enough to his thinking that he chose it for the title of the story and the collection, until Nadell objected.

3
. Wallace told Costello that another character in the story, Magda, the orange-faced stewardess—“an aloft waitress, she terms it”—of the story, came from real life. While he was working on “Westward,” a flight attendant who was a fan of postmodernism recognized him from the sketch the
Wall Street Journal
had published alongside their article. She took him to her condo in Hartford for three days.