Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (51 page)

4
. The passsage plays off Barth’s own essays on literature and generational conflict with their premise that the aesthetic of modernism was no longer useful and something new had to be found.

5
. He would add in a 2002 letter to the critic Marshall Boswell, in the course of his by then customary putdown of
The Broom of the System
, “The best thing to come out of that was that I still have the same agent, and she’s a dear friend and merciless critic.”

6
. He would later speak of “sort of an artistic and religious crisis” in these months, words reminiscent of his description of the breakdown that first spurred his creativity at Amherst in 1983.

7
. He usually drank alone until he lost consciousness. He would describe himself in a later interview as “sort of a joyless drinker.”

8
. After
Broom
’s success, the IRS claimed Wallace owed them money. He had always been a careful taxpayer, part of his midwestern upbringing of cooperation and order. “A certain Uncle wants a certain sum far in excess of proper family obligation,” he wrote Howard in surprise. The problem was traced to an erroneous 1099 form. Wallace dashed off an explanation and there it ended, though he would have other similar mix-ups with the agency over the years. Perhaps these planted an interest in the agency.

9
. These sorts of paradoxes were of absorbing interest to Wallace and extended beyond verbal tricks for undergraduates; they feature in much of twentieth-century mathematical logic. They also play a role in
Broom
, where a plot point revolves around a riddle whose implications Wittgenstein wrestles with in his
Tractatus
: The barber cuts the hair of anyone who doesn’t cut his own hair. Who then cuts the barber’s hair?

10
. Wallace did not overestimate the appeal of this habit. He wrote to Franzen that tobacco chewing “turns the mouth to hamburger in a week, is stupid and dangerous, and involves goobing big dun honkers every thirty seconds.”

11
. The program Wallace joined stressed anonymity. For that reason I don’t identify it by name and use the first name and first letter of the last name when quoting members who spoke about Wallace.

12
. He would in a 1990 letter to Jonathan Franzen explain that the role drugs played in his writing was “not working under the influence, but somehow using the influence as a counterpoint to the work—hard to explain.” This is somewhat evasive; according to Costello, he also wrote high.

13
. “Title imposed by editor,” he wrote Brad Morrow, who ran
Conjunctions
, noting that he now found the story “Girl with Curious Hair” “pretty gross.”

14
. In later years, Wallace would boast about “a seventeen-page letter about literary theory” that he had written to Howard to argue his editorial vision for
Broom
, but there is no such letter; he was either misremembering his explanation to the Viking legal department or trying to make a grim experience more palatable.

15
. The nineteenth-century German critic Gustav Freytag designed a widely used triangular representation of a typical story line, in which the action rises to the climax or moment of reversal and then descends through the denouement.

16
. Wallace was not always so impressed with the idea that his generation faced unique challenges. He wrote an undergraduate in 1995 that the idea was “a lot of hooha. Kids write about Jeopardy and Letterman exactly the way elders write about trees and the sky-reflecting mudpuddle. It’s what’s there.” Then, reconsidering his reconsideration, he added, “That may be a bit disingenuous.”

17
. Amy Wallace says her brother exaggerates. Their father came from nonpracticing Catholics. Their mother was from a religious family but her own parents were not churchgoers. “David and I were encouraged to believe what we wanted,” she says.

18
. “Order and Flux in Northampton” is an homage/parody of James Joyce. Wallace shared Joyce’s fascination with wordplay though they approached literature from very different perspectives. But he took what he wanted from other writers. He told Mark Costello that he had gotten the idea of the discontinuous interview numbers in
Brief Interviews
after reading in a biography that Joyce loved putting puzzles in his work.

19
. His intense sense of competitiveness returned quickly though. Reading the work of William Vollmann, he felt a familiar twinge of envy and anger. When he learned that Vollmann’s new book,
The Rainbow Stories
, was also about to be published, he worried that
Girl
was “going to get dwarfed by that fucker Vollmann’s coming out only a month sooner,” as he wrote Brad Morrow. He also tarred Vollmann’s first novel,
You Bright and Risen Angels
, with being, of all things, “too Pynchonian.”

20
. When Steven Moore mentioned in a letter that he was submitting Wallace’s essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” for a $1,000 prize, Wallace joked, “My nose could use the grand.”

21
. Bangs in turn likely got the image from Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
, in which Roger Mexico’s heart “grows erect, and comes.”

22
. Costello’s literary aspirations would bear fruit in a pseudonymous noir novel,
Bag Men
, published in 1997, and
Big If
, which came out in 2002 and was nominated for a National Book Award.

23
. This rating should be taken in context. Wallace turned to letters when his fiction was not going well, so his letters rarely report a good day’s work. All the same, in mid-1989 he was clearly frustrated. Adrift in his current work, he devalued his old.
Broom
he was embarrassed by, though
Girl with Curious Hair
he still admired. It had furnished “some real personal mind-blowing successes,” he wrote his friend Franzen.

24
. When
Boogie Nights
came out in 1997, Wallace called Costello and told him the movie was exactly the story that he had been trying to write when they lived together in Somerville.

25
. Vollmann’s reportage among prostitutes and skinheads in San Francisco for stories like “Ladies and Red Lights” and “The White Knights” likely inspired Wallace’s own attempt to mix reporting and fiction in his pornography novel.

26
. Franzen did not win the grant until 1996, but he did get a Whiting Award that year thanks in part to Wallace (as did Vollmann).

27
. Jim Wallace remembers his son’s surprise at the hierarchical nature of the Harvard program. “The students did their professors’ laundry and clustered around them, and he thought that was just ridiculous. He was a published author and expected to be treated as an equal.”

28
. The attentive observation in
Infinite Jest
of Denial Aisle—the back row at recovery meetings full of “catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing every thing they own”—likely comes from this period.

Chapter 5: “Please Don’t Give Up on Me”

1
. Wallace found it funny that a “marine hospital” should be nowhere near water.

2
. Wallace fictionalized Larson with affection in
Infinite Jest
. “It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed—really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house—in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky,” he writes of the executive director of Ennet House.

3
. All the same Wallace liked to quote one of the veteran recovery members, the group known in
Infinite Jest
as “the crocodiles,” who told him, “It’s not about whether or not you believe, asshole, it’s about getting down and asking.”

4
. Members of recovery groups were supposed to be anonymous. So when
Infinite Jest
with its many scenes set in a thinly fictionalized Granada House came out, Wallace was forced to dissemble. “I mean,” he told an interviewer, “I got very assertive research and finagle-wise. I mean, I
hung out
. There were twelve halfway houses in Boston, three of which I spent literally
hundreds
of hours at.”

5
. Big Craig didn’t trust Wallace when he first met him. Marijuana was a lightweight addiction in his eyes. Craig was just out of prison; Wallace was just out of Harvard. “My suspicions were that he was looking for material for a book,” he remembers.

6
. Wallace was well aware that suffering could help a writer produce his best work. In Somerville he had read Paul De Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and wrote “brilliant” when he came upon the following disquisition on authorship: “The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification.”

7
. The exchange was not entirely so serious. Wallace also gave Franzen some practical advice for his upcoming stay at Yaddo: “Seek out the artists and composers. I’ve found them almost without exception nicer!! Less cliquish, and less apt to fuck with your head than the fiction writers. Poets tend to be OK as long as they’re old. Avoid any fiction writer you don’t already know. Do not fuck anyone (you’ll pay a huge psychic price later).”

8
. A few years later he would tell a recovery audience that during this time the only way he could stop his whirring brain was either to masturbate or go to a movie and sit in the front row.

9
. Wallace similarly hyped Costello to Karr. “I expected to meet some guy that was like seven feet tall, wearin’ a cowboy hat, chewing tobacco, with his dick coming out the bottom of his pant leg,” she remembers.

10
. “The big reason” for the prohibition, Wallace explained ably in
Infinite Jest
, “is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by…and intense romantic involvements…tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender.”

11
. Around this time Karr was working on an essay on poetry called “Against Decoration,” published in
Parnassus
in 1991, where she took as the twin poles of authorial error “absence of emotion” and “lack of clarity.” She urged poets to move their readers, writing that emotional response was the main goal of art, and was not shy in passing on the same message to Wallace. When he told her he had put certain scenes into
Infinite Jest
because they were “cool,” she responded, “that’s what my fucking five year old says about Spiderman.”

12
. The book was a platform for some of the themes Wallace had first tried out in Arizona, especially the damage wrought by irony. “Serious rap’s so painfully real,” he wrote, “because it’s utterly mastered the special 80s move, the ‘postmodern’ inversion that’s so much sadder and deeper than just self-reference: rap resolves its own contradictions by
genuflecting
to them.”

13
. Big Craig had a role in inspiring the climactic scene in
Infinite Jest
too. He had his wisdom teeth out with only Novocaine.

14
. A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.

15
. When the critic Marshall Boswell wrote to Wallace in May 2002 to ask when he had started
Infinite Jest
, Wallace replied, “It doesn’t work like that for me. I started
IJ
or somethin’ like it several times. ’86,’88,’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91–’92 all of a sudden it did.”

16
. At Arizona Wallace wrote a character sketch, which he called “Las Meninas,” in which a young African American woman named Wardine is beaten by her mother, who is jealous that her boyfriend is attracted to her daughter. Likely for some years the sketch stood alone, but in
Infinite Jest
it becomes connected to other stories. Wardine’s mother’s boyfriend lives in the same housing project where an addict named Poor Tony goes to buy drugs (the project was actually close to Granada House). Poor Tony, a transvestite, in turn winds up visiting a store run by a pair of Quebecois terrorists.

17
. There exists an early two-page draft of a scene from
Infinite Jest
titled “What Are You Exactly.” In the brief scene, Hal (called “David”) goes for a visit to a man described as a professional conversationalist, who turns out to be his father in disguise. The scene is reminiscent of the therapy sessions between Lenore and Dr. J. in
Broom
; both share an unacknowledged sadness and a brittle despair.

18
. The word “Incandenza” also appears on a list of character names Wallace made on the title page of
Erotic Communications
, a collection of readings that he used in Somerville for his research on pornography.

19
. The addicts’ time at Ennet House is in some way therapy for an overdose of consumerism. In the margins of his copy of Lewis Hyde’s
The Gift
, Wallace noted, “AA’s = those driven mad w/ fear by the paradigm of scarcity in a commodity/capitalist economy; require return to basically 1st-century communism of spirit.”

20
. She diverges from Wallace grammatically when she asks her psychiatrist, “Listen, have you ever felt sick, I mean nauseous? Like you knew you were going to throw up?”

21
. Both Gompert and Erdedy wind up in Ennet House, along with others of Wallace’s troubled legions, the facility proving an effective fictional device for Wallace. For where else do addicts congregate but a rehab house? It is their Rick’s.