Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (53 page)

4
. The syllabus averred, “If, in a piece of creative nonfiction, an event is claimed to have happened, it must happen.” But in the classroom Wallace was known to be the less dogmatic of the two teachers when it came to literal accuracy, and one senses his hand in a later sentence on the syllabus: “And yet, the ‘creative’ half of the title suggests an impulse rather than Enlightenment perspicuity motivates the writer and shapes the writing.”

5
. An alternate reading of “The Depressed Person” is that the author sympathizes with her. The space he gives to narrating her experiences confers a validity to them, a gift that mimics at the same time the gift of therapy.

6
. When from Las Vegas he called Francis B. to complain the mirror on the ceiling was keeping him from sleeping, his friend told him to roll over.

7
. Wallace liked the way unwritten questions forced the reader to use his or her imagination. He had practiced the form in a six-page endnote in
Infinite Jest
in which Hugh Steeply, the O.N.A.N. agent, posing as a female journalist, interviews Orin Incandenza. The only voice we hear is Orin’s.

8
. Wallace had first come upon the story of a man who specialized in finding such women in
Cracking Up
, a psychoanalytic casebook published in 1996.

9
. The problem with the relationship might be captured on either side by the comment the outraged male narrator of “Here and There” makes about his girlfriend: “She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the ‘me’ she seemed so jealously to covet.”

10
. His habit was worsened by Nardil, which increases nicotine’s addictiveness.

11
. In 1999, he sent DeLillo a card with the words, “May the peace and blessing of almighty God descend upon you and remain with you forever” on it and added the quip, “Today’s Catholic isn’t afraid to send cards like this.” Later he mailed another one, with a token indicating he had made an offering at mass, with the words, “Already paid for—like a sort of cosmic gift certificate.”

12
. Franzen would later capture his impression of the relationship in one of a suite of stories called “Break-Up Stories,” published in the
New Yorker
, in which a Heidegger-spouting
university instructor insists he is going to marry his girlfriend even as he is scouting around for the next woman.

13
. At some point in the late 1990s, Wallace hired a prostitute. It was a logical step for a writer who was interested in the point where sex and marketing met. Plus it was an opportunity for a new experience. Wallace negotiated a price of $200 but when he got into bed with the woman he lost his desire. “We sort of ‘cuddled and talked’ instead,” he wrote Evan Wright, who had helped him with his adult entertainment awards article for
Premiere
in 1999; “she was nice about it.”

14
. Gale Walden’s father, whom Wallace admired, had left the ministry to become an IRS agent, a living metaphor.

15
. In a notebook entry, Wallace suggests that Drinion might be the child in the micro-story “Incarnations of Burned Children,” and that his penis photographs better than one that has not been scarred by scalding water.

16
. It is likely that this plot about a porn performer whom the viewer can digitally replace with himself dates back to the pornography novel that Wallace abandoned in the late 1980s; he mentions the video technology in
Signifying Rappers
, which he was working on around the same time.

17
. Other names the novel had, at least briefly, included
Glitterer
,
Net of Gems
,
What Is Peoria For?
and
Sir John Feelgood
(Drinion’s nom de porn).

18
. The theme of the novel is anticipated in an essay Hal Incandenza submits for “Mr. Oglivie’s seventh-grade Introduction to Entertainment Studies” in
Infinite Jest
, about a future television hero who represents the conclusion of a lineage that begins with the “hero of action” (Steve McGarrett of
Hawaii Five-O
) and passes on to the “hero of reaction” (Frank Furillo of
Hill Street Blues
). “We await,” Hal writes, “I predict, the hero of
non
-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.”

19
. Its previous tenant had been Planned Parenthood. Wallace told Costello that if he got bombed or shot there, the police should look for right-to-lifers with an outdated phonebook.

20
. The earnest authenticity that was Wallace’s core literary voice had by now spread far. It was even in the process of being appropriated by advertising, no doubt to Wallace’s horror. But the change was bigger than this. The 1980s era of masculine hyper-certainty that had spawned Wallace in rebellion was far in the past. He had helped to move the culture and, with the culture moved, the question he had to answer was what new to write against.

21
. Wallace told the
New York Times Magazine
that Franzen exercised in black socks, but then felt ashamed, as he wrote DeLillo. (The comment was not used in the article.)

22
. “He spent his entire life apologizing to me,” Amy Wallace remembers. “Almost every time I saw him he’d apologize.”

23
. As did others. The
Onion
, the satirical newspaper, ran a parody with the headline “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter at Page 20” in February 2003, shortly before he left Bloomington.

Chapter 8: The Pale King

1
. But, as Wallace himself would have asked, was he writing these letters to be open and honest or merely to make Green believe he was open and honest—which would actually make him the opposite?

2
. Stecyk’s flaw, in Wallace’s eyes, was the same as that of the men described in
Brief
Interviews
who are so busy worrying about pleasing their sex partners that they get no pleasure themselves; being pleased is an indispensable part of giving pleasure, just as being helped is an indispensable part of being helpful.

3
. The story may have been inspired by an episode of Lars von Trier’s
The Kingdom
, a show Wallace loved.

4
. Wallace had met DeLillo only one time before for a dinner set up by Franzen at an East Village restaurant in 1998. He was amazed then at how much the older writer looked and sounded like his father.

5
. Zeno’s dichotomy is the idea that motion is impossible because it requires an infinite series of submotions. To get somewhere, you must first get halfway there, but to get halfway there you must first get halfway
there,
and so on.

6
. The two longest are set in offices. What drew Wallace to office life were its codes of conduct, the implicit restraints on the individual that were so lacking in his own life. For him office life bore the same relation to real life that literature did. It was a beguiling simulacrum, a cleaned-up imitation, a playful variation with rules.

7
. A draft of “Good Old Neon” ends, “Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

8
. After Costello read
Oblivion
he told Wallace it could be the road map for
The Pale King
. Wallace snapped back, “You don’t understand how tough the problem actually is.”

9
. This was a past he made mild attempts to deny over the years. To an acquaintance who read in Marshall Boswell’s
Understanding David Foster Wallace
that the author had had a promiscuous period in the late 1980s, he responded, “Huh? I’ve never been ‘promiscuous’ though I would have loved to…. Where do people get this stuff[?]” To another he refuted stories about Elizabeth Wurtzel: “I know her, may have been at the same table as her at a coupla dinners. But we have never ‘dated.’”

10
. Wallace enjoyed having younger sponsees in particular. “Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces,” the narrator reflects on Hal in
Infinite Jest
, where his job is to be a Big Buddy to younger players.

11
. The speech, transcribed from a recording made by a member of the Wallace-l email list, moved around the Internet quickly, to Wallace’s surprise. When an acquaintance mentioned seven months later that he had read it, Wallace wrote back, “I never gave Kenyon a transcript of it. Much of it was handwritten. I don’t get it.”

12
. From the notebooks for
The Pale King
: “Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people.”

13
. This passage updates nicely Wallace’s insistence in his “Fictional Futures” essay that successful contemporary writing must recognize “a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread.”

14
. In 2007, when a former colleague from Illinois State University, Becky Bradway, asked him to explain for a textbook she was writing the role research played in a novel, Wallace wrote back, “What’s tricky is just what you’re asking: how much is enough? You can drown in research. I’ve done it. I’m arguably doing it now.”

15
. In a later section of the novel, a picture of the infant on his desk comforts Dean, an evangelical Christian, in a moment of despair. Dean is processing forms, trying to visualize a sunny beach as the agency taught him to do during orientation, but he cannot maintain the image—it turns in his mind to a gray expanse covered with “dead kelp like the hair of the drowned.” Overcome with boredom, he considers suicide. “He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor.”

16
. Wallace informs the reader that during a suspension from college he was hired by the IRS as a wiggler. “I arrived for intake processing at Lake James, IL’s I.R.S. POST 047, sometime in mid-May of 1985,” he writes. Upon arriving at the intake center, he is mistaken for another David Wallace—a high-powered accountant transferring to the facility from Rome, New York. For much of the chapter, everyone at the IRS thinks that David Foster Wallace is the other Wallace, a double to his fictional double.

17
. From a notebook: “Beneath S[tecyk]’s niceness is incredible rage. Sadism. Waiting only to be unleashed. His rage is a secret within a secret—a secret even from himself.”

18
. In keeping with his new maturity, Wallace also became more straitlaced about the need for literal accuracy in nonfiction. When Becky Bradway, his former colleague at Illinois State, wrote him for her textbook on creative nonfiction in 2007 and asked what his standard of accuracy was in his writing, he answered, “We all knew, and know, that any embellishment is dangerous, and that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances overall ‘truth’ is
exceedingly
dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify Means rationalizations.”

Throughout this book I quote liberally from David’s work. To avoid clutter, unless otherwise indicated in the chapter-by-chapter notes that follow, quotations are drawn from the following editions of David’s work.

FICTION

David Foster Wallace, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,”
Amherst Review
, 1984.

———. “Solomon Silverfish,”
Sonora Review
, Fall 1987.

———.
The Broom of the System
(New York: Penguin, 1987).

———.
Girl with Curious Hair
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

———.
Infinite Jest
(New York: Little, Brown, 1996).

———.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
(New York: Little, Brown, 1999).

———.
Oblivion: Stories
(New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

———.
The Pale King
(New York: Little, Brown, 2011).

NONFICTION

———. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
, Spring 1988.

——— and Mark Costello,
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
(New York: Ecco Press, 1990).

———. “The Horror of Pretentiousness,”
Washington Post
, February 19, 1990.

———. “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress,’”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
, Summer 1990.

———. “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,”
Harper’s
, December 1991.

———. “Rabbit Resurrected,”
Harper’s
, August 1992.

———. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
, Summer 1993.

———. “Ticket to the Fair,”
Harper’s
, July 1994.

———. “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,”
Harper’s
, January 1996.

———. “Feodor’s Guide,”
The Village Voice,
April 9, 1996.

———. “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One,”
New York Observer
, October 13, 1997.

———. “Neither Adult nor Entertainment,”
Premiere
, September 1998.

———. “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub,”
Rolling Stone
, April 13, 2000.