Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (21 page)

In early July, Wallace started a long second visit to Yaddo. Just before, he flew to Los Angeles to research his porn novel and decided definitively while there that his approach to the subject ought to be through nonfiction. He was intrigued by how the women seemed to boss around the men, despite the latter’s large sex organs, and admired the veteran actresses in porn who handled desire with the cool of businesswomen. He watched dozens of sex scenes and interviewed some of the actors. He asked Joey Silvera, a porn actor in his thirties and the star of
Slick Honey
, how he could have so many erections in a day: “Is it natural glandular horniness or is it a professional thing? Are you all trained to be that way?” He was impressed, he told Tori Welles, the star of
Torrid Without a Cause
, by how much nicer porn actors were to one another than writers. While in Los Angeles, he also finished up another pass on his rap book and went to Compton to hear some rappers but got so scared he had to leave before he could find the concert—or so he told a friend. He signed a note to Nadell just after returning, “Stay Fly, and Shit…DF Fresh W.”

All this made it hard for him to settle down in Saratoga Springs afterward. The retreat felt different two years after he had last been in residence. The trendy writers whose camp follower he had at times wanted to be were gone and he himself was less impressionable. He believed he knew the limits on his audience and accepted them. “The thing I like about my own prison,” he wrote Moore shortly before arriving, “is I have
tenure
in my prison.” He had a room in the old main house, on the top floor, and he set up fans facing out of the windows (writers were not allowed to smoke in the building). He had brought along an impossible amount of work: William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions
, a postmodern novel he had always meant to read, his pornography manuscript, and his research material for his article on
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
. He assured Steven Moore that he would “carve out two days at Yaddo to reread the book, reread the Tractatus (gulp), and do the piece.” While there he also went quickly through Russell’s
Foundations of Logical Atomism
, to which Wittgenstein had been responding in the
Tractatus
. “Fine prep. For the innumerable times I’ll be having to do this sort of instant-mnemonic-pretense shit during the upcoming year,” he told his editor.

He was a dominant figure this time at Yaddo, one of the best-known writers there, with a book published and another soon to come out. Intriguing packages came for him at the mail table. “Let’s move on to the next vector,” he liked to say, when he meant: Let’s get out of here. He would play tapes of his interviews with porn stars for the curious in the common areas, but if you wanted to hear Tami Monroe, you had to come to his room. The others were amazed to learn he was giving up a career in fiction for one in philosophy. He told them it was to free himself from publishers and editors and their demands but at the same time opined that writers were tired of freedom and experimentation and looking for something to believe in. He said he was less worried that the
New York Times Book Review
would ignore
Girl with Curious Hair
than that they would put it in their “Briefly Noted” section. He met and became involved with Kathe Burkhart, a conceptual artist. Just as Gale Walden was less conventional than the young women he grew up with in Urbana, Burkhart was less conventional than Walden—he was curious about bondage, so one time she tied him up, using a jump rope he’d brought to exercise with.

Wallace had learned from past mistakes. This time he made sure he
had pot at the retreat, and when he ran out, Burkhart flew to New York and got more. When her stay was over and she returned to New York for good, he took up with the novelist Ann Patchett. He wrote Nadell, astonished at the complexity of his dating life, that he was “looking into celibatee orders’.” One day, on a visit to his father’s family in Troy, New York, he drank most of a bottle of Glenlivet and threw up in his sleep: “Thank God I don’t pass out on my back; what a dumb way to die,” he wrote Burkhart, imagining the headline:
“SENSITIVE AESTHETE DROWNS IN OWN PUKE! ARTISTE’S ASPIRATIONS ASPIRATED!”
He added in another note, “You seem doomed to be involved with addicts.”

Yaddo the second time was a hurried-up parody of the first. He worked late into the night—Burkhart guessed he was taking speed to stay up—but he had no satisfying project to commit to. He worked mostly on the pornography manuscript, struggling to separate what was interesting from what was not and always feeling he had failed. He came to think that what was needed was a reported piece on how the industry had changed as the so-called golden age of porn gave way to the era of inexpensive and inartistic video.
²⁴
Inevitably, he returned to Somerville dissatisfied, nothing finished, the time nearing when he would have to, as he wrote Franzen, “toddle off with my Get Smart lunchbox for the first day of grad school.” He had ambitions beyond the rational at this point. He wanted to write full-time, fulfill his first-year graduate philosophy student requirements, plus “intro german plus intro library science plus a seminar on Cowper, Collins and Smart in the English Dept., plus probably a part-time job,” he had written to Moore in the spring, adding without irony, “I’m leery of committing myself to more.” Having no center to his work, Wallace seemed to have no limits either.

The final weeks of the summer were hectic. He was often drunk or stoned, but also snuck off to recovery meetings, at least fitfully. Costello would come home from his office and find that Wallace had turned on the fan in his room to disperse the smoke. Since Costello did not care if his roommate got high, he concluded that the only person Wallace could have been hiding his habit from was himself. One night the two went to a party; Costello came home first and Wallace appeared in the early morning with a bloody hand. Remembering that part of recovery was the obligation to make amends, he went back to the grocery whose window he had busted
and shoved $200 into the surprised cashier’s hand. “There was no shortage of chaos around 35 Houghton Street, apartment 2,” Costello wrote in summary in his memoir of his time there with Wallace. “Lost bills went unpaid. The phone rang at 3:00 A.M. and women banged on the back door two hours later.”

Everything was coming to a head as Wallace got ready for school. The piece on Wittgenstein remained unwritten, and the porn essay was a mess. He had written an unsuccessful “short journalistic version…a waste of 2 Yaddo weeks,” as he wrote Nadell. He’d thrown that away and now it was again, he added, “horribly long…. I’ve got about 200 pages and am only half done (‘
NOT
a nice noise, Bonnie’).” Yaddo seemed a complete washout. When he looked for comfort he realized his relationship with Walden was past repair.

Even Alice Turner was furious with him again. She had thought he was researching a novel, but it had turned out he wanted her to publish his insights on the pornography industry. “This magazine is way beyond you,” she lectured him. “We already know the things that you are offering as new discoveries.” Wallace hemmed and hawed, apologized for the “confusion, misunderstanding, deception, whatever,” explained he was trying to get out of the “rut of ‘self-conscious meta-shit’ you seem to think is my only interest and forward gear.” “I must say,” Turner wrote back, “you’re like one of those Bozo bags that bounces back every time you take a shot at it.”

In August 1989,
Girl with Curious Hair
came out at last. “The stories in his first collection,” Norton’s catalog stated, “could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmodernism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine.” These words perfectly captured Wallace’s hope for the book.
Kirkus Reviews
, though, found the writer “too much impressed with his own gifts and with some current critical theory.” It was, Wallace wrote to Morrow, “a real brown helmet…. I’ve told Gerry I’m just not going to read fucking reviews, good or bad, this time.” On the plus side, the
New York Times
Book Review
gave the book a full review. Written by Jenifer Levin, a young novelist, hers was the most positive notice his fiction would ever get in that paper. It praised Wallace as “a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent” and singled out not just “Lyndon” but
the little-loved “John Billy,” his Gass homage. An even brighter spot was an essay by Sven Birkerts in
Wigwag
. Birkerts was Wallace’s natural reader, because he too was keenly interested in how writers adapt to a changing world. To the question “What is the fiction writer—the writer who would try to catch us undistorted in our moment—to do? What prose will raise a mirror to our dispersed condition?” he put forward Wallace:

Few other critics felt as Levin and Birkerts did. Most newspaper reviewers skipped the book entirely, and those who wrote about it mostly evaluated the individual stories. Wallace felt that missed the point—who cared if one story was better than another? The point was that the collection
as a whole
was meant to open the door to a new kind of fiction. “A lot of it is like being told your soup needs less salt,” he complained to Moore.

Not that Wallace himself didn’t have clear favorites in the collection. These are evident in an exchange of letters with Franzen. Wallace had never had close literary friends; he was too competitive, judgmental, and self-absorbed. Most literary fiction he did not care about, and what few books were worth reading were worth writing, which meant in turn that he wished he’d written them. The no-writer-friends rule was not conscious but grew out of his personality, and like most of Wallace’s behavior, had a refractory edge: he also felt guilty that he felt this way, which made him all the more want to avoid the whole issue.

But the past few years had been humbling ones for Wallace, and the humiliation had made him more open to other writers’ writing. In fact, in such moments some aspect of his self-anger made him overestimate the
work of others in order to diminish his own. Thus, during his time in Somerville two authors had earned his intense admiration. One was William Vollmann, whose collection
The
Rainbow Stories
Wallace had read three times that spring in galleys and thought evidence, as he wrote to Moore, of “the best young writer going.” In that collection, the novella “The Blue Yonder,” half expressionist nightmare, half reportage, “simply separates sock from pod,” he reported to Franzen. Vollmann reminded Wallace of Pynchon, Coover, and William Burroughs but was “remarkably unselfconscious” in his debts, a writer whose every word satisfied Wallace’s call for fiction that subtly parried the media that saturated it in creating a new kind of art.
²⁵

In person, though, Vollmann was too odd for the fundamentally bourgeois Wallace. The two had had dinner that spring in New York with Brad Morrow, and afterward Wallace reported to Moore that his counterpart was “more than a bubble off plumb—prefers bloody venison and chocolate cake washed down with Stout for supper, speaks easily of blow-jobs and cooze while we’re eating.” Franzen, the more conventional of the two and a midwesterner, was the better match for Wallace. For one thing he was hungry for the company of other writers. A friendship for him consisted in equal parts of affection and challenge, a dynamic Wallace knew well from his days on his high school tennis team.

Wallace had been exuberant in his praise of
The Twenty-Seventh City
. Now Franzen wrote Wallace after reading the galleys of
Girl with Curious Hair
to tell him that he thought he’d written
half
of a great book. He particularly loved, he wrote the author, “Here and There,” the story of the young man who begins by trying to reinvent literature and ends up failing to fix his uncle and aunt’s old stove; and he particularly hated “Westward,” which he felt provided none of the nourishment of good fiction. For him the heart of the story was the coda, the part with the David and L.—’s relationship that climaxes in L.—’s suicide-by-arrow:

Franzen felt he’d gone too far and crossed out the last line before he mailed it, but even so Wallace, opening the envelope at Yaddo, was stunned to read that Franzen had liked only “stories 1,2,6,7, and 8” in the collection, leaving out “Westward,” “Lyndon,” “John Billy,” and “Girl with Curious Hair” among others. Wallace had never been written to in this way before. “This Jonathan Franzen guy,” he wrote to Moore in mystification a month later, “keeps sending me these 15-page missives describing how I’ve violated every precept of ‘fiction as a moral exercise, an affirmation of life’.” His own favorites in the book were nearly the reverse of Franzen’s: only the Letterman story, the
Jeopardy!
story, “Lyndon,” “John Billy,” and of course “Westward” deserved to be in the collection. The other tales, he wrote Moore, had been part of the trade-offs he had had to make with Howard to get “Westward” into the book. “Here and There,” he wrote his new friend, was nothing but “sentimental pretentious pseudo-autobiographical crap.”