Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (37 page)

By April, Wallace was at last all but done. He had had a fantastical success, and he was far from sure the experience had been a pleasant one. He was too self-aware not to see the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive. He had tried to write a splintered entertainment, to remind people of the dangers of spectation, and instead he had wound up prying open their wallets with Leyner-like adroitness. He had hoped readers would read his book twice, but whether they had read it at all was the question. Had
Infinite Jest
become another entertainment cruise ship, bright lights on an empty sea? Wallace turned to DeLillo to try to make sense of the experience, alluding to a media stampede satirized in his novel
White Noise
:

When JT, his buddy from Tucson, wrote to congratulate him, he wrote back, “WAY MORE FUSS ABOUT THIS BOOK THAN I’D ANTICIPATED. ABOUT 26% OF FUSS IS WELCOME. AS YOU SAID YEARS AGO, ‘YUPPIES READ.’”

As soon as Wallace got home, he pulled the tour schedule off his wall and threw it away. Being back was a relief. He felt again the “weird warm full excitement of coming home,” the pleasure, as he had written Alice Turner just before his book tour, of a world where his neighbors were “lumber salesm[e]n and Xerox copier repairmen,” and hoped he would never have to go anywhere again. “The Icky Brothers”—Jeeves and The Drone—were waiting. He wrote poetically to DeLillo about the “horses in the yard of the doctor’s manse next door,” of spring in Bloomington, and apologetically to Corey Washington. He left a two-word message with Costello’s secretary: “I’m sorry.”

He was glad again to attend his regular meeting and reinsert himself in the world of recovery, with its emphasis on community and cooperation. The lessons of recovery were never far from his thoughts. When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author’s getting an award he thought should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: “Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I’m no pollyanna—this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don’t often do it well. But I try…. Life is good.”

Little, Brown wanted to publish a volume of Wallace’s magazine pieces right away. The idea was to get the book out before the red eye of Sauron moved on. Even before the last “spasms-trips” of Wallace’s tour, as Wallace called them, Pietsch was asking for the manuscript. Wallace, trying to
show his gratitude, promised to work fast on “the lump.” For him it also represented an opportunity. He had never liked magazine editing, though he accepted it. Now he had, as he would later explain to DeLillo, a chance to undo the cuts editors had imposed on him to “make extra room for Volvo ads.” He added back in what had been taken out, sometimes doubling the published length of the pieces, reestablishing their verbal exuberance and their scope.
¹
He tinkered until the last minute, offering again to pay for corrections and reminding Pietsch that he still owed him for the ones at the last minute for
Infinite Jest
, but Pietsch pointed out that
Infinite Jest
was certain to generate royalties beyond its advance and the cost of the changes could come from those funds. Wallace responded that there would be more corrections forthcoming for the paperback.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
came out in February 1997. Wallace told DeLillo he liked only the first and last essays in the book—“Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” to which he gave back his original title with its mathematical overtone, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” and the cruise ship piece. Yet the response to the publication of what were to Wallace a group of older, maybe not so interesting anymore essays, was surprising.
Infinite Jest
had left in equal amounts goodwill and frustration. How many readers had gotten to page 70 and given up? But they all the same wanted more of Wallace. If nothing else, the title he gave the collection—it was the original title of the cruise ship piece restored—captured well his generation’s ambivalence toward pleasure and marketing and the marketing of pleasure. There was something stunning about the experiential aspect of the essays in the book too, the ones whose technique Wallace described in an interview as “basically an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.” Their very length spoke of commitment, discomfort, the importance of caring in a world urging you constantly to lighten up. It was like listening to your best friend in grad school, tirelessly willing to absorb, reason, confront, embrace but never accept.

In general, critics felt less ambivalent toward Wallace’s nonfiction than they did toward his fiction. The
San Francisco Chronicle
saw “a passionate and deeply serious writer” amid the hijinks, and James Wood in
Newsday
noted a fruitful divide between Wallace the postmodern essayist and the journalist “eager to notate reality (though in funky ways),” concluding, “His
contradictions are his strength, and if one wants to see the zeitgeist auto-grappling, in all its necessary confusions, one must read every essay in this book.” For Laura Miller of
Salon.com
, the articles were confirmation of the promise hinted at by
Infinite Jest
. Writing in the
New York Times Book Review
she noted that
A Supposedly Fun Thing
“reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that his fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about ‘serious’ art, and as a mensch.”

Wallace did not want to go on tour for the paperback of
Infinite Jest
, but since it came out the same month as
A Supposedly Fun Thing
, he could do so without appearing to. He went to ten cities as the new book appeared on many bestseller lists and sold roughly fifteen thousand copies in hardcover. One night Wallace read at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then went to the
Harvard Lampoon
castle to receive an “Author of the Millennium” award, which he accepted only after making sure it was made up. There were long lines everywhere he went. At the end of the
Infinite Jest
book tour, despite misgivings, he had gone on Charlie Rose’s talk show. The spur was not his novel but a recent essay by Franzen on the state of fiction. The two had faced off with Mark Leyner and the experience had been relatively painless. So Wallace now said he’d appear on the show again for his essays. This time, without foils, the encounter was uncomfortable, as Wallace rocked back and forth in his white bandana, battling the urge to spew out the churning contents of his mind—to be on TV talking about the power of TV left him particularly confused: it was the kind of recursion he could not ignore. Friendly but insistent, Rose asked him about his pre-recovery days:

After a second successful book, Wallace again wanted to be sure that nothing fundamental had changed. Francis B. asked him to go with his wife’s preteen daughter to a movie and Wallace took her to
Titanic
and told her to cover her eyes during the nude scene. As ever, he admired those who lived as he could not: one member of his group worked twelve-hour shifts in a tire factory without air-conditioning, his only comfort the Serenity Prayer. “I mean,” he wrote a friend, “can you see why I LOVE some of these people?” At school he wore his bandana, devoted time in his classes to Grammar Rock, his mini-lessons on usage, and spat tobacco delicately into a red plastic cup. He edited students’ stories three different times, encouraging the timid and rebuffing the febrile. He made vocabulary word lists: “Birl, cause to spin rapidly with feet.” “Musth, period of heightened sexual drive in elephants (Vulcans) when they’re more aggressive.” He wanted to disappear again into the obscurity of being a difficult writer in a regional midwestern city.

Yet the world was different. What he liked about Bloomington was that he could live his life there “blissfully ignorant of most of the Red Hot Center’s various roars and hisses,” as he had written Alice Turner, adding, “My best kids are farm-kids who didn’t even know that they liked to read until I persuaded them they did.” But still they or their parents got
Time
and
Newsweek
. They had seen the pictures of Wallace and knew that the outside world regarded him as a personage. But students who wanted to talk about how it felt to be famous did not get far, and anyone who thought they would get points for reading
Infinite Jest
soon learned to do it out of their teacher’s sight.

His fame occasionally impinged on the campus. A man from Chicago
called his department office, wanting to arrange a tennis game. Another came to the school and asked how he could meet the author of
Infinite Jest
and proceeded to wait the whole day, making the staff of the English department nervous. Some students from the University of Chicago arrived on a scavenger hunt, one requirement of which was to get their picture taken with Wallace (he was nowhere to be found).

Wallace began to change his phone number every few months. He would make restaurant reservations under fanciful names—one he particularly liked was Jim Deatherage, the name of a friend’s high school creative writing teacher. John O’Brien, the Dalkey Archive Press director, had thirteen dogs. They would come over and play with Jeeves and The Drone or Wallace would bring the Icky Brothers over to his house on the outskirts of the city. One day he complained to O’Brien that he no longer knew what to make of people: “People come up and say they love the book and I don’t know if they’ve read it. I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

Students had begun applying to the graduate program specifically to study with him. He was becoming a beacon for a kind of writing, not the postmodernism of the rest of the department and not the realism of Iowa and everywhere else, but a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real. Making the head throb heartlike had the potential to become a literary movement. Different names were bruited for it, from the New Sincerity to Post-postmodernism. Occasionally one heard Grunge Fiction.

But Wallace did not seek acolytes. He was too competitive, too solitary, too recursive, felt his journey too painful to wish on others. For him teaching was just instilling basic skills; the student had to do the rest. He was starting to wonder how happy he really was in Bloomington anyway. “I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year and—and it’s a little bit horrifying,” he had told Rose on his show, pointing out that most teachers stopped learning from their teaching after “about two to three years.” He became interested in yoga and meditation and practiced them regularly. With some of his recovery friends he went to a Jesuit retreat near St. Louis for a few days. The monastery observed silence to encourage reflection, and Wallace took advantage of this by bringing a bag full of work. He’d always wanted to see the Mississippi River up close, though, so he convinced Francis B. to descend with him to the riverbank below the
cliffs on which the monastery stood. Disappointingly, when they got there, the flats held nothing but a dead gar. “This isn’t what I expected,” Wallace complained. At that moment, a cabin cruiser went by and a group of women lifted up their shirts. “Now that was spiritual,” Wallace said.

Sex, and the intense, complicated interchanges it brought with it, filled a place in Wallace that nothing else could. Promiscuity had been part of his life for a long time now. But being famous increased the number of women who would sleep with him or perhaps his sense that he needed to sleep with them. At his readings there were long lines everywhere he went, abundant “audience pussy”—a phrase Mary Karr used. He came back from one reading in New Orleans to tell Francis B. he had slept with a girl who was underaged. Corey Washington went to a reading in Washington, D.C., and saw two hundred people there, Wallace sedulously signing copies of
A Supposedly Fun Thing
. A young woman came up to them afterward. “I told you not to come here,” Wallace snapped. He was, he wrote a friend, “literally crazy” on the subject of sex. Once talking to Franzen he wondered aloud whether his only purpose on earth was “to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible.”

When Kymberly had left, she had speedily been replaced by another woman in recovery, who was also taking one of his classes in the English department. But one day when he wasn’t in the house, she read through his journal and he broke up with her. She was in turn replaced by her best friend, who was also a friend of Kymberly’s. She had two children, a favored arrangement for Wallace, part of the “fetish for conquering young mothers,” as he phrased it, that he had given to Orin Incandenza in
Infinite Jest
.
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The young woman chewed tobacco and they dated for more than a year. But Wallace was badly suited to relationships by now. He had been alone too long and become, to quote his description of the tennis academy in
Infinite Jest
, “abundantly, embranchingly tunneled.” Over time he had added idiosyncratic touches to his house. He painted one room black, where he expected to work, and put his silver velour chair in it. “I’ve wanted a black room since I was a kid,” he explained to Brad Morrow in a letter. He filled it with lamps, many removed from his parents’ house. He put his computer in the living room for rewriting and revising and covered it with the wedding veil of a friend, as if it were the site of a sacral mystery. Wallace knew himself well enough to know he did not want a
TV—until he did. Then he would buy one and insist it stay unplugged. Or he would put it out at the curb for collection or give it to some of his friends from recovery. His behavior was so noticeable that the local paper, the
Pantagraph
, mentioned it in an item.