Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (5 page)

There had been problems in the Wallace parents’ marriage for some time. In early summer Sally Wallace discussed them with her daughter and told her she was moving out. She asked Amy to tell David in turn. The blow to her son was enormous. He refused to visit her in her new home. Her brother, Amy realized, “felt personally betrayed. He really thought that in a family everybody is expected to tell the truth by word or by deed.”
Years later, he would write a girlfriend that what had devastated him about the moment was his mother’s “not trusting me with reality, fearing it would pain me.” Yet at the time these events did not derail Wallace’s recovery. The relationship between event and crisis for Wallace was not always a direct one. It may have helped cushion the blow that as the summer wore on, he started hanging out with Susie Perkins. Perkins was now a psychology major at Indiana University. They became involved. Wallace was deeply drawn to her, seeking a caregiver to replace his mother. To Costello, her affect toward his friend reminded him of a girl looking after a wounded bird.

Wallace came back to Amherst in the fall of 1982. He was extremely embarrassed: the myth of his capability had been shattered. He was elusive about what had happened—among his close friends only Costello knew the truth. The two friends had agreed to live together again, adding Nat Larson to their group. Just before the start of school, they went on a camping trip to Maine and Nova Scotia. “We stuffed ourselves with fresh seafood from buffets and lay around on the beach,” remembers Fred Brooke, who also went along. For Wallace, all-male dynamics were often the most comfortable, but he was also so agitated by the bugs, he chose to sleep in the car. The rest were amused by the slapping noises they heard through the night, though to Costello, who knew him best, Wallace’s behavior was as frightening as it was funny. He knew that Wallace when he was under stress or fragile acted out his full complement of phobias.

In the housing lottery the group was awarded a room in Stone, one of the “social dorms,” as they were called. The social dorms were designed with bedrooms radiating off a common room and were much more pleasant than the rooms in Stearns or Moore. Wallace, his friends noticed, looked different now. He no longer wore the generic clothes—the corduroys and White Sox and Bears T-shirts of the Midwest—choosing instead worn thrift-shop T-shirts and torn shorts, often with his beloved hoodie. He liked untied Timberland boots and double socks. The sartorial change was representative of an interior one. He was beginning to distance himself from the culture of the Midwest that had formed him, where one could be radical but never rude. Adopting the “dirt bomb” look, as it was
called, was one small way of saying he was done trying to be Joe College. His inchoate political hopes were gone too. “No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a nuthouse,” he told Costello, and mentioned Thomas Eagleton, the senator and Amherst graduate who had briefly been a vice presidential candidate before the news that he’d had electroconvulsive therapy for depression forced him to withdraw in 1972.

Wallace took no chances with his classes on his return. His first semester back he enrolled in logic, Christian ethics, and ancient and medieval philosophy with Kennick. The only nonphilosophy course he took was French, which was necessary if he wanted to get a degree in the department. He aced all four classes, taking particular pleasure in logic. The course description promised to cover “the categorical, hypothetical, alternative and subjunctive syllogism,” as well as the “concepts of consistency, completeness and decidability.” In logic, you were either right or you were wrong, and the things that could keep you from always being right—lassitude, sloppy thinking—with Wallace’s enormous focus he could always overcome. He would later talk about the “special sort of buzz” logic gave him, how after “a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions,” you almost heard a “click.” In no time he was a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie.”

Wallace’s father thought little of the discipline, objecting that logicians tended to replace important questions—free will, beauty—with technical discussions about the language behind those questions, but this was work of the sort that made Wallace’s mind hum. It replaced the ambiguity of actual life with clarity. And as he would later tell an interviewer, highly abstract philosophy gave Wallace both the pleasure of being in his father’s field with the “required thumbing-the-nose-at-the-father thing.” (Another interpretation is that he was still trying to please both parents—grammar is another logical system, after all.)

Kennick’s ancient and medieval philosophy was a class that gave Wallace pleasure for a different reason. His father had taken the course some thirty years before, and much as he wanted to escape his father’s shadow, he also wanted to be protected by it. The ancients were part one of Kennick’s three-part introduction to the field he loved. Kennick required a paper every two weeks. The student was supposed to encounter the material
fresh, using only original research and thinking, without consulting secondary sources. “I want you to be writers of prose, not processors of words,” Kennick would explain. Wallace met this rigorous timetable with a routine of his own. He would write a draft, then revise it twice longhand, then revise that revision twice on his Smith-Corona, pecking away with two fingers.

Kennick restricted papers to five pages, because he thought that compression made for better thinking. Wallace, in thrall to his galloping mind, could not write short. One time Kennick had Wallace count the words in one of his papers and found he had squeezed five hundred onto each page, nearly double the norm. He gave Wallace an A-plus in the class anyway. Wallace for his part basked in Kennick’s affection.

Wallace liked comedy, and comic writing had come easily to him from childhood. So that semester he and Costello revived the campus humor magazine,
Sabrina
. From an office in the basement in Frost Library they put out several issues a year modeled on the
Harvard Lampoon
. The headquarters also served as an informal social club to gossip and postulate, an extension of their table in Valentine Dining Hall. The atmosphere was, appropriately, sophomoric. One member of the editorial team remembers a long discussion on whether women farted, with Wallace insisting they did not. The magazine itself was likewise often juvenile, but in its pages Wallace could satisfy his passion for parody, mimicry, and farce. In
Sabrina
, he wrote an advice column called “Ask Bill,” in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. “Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has
any
relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving,” the
Sabrina
Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write “The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster” himself:

By spring semester Wallace and Costello were becoming well known on campus because of the magazine. Their table in Valentine began drawing a small but intense group of adherents. Nicknames had been a staple of his friendships in Urbana, and Wallace reveled in them here. He was “the Daver” and also “the Waller.” Costello was “Marcus Aurelius” for his first name, philosophical air, and high forehead; Nat Larson was “the Bumpster,” via the name “Natty Bumppo.” Corey Washington, Wallace’s friend from the debate team, was “Apple” or “the Reactor,” a play on “core reactor.” Eventually they were joined by Washington’s roommate Miller Maley, a wunderkind who had entered the school at twelve, Amherst’s youngest student in decades. Self-conscious about his iffy entry into puberty, Wallace liked having the younger Washington and Maley around. Washington was African American too, a distinct minority at the school, adding to the flavor of a table of refuseniks amid the mostly hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere of Amherst. In their undertrafficked corner of the dining hall, the conversation among the group bounced between social and sexual frustration, intellectual enthusiasm, and nerdy inquiry. Washington remembers the roving subjects as “Wittgenstein, the New Deal, Cantor, current politics, mathematical logic, Descartes, hot girls, Kant, etc.” They’d talk about classes, imaginary or hoped-for girlfriends, and weekend parties at the University of Massachusetts or Mount Holyoke College, where Amy Wallace now went.

Costello and Wallace were the twin centers of the group. Costello had authority, gravitas, and a boundless interest in the New Deal. Wallace was intense, with a brain that seemed to whirr faster than he could speak, and he was funny, shooting off clever comments and entertaining with his impressions. He had been in an economics course that semester. Did anyone want to see Friedrich Hayek hit on by a girl from Wilton, Connecticut? He could do his grandparents, his neighbors in Urbana, or Costello (when he wasn’t at the table). But his affection for his roommate was evident to all. Many people never saw the one without the other. To young Washington, their relationship was “like a marriage.”

His new popularity didn’t prevent Wallace from bearing down even
harder in his studies. John Drew, another member of the circle, remembers an undercurrent of competitiveness in the group, of “a whole lot of score keeping and who’s the smartest.” That spring Wallace took the next installment of Kennick’s class, on early modern philosophy. This second unit began with Hobbes, continued through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and finished with Kant. Wallace thrilled to (and had fun imitating) the announcement Kennick made when he got to the German idealist: “Fasten your seat belts. We’re going up!” He also took French again, metaphysics, and economics. In economics, Wallace had to try. He was good at theory, not calculation. But with his grade point average at risk, he worked ceaselessly at the subject and even won a prize for best undergraduate work in the discipline. Costello, also in the class, now had
his
moment of realization about the gifts of his roommate. Wallace got straight A-pluses that semester, spring 1983, his grades perfect. The depression of early 1982 was in the past, forgotten almost, even perhaps by him. When people would ask about why he had left school, he would not answer, or say vaguely that a friend had died and he had needed time away to get over it.

In May, Wallace returned home. He signed up for a summer logic class and another in calculus at the University of Illinois. He would study right through the summer break. But soon he was sorry. He wrote Washington that he just couldn’t focus while “the smell of flowers is in the air and the birds are singing and the pop of frosty Old Mil cans can be heard from the classroom window. I rose one day and said ‘No.’ That’s what I said.” In fact the reason may have been Susie Perkins—Wallace told friends the two were growing more deeply involved. He dropped calculus and contented himself with more logic classes, which he preferred to math anyway—in math he didn’t hear the “click.”

Home was not the place it had been. His father had spent the year alone, keeping a radio on for company. But nothing could tarnish Wallace’s exuberance. He was on a high and cocky, the smartest kid at Amherst. He felt raised up and vindicated. Early in the summer, he warned Washington, who was going to work at the particle accelerator at Stanford University, that he needed to get used to “dealing with, yes, living with, dull, unappealing people.” This brotherly advice was a sign of how far Wallace’s confidence had come back since his breakdown.

Though they lived apart, Wallace’s parents had not given up on their
marriage and continued going to therapy. They now wanted the family to attend as a group. Wallace and Amy reluctantly agreed. Seeking to get to the root of the Wallace family’s dynamic, the therapist asked Amy to position the different members of the family in the room as she perceived them. She refused, drawing instead a schema of interlocking gears on the blackboard.

Afterward, Wallace was no less sour about the experience than he had been going in: “Marriage therapy degenerated into family therapy,” he would later write in
The Broom of the System
. “God knows what all went on.” He fictionalized the marriage therapist’s attempt to get Amy to draw images of how she saw her family into a scene in the novel in which Lenore’s sister’s family put on masks in a ritualized attempt to express their emotions, to the applause of a LaserDisc audience. Perhaps Wallace was angry because the therapy did not avert the formal dissolution of the family. Soon, Jim and Sally told the children they were getting divorced. But one day a month later, their mother was back in the house she had not been in for a year. The children didn’t ask what happened and the parents didn’t offer, Amy remembers.

During the summer Wallace was also beginning to think about fiction differently. He had always liked and read novels; he found them absorbing and relaxing and mined them for the information they provided. He had hoovered everything on his parents’ shelves, from a compilation of the underground nineteenth-century porn magazine
The Pearl
, a favorite, he once told a therapist, of his high school masturbations, and
Fanny Hill
, to popular crime novelists like Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald, to creators of literature—Updike and Kafka. Friends and relatives often tried to suggest books to him that combined his parents’ two interests. This usually meant recommending the big popular philosophical titles that were a mainstay of the era, like
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, which, Wallace noted in a letter to Washington that summer, his mother “practically rammed…up my ass.”
⁶
But this wasn’t the reading he was after. Instead, the first story that, as he later put it, “rang his cherries” was Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.” Barthelme didn’t tell straightforward stories. He sought to fracture the surface of fiction to show the underpinnings on which its illusions depended. As with other postmodernists, the point was not to make the reader forget the conventions of the charade but
to see them more clearly. A truly fulfilled reader was one who always remembered he was just reading a story.