Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (6 page)

“The Balloon” is typical of Barthelme’s work. In the story, a large balloon appears over Manhattan. While it hangs above the city, various characters approach and consider it, each from his own point of view. Children jump up and down on it for fun, while adults grouse that it serves no purpose or talk about how looking at the balloon makes them feel. The police worry about the threat to public order. In the end the narrator reveals that the balloon is an artifact, something he just felt like inflating because he was lonely. This was writing that a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie” like Wallace could appreciate. It peeled back the skin of literature just as logic peeled back the skin of language. Wallace told an interviewer years later that Barthelme was the first time he heard the “click” in literature. He added that Barthelme’s sort of writing appealed to him far more than the fiction he had enjoyed in high school, writing that contented itself with telling a story. “Pretty” as Updike’s prose was, Wallace acknowledged to the interviewer, “I don’t hear the click.”

Soon another postmodern work came his way. That book was Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
. Charlie McLagan, a fellow student, had turned him on to Pynchon the semester before. McLagan, who was a year behind Wallace, was different from the rest of their circle. He came from a wealthy suburban Chicago family who belonged to a country club. At Amherst he kept himself apart, rooming alone in Tyler House, a distant dorm, in a room he nicknamed “the Womb” with madras prints on the wall. His two cats were named Crime and Punishment. McLagan read widely and imaginatively, and let everyone know he had sex with his girlfriend. When Wallace and Costello would go to his dorm, the three would drink gin and tonics and eat Nutter Butter cookies and listen to U2. (Wallace was delighted to find his roommate looked like the band’s guitarist, The Edge.) But when Wallace came alone, the atmosphere was more intense: despite Wallace’s effort to stop smoking pot, he and McLagan would get high together. “God damn Charlie and his damn drug-allure,” he wrote Washington that summer. The two would sometimes even drop acid, but Wallace found he preferred mushrooms. “Don’t do LSD, and don’t do coke, because they’re both dangerous and expensive in that order,” Wallace advised Washington, but “mushrooms are fun and
giggly and they make you think you’re smarter than you are…which is fun for a while.” While they tripped, Wallace and McLagan would listen over and over to “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno on McLagan’s expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs.

One day McLagan had run into Wallace and Costello discussing
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and tossed them his copy of
Lot 49
, which they promptly read. The novel is the story of Oedipa Maas, a young woman trying to uncover a centuries-old conspiracy involving a secret postal organization known as Trystero. Maas travels around California encountering people who give her clues to the puzzle—or the whole action of the novel may be a hallucination or a hoax set in motion by an ex-boyfriend; the reader is left uncertain. One thing that caught Wallace’s eye about the book was the idea that to live in America was to live in a world of confusion, where meaning was refracted and distorted, especially by the media that engulf and reconfigure every gesture. As one character announces, pointing at a television, “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine.”

Lot 49
was an agile and ironic metacommentary, and the effect on Wallace cannot be overstated (so much so that in a later letter to one of his editors Wallace, ever nervous of his debt to the other writer, would lie and say he had not read the book). Wallace reading Pynchon was, remembers Costello, “like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie.” One postmodernist made way for another. Barthelme was hermetic, Pynchon expansive. He tried to take in the enormity of America in a way that Barthelme did not. And he showed you that the tone and sensibility of mainstream culture—
Lot 49
drew its energy from pop songs, TV shows, and thrillers—could sit alongside serious issues in fiction. At the very least, the book was funny, and Wallace already knew how to be funny. The irony of the writing was a more directed version of what he and Costello had been turning out at
Sabrina
.

Wallace had been free of depression since the beginning of 1982, but now, twenty months later, the black hole with teeth got hold of him again. Toward the end of an otherwise happy summer, he began to have acute anxiety
attacks, perhaps brought on by a feeling of letdown after his perfect semester. His life had had the quality in the past year of using one click to drown out another. He himself in later interviews would—not entirely credibly—blame the breakdown on a sudden realization that he did not want to be a professor of logic, that he had “a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity,” as he told an interviewer. The discipline suddenly seemed lifeless and pedantic to him; and his amazing grade point average was just an evasion, a reflection of his fear of dealing with living people as opposed to dry equations. “The same obsessive studying that helped me come alive,” he would later explain to an interviewer, “also kept me dead.” Whatever the onset of the attack, things got worse when a psychiatrist prescribed Tofranil, a tricyclic antidepressant, to help ease the anxiety.

Wallace hated the drug, which made him feel apathetic. He was preparing for the third leg of Kennick’s history of philosophy course, but now when he tried to read Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations
—“Uncle Ludwig” in his formulation—he couldn’t focus. Wittgenstein was a core interest of Wallace’s. His father had studied with a disciple of the Austrian philosopher, as had Kennick. For a while Wallace tried to ignore the side effects. He played tennis, went to the gym, swam “a teenyweeny bit,” “farting off,” as he wrote Washington, to whom he did not at first mention the crisis. The upset was augmented by the fact that Wittgenstein seemed to be saying what he was thinking and Pynchon writing: that experience was like a game, that people were all and ever radically disconnected. Still hopeful, he went to rejoin his classmates, only to find himself falling into deeper agony.

Back at school for the fall, he found himself in an uncongenial housing situation. He and Costello, now a senior, had joined a large rooming group, some eight people divided into two suites. Wallace could not find a way to be comfortable among so many young men. The group included preppy students, who on principle rubbed Wallace the wrong way (Wallace had ended a friendship with one of his freshman stoner friends when he had joined a fraternity). His brittle balance shattered, Wallace began to withdraw into himself. He would sit quietly at the Valentine dining table in the midst of his friends’ chatter and say nothing. They would urge him to do his impersonations but he wouldn’t respond. Just as Costello
had the year before, they were learning that there was another side to their friend.

Quietly, Wallace again thought about hurting himself. McLagan was on his mind. During their hours in the “womb,” Wallace had debated suicide with McLagan. Music playing, they kicked around the fate of Ian Curtis of Joy Division, who hanged himself at the age of twenty-three. In high school McLagan himself had once stood on the edge of an overpass with a bottle of champagne in his hand, contemplating throwing himself onto the Illinois Tollway. For McLagan, killing yourself could be the fitting—maybe even necessary—exit for the sensitive artist from the brutal world. Wallace, though he’d known a despair deeper than his friends could imagine, wasn’t so sure. Suicide looked to him like an escape rather than a solution. He knew depression too well to see it as glamorous. He looked around for ways to harm himself but decided instead to withdraw from school again and find a psychiatrist.

Leaving school a second time for Wallace was even more humiliating. No one had known him sophomore year; no one cared if he came or went. But by the fall of 1983 he was one of the school’s champion students. He had just won a scholarship for most promising philosophy student and would have to give the money back. The scene from sophomore year repeated itself with variations. Costello drove Wallace to Bradley Airport outside Hartford for the flight home. (The car, an AMC Pacer, would later surface, with Wallace’s mother’s Gremlin, in
The Pale King.
) The first time Wallace had left, a year and a half before, he had fought back tears; this time he showed little emotion. He kept telling Costello he had thought he’d had a strategy and now it was clear he had been deluding himself. For the last twenty miles he was silent and wouldn’t let Costello park the car to see him to his gate.

Wallace had told none of his other friends that he was leaving. He did not give his trust easily but felt he could bring Corey Washington into his confidence by now. So, shortly after he got home, he explained his departure in a letter: “I came very close to doing something stupid and irrevocable at Amherst but finally opted, sensibly or wimpishly, depending on whether your point of view is that of my parents or that of Charlie M[cLagan],
to try to get better so that I could exist.” He added that he now found himself in the hands of a doctor he trusted. He made light of some of the revelations to his friend: “One hideous symptom of severe depression is that it is impossible both to do anything and to do nothing; as a devotee of Jumping Joe’s [their logic professor’s] Celebrated Excluded Middle I am sure you can assess that this is an Intolerable Situation.” More seriously the psychiatrist, whom Wallace nicknamed “Dr. Tetemaigrir” (French for Head Shrinker), had, he wrote Washington, “real valid and non-sterile things to say” about depression. The doctor took him off Tofranil and likely put him on a different antidepressant. Wallace was beginning to understand things that had either never been told to him before or that he was only now ready to hear: that he had a biological condition that was with him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t just ignore it. Though he shared his family’s worry that, as Amy says, “his potential as an autonomous adult was pretty much vaporizing,” Wallace began healing, the “festering pus-swollen c[h]ancre at the center of my brain” diminishing, as he wrote to Washington. He apologized for the façade he had been putting up, adding in another note, “You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real ‘Waller’: an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit.”

Even in the midst of his depression and treatment, Wallace continued to read widely. He picked up Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
and finished it in eight nights, or so he told McLagan. He wrote as well, focusing as he had not before. The work Wallace undertook now was at a different level. His hope that he could lose himself in the rigors of logical philosophy shredded, he may have felt he had no other choice. He had nowhere left to hide. In the event, he was now able to achieve things he had not before. One result was “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” the story of a young man who withdraws from college with psychiatric problems. Though it was not pure autobiography, the authorial “I” and the “I” of the narrator parallel each other in the story in a way they never would again in Wallace’s fiction; the sense of dismay at being mentally ill is fresh. The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form. For much of his story, Wallace drew on his memories of his recent traumatic breakdowns. His nameless
narrator is also suffering from “the Bad Thing”—his phrase for depression. He has tried to commit suicide in his parents’ house—“a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don’t wish to say a whole lot”—and at story’s beginning he finds himself in a psychiatric hospital. In the ward, Dr. Kablumbus gives the narrator a choice between electroconvulsive therapy and a course of antidepressants. The narrator chooses the latter, but the drug he is given, Tofranil, makes him feel tired and affectless, just as it had Wallace the previous summer. Still the narrator—earnest in the style of Wallace when he first entered Amherst—assures us that being medicated is not so bad. “They’re fine, really,” he claims of antidepressants, “but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously.”

A fellow patient may come to the rescue, though. In the ward the narrator meets May Aculpa, a young woman likely recycled from the story Wallace had shown Costello the year before. May Aculpa and the narrator chat and flirt, but just as a human connection is being made, the pretty young depressive is discharged, only to die in a car accident shortly after. “I tried to call May’s parents,” the narrator tells us at story’s end, “just to say that I was incredibly sorry,” but he gets the parents’ answering service.
⁷

“Planet Trillaphon,” which Wallace would publish in the
Amherst Review
when he got back to college, is more original in subject than in style.
⁸
Its structure and pacing are those of well-made student fiction; Wallace was still deconstructing existing stories trying to find what held them together. He boasted to the interviewer David Lipsky years later that his gift in college was to be “a weird kind of forger. I can sound kind of like anybody.” Here he was rifling Pynchon for names and J. D. Salinger for tone, but the Salingerian faux naïveté becomes magnified with a lens worthy of Gogol as Wallace reimagines his nightly battles with acne as something surreal: