Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (22 page)

Yet he was happy to be attacked in this way; just beneath his self-confidence was always plenty of doubt, and the attention was flattering. He thanked Franzen for his critique, adding that he found his “extensively explained dislike for Westward fascinating.” It was “in its violence immensely gratifying.” He hoped they could meet in Boston soon to “drink or eat or whatever.” Franzen in turn suggested a Red Sox game. Wallace agreed to write a recommendation for his new friend’s Guggenheim Fellowship application.
²⁶

Meanwhile, Wallace was facing the reality that few readers cared as much as Franzen about his attempt to remake literature. He hoped for a tour to go with the publication of
Girl with Curious Hair
, but there wasn’t much of one. He gave a reading at the Cambridge Public Library with a handful of people in attendance, including a schizophrenic woman who kept shrieking. He went down to New York and appeared with Vollmann at Dixon Place, a performance space. At the reading, Vollmann accompanied a story with a starter pistol shot into the air, Wallace covering his ears in pain. Afterward, he and Gerry Howard and a few others went to
Café Pig, a restaurant on Houston Street. Howard was unsettled to see Wallace drink three bourbons “in dismayingly quick order” and then disappear downstairs into a bathroom for a half hour with a “proto-Goth girl with black lipstick”—Kathe Burkhart. He realized that the innocent boy in the U2 T-shirt was gone.

Girl
could barely be found in bookstores, Wallace observing the increasingly unpromising situation. “The book is not yet out anywhere in New York or Boston,” he complained to Nadell in early November, “and apparently likewise in the Midwest. Curioser and curioser.” The nonreception of
Girl
was making its author more and more upset—after all, he had no new fiction with which to follow it. He saw the publication, he later told an interviewer, as “a kind of shrill jagged laugh from the universe. About, you know, I’m done, and now this
thing
, what was it like? This thing sort of lingers behind me like a really nasty fart.” He had risked a psychotic breakdown to create really serious work and hadn’t even gotten a review in the daily
Times
. He inscribed a copy to Rich C., praising the “pretty jacket” but adding, “This book is dying. You probably have the only copy in Tucson.”

Improbably, come September, the twenty-seven-year-old Wallace became a student again. The philosophy department at Harvard was located in Emerson Hall, a turn-of-the-century redbrick building in the Yard with a quotation from the Psalms inscribed on its façade. Wallace was among only six students admitted from hundreds of applicants. Nearly all had been graduate students in philosophy before. Yet within the department the students were considered beginners, neophytes. “There is no fathoming the subdoctoral mind,” was a phrase one professor liked to invoke, quoting the famous retired departmental head W. V. O. Quine.

As often happened with Wallace, the realization he’d made a mistake was nearly immediate. He went to a seminar taught by Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who held a special place in Wallace’s esteem. Cavell’s lively, learned, but friendly approach to philosophical investigations in books like
Must We Mean What We Say?
was the closest Wallace knew to his own; indeed Cavell may have been one of his literary models. But in person Cavell seemed to be talking only to himself and his initiates, who circled
him like acolytes. Wallace, one student remembers, interrupted the professor and asked him to “make himself intelligible please,” a snarl on his face. Shortly afterward, he stopped going.
²⁷

There were other problems. He took a first-year colloquium with John Rawls and found the reading, an anthology called
Free Will
, impossibly dense. He realized he was too old to go back to school; his classmates in the program seemed academic and sheltered to him. One time he went out with two of them to the Hong Kong, a Chinese restaurant near Harvard Square that specialized in heavily alcoholic drinks, and in the midst of a conversation between the two on semantic externalism, he interrupted to ask, “Have you ever tried LSD?”

His fellow students in turn regarded Wallace as a curiosity, a mystery, almost a primitive type, with his interest in porn and rap. One remembers thinking he’d gone back to school as “an anthropologist.” It was clear to most that he did not have the focus to keep up with the pitiless workload. He was still trying to finish his various freelance projects, and he looked tired and wrung out when he came to class. Gerry Howard visited Wallace around this time and found him in an apartment “messier than any I had been in since college.” He remembered philosophy and mathematics textbooks so abstruse he “could not even understand their titles,” and his author “shaky and unhappy.” Toward the end of Wallace’s brief stint at Harvard, one student came upon him fast asleep under one of the old wooden desks in the library on the second floor of the philosophy building.

Wallace wrote on the dedication page of the copy of
Girl with Curious Hair
he sent to Rich C. that he was “fucking up.” He added that he still attended two recovery meetings a week, but often hungover, and now had the shakes.
²⁸
Faced with the possibility that he would fail at the second of his chosen careers, the one his father had pursued so admirably, Wallace found his stunning energy collapsing in on itself again. It was, he later told an interviewer,

Wallace went to a doctor who told him he needed to quit drinking and go to a rehab facility. But Wallace was worried that Harvard would fail him if he took a month off. In late October he forced the issue. He called Costello from the Harvard Health Services and said that he had told the school he was thinking of hurting himself. Once you did that, he explained, the university had no choice but to put you on suicide watch. He asked Costello to bring his bathrobe, his cigarettes, his notebook, and a small TV and meet him at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric institute in Belmont affiliated with the university. “The lovely medical staff at Harvard is putting me in an alcohol rehab and detox center on 11/2,” he wrote Brad Morrow. “Apparently I have liver problems. No joy in mudville.”

The four weeks Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. This was not his first or most serious crisis, but he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom. For all that he had thought of “Westward” as an “Armageddon,” as he would later tell an interviewer, he had really expected it to be a phoenix. From the ashes to which he had reduced postmodernism a new sort of fiction was meant to arise, as laid out in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” How else to understand the love note to the reader at the end of “Westward”? But instead of rebirth, a prolonged dying had followed, and for the past year the corpse had moldered. Wallace hadn’t even been able to finish a nonfiction piece without help since 1987. Never before had he worked so hard with so little to show for it.

Wallace was placed in Appleton House. Outside, the building was attractive—colonial revival
à la
Harvard. Inside it had the look of a faded country hotel, with tattered wine-colored carpets, old brass lamps, and a deep smell of tobacco. Appleton was where the addicts went, with a large room for substance abuse recovery meetings. The medical staff interviewed the twenty-seven-year-old Wallace and told him that he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user and that if he didn’t stop abusing both he would be dead by thirty. Wallace in turn reported the news to Costello, who came the next day. “I’m a depressive, and guess what?” Wallace said. “Alcohol is a depressant!” He smiled through his tears, as if, Costello remembers, he “was unveiling a fun surprise to a five-year-old.” It was of course information Wallace knew already.

The program was meant to shake up the addict, and, with Wallace, it
succeeded. Pulling him out of his old life and keeping him away from its temptations and habits helped. In the end, though, what mattered most was probably that the intoxicated Wallace was no longer writing successfully, which left open the hope that a sober one might. Wallace saw a therapist and went to substance abuse meetings every day. He detoxed from the alcohol. Nadell, back in the Northeast to be with her family for Thanksgiving, came by to see her author a few weeks after his admission. Wallace was already calmer by then. He met them in a brightly lit room full of other patients, all smoking and drinking black coffee and meeting with friends and family. Wallace looked so ragged that Nadell borrowed a pair of scissors from the staff and cut his hair. But she was happy to see he was writing in a notebook. His doctors gave Wallace a pass, and he and his friends walked in the woods at the foot of the campuslike property. McLean was the storied holding tank for many literary depressives, from Sylvia Plath to Robert Lowell, and it occurred to Wallace’s friends that this gave him at least some comfort, that he thought of himself as at a mental health Yaddo. Wallace’s cheerfulness, Nadell felt, kept breaking out.

It was Wallace’s expectation that he would go back to Harvard after his stay at McLean. He was, after all, still enrolled in the graduate program. But the psychiatric staff kept advising him against it. They told him that without continuing support he would just go back to his old habits. Returning to Somerville would be a catalyst for that mistake. Wallace was at first resistant—he did not recognize himself in their phrase “hard-core recidivist,” but as the weeks went by he felt farther and farther away from his old self and must have begun, amid his anxiety about writing, to concede the point that survival had to come first. In any event, he chose to go to a halfway house in Brighton run by a woman who had worked in a psychology lab funded by NASA before she herself went into rehab. He hoped she would understand what he saw as the particular problems of a person as intelligent and educated as himself and provide support. It would be the next best thing to McLean, which Wallace was—Costello noted—sorry to have to leave. He had gotten used to the routines—the meetings, the therapy, the order, the prepared meals—not entirely unlike home. Brighton was a world away from Cambridge, and he did not know what to expect. Despite having written a book on rap, his knowledge of anything other than middle-class academic life was minimal. He wrote Nadell at the end
of November, “I am getting booted out of here and transferred to a halfway house…. It is a grim place, and I am grimly resolved to go there.”

Granada House was on the grounds of the Brighton Marine hospital near the Massachusetts Turnpike.
¹
Wallace gives a good picture of its fictional counterpart in
Infinite Jest
, the novel it would help inspire:

The compound consisted of seven buildings—“seven moons orbiting a dead planet,” as it is described in
Infinite Jest
—all leased to various substance abuse and mental health assistance groups. Wallace met Deb Larson, the director, at his new temporary home. Tall and blonde, she walked with a limp: drunk, she had fallen down in her kitchen, hitting her head, causing a partial paralysis. Even then she hadn’t stopped drinking. Wallace respected her. She was pretty and smart and gave him a link to an old life that was still his present—you could almost see Harvard from the top floor of the building.
²
Recovery facilities tried to control the stress levels of their participants, and one activity they generally prohibited was school. Wallace had no choice but to call the philosophy department at Harvard and ask for a leave of absence. He was too humiliated to go back to get the vegetable juicer, a gift from his mother, that he had left behind in the graduate office.

As a new arrival, Wallace was not allowed out of the building on his own for the first ten days. For the next twenty he could go out only to substance abuse meetings. Then he was expected to find low-level work. Wallace, whose only real skill was teaching and writing, cast around and was able—probably thanks to the presence on his résumé of the head of Amherst
College security as a reference—to get hired as a guard at Lotus Development, a large software company. Granada House rules stipulated a forty-hour workweek, so Wallace got up at 4:30 in the morning to take the Green Line subway and worked until 2 p.m., walking a vast disk packaging plant in Lechmere, clocking in his whereabouts every ten minutes and twirling his baton (or so he later said). He would tear pages out of his notebook and send letters to his friends, maintaining contact with the small group of editors and writers who were vital to him. The Lotus experience, he recalled in a later interview, reminded him of “every bad ’60s novel about meaningless authority,” but at the time he bore it well. “Give me a little time to get used to no recreational materials and wearing a polyester uniform and living with 4 tatooed ex-cons and I’ll be right as rain,” he wrote Moore with ironic brio shortly after starting. Even inside Granada House, he managed to attend to the business of being a writer—following up on submissions to magazines and reading pages of stories he had coming out. He could see the strange side of his situation. When the galleys of “Order and Flux in Northampton” arrived from
Conjunctions
with a page missing, he told Morrow he could send it at his convenience. “I’m not going anywhere for Xmas,” he wrote.