Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (24 page)

Even as Wallace was complaining that he had lost his old reason for writing, Franzen in his letters was quietly suggesting a replacement. He would remind Wallace of the pleasure Franzen took in creating characters he loved and how the stories he had liked in
Girl with Curious Hair
had given him the same satisfaction; both were part of “the humble, unpaid work an author does in the service of emotion and the human image.” A year before when Franzen had suggested something similar, Wallace had
dismissed it as twaddle. Back then, in the same letter in which he said readers were welcome to think he was an asshole, he had made clear that

But now he wondered if his resistance toward a more supportive idea of the writer’s relationship with the reader wasn’t the cause of his blockage. He responded to Franzen:

He reluctantly acknowledged that he might suffer from “a basically vapid urge to be avant-garde and poststructural and linguistically calisthenic—this is why I get very spiny when I think someone’s suggesting this may be my root motive and character; because I’m afraid it might be.”
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Wallace’s stay at Granada House finished in June. Where he chose to go next, he knew, would be important. He had not drunk alcohol or gotten high for seven months. He considered Somerville, Urbana, and Arizona, but instead moved into a transitional facility on Foster Street, just a few blocks away, with Big Craig and two other men from Granada House. The “sober house,” as it was called, was split into men’s and women’s sections. The residents spent most of their time at work and the building had an empty feel compared to Granada House—Amy Wallace visited and found it remarkably clean, considering more than a dozen adults lived there.
When the other residents went off to their jobs, Wallace would head for the library in bandana with knapsack to spend the day trying to write. He still did not feel well. He wrote David Markson that he was “so blank and depressed and befogged” that he couldn’t even tell if he liked what he was
reading
. He and Costello went around Harvard Yard, Wallace showing his friend all the places he had tried to study when he was a graduate student and failed. When he got to Emerson he said he often thought of throwing himself down the stairs. With his friend Debra Spark he went to his Somerville apartment and emptied his things out. He threw out books and piles of manuscripts and drove his computer to the Costello family house in Winchester, Massachusetts. Spark urged him not to throw the material out, saying he’d want it later. “I cannot sit still,” he wrote Markson, “can barely read, and have thoughts that don’t race so much as intertwine in a boily and clotted and altogether nauseous way. Fiction-wise I’m dead in the water.” How he yearned, he said, for “just one tall cool frosted bar-glass of Wild Turkey.” For his nine-month anniversary of sobriety, in July, Wallace’s sponsor gave him a Jolly Pecker, “a squat little fireplug of a phallus, with feet, which when you wind it up hops up and down in a plaintive eager way that just breaks hearts. It seems to capture my state…so aptly I can’t even be bothered to think the guy’s a dork.”
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Wallace had paid $20 a week in rent at Granada House. He had had few other costs as he worked to kick his addiction. But now he was facing the ordinary expenses of a Boston-area resident. Book reviews paid a trifle; he had no grant money left. He was back against the old problem that if he taught he might not write but if he didn’t teach he would not eat. It was the one thing he knew he knew how to do, the only thing he thought he could do. Determined to stay in Boston, where he had made a new beginning, he applied to Tufts and Harvard as a creative writing instructor.

Someone new came into his life now, as if to counter this disappointment: Mary Karr, a poet. The Texan-born Karr was in her mid-thirties, seven years older than Wallace. She lived in Belmont with her husband and young son, drove a station wagon, and had the stability and the grit that Wallace felt he lacked. They had in fact met once at a party before he’d gone to McLean and he’d been very taken with her; she was witty and
had a raunchy vocabulary. Soon after he moved out of McLean, he saw her at a meeting in Harvard Square. That she was a recovering alcoholic too seemed like serendipity. He quickly grew infatuated. When his friend Mark Costello came up to visit him, the two waited in the back of a meeting hall in the hope that this extraordinary woman would come by. (She did and seemed pleasant but harried to Costello, who was used to his friend’s exaggerations.)
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There were warnings Wallace was well aware of against pursuing another person newly in recovery. (Ignoring the prohibition is derided by members as “thirteenth stepping.”)
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It did not matter to him: here was a kindred spirit, another writer struggling to surrender to a greater power but for whom phrases like “One day at a time” and “Do what’s in front of you to do” hurt the brain.

Deb Larson counseled Karr and Karr also volunteered at Granada House, so Wallace often had occasion to see her. Immediately, he wanted to be involved, but Karr, who was in a shaky marriage and trying to protect her son, says she had no interest. She sensed instability and trouble. “We were both just shocking wrecks,” she remembers; he bragged that he had perfect SATs, and called her Miss Karr “in this obsequious, Charlie Chanish fawning kind of way.” He saw her, she realized, as some sort of mother/redeemer figure.

Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no; he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. He would show up at Karr’s family home near McLean to shovel her driveway after a snowfall, or come unannounced to her recovery meetings. Karr called Deb Larson and asked her to let Wallace know his attentions were not welcome. Wallace besieged her with notes anyway. He called himself Sorrowful Werther. She was “Sainte Nitouche,” the saint who cannot be touched, a reference to her favorite book,
Anna Karenina
. She felt an affinity for him, considered him brilliant but also unsound. One day, she remembers, he arrived at a pool party she was at with her family with bandages on his left shoulder. She thought maybe he had been cutting himself and wouldn’t show her what was underneath—a tattoo with her name and a heart. He called Walden, with whom he was not much in contact anymore, to tell her what he had done. He clearly felt he had made a commitment there was no retreating from. The details of the relationship were not clear to others though: Wallace told friends they were involved, Karr says no.

Karr did not admire Wallace’s writing. She read
Girl with Curious Hair
and “told him it was not a great book,” she remembers, praising only “Here and There”: “His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things.” She advocated more direct prose.
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But Karr was not impervious to his restless mind and contacted a friend who ran the writing program at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry, to recommend Wallace for a job there and assure him that if he proved too unstable to teach the class, she would step in. Henry agreed to take Wallace on as an adjunct professor in the fall of 1990.

In that month he began his reluctant return to academia. He took the Green Line subway to Emerson, “a hip kids’ college in the Back Bay,” as he described it to Markson. The combined rejection of the stories he most admired by the two people whose opinions he admired most—Franzen and Karr—was beginning to tell. When DeWitt Henry put up an advertisement for
Girl with Curious Hair
on a bulletin board, Wallace pulled it down, saying he was embarrassed by the book. A few weeks into the semester Wallace checked in with Franzen. “Teaching is going OK,” he wrote his friend. “I’d forgotten how young college students are. They’re infants, though: you can see the veins in their little eyelids, you almost have to cradle their heads to help their necks support the skull’s weight.” He found he was popular, known for a loose style and an appealing willingness to digress. “We spend most of our time talking about Twin Peaks and The Simpsons so they think I am an okay caballero,” he told Markson. This was clearly a very different approach than the one he had taken at Arizona and Amherst, where his commitment to his students was preternatural and even a little maniacal, but Wallace was tired and confused: the stage didn’t feel like a stage without drugs and alcohol; it felt like a classroom.

Wallace did have one literary project in which he was putting his energy.
Harper’s
had asked him to write a 1000 word piece on television for a forum. It had of course sprung to larger-than-life dimensions, consuming his untapped energy. TV remained a subject of paramount interest to him. When he had accepted the assignment, he had joked to Markson, who had been a friend of Malcolm Lowry, that having him write about television was “rather like asking the Consul in his late stages to write a haiku on the history of distillation.” He found interesting tidbits in Widener Library at
Harvard to suggest he might be an outlier but he wasn’t a singleton. In recent years, he learned, for instance, educated viewers had come to watch as much TV as uneducated ones; six hours a day was now the national average. He wrote page after page as he tried to wrestle the filthy machine to the mat. He had little hopes of the work being published, so what he was doing was memorandizing himself, though, as he told Markson, even the kill fee—around $1,000—would be “sumptuous.”

The assertion that television promoted passivity was not new—it was standard in the works of cultural critics like Todd Gitlin and Mark Crispin Miller—but for Wallace the charge wasn’t theoretical; it was personal, crucial. TV’s treacly predictability held him in strange thrall, and during periods of collapse he seemed almost literally attached to it. The students he was teaching made him feel the problem was worse than he had known. They were the Letterman generation he had imagined in “My Appearance,” proud of their knowingness. “They’re all ‘television’ majors, whatever that means,” he complained to Markson, adding that he’d had his wrist slapped by his department for “‘frustrating’ the students” with a DeLillo novel (he does not say which) by which he meant to wake them up: “Most…desire to read nothing harder than news headlines off TV cue cards.”

Wallace knew he did not want to stay at Emerson long. He thought about applying for a fellowship but realized he had nothing to propose to fund. “I want to start trying some creative writing again,” he wrote Moore in November 1990, “but I find now that I am terrified to start, have forgotten most of what I (thought I had) learned, and feel like the little reptile section of my brain that used to be in charge of really good writing is now either dead or playing possum in protest.” But whereas a few years before his frustrations would have sent him on a pot binge, his daily recovery sessions taught him how to wait it out. He had just finished his first year of sobriety, a significant event for him. There were still meetings, time with his sponsor, and he also eventually saw a private therapist at Karr’s urging. Predictably, he found therapy both appealingly and apprehensively absorbing. But it gave him another tool to deal with moments of frustration such as this one. “There is absolutely nothing I can do except accept the situation as it is and wait patiently for some fullness-of-time-type change,” he wrote Moore. “The alternative to patience is going
back to the way I used to live, which Drs. and non-hysterics at the rehab told me would have killed me, and in a most gnarly and inglorious way, before I was 30.”

Still, acceptance wasn’t a lesson that he took in evenly in all aspects of his life. Where the alcohol and pot had held sway there was now an enormous amount of anger that was not easily acknowledged. Big Craig happened to watch a car cut off Wallace one day when the latter was driving near Foster Street. In fury Wallace rammed his car into the other person’s. “He got out of the car, scratching his head,” Big Craig remembers. “‘Oh Gee, what happened?’”

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
, Wallace’s collaboration with Mark Costello, who was now an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, came out in November 1990, a volley from the past. “
Signifying Rappers
is the first serious consideration of rap and its position as a vital force in American cultural consciousness,” an ad for the book in the
Voice Literary Supplement
declared. But Wallace cautioned in the book’s pages, “If you’re reading this in print it’s already dated.” And he was right. By the time the book was published, rap had ceased to be a revelation, though it was still in the news. Its threat to be, as Wallace put it in the book, the “prolegomena to any future uprising,” had been contained. Tipper Gore and George Will had denounced it, the noted professor Henry Louis Gates supported it, and a Florida prosecutor was bringing charges against 2 Live Crew for obscenity. The publisher’s press release offered, “The Authors—white, educated, middle class—occupy a peculiar position, at once marginal and crucial to rap’s us and them equations.” Few reviewers or readers seemed to know what to make of the joint effort. The authors’ stance that rap was “quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today” felt at once too clever and obvious. The way their alternating short takes on rap resembled rap’s own samplings went unappreciated. At the least, Wallace got to set out his new awareness of the power of addiction. He might have been looking around the Granada House common area when he wrote of a