Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (31 page)

Wallace’s informal, rule-bending appearance was misleading. He had revived as a teacher since Emerson, just as he had revived as a writer, and ran his class tightly, a pedagogic hardass. He penalized for lateness and for absence and grammar and spelling errors, trying to wean a lazy generation from dangling participles and subject/verb disagreements. “Don’t give your talent the finger,” he would tell the students. For tricky grammar questions, he would step out of his office and call his mother—even when they were supposedly not speaking, they could speak about this.

In his undergraduate class, Wallace was kind to the clueless but cruel to anyone with pretensions. When a student claimed that her sentences were “pretty,” he scribbled lines from her manuscript on the blackboard and challenged, “Which of you thinks this is pretty? Is
this
pretty? And
this
?” He continued to battle any young man who reminded him of his younger self. When one student wowed his classmates with a voicy, ironic short story, he took him outside the classroom and told him he had “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before.” Wallace promised to prevent the “erection of an ego-machine” and strafed the student with
criticism for the rest of the semester. The young man, Ben Slotky, found it odd that Wallace kept inviting him to play tennis though he did not know how. Wallace took pleasure in telling undergraduates who expected creative writing to be a gut that they should get out before they learned they were wrong. No one could call themselves a writer, he added, until he or she had written at least fifty stories.

He asked for a high level of commitment, but he gave it too. No one worked harder. He read every story three times and marked it up with each pass—once for first impressions, a second time to evaluate how well it did as a work of fiction, and a third time as if it were about to go to press. He would append long letters of analysis and critique to even routine undergraduate efforts. And for the graduate students, many of whom had been drawn to ISU by its reputation as a safe place for theoretical fiction, the first day of class Wallace sometimes put the names of major literary theorists on the blackboard and said, “I know about all this stuff. You don’t need to remind me of it.” Anyone who thought he was going to champion the department’s tradition soon realized he or she was wrong; his goals were traditional. The story should connect reader and writer. “Go somewhere it is difficult to get to. Try to tell about something you care about,” he would say. Or, “What is at stake in this story?” he would ask, parroting just the question he’d found so irksome from the professors at Arizona almost a decade before. If a story shied away from its emotional potential, Wallace would write on their papers, “This is a skater. See me.” And to those who insisted on the intellect over the heart, he’d order, “Write about a kid whose bunny died.” He was making a clear statement about the purpose of fiction. If the heart throbbed, who cared what the head did?

Wallace was relieved to find he could work on
Infinite Jest
and teach at the same time. The first semester he taught he was also moving forward again on the book. As he had with Karr, he gave Kymberly Harris new sections to read and comment on. But Harris had not come to Bloomington to be a muse or literary widow; she wanted Wallace to go out with her for dinner, to see her in plays, to be available for conversation. Wallace wanted to work. They broke up, got back together, each iteration making their mutual need more intense, a pattern he knew from Walden and Karr. He
closed the door and wrote; she went out without him. Yet he did not want to be as alone as this left him. Writing all day was too solitary; being with Kymberly was too much company. So Wallace adopted a rescued Labrador pup that he named Jeeves (formally, Very Good Jeeves, the name of a story collection by P. G. Wodehouse that Wallace had loved as a boy). The dog gave Wallace great pleasure. He had the run of the house, slept in Wallace’s bed, and ate food out of his mouth; Wallace particularly liked a little sideways dance Jeeves did before he got his dinner. He understood that a dog was not a relationship with another person and yet he saw the advantages. Dogs didn’t have acting careers; they didn’t compete with you for grant money; and when you lavished love on them it made you feel good about yourself. As he would tell an interviewer after
Infinite Jest
came out, “It’s just much easier having dogs. You don’t get laid; but you also don’t get the feeling you’re hurting their feelings all the time.”

But it turned out that Wallace was too busy for the demands even a canine made. Jeeves would chew on his foot while he typed, then hump the velour recliner. He would relieve himself in the living room. Harris would come over to find her $100 pairs of shoes ruined and her underwear eaten. And Jeeves’s barking drove Wallace crazy; he tried to wear earplugs while he worked, then added airline headphones. He found himself unable to set limits. In some way Jeeves was an avatar of him—or of how he saw himself—ungainly, honest, quick to give his love, a rebounder from constant disappointment. Any form of discipline for Jeeves just seemed to him cruelty; he felt keenly the least whimper of pain from the animal. It was easier for him to be mean to a person than a pet.

In desperation, Wallace reached out to his friends from the university and in his recovery group. John O’Brien sent over his dog trainer, but Wallace couldn’t bear to see Jeeves disciplined. His sensitivity became a joke among his friends—this was after all farm country. Finally, a retired engineer from his recovery group started taking the Lab puppy for walks in nearby Miller Park, while Wallace strove to work. Still, he complained when Jeeves came home covered with green slime from the pond there. “What am I supposed to do,” he demanded, “send him through a car wash?”

Gale Walden had appeared in Illinois to look after her grandfather in Champaign, who was ill. She had also gotten a job at the
Review of Contemporary
Fiction.
She and Wallace had barely been in touch since he had warned her away in Boston. Sometimes the two would meet now at diners, halfway between Champaign and Bloomington. They picked corn together on her grandfather’s land, and she cooked it for him. A more mature friendship was emerging. She would sometimes come by his house and be amazed at the chaos—“papers, file cabinets, multiple
Harper’s
magazines, toys Jeeves had torn up, and really a lot of herbal tea, which I thought was probably a female influence,” she remembers. He had papered the bathroom with pages from his novel. He told Walden he was putting everything he had into it. To her he seemed happy in a new way.

As 1993 drew to a close, Wallace had nearly finished his draft. He had made some of the cuts Pietsch had suggested and he had continued to expand Don Gately’s role, so that Gately was beginning to take the book over from Hal Incandenza. The change limned his own journey post-sobriety, from clever to mindful. Late in the novel, Gately is shot trying to protect his Ennet House charges and lies in a hospital, enduring the pain without morphine. In what is effectively the climactic scene of a novel without climaxes, he resists artificial pain relief with great effort:

In November, Wallace returned to Boston for a panel at the Arlington Center for the Arts. The subject was the future of fiction. There were about thirty people in the audience and the host was Sven Birkerts. Birkerts and Wallace had met once since the former had given
Girl with Curious Hair
its first serious consideration, during Wallace’s short stint as a student at Harvard. At the time, Birkerts had been stunned by Wallace’s rapid-fire
thought, enthusiasm for postmodernism, and need for cigarettes. Birkerts had also invited Franzen. To the audience, Wallace seemed the most cheerful of the three participants, the one with the most sense that successful fiction was still possible. Stranded overnight on the way home at O’Hare Airport, he wrote a long note (“HOPE THIS IS READABLE; I USED BLOCK CAPS, IN HOPES”) to Birkerts, trying to explain just how much he had changed. He told Birkerts that the critic cared more for “Little Expressionless Animals” than the author did now. The note also contained an early suggestion that capturing human verities when you had Wallace’s racing, recursive mind might at times be hard:

He added, “I have never felt so much a failure, or so mute when it comes to articulating what I see as the way out of the ironic loop.”

That fall Wallace asked Moore to look over the manuscript and see whether the cuts Pietsch had wanted in June made sense to him. He was pleased when a month later Moore responded with suggestions for more modest condensing. Even better, his ideas were, by Wallace’s estimate, “80% different from Little Brown’s, meaning I get to go with my gut more.” Wallace’s gut was that when Pietsch read all the pages he’d see better how they all fit together. He had also realized by now that he was not going to be able to get the book in by the end of the year and had apologetically asked Pietsch for an extension; there were only so many hours in the day. As a professor, he penalized students for late papers, but to his surprise, Pietsch was happy to give him more time. “The trick in a case like this,” Pietsch wrote back, “is to make sure we have to ask for only one extension.” They agreed in the end to a new due date of April 15, five months away. Still, feeling guilty after the fact, in January, Wallace sent the excuses he ought to have put in the first note: the surprising Illinois cold, a lithium battery in his 1980s-era computer so old it was “no longer manufactured outside like Eastern Europe,” and most of all Jeeves:

He was back at work by now, among other things expanding the “interAmerican huggermugger” that Pietsch had found too complicated, believing that the book needed it.
Infinite Jest
might be a “Jamesian melodrama,” but it was also the big shit he’d been working on for almost ten years, his bid for a seat at the table with Pynchon, and for that he had to preserve his unfamiliar political setting. He also around this time wrote what would become the beginning of the novel, the memorable scene, set a year after the end of the rest of the book, in which Hal Incandenza has a nervous breakdown during an admission interview at the University of Arizona. What transpires is an exaggerated version of Wallace’s own experience on his college tour fifteen years before, when he threw up at his Oberlin interview. At his own interview, Hal is seized by terror and literally can no longer speak. He is rushed to an emergency room in the midst of a psychotic episode, the end of which trip he imagines in detail:

Wallace saw that the scene was a better lead-in for the novel than the discussion between Hal and his father posing as a professional conversationalist that had stood at the book’s beginning for so long. It captured the sense of terrified isolation that is key to the story, the worry that what we feel we can never express. And it held out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace’s earlier work but dear to his recovery experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal.

But beginning the chronology of the book a year after the earlier draft had ended also presented a problem, one that offered an opportunity that excited Wallace. Telling Pietsch about it was likely the real purpose of his letter complaining about Jeeves. Wallace acknowledged as much in his note: “A lot of this is stalling before a query.” If Hal was a crack-up in the first scene of the novel, the reader might reasonably wonder how he had gotten that way. There were several possibilities. Hal may have seen the devastatingly absorbing video his father made or be detoxing from marijuana or have taken a potent kind of hallucinogenic fungus known as DMZ (nicknamed “Madame Psychosis”). Hints for all three of these plot twists are in the text. But Wallace wanted to tell Pietsch that he was never going to let the reader settle on one.
Infinite Jest
was meant to be a failed entertainment, not a potted amusement. He now warned his editor that he wasn’t going to tie up his story in a nice little bow: “Any sort of conventional linear ending for this stuff is in my opinion going to seem either linearily thrillerish in a way that doesn’t go with the rest of the book; or else incredibly prolix and complicated.” Reminding Pietsch that the plot of the book he’d bought “has always been more of an arc than a terminating line,” he proposed