So by late August he was back at Amherst, slightly more than two years after he had left it. He moved temporarily into the Peterson home. It was perhaps a bad omen that Lolita had just died—“Her little ticker didn’t quite hold out long enough to meet her re-maker,” Peterson wrote. But he was happy to find that Andrew Parker, his favorite literature theory teacher, was willing to share an office. Peterson was lending him his cubicle in Frost too. Even so, immediately Wallace sensed that he’d made a mistake. Amherst in 1987 wasn’t his Amherst. Nearly everyone he knew was gone; he was alone. Walden and Wallace had left their relationship on hold over the summer, and now he reached out to her, suggesting marriage for the second time. Wallace told his friends they’d chosen a date in the late fall at a church in Cicero, outside of Chicago; Walden’s father, a minister, would preside. Wallace asked Costello to be best man. His friend suggested he make sure he was going in with his eyes open. “They’re saucers,” Wallace replied. But Walden was wary, understandably. She came east to be near Wallace, moving in with a friend in Belchertown, a few miles from Amherst, and she and Wallace made efforts to reestablish their relationship. But his drinking and depressiveness worried her and she kept her distance.
At the core the problem for Wallace was what to write next. He had said what he had to say in “Westward.” It was what he had been born to write, and having done so, as he would later explain to an interviewer, he had “killed this huge part of myself doing it.” Much like an addict looking back on a final binge, Wallace would later shudder at its memory, calling the effort “a horror show…a permanent migraine…crude and naïve and pretentious.” To Franzen he would reflect, “I wanted something utterly open,” like “the bleeding guts of a patient who should die on the table, aetherized, but won’t.” Since finishing the novella, he hadn’t written a word; the story, he realized, as he would tell a later interviewer, was also “a
kind of suicide note”—if he wasn’t precisely a metafictionist, he was certainly someone for whom pulling off the façade of realism was congenial. The arrow he had killed the fictional Gale with had pierced him too.
At Yaddo he had drunk heavily as a replacement for pot, and because McInerney did, and a part of him wanted to be McInerney. But here at Amherst, still without pot, the alcohol itself became an issue. He wrote JT that he had “picked up a bit of a drinking problem and am currently grappling.” The blithe note belied his upset that what had begun as a placeholder was now a new addiction and thus a new source of disgust with himself. He might not have drunk if he had had some work to do, but his days seemed empty and pointless.
6
When he got the news that the
Paris Review
had taken “Little Expressionless Animals,” he told JT that the sale made “Viking pretty happy,” but “at this point I don’t really care.” On arriving in Amherst, he had worked his way through Peterson’s liquor cabinet and then quietly replaced the bottles, only to work his way through them again. Soon he got an apartment in North Amherst—“not really all that nice, plus expensive,” he wrote Washington, and for a moment he was able to summon some joy at the sight of a New England fall again—at least from behind the scrim of his letter-writing. “I’m squatting amid boxes,” he wrote Nadell in early September, “offering prayers of thanks for some unfurnished privacy. The leaves are threatening to get pretty already.” But his good mood did not last long. “Please
please
get me out of here,” he pled to Nadell a few weeks later. He said he was listening to “sad Springsteen and Neil Young. I wander around Rick [Vigorous]-like, remembering disasters.” He wrote Forrest Ashby that he was thinking of moving to Canada to be a high school teacher.
Wallace was on the verge of falling into a new depression. The struts that held up his life—classes, his work, his relationships, his drug use—had all been removed. He turned to television now, his drug of last resort, soothing himself with hours of sitcoms, soap operas, and sporting events. He drank still more.
7
“Do Not Send Any Bob, Please,” he wrote a connection in Tucson, knowing that marijuana was the last thing he needed. But then, later: “Bob’s presence urgently requested.”
Class began.
Broom
had done well for a first novel, but Wallace was far from famous.
8
To the Amherst undergraduates, he was just a name on the syllabus. In fact, because he was a last-minute addition meant to fill a
teaching hole, they knew less about him than about most of their instructors. The students who showed up for his class were surprised to find a man barely older than themselves, carrying a pink Care Bears folder and a tennis racket. Before the first seminar meeting, Wallace had asked for writing samples—admission to seminars at Amherst was selective. When one girl asked why she had to provide a sample of how well she wrote in order to get into a class to learn how to become a better writer, Wallace acknowledged the tautology—and perhaps her anxiety—and told her she could just submit a grocery list. In the end, he taught thirteen students.
Wallace knew that if he taught hard he wouldn’t be able to write, but he also knew that he wasn’t writing anyway, so he went at teaching with fervor, covering the students’ papers with pages of annotations, throwing himself into their work. Teaching brought focus and a sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that he was honoring his parents, and Wallace needed all that. The students were astonished at his intensity.
Feeling he had endured the scorn of the Arizona professors, Wallace made sure his comments were supportive and the tone of the class positive. He did not want to replicate the discouraging classroom atmosphere he had just left. He cautioned the students, as one remembers, not to “tap dance in cleats” on one another’s stories. His syllabus was conventional, meant to teach the basic tools of writing: character, dialogue, and plot. He gave his students Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” to illustrate the unreliable narrator and Lee K. Abbott’s “Living Alone in Iota” to showcase voice. “Just because it really happened, doesn’t make it good fiction,” he would remind them. He had the ability to shift gears in this way—to go from the pyrotechnics of writing “Westward” to teaching the rudiments of fiction; in fact, the simpler the teaching, the happier it made him. He did not go to class for challenges, personal or intellectual, he went to find certainties of the sort that eluded him in his own writing. Every meeting started with a grammar lesson—the difference between “between” and “among” or “further” and “farther.” “I’m a grammar Nazi,” he liked to tell his students. One day he put the words “pulchritudinous,” “miniscule,” “big,” and “misspelled” on the blackboard. He asked his students what the four words had in common, and, when no one knew, happily pointed out that the appearance of each was the opposite of its meaning: “pulchritudinous”
was ugly, “miniscule” was big, “big” was small, and “misspelled” was spelled correctly. The students had rarely seen him so happy.
9
To their eyes, the twenty-five-year-old Wallace was a mystery. He came to class in his Arizona bandana (some thought it was to keep his hair from falling out), Timberland boots, and plaid shirts, cursed, and took frequent smoking breaks. He was trying to quit smoking and so had begun chewing tobacco.
10
He was happy to extend office hours for as long as students wanted, but if he bumped into them on the street he hardly acknowledged them. One student was reminded of Dostoevksy’s Underground Man. Costello came for a visit and found his old roommate strangely diminished. He remembers “everything happening in very slow motion—getting dressed to go out, finding car keys, finding dip, notebook, working pen, writing a phone message.” There were only blondies and mustard in the fridge. Wallace told his college roommate he worried that pot smoking had ruined his brain permanently and he would never be able to write again.
Depressed, he was still not without romantic appeal. Two undergraduate women in his class set off one day to see where he lived and were excited to find his apartment above a sandwich shop in a run-down part of Amherst. When two students in his class asked if he wanted to go hear an Irish band play in Springfield, forty minutes south on the interstate, he surprised them by agreeing. On the way home the car, which Wallace was driving, spun out, leaving them all scared by the side of the road before they climbed back in and returned to the college. They did not repeat the adventure. To them, he looked spooked, hollowed out, adult.
Toward the end of the semester, Wallace occasionally dropped hints of a different life. When he gave his class an excerpt from
Story of My Life
to read, he mentioned he had been with the author at Yaddo when he was writing it. That fall he went to New York to receive a Whiting Award, and afterward told the class he had met Eudora Welty. At semester’s end, Wallace gave his students his
Jeopardy!
story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” to read and critique. “I’ve spent all semester reading your stuff and now you can read something of mine,” he told them.
Wallace’s only obligations were his once-a-week class and office hours. “I’m basically on my own,” he wrote Ashby. He turned out to miss structure, writing in a letter later in the semester, “The view from my apartment,
where I spend staggering amounts of time, always seems accessed through dirty windows, no matter how vigorously Windex is applied.” Andrew Parker, with whom he was supposed to be sharing an office, was surprised how little he saw of his former student. And when he was around, there was something about Wallace’s behavior that discouraged questions.
No one in his orbit guessed the intensity of Wallace’s suffering—the television he watched (six to eight hours a day, he told one of his students), the drinking, drugs, and loneliness. It was not that he was not trying to write; it was that he was not succeeding. He may have picked up some older stories at this time and reworked them, especially “Church Not Made with Hands,” an intricate story about an art therapist and a man coping with his daughter’s brain injury that he had first submitted in Mary Carter’s workshop at Arizona. He started two novellas sometime around this time, of which he would later say that they were “just so
unbelievably
bad…. Hopelessly confused. Hopelessly bending in on themselves.” (They have never surfaced.) The feeling he had said all he had to say in “Westward” still lingered. The story pointed backward but not forward; metafiction was done, but what was to come? He had no experience writing without inspiration—creativity was tied in to the manic part of his personality.
Esquire
was interested now in publishing his Letterman story, but he would have to cut ten to fifteen pages. Wallace dutifully tried but in the end the magazine turned it down.
Predictably, the planned late November wedding began to come apart. Walden had returned to her family in Chicago, worried about her fiancé’s drinking, and in mid-October he visited her there. They fought. One issue was that Wallace had invited Alice Turner to their ceremony, and Walden, when she discovered what had gone on at Bennington, refused to have her at the celebration. Wallace strove to explain, but Walden could not be convinced—at least this was the version Wallace gave Turner in a letter; Wallace may have been exaggerating or simply inventing. One way or another, the relationship appeared truly finished. Wallace went on a new bender, considering suicide. “I’ve hurt not just me but her and her family,” he wrote a friend three weeks later, saying the new break with Walden left him “feeling dead.”
But though breakups were often the prompts for Wallace’s collapses, they never quite seemed the cause. Indeed, the decision to force things
with Walden may have been a deliberate whack of the Paddle of Immoderation, an attempt to shock himself into writing again. Whatever the motive, the break with Walden felt final.
Becalmed back in Amherst, Wallace began to yearn for Tucson. He had not particularly liked the city, but he had written well there. As the fall wore on, he asked JT to confirm the rumor of “gorgeous new poetesses” in the MFA program, and when the faculty invited him back to give a reading at the Poetry Center in January 1988, he went. He flew west and met up with old friends, many still in the writing program. He and Ashby went climbing in the Tucson Mountains west of the city. A new graduate student, Martha Ostheimer, whom Forrest was friends with, came along. Wallace strove to impress her by running up the mountain before the other two, but he was out of shape and wound up vomiting in some bushes near the summit. That evening there was a party, and afterward, he and Ostheimer talked for hours in her car about literature, particularly Pynchon. He wound up in her apartment, where they spent the next several days. A relationship no sooner begun, Wallace fled it. Quickly he flew off to San Francisco, where, he told Ostheimer, he had to see Nadell. He came back to Tucson for the reading and impressed his old pals by crumpling and tossing the pages of “Westward” as he read it. “It was,” remembers Ostheimer, “as if they no longer existed after he’d read them.” When Ostheimer went around to see him at JT’s, the former marine told him Wallace was not available. Afterward, Wallace sent JT a note thanking him for his help, but to Ashby he admitted, “I think I’ve again fucked up girl-wise.” He apologized to Corey Washington, who was at Stanford, saying he’d been “too hung over” to visit. One last note he sent was to Rich C., a friend from the writing program with whom he used to get drunk. Rich C.
11
had recently entered an alcohol abuse program. “Let me know how it’s going,” Wallace wrote. He saw that things couldn’t continue this way indefinitely.
Wallace had returned home to Urbana by January 1988, his semester appointment over. He had tried to find a job after Amherst but failed. One place he approached was the MFA program at the University of Arizona. “I asked the fiction faculty,” remembered Steve Orlen, then the director. “They didn’t want him.” Frank Conroy, with whom he had read at the West
Side Y in spring 1987, was a fan but told him that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had no positions open right now. The Provincetown Fine Arts Center said he was “over-qualified” for a residency. Wallace had no choice but to turn to his parents, resubscribing to what he later called “the Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children.”