Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (28 page)

Ever since Boston, Wallace had been seeing therapists. Unsurprisingly, during these sessions his attention came to rest on his mother. Sometime in therapy he became certain that his mother had been abused as a child by her father. As he understood it, she had repressed the memory of the transgression and thus repression and control had become her way of dealing with the world, including the problems in her marriage. From this Wallace grew convinced, as he wrote Karr, that his mother’s hidden life—“so much hidden pain and lying”—was key to understanding his own situation. Her insistence that all was well, her desire to protect him, he believed, had set the stage for the denial of his own pain that lay behind his drug use and alcoholism. The link was so clear, he wrote Karr, that his mother might just as well have taught him “how to bartend and de-seed dope.” Once her story was unearthed, the healing might begin. The truth hurt, he wrote Karr, but, he was convinced, “it heals too.”

Wallace had entered therapy with some trepidation. He was not from a culture that routinely dug up past upsets. But Karr had encouraged him in his investigations,
³⁰
and by the time that he left for Syracuse he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he’d once been to crack logical paradoxes. He went to group therapy and also had a private therapist, whom he paid cash because he had no health insurance. His hope was that his background or upbringing might at least partly explain his depressions and addictions. Yes, he had a chemical imbalance, but why? What had happened to make him into this anxious, agitated, and needy thirty-year-old?

He wrote some speculations in the margins of Alice Miller’s
The Drama of the Gifted Child
, a book Karr gave him. He recognized himself in Miller’s description of the unhappy, talented child. “Ouch” and “Gulp,” he speckled in the margins. After Miller wrote:

Wallace penciled “SFW,” his mother’s initials. (Inadvertently proving her reach, next to the word “effect” in the same paragraph, he wrote, “s/b [should be] affect.”) He ascribed his current predicament to having a “narcissistically-deprived Mom.” There is an intemperateness to Wallace’s explorations of his childhood here, the anger he felt at his mother’s supposed obfuscations unleashed again as he discovers his own—but then he had come to believe the one had led directly to the other.

He read John Bradshaw’s
Bradshaw on the Family
, a pop bestseller on dysfunction and childhood, and where Bradshaw wrote that low-self esteem translated into “believing that your worth and happiness lie outside of you,” he noted, “Writing Success Fame Sex.” Wallace wanted to become the sort of person for whom desire for the last three did not motivate the first. That was one of the goals of the therapy, as it was, indirectly, of recovery. As he worked his way through his past, on the advice of a therapist he told his mother that they should stop talking, which led to an estrangement that would last on and off for some five years.

As the fall turned into a remarkably snowy winter, Wallace’s relationship with Karr deteriorated further. The two fought bitterly. Karr, Wallace wrote Franzen, was prone to “terrible temper-outbursts.” She found him spoiled, a mama’s boy using rehab as an excuse for self-absorption. Her needs were more concrete—food, money, child care for her son. He still wrote her constantly, even though he was just around the corner. He printed out in huge letters on a computer the words “MARRY ME” and added, “No shit, Mary Karr, do not doubt my seriousness on this. Or the fact that I’m a gila-jawed bulldog once I’ve finally made a commitment, a promise. My expectation is not that it would be easy, or all the time pleasant. My expectation is that it would be real, and illuminated.” Karr knew it would not work out, she remembers, when one day she asked Wallace to pick up Dev from school and Wallace said he needed his car to go to the gym instead. Thinking back on all his failed relationships, in the margin of
Bradshaw
he blamed them on his “fantasy bond” with his mother.

In April 1992, Nadell submitted the first 250 pages of Wallace’s novel—“structurally…not much like any other novels I’ve seen,” as Wallace had written in his cover letter—to Howard at Norton. The submission contained the major lines of the novel—the Incandenza family, Gately and Ennet House, and the plot to find the master copy of “Infinite Jest,” a movie so absorbing that watching it could kill you. In a country addicted to television, it would be the ultimate weapon, an entertainment neutron bomb. The novel was set in the near future but no reader could mistake it for anything other than a commentary on the present day. Reading the manuscript, Howard was amazed by the changes he saw in his author’s writing. Wallace had gone from a clever writer to a profound one, from one with lots of ways to say little to one with one way to say something important. He now saw Wallace’s addiction, descent, and recovery as “a ceremony of purification.” He was eager to publish the new work, but Norton was a conservative house. Its taste was mainstream (it would soon have a huge success with Patrick O’Brian, the purveyor of seafaring tales), and did not put out much in the way of avant-garde writing—
Girl with Curious Hair
was an exception, but it had sold only twenty-two hundred hardcover copies. Howard went to his editorial board and asked how much he might offer. They authorized him to pay an advance of $35,000. Wallace calculated what would be left to live on after expenses and his agent’s commission. He was taking the psychic risk of asking for an advance so he could write without teaching, but $5,000–$6,000 a year wouldn’t do it.

Nadell quickly found another bidder, Michael Pietsch, an editor at Little, Brown, who in June 1992 bought the book for $80,000. Pietsch had worked with other innovative writers like Rick Moody and had been quietly supportive of Wallace’s work when few were—when Wallace had just graduated from Arizona he had tried to help him place some stories in magazines. Pietsch told Nadell he wanted to publish
Infinite Jest
“more than I want to breathe.” Wallace wrote Pietsch to accept his offer, citing his “gut instinct (I have so few gut instincts I am reverent when one manifests).” He thanked him for advancing enough money that he could “get health insurance and fix my car if it breaks and buy books so I can mark them up.”

Wallace avoided confrontation with authority figures, so it is a testimony to his faith in his judgment this time that he now wrote Howard with frankness, assuring the editor who had been through so much with him that his decision to sign with Little, Brown was not “a…go-for-the-gold-type pressure situation.” He explained, “I not only wanted to quit dicking around with teaching and try to be a professional writer, but also wanted to try to live like a grown-up while I did so…. If that compromise seems venal or ungrateful,” he added, “so be it.” He said he was “qualmless” but finished on a more conciliatory point for the editor who had meant so much to him:

With Pietsch, Wallace had some immediate damage control to do: his new editor also edited Leyner. How to tell him that in his essay on television, still forthcoming, he spent a half dozen pages flaying one of Pietsch’s best-known writers?
Harper’s
and he had finally agreed that the television piece was wrong for the magazine, but Steve Moore had picked it up for the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
and, titled “E Unibus Pluram” (“Out of One, Many”), it was to come out the next summer. Wallace wrote to his new editor to explain what he found missing in Leyner’s writing, almost as if writing a review of his earlier self:

He promised Pietsch that
Infinite Jest
would supply the element missing in Leyner’s work, would make, as he’d written about
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
, “the head throb heartlike”:

As an editor, Pietsch was used to being
in loco parentis
; he felt no need to take sides. He responded, “My notion about Mark Leyner is that he doesn’t feel any compulsion to do more in his work than entertain, surprise, and dazzle…. It’s fine to want more from a book but that doesn’t lessen the legitimacy of his accomplishment.” But he added, “All that notwithstanding, it was with delight I read of your intention to pursue selves and stories.”

Wallace returned to work. “I am both bogged down and forging ahead on the Project, if that’s coherent,” he wrote Franzen in September. “Word on the streets is that fall here is beautiful but very brief: snows swirl by Halloween.” He worried what winter would be like, though on the plus side his apartment was so small that his body heat or “at the very outside one space heater is apt to warm the whole facility.” To escape the town he had taken to calling “Drearacuse,” he sometimes drove to New York for the weekend and stayed with Costello. He would make an arrangement to meet a young woman for coffee and then, as Costello remembers, come back Sunday night and get his bag.

Other than women and his old friend, New York held little interest for Wallace. (“My whole nervous system seems to be on the outside of my body when I’m in NYC,” he would later protest to Alice Turner.) One exception was a community garden on Avenue B and 6th Street in the East Village, near where Costello lived. There a street sculptor was engaged in building a monument called the “Tower of Toys.” Homeless and barefoot, the sculptor would climb up and nail or attach yet one more plank or pole. While he watched the seemingly endless project, Wallace would complain to Costello about Karr.

In the spring of 1993 Wallace got an unexpected job offer. The English department at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, about an hour from where he had grown up, was hiring. The school was an oddity, a large public college with an interest in avant-garde fiction. The English department ran something called the Unit for Contemporary Literature,
³¹
under which auspices it hosted the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
and the Dalkey Archive Press, the publisher of
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
. When he had heard of the job opening, Steve Moore had contacted Wallace. Wallace had promised himself not to teach while he finished
Infinite Jest
, but he had been writing the manuscript steadily and successfully. So in bandana and boots, he went for a brief interview at the MLA conference in New York in December 1992. He was unusually self-confident, perhaps buoyed by a sense that
Infinite Jest
was on target. “You should know I am really really smart,” he told the English department members who met him. He sent a résumé with his publications and on the second page added entries for “REVIEWS IF ANYBODY CARES…” and “PRIZES &c (IF ANYBODY CARES…).” In February he flew to Illinois for two days of interviews and readings. To a small group of faculty and students he read the Don Gately crime scene and a section about Lyle, the guru who haunts the Enfield Academy weight room licking sweat off the players and dispensing advice in return. During a question-and-answer session, when a faculty member asked why they should hire him, he responded, “Who else?” Then the faculty committee went out with him to a local Chinese restaurant, where he told the department chair, Charlie Harris, a Barth expert, that Barth was dead.

By now the department was getting the idea that this was not the same author who had written
Girl with Curious Hair,
but they did not mind, it seemed. They found Wallace stunningly smart and committed. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace quoted Emerson that once or twice in a lifetime one met a man who “carries the holiday in his eye.” Wallace seemed to them such a person.

Good as the visit was, Wallace still did not expect to get the job. “I alert you in advance,” he had joked in a note to Harris when he first applied, “that I am both caucasian and male.” The department was under pressure to hire more women, but everyone was deeply impressed with Wallace. They did not know what had happened in Arizona or Amherst or Boston, though Wallace’s fragmented teaching history must surely have suggested problems in the past. “What we wanted was the writer,” remembers Curtis White, a professor in the department who had helped organize the Unit for Contemporary Literature. “We hoped for the best on the rest of it.”