All this might have suggested a man not well suited to relationships, but his dedication—sexily flawed—to what might be called single-entendre connections was extremely intoxicating to some women. For them, as several remember, he was “like a drug.”
3
He played Trivial Pursuit with one undergraduate and her friends in their dorm. To another he read
The Velveteen Rabbit.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” the Skin Horse tells the Velveteen Rabbit, “it’s a thing that happens to you.” With a third it was charades. The women would wind up sharing his bed with him, Jeeves, and The Drone for a time, cajoling him about what one called “the food with no color” in his fridge—crackers, cream cheese, cereal—and then, sooner or later, they were sent on their way. “That’s a three-day weekend I’m still paying the credit card bill on,” he said of one young woman, unchivalrously. Wallace affected not to care that some of the women were his students. He told his friend Corey Washington he was trying to get himself fired.
Wallace continued seeing therapists in Bloomington, partly to try to resolve issues with his mother, partly for his own relationship problems. Worried that he was becoming a stock Romeo, he insisted he was ready for commitment, and for an end to what he called in a later letter “serial high-romance and low-intimacy” relationships that never got truly intimate. Other than the classroom, his favored venue for meeting women was St. Matt’s, the church in whose rectory his recovery group met. His listening skills and his own practiced efforts at self-disclosure often led to breaking the rules against “thirteenth stepping.” Other recovery members warned him to stop, citing the emotional dangers of dating the newly sober, which, from his crazed relationship with Mary Karr, Wallace was no stranger to. “The odds are good but the goods are odd,” went an old recovery saw. But Wallace could not stop himself. He wrote a friend that there were times he’d walked into the twelve o’clock recovery meeting and found that he had slept with three of the ten women there, “and come close” with one or two others. His behavior seemed, even to him, at times hard to justify; he was leaving a lot of hurt in his wake. But his bigger worry was that all this seducing was most damaging to himself. He saw that the need to make
every woman fall madly in love with him had made him highly manipulative, a man who went around trying to make women feel the same, as he put it in a letter to a friend, “tuggy stuff” he always felt in that moment. To him this was the most wretched of transactions—tricking someone into needing you by pretending to care. It was the thing he had written
Infinite Jest
in part to expose. It made you, he realized, not so different from “the people selling Tide.”
By the time Wallace returned to Illinois State from his
Supposedly Fun Thing
book tour in the spring of 1997, he was already worried about his fiction writing. Predictably the effort to produce
Infinite Jest
had left him feeling wrung out. This sense of depletion had not surprised him at first. He had crafted the beginning of the novel in Boston in the early 1990s, expanded and improved it in Syracuse, and by the time he got to Bloomington in July 1993 he was mostly rewriting and responding to Pietsch’s edits. That had taken up the next year or so. But by 1995 he had been hoping—expecting—to start something else. It was his assumption that the new thing would be a novel too. The novel was the big form, the one that mattered, that reviewers and other authors cared about and by which he could fulfill his compact with readers. DeLillo’s published writing consisted almost entirely of novels; so did Cormac McCarthy’s.
The freedom success now brought left Wallace uneasy; in his life, he had worked to narrow his choices, to give himself a simple set of instructions—don’t drink or smoke pot; don’t try to impress others to make yourself feel better. But on the page things were more complex. He knew that he had to write for himself and not think about the reader, but that was easier to enunciate than to enact. He would have conversations during this period with Costello where he would complain about how hard it was now to get the words down in the right order. Since Amherst, he and Wallace had had as a touchstone of good writing John Keats’s poem “This Living Hand”:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
Wallace would talk about wanting in his writing to “make the hand come out,” and then, in disappointment afterward, “The hand, Mark—there’s no hand.” Costello worried that his friend was being too negative about his own work, that success had tipped his delicate internal balance.
When
Infinite Jest
was done, Wallace found himself more comfortable with shorter fiction. The value of this writing was unclear to him, though, and did not make him feel he was using his time well. “Writing is going shittily here,” he wrote to DeLillo in September 1996. “I’ve spent all summer doing dozens of obscure ministories that seem neither comprehensible nor interesting to anyone else.” He told Brad Morrow at
Conjunctions
that he spent his days in his black room, writing “weird little 1-pagers.” Some were about “the spiritual emptiness of heterosexual interaction in post-modern America,” as he would phrase it in a later interview, others almost metaphysical aperçus about the hazy intersection of cognition and the world, vignettes he grouped together under the heading “Another instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders.” What had made the scope of his imagination contract so radically? He blamed himself, rather than, say, fatigue or age. He thought perhaps other authors had less trouble. The year before he had turned back to the writer whom he most admired for help. He had a “jejune” question for DeLillo—like “some kind of tentative hand in the back row of a writer’s classroom visit or something.” He went on, “Do you have like a daily writing routine? Do you set off certain intervals as all and only time for fiction-writing? More important, do you then honor that daily obligation, day after day? Do you have difficulties with procrastination/avoidance/lack of discipline? If so, how do you overcome them?”
I ask because I’m frustrated not just with the slowness of my work but with the erratic pace I work at. And I ask you only because you seem at least on this end of the books, to be so steady—books every
couple or so years for over two decades and you don’t seem to have an outside job or teaching gig or anything that might relieve (what I find to be) the strain of daily self-starting and self-discipline and daily temptations to dick around and abandon the discipline. Any words or tips would be appreciated and kept in confidence.
DeLillo wrote back to reassure the thirty-three-year-old Wallace that centering yourself to write got easier over time, though it never got easy. “The novel,” he wrote his younger friend, “is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.” This perhaps satisfied Wallace for a time, but his hand was up again a month later. Why, he asked his adopted role model, did the route to maturity have to be such a struggle?
Maybe what I want to hear is that this prenominate war is natural and necessary and a sign of Towering Intellect: maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit. I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less
Fun
than it was.
“All right,” DeLillo replied, a bit more sharply this time, “your first book was more fun but that doesn’t mean you’ve left pleasure behind forever.” For him, at least, it was the act of writing that carried him forward: “I have fun when I find myself gliding on language and when the story seems to drive itself forward and when I’m able to give a character his or her most unexpected expression,” he wrote. Still, novel writing, with its isolation and the uncertainty about what one had achieved, was never going to be a picnic. Wallace had to understand that. He offered a kind of buck-up, disputing Wallace’s distinction between his “bad” early work and his “good” later work:
And I don’t see that the occasional acrobatics in Girl with Curious Hair are a form of exhibitionism. And I don’t see anything in the early pages of [
Infinite Jest
] that would lead me to believe that you are dying of funlessness. But of course reader and writer are dealing from different perspectives. Where you see fun in my work, I remember
doubt, confusion and indecision, and now experience considerable regret, particularly over the earlier books.
And he ended with a compliment, meant to give Wallace a sense of belonging to an elite for whom this sort of suffering was the price of membership:
When I say the novel is a killer, I am reserving this designation for writers who are smart enough, sensitive enough and good enough to realize the dangers and consequently to respect the form. You have to be good before you even sense the danger, or before you can understand what it takes to succeed. Let the others complain about book tours.
It’s unlikely this comforted Wallace. For him there had to be a huge difference between the tone of his early work and
Infinite Jest
—not just his literary development but his actual physical survival was embodied in the difference. Now Wallace cast about for different ways to motivate himself. He invited Charis Conn from
Harper’s
to stay with him for a semester to work on her novel, putting at once a competitor and a watchdog in his spare bedroom. (He dubbed his house “Yaddo West.”) He quit smoking, took it up, quit it again. He tried teaching new classes to spur his interest in his day job. In the spring of 1997 he taught a course with Doug Hesse, a colleague in the English department, on creative nonfiction, which they defined in a handout they gave the class as “a somewhat problematic term for a broad category of prose works such as personal essays and memoirs, profiles, nature and travel writings of a certain quality, essays of ideas, new journalism, and so on.”
4
The same semester he designed and taught a class on great novels of the twentieth century, “basically,” as he wrote in the course syllabus, “a contrived, excuse/incentive to read several interesting, difficult U.S. novels…. The class is to function as a large, sophisticated, energetic reading group.” “I’m gearing up to do 2 DeLillo, 2 Gaddis, 2 McCarthy…and 1 Gass. Death by fiction,” he wrote Steven Moore with pride.
When extra teaching didn’t stimulate his creativity, Wallace thought about not teaching. He had not forgotten that he had done his best work
away from the classroom. Other times he blamed his lack of discipline. He imagined a more perfect version of himself and scribbled it on a sheet of paper one day:
What Balance Would Look Like:
2–3 hours a day in writing
Up at 8–9
Only a couple late nights a week
Daily exercise
Minimum time spent teaching
2 nights/week spent with other friends
5 [recovery meetings a] week
Church
“I’m back to thinking IJ was a fluke,” he wrote on another sheet:
I feel nothing lapidary inside. “Until there is commitment, there is only ineffectiveness, delay.” Goethe. How to make a commitment—to writing, to a somewhat healthy relationship, to myself. How to schedule things so that a certain portion of each day is devoted to writing. How to save money so that I can take Fall ’97 off.
This last he acted on. He asked DeLillo to recommend him for a Guggenheim Fellowship, then four days later canceled the request. “A weird lightning-bolt fellowship” had come his way, he reported. The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe had awarded him $50,000, “which means,” he wrote Steven Moore, who had helped arrange the grant, “I can take an unpaid year off next year and face writing fears head on.” But the prospect of a whole year without classes, Wallace wrote DeLillo, caused him “basically to have projected my own superego out onto the world and thus imagine that THEY expect-nay-demand an exhilarant piece of novel-length prose at the end of my grant time, which I know is horseshit but still makes it hard to breathe.” He asked again why he could not find DeLillo’s discipline—“you quiet, deeply serious guys who take time and publish only finished, considered stuff.” He was becoming as afraid of having too much time as not enough.
God, as Wallace liked to point out, being “nothing if not an ironist,” the year after he won the Lannan, the MacArthur Foundation gave him an award of $230,000, which, together with the Lannan money and the income from his books, effectively freed him from the need to teach. The receipt of a so-called genius award was acutely uncomfortable for Wallace. It sat just the wrong side of his worry that he was a high-level entertainer who could be bought by what he called, in a letter to Markson, “the blow-jobs the culture gives out.” He did not like the idea of being celebrated for who he was, as opposed to what he had written or was currently trying to write. Accepting the award was as risky as taking an advance on a book—worse psychologically, really, because you got to keep the funds either way. The only one who could punish you for not living up to expectations would be yourself. He did not really need the money either. His only big cost was health insurance, which ISU provided. He went nowhere and bought little—he drove an old car, and malls, he told friends, made him sad. To expiate the burden, no sooner did he have the funds than he tried to get rid of them. He lent money to ex-girlfriends and gave it away to friends in his recovery group to pay for their children’s college tuition. He offered to fund other friends’ worthy projects—one wanted money to help her write a study of childhood sexual abuse. He bought a pickup truck. One day in class he mentioned he couldn’t figure out where it had gone. He was embarrassed when a student brought forward the keys and told him he had lent it to her several weeks before.