Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (44 page)
His grammar obsession quickly became well known. “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he would tell students, seeing a particular blunder. Or, “This actually hurts my brain.” He would consult his mother’s book,
Practically Painless English
, to answer any challenges and would sometimes trot out her old feint of fake-coughing when a student fell into a grammatical solecism. He used the modifier “only” in class to show the power careful usage wielded:
You have been entrusted to feed your neighbor’s dog for a week while he (the neighbor) is out of town. The neighbor returns home; something has gone awry; you are questioned.
“I fed the dog.”
“Did you feed the parakeet?”
“I fed
only
the dog.”“Did anyone else feed the dog?”
“
Only
I fed the dog.”“Did you fondle/molest the dog?”
“I
only
fed the dog!”
His voice cracked with pleasure as he spoke the last line.
Wallace stood out in Claremont. His earnestness, part midwestern childhood, part defense mechanism, was unusual on a campus where the tone was muted cool, sun-drenched Ivy. Wallace once tried to get approved a course called “Extremely Advanced Essay Writing,” but the registrar objected that no “Advanced Essay Writing” class had been offered before. Still, Wallace’s arrival was a triumph for both the department and the university, this middle-aged
monstre sacré
in his iconoclastic outfits—bandana, beaten-up hiking shorts, and double athletic socks inside unlaced hiking boots. The
Los Angeles Times
, in covering his arrival, noted with approval his Pomona College sweatshirt with the arms cut off.
Wallace very much wanted Green to be in the same city with him. He
did not want to wait until Stirling graduated high school in 2005. In the summer of 2003, Green bought a house in Cave Creek, Arizona. Wallace made the six-hour drive once a week. He worked in an upstairs room and read Tom Clancy novels by the pool, “burning his shoulders to a crisp,” as Green remembers. There was a local recovery group he liked too.
In August 2003 Wallace went to Maine with Green on an assignment for
Gourmet
. She had never met his parents before but his relationship with his mother had gotten easier with time and they bonded as a group. His editors were hoping he would reprise his role as the elite’s correspondent in the heartland, but, having promised to do his “own eccentric researching,” he came back with something decidedly more delicate than the state fair or the cruise piece. He had always been interested in what animals feel—their inability to protect themselves touched him as human pain didn’t—and over the years he had begun to wonder what right we had to be cruel to them. In Maine he found a scene worthy of Hogarth: thousands of lobsters being boiled alive at the “enormous, pungent and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival,” where “friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking and chewing and dribbling. It’s hot, and the sagged roof traps the steam and the smells.” Who, he wanted to know, gave us such dominion? But Wallace was and had always been averse to hectoring—it seemed rude to him—and in the piece he took pains to distance himself, physically and rhetorically, from the PETA representative, “Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas,” who, he writes, papered the festival at the harbor with his leaflet “Being Boiled Hurts.” Instead, Wallace posed the problem with lobster eating as a series of ethical questions, writing in the faux-naïve voice of the curious midwestern boy he still in some ways was: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” He went on slyly:
For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands?…If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with [such] confusions and convictions…what makes it feel truly
okay, inside, to just dimiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here—I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?
Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone’s behavior (it did not change his own—at the festival one evening, Green remembers, he enjoyed two lobsters for dinner), but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency.
In general, Pomona had a mellowing effect on Wallace. In September 2002, for instance, he had gone east for the
New Yorker
festival. He was to read alongside Franzen, and the two, who had never shared a stage before, jockeyed for the order, with Wallace feigning not to know that the second reader had the more prestigious slot. For Franzen, it was a microcosm of something that always bothered him in their friendship: Wallace didn’t like acknowledging how competitive they were. In the end, Wallace went first in the heat and read two sections of his long, unfinished novel. One was about Leonard Stecyk, the smarmy young man whose desire to behave perfectly with everyone leads to a wedgie in school (he grows up to be an IRS agent),
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and the other was a Kafkaesque story about an implacable infant who turns up in an agency office and drives the examiners crazy. “My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant,” the narrator, an unnamed auditor, recounts, “I can describe only as— fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger—fierce, intimidating, aggressive.”
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The crowd was highly appreciative; Wallace had brought a towel for his own perspiration and was happy to see his friend also sweating. “I…did not think he could,” he wrote DeLillo afterward. But, graciously, Franzen had spared him the news that the author they both most admired was himself in the audience. “He’s kind in his way,” Wallace acknowledged afterward of his friend.
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Wallace had had three significant projects to work on as he settled in at Pomona: the ever-present Long Thing, a new story collection he had proposed to Pietsch, and a round of editorial queries on his book on Cantor and set theory. On the math book, he had pushed himself hard in the spring of 2002, his last semester in Bloomington, devoting almost all his time to it and getting a draft in just before leaving. Characteristically, the project had gone from a dare (“I’m doing a book about math!” he’d written Moore. “You?”) to a task (to DeLillo, just before moving to Pomona, he called it his “wretched math book”). But all the same, after a lot of effort he felt he had done good work and struck a balance between the biographical and the mathematical. He had hired a University of Illinois graduate student to go over the equations and technical details to make sure they were accurate too. But in September 2002, he wrote DeLillo in frustration that what had seemed done was not. “Both the math-editor and the general editor want repairs,” he complained. A book he had thought would take him four months of part-time work had now taken eleven of nearly full-time work. “I never want to see another Fourier series as long as I live,” he added, pride peeking out from beneath the irritation. And the copyedit was living up to his nightmares. Nine months later he was back to DeLillo with this new complaint: “The galleys for this blasted math book were such a mess that they’re having to typeset the whole thing over.” When the publisher asked for a small essay for its catalog on how he had come to write the book, Wallace responded with a meta-refusal:
The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that if the booklets are any good at all…blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the booklets aren’t any good, it’s hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno’s Dichotomy
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and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness—how any such stuff will help.
Wallace’s publisher printed the disclaimer. It also asked another mathematician to review the manuscript. He expressed serious reservations and pointed to errors, some small, some larger, in it. Much as during his time at Harvard, Wallace was beginning to wonder if he had gotten into deeper water than he had realized.
Everything and More
was finally published in October 2003. In the book Wallace covered the history of infinity as a philosophical and mathematical concept, beginning with Zeno’s dichotomy and moving through calculus and axiomatic set theory, the idea that all of mathematics is derivable from a handful of simple axioms, and on to Cantor. Cantor had suffered from severe mental illness; Wallace took pains to point out that the mathematician’s willingness to delve deep into questions of recursion and paradox was not the cause. “The real irony is that the view of ∞ as some forbidden zone or road to insanity—which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years—is precisely what Cantor’s own work overturned,” he wrote. He noted:
In modern medical terms, it’s fairly clear that G.F.L.P. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time when nobody knew what this was, and that his polar cycles were aggravated by professional stresses and disappointments, of which Cantor had more than his share. Of course, this makes for less interesting flap copy than Genius Driven Mad By Attempts To Grapple With ∞. The truth, though, is that Cantor’s work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there’s no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy’s life…. Saying that ∞ drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George’s loss to the dragon: it’s not only wrong but insulting.
Wallace had written
Everything and More
in a slightly different voice than usual, that of an amateur delighting in his subject and eager to communicate his enthusiasm, Cavell on holiday. He adduced a made-up high school math teacher, Dr. Goris, as his guide and threw in his customary mixture of high and low vocabulary, as well as a lot of math notations. He hoped that the playful tone of the book would help critics and professionals identify
Everything and More
as the college bull session it was meant to
be. A few were charmed. The distinguished math writer John Allen Paulos in the
American Scholar
praised Wallace’s “refreshingly conversational style as well as a surprisingly authoritative command of mathematics,” but many felt otherwise. One, a philosopher of mathematics, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, thought the book suffered from some of the same flaws as
Infinite Jest
: “One wonders exactly whom Wallace thinks he is writing for,” noted David Papineau of King’s College, London. “If he had cut out some of the details, and told us rather less than he knows, he could have reached a lot more readers.” Papineau was kinder than some of the other experts.
Science
wrote of the book that “mathematicians will view it with at best sardonic amusement. Crippling errors abound.” The magazine’s reviewer, Rudy Rucker, who had given
Broom
a glowing notice in the
Washington Post
in 1987, went on to enumerate a host of technical errors: providing the wrong definition of uniform convergence, botching the crucial Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms that form the basis of much of set theory, and conflating Cantor’s continuum problem with his continuum hypothesis. Wallace-l, an electronic mailing list devoted to Wallace’s work, became a repository for suggested corrections by various professional mathematicians. Wallace’s publisher now asked one of the list’s contributors, Prabhakar Ragde of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, to re-review the book before paperback publication. He sent back a three-page memo. Some of his suggestions Wallace took, but he also finally cried enough: there was a distinction between trying to write for general readers and specialists. “Dr. Ragde, who is clearly one sharp hombre,” he wrote the editors, “has nailed many of the book’s crudities—it’s just there are lots of crudities that I decided were more perspicuous for lay-reader purposes.” The book became one of the publisher’s bestselling titles all the same, on the strength of Wallace’s name and its engaging style, though he always had the disquieting feeling that he had been mugged for trespassing.
Oblivion
was a far smoother process. The collection consisted of eight stories, some of which came from the notebooks Wallace was using to write portions of
The Pale King
and probably began as sections of it. Wallace had downplayed the stories when he had first tentatively suggested a new collection to Pietsch in October 2001, calling them “the best of the stuff I’ve been doing while playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing.” But Pietsch, as ever his ideal reader, responded immediately to the portraits
of “unhappy, complicated, intellectualizing men.” In the following two years, while Wallace worked on
Everything and More
, he also wrote the last story in the collection, “The Suffering Channel,” the story of a man for whom great art comes so easily that he can defecate it, and Pietsch began organizing the pieces for publication. “I don’t feel like much of an editor here,” Pietsch admitted to Wallace in October 2003, “but these stories didn’t strike me as needing many red-penciled queries…. Overwhelmingly, these stories do what they do with irresistible force.” Privately, he marveled at the creative pain and stress evident in his author’s newest effort.