I too have lots of stuff that’s been jostling in line inside for years for a book. And many, many pages written, then either tossed or put in a sealed box. What’s missing is some…thing. It may be a connection between the problem of writing it and of being alive. That doesn’t feel quite true for me, though. Mine is more like the whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t, which tends to lead to the idea that I’ll have to write a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside. I’ve brooded and brooded about all this till my brooder is sore. Maybe the answer is simply that to do what I want to do would take more effort than I am willing to put in. Which would be a bleak reality indeed, if that’s all it is?
“DeLillo’s thing,” he added to Franzen, “about the unwritten book following Gray around like a malformed fetus dribbling cerebrospinal fluid from its mouth gets apter all the time. I am dead becalmed—stuff literally goes right into the wastebasket after being torn from the top of the legal pad.” More than a year later he was no farther along, writing to Franzen: “I go back and forth between (a) working to assembl[e] a big enough sample to take an advance, and (b) recoiling in despair, thinking that if I had your integrity I’d pitch everything and start over.”
Complicating things was that he and Green were having so much fun. They listened to U2 and old Simon and Garfunkel CDs and loved IZ’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” For his forty-fourth birthday, in February 2006, Green got her husband a bootleg of the new season of
The Wire
. That Christmas they had spent with his family on Stinson Beach, Wallace with a pair of binoculars watching out for sharks as Karen swam far from shore. Franzen persuaded Green and Wallace to go to Capri in the summer for a writer’s festival, where Wallace discovered octopus and went to parties at sponsors’ houses. He seemed, to Franzen’s eyes, as “available” as he had ever been. Afterward, Wallace took a detour to Wimbledon to start a piece on Roger Federer for the
New York Times Magazine
. He loved sitting courtside and watching Federer play. When Wallace insisted on using the serial comma, which was against the rules of the
Times’
s style handbook, the issue was settled in his favor by the executive editor Bill Keller.
Wallace was used to contradictions, both in his life and in his work, by now. But he could not pretend after all these years that his real work was going well. He told Michael Pietsch that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty are usable.” He wrote Franzen at the beginning of 2006 that he had to get serious again in late January, and then again, when he didn’t, in the fall.
In September 2006, Green and Wallace adopted a two-year-old dog, whom they named Bella. “It’s…part-Rottweiler, part Lab (?) or Boxer (?)…. Very good-hearted, patient, and smart in dealing with Werner,” Wallace wrote Franzen. Though Wallace saw Werner as the boss, their friends laughed to see his first female dog subtly take over the pack. Bella made Wallace feel his family was complete again. Yet the specter of his unfinished work was never far from his thoughts.
The Pale King
was wildly overdue now, though the only deadline was in his own mind, since there was no contract. When Little, Brown had invited him to a celebration for the tenth anniversary of
Infinite Jest
in 2006—the book was to be reissued with an introduction by Dave Eggers—he had declined, telling Michael Pietsch he was “deep into something long, and it’s hard for me get back in it when I’m pulled away.” The next year the New School invited him for a commemoration. “The idea of coming to NYC is appealing,” he wrote to
Franzen. “The idea of doing any more public events around a book I don’t remember is not.”
Stymied in the composition of the novel, Wallace threw his energy into research, though he knew the danger that posed.
14
But he still wanted to be first in his class. The value of meditation and emptying the mind continued to play a key role in
The Pale King
; Wallace still wasn’t sure he understood Buddhism and its practices. He began a correspondence with Christopher Hamacher, a young man who had read his Kenyon address and traced some of its roots to Buddhist thinking. Wallace peppered his correspondent, a practicing Zen Buddhist, with questions. He asked about authors he should seek out, mentioning books by Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. His friend told him don’t read, just do: “It’s absolutely wonderful that you don’t ‘know’ anything about zen.” Wallace wondered was he letting himself off easy when he meditated: “Is it OK to sit in a chair? Or is severe pain part of the (non-) point?” he asked. “What about a ‘meditation bench’ that lets you kneel with a straight back? Is it half-lotus or nothing? If so, why?” His new friend told him that the lotus position was preferable and the pain would pass, but to use his common sense. Wallace then confessed that there were many times when he didn’t much want to sit or sat only briefly. “You’re not going to hell if you only sit 15 minutes, sometimes,” his friend advised him. “A good rule is to sit exactly as long as you planned, no more, no less.” It was still hard for Wallace to understand that Buddhism wasn’t a course you tried to ace.
Wallace audited more accounting courses, now at the Claremont Graduate University. “You should have seen him with our accountant,” Karen Green remembers. “It was like, ‘What about the ruling of 920S?’ He had a correspondence with an Illinois accountant, Stephen Lacy, also a former philosophy student, who sent him a famously impenetrable passage, Section 509(A) of the IRS tax code, with a note that seemed to echo Wallace’s own premise for the novel:
I find that although I can never quite understand what it says, after I read it several times and concentrate, I can actually get into a kind of weird Zen-type meditation high! (Then again sometimes it provokes a profound anxiety attack.)
Lacy argued that the tax code was postmodern, meaning relativistic and constructed of words, but Wallace did not want to write a postmodern novel about the tax code: in fact the opposite, he wanted to write a premodern novel about the tax code, one that took the code as holy writ, a text out of which mystical clarity might emerge. “Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess,” he emailed Franzen in April 2007, “with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it’s a bit like math: I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.” He added, “I wrote a page today! (Well, more like rewrote/typed, but STILL!)”
In his heart Wallace knew he was temporizing.
The Pale King
had so many ambitions. It had to show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to dramatize boredom without being too entertaining. And it had to sidestep the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was the opposite of Wallace’s own. In 2005, Wallace wrote in one of his notebooks, “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.” By now, his failing to write the book had itself risen to a meta-level—he saw that he could not write it because he could not himself tune out the noise of modern life. He wasn’t an adept, an immersive, even after more than a dozen years of sobriety and recovery and sitting. He was not as far as he wished to be from the “obscurely defective” young man from Urbana who had arrived at Amherst in 1980. “Work,” he wrote Franzen in December 2006, “is like shitting sharp stones, still.”
There were many parts of the book all the same that came to some fruition, ones where he polished the sentences over and over. A few sections achieved what he was aiming for, or came close enough for him to allow for their publication. In 2007, the
New Yorker
ran a small part of the novel, entitled “Good People,” which dealt with the decision by a future IRS agent named Lane Dean Jr. to commit to his girlfriend, whom he had accidentally gotten pregnant.
15
Another section, a favorite at readings, was the one in which an agent’s calm is disturbed by a colleague’s surreally menacing baby. It found its way into
Harper’s
as “The Compliance Branch” in 2008. The Lane Dean section was poised and uninflected, written with
a quiet style reminiscent of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”; “The Compliance Branch,” by contrast, was hectic and exaggerated, not unlike the Incandenza sections of
Infinite Jest
. The disjunct between the two suggested the challenge Wallace was facing in deciding how to tell his story. “My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some,” he wrote his
New Yorker
editor, Deborah Treisman, about “Good People.” “But the terror is still there.”
He made starts at many other passages and characters. Despite his promise to the reader in an “Author’s Foreword” not to write “some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher,” he introduced a character named “David Wallace,” who works at the agency as a summer intern.
16
Other agents contained identifiable parts of the real Wallace. There is Stecyk, the unctuous young man who winds up getting a wedgie.
17
And David Cusk, who suffers from anxiety attacks, racing to the bathroom where “the toilet paper disintegrate[s] into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead.” In the quiet study of tax forms, they both seek peace.
Wallace came closest to creating the sort of character who fully inhabits the page in Chris Fogle, whose apathy when stoned echoes that of Wallace in his senior year of high school. Fogle, though, has a conversion far neater than Wallace ever experienced, one of the sort he had urged on the students that day at Kenyon College:
I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera
As the World Turns
on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith…. There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid…. Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera…and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching
As the World Turns
,” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching
As the World Turns
,” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching
As the World Turns
”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement…. It was
as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching
As the World Turns
.”…I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.
Fogle decides to join the IRS, and soon heads off for training in Peoria, after which he is recruited to be part of a team of tax savants—Fogle’s ability, never fleshed out in the text but present in Wallace’s notes, is to recite a string of numbers that grants him total concentration. Wallace liked the many pages he wrote on Fogle well enough to consider publishing them as a short stand-alone novel. Perhaps someone else reading other sections of the book—Wallace would show them to no one—might have been satisfied with those too, but he could not get out from under the shadow of the statue. To the inside cover of a notebook, he taped an anecdote about T. S. Eliot, who had also suffered from crushingly high standards: “One of [Conrad] Aiken’s friends was a patient of the famous analyst Homer Lane, and Aiken told this friend about Eliot’s problem. Lane said to his patient, ‘Tell your friend Aiken to tell his friend Eliot that all that’s stopping him is his fear of putting anything down that is short of perfection.
He thinks he’s God.
’” (The underlining was Wallace’s).
Wallace had said again and again how much he loved the reader. But how much did he really care whether people found what they were looking for in his books? And how much did he write for himself? One test was his willingness to create a satisfactory plot. He had never liked plot, that tidying up of life in which, as he had written Howard in 1986, “revelations revelationize [and] things are cleared up.” To rely too much on plot risked seducing the reader; it was like selling Tide. Moreover, plots typically involved the gradual maturation of the characters, and that was not how Wallace saw things. His default view of life was more mechanistic than organic. Change in a character—Hal, Gately, Wallace himself at Granada House—was usually a binary flip. Yet he knew an unplotted book violated the physics of reading. So over the years, he slowly cast about for a structure for
The Pale King
. In one of his notebooks, there is a sentence suggesting that he had hit on a framework of interest: an evil group within the IRS is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining
a heightened state of concentration. It was a nice Pynchonian notion, with an echo of the scramble for the “Infinite Jest” video cartridge, but Wallace didn’t follow up on it. Probably it struck him as too clever, a short cut. Instead he divided the agents into two groups: those who wanted to automate the agency versus those who still wished to process returns by hand. His own heart was with the old-fashioned processors. Over the past decade he had been watching the digitalization of media with ever greater discomfort. “Digital=abstract=sterile, somehow,” he had written to DeLillo in 2000. Electronic media facilitated consumerism; it removed obstacles to spectation. It was also that if the IRS was going to be a secular religion, it needed its priests. To Wallace, so troubled by freedom, there was nothing more erotic than people who willingly gave up theirs. But anti-automation was more of an attitude than a plot anyway, as perhaps Wallace knew. There was also the consideration that if you really wanted to capture the mindfulness that comes through boredom, the less plot you had the better. Wallace wrote in a note: “Something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen,” and elsewhere, characterized the novel as “a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens.” Maybe different scenes in suggestive apposition may have been all he wanted for his plot, but if so, he remained worried that the thousands of pages he had written left the reader still too much on his or her own. “The individual parts of this book would not be all that hard to read,” he wrote Nadell in 2007. “It’s more the juxtaposition of them, the number of separate characters, etc.”