And life kept breaking back in. Wallace had become increasingly political over the years, thanks in large part to Green. He was a vocal critic of George W. Bush’s administration. “I am, at present, partisan,” he had told
The Believer
in 2003. “Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration…. My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.” When Bush won reelection in 2004, Wallace and Green seriously considered leaving the country, but Wallace felt that would be an overreaction. In the end, he
was a writer, not a political operative. He cared about the moral state of the country, more than which side won.
The thought kept recurring to him that he was no longer the kind of person who could write the novel he wanted to write.
Infinite Jest
had been driven by his dysfunctional yearning for Mary Karr; nothing similar goaded him now. Green had opened up a showroom for her work. She called it Beautiful Crap, a name that happily coincided with the plot of “The Suffering Channel.” She loved her gallery, and they discussed jobs he might enjoy. “He talked about opening up a dog shelter,” she remembers. It would be what the tennis coach Gerhard Schtitt in
Infinite Jest
meant when he said that the important thing was to “learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.” Wallace considered, he wrote Franzen, “forgetting about writing for a while if it’s not a source of joy. Who knows. Life sure is short though.” He thought about focusing only on his nonfiction.
18
The Federer piece had been a complete joy. He stopped the nonfiction for a period to see if it made the fiction come easier—was the magazine work dissipating his ability to finish
The Pale King
? “It just made him crazy to think he had been working on it for so long,” Green remembers. In his final major interview, given to
Le Nouvel Observateur
in August 2005, he talked about various writers he admired—Saint Paul, Rousseau, and always, Dostoevsky, among them—and added, “What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.”
Around this time, Wallace wrote Nadell, telling her that he needed “to put some kind of duress/pressure on myself so that I quit futzing around and changing my mind about the book twice a week and just actually do it.” Franzen’s example had been an influence; he told Wallace that having a contract for
Freedom
, the novel that followed
The Corrections,
had helped focus him. Wallace wasn’t sure. He explored the tax consequences of taking a single payment versus spreading the advance out over the years and worried about the alternative minimum tax. And he prepared a stack of about 150 pages of
The Pale King
. There were plenty of equally finished pages—among them the story of the levitating Drinion—which, for whatever reason, he did not include. “I could take a couple of years unpaid leave from Pomona and just try to finish it,” he wrote to Nadell. When she encouraged
him, he responded more hesitatingly: “Let me noodle hard about it. It may not be until the end of summer that I’d even have a packet together.”
Wallace had never been certain that being on Nardil was the right thing, and whenever he was not writing well, he wondered if it played a role. But the memories of how it had saved his life were also always present. He had read widely about other antidepressants but never found one he thought he should change to. In the summer of 2007, Wallace was eating in a Persian restaurant in Claremont with his parents and began to have heart palpitations and to sweat heavily. These can be the signs of a hypertensive crisis, although Green thinks he may have merely had an anxiety attack—the chicken and rice dish he ordered was one he had eaten many times; he never saw a doctor for a diagnosis. In any event, he eventually went to a physician, who told him what he already knew: there were a lot of superior antidepressants on the market now. Compared with them, Nardil was “a dirty drug.”
Wallace saw an opportunity. He told Green that he wanted to make a change. “You know what? I’m up for it,” she remembers answering, figuring he could not be stopped anyway. She knew the decision came out of an area of deep conflict for him. “The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” she says. “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.” Soon afterward, he stopped the drug and waited for it to flush out of his body. For the first weeks, he felt that the process was going well. “I feel a bit ‘peculiar,’ which is the only way to describe it,” he emailed Franzen in August, who had checked in to see how he was doing. “All this is to be expected (22 years and all), and I am not unduly alarmed. Phase 4 of withdrawal/titration commences today. It’s all OK. I appreciate the monitoring.” The next month brought “disabling nausea/fatigue” and left him more concerned: “I’ve been blowing stuff off and then having it slip my mind,” he wrote his friend. “This is the harshest phase of the ‘washout process’ so far; it’s a bit like I imagine a course of chemo would be.” He remained “fairly confident it will pass in time.”
GQ
took his picture for their October 2007 issue, and in it, he looked skinny and unshaven, a grizzled
version of his Amherst self. Wallace had never entirely put out of his mind the fundamentalist faction in recovery that regarded prescription drugs as a crutch. The plan was for him to go from Nardil to another antidepressant, but he now decided he should try to be completely drug free. Green was worried. Her husband, she remembers thinking, was expecting “a Jungian rebirth.” Soon afterward, Wallace had to be hospitalized for severe depression. When he got out, doctors prescribed new drugs. But he was now too panicked to give them time to work. He took over the job of keeping himself sane, second-guessing doctors and their prescriptions. If he tried an antidepressant, he would read that a possible side effect was anxiety, and that alone would make him too anxious to stay on the drug. He wrote to Nadell in December, “Upside: I’ve lost 30 pounds. Downside: I haven’t even thought about work since like September. I’m figuring I get 90 more days before I even remotely expect anything of myself—the shrink/expert says that’s a fairly sane attitude.” When his sister, Amy, would call, he would tell her, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”
He continued to write in a notebook, but he did not have the strength to return to his challenging manuscript. “The Pale King” had once referred to the IRS, and possibly to the state of contentment and focus the book advocated; but now it was a synonym for the depression that tormented him, or death. Not all days were bad. He taught throughout. He emailed friends. He and Green tried to maintain their lives. Always self-critical, Wallace would rate good days as “B-plus” or “cautiously optimistic.” They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.
During the spring of 2008, a new combination of antidepressants seemed to stabilize Wallace. It looked like the worst might be over. In February, he had written to Tom Bissell, a writer who was a new friend, “I got really sick over the fall. Pneumonioid-type sick. Lost a scary amount of weight. I’m still not all the way back on my feet. I’m twelve years older than you; I feel more like 30 years older right now. This return letter will probably be the most ‘work’-type thing I do today, writing-wise.” He added that he had been reading Camus lately: “He’s very clear, as a thinker, and tough—completely intolerant of bullshit. It makes my soul feel clean to read him.”
He taught a class in creative nonfiction that semester. Students who had studied with him before, though, noticed that his comments were terser, his playfulness muted. On the last day of class, he choked up. The students were confused; where was the Wallace they knew? At a coffee shop afterward he cried again. “Go ahead and laugh,” he told them, but they knew something was wrong.
That spring
GQ
asked him to write an essay on Obama and rhetoric and he felt almost well enough to do it. Obama gave him hope; he and Green even talked about his being a speechwriter for the candidate. The magazine reserved a hotel room for him in Denver for the Democratic convention and began to make arrangements, but soon he canceled. When the
New York Times Magazine
approached him to write about the Olympics in Beijing that summer, he apologized but said he wasn’t feeling well enough. Nadell was busy explaining that her client had a stomach malady. “It had to be severe enough to explain why he couldn’t travel,” she remembers. Wallace would mine
House
for diseases he could suggest to others he might be suffering from.
Wallace’s parents were slated to come visit. His relationship with them was the best it had been in years; he told Green he had no idea what had made him so mad at his family in his thirties. “We’ll have big fun,” he promised them. But then he asked them to wait. That June, the annual booksellers’ convention was in Los Angeles, and Green and Wallace drove the thirty miles of roadway to have dinner with Pietsch, Nadell, the humor writer David Sedaris, and his publicist Marlena Bittner, who also worked on Wallace’s books. Sedaris was surprised at how funny and gentle Wallace was, how full of praise for his students. At the end Pietsch asked Wallace how he was doing. “You don’t wanna know,” his writer replied. When they hugged, Pietsch looked into Wallace’s eyes and thought they looked “haunted.”
About ten days after the dinner, Wallace checked in to a motel about ten miles from his home and took all the pills he could find. When he woke up, he called Green, who had been searching for him all night. She met him at the hospital and he told her that he was glad to be alive. He was sorry that he’d made her look for him. She had him transferred to the university’s hospital, his speech still slurred for a week. The suicide note he’d mailed got to her several days later. She painted their garage door red to
match the inside, a promise she’d made him in the hospital. He switched doctors and agreed to try electroconvulsive therapy. He was terrified at the prospect—he remembered how ECT had damaged his short-term memory in 1988—but he underwent twelve sessions.
Franzen came for a visit while the treatments were in progress in July. He now spent part of each summer in nearby Santa Cruz writing. He was astonished at the changes in his friend’s body and mind. They would play with the dogs or go outside so Wallace could smoke. Franzen asked what he had been thinking when he tried to kill himself and Wallace winced and said he didn’t remember. He was barely able to read, not even the thrillers he ordinarily devoured. Instead he mostly watched TV. After dinner, Werner licked out his mouth.
Wallace’s illness was taking a huge toll on Green; she was exhausted. For one nine-day period, she didn’t leave their house. When she did go out, Wallace’s friends from his Claremont recovery group kept him company. Later in the summer a yard hose went missing and Green found it in the trunk of their car. He had planned to tie it to the exhaust pipe using his bandana. When she confronted him, he insisted he had already decided not to go through with it. She did not believe him and had him hospitalized again.
In August, Stirling suffered an athletic injury, and Green wanted to be with him, so Wallace’s parents stayed with Wallace for ten days. He was close to giving up hope. “It’s like they’re throwing darts at a dartboard,” he complained to them about his psychiatrists. They went with him to an appointment; when the doctor suggested a new drug combination, Wallace rolled his eyes. He was a shut-in now, worried he’d run into his students if he went into town. Sally Wallace cooked him the meals he had loved as a child—casseroles and pot pies; they watched
The Wire
. It was obvious to his family that he was in unendurable pain. Before she left, he thanked her for being his mother.
Eventually, Wallace asked to go back on Nardil, but he was too agitated to give it the weeks it takes to work. Franzen would call and encourage him to stick with it—the worst was over. “Keep talking like that,” Wallace said. “It’s helping.” In early September, Nadell spoke with him and thought that he sounded a bit better. He was writing notes to himself, making gratitude lists and lists of symptoms and fears and keeping a journal. In
his last entry he wrote that he would stay awake so that when Green got home he could help her with the groceries.
Green believes that she knows when Wallace decided to try again to kill himself. She says of September 6, “That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday.” He waited two more days for an opportunity. In the early evening on Friday, September 12, Wallace suggested that Green go out to prepare for an opening at Beautiful Crap, which was about ten minutes away in the center of Claremont. Green felt comforted by the fact that he’d seen the chiropractor on Monday. “You don’t go to the chiropractor if you’re going to commit suicide,” she says.
After Green left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in
Infinite Jest
, he is “catapulted home over…glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
Green returned home at 9:30 and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Pietsch. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel over the past decade. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.