Come and Go

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
----T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"


"Human beings came and went" an epitaph of thanksgiving to my mentor the late David Foster Wallace


In my late teens and early twenties Infinite Jest was my best friend. I lugged the glossy tome of erudition and narrative bravura with me everywhere I went. I ploughed through the continents of paragraphs, brandishing my pen like a scalpel as I chiseled annotations into each page. I loved how each individual sentence revved up and sputtered before driving the reader deeper into a neon Golgotha of an overtly subsidized, spiritually vacuous future. I loved the acronyms and the irony and the lack of punctuation—how everything fractl'd out of control with the subtle velocity of a mouse click and the startled sunrise of a new web page. I loved how from page one, Wallace allowed the reader to stumble and wade into a sea of characters in the book-- creatures who are seeking and yearning. Creatures who are fucked up yet fighting. The scene where Tiny Ewell is confessing his pubescent chicanery to a comatose Don Gately still to this day reverberates inside my chest with the resonance and flap of angel wings. Or the scene where beloved maladroit Mario asks the Moms how she can tell if someone is sad. Open to around page 200 in nearly any version of Infinite Jest and you will witness a miracle in print, the epistemic of a heart that wildly observes and blinks as well as pulsates with the aesthetic drive of all mankind as it lurks and scopes out a simple halfway house while detailing the errant souls that dwell within.

I annotated and re-read and pondered and dreamed. I talked about Wallace to anyone who would listen. I started carrying around a vial of Visine. I told them that Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain had been to a generation of lyricists. I told them that the linguistic mortar binding the jacket of this book together contained the ever-elusive "it" in which we as a collective human species were all somehow seeking. The book was marketed like the purported failed entertainment itself—glossy and gargantuan. Epic and exhausting. The blurbs of Moody and Vollmann and Franzen sprouted off the back cover with the intensity of fireworks blossoming above the tinted window showcasing the pensive author himself, looking as if he had just inhaled something green and potent while mulling over the outcome of a game of frisbee golf. He looked like what I thought a literary savior should look like: a wizened Spartan wordsmith. A feral wildman boasting about the glory of his fresh inky kill. He looked like someone who had been there, a washed up itinerant emotional Ishmael, who had not only survived the to tell the tale but one who wished to convey it in a fashion that had simply never before been conceived. That he wished to push the (porous) borders of the page as far as they would allow. Wish to amp up the volume of the contemporary state of American letters. That he wished simply to stretch out the possibility of the human experience and immortalize it in the tattooed hieroglyphics of language.

But more than anything what inspired me about David Foster Wallace was that he lived forty-five minutes away from the aching bluffs of the river town where I was born. For a formative teenage writer lodged in the genital wart of the Midwest nothing is more needed, more revered, more sacred then finding superman occupying the corner phone booth in the sometimes empty avenues of your artistic ambitions—and when that superhero looks like David Foster Wallace and writes like a wild-haired caged mad man howling at the harvest moon, you know you have found a true mentor of the soul indeed.

The summer of '97 I would drive down the cement arteries of I-74, lost in the emerald husks of corn, thinking to myself aloud that "This is David Foster Wallace, country" as I chained smoked Camel Turkish Golds thinking about Don Gately or Hal Incandenza or Himself pressing microwave integers or thinking about the ravishing, unforgettable Lenore Beadsman from Broom of the System (my favorite DFW protagonist of all time) wondering if I would spot him at the Denny's he was rumored to write at. Apparently he would put his television in his front lawn when he wished to log in some serious writing hours. My friends who had met him said that he always referred to writing as "work." That he smoked like a chimney at a nuclear facility. That he was apish in stature, hairy and uncouth and dipped even when he was in class. That he was brilliant. That he smelled. That he couldn't play tennis anymore because he had a sore knee. That he didn’t know how to shave. That all the girls loved him. That he would often enroll his creative writing students through two weeks of remedial grammar at the onset of every semester because they didn't know how to punctuate worth shit. That he would chew up your individualized slain over manuscripts and spit out the romantic residue of your tears. That he was going through writers block. That he had his own private study in Milner library. That he could sometimes be a real asshole. That he had gotten it on with fellow writer Mary Karr at Syracuse and had her initials tattooed somewhere on the hirsute boundaries of his flesh. That he looked like a hybrid between a court Jester or a samurai warrior in that ubiquitous bandanna he donned with the cagey assurance that he could either easily amuse you to death or simply fuck with everything you have ever believed in.



I never had a class with David Foster Wallace. After I discovered the blinding shield of linguistic light that is Infinite Jest I began to consume every writer and book David Foster Wallace recommended. For me personally, this was where David Foster Wallace, the image of a jaded hip insomnia-addled novelist chain smoking cigarettes at a local coffee bar comes to life--that image made me simply want to read and write books and sent younger writers a message that if you openly indulged in your literary fetishes you might also influence others in the process.

Everything David Foster Wallace recommended I devoured with the appetite of hunger strike riddled martyrs. When I first discovered Wallace I was lost in the mire of serpentine sentences brought on by an unyielding "beat and James Joyce phase" that compels so many young (esp. males) writers to forgo the piecemeal rudiments of punctuation, sandblasting a ditzy clang of syllables into the drywall of the page in hopes that a metaphor encapsulating the human condition might somehow be revealed in a dash of brilliance. While my education at that time was (to plagiarize Wallace again) "A few french fries short of an academic happy meal," I never received anything close to the edification and encouragement and the joy inside the classroom that Wallace offered me via his prose and his enthusiasm for contemporary state of letters. There were the writers on the back of the book cover, Sven Birketts urging us to "THINK" William Gaddis and William Gass and John Barth and (oh yes) Thomas Pynchon. I read William James' "Varieties of a religious Experience," I fell head over knee caps enamored with Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus based solely that Wallace's first novel Broom of the System had incubated inside the epistemological rungs of this philosophical ladder.

A sentence referencing eternity in respect to the vicissitudes of time culled from that positivism bulletin provides the title of this particular blog.

But then I also began to read his contemporaries. If Wallace was vaulted into the coveted dome of the literati spotlight, he was sharing his champagne and confetti with writers who struggled and wrote long side him. Younger writers. I read the writers whom he was compared to yet seemed to vehemently despise (McInerney and Leyner). I read the writers he adored. I read Susan Daitch and AM Homes. I read and re-read Galatea 2.2 and fucking wailed til their were tear drops on my testicles ("Richard Powers," Wallace applauded in an interview "Who lives all of 45 minutes away from me and whom I have met all of once.") I fell in madly love with the spritely wit and windex clear prose of Lorrie Moore. I slipped into the frigid late-70's ambiance of Rick Moody's icicle prose parading over the upholstery of Updike. I lauded the beautiful carnivalesque clan and narrative tomfooleries of Don Antrim's "100 brothers." I ordered a copy of 27th City and even submitted my name to Oprah's book club in hopes that I would be a guest panelist during the one week that Jonathan Franzen itchingly anticipated CORRECTIONS was chosen to be in the aborted media spotlight.


After all, I knew all about Franzen. David Foster Wallace had introduced me to his work years before.

I read more William T. Vollmann then could possibly be salubrious for my spiritual longevity. More than once I got laid plagiarizing the quote "Gave my heart an erection," a metaphor he quoted in an interview while talking about Carole Maso's ravishing novel "AVA."

Some of the books Wallace introduced me to have become my best friends. I can't imagine where I would go for emotional solace if I didn't have Delillo's WHITE NOISE or GREAT JONES STREET. During the IJ tour Wallace was quoted to having said something like, "The writer I'm most into right now is George Saunders Civil War Land in Bad Decline."--Saunders becoming a second literary avatar who I was honored to introduce in Chicago during his book tour for Pastoralia.

I read every DFW interview I could land my postmodern inflicted paws on. To this day I feel the Larry McCarffery Interview featured in the 1993 Summer issue of THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION has served as my emotional rod and staff--it is the one piece of exposition I have been going to like a confidant for over a decade to confirm my devotion to this craft.

In the interview (published when Jest was still in its second trimester)Wallace said things like "Fiction is what its like to be a fucking human being." He talked about Wittgenstein and about chasing what Yeats called "the click of a well made box " How he talked about the craft and loyalty to composing stories being an act of love. "And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you are smart or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you in the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself that talk out the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves."

The interview with Larry McMurphy stewarded to my life what the New Testament proclaims to give to tithing Born again arms flailing Christians. It gave me orientation and encouragement and still to this day part of me feels set on fire every time I read it.


The first creative writing seminar I attended at Bradley University I wore glasses and a bandanna to class. After the class period I chatted with my instructor, the great Thomas Palakeel, about post modernism and Wallace’s place in it. A year later I transferred to Illinois State to save money. Wallace was on sabbatical that semester but I remember jipping class and spending all day burrowed 400 meters from his office writing in the basement of Manchester. I had a crush on the scarlet-haired professor with the tight ass whose office was adjacent to Wallace's academic den. I would hang outside his office, my manuscript folded beneath my arms like an American flag configured after taps, waiting to be discovered. There was nothing remarkable about his office. I remember that he had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his office door (something about rogain, middle age and chest hair). He also had a quote stating how he would be on sabbatical followed by the phrase” FARETHEWELL FELLOW TRAVELER.

When I called his office just to hear the voice of my avatar on his office answering machine, hoping to introduce myself as an eager student and enthusiastic fan of contemporary fiction I was dismayed when the semi- nasal tone of his voice offered out a bitter caveat stating, "This number is for student and academic inquiries only."

I met a cool cafeteria worker at Illinois state who was a late-middle aged writer paying his dues like every other aspiring chronicler I know and who walked out of Wallace's classroom after a heated discussion where Wallace ripped his story apart.

"The one word to describe Dave Wallace is "intense." He said, after telling me about a recent rejection letter he had just received from Esquire.

We had a mutual friend named Nick who worked at Brewster Beans and who looked just like Tiny Ewell from Infinite Jest. Nick had met DFW in hallways of Stevenson one afternoon and knew him solely as a professor. Nick was also an English major and I remember feeling appalled when he confessed to me that he had no clue of DFW’s literary renown. Nick had never heard of Infinite Jest, was oblivious that his friend Dave Wallace was named to the New Yorkers "Top twenty writers for the New Millennium."

Nick was working on an adaption of Hamlet for class.

"He has a really cool set up for writing." Nick said. "When I was inside his house last week he told me that he was working on something very serious and that he trusted me not to look around too much."


Nick told me a story how DFW's home answering machine apaprently kept weekly updates of the Bears 2000-2001 sloven season.

"By the way," It would end, "The Bears are still oh and five."


I edited a copy of Nick's Hamlet manuscript. Later Nick work shopped the manuscript. Next to my scribbled comments were those of DFW's. His handwriting was a lot neater than mine.The closest to Dave Foster Wallace I would get that semester was having my handwriting on his writing desk, wondering if his lips offered a snicker of delight when he saw my request of "Needs to have more Alas Poor Yorricks."

I transferred back to Bradley to wade ad infinitum in a haunting quagmire of debt but still somehow determined as fuck to scribe out my heart on to the unblemished pasture of snow that is the beckoning freshness of a blank page. I fell in love with girl who was the most beautiful (visually stunning) and ebullient gifted writer I have ever met (for all you jest-heads out there, her smile alone would make Joellen PGOAT look like she belonged in a barnyard bargain book bin). When John Updike came to speak at Bradley University that fall, I inquired about the future of fiction. Updike mentioned the name of David Foster Wallace and the whole room visually turned in my direction. I made friends with Kris, a James Joyce scholar whose IQ may be soaring somewhere next to the hubble telescope. Together with the PGOAT we maxed out autumnal afternoons driving around Bloomington, leaving Babbit books with a pagoda of postmodern texts busheled in the basket of our arms. We visited Dalkey Archive press and Fiction Collective 2 in Fairchild Hall requesting back issues of The review of Contemporary Fiction. We tramped through Stevenson Hall in search of simply spotting the author. We made Wallace out to be an elusive sasquatch and even coined the term "Wallace droppings" whenever we came across a twinkie wrapper. We bought more books. We read more interviews. We listened to folk music (Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Greg Brown) and smoked weed. Thanks to the mind blowing Hyperbolean philosophical orations of Dr. Greene we spent that autumn immersed in the incendiary soul poetry of Husserl, Levinas, Battaile and Blanchot. We loved life. We howled and screamed. We fucked and accused. We continued to pelt out the confusion of love and the love of confusion into the keyboard every night in forlorn hopes that a metaphor might somehow be conceived.

We dreamed.


Still Wallace had been the most influential writer in the last half-decade of my life--his prose and literary recommendations alone served as the impetus to my every creative craving and try as hard as I fucking may, I never saw him once.


I finally met David Foster Wallace at Borders Books store in downtown Chicago on Bloomsday 1999. He had just appeared in the New Yorker top 20 writers for the new millennium issue, standing next to George Saunders, doing what looks like a fist pump of joy.

He was large. With his bulk he looked like an offensive center hunched over on all fours about ready to hike a football shaped exactly, somehow, like the book which I felt was the greatest text in the English language. He wore a pink bandanna, shorts and purple socks. He looked nothing like the saint I had drooled over the past three years. I remember telling my girlfriend that I thought he looked like the energizer bunny clad in that pink bandanna lumbering across aisled of reduced bestsellers brandishing an empty Evian bottle like a scepter, using it solely for a tobacco spittoon, the jester taking court, center stage, waiting to tell us a story.


He looked like a poured hybrid of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately.

He gave a kick ass reading, his voice soft, a late spring breath rustling over the Midwestern prairie reeds. When the plenary Q and A section of the book signing convened and one gentlemen asked him what he was currently reading he answered, "Hannibal" followed by a pause followed by a, "like the rest of the nation" rejoinder. When a middle-aged lady asked him where his inspirations come from, he scratched his head in an apish fashion and confessed that he really didn't know.


After the Q. and A the audience configured into an exclamatory mark of anxious bodies standing in the direction where the author was seated. David Duchovnyof X-files renown cut my girlfriend ( the PGOAT) in line and stepped on my foot in the process in order to be the first to offer Wallace a congratulatory shake. Wallace seemed completely unphased by Duchovy's presence.

I had one copy signed for me and another addressed to Doc. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof at Bradley university. I began to get tense. I tittered. I tried to convey to him the gratitude I felt for everything he had given me. He brushed it off like he could care less about what his work had meant to the general populace at large. When the person behind me in line made a reference to the date of June sixteenth being Bloomsday I almost on cue broke out into a fulsome rendition of Joyce's "Ineluctable modality of the visible," warranting a scowl from my Waterhouse visgaed PGOAT girlfriend which strongly insinuated to quit being so pedantic in public, honey. DFW continued looking down as he autographed his, "with best possible wishes" bromide in the interior of each Hardcover book. When I asked him if I could shake his hand, he said I could but then commented in a very James Joyce May-I-kiss-the-hand-that-wrote-Ulysses-germane-to-Bloomsday-kind-0f-way that if he were me, then I should still wash it, preferably with soap. I kept on wanting to talk to him. I wanted to ask him the perfunctory interrogation of "What advice would he give young writers? Who do we need to sleep with to get published?" As he scribbled the rehearsed sentence into the collar of my book I tried to thank him again for every thing he has given me. Stuttering I mentioned how I had read his five, "Direly underappreciated American novels" appearing in a recent on-line issue of Salon and how I had read each of them and how this constituted my overall affection for himself as the author, that not only did he make me want to give up everything I was doing and write books he simultaneously made me want to give up everything I was doing and read books as well.


When I told him we were from Peoria and attended Bradley University he paused for a moment and said "You guys have a really good basketball team, though, right? That one white guy."

"That one white guy," I thought to myself as I held the porcelain handle of the PGOATs palm in mine and two autographed copies of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men between us like a newborn as we left the bookstore on Michigan Avenue, the late-afternoon tint of over head lego-stacked buildings adorning downtown Chicago like a spiking utilitarian nest of beauty falling all around us in fragments of shadows and in spangles of fresh light.

I don't think the author ever looked up at me once.


You could see it after Infinite Jest. You could see Wallace trying to change. You could see Wallace trying to stretch the perimeters of the page. You could see it in Adult World (II) and other more abstract selections of BIWHM. It was as if he wanted to perform electroshock therapy on his readers psyches. It was if he wanted to push the envelope of language past the shoreline of the page into the ocean of reality , the feeling of wading in a pond of consciousness, a feeling of what it means to be a pulsating, sentient human being alert at all times versus, as he quotes, “a very sophisticated mammal” or as Wallace elegantly espoused in his 2005 Kenyon graduation speech: “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

This is the world we are all blessed to somehow an astonishing part of.


Wallace demanded that you look at a piece of fiction (or reality for that matter) with this sort of 24-7 metaphysical cognizance---to scrutinize the vessels and shapes of the alphabet in a new way, which in doing so, coerces the individualized reader to look at his world from a wider self-expanded periphery. You could see this in Tense Present Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage. You could see it most vividly in HOST with its cryptic interpolated urine stained continents of prose. It looked like witnessing a crop circle from an overhead bush plane. Linguistic alkaloids and metaphorical algorithms and a lot of avant-gardish where the fuck am I going with this—but mostly, I thought to myself as I leered into the foam of sentences ornamented into the page was that this looked like a lot of cryptic slop and I longed for a novel, an adopted Chinese sibling for Infinite Jest to cuddle up with for an eternity all for my own.

Still, in the last half decade of his life, Wallace wrote some astounding shit.

Less than a month after 9-11 A View from Mrs. Thompsons was published in Rolling Stone. Wallace recounts witnessing the tragedy and shock of that day on a neighbors couch. He was writing about 9-11, but he was writing what was transpiring on that day in my back yard. I felt every resident in central Illinois should buy five copies of the article and memorize it. Again I was seminally pissed that no one I knew in the community seemed to care that DFW was writing about the lens of global loss from the vantage point of our own backyard.

Wallace even published two nature poems in Triquarterly "Peoria," named after the city and the lush prairie environs where I have lived for the bulk of my life.




“ Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and sky line of canted rust and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to a place beyond the windbreak, where unfulfilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat…. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and wholrs of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite, Very old land. Look around you. The horizon, trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”


Reading that poem, thinking about all the late nights I spent driving in the country, smoking cigarettes in David Foster Wallace’s zip code, chasing the peach blink of the sunset as it gradually dissipated in the autumnal vapors of the west, thinking about how I too, wanted just to be like this man who had inspired me, it seemed that Dave Wallace had composed these two poems somehow just for me. But I wanted novels. I wanted another 1000 page emotional lifeboat with labyrinthine plots and random minutia. I wanted another Lenore Beadsman and another Great Ohio Desert and a pub where all the bartenders dressed up like Gilligan and a sumo-shaped proprietor who simply wants to eat everything in sight. I wanted the scenes, banal and beautiful, Don Gately trying to rouse fellow residents at 2 am to prevent their vehicles from being towed or precocious Hal Incandenza trying to feel that he is more than just a corporeal version of the OED with a killer backhand—trying to feel that he is somehow a human being in a world where even the calendar days are corporate cavities of the heart.

I wanted another novel.


Candidly I began to give two shits about Wallace’s essays. I checked amazon dot com and the Howling Fantods religiously with the anticipation of seeing an upcoming Work in Progress. When the 2002 O.Henry awards came out I paid more attention Anthony Doeer's resplendent THE HUNTERS WIFE then I did to Wallace's GOOD OLD NEON, a story it seemed to me that was a run off sentence blistered from a previous bildungsroman. Not to bash G.O.N, a story which has meant much to many readers, it just seemed to me that it was nothing more than an extracted B-side raked from the galleys of Brief Encounter (read B.I. #20 12-96 and re-read it and re-read it and re-read it again).


All I could do was bitch that he didn’t write fiction the way he used to anymore.

By this time I was working at Bradley University library as a third shift access coordinator, still writing my ass off every opportunity I got. I turned in a single spaced very heavily David Foster Wallace induced 700 page novel to my creative writing professor at Bradley for my senior project (my other senior project was about the efficacy or lack thereof of MFA programs entitled, “Jack Kerouac never got an MFA.” ) I would periodically find myself back in Normal visiting my artist friend, going to Folk concerts at Illinois Wesleyan still finding gems inside Babbbits used books bin.

I would even traipse around the cigarette stained contours of Stevenson Hall wishing to talk with my mentor, wanting to share with him my nest of rejection letters or convey to him the jolt of electricity I felt every time I massaged the tips of my fingers on the welcome mat of the keyboard. I wanted to tell Foster Wallace how much inspiration his work and artist's purview continued to add joy to my life.

I again wanted to tell Wallace all this only I couldn’t-- Wallace had abandon his longest teaching gig at ISU, leaving the trigonometric back road plains of central Illinois for Pomona California where rich corporate demagogue awarded him 0ne million dollars to teach two classes a year.




****


In the apocryphal Book of Enoch a story is relayed about the fallen angel Penemue, exiled from the presence of God, jettisoned from eternity in heaven for being the first ever teacher of the craft of writing. Even an amateur etymologist could surmise that from name comes the origin for the writing instrument.

“And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom. He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. Therefore numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day. For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith; Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure. Nor would death, which destroys everything, have effected them; But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them. "


The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it is also the lance in which the damned author will slit his wrist .....


***



This is how I heard about the suicide of my mentor: I monopolized that entire September weekend blanketed in the late night din and fracas of a local bar, blatantly cursing at flat screen digitalized rectangle to see if my beloved White Sox would inch into the playoffs (note: they did). Sunday afternoon when I awoke I was pensive and inexplicably felt broken glass shards coating the interior of my lower stomach lining. My girlfriend kept inquiring what is wrong and I could not give her a valid answer. Ironically my girlfriend of two months was reading Broom of the System. When I arrived at work there was an e-mail. Fittingly, the news of his suicide came from Dr. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof. The heading to the missive simply read "Sad news." Before the New York Times link Dr. Palakeel wrote the sentence, “ I know he has tried this before.”



*****




For the over last decade I’ve been telling everyone that David Foster Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain was to a generation of musicians and now Wallace has joined that cadre of elite souls too brilliant and too misunderstood to cope with the book jacket binding that serevs as their own flesh. Wallace joins the extolled likes of Hemingway and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath. Dying young cements that there will be a mystique around the narrative of your life—that scholars will probe into every facet of your tortured genius, that teenagers will attire themselves in black while locking themselves in the bedrooms of their parents suburban casa numerating ways that there life is sad and lonely just like that of their mentor. Dying young grants you the cool aura Fitzgerald and Jack London and Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. Dying young grants you a romantic aura of Byron or Keats or Shelly. Wikipedia writers who have committed suicide. Vachel Lindsey drinking Lysol. Virginia Woolf’s grave being marked in an effervescent tombstone of expired bubbles. Jesrzy Kosinski leaving a suicide note that reads simply:


“I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity".

An essay from Denise Levertov published three decades ago discusses the suicide and death of so many young writers with fervor germane for today's literary community:


“My own sadness at the death of a fellow poet is compounded by the sense of how likely it is that Anne’s Sexton’s tragedy will not be without the influence of tragedy in others lives. She herself was obviously, too intensely troubled to be fully aware of her influence or to take on its responsibility. Therefore it seems to me that we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims. Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion, and I surmise that her friendship with Sylvia Plath had in it an element of identification which added powerfully to her malaise. Across the country at different colleges I have heard many stories of attempted—and sometimes successful suicides by young students who love the poetry of Plath and who suppose that somehow, in order to become poets themselves, they had to act out in there own lives the vent of hers. Innumerable young poets have drunk themselves into stupidity and cirrhosis because they admired John Berryman or Dylan Thomas and came to think they must think like them to write like them.”

One doesn't much like to ponder the bleak possibility come a decade or two from now of a young writer in his late teens with so much potential hanging himself in the manner of his mentor, a bandanna clad around his limp neck like a fallen halo.

David Wallace becoming the Kurt Cobain for a generation of those who decided to read.

***


Part of me is pissed off and wounded. Part of me wants to buy him a beer and say funny anecdotes so that he can laugh. Part of me wants to give him the finger, tell him he's an overrated fuck up, tell him there are so many young writers, good writers working piss-ant jobs, struggling, impecunious, lonely, fucked-up who harbor knee-deep suicidal proclivities every time they try to explain the jaded nature of their vocation to their parents, to their girlfriends, to their peers-- see the deflated expression etched into the face of a writer who has scribed over a million words in the last decade and still can't find a publisher or make rent but refuses to yield to the chorus of his calling at all costs.

Part of me is learning (on the recommendation of a feathered spiritual friend) to seriously, like Don Gately in IJ get down on my knees and pray for his soul and in hushed reverence thank him for everything he has simply given. That his soul needs help. That it is in a confused state and that it needs fellow wayfarers and dreamers to assist him in his journey between the oscillating spectrum of light casting shadows and prisms between this realm of being and the inscrutable wonder of the world to come.

Part of me doesn't like to think about the method in which he died. Part of me can't imagine killing yourself in such a manner in which your surrogate soul mate or spouse walks in on you hung from the neck, swaying like the stem to some unknown pendulum, an octagon thatch of urine staining the infield of his crotch, his keen eye prodded free from his socket, duck tape manacled around his wrist like an identification bracelet from some Podunk country hospital, the smiley sick clowned faced emblem of Infinite Jest unable to find any more amusement by the simultaneous recurring wonder that is the failed entertainment cartridge of ones own shot at existence.

Part of what gives me the Howling Fantods is that someday, in the not so distant subsidized future that is subsidized academia, some grad student whose published academic drivel on writers include more footnotes than Wallace ever employed will one day quote the death of David Foster Wallace as being the death of postmodernism.


What gives me Howling fantods even more is that he may have had this whole shit planned for some time. When you think of stories such as "The Depressed person," or "Suicide as a sort of present." Or when you look at the time line linearity of Infinite Jest and begin to randomly ponder if Wallace had choreographed this shit: As a fellow Jest head notes:

Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U., which is probably Gregorian 2009. Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that Y.D.A.U. corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years prior to Y.D.A.U. (n. 60). It is also possible that Y.D.A.U. is 2008---

YDAU equals autumn 2008.

That “Himself” was Foster Wallace himself. That he gave his readers an sos cryptogram of help and that, throughout the adulation and the praise and the grants and bandana wielding and the dip, there was a tortured soul veiled only as the letter Q. to the astute reader seemingly blinded by his brilliance--a soul who direly needed someone to see him and to hold him and just to pull a Marley and tell him that every little thing is gonnna be alright.

Later in that afternoon I would call Dr. Palakeel, only to hear his voice on the other end of the phone, saying that he knew it was me on the other end of the line the minute the phone rang.

***


Poets and writers drink more intensely. Smoke more intensely. Worship God more intensely. Poets and writers fuck more intensely. Poets and writers give more willingly-- spilling the alphabetical marrow of their souls out into the albino sonogram of hope that is the page, hoping some stranger whom he or she has never before met turns to his crafted syllables in time of dire need and somehow finds solace, finds laughter finds a friend. The best writers will gladly serve as damaged dantes to the romantic whims of their readers Beatrice-like longings. The best writers will be butchered by academics--the same academicians who use footnotes of another mans failed genius as stilts to publish anything at all. The best writers have their hearts turned into a maxi-pads day in and day out. The best writers will understand poverty. The best writers will be self-published. The best writers will watch as rich spoiled North shore brats who have been wiping their asses with two dollars bills their entire lives publish simply because they were able to spend two years on their fathers' yacht writing full time.

The best writers never make it during their lifetime.

The best writers fail.

Again and again and again.

The writer sees. He feels. He loves. And more than anything, he gives, even with the heartbeat and breath of everything that is lodged inside of him.

***

When Foster Wallace died I thought about a lot of things. I thought about his closing comments in the aforementioned Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, in which, when asked about the future of fiction he replies:

"For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back—I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back—which means we’re going to have to be the parents."

I thought about how so many writers fall pray to this maxim of Shakespeare , "On the ashes of his youth doth lie/ As the death-bed whereon it must expire/ Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by..."

I thought about how the ashes of too many writers fertilize their corpse buried deep in the soil of the page. I thought about good ol' Penume and how the writer is seemingly damned from the outset, perhaps even by a Deity for endeavoring to tell the truth.

Writing is the most lethal vocation I know. No one knows what indeed was concealed behind the bandana Wallace shielded around his skull like a turban or a helmet.

No one truly knows what emotional shit he was goin' through.

I also thought about this quote, by former poet Laureate Donald Hall, written shortly after the death of Dylan Thomas.


“The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate. The human who confronts darkness and defeats it is the most admirable human.”

**


Two weeks after his death I did the only thing I knew I could do-- I phoned up his office in Pomona and left a message for him. I had been trying to contact him for years. I wanted to convey to him everything he had meant to the discourse of my life. I wanted to tell him how he made me want to devote my life to the craft of fiction.

His voice on the answering machine identified himself as "Dave" Wallace followed simply by a high pitched electronic purr. In that moment, as I wallowed in the pause that followed the sound of his deceased monotone. I then told him what I had been waiting to tell him for nearly a decade. I thanked him for everything he had given me.

I quoted his Kenyon commencement address, parts of it verbatim. I told him how he said in his address speech that the "Capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death," and how his life, his prose, his astute observation about the world around him, his incessant curiosity towards the habits and vices of the human race impelled me to want to write books, made me want to read books, and made me want to convey his joy and beauty found in this beautiful pond of reality we all find ourselves skinny dipping through.

Thank you David Foster Wallace.

Bravo!!!!

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

Mister Squishy, c'est moi: David Foster Wallace's Oblivion
Kiki Benzon

Emancipation is not a term I much like to use. Too loaded with foggy connotations of even foggier, poorly-defined "breaks" from (nonspecific) (nebulous? well, at least, invariably, nefarious) regimes or states of being. See: the imprecision is infectious. But upon reading David Foster Wallace's latest short story collection, Oblivion (out this June in the U.S. and early July here in the U.K.), the term seemed somehow right. Though only two of the volume's eight stories are, strictly speaking, "new" fictional offerings (the first six have appeared in journals from AGNI to Esquire), Oblivion is shot through with a largely consistent set of themes and arguments, rendering the work Wallace's most penetrating, disquieting and altogether kick-ass compilation to date. Operating in a world where life and commercial narratives have become virtually indistinguishable, Wallace's characters appear to us at points of solemn epiphany, ardent self-delusion, existential collapse and grotesque narcissism. There is the marketing Focus Group facilitator, Terry Schmidt, who "behave[s] as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant" (9); there is Randall Napier, a frazzled yuppie, persecuted by allegations of snoring by his disconsolate wife and plagued by hallucinations involving "an endlessly ringing and unanswered public telephone" (194); and there's the Style reporter, Skip Atwater, producing an article about a defecation "artist," whose ambivalent state, Skip is convinced, comes "very close to the core of the American experience" (283). As in his preceding collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), and his massive, polyphonic novel Infinite Jest (1996), Wallace represents basic human fears of mediocrity, unknowability and insignificance with uncanny perspicacity and linguistic cunning. What distinguishes Oblivion is its pervasive (often deeply encoded, implicit) didacticism - another dubious word, especially nowadays, but bear with me - about how fundamental ontological puzzles may be made less crippling, less horrible for those who would (as many of his characters do) rage against or succumb to or remain improbably ignorant of what one moribund character calls "the fraudulence paradox" (147). Life is fake and empty, but we go on living it as if it weren't. It's not the case, Wallace's tales suggest, that one can be "emancipated" from the paradox, but rather that an individual may exist in spite of it - and exist, perhaps, with a modicum of happiness. Dare I say authenticity? Better not. And enough already with the regrettable terms.

If there is light at the end of so many tunnels of self-loathing and alienation in Oblivion, it's not detectable without a measure of eyestrain. In "Mister Squishy," for example, we are led through the proceedings of a "third-phase" target demographic group seminar at Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising, where the commercial valences of a new Mister Squishy snack called Felonies! ® are being strategically assessed. Not only do the baroque, methodical assessments turn out to be (in terms of their empirical validity) bogus of the highest order, but also the conveners and test subjects (all, here, male) are portrayed as little more than walking aggregates of the various brands and products they consume or propagate; people are interpreted in exclusively "demographically meaningful" terms like age, race and haircut: Schmidt's "own face and the plump and wholly innocuous icon's [i.e. Mister Squishy's] face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude and line-drawn" (34); his subjects' faces "were well-nourished, mid- to upscale, neutral, provisionally attentive, the blood-fed minds behind them occupied with their own owner's lives, jobs, problems, plans, desires, &c" (17). Marketing is pseudoscience, the story suggests, for pseudo-human beings; social-psychology, however bastardized here, is a means to sell stuff and make money. But while the scenario appears nauseatingly total and hermetic - a perfectly self-perpetuating capitalist fractal - subversive elements begin to puncture the façade: a spy/saboteur infiltrates the focus group, Schmidt cultures Ricin in his apartment, and a terrorist-and/or-performance artist figure with inflatable appendages and suction cups scales the R.S.B building. The perimeter of the ostensibly closed and contained marketing research space is eroding - via rather sinister forces, true, but eroding nonetheless.

Wallace is especially skilled at depicting a gnawing sense of personal futility - both in terms of its cultural sources and psychological expression - but in Oblivion he seems to be ultimately concerned with the way in which this (to varying degrees, universal) problem is handled by those who confront it. The clinically phony Schmidt yearns to "[pour] out the most ghastly fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible thoroughgoing smallness " but is rendered inert and cynical by the "grinding professional machine you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could change" (31-2). Rather than acting upon his attraction to a certain colleague Darlene Lilley - an attraction which would take but "one moment of the courage to look prurient or creepy" (33) to test its mutuality - Schmidt sublimates his desires by watching satellite television, collecting rare coins, and cultivating lethal toxins in his home laboratory (which, we are given to understand, is part of a campaign to poison Felonies! snacks and thus undermine the marketing regime Schmidt professionally perpetuates and personally loathes). Schmidt's grave sense of purposelessness is matched by the narrator in "Good Old Neon," Neal, who always had "an almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies" and seemed "impressively and authentically at ease in the world" (180), but feels his life has been an obscene and irreversible hoax. Neal finally resorts to suicide as a means of escaping his incapacitating sense of fraudulence and the reality of inexorable, private "infinities you can never show another soul" (179).

Though Wallace's renderings of psychic tumult are enough to make any homo sapiens shudder in grim soul-exposure (like, to be understood is to be found out), his stories are not simply overdeveloped anatomies of overdeveloped egos or, what Michiko Kakutani calls in her recent review of Oblivion, "claustrophobic portraits of self-pitying, self-absorbed individuals who are endlessly long-winded." To receive them as such would be to miss the point of Wallace's writing. Yes, pages of waffling and ennui number many in this collection - but they need to in order fully characterize the traps in which some people find themselves. And one of these traps is over-analysis itself. Near the end of the forty-some page confessional "Good Old Neon," for example, the narrative perspective imperceptibly morphs from the disaffected Neal to a "David Wallace" who flips though his high school yearbook and tries to "imagine what all might have happened to lead up to my [i.e. Neal's] death in the fiery single-car accident he'd [i.e. David Wallace's] read about" (180). The bottom line, for the reflecting former schoolmate, is a hard and non-indulgent one. Troubled by those unshowable infinities?: "Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you" (179). Already snuffed your fake, egocentric self?: "[I]t wouldn't have made you a fraud to change your mind. It would be sad to do it because you think you somehow have to" (180). "The cliché that you can never truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid," maybe, but this "David Wallace" entreats you to not "[mock] the attempt" (181). After so much parody, ironicism and "look mom, no hands!"ism in contemporary writing, Wallace's (dare I say it) sentimentalism here is, for this reader at least, a breath of fresh fictional air. And it is on this count that Oblivion surpasses Hideous Men, a work which, though its psychological portraiture is gob-smackingly on, leaves its characters pretty much to their hideous selves without any sense that these selves could ever be other than what they are. It would appear, then, that the literary imperatives Wallace put forward in a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery - that unlike postmodernist "image-fiction" (167) and the self-conscious writing of Pynchon-clone "crank-turners," new writing should reflect "real aspects of real experiences" (140) - have come to some fruition Oblivion.

The upfront treatment of Neal's mind-forged manacles comes as a sobering jolt in "Good Old Neon," but possibilities for emancipation from inertia and systematic embitterment are advanced in other stories, more covertly, on the level of narrative structure. No stranger to the unresolved and the nonlinear (as evinced by his psychological snippets in Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair (1989) and the spiraling Infinite Jest) [ link to Piotr Siemion's review of Infinite Jest EBR BOUND linkEBR BOUND (/criticalecologies/postapocalyptic) in ebr -eds.], Wallace exploits the alienating (read: critically rousing) effects of disrupted or convoluted (or altogether absent) plotlines. Denying the reader the anesthetic of causal, sequential stories, Wallace's fiction has been (notoriously) replete with protracted digressions, foot/endnote feedback loops, baffling truncations and thornily difficult language. In Oblivion, Wallace takes these antics down a notch or two, employing a smaller range of verbal stunts - a diminution which helps to curb the sprezzatura -on-speed-osity that makes some of his earlier work come across more like an episode of Prodigy Showcase (a program that doesn't exist - but could) (should?) than serious fiction. One tactic that stands out in the current collection is the complex intermeshing of narrative threads. In "The Soul is not a Smithy," for example, a man relates how, as a slow-learning child in the midst of an elaborate daydream, he witnessed a teacher's psychotic break and killing by the police. The daydream is catalyzed by things the child peripherally sees through the classroom window and achieves a kind of structural order from the window's mesh, which was "divided into discrete squares that appeared to look like rows of panels composing cartoon strips, filmic storyboards" (70). The boy's fantasy involves Cuffie the dog, who strays from her owners, Ruth, the blind, ridiculed girl and her respectively vain and saintly mother and father. The adult narrator's account at first shifts broadly between the drama invented by the boy and the one being played out in his classroom, which he only half-registers; but as the emotional temperature in the classroom rises - i.e. when the substitute teacher begins to repeatedly scrawl KILL THEM ALL amongst his chalkboard jottings on the XIIIth Amendment and students begin to cry, call out for Stepmutti, and vomit in fright - the pendulum swing between the two scenarios becomes increasingly rapid. The imagined invades the real, providing both cover from and allegorical expression of the actual terror taking place. But rather than enabling mere escape, the intertwined memory of the daydream and Mr. Johnson's insane rupture and death provides a platform upon which the reflecting adult then interprets his father. "There was something about [the father's] routine," we are told, "that cast shadows deep down in parts of [the narrator which he] couldn't access" (105) and the episode in classroom is - if elliptically - illuminating in this regard. Cuffie and Ruth thus give way to another recollected dream, a Kafkaesque scenario of "a large room full of men in suits and ties seated at rows of grey desks, motionless, silent" (108). Much like the students in the fourth grade Civics class, the "men in the dream appeared both as individuals and an anonymous mass" (108). The sheer banality of these images explodes into an understanding of "the deeper, soul-level boredom of his [father's] job" (105) and how his "father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, florescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations" (106). Finally the narrator reveals that he is "one of them, one of the mass of grey faced men" (109) in the dream and that his eyes too are "are flat and opaque" (110). This all sounds a little cheesy, perhaps. But what's exceptional is the way in which Wallace conveys the deep psychic structures of the cheese, a shifting architecture of experience represented by interpenetrating narrative strands, rather than the "let me tell you about my father," shotgun, hear-my-plight approach that is so very au fait on the book-clubby circuit these days. Performing and not simply describing self-examination, the story conveys the real yet indeterminable effects of the Oedipal and traumatic functions that haunt the narrator.

Textual lines thus become "lines of flight" (pace Deleuze and Guattari) from regimental systems and modes of thought; lateral and regressive moves constitute advancement, though according to a logic that is less readily discernable than a Newtonian or naturalist cause-and-effect. Wallace's stories enact an expansive and flexible mode of interpretation (of self, others and events) that amalgamates the peripheral, the focal and the alternate. This narrative strategy, a kind of literary-cognitive knight's move, reaches its pitch in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," where oscillation between subjects and storylines occurs at sentence and even phrasal levels. While exquisitely nuanced in their own right, Wallace's sentences here derive much of their connotative power from their discordant relations to immediate neighbors. A large, goggle-wearing man relates the circumstances of both his and his mother's legal troubles: she is suing her plastic surgeon for work which "did something to the musculature of her face and caused her to look insanely frightened at all times" (182) and he is charged with "failing due exercise of caution" (186) because a nine-year-old boy fell through the narrator's garage roof, landed upon a "tempered-glass container complex" full of black widow spiders, and consequently died. The unfortunate pair ride a bus to an attorney's office, and the son brings along a briefcase full of the lethal spiders in case anyone gives his mother grief about her "chronic mask of crazed suffering" (188). Freud and Lacan are invoked everywhere, from the son's bizarre overprotectiveness to the many unsubtle "mirrors" like the mother who knits and her son's fetishized widows, who are "industrious weavers" (187). But the exaggerated codependence of this particular relationship finds its objective correlative in story's deeply involved narrative texture, where each sentence becomes itself a "mirror of nature," reflecting and refracting (apparently) distinct lines of thought from one statement to the next:

Mother herself who is a decent-hearted if vain, bitter and timid female specimen but who is not a colossus on the roads of the human intellect, to put it frankly, could not ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was a response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to what in the mirror if the response was itself the expression. Causing no end of confusion before they got her sedated. The surgeon was leaning forward against the wall with the expression, Yes there was an objective problem with the surgery's results. The bus is because we have no car, a situation the attorney says he can remedy in spades. The whole thing was carefully screened off and contained and even the state conceded that if he had not been up there fiddling on the roof of someone's garage there is no way he could have come in contact with them in any form. (185)

An extended series of once/twice-removed connections, the textual pattern emulates the son's skewed logic which blurs distinctions between parent and child, insect and human, legal and ethical.

So often in Wallace's earlier work are "plots" and ideas obscured, clarified or aped by the forms which contain them: "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" is a long, annoying metafictional story about long, annoying metafictional stories; in "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life" two loners' tepid attempts at connection are detailed in a few measly sentences, with the final phrase thrice repeated to connote the cyclic pervasiveness of modern alienation; and in "The Depressed Person," parasitical footnotes impinge upon the tale-proper about a depressed person whose illness transforms her into a parasite to those who try to help her. While these and other stories are superbly crafted closed-circuits of form and theme, they offer the reader few points of entry other than a simple recognition of the systems and scenarios represented. Oblivion is a relatively "porous" (a favored Wallacian term) work in that its structures and forms are less ways to "prove the point" of the stories they put across than currents which engulf the reader while drawing her along. Nowhere is this more the case than in "Incarnations of Burned Children," a three-page textual gush which describes the first panic-stricken moments after parents discover their infant drenched by scalding water. Not describes, really, but rather is:

... the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man's mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he'd ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his own child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they'd become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. (115)

The torrential prose becomes the coursing thoughts and gestures that are set off by an unimaginable accident. A similar narrative principle is at play (though less successfully so) in the title story "Oblivion," where movements among the various fraught dimensions of Randall Napier's life - golfing rituals with a surly father-in-law, frustrating interviews with a dopey psychotherapist, vaguely erotic impressions of his daughter, exhaustive/ing analysis of his alleged snoring - convey the age-old philosophical problem of locating the real; what seems at first to be a straight-forward account of one man's ordinary unhappiness is complicated by an escalating surrealism, leading up to the "final" revelation that everything we (think we) have learned about Mr. Napier is actually the substance of a dream. Or (strike the suspenseful minor chord) is it? Thus, the problem with "Oblivion," the weakest tale in the collection: an otherwise gripping mystery about indeterminable reality is reduced to the late-1970s music video trope (courtesy Keats), "like wow, do I wake or sleep or what..."

Oblivion is kind of like a handbook for the mid-life crisis victim. Its characters - mostly men - find themselves confined to prisons both vocational and psychological. Dead marriages, pointless jobs, beige apartments, circadian monotony. The fraudulence paradox. We are Mister/Ms Squishys: agentless, empty-calorie snack-food fuelling an insatiable capitalist stomach. But lest this all sound a bit patronizing, I should say that Wallace doesn't claim exemption from the pangs of meaninglessness. The writer, the artist is potentially the biggest fraud of all, or so it is heavily implied in "The Suffering Channel," which begins with the poignant exchange:

"But they're shit."
"And yet at the same time they're art. Exquisite pieces of art. They're literally incredible."
"No, they're literally shit is literally what they are." (238)

Shit and art: distinguishable how? Both inhabit the general ontological sphere of excrement. One wonders, though, as does a Style employee later on in the story, "What sort of person goes around displaying his own poo?" (246). A person like Wallace, I guess - or, at least, metaphorical expressions of said poo. But that which is displayed in Oblivion is not simply a demonstration of the literary "firepower" that "David Wallace" in "Good Old Neon" finds emotionally dehydrating, but also an expression of "the realer, the more enduring and sentimental part of him" (181). The shift itself suggests the potential for a break from precedent, from the established code. It's Mister Squishy - see: malleable - not Mister Stiffy. Just watch that expiration date.
Works Cited

Kakutani, Michiko. "Life Distilled From Details, Infinite and Infinitesimal." Review of Oblivion. New York Times. 1 June, 2000.

Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.

---. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

---. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

---. Oblivion. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004.

---. and Larry McCaferry. "An Interview With David Foster Wallace." The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 13.2. (Summer 1993): 127-150.

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The Hand That Signed The Paper by Dylan Thomas Part II

The Hand That Signed the Paper



The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas



The hand that signed the paper is a work where content is much more important than form.

There are many interpretations hidden in the words of this author, as I will analyze later, because the form of the poem is very simple: it has four stanzas where there are four verses in each one.



In a linguistic analysis of the poem, we can identify the use of certain cataphoric, anaphoric and homophoric items. For instance, the use of “the” in stanza 1(the hand, the paper, the breath and the globe) is cataphoric, while the subsequent uses or “the” are defining, so they are anaphoric. Examples are: The mighty hand or The five kings.

The use of “the” in the dead in line 1 of stanza 4 is homophoric and anaphoric since the phrase the dead could be said to get an universal application. Also we have in the poem the use of participant relations where parts of the body and certain elements are made to act as if on their own volition. For instance, in the title of the work, The hand that signed the paper, the poet presents the hand as if acting independently of its owner whose brain must have given the signal before the actual signing was done. Also, we have fingers taxed the breath, A hand that rules pity, a hand that rules heaven, etc.

On the other hand, there is a preponderance of the nominal group in the poem, and most of these nominal groups are inanimate: The hand that signed the paper, The globe of dead (stanza 1, line 3), a scribbled name (stanza 3, line 4), etc.

Synonymy is another lexical device used in the poem: did a king to death (stanza 2, line 4) and murder (stanza 2, line 3) can be said to be identical meaning. Also, paper and treaty can be said to be synonymous. The use of fingers and hand is an instance of hyponymy. The implication of this is that the poet uses them as elements of foregrounding to lay emphasis on the actual message of the poem.



The rhyme is unique for the whole poem: ABAB. The vocabulary used by Thomas is not very complicated, but there are some words difficult to understand even for English students, as goose (line 7), locusts (line 10) or scribbled (line 12).



As I have said before, this text of Thomas is full of words with double meaning that make this poem an excellent portrait of what happens when the (hand of a) man has got the power to initiate and to end a war with a simple sign in an insignificant piece of paper. This is shown in a masterly way in lines 7 and 8: A goose’s quill has put end to murder/ That put an end to talk.

Thomas does not use the term death, even it would be a more appropriate word for a poem which talks about war and its consequences, but he uses murder to emphasize the dramatic effect of death, the only way of not finding death in a natural way. This two lines are, in my opinion, the most brilliant ones in the whole poem.



In the line 2, Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Thomas shows the fingers of the hand as kings, as powerful figures; we can see this again later, two lines further down. The expression taxed the breath is very good to explain how difficult it is to survive in a war, because signing that paper means killing a lot of innocent people.



The second stanza begins with a reference to God, to divine power: The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder: God is Almighty, that hand can be so mighty as God.

In lines 9 and 10 (The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,/ And famine grew, and locusts came:). It makes reference to plagues that people who are physically and psychologically injured in a war have to endure.


Great is the hand that holds dominion over/ Man by a scribbled name. Here the writer criticizes the power of bureaucracy. Is it possible that a man, for having signed a piece of paper, had in his hands the destiny of millions of men, women and children?



The last stanza is a return to terms explained before: Thomas comes back to show the fingers of the hand as individual kings, as powerful men (The five kings), and also comes back to compare the hand of the man with God’s hand: A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven.

The Hand That Signed The Paper by Dylan Thomas

The Second Coming Part III

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[1] However, the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well those of Germany and Russia; as a result, it is unlikely that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.[citation needed]

Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed]

The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'". However, there are some differences between the two characters, mainly that the figure in the poem has no wings.

Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "…we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying – he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality."

Manuscript variations can be found in Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.


The Poem

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[edit] Origins of terms

The word gyre used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from the mythology of William Blake. In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, as his description of the figure in the poem is nothing at all like the image of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance.

The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. Carl Jung's book The Psychology of the Unconscious, published in 1912, could have had an influence, with its idea of the collective unconscious.

[edit] Allusions to the poem

Chinua Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by evincing the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism.

The hip hop group The Roots titled their 1999 album Things Fall Apart taking the name from the above novel.

The song "Four Winds" on the band Bright Eyes' 2007 album Cassadaga contains the lyrics "a school of meditation built to soften the times/and hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds," and "the sum of man/slouching towards Bethlehem."

The poem is referred to on the tv show Angel, in the fourth episode of season four, titled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". In the episode, the character Lorne has a psychic vision of something evil coming in the near future, and describes it by saying "do the words 'slouching toward bethlehem' ring any bells?".

The poem is referred to several times directly and indirectly in Stephen King's epic novel The Stand. It is also cited several times in Dan Simmon's novel Hyperion.

Joni Mitchell set the poem to lyrics in her song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" originally on her Night Ride Home CD.

All but a few lines of the poem have been lines of dialogue on the television show The Sopranos, including one episode in which Dr. Melfi tells Tony "The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer".

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used "The Second Coming" as the epigraph to his book The Vital Center. More than a half-century later, he explained that the poem had been "less of a cliché in 1948" than it had become currently.[2] In 1986 Schlesinger, in The Cycles of American History, again referenced this poem with prophetic paraphrase: "Still, let us not be complacent. Should private interest fail today and public purpose thereafter, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, may be slouching toward Washington to be born?"

Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, references the poem, as does Nina Coltart's 1993 book Slouching Toward Bethlehem... and Further Psychoanalytic Explorations, as well as numerous popular songs, movies and novels. Conservative judge Robert H. Bork used the poem as an inspiration for the title of his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. In response, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage chose Skipping Towards Gomorrah as the title for his 2003 book (ISBN 0-45-228416-3).

Adam Cohen, of the New York Times on 12 February 2007[3] commented how the poem has been used more and more as a metaphor for the war in Iraq.

In the September 20th, 2008 edition of The Economist, the lead article, entitled "What next?", alludes to the poem. The article is about the financial crisis and seems to use the poem as a theme. The second line begins with the phrase "In the widening gyre." The two section headings in the body of the article are also taken from the poem. One is "The blood-dimmed tide." The other is "The centre cannot hold." Also, the cover depicts a whirlpool pulling down the corporate logos of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, HBOS, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Northern Rock, Indymac, as well as the Lehman Brothers building and the Charging Bull sculpture.

Similarly, in a New York Times column (Oct. 27, 2008), Paul Krugman compared the ongoing 2008 financial crisis to the anarchy described in the poem. Specifically, he used the widening gyre as the title of his column and as a placeholder for economic feedback loops, suggesting that the falconer would be best represented by Henry Paulson. Krugman concluded the column, "Things continue to fall apart."

In a deleted scene from Oliver Stone's 1995 Movie Nixon, Richard Helms' character played by Sam Waterston recites "The Second Coming" in its entirety to President Nixon played by Anthony Hopkins. It is also alluded to in Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox, "So sport, the falcon has heard the falconer."

In an episode of the television show Heroes entitled "The Second Coming", the fictional character Mohinder Suresh narrates the poem "The Second Coming" in its entirety at the conclusion of the episode.

Author Tad Williams, in Chapter 19 of City of Golden Shadow (1996), the first book in his Otherland series, references to the poem when two of the main characters !Xabbu and Irene "Renie" Sulaweyo are discussing !Xabbu's dream premonitions of a foreboding future.

"I am speaking of something greater. There is a poem that I was taught in school-an English poet, I think. It spoke of a beast slouching toward Bethlehem."
"I remember that, sort of. Blood-dimmed tides. Anarchy loose in the world."
He nodded. "An apocalyptic image, I was told. A vision of the end of things.

The Second Coming Part II

The Second Coming

The Shining Ball Room Music

David Foster Wallace ----The Rolling Stones Article

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace
He was the greatest writer of his generation - and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind

DAVID LIPSKY

Posted Oct 30, 2008 12:31 PM


He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete's saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.

His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

"The one thing that really should be said about David Foster Wallace is that this was a once-in-a-century talent," says his friend and former editor Colin Harrison. "We may never see a guy like this again in our lifetimes — that I will shout out. He was like a comet flying by at ground level."

His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, was Bible-size and spawned books of interpretation and commentary, like Understanding David Foster Wallace — a book his friends might have tried to write and would have lined up to buy. He was clinically depressed for decades, information he limited to family and his closest friends. "I don't think that he ever lost the feeling that there was something shameful about this," his father says. "His instinct was to hide it."

After he died on September 12th, readers crowded the Web with tributes to his generosity, his intelligence. "But he wasn't Saint Dave," says Jonathan Franzen, Wallace's best friend and the author of The Corrections. "This is the paradox of Dave: The closer you get, the darker the picture, but the more genuinely lovable he was. It was only when you knew him better that you had a true appreciation of what a heroic struggle it was for him not merely to get along in the world, but to produce wonderful writing."

David grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His father, Jim, taught philosophy at the University of Illinois. His mother, Sally, taught English at a local community college. It was an academic household — poised, considerate — language games in the car, the rooms tidy, the bookcase the hero. "I have these weird early memories," Wallace told me during a series of interviews in 1996. "I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other in bed, holding hands and both lovin' something really fiercely." Sally hated to get angry — it took her days to recover from a shout. So the family developed a sort of interoffice conflict mail. When his mother had something stern to say, she'd write it up in a letter. When David wanted something badly — raised allowance, more liberal bedtime — he'd slide a letter under his parents' door.

David was one of those eerie, perfect combinations of two parents' skills. The titles of his father's books — Ethical Norms, Particular Cases — have the sound of Wallace short-story titles. The tone of his mother's speaking voice contains echoes of Wallace's writing voice: Her textbook, Practically Painless English, sounds like a Wallace joke. She uses phrases like "perishing hot" for very hot, "snoof" for talking in your sleep, "heave your skeleton" for go to bed. "David and I both owe a huge debt to my mother," says his sister, Amy, two years younger. "She has a way of talking that I've never heard anywhere else."

David was, from an early age, "very fragile," as he put it. He loved TV, and would get incredibly excited watching a program like Batman or The Wild Wild West. (His parents rationed the "rough" shows. One per week.) David could memorize whole shows of dialogue and predict, like a kind of plot weatherman, when the story was going to turn, where characters would end up. No one saw or treated him as a genius, but at age 14, when he asked what his father did, Jim sat David down and walked him through a Socratic dialogue. "I was astonished by how sophisticated his understanding was," Jim says. "At that point, I figured out that he really, really was extraordinarily bright."

David was a big-built kid; he played football — quarterback — until he was 12 or 13, and would always speak like an athlete, the disappearing G's, "wudn't," "dudn't" and "idn't" and "sumpin'." "The big thing I was when I was little was a really serious jock," Wallace told me. "I mean, I had no artistic ambition. I played citywide football. And I was really good. Then I got to junior high, and there were two guys in the city who were better quarterbacks than me. And people started hitting each other a lot harder, and I discovered that I didn't really love to hit people. That was a huge disappointment." After his first day of football practice at Urbana High School, he came home and chucked it. He offered two explanations to his parents: They expected him to practice every day, and the coaches did too much cursing.

He had also picked up a racket. "I discovered tennis on my own," Wallace said, "taking public-park lessons. For five years, I was seriously gonna be a pro tennis player. I didn't look that good, but I was almost impossible to beat. I know that sounds arrogant. It's true." On court, he was a bit of a hustler: Before a match, he'd tell his opponent, "Thank you for being here, but you're just going to cream me."

By the time he was 14, he felt he could have made nationals. "Really be in the junior show. But just at the point it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play." Plus it was the Seventies — Pink Floyd, bongs. "I started to smoke a lot of pot when I was 15 or 16, and it's hard to train." He laughed. "You don't have that much energy."

It was around this time that the Wallaces noticed something strange about David. He would voice surprising requests, like wanting to paint his bedroom black. He was constantly angry at his sister. When he was 16, he refused to go to her birthday party. "Why would I want to celebrate her birthday?" he told his parents.

"David began to have anxiety attacks in high school," his father recalls. "I noticed the symptoms, but I was just so unsophisticated about these matters. The depression seemed to take the form of an evil spirit that just haunted David." Sally came to call it the "black hole with teeth." David withdrew. "He spent a lot of time throwing up junior year," his sister remembers. One wall of his bedroom was lined with cork, for magazine photos of tennis stars. David pinned an article about Kafka to the wall, with the headline THE DISEASE WAS LIFE ITSELF.

"I hated seeing those words," his sister tells me, and starts to cry. "They seemed to sum up his existence. We couldn't understand why he was acting the way he was, and so of course my parents were exasperated, lovingly exasperated."

David graduated high school with perfect grades. Whatever his personal hurricane was, it had scattered trees and moved on. He decided to go to Amherst, which is where his father had gone, too. His parents told him he would enjoy the Berkshire autumn. Instead, he missed home — the farms and flat horizons, roads stretching contentedly nowhere. "It's fall," David wrote back. "The mountains are pretty, but the landscape isn't beautiful the way Illinois is."

Wallace had lugged his bags into Amherst the fall of 1980 — Reagan coming in, the Seventies capsized, preppies everywhere. He brought a suit to campus. "It was kind of a Sears suit, with this Scotch-plaid tie," says his college roommate and close friend Mark Costello, who went on to become a successful novelist himself. "Guys who went to Amherst, who came from five prep schools, they always dress a notch down. No one's bringing a suit. That was just the Wallace sense that going East is a big deal, and you have to not embarrass us. My first impression was that he was really very out of step."

Costello came from working-class Massachusetts, seven kids, Irish-Catholic household. He and Wallace connected. "Neither of us fit into the Gatsby-ite mold," Costello says. At Amherst David perfected the style he would wear for the rest of his life: turtleneck, hoodie, big basketball shoes. The look of parking-lot kids who in Illinois were called Dirt Bombs. "A slightly tough, slightly waste-product-y, tennis-playing persona," Costello says. Wallace was also amazingly fast and good company, even just on a walk across campus. "I'd always wanted to be an impressionist," Wallace said, "but I just didn't have an agile enough vocal and facial register to do it." Crossing a green, it was The Dave Show. He would recount how people walked, talked, held their heads, pictured their lives. "Just very connected to people," Costello recalls. "Dave had this ability to be inside someone else's skin."


Observing people from afar, of course, can be a way of avoiding them up close. "I was a complete just total banzai weenie studier in college," Wallace recalled. "I was really just scared of people. For instance, I would brave the TV pit — the central TV room — to watch Hill Street Blues, 'cause that was a really important show to me."

One afternoon, April of sophomore year, Costello came back to the dorm they shared and found Wallace seated in his chair. Desk clean, bags packed, even his typewriter, which weighed as much as the clothes put together.

"Dave, what's going on?" Costello asked.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Wallace said. "I know I'm really screwing you."

He was pulling out of college. Costello drove him to the airport. "He wasn't able to talk about it," Costello recalls. "He was crying, he was mortified. Panicky. He couldn't control his thoughts. It was mental incontinence, the equivalent of wetting his pants."

"I wasn't very happy there," Wallace told me later. "I felt kind of inadequate. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to read that wasn't part of any class. And Mom and Dad were just totally cool."

Wallace went home to hospitalization, explanations to his parents, a job. For a while, he drove a school bus. "Here he was, a guy who was really shaky, kind of Holden Caulfield, driving a school bus through lightning storms," Costello recalls. "He wrote me a letter all outraged, about the poor screening procedures for school-bus drivers in central Illinois."

Wallace would visit his dad's philosophy classes. "The classes would turn into a dialogue between David and me," his father remembers. "The students would just sit looking around, 'Who is this guy?' " Wallace devoured novels — "pretty much everything I've read was read during that year." He also told his parents how he'd felt at school. "He would talk about just being very sad, and lonely," Sally says. "It didn't have anything to do with being loved. He just was very lonely inside himself."

He returned to Amherst in the fall, to room with Costello, shaky but hardened. "Certain things had been destroyed in his head," Costello says. "In the first half of his Amherst career, he was trying to be a regular person. He was on the debate team, the sort of guy who knows he's going to be a success." Wallace had talked about going into politics; Costello recalls him joking, "No one is going to vote for somebody who's been in a nuthouse." Having his life fall apart narrowed his sense of what his options were — and the possibilities that were left became more real to him. In a letter to Costello, he wrote, "I want to write books that people will read 100 years from now."

Back at school junior year, he never talked much about his breakdown. "It was embarrassing and personal," Costello says. "A zone of no jokes." Wallace regarded it as a failure, something he should have been able to control. He routinized his life. He'd be the first tray at the dining hall for supper, he'd eat, drink coffee dipped with tea bags, library study till 11, head back to the room, turn on Hawaii Five-O, then a midnight gulp from a scotch bottle. When he couldn't turn his mind off, he'd say, "You know what? I think this is a two-shot night," slam another and sleep.

In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored — English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. "It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it," he said. "So I thought I'd do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel." He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at 700 pages. He called it The Broom of the System.

Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication "made me feel like I was stoned and in hell," he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

It wasn't just writing the novel that made Wallace realize his future would lie in fiction. He also helped out friends by writing their papers. In a comic book, this would be his origin story, the part where he's bombarded with gamma rays, bitten by the spider. "I remember realizing at the time, 'Man, I'm really good at this. I'm a weird kind of forger. I can sound kind of like anybody.' "

Grad school was next. Philosophy would be an obvious choice. "My dad would have limbs removed without anesthetic before ever pushing his kids about anything," Wallace said. "But I knew I was gonna have to go to grad school. I applied to these English programs instead, and I didn't tell anybody. Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent."

After Amherst, Wallace went to the University of Arizona for an MFA. It was where he picked up the bandanna: "I started wearing them in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time, and I would perspire so much I would drip on the page." The woman he was dating thought the bandanna was a wise move. "She was like a Sixties lady, a Sufi Muslim. She said there were various chakras, and one of the big ones she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. Then I began thinking about the phrase 'Keeping your head together.' It makes me feel kind of creepy that people view it as a trademark or something — it's more a recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried that my head's gonna explode."

Arizona was a strange experience: the first classrooms where people weren't happy to see him. He wanted to write the way he wanted to write — funny and overstuffed and nonlinear and strange. The teachers were all "hardass realists." That was the first problem. Problem two was Wallace. "I think I was kind of a prick," he said. "I was just unteachable. I had that look — 'If there were any justice, I'd be teaching this class' — that makes you want to slap a student." One of his stories, "Here and There," went on to win a 1989 O. Henry Prize after it was published in a literary magazine. When he turned it in to his professor, he received a chilly note back: "I hope this isn't representative of the work you're hoping to do for us. We'd hate to lose you."

"What I hated was how disingenuous it was," Wallace recalled. "'We'd hate to lose you.' You know, if you're gonna threaten, say that."

Wallace sent his thesis project out to agents. He got a lot of letters back: "Best of luck in your janitorial career." Bonnie Nadell was 25, working a first job at San Francisco's Frederick Hill Agency. She opened a letter from Wallace, read a chapter from his book. "I loved it so much," Nadell says. It turned out there was a writer named David Rains Wallace. Hill and Nadell agreed that David should insert his mother's maiden name, which is how he became David Foster Wallace. She remained his agent for the rest of his life. "I have this thing, the nearest Jewish mother, I will simply put my arms around her skirt and just attach myself," Wallace said. "I don't know what it means. Maybe sort of WASP deprivation."

Viking won the auction for the novel, "with something like a handful of trading stamps." Word spread; professors turned nice. "I went from borderline ready-to-get-kicked-out to all these tight-smiled guys being, 'Glad to see you, we're proud of you, you'll have to come over for dinner.' It was so delicious: I felt kind of embarrassed for them, they didn't even have integrity about their hatred."

Wallace went to New York to meet his editor, Gerry Howard, wearing a U2 T-shirt. "He seemed like a very young 24," Howard says. The shirt impressed him. "U2 wasn't really huge then. And there's a hypersincerity to U2, which I think David was in tune with — or that he really wanted to be sincere, even though his brain kept turning him in the direction of the ironic." Wallace kept calling Howard — who was only 36 — "Mr. Howard," never "Gerry." It would become his business style: a kind of mock formality. People often suspected it was a put-on. What it was was Midwestern politeness, the burnout in the parking lot still nodding "sir" to the vice principal. "There was kind of this hum of superintelligence behind the 'aw, shucks' manner," Howard recalls.

The Broom of the System was published in January of 1987, Wallace's second and last year at Arizona. The title referred to something his mother's grandmother used to say, as in, "Here, Sally, have an apple, it's the broom of the system." "I wasn't aware David had picked up on that," his mother says. "I was thrilled that a family expression became the title of his book."

The novel hit. "Everything you could hope for," Howard says. "Critics praised it, it sold quite well, and David was off to the races."

His first brush with fame was a kind of gateway experience. Wallace would open The Wall Street Journal, see his face transmuted into a dot-cartoon. "Some article like 'Hotshot's Weird New Novel,' " he said. "I'd feel really good, really cool, for exactly 10 seconds. Probably not unlike a crack high, you know? I was living an incredibly American life: 'Boy, if I could just achieve X, Y and Z, everything would be OK.' " Howard bought Wallace's second book, Girl With Curious Hair, a collection of the stories he was finishing up at Arizona. But something in Wallace worried him. "I have never encountered a mind like David's," he says. "It functioned at such an amazingly high level, he clearly lived in a hyperalert state. But on the other hand, I felt that David's emotional life lagged far behind his mental life. And I think he could get lost in the gap between the two."


Wallace was already drifting into the gap. He won a Whiting Writers' Award — stood on a stage with Eudora Welty — graduated Arizona, went to an artists' colony, met famous writers, knew the famous writers were seeing his name in more magazines ("absolutely exhilarating and really scary at the same time"), finished the stories. And then he was out of ideas. He tried to write in a cabin in Tucson for a while, then returned home to write — Mom and Dad doing the grocery shopping. He accepted a one-year slot teaching philosophy at Amherst, which was strange: Sophomores he had known were now his students. In the acknowledgments for the book he was completing, he thanks "The Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children."

He was balled up, tied up. "I started hating everything I did," he said. "Worse than stuff I'd done in college. Hopelessly confused, unbelievably bad. I was really in a panic, I didn't think I was going to be able to write anymore. And I got this idea: I'd flourished in an academic environment — my first two books had sort of been written under professors." He applied to graduate programs in philosophy, thinking he could write fiction in his spare time. Harvard offered a full scholarship. The last thing he needed to reproduce his college years was to reactivate Mark Costello.

"So he comes up with this whole cockamamie plan," Costello recalls. "He says, 'OK, you're going to go back to Boston, practice law, and I'm going to go to Harvard. We'll live together — it'll be just like the house we had at Amherst.' It all ended up being a train wreck."

They found an apartment in Somerville. Student ghetto: rickety buildings, outdoor staircases. Costello would come home with his briefcase, click up the back stairs, David would call out, "Hi, honey, how was your day?" But Wallace wasn't writing fiction. He had thought course work would be a sideline; but professors expected actual work.

Not writing was the kind of symptom that presents a problem of its own. "He could get himself into places where he was pretty helpless," Costello says. "Basically it was the same symptoms all along: this incredible sense of inadequacy, panic. He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.' "

"Harvard was just unbelievably bleak," Wallace said. It became a substance marathon: drinking, parties, drugs. "I didn't want to feel it," he said. "It was the only time in my life that I'd gone to bars, picked up women I didn't know." Then for weeks, he would quit drinking, start mornings with a 10-mile run. "You know, this kind of very American sports training — I will fix this by taking radical action." Schwarzenegger voice: "If there's a problem, I will train myself out of it. I will work harder."

Various delays were holding up the publication of his short-story collection Girl With Curious Hair. He started to feel spooked. "I'm this genius writer," he remembered. "Everything I do's gotta be ingenious, blah, blah, blah, blah." The five-year clock was ticking again. He'd played football for five years. Then he'd played high-level tennis for five years. Now he'd been writing for five years. "What I saw was, 'Jesus, it's the same thing all over again.' I'd started late, showed tremendous promise — and the minute I felt the implications of that promise, it caved in. Because see, by this time, my ego's all invested in the writing. It's the only thing I've gotten food pellets from the universe for. So I feel trapped: 'Uh-oh, my five years is up, I've gotta move on.' But I didn't want to move on."

Costello watched while Wallace slipped into a depressive crisis. "He was hanging out with women who were pretty heavily into drugs — that was kind of alluring to Dave — skanking around Somerville, drinking himself blotto."

It was the worst period Wallace had ever gone through. "It may have been what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis," he said. "It was just feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false. And there was nothing, and you were nothing — it was all a delusion. But you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function."

By November, the anxieties had become locked and fixed. "I got really worried I was going to kill myself. And I knew, that if anybody was fated to fuck up a suicide attempt, it was me." He walked across campus to Health Services and told a psychiatrist, "Look, there's this issue. I don't feel real safe."

"It was a big deal for me, because I was so embarrassed," Wallace said. "But it was the first time I ever treated myself like I was worth something."

By making his announcement, Wallace had activated a protocol: Police were notified, he had to withdraw from school. He was sent to McLean, which, as psychiatric hospitals go, is pedigreed: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton all put in residences there; it's the setting for the memoir Girl, Interrupted. Wallace spent his first day on suicide watch. Locked ward, pink room, no furniture, drain in the floor, observation slot in the door. "When that happens to you," David said, smiling, "you get unprecedentedly willing to examine other alternatives for how to live."


Wallace spent eight days in McLean. He was diagnosed as a clinical depressive and was prescribed a drug, called Nardil, developed in the 1950s. He would have to take it from then on. "We had a brief, maybe three-minute audience with the psychopharmacologist," his mother says. Wallace would have to quit drinking, and there was a long list of foods — certain cheeses, pickles, cured meats — he would have to stay away from.

He started to clean up. He found a way to get sober, worked very hard at it, and wouldn't drink for the rest of his life. Girl With Curious Hair finally appeared in 1989. Wallace gave a reading in Cambridge; 13 people showed up, including a schizophrenic woman who shrieked all the way through his performance. "The book's coming out seemed like a kind of shrill, jagged laugh from the universe, this thing sort of lingering behind me like a really nasty fart."

What followed was a phased, deliberate return to the world. He worked as a security guard, morning shift, at Lotus Software. Polyester uniform, service baton, walking the corridors. "I liked it because I didn't have to think," he said. "Then I quit for the incredibly brave reason that I got tired of getting up so early in the morning."

Next, he worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts. "Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. I'm sitting there, and who should walk in to get their towel but Michael Ryan. Now, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writers' Award the same year I had. So I see this guy that I'd been up on the fucking rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize. It's two years later — it's the only time I've literally dived under something. He came in, and I pretended not very subtly to slip, and lay facedown, and didn't respond. I left that day, and I didn't go back."

He wrote Bonnie Nadell a letter; he was done with writing. That wasn't exactly her first concern. "I was worried he wasn't going to survive," she says. He filled in Howard, too. "I contemplated the circumstance that the best young writer in America was handing out towels in a health club," Howard says. "How fucking sad."

Wallace met Jonathan Franzen in the most natural way for an author: as a fan. He sent Franzen a nice letter about his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Franzen wrote back, they arranged to meet in Cambridge. "He just flaked," Franzen recalls. "He didn't show up. That was a fairly substance-filled period of his life."

By April of 1992, both were ready for a change. They loaded Franzen's car and headed for Syracuse to scout apartments. Franzen needed "somewhere to relocate with my wife where we could both afford to live and not have anyone tell us how screwed up our marriage was." Wallace's need was simpler: cheap space, for writing. He had been researching for months, haunting rehab facilities and halfway houses, taking quiet note of voices and stories, people who had fallen into the gaps like him. "I got very assertive research- and finagle-wise," he said. "I spent hundreds of hours at three halfway houses. It turned out you could just sit in the living room — nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs."

He and Franzen talked a lot about what writing should be for. "We had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something," Franzen says. "Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness." They would talk about lots of Wallace's ideas, which could abruptly sharpen into self-criticism. "I remember this being a frequent topic of conversation," Franzen says, "his notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn't just being funny — there was something genuinely compromised in David. At the time I thought, 'Wow, he's even more self-conscious than I am.' "

Wallace spent a year writing in Syracuse. "I lived in an apartment that was seriously the size of the foyer of an average house. I really liked it. There were so many books, you couldn't move around. When I'd want to write, I'd have to put all the stuff from the desk on the bed, and when I'd want to sleep, I would have to put all the stuff on the desk."

Wallace worked longhand, pages piling up. "You look at the clock and seven hours have passed and your hand is cramped," Wallace said. He'd have pens he considered hot — cheap Bic ballpoints, like batters have bats that are hot. A pen that was hot he called the orgasm pen.

In the summer of 1993, he took an academic job 50 miles from his parents, at Illinois State University at Normal. The book was three-quarters done. Based on the first unruly stack of pages, Nadell had been able to sell it to Little, Brown. He had put his whole life into it — tennis, and depression, and stoner afternoons, and the precipice of rehab, and all the hours spent with Amy watching TV. The plot motor is a movie called Infinite Jest, so soothing and perfect it's impossible to switch off: You watch until you sink into your chair, spill your bladder, starve, die. "If the book's about anything," he said, "it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit. It's about me: Why am I doing it? The original title was A Failed Entertainment, and the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn't work" — characters developing and scattering, chapters disordered — "because what entertainment ultimately leads to is 'Infinite Jest,' that's the star it's steering by."

Wallace held classes in his house, students nudging aside books like Compendium of Drug Therapy and The Emergence of the French Art Film, making jokes about Mount Manuscript, David's pile of novel. He had finished and collected the three years of drafts, and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. "But a really fast finger."

It came to almost 1,700 pages. "I was just terrified how long it would end up being," he said. Wallace told his editor it would be a good beach book, in the sense that people could use it for shade.

It can take a year to edit a book, re-edit it, print it, publicize it, ship it, the writer all the time checking his watch. In the meantime, Wallace turned to nonfiction. Two pieces, published in Harper's, would become some of the most famous pieces of journalism of the past decade and a half.

Colin Harrison, Wallace's editor at Harper's, had the idea to outfit him with a notebook and push him into perfectly American places — the Illinois State Fair, a Caribbean cruise. It would soak up the side of Wallace that was always on, always measuring himself. "There would be Dave the mimic, Dave the people-watcher," Costello says. "Asking him to actually report could get stressful and weird and complicated. Colin had this stroke of genius about what to do with David. It was a much simpler solution than anyone ever thought."

In the pieces, Wallace invented a style writers have plundered for a decade. The unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making choices and cuts. The voice was humane, a big, kind brain tripping over its own lumps. "The Harper's pieces were me peeling back my skull," Wallace said. "You know, welcome to my mind for 20 pages, see through my eyes, here's pretty much all the French curls and crazy circles. The trick was to have it be honest but also interesting — because most of our thoughts aren't all that interesting. To be honest with a motive." He laughed. "There's a certain persona created, that's a little stupider and schmuckier than I am."

The cruise-ship piece ran in January 1996, a month before David's novel was published. People photocopied it, faxed it to each other, read it over the phone. When people tell you they're fans of David Foster Wallace, what they're often telling you is that they've read the cruise-ship piece; Wallace would make it the title essay in his first collection of journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In a way, the difference between the fiction and the nonfiction reads as the difference between Wallace's social self and his private self. The essays were endlessly charming, they were the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. Wallace's fiction, especially after Infinite Jest, would turn chilly, dark, abstract. You could imagine the author of the fiction sinking into a depression. The nonfiction writer was an impervious sun.

The novel came out in February of 1996. In New York Magazine, Walter Kirn wrote, "The competition has been obliterated. It's as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL, or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy! The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good." He was in Newsweek, Time, Hollywood people appeared at his readings, women batted their eyelashes, men in the back rows scowled, envied. A FedEx guy rang his bell, watched David sign for delivery, asked, "How's it feel to be famous?"

At the end of his book tour, I spent a week with David. He talked about the "greasy thrill of fame" and what it might mean to his writing. "When I was 25, I would've given a couple of digits off my non-use hand for this," he said. "I feel good, because I wanna be doing this for 40 more years, you know? So I've got to find some way to enjoy this that doesn't involve getting eaten by it."

He was astonishingly good, quick company, making you feel both wide awake and as if your shoes had been tied together. He'd say things like, "There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness." He talked about a kind of shyness that turned social life impossibly complicated. "I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me."


He said one interviewer had devoted tons of energy to the genius question. "That was his whole thing, 'Are you normal?' 'Are you normal?' I think one of the true ways I've gotten smarter is that I've realized that there are ways other people are a lot smarter than me. My biggest asset as a writer is that I'm pretty much like everybody else. The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever almost made me die."

It had been difficult, during the summer, to watch his sister get married. "I'm almost 35. I would like to get married and have kids. I haven't even started to work that shit out yet. I've come close a few times, but I tend to be interested in women that I turn out to not get along very well with. I have friends who say this is something that would be worth looking into with someone that you pay."

Wallace was always dating somebody. "There were a lot of relationships," Amy says. He dated in his imaginative life too: When I visited him, one wall was taped with a giant Alanis Morissette poster. "The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession — a six-year obsession," he said. "It was preceded by something that I will tell you I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, leaning forward and covering my hand with hers."

He tended to date high-strung women — another symptom of his shyness. "Say what you want about them, psychotics tend to make the first move." Owning dogs was less complicated: "You don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time."

His romantic anxieties were full-spectrum, every bit of the mechanics individually examined. He told me a joke:

What does a writer say after sex?

Was it as good for me as it was for you?

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely."

One night Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."

Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."

When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"

Success can be as difficult to recover from as failure. "You know the tic big-league pitchers have," his mother says, "when they know that they've pitched a marvelous game — but gee, can they do it again, so they keep flexing that arm? There was some of that. Where he said, 'OK. Good, that came out well. But can I do it again?' That was the feeling I got. There was always the shadow waiting."

Wallace saw it that way too. "My big worry," he said, "is that this will just up my expectations for myself. And expectations are a very fine line. Up to a certain point they can be motivating, can be kind of a flamethrower held to your ass. Past that point they're toxic and paralyzing. I'm scared that I'll fuck up and plunge into a compressed version of what I went through before."

Mark Costello was also worried. "Work got very hard. He didn't get these gifts from God anymore, he didn't get these six-week periods where he got exactly the 120 pages he needed. So he found distraction in other places." He would get engaged, then unengaged. He would call friends: "Next weekend, Saturday, you gotta be in Rochester, Minnesota, I'm getting married." But then it would be Sunday, or the next week, and he'd have called it off.

"He almost got married a few times," Amy says. "I think what ultimately happened is he was doing it more for the other person than himself. And he realized that wasn't doing the other person any favors."

Wallace told Costello about a woman he had become involved with. "He said, 'She gets mad at me because I never want to leave the house.' 'Honey, let's go to the mall.' 'No, I want to write.' 'But you never do write.' 'But I don't know if I'm going to write. So I have to be here in case it happens.' This went on for years."


In 2000, Wallace wrote a letter to his friend Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone contributor: "I know about still having trouble with relationships. (Boy oh boy, do I.) But coming to enjoy my own company more and more — most of the time. I know about some darkness every day (and some days, it's all dark for me)." He wrote about meeting a woman, having things move too easily, deciding against it. "I think whatever the pull is for me is largely composed of wanting the Big Yes, of wanting someone else to want you (Cheap Trick lives). . . . So now I don't know what to do. Probably nothing, which seems to be the Sign that the universe or its CEO is sending me."

In the summer of 2001, Wallace relocated to Claremont, California, to become the Roy Edward Disney Chair in Creative Writing, at Pomona College. He published stories and essays, but was having trouble with his work. After he reported on John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign for this magazine, he wrote his agent that it would show his editor that "I'm still capable of good work (my own insecurities, I know)."

Wallace had received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1997. "I don't think it did him any favors," says Franzen. "It conferred the mantle of 'genius' on him, which he had of course craved and sought and thought was his due. But I think he felt, 'Now I have to be even smarter.' " In late 2001, Costello called Wallace. "He was talking about how hard the writing was. And I said, lightheartedly, 'Dave, you're a genius.' Meaning, people aren't going to forget about you. You're not going to wind up in a Wendy's. He said, 'All that makes me think is that I've fooled you, too.'"

Wallace met Karen Green a few months after moving to Claremont. Green, a painter, admired David's work. It was a sort of artistic exchange, an inter-disciplinary blind date. "She wanted to do some paintings based on some of David's stories," his mother says. "They had a mutual friend, and she thought she would ask permission."

"He was totally gaga," Wright recalls. "He called, head over heels, he was talking about her as a life-changing event." Franzen met Green the following year. "I felt in about three minutes that he'd finally found somebody who was up to the task of living with Dave. She's beautiful, incredibly strong, and a real grown-up — she had a center that was not about landing the genius Dave Wallace."

They made their debut as a couple with Wallace's parents in July 2003, attending the Maine culinary festival that would provide the title for his last book, Consider the Lobster. "They were both so quick," his father says. "They would get things and look at each other and laugh, without having to say what had struck them as funny." The next year, Wallace and Green flew to his parents' home in Illinois, where they were married two days after Christmas. It was a surprise wedding. David told his mother he wanted to take the family to what he called a "high-gussy" lunch. Sally Wallace assumed it was Karen's influence. "David does not do high gussy," she says. "His notion of high gussy is maybe long pants instead of shorts or a T-shirt with two holes instead of 18." Green and Wallace left the house early to "run errands," while Amy figured out a pretext to get their parents to the courthouse on the way to the lunch. "We went upstairs," Sally says, "and saw Karen with a bouquet, and David dressed up with a flower in his buttonhole, and we knew. He just looked so happy, just radiating happiness." Their reception was at an Urbana restaurant. "As we left in the snow," Sally says, "David and Karen were walking away from us. He wanted us to take pictures, and Jim did. David was jumping in the air and clicking his heels. That became the wedding announcement."

According to Wallace's family and friends, the last six years — until the final one — were the best of his life. The marriage was happy, university life good, Karen and David had two dogs, Warner and Bella, they bought a lovely house. "Dave in a real house," Franzen says, laughing, "with real furniture and real style."


To Franzen's eye, he was watching Wallace grow up. There had been in David a kind of purposeful avoidance of the normal. Once, they'd gone to a literary party in the city. They walked in the front door together, but by the time Franzen got to the kitchen, he realized Wallace had disappeared. "I went back and proceeded to search the whole place," Franzen recalled. "He had walked into the bathroom to lose me, then turned on his heels and walked right back out the front door."

Now, that sort of thing had stopped. "He had reason to hope," Franzen said. "He had the resources to be more grown-up, a wholer person."

And then there were the dogs. "He had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them," Franzen says. "Whether through a sense of identification or sympathy, he had a very hard time disciplining them. But you couldn't see his attentiveness to the dogs without getting a lump in your throat."

Because Wallace was secure, he began to talk about going off Nardil, the antidepressant he had taken for nearly two decades. The drug had a long list of side effects, including the potential of very high blood pressure. "It had been a fixture of my morbid fear about Dave — that he would not last all that long, with the wear and tear on his heart," Franzen says. "I worried that I was going to lose him in his early 50s." Costello said that Wallace complained the drug made him feel "filtered." "He said, 'I don't want to be on this stuff for the rest of my life.' He wanted to be more a member of the human race."

In June of 2007, Wallace and Green were at an Indian restaurant with David's parents in Claremont. David suddenly felt very sick — intense stomach pains. They stayed with him for days. When he went to doctors, he was told that something he'd eaten might have interacted with the Nardil. They suggested he try going off the drug and seeing if another approach might work.

"So at that point," says his sister Amy, with an edge in her voice, it was determined, 'Oh, well, gosh, we've made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I'm sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.' They had no idea that it was the only thing that was keeping him alive."

Wallace would have to taper off the old drug and then taper on to a new one. "He knew it was going to be rough," says Franzen. "But he was feeling like he could finally afford a year to do the job. He figured that he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil was not perfect."

That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. "They could find nothing," his mother says softly. "Nothing." In September, David asked Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally says, "but then it seemed OK." He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.

When Amy talked to him on the phone, "sometimes he was his old self," she says. "The worst question you could ask David in the last year was 'how are you?' And it's almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don't see regularly without that question." Wallace was very honest with her. He'd answer, "I'm not all right. I'm trying to be, but I'm not all right."

Despite his struggle, Wallace managed to keep teaching. He was dedicated to his students: He would write six pages of comments to a short story, joke with his class, fight them to try harder. During office hours, if there was a grammar question he couldn't answer, he'd phone his mother. "He would call me and say, 'Mom, I've got this student right here. Explain to me one more time why this is wrong.' You could hear the student sort of laughing in the background. 'Here's David Foster Wallace calling his mother.' "



n early May, at the end of the school year, he sat down with some graduating seniors from his fiction class at a nearby cafe. Wallace answered their jittery writer's-future questions. "He got choked up at the end," recalls Bennett Sims, one of his students. "He started to tell us how much he would miss us, and he began to cry. And because I had never seen Dave cry, I thought he was just joking. Then, awfully, he sniffled and said, 'Go ahead and laugh — here I am crying — but I really am going to miss all of you.' "

His parents were scheduled to visit the next month. In June, when Sally spoke with her son, he said, "I can't wait, it'll be wonderful, we'll have big fun." The next day, he called and said, "Mom, I have two favors to ask you. Would you please not come?" She said OK. Then Wallace asked, "Would your feelings not be hurt?"

No medications had worked; the depression wouldn't lift. "After this year of absolute hell for David," Sally says, "they decided to go back to the Nardil." The doctors also administered 12 courses of electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace's medication to become effective. "Twelve," Sally repeats. "Such brutal treatments," Jim says. "It was clear then things were bad."
Wallace had always been terrified of shock therapy. "It scares the shit out of me," he told me in 1996. "My brain's what I've got. But I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it."

In late June, Franzen, who was in Berlin, grew worried. "I actually woke up one night," he says. "Our communications had a rhythm, and I thought, 'It's been too long since I heard from Dave.' " When Franzen called, Karen said to come immediately: David had tried to kill himself.

Franzen spent a week with Wallace in July. David had dropped 70 pounds in a year. "He was thinner than I'd ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at 10 percent strength." Franzen would sit with Wallace in the living room and play with the dogs, or step outside with David while he smoked a cigarette. "We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, 'A dog's mouth is practically a disinfectant, it's so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.'" Before he left, Wallace thanked him for coming. "I felt grateful that he allowed me to be there," Franzen says.

Six weeks later, Wallace asked his parents to come to California. The Nardil wasn't working. It can happen with an antidepressant; a patient goes off, returns, and the medication has lost its efficacy. Wallace couldn't sleep. He was afraid to leave the house. He asked, "What if I meet one of my students?" "He didn't want anyone to see him the way he was," his father says. "It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I'm sure."

His parents stayed for 10 days. "He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods — pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't take it."

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."

At the end of August, Franzen called. All summer long he had been telling David that as bad as things were, they were going to be better, and then he'd be better than he'd ever been. David would say, "Keep talking like that — it's helping." But this time it wasn't helping. "He was far away," Franzen says. A few weeks later, Karen left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself.

"I can't get the image out of my head," his sister says. "David and his dogs, and it's dark. I'm sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry."

[From Issue 1064 — October 30, 2008]