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Finite JestEditors and writers remember David Foster Wallace.

By Sven Birkerts, Charis Conn, Jordan Ellenberg, Colin Harrison, Gerald Howard, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Riker, and Sean WilseyPosted Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008, at 1:13 PM ET

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Sean Wilsey, author
I met David Foster Wallace during a writing residency in the town of Marfa, Texas, where we lived across the street from each other in houses on loan from the Lannan Foundation. The first time I saw him, he was running back and forth, just outside my window, where a wall cut off the lower 3 feet of my view, shouting encouragement to something hidden from sight. I stood up and saw that he was walking a pair of exuberant golden retriever puppies. So I went outside to say hello. He told me the dogs belonged to a local rancher. He was dog-sitting. Or, it became clear as I watched him, dog-training. After talking about Marfa for a bit and agreeing that the monotony of West Texas food—Dairy Queen, beef, refried beans—was getting us down, I said I was planning to blow off a morning's writing to drive 50 miles through the desert and buy fish at a supermarket called Furrs.

He looked intrigued but advised, "You'd better give that the old sniff test."

A week or so later we went down to Mexico, looking for a fish restaurant, and he spent the whole car ride teaching my friend's son, a 9-year-old Icelandic boy, American show tunes: "There is nothing like a dame: Nothing … in the … world!" They were both incandescent with joy by the time we arrived in the blasted-out town of Ojinaga—where our quest for fresh fish met with resounding failure. Then, after I mistakenly drove through a puddle of raw sewage and our vehicle commenced failing the sniff test, we all sang show tunes, with the windows down, led by Wallace—"Tsssssssteam heat!" When we got to the border, an agent took one sniff, said "Woah!" and waved us through.

After his residency was over, he gave me the keys to his place, saying, "If you ever need some space, you should use my house. Nobody'll bother you. I don't think they've got anyone else coming." I sat in his living room, where he'd turned all the foundation's copies of his books spine-to-the-wall, and, attempting to relive my reform-school days, shouted and cried and took notes for a memoir I was working on. This did not go unnoticed in a small town. Locals, I discovered later, thought that my cries were coming from David Foster Wallace and gossiped about his passionate outbursts. But in my brief encounters with the real David Foster Wallace, I knew only a writer who was humble, kind, gentle, and playful in everything he did.

Sven Birkerts, essayist
I first encountered David Foster Wallace's work in 1989. I had a monthly column in what turned out to be a very short-lived magazine called Wigwag. My mandate was to find the unlikely, to ponder things that were off the main spectrum, and his book of stories Girl With Curious Hair, which had snagged me with its title, was just the business I needed. The prose was beautifully abrasive and seemed to be filtering something from the moment that no one else was filtering. It was a sardonic cloth with a lyric lining. I offered my praises in the column. A few weeks after the piece came out, I received a letter—thankful, sweet, even ingenuous—from the author. He said he was living in Cambridge, Mass., and wondered if we might not have coffee.

We met at the Café Pamplona. David would have been in his late 20s then, and it is with shocked disbelief that I peel away the accreted overlays, so many of them, to get my image of a tall, thin, and, yes, young-seeming man standing on the sidewalk. Smoking a cigarette then and never not smoking one from the time we sat down until we parted. My kingdom for a better memory! We talked about John Barth and Harvard (he was doing work in philosophy), and he told me about his father, who had, if I have this right, studied with Wittgenstein's disciple Norman Malcolm in England. And David told me with very great seriousness how his father had read philosophy to him when he was putting him to bed. He was nervous and polite to a fault.

Our paths crossed only a few times after that. In the early mid-'90s (pre-Infinite Jest and pre-The Corrections), he and his great friend Jonathan Franzen agreed to join me on a panel assessing the outlook for fiction that I hosted at the Arlington Center for the Arts (Arlington, Mass.), and we had maybe 30 people in attendance. And then—maybe five years ago—we were paired at a Boston radio station, talking over … the outlook for fiction. By then he had doubled into his shaggy eminence, and I spent our studio time doing double takes. I remember that one of the callers, the last, was Cynthia Ozick and that when we were off the air, he asked our host, Chris Lydon, if he could finish his conversation with her. I had to hurry off and tapped him on the shoulder to say goodbye. He looked over. He was saying—I remember this—nervous and beautifully polite, "Thank you, Miss Ozick." His tone was perfectly deferential. I think he said "Miss."