HOME / culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

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

(Continued from page 2)

RSS

Colin Harrison, author and editor, Scribner
You didn't really edit David. Instead you played tennis with him using language as the ball. At Harper's, we did three lengthy pieces together—on attending the Illinois State Fair, on sailing on a luxury cruise, and on the usage of the English language—and with each one I increasingly came to see how competitive David was. Not with me, his magazine editor, nor particularly with other writers, but with the great maw of horridness, to choose a word he might use. He was competing against the culture itself, and his pieces arrived on my desk way too long, letter-perfect, and appended with a one-line note that said something like "Here, maybe you'll like this."

Well, of course at Harper's we did like his pieces—knew immediately that they were fabulous, the work of a genius. But then we had to get them into the magazine. Our publisher, Rick MacArthur, was generous with space for David's pieces. But still they needed to be cut, sometimes by many thousands of words, and this was where the tennis came in. The trick was to make a perfect thing smaller but still perfect and still itself. In David's case, this meant confronting the corresponding substructure of footnotes, which interlaced not only with the main text but with each other. And simply getting the footnotes into the bottom of the same narrow magazine column was a challenge. It made for some very long conversations, going over every comma, period, and Wallace-esque construction. David liked the push and push-back of this, the here's-what-I-think, what-do-you-think rallies that sometimes went on for many minutes. It was exhausting and exhilarating, with points won, points lost. He liked defending his work, explaining the motivations behind his choices, but like a great athlete, like the great writer he was, he also enjoyed the opportunity for the spontaneous shot, the sudden chance to make something even better. And he did—literature.

Charis Conn, author and editor
Although I edited David's fiction in Harper's for years, I met him the way that many have, through good old-fashioned letter writing. The only fan letter I have ever sent was inspired by his first story collection, which walloped me not only with its brilliance but on a more profound personal chord than I had ever experienced as a reader. My instinct was right, and we became good friends. He was always generous with praise of my own efforts, as a writer as well as an editor, and when I took a leave to work on a novel, he insisted I spend it in his home, dubbing it Yaddo West, a reference to the artists' colony we both adored. The landscape of autumnal, suburban Normal, Ill., was indeed a perfect place to work—flat, featureless, chilly—but especially because of the sound of DFW clicking away in the next room (a room painted black, which I found surprisingly soothing and inspiring). Between teaching, errands, endless favors for friends, and caring for his enormous dogs, he made a point of devoting increments of as little as 15 minutes to writing if that was all that was available. His social world then was not what any of his readers might imagine, I suspect. Our entertainments during those months included a hayride, some fairly goofy movies on video (he had no TV), and several evenings lounging on the living room carpet of a local middle-aged couple, overeating and watching goofy crap on their TV.

Although his own brilliance, along with the accolades it brought, could easily have cut him off from the vast majority of people (who, after all, still don't recognize his name), David truly connected with everyone he encountered. Unlike many literary stars, he had a foot in both worlds, and he often found his new fame utterly uncomfortable and embarrassing. I remember hiding out with him in a tiny room high atop a screaming nightclub at what must have been his Infinite Jest book party. We had fled there after a barrage of flashbulbs had unnerved him, agreeing that the party was best enjoyed from this vantage point, viewed from behind a tiny window, safely hidden. David was as amazed as a yokel by New York City, (where, by the way, his very first reading boasted a crowd of four, including me and Gerry Howard). He was a person who drew—unironically—little happy faces beside his signature on letters and was prone to uttering the syllable "awwwwww," also unironically, at anything he found adorable. He once made this sound over a drawing I did of his dog Jeeves, and it seemed to me at the time perfectly eloquent. Because when someone like David chooses this simple sound, among all his vast array of things to say, and ways to say them, it is reborn as a true expression of humanity, as are all the words and sounds and symbols he chose and arranged with such loving, raging care.

Jordan Ellenberg, author and professor
David Foster Wallace was well-known as an appropriator of prose registers that are not conventionally literary: the language of the bureaucrat, of the academic theorist, of the focus group, of the Hollywood agent. Less spoken of is the debt his writing owed to the language of mathematics—presumably because that language has no native speakers.

Some of the mathiness of Wallace's prose was superficial—he liked to present careful definitions of terms to be used, and he decorated his arguments with side remarks and corollaries, labeled as such. He liked numbered lists and specialized acronyms (cf., w/r/t., u.s.w.) For mathematicians, this business imparts a kind of homey charm.

But there's a deeper likeness, too. "We live today," he told the Believer in 2003, "in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life." Technical complexity, a turnoff to most, was Wallace's bread and meat. He was never interested in the kind of truths that you could sum up in 10 words—which is why it's so hard to quote Wallace 10 words at a time. You usually get something as inert as a single line of a long proof.

Wallace's writing was driven by his struggle with contradictions. He was in love with the technical and analytic; but he saw that the simple dicta of religion and A.A. offered better weapons against drugs, despair, and killing solipsism. He knew it was supposed to be the writer's job to get inside other people's heads; but his chief subject was the predicament of being stuck fast inside one's own. Determined to record and neutralize the mediation of his own preoccupations and prejudices, he knew this determination was itself among those preoccupations, and subject to those prejudices. This is Phil 101 stuff, to be sure; but as any math student knows, the old problems you meet freshman year are some of the deepest you'll ever see. Wallace wrestled with the paradoxes just the way mathematicians do. You believe two things that seem in opposition. And so you go to work—step by step, clearing the brush, cataloging what you find there, separating what you know from what you believe, your intuition sounding at all times the nauseous alarm that somewhere you've made a mistake. And until you find the mistake, there's always a bit of hope—that your intuition is wrong, that your work isn't wasted, that what seems like a paradox really isn't one, that maybe the incompatible beliefs you hold can be satisfied all at once.

Usually it doesn't work out that way.