Writer David Foster Wallace has died, apparently by his own hand, at the age of 46.
I’m not going to claim to be a fan (and I’m definitely not going to claim that I’ve even attempted to get through his masterwork, Infinite Jest–and I’m convinced after all these years that probably at least half the people who claim that they’ve finished Infinite Jest are lying). My usual approach to Wallace’s work was to begin it, find myself enjoying it, and then end up putting it aside about halfway through because my brain just felt too snowed under to continue.
And I always meant to come back. But I never did. Even the last thing I read by him, his brilliant essay on Roger Federer, I don’t think I ever finished. And I think my inability to finish a Wallace work–big or small–is probably due not only to my lack of intellectual prowess but also to my inability to separate the man and his work from my personal life.
I’m not big on meeting writers whose works have vaulted them to what passes for celebrity in the literary world, mostly because I’m afraid that my personal interaction with them will color my previously-held and future perceptions of their writing. This quirk of mine is a bit odd to me, because I have no problem interpreting the literature of the long-dead through a historicist lens–I love speculating, for example, how the circumstances of Jane Austen’s life may or may not have shaped her novels. But Jane Austen’s long gone, so there’s no chance of a conversation with her screwing up my beliefs about how much of her personality seeped into Emma Woodhouse or Elinor Dashwood.
And at this point, I should probably note that I never actually had a full conversation with David Foster Wallace (I’m guessing the most I ever said to the man was “Thank you”), otherwise this essay runs the risk of being more than it is, of claiming some sort of sadness that I don’t actually feel, of becoming some sort of self-important “Hey, I brushed elbows with that famous dead guy” piece–which isn’t how I mean this at all. The most I can claim is that I moved in the man’s orbit–he was a professor of English and creative writing at Illinois State University during the time that I was working on my Ph.D. in English there. But any shock I feel at his death is less personal and more 1) a by-product of that weird, ineffable feeling you get when someone you once shared air space with dies and 2) the knowledge that people I know well–and a few of whom I actually despise–are feeling some measure of disbelief and sadness right now (and I should note that none of these people that I despise could be counted among Wallace’s close friends and family. I’m not that cold.).
I guess Wallace represents to me, given our overlapping time at ISU, two things: 1) he is a representation of the bizarre behavior people sometimes exhibit when they find themselves in the presence of “celebrity” and 2) he is a reminder, both in his person and in his works, of a very strange period in my life.
When I first started at ISU in the fall of 1996, Infinite Jest had been released a few months earlier and, due mostly to my intense focus on literary works released before 1900, I’d never heard of Wallace, a fact that was greeted with some incredulousness on the part of a few of my grad school colleagues who had come to Normal, Illinois, from far more glamorous places just for the shot at studying with him. Although he taught in the department, I never actually saw him until sometime in late 1997 or early 1998 (and, in fairness, ISU’s English department is the largest in the university and I wasn’t taking creative writing classes). I arrived early to a party at a professor’s house and the only guest who had arrived before my friend and me–a kind of grungy-looking guy with greasy, shoulder-length hair–offered to take my coat and hang it up. And I said, “Thank you.”
And as grunge-guy walked away, my friend gripped my arm to the point that my hand nearly popped off and whispered in my ear, “That was David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace just took our coats!”
I think I just shrugged to my friend, but I remember thinking, “That guy? That’s the guy everyone’s swooning over?” (and I do mean swooning–I had a student one semester who informed the entire class that she planned to marry David Foster Wallace if only she could figure out how to “get rid of” his girlfriend. I was mildly disturbed.). Intellectually, I knew that “geniuses” didn’t have a standard look, but I couldn’t believe that this homeless-looking guy was supposedly one of the great modern literary minds.
So I didn’t run right out and buy Infinite Jest, I didn’t start reading his essays–I just took as a point of pride that I got to teach in the same department as someone who had been deemed one of the great literary lights of the Twentieth Century. And in recalling my somewhat “meh” attitude, I’m not trying to claim some moral or literary superiority over my classmates who seemed to worship him. But for my money, the Illinois State English department was filled with geniuses, students and faculty both. David Foster Wallace just happened to be the best known one, the one who had reached the pinnacle of a field that people outside academia pay attention to.
The paragraph above should not imply, however, that I wasn’t just a little bit intimidated by the guy in spite of myself. One semester, a group of grad students used to gather at Rosie’s Pub in neighboring Bloomington, and several of these students were taking a course from Wallace and would wander over once he let the class go for the evening. Those of us who weren’t in the class used to joke with the ones who were about trying to talk Wallace into joining us some evening–and we’d joke because we figured it would never actually happen. Until it did.
He sat across from me at a table, eating saltine crackers that come in those little plastic restaurant packages (I think I remember him saying something about trying to quit smoking, and knowing that he’d had a past with addiction, I’m sure a bar must not have been the most comfortable place for him), and offering them to those of us sitting around him (and despite the title of this essay, I can’t remember if I actually ate one or not). And I didn’t say a single word to him, because, knowing me, I was probably terrified of saying something stupid. Instead, I just listened to the conversations he was having with the others–mostly the students from his class–conversations I remember almost nothing about, except that at one point, in a context that I don’t remember, he told one of his writing students “No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
I got up to go to the bathroom shortly thereafter, and when I came back, Wallace and his students were gone, leaving only me and two of my friends (one of whom was the friend who attended the party with me that I wrote about above). My friends were in the middle of trying to remember lines from A. E. Houseman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young,” and I was curious as to why.
“We’re trying to figure out what poem Wallace was quoting,” they informed me. And I think they were both a bit stunned when I told them that the “poem” our local intellectual celebrity genius had quoted was “Time” by Pink Floyd.
I always liked Wallace after that moment (still didn’t go out and buy Infinite Jest, but…). My relationship with these two friends was deteriorating (and one of them remains in the category of “People I Despise” whom I mentioned above), and he had unknowingly handed me a brief moment of one-upmanship on a cracker-crumb strewn tabletop. The “genius” reassured me of what I’d suspected back when he took my coat at that party. Despite his celebrity, despite an intelligence that would have allowed him to quote any philosopher or poet he wanted, he decided in that moment to dole out wisdom in the form of Pink Floyd lyrics. In that moment, the “genius” was a regular guy, and any one of the grad students around that table was capable of “genius” as well. And even though I never took a class from him, I can’t help but wonder if that’s who he was as a teacher–”I did this, this writing thing, and you can do it, too.”
But even as I write these inconsequential recollections and sit here and try to imagine what Wallace was like as a teacher, I feel anger at the pain these vignettes conjure up. That incident at Rosie’s occurred during a dark period in my life, and there he is, squarely in the middle of that memory. And perhaps that’s why I can’t get through his work–his presence flits around the edges of some of my worst moments, and worship of him stands out among the most insipid qualities of someone whom I would probably still punch in the face if I met that person on the street, even ten years later. I certainly don’t blame Wallace for any of that, of course, but I just hate that in this moment after he has tragically chosen to remove himself from this earth, rather than sitting here and glorifying his work, all I can do is be reminded about anger I’d forgotten I once felt (And for the record, my time at ISU wasn’t a total wash. I still have good friends from that time, I did eventually earn my Ph.D., and I met the man I would eventually marry–who brought to our union, among other things, copies of Infinite Jest and Girl with Curious Hair, not to mention his own parcel of David Foster Wallace stories. So not a total wash by a long shot).
And I also can’t help but wonder, as I suppose everyone must when someone they have come into contact with commits suicide, if whatever darkness overtook the dead was always there. So now, that memory from Rosie’s has an extra layer of pain over it, as I sit here and wonder if part of him was gone, even then–if the seeds of whatever overcame him a few days ago were already taking root.
I can’t glorify in death someone I didn’t really know, someone whose work I’ve barely read, someone whose even tangential connection to my life doesn’t bring back the brightest of memories. But I’m human. I’m human, and I’ve lost people–to death, and to the petty arguments of life. So my sympathies are with David Foster Wallace’s friends and family right now. My sympathies are with the literary world, which has lost one of its shining stars. And my sympathies are with any of my friends, both current and former, who are feeling even a little measure of pain at his shocking loss. Because I once loved you, and loved the things that you loved merely because you loved them, your sadness is my sadness in this moment, even in its smallest measure.
