cosmopolis

DFW and Updike

The Web is afire with tributes to Wallace; several hark back to the blogger's encounter with the novelist at a reading and how he or she was like a lover spurned because of something Wallace said or didn't say, did or didn't do. He inspired, and dreaded, that sort of reaction. Many emphasize he was their favorite living writer, quickly followed by, "and I'm sure that's true of so many others."

But there is one person, I think, yet to be heard from: John Updike, whose sci-fi novel Toward the End of Time and career in general was taken down many pegs by Wallace in 1998 in a piece that used the deadliest tone: disappointed admiration. (Plus occasional savagery. The line I remembered for a decade, "Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?" is, to be fair, quoted from an anonymous friend of Wallace's. Not that he disputes the point.)

Anyway, no one would have thought Updike would outlive Wallace, but he's still here, publishing a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, which was a much much better book than Toward the End of Time although the same will not be said of this new volume, The Widows of Eastwick. In it, Updike makes his now-familiar complaint:

 "... print doesn't mean to people what it used to, it may be. A considerable number get what news they need off the internet. They don't need much. Sports, celebrities. For self-advertisement there's all this blogging. It's amazing to me that anyone has time to read such crap, but I guess they do."

That'll make him the toast of the blogosphere!

Curiously, Wallace was also a happy luddite: he had very mixed feelings toward TV, and only looked at his email once a week. Go beyond the pop culture affect and he was nearly as retro as Updike. This adds yet another bitter note to his suicide; for all his criticism of what he called the GMN, for Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, Updike), he, their heir, paid much more attention than the other writers of his generation did.

"What exactly was the whole big Roth hysteria?" he wrote me once. "I'm way behind on my Roth, admittedly. I still reread Portnoy's Complaint, but I flagged in the middle of one of the Zuckerman books and now am like 8 novels behind. The same thing happens to me with Mailer."

Can we get a graduate student to work on Humor in Portnoy and Infinite Jest? Thanks.

DFW and DeLillo

Don DeLillo was David Foster Wallace's hero and mentor. Some day a fine book will be made out of their correspondence. When I first visited Wallace in Normal, Ill., a few months before Infinite Jest was published in 1996, he had letters from DeLillo taped to the cabinets in his kitchen -- the better to reread as he heated up a can of soup for dinner, I guess. (I told him this was going to be perfect fodder for anyone who came to interview him, and he immediately took them down.)

DeLillo, like Gaddis before him, was a prospector mining a lot of the same territory as Wallace. How to hold onto your humanity in the age of technology, for one. "I believed we could know what was happening to us," says Nick in DeLillo's "Underworld." "We were not excluded from our own lives." Wallace loved that passage.

The nexus of fame and commerce, for another. "The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism," comments the crazy, unsuccessful writer in "Great Jones Street," DeLillo's 1973 novel about paranoia, rock music and the ravages of fame. "It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It's a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills."

Wallace was determined to resist this. He wanted to be read, but didn't want to be a star. He had trouble with fans. He would mumble and move on. He was interested in a lot of things, but really believed only in a few, starting with fiction. Fiction, he once said, is "one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."

 

Maybe he asked too much of fiction. Maybe it failed him in the end, and there was nothing left. He always knew that survival was a random thing. Witness the scene in one of the stories in "Hideous Men," where there's Pop Quiz #4:

 

"Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley's wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts' teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees.

 

"This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.

 

"Q.: Which one lived."

The last time I saw Wallace in public was at an event in San Francisco in 2003 or thereabouts with Rick Moody. It was billed as a conversation between the two, but all the questions came from Wallace, which wasn't what the crowd wanted. They wanted answers from their hero.

He explained later: "I was told that the event, which was part of Moody's book tour, would consist of me 'interviewing' him, rather than conversing. He was told this, too. Apparently, neither the City Arts and Lectures people nor the audience were told this. The bizarreness, then, of me asking Qs the whole time was just one part of what was, I thought, a slow-mo train wreck. The whole thing felt stilted and fake. It is my last such event."

I teased him, asking who was telling him all this, the voices in his head?

"The 'voices' were the publicity ladies from Little, Brown; it was all set up months in advance. My private voices have much more interesting stuff to talk about than what's a book tour and what isn't, trust me."

DFW, RIP

News of David Foster Wallace's suicide comes as a shock, although I have a feeling it will soon begin to seem inevitable. A writer who kills himself at the age of 46, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, becomes a writer who was always destined to kill himself at age 46. All DFW's work will be read retrospectively with knowledge of his end, as if it were ordained. (If I were Wallace, I'd have a footnote here referring to Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath and John Kennedy Toole, whose company he now joins.)

Wallace and I were in only intermittent touch recently, but I assumed he was on an even keel -- writing prolifically, recently married, happily teaching. I guess not. He could document his troubles in Infinite Jest, a work of fiction so brilliant you often find yourself putting it down just to breathe, but he could not, in the end, escape them. 

Already I hear editors making phone calls, clearing space in the November issue, the writers jockeying for position to interview those left behind to record The Suicide of America's Most Brilliant Writer, and how Everything Wasn't Enough, how He Fought His Demons but They Finally Triumphed. It may even be true. But Wallace would have hated it anyway. He dodged the press--when the LA Times sent a writer out to Claremont he declined to talk--and kept his private life as private as he could.  

He was a good friend, in all senses of the word. I was once having some woman trouble -- my girlfriend, a poet, had run away, big melodrama, I was angry and stricken. Here's what will happen, he said. She will call and beg to come back, and tell you this time it will all be different, she's changed, she's better now. And when you hear that, let me know, and I'll tie you to a chair so you can't answer the door.

And so a few weeks later, right on schedule, she did call, and say, this time it will be different, I'm so sorry, I want to come back. I took her back, and it didn't work out, which only proved Wallace was right.

 "I had a thing for mad poets for a while," he wrote in an email. "Got tired. Karen is a painter, and also works as a stylist for photographers, and once taught tapdancing to the whole cast of Cheers. My brush with greatness."

I like the sentiment at the Howling Fantods, a DFW fan site: "I never made an effort to contact him, in fact, I actively avoided it. This seemed to be the right thing to do in the light of all I knew about David Foster Wallace. I don't know where I am going with this."  

Writers. They always break your heart.

Another bookseller heard from

Dear David, I'm disappointed that I still haven't received payment for ANGLE OF REPOSE (invoice of July 26 attached).  I gladly gave you your customary discount.  (Though less than you implied you wanted, 10% is my usual trade discount on books not selected in person at either of my premises.)  Moreover, as an additional courtesy (one I've extended to only three other people over the years), I didn't charge you postage but wrapped the book myself and brought it down to Serendipity, where I left it for you, just as you'd asked.  True, you didn't pick it up until July 31, when I saw you there.  But today is September 9.  The overwhelming majority of my private customers, dealers as well as collectors, pay on receipt.  Some actually pay in advance (I myself pay either in advance or upon receipt), though a few take full advantage of the traditional terms of the trade – i.e., 30 days from the arrival of the book in the buyer's hands to the arrival of payment in the seller's – which is, of course, completely acceptable.  But in my almost two decades as an independent antiquarian bookseller, you are only the second private customer, dealer or otherwise (institutional libraries, as you know, traditionally receive special billing), to take MORE than 30 days.  I guess I've been very lucky.  Please send your check as soon as possible.  Best wishes, Burton