cosmopolis: 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."

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I got two or three letters from DeLillo just after Y2K, but keep them in a box (with Xmas cards from my dead grandparents, clippings about Blanchot and NRBQ, letters from my old schools concerning academic probation, etc) rather than on my kitchen cabinets. Not that I don't cherish 'em, y'know.

He was very helpful concerning what I was writing him about and I had the feeling he would have been happy to answer another letter but I felt if I wrote him again it should be about Something Important so I didn't get around to it. I had the same kind of feeling when I was tossing the occasional email back and forth with Bob Gottlieb a few years later.

Fun Great Jones Street fact: It's Keanu Reeves' dream project. He's come very close to filming it once or twice but the financing fell through. If you find that hard to believe just Google the book's title and "keanu."

Almost-as-fun fact: Jay McInerney's "Story Of My Life" is Reese Witherspoon's dream project. McInerney gave an interview around '02 in which he said the actress contacted him in the '90s and told him she was dying to play Alison Poole (ie, Lisa Druck aka Rielle Hunter). She optioned the book, renewed it a few more times. When she came to him to renew it one more time he told her to forget it unless she wanted to buy it outright. Which she did. She'd be too old for the part now, though.

Re the post below about Larry McMurtry's books: Charles Everitt's book from the early 1950s, "Adventures Of A Treasure Hunter," is the one volume about book collecting I've ever read that is something other than a surefire cure for insomnia. Though it is more about book dealing than collecting per se. It was reissued a few years ago and I think is still in print, though Abebooks has a fair number of copies.

Posted by: Lawrence Tate | September 15, 2008 at 05:40 PM

And about DFW: outstanding as a writer and a person. Peace be unto him now and always.

Posted by: Lawrence Tate | September 15, 2008 at 10:56 PM