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.

Comments

[mernitman]

It's such a terrible thing -- for him, his wife, friends, and now the rest of us. As a writer, I'm familiar with the (true) cliche about comedians and comic writers being some of the saddest and most serious people, but given that DFW gave me more laugh-out-loud-until-you-cry moments in his nonfiction than any other contemporary writer I can think of, the WTF?! factor here is huge. Was David manic depressive? Any light you might shed on what seems inexplicable -- to those of us who never knew him personally -- would be most helpful.

[mernitman]

It's such a terrible thing -- for him, his wife, friends, and now the rest of us. As a writer, I'm familiar with the (true) cliche about comedians and comic writers being some of the saddest and most serious people, but given that DFW gave me more laugh-out-loud-until-you-cry moments in his nonfiction than any other contemporary writer I can think of, the WTF?! factor here is huge. Was David manic depressive? Any light you might shed on what seems inexplicable -- to those of us who never knew him personally -- would be most helpful.

[Jim]

Thanks for sharing this. It helps to put this in some type of context for me.

I didn't know DFW personally, but like all good writers (or at least the ones we're drawn to), his work provided a special connection to him that makes this news difficult to process on a personal level.