“Wrong,” he would say, as he’d turn away. Art walked in a sort of midriff-led way, as if his belly were self-propelled. “It’s David Gergen.”
In the stage play of Amadeus, there are two characters called the “Venticelli”: the little winds. They’re the whisperers, the ill breezes, the purveyors of fact, rumor, and gossip—a kind of caustic Greek chorus, commenting throughout on the action. Eventually, I came to think of myself as the Venticella of the office, sitting quietly at my desk, watching these men watchfully. Yes: the Venticelli may seem inscrutable, but they see and hear everything—and store it for use at a later date. They are players of the long game.
I BEGAN RECEIVING SOME SUSPICIOUS MAILINGS, POSTCARDS WITH images of cloud formations, blue and white. INFINITE PLEASURE read one. INFINITE STYLE. INFINITE WRITER said another. These mysterious teasers were clearly the early stages for some massive advertising campaign for a forthcoming book, and they put me rather too uncomfortably in the mind of an Absolut Vodka advertisement. Or maybe they were supposed to be a parody of the Absolut ads? Who knew. My reaction? The old eye roll, followed by the old lip-gloss reapplication. What was this novel, Infinite Jest? No clue, and the publicity materials, with their ominous cloud formations that put me in a hazy, hereafter frame of mind, only raised more questions than they answered. And who was this author? The one with the wacky bandanna and the melancholy face (a later comment about the author photo from the author himself: “Yes, that’s the post-lobotomy picture”), this person with so radically name-y a name: David Foster Wallace.
“How in the hell have you never heard of him?” a writer friend asked.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I can’t keep up with everything.”
“Isn’t that sort of your job?”
The writer explained to me that David Foster Wallace had also published a couple of books and a bunch of other splashy nonfiction essays in magazines, notably in Harper’s—there was this one about a state fair, and there was this other one about a cruise. The essays, evidently, were really just cripplingly long, and Harper’s published them as a folio insert—pages of a different paper stock, and uninterrupted by ads. GQ did not run folios, though it had plenty of writers who were stars, or who considered themselves to be (a cheap joke—these were exceptional writers, some of them).
“What, is it like stunt journalism?” I asked.
“No,” the writer said. “He’s intellectual.” A pause. “He seems like a dick.”
Then I started paying attention. I soon noted that the general tone when anyone spoke of David Foster Wallace was, essentially: That fucking guy. John Adams once said that the principal human urge was “the passion for respect and distinction” (I would have phrased it “the rage for respect and distinction”), and my time working at GQ had certainly helped clarify what he meant by that. Resentment, or ressentiment, it destroys art and ruins souls. But it’s also possible that resentment makes the world go round.
The galley of the mega-novel Infinite Jest finally arrived. My friend Allison, a fellow GQ assistant, and I chortled about how, as the Prada backpacks every woman in the Condé Nast building then carried were getting smaller and smaller, the books (not to mention the CDs—the epical Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness had just been released) seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. Now here was an idea to launch a thousand magazine think pieces! We would have assigned it if we could have. Some editors and writers in the office started asking me if I could get them their very own copies of Infinite Jest. That was something I could do, it turned out.
The week before Thanksgiving, I committed myself to review Infinite Jest for GQ. (By that point, somehow, and probably unwisely, I could review anything I wanted to review.) Even in those pre-9/11 times, I knew the meaning of the word “terror”: the review was due the Monday after the holiday. Six days to read 1,079 pages—a project the author believed (I would later learn) should take between two and four months. I was the back seat passenger in my parents’ car as we drove from Ohio to my grandmother’s house in Martinsburg, West Virginia, for Thanksgiving weekend; my grandfather, who had died six years before, was still dead. I had the flu, and my grandmother (who always referred to herself in the regal third person and with the nickname George) said to me upon our arrival, “George wants to know why Adri isn’t dating JFK Jr. yet.” I was not in the best frame of mind that weekend, honestly. But even if I had been, I would not have been able to summon the kind of monkish devotion Infinite Jest required.
I thought the novel was insane and bizarre and full of grandeur and despair, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t get it. I was insufficiently enlightened to get it, I guess, but “getting it” wasn’t even the point. It would take years for me to understand that that which offers redemption does not come in an instant. (During two subsequent readings, I would have the author himself to help guide me along my journeys . . . when, that is, the author felt like it.)
But maybe I wasn’t exactly the ideal reader for Infinite Jest then. Maybe I never was. I became peculiarly fixated on my loathing for the loathsome character Orin Incandenza, the anti–Sydney Carton and a serial seducer of young mothers whom I wanted to drag out onto the balustrade and slap across the face with an evening glove; the females in the novel seemed archetypes rather than successfully credible characters; I was confounded by the narrative’s chronology; I was unnerved by its lack of warmth; I had no interest in drugs; I hated tennis. At the same time, I loved the stagecraft and the theatricality, and the language was so audaciously charged with life—even as the world it depicted was dead: a thing. A book at total cross-purposes with itself: a maximalist work with nothing to celebrate.
Yet at the same time, there was something godlike about it.
I had a hard time squaring the whole together. Did the beautiful and elating parts outweigh the exasperating ones? If you happened to have a conversation in those weeks with someone who was also scrambling to read a review copy of Infinite Jest, this was the overarching question. Come to think of it, this was also much like the experience of knowing David Wallace himself—joy and delight, countered by exceptional frustration and disillusionment.
A GQ writer had scheduled an interview with David, which was to take place at his hotel in midtown the day of the Infinite Jest party. At the eleventh hour, a publicist called to cancel the interview. Believe me, this did not go down well in the GQ offices (“fuck him!”), and the excuse—“David’s tired”—smelled of unbearable prima donna–ish behavior, and there was plenty of resentment at the magazine for that and for everything else. But it was possible that I was more on this guy’s side than not—I was becoming less clear about why it was always so easy to get celebrities to talk to journalists anyway. The entertainment press is never benign. You didn’t have to explain to me why Terence Trent D’Arby (I know this is a random one) changed his name (to Sananda Maitreya, amazingly). The real question: Why don’t more subjects seize their own stories? When you give up your narrative, your life becomes just another story, one for other people to tell; you will be trapped within the stale pages of someone else’s interpretation, made less subtle than you are (at best), made a fool of (at worst), reduced to an object (always), and caricatured into abstraction.
THE PARTY FOR INFINITE JEST WAS ON A COLD EVENING IN FEBRUARY. February in New York: that special time of year when you want to pitch your winter coat, gloves, hat, and scarf into the garbage can forevermore (but you still have two more months of wintery torment to go). It was held at a bar in the East Village, and I had a bad attitude about the whole thing. Man, I so did not want to go. I’ll also admit that in my constructed scenario of the evening, the remarkable guest of honor was but an afterthought. But my incentive to attend came when Granger invited me to ride downtown to the party with him and a writer from GQ, Tom Junod, in a town car. No subway for me that night! Things were looking up, slightly. The cherry on top came in the form of my getting to glom on to their plans to have dinner afterward at a restaurant I other
wise had no business in.
The bar was mobbed. There were cinder block walls and red ikat-upholstered furniture. It was stuffy and did not smell all that great. As soon as we checked in at the door (hello, ladies—I’d been one of you before, and I’d be one of you again), I just knew that my hair would smell like cigarette smoke when I woke up the following morning. (Remember when you had to air your clothes out from tertiary smoke as soon as you got home from a night out?) The bad news for me was that I knew, or at least recognized, many of the people there—the more junior ones, that is. I scowled at them. They scowled at me. Hey, how did you get in here?
About half the crowd seemed to be made up of Esquire editors. Granger, Tom, and I made sure to sneer at them good (Sharks versus Jets, etc.). The two men each went their separate ways, circulating around the room, and I hung back in the periphery, taking in the scene with grim fascination (I’m terrible at mingling and have never gotten any better at it). This party was more surreal than most, with people orbiting David Foster Wallace like electrons around a nucleus. Something was happening, and whatever that thing was, everyone wanted to be part of it.
I watched with wonder as people watched David but tried not to watch David, who did not seem chatty—or even, frankly, civil—in the least. “Prima donna” was not exactly the label that came to mind. My main sense was that he was a man apart. His hair was long, auburnish, and he had on round granny glasses and a blue-gray polo shirt about four sizes too small. I, however, was gorgeously attired, wearing a long brown Paul Smith skirt and my most sumptuary garment—a Paul Smith blouse of the palest red-and-white silk brocade. (It wasn’t a matchy-matchy thing; the skirt and blouse were from different seasons—one current, one not.) The shirt looked as if it had been spun by monks, and probably it had.
I’d found it somewhat interesting, but mostly just deeply irksome, to watch the culture industry gear up around David Foster Wallace and announce: We now present you with the BOOK and the AUTHOR of the moment, and you are powerless in the matter. ENJOY. It was also a paradox not lost on me that I was, nominally, a cog within that machinery. Also, I now understood that celebrity worship is a deep human evil, and I’m sure that this diagnosis had its basis in my idea, nurtured in my more crabbed and pessimistic moods, that most humans are incapable of self-government and have no common sense.
My anti-celebrity-culture stance certainly also had to be at least somewhat connected to my forced reading of so many magazine celebrity profiles. I needed someone to tell me why it was that the profile writers (who were thoughtful people, usually) always produced these old, stagnant, lazy things. And about David: it made no sense—why did people take such a personal interest in the lives of writers, when the writer’s real life is never visible? People wanted gossip and biography; people wanted things prepackaged for them, placed into categories—they wanted everything but the thing itself, which is the work.
So anyway, I didn’t read any of the profiles about David Foster Wallace. Didn’t have to. I already knew what was in them: David would be presented as an already mythic, mystery-shrouded figure; there would be genuflection before the male genius; there would be resentment. I already knew that the pieces would have more to do with the profile writer’s ressentiment than they would with anything else.
I had an exchange with a woman I knew, an assistant at a literary agency. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her, although we did both agree that David could have spruced himself up a bit more for his own party. But we endured each other because we had no one else to talk to. (I now have a theory, developed after many years in New York, that parties exist only so that we may be thrust into conversations we do not wish to have, thereby sharpening those artificial-good-humor skills so necessary to face the real world.) This was one of those conversations during which one finds oneself planted like a redwood, and with no exit strategy (I’ve since learned: always have an exit strategy) . . . but thankfully Tom materialized. I’d already reached my allotment of literary encounters for the evening (one), and I was content to drift silently (I, silent; he, not) to and fro with him.
OVERHEARD: “It’s great to be able to put a face to a byline!”
OVERHEARD: “They say it’s going to win all of the prizes next year.”
OVERHEARD: “So what does everyone really think of it?”
David’s editor stood up on a table and gave a quite impassioned speech about the novel and its author, those accumulators of much recent stupefied praise. The editor was young and fair-haired and did not seem to be by nature a table-stander. The act was significant. After the speech, I watched as some of the more brazen types approached David, like, for instance, one woman who crept up to him in slow motion and had the following to say when her moment in the sun came:
“I’m half dog!”
Tom and I were standing in the bathroom hallway, evaluating the party and analyzing its dramatis personae, when David slunk by, en route to the john—to sneak some chewing tobacco, as would later be explained. Tom introduced himself to David. Tom introduced me to David. Really wished he hadn’t done that. Had a bad feeling about what was coming next.
“Adrienne here is the person who wrote the Infinite Jest review in GQ,” said Tom.
Sea, I thought, swallow me. Go ahead and swallow me whole. I knew as well as I’d ever known anything that my review of the book was crude and short, and I didn’t even begin to get at anything I wanted to get at in it. Those three hundred words contained nothing real. I had not read the book or written the review with anything like full obligation. Not even like 20 percent obligation, and I knew it.
David said nothing. He studied the floor.
Tom asked, “So. Do you feel as if your head has been emptied out since you finished writing Infinite Jest?”
David gave a shrug. “Yeah,” he murmured. “My brain really is empty now, I suppose.”
With that, David scuttled off into the bathroom like a raccoon.
Plainly, Tom and I were immobilized by this failed encounter—all we could manage to do was continue to stand there in that little hallway and blink at each other. Why were we not suaver conversationalists? Why were we so wretchedly unappealing? What was wrong with us?
When David finally emerged from the bathroom, Tom and I were still stationed there, not having budged an inch. In the manner of an antisocial second grader, David ducked between us, not bothering with any token courtesy like, say, eye contact or an “excu-use me,” and darted away.
How about that? Rejected by the man of the hour not once, but twice.
I watched as David joined the crowd and thought, There he goes again, grossing out the Establishment. But we were clearly in the presence of someone who was extraordinarily unusual in every way. And those were the first words I heard David Foster Wallace say, directed, more or less, toward me, or not: “Yeah, my brain really is empty now, I suppose.”
10
I wasn’t really too successful at being twenty-three, twenty-four. In general terms, my physical existence alternated between the following locations: GQ, apartment, gym. (My route to and from my gym took me by the old Tower Records at Broadway and Fourth Street, where a poster for the album Fashion Nugget, by Cake, remained in a window for what seemed like a decade.) At the gym, I’d occasionally chat with a handsome blond-haired guy who always worked out in purple sweatpants; he explained that he was a painter, and when I once rather inanely asked him if he ever did any art for magazines (my mind-set was still: if it’s not in GQ, it doesn’t exist) he replied, “Oh, I’m not an illustrator. I’m an artist.” And an artist he was. That man was John Currin.
Dates still remained not the best uses of my time. For better or worse, most of the men I tended to meet now were writers. Were they my tribe? Sure. I guess, maybe. Mainly, I enjoyed talking to writers about books, although talking to writers about books would also inevitably serve as a reminder to me of the huge number of things I should already have read but had not. It was not that I felt I couldn’t keep u
p with anyone I talked to, however, and only a ferret-eyed doofus will ever casually quiz you about the Great Books; it was merely that I understood I was smarter than I was educated. But I didn’t want a mentor or anything like that, and a Trilby-Svengali dynamic was so not going to work for me. The mind, remember, must be sovereign. I didn’t want instruction—what I needed was information.
And so what is it that writers really want to talk about, even and especially on dates? Their own work, of course. I became accustomed to this arrangement: if I were to go out on a date with a writer of fiction, I might receive, at the rendezvous’s end, a batch of six to ten short stories (or, God help me, a part of an in-progress novel) to read and comment on—ASAP, if you please. I understood that every writer is always desperate for readers, so I tried to be helpful in this regard. But, depending where the guy was in his career journey, I might also be asked to evaluate lines in rejection letters (“I’d welcome the opportunity to consider more of your work in the future”) as if interpreting smoke signals from the pythoness at Delphi. From writers in somewhat later phases of their career journeys, I would learn that there are agents who forward to their clients editors’ rejection letters and that there are ones who do not. (Is this interesting to know? You decide.)
Often I’d find myself wondering why it was that these dudes never really asked me about any of my own extracurricular writing, by the way, but these situations were never as reciprocal as one might have wished. But maybe that was my own fault. I hadn’t written much. I wanted to write—always believed I would—but I hadn’t yet. And as talent-free as I may have privately believed most of these guys were, I did admire their initiative and their persistence. I worried that I had neither.
What else was I doing with my life? Not enough. There were more readings; there were movie screenings (the best: Sergei Eisenstein’s restored Alexander Nevsky, with a new recording of the Prokofiev score; the prescreening party, with its mounds of caviar and fountains of vodka, has now in memory expanded to the status of legend). Occasionally, fashion department people would give me their tickets to the shows. I had no professional reason whatsoever for attending a fashion show, but I did enjoy them (though I was too high-toned to have admitted that to anyone). Fashion shows always started late, so I’d bring along Pale Fire as my go-to reading material. (Yeah, I was just that way: the young lady who brings a Nabokov novel—and that Nabokov novel—to a fashion show.)
In the Land of Men Page 10