Well, I supposed that I was just another one of the fellas to the extent that I could quote pretty much all of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s lines in Full Metal Jacket: “You are nothing but unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit.” (And: “If there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker. You know that, don’t you?” Oh man, I could go on.) But unless the guys in question were Stanley Kubrick (chef’s kiss to you, Stanley, in perpetuity, for all of it), Stephen Sondheim, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Thomas Jefferson, being one of the guys was of no interest. At various professional men’s magazine–based events, when I’d witnessed the spectacle of women mimicking men—drinking whiskey, smoking cigars, cursing like boatswains, etc.—I’d always sent myself the following message in a bottle: No matter what happens, never do that. But, to quote Robyn Hitchcock, “everything you say you won’t is what you will eventually” (“honesty is money in the cemetery”), so was it possible that I’d already become one of the guys?
Or was it that these men felt comfortable enough with me to be the brutes they actually were?
No, not that, either. The more likely scenario: these men just forgot whom they were speaking to.
David went on about his Infinite Jest party: “And I ended up spending pretty much the whole party in the restaurant kitchen, smoking cigarettes and crying.”
“The kitchen?”
“Yep.”
“Crying?”
“Yep.”
This sounded marginally insane.
David and I began speaking of another gentleman we had both spied at the party and whom we both knew slightly. David, who had total recall for slights real and imagined (“it is burned into my frontal lobe,” he would declare of various affronts), told an interesting little story about how this guy had once insulted him. David observed, “He has eyes like a fish. If you poked his tummy, your finger would get stuck in foam.”
I explained that I’d been invited to the party because I’d reviewed Infinite Jest. When I later admitted to David how quickly and crudely I read the novel that first time, he said, “You have just confirmed all of my worst suspicions about book reviewers.” But as a measure of the kind of person David was or could be, he didn’t hold the existence of that appalling little review against me.
The next time David called, he volunteered the tentative title of the book he was working on, a short-story collection in which he would include “Adult World.”
“But please don’t tell anyone,” he said.
This was the first of many disclosures throughout the years I would be expected to treat as classified information. Although how top secret actually were many of these confidences? It’s a question.
The title: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Nice one. Was it going to be—ahem—funny?
“Yeah, talk about a laugh riot. Parts of it are funny, I guess, but there are parts where you’ll need a damp cloth on the solar plexus.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
Looking back on it, there was, right away, a tone that felt correct when talking to David: one had to be extremely direct and also gently ribbing. Soon enough, I would understand that he would also frequently need to be rebuked, sternly, as a child is rebuked.
“Everyone’s going to hate this book,” he said. “Just wait.”
David remained consistent to me in his prediction that Brief Interviews with Hideous Men would be critically panned. He said he felt vindicated when it was. (It wasn’t, but I’m here to tell you that he believed it had been.)
He called again a couple of days later.
“Can you please say hi to the Icky Brothers?” He introduced me telephonically to his dog Jeeves. “And this is Cancer Boy.”
His other dog, Drone, had recently been diagnosed with lymphoma, and David was a mess about it and would become a bigger mess still. He said he knew Drone was sick when he noticed that he (Drone) was drinking abnormally large amounts of water. (With every animal I’ve had since then, I’m always on the morbid lookout for this portent of doom.)
“So,” David said. “This is it. Welcome to the Love Grotto.”
A call a couple of hours later:
“I was hoping you’d help me out with something,” David said.
Yes?
“Well, I don’t like everything I do, and I have no confidence that anyone else will, either. I mean, I do ‘like’ the story, but I’m nervous that people just won’t get it if it’s in Esquire. This whole issue is not unrelated to the weird, hard reading you’re asking your audience to do with this, yet at the same time, you can’t ignore the business of the magazine, which is to sell ads. We’re both trying to have our cake and eat it, too, I suppose.”
He quizzed me again—again!—about why I liked “Adult World.” Would he have grilled Maxwell Perkins in such a way? Gordon Lish? Rust Hills? Yes, there were plenty of sexist overtones in this, and, yes, I was alive to them all. I had intuited that he’d also wanted to see if I had any independent taste of my own, or if I liked “Adult World” merely because the author was David Foster Wallace. Either that or he was the most cripplingly insecure person I’d ever encountered. (Probably both, actually.)
I told him that what I found most moving about “Adult World” was its view that sex cannot help two lonely people transcend the fortress of self that separates them. Despite the comic elements of the second half, it’s a damn sad story.
“OK. You understand. I’m just real grateful for your degree of certainty that an apelike Esquire reader will feel the same way about it that you do.”
An apelike Esquire reader. This, I would come to recognize, was a classic Wallace move—flattery barbed with an insult, a surprise thumbtack in your flan.
“Adult World” had been rejected everywhere else, he said.
“Perfect,” I said.
“You still want it?”
“Even more.” I added, ever so lightly, that his work probably wasn’t to every editor’s taste anyway.
And by the way, I was rather annoyed to learn that so many other magazines had already seen the story. This was not pleasant information to receive, that Esquire was at the bottom of the DFW submission totem pole.
David: “The challenge of fiction at Esquire is that it doesn’t want anything too arty or too boring, and it has to appeal to both yuppies and homosexuals. It’s an interesting paradox of the glossy magazine. You’re in the luxurious position to have your pick of American short fiction, yet your demographic restricts you quite a lot. You have many unique challenges in your job. I can appreciate that. And like every other magazine, you can’t, or won’t, do anything that’s not in the house style.”
Although most of us, other than the ever-clairvoyant David, were not prescient enough to see what was coming, we were then at the tail end of the magazine industry as we knew it. Back then, in these last-hurrah days before all hell broke loose and the business became the Wild West of our era, each publication was, to a certain extent, its own closed system; each magazine had its own writerly (or anti-writerly) sensibility.
But “David Foster Wallace” and “house style” were two things that did not go together. (Let us recall, for example, that David, during the editing of his Roger Federer essay, convinced the New York Times to swerve from its obstinate style rules for him and cede to his use of the Oxford comma—the first, and I should think last, author to claim such a distinction.) David was too much his own man, for better or worse: too allergic to received wisdom, too much of a rhetorical provocateur, and too much of a monomaniac to have written in any voice but his own.
“The particular fiction in a glossy mainstream magazine is there to amuse and entertain, not to provoke and push,” he said. “All of these sections sort of drift along ghostlike, and ninety-nine percent of the stuff in them doesn’t seem alive.”
I did not entirely disagree with that (an “it’s not a gripper” aura hung heavy over much magazine fiction), but of course I had to defend myself. I reminded him: at lea
st a few glossies actually were still engaged in the noble and important enterprise of publishing fiction. But if David’s response to magazine fiction was tepid at best, who actually were the enthusiastic readers? Were there any? Maybe there weren’t any. Whenever a reader sent a letter to the editor about a story in Esquire, a photocopy of that letter was given to the story’s assigning editor. And since I’d been at the magazine, I had to admit that there hadn’t been one letter about a story I’d edited. These sorts of things contributed to the way an editor’s work was perceived internally.
“But do you know what’s even worse than that?” David said. “The fiction in them is there only to signify literary respectability and to win awards. Come on. I don’t have to tell you this, of all people.”
The fact was that Esquire, in its incarnation at the time, was not too concerned with literary respectability. (If it had been, I would not have been hired.) It had a very short list of “approved” literary writers: Mailer, Roth, Updike, and the man in the white suit, Tom Wolfe. (They always wanted a short story by Stephen King, and that was a good day for me when I finally did haul one in.) But after those big men, Esquire was not quite as much a literary “club” as you’d think. A submission from a young cultural phenomenon, like, say, David, was not quite viewed as a gift from the literary gods; come to think of it, many of the authors’ names on the manuscripts I presented may as well have been obliterated with a Sharpie. This was a freeing and democratic, if frankly eccentric, editorial approach.
But it was also, possibly, I worried, anti-intellectual and ill-literary: If we had no real reverence for or even any interest in (or awareness of?) an author’s body of work or accomplishments, was it possible that we were neglecting our most essential artists? Did we even know what we were looking at? These were questions.
“So here’s what you do,” said David. “You do your bullshit service crap, but you also do hard-core lit. You hear that? Hard-core lit. You have the harness of power, but I can also sense that your mouth is clamped. I’m probably bitching to the wrong person, actually. But why does everything need to be run through the same grinder? Not everything is for the same reader—the halfwit knuckle-dragging ape. People feel so lied to in this world; they want something nourishing, something that doesn’t seem so blatantly false.”
Perhaps he expected me to defend the role of the big soft glossy—the “BSG,” as he, rather excrementally, would call it in his short story (Russian novella?) of magazines and excrement, “The Suffering Channel.” Maybe David wanted an argument. At that point, I had never spoken with any other magazine editor who’d worked with him, and I had no way of knowing if this was just the way he was. Or at least the way he started off. Maybe he put all new editors through a sort of grisly hazing process. Maybe he wanted to see whether I could be trusted.
“I’m sorry I’m being so outspoken and bad-tempered,” he said. “I seem to have no filter when I talk to you. It’s weird.”
“Not a problem,” I said.
Or was it?
“It’s just that sometimes I think, You know what? That’s it. I’m not gonna play anymore. But then the other side of me is like, Gotta be in the magazine, gotta be in the magazine. So that’s that. So here I am.”
David was fired up today. But whom, or what, was he mad at? I wasn’t the one making him play. And what was he complaining about exactly? (Later, he would apologize, sort of, to the extent he was ever actually able to apologize, for being such a difficult person in this era [“dick” was the word]: “I was not a healthy man then.”)
I reminded him that the magazine was paying him $10,000 for “Adult World.” (Those were the days.)
“I know. I’ve been telling everyone how much you pay for fiction.”
He later admitted that Esquire could have gotten “Adult World” for free.
“Look, I’m very grateful to you . . . God. Sorry. I’m sure you’re used to foul tempers, talking to fiction writers all day.”
That was true. My job had already taught me a lot: first and foremost, all art is compensatory, and well-adjusted people do not become artists. Quoth the brilliant Wallace story “Octet”: “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.”
“You have to be kind of a shrink, too, in your job, I guess,” he said. “But this whole magazine question really does drive me nuts. All of this stuff is so diluted all the time; it’s as if all of these glossies are edited subject-matter-wide. Esquire does not have to compete with Entertainment fucking Weekly, you know. Tell them that. You go in there and you fucking tell them that . . . Damn. Sorry. I’m not your problem. I’m my own problem. I’ll leave you alone now.”
Now came calls from David with story ideas.
“You should have six well-known but ridiculous people review the same book,” he said.
Courtney Love was one such potential author. Wall Street Week’s Louis Rukeyser—he was another.
“What about doing some trailblazing Internet thing?” he asked. “What about a story in hyperlink?”
Wait, what was hyperlink? Patiently, it was explained. He would later tell me that the footnotes in Infinite Jest functioned like hypertext. Later still he would say that he considered Infinite Jest “basically an Internet novel.” And: “When people finally figure that out, they’ll see that I didn’t invent a new form or anything.”
Then another call—this time about writers whom he thought I should approach for the magazine.
But hey, David, why should I even listen to you? What credibility, exactly, do you have in this department?
He had been a fiction editor of the Sonora Review when he was in grad school at the University of Arizona, he said. That was why I should listen to him. This, hilariously, was the only credential I was given.
One afternoon—we’re in late March here, and we’d been talking for a month or so (he now called randomly to chat)—he and I were grumbling on the phone about book critics. We were joined in the opinion that most book reviewers were simply reacting to other reviews and that the so-called literary world was hivelike, its tastes and opinions imposed from the top down. (As Michael Herr excellently wrote in Kubrick, his mesmerizingly great biographical treatment of the master, “There aren’t many spectacles more dispiriting than this one: the culture-critical smart set, united in aversion, dreadfully putting on their thinking caps.”) David consistently maintained to me that he had only one intelligent interview during the entire course of the Infinite Jest publicity campaign, with the critic Laura Miller, who then wrote for Salon. That was his story and he stuck to it.
He would tell me, and I believed him, that the acclaim he had received for Infinite Jest did not make him feel, in his words, like a big man, but actually had the opposite effect: the superlatives served only to reinforce what a fraud he believed he, at bottom, was. In later years, he told me that no one seemed to have noticed how he had pulled one over on them.
I remarked to him that I wanted to find someone to review books for Esquire; I would suggest that writer to the boss and hope for the best. It was damn hard to get too excited about most book reviewers, or reviews—so many were cribbed from press releases or plagiarized from other reviews. I had a dream: I wanted drollery, I wanted elegance and (occasional) vehemence, I wanted someone immune from that dreadful phenomenon of critical consensus. I wanted someone godlike, someone who understood the whole intellectual history of literature and culture, someone who could do high and low but never middle: I wanted the young Robert Hughes of books. As a matter of fact, what I wanted was the actual Robert Hughes—irascible art critic and author of the following sentence: “Truly bad art is always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens.” Hughes, please. Get me Hughes.
And I did try to get the actual Hughes to write something for me once, but by that point, I had become nicely inured to the experience of being yelled at by brilliant, outsp
oken, bad-tempered old men. And I spent my life alternating between two modes: indulging these men or else (occasionally) fighting back. Usually, I tried to be polite. Thomas Jefferson believed that politeness is artificial good humor and that artificial good humor is—or was, back before our culture became so poisonous—what makes the world go round.
“Run, do not walk, to get James Wood in the magazine,” David said.
David was an enthusiastic early reader of Wood, the now eminent literary critic who would famously give David’s work a misread—a reasoned misread, but a misread, a big one. (He changed his tune later, though.) This was a year before Wood’s first book was published; Wood was then writing reviews for The New Republic.
“He should be your book critic . . . if you could get him past your boss.”
(David just had to get that little insult in there.)
More calls:
“I can’t stand to be around men. Just watch the structure of a male exchange: ‘Whose dick is bigger?’ ‘How much of the world have I penetrated?’ It’s Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: ‘Now we observe the male of the species . . .’ It’s mental chess, and it is always a pretend friendship. I prefer women to men. All of my friends are women.”
David, lover of women, all kinds, said that he liked lesbians best of all.
“You don’t have any male friends?”
“Not a one.”
Later in the conversation, I noted with amusement as he listed the names of many of his friends, in New York and in Bloomington, each and every one of them a man.
And:
“My domestic life is an education in lameness. I have a diet consisting solely of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, and lemons.”
“You eat lemons?”
“Yes. They’re delicious and they prevent scurvy.”
“Weird,” I said.
Dare I ask what his beverage of choice was?
In the Land of Men Page 16