David’s Updike hatchet job was an instant classic, although I didn’t believe the rowdily hostile tone was consistent with the David I knew, or believed I knew—that David was as generous when speaking of writers and writing as anyone ever was. Updike, a superlative prose stylist and a true artist-critic, ought to have been granted a bit more reverence, I thought. It was impossible to imagine what twentieth-century American literature would have looked like without him. (Although he was indeed also quite problematic in all the ways David observed.)
“Geez, David,” I said. “You could have a little more respect for your elders.”
He conceded that Updike was a titan and that his prose was gorgeous, and he added a terribly gross and impeccably Wallace-ian comment about how some Updike sentences made his sphincter pucker. He offered his number one favorite Updike line, from the short story “A & P”: “You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?).”
“OK, that’s actually terrible,” I said.
His favorite sentence from Updike was a misogynistic dig at female intelligence?
“Bzzzzzz,” David said evilly. “Bzzzzzz.”
I also had to wonder how much the judgment of a young hooligan like Wallace—Updike’s replacement, in fact—actually mattered to a writer like Updike. Certainly, the piece had to hurt the old man—the marginalization of Updike (which, by the time of his death in 2009, was nearly complete) was already very much in motion: Gore Vidal had been going around describing Updike’s novels as “Biedermeier” (I mean, oof), and Mailer had, in his outrageous “Norman Mailer versus Nine Writers” piece in Esquire in 1963, compared Updike’s prose style to stale garlic. But David’s essay would certainly help speed the late-career Updike demotion along.
There was something else about the piece. Its sanctimonious, high-minded moralizing about the novel’s central character’s use of women for his own gratification didn’t exactly track all that well with what David had described to me of his own life. But he did keep insisting that he was, in every way, a changed man—so maybe the essay was illustrative of the new, improved David? This was the hope. Lord, this was always the hope.
But the main thing that stuck in my craw was the essay’s insistence that women readers didn’t, or couldn’t, make critical evaluations about books, only emotional ones. (Don’t even get me started about the casually patronizing line about the fruitlessness of arguing with these female “readers” about the aesthetic merits of Updike’s writing.) The operating principle of the piece seemed to be that women detested the GMNs because they—or their authorial stand-ins—were incapable of love. And a love story, really, is all women—and women readers—want.
Closer to the truth: we want a respect story. We merely want to see what we understand of the human estate represented on the page.
Less crucially, I needed to know which of David’s female “friends” were included as the supposed speakers of the essay’s hilarious and, yes, emotional (not critical, not literary or learned) mosaic of Updike insults: “Just a penis with a thesaurus,” etc. This was of interest to me because in my observations, when David talked about the women he knew in his actual life, he tended to boast (that’s not right: it was half boast—see, the bonny princeling David could coexist with the regular folk!—and half ridicule) about how they were not, to put it charitably, big readers. (I know, believe me, on every possible level, I know.)
Now, it’s of course important to recall that with David you never knew what to believe—that old sliding scale of truth—but the claim to me was that his sometimes friend Charis Conn from Harper’s had made a comment that vaguely suggested one of the lines. But he’d made the quotes up (of course he had), appropriating her voice—sort of.
“But please don’t tell anyone,” he said. “Dead man’s talk?”
My other takeaway from the piece was that it was inwardly directed, a note to the self. I suggested as much to David.
This was a conclusion, an obvious one, I’d already reached about a lot of David’s work. Despite the opulence and majesty of his writing, much of it was just such a note to the self.
“Yeah,” David said. “I guess that’s right. I just never want to become one of those old fuckers who writes about his genitals and who teaches his own stuff in class.”
It was also clear that this was just the sort of grave-stomping nightmare review that David so feared of his own work. If I’d been smarter, I would have seen that David believed he already inhabited the position of the Great Male Narcissist himself and that every sentence in the essay bespoke the terrors of the king, dying or otherwise.
THAT SPRING, DAVE EGGERS HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT PUBLISHING A journal. As I understood it, this project, possibly called Timothy McSweeney’s, would be democratic, all-embracing, and celebratory in spirit. It would have little to do with good taste; energy was the thing. It would be, as Dave described his vision for it, text only and would publish weird and adventurous work that perhaps would be (or maybe already had been) rejected by a mainstream magazine—rejected, that is to say, by a magazine like Esquire and, probably, by an editor like me.
The first issue of McSweeney’s was produced, in large part, in the Esquire offices. We had brand-new iMacs at work, and I watched the initial issue come to life on Dave’s new computer, and that egg-shaped, ice-cream-colored beauty just added to the thrill. I helped write a couple of small pseudonymous pieces for that issue and proofread some others. I thought this McSweeney’s of Dave’s was creative, bold, gorgeous, and hilarious. (And the best pieces were the ones Dave had written himself.)
In the after-work hours that summer, I witnessed some guys, the same niche demographic as the HoJo guys—the literary urban hipster, I guess the stereotype would be, although these guys were more benevolent than that stereotype would suggest—moseying on into the Esquire office after everyone else had gone home, to help Dave with that first McSweeney’s. The fellows would settle into the empty editorial cubicles (has there ever before been an editorial office with too much physical space? we actually had too much space) and would get industriously to work proofreading whatever it was Dave had given them to proofread. Dave worked with a printing company quixotically located in Iceland to produce that first issue; a rep from the company came into the office one afternoon to meet with Dave. Why did this guy also meet with me? I have no recollection, but there he was. I can still see his soulful face as he sat in the red velvet chair across from my desk and spoke of Iceland’s stark beauty.
Dave had it in mind to do some sort of future event for McSweeney’s, and I toured some possible venues with him. Would it be funny to have the party at the Hooters by our office? A Hooters manager—yes, she was wearing one of those shirts—took us on a tour of the place. We quickly concluded that a McSweeney’s party, or indeed any party, at a Hooters would actually not be funny at all. That first McSweeney’s event ended up being held in the back room of a Belgian beer bar with the congenial name Burp Castle. There was no guest list, and there were no young Byzantines waiting by the door with scary clipboards. Those early events had a sprightly egalitarian ethos, and even if you were only nominally a McSweeney’s contributor but you wanted to read or perform, all you had to do was state your case to Dave. He’d probably let you go on. This was Dave’s genius—he really did include everyone.
Smartly, Dave had opened up the evening to people outside the world of books, and the event at Burp Castle had the feeling of an ersatz variety show at a summer camp. It was emceed by John Hodgman, then a literary agent and a phone buddy of mine (never has there been a greater gap between such an outstandingly hilarious person and such a humorless job; he’d have me in stitches on every call), and everyone onstage seemed to be some kind of comic or musician. The whole DIY ethos of the thing stood in conscious opposition to a gatekeeper-controlled literary culture—the culture that Esquire, for better or worse, had once represented. It is true that mos
t of the Burp Castle performers were boys—clever, clever white boys—but it is also true that there wasn’t much machismo to the undertaking, either. And, most important, there were no oldsters yammering on about their books. Writers who talk about their books: intolerable.
David’s story “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” which, before David went the Richard Rorty title route, was called “Yet Another Example of Porous Borders (XIII),” was published in that first issue of McSweeney’s. I edited it. I’d sent David a short, witty book about predatory insects I knew he’d like (The Red Hourglass by Gordon Grice), and he composed the story in a sort of response to it, and for, as he wrote to me, my amused information about the dangers of giving him a riveting spider book when he was finishing a manuscript; there’s a wacky peripheral backstory in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” about a lawsuit and a black widow farm.
(He had considered including the story in Brief Interviews but decided against it and would place it in Oblivion instead. When he was putting together the manuscript of Oblivion, he said he couldn’t find a copy of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” around anywhere and asked me to send him that first McSweeney’s with the story in it. Which just goes to show you, I guess, that even, and probably especially, geniuses don’t always have their shit together, either.)
Embarrassingly, I was tasked with the job of asking David if he would consider a sort of videoconferencing situation for that Burp Castle event, and I got a moderately miffed “I think you know that is so not me” in response.
Later, there would be another McSweeney’s event at a BBQ place on the west side. (I was supposed to find out how to rent a Mister Softee ice-cream truck for it, but I didn’t get too far with that one.) These early events felt unusually noncompetitive, and I think we all felt part of the same team. I guess we all knew we were witnessing the birth of a movement of some sort.
AMONG THE MANY CHALLENGES OF LIVING WITH AN UNCAGED CITY rabbit: she will chew your baseboards and electrical cords to bits, and large hunks of your weekends will be spent doing touch-up work to your walls and slapping black electrical tape and/or plastic tubing onto the cords she’d gnawed through the previous week. (The bitter apple spray David sent as a rabbit deterrent did nothing.) So I had no home answering machine that summer—the rabbit had eaten the cord—though I did still have a phone.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and the phone was ringing, just ringing away, but at this particular moment, I did not feel like talking.
The cycle appeared to be: the phone would ring for a minute or so (seemed like ten) and the caller would hang up, call back, and let it ring for another minute (or ten). I sat on a straight-backed chair in my infinitesimal apartment, timing the whole show on the digital clock on my microwave.
I felt the first pulse of a headache and considered all the ways in which I was simply not equipped to handle the dazzlingly complicated person on the other end of the line. It was hard to imagine how anyone ever could be.
“Where were you?” David asked, his voice expressionless, when I finally did pick up.
I lied. “At the gym.”
“Why do you work out so much, Adrienne?” he said with flat affect. “You sure seem to spend a lot of time at the gym. Are you afraid that you’re going to become obese?”
I loved him, but, man, was he so exhausting. I was terrified of his need for me. It also frightened me to admit how emotionally yoked I felt to him now. Not to get too mystical about it, but sometimes it seemed that my emotions, which apparently were no longer mine alone, became—sometimes, not always (I was still an autonomous entity, and I wanted to keep it that way)—undulations of his. (It was never the other way around, of course.) Whenever I’d think, Something is going on with David, I’d be right. His drama became, to a certain extent, your drama, too. You’d cry right along with him. Who knows how David was able to work his voodoo, but I’m telling you that it was real. I think he probably had some form of ESP. And I think I had a form of it, too, at least regarding him. (I know how that sounds.) I’m certain that those who knew him better than I felt his telepathy with significantly more force.
One night, I could feel that something was happening with him. We spoke, and he sounded peculiar, dazed almost. He said he’d been driving as slowly as he possibly could without actually getting himself killed, listening to a Carpenters CD while repeating, “I am the most boring person in the world. I am the most boring person in the world.”
I always worried about David and cars. A couple of years later, when I was reading a manuscript he’d sent me of his story “Good Old Neon,” which has its terminus in a fiery vehicular suicide, I went into my bathroom and threw up. That was the moment I knew he believed he was doomed. It was always so hard to imagine David’s third act.
But there’s a problem with communicating with a person who’s combatting some sort of darkness in himself, or at least there was a problem for me: I always felt that I was speaking in generalizations and repeating conventional wisdom. I always felt like Polonius, in other words—cliché, cliché, platitude, platitude. David, you’re doing great. David, your life is golden. David, we all love you and admire you. All of which was true, of course, but essentially it was all the lazy cliché “you have no right to be unhappy.” When I’d talk to him, I’d often find myself thinking about how not everything can be distilled down to common sense. I’d also consider how resistant depression is to interpretation and how inadequate our language is to deal with it. (And from his end, I’m sure David was like, You just don’t get it at all.)
A bit later in the summer, David was calling from a hotel in Arizona, where he was visiting his family. He had finally finished Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
“I don’t have anyone to dedicate it to,” he said, in lonely-boy mode.
Where was this going?
I said nothing.
“Oh, I know,” David said, performing just a little bit too much for my taste. I’d hoped we were beyond the routines, the acts, by now—but no, we never were. “I’ll dedicate it to you.”
He would? Well, that would be slightly . . . odd. I mean, he’d sent me a couple of stories in the book for me to give friendly notes on, writing that he didn’t want to send them to his editor if they were so bad or off-the-wall that they would hurt his credibility (and while also wanting points for being “vulnerable” with me). But I hadn’t read the whole manuscript and obviously hadn’t known him during the composition of most of the book—he’d written some of the stories in grad school, for God’s sake.
Throughout the rest of the summer, he dangled the prospect of a Brief Interviews with Hideous Men dedication before me like some kind of book-dedication worm. I was of many minds about this. On one level, I was flattered. Of course I was. We liked each other. We loved each other even, maybe, I hoped. But a book dedication at this stage would really have been pushing it.
Here was another feature of the well-oiled DFW act: he’d say and do outlandish things just to see what your reaction would be. He’d poke you and prod at you and try to get your goat. And so, looked at from this view, David could certainly have been screwing with me. Jesus, did he really want me to ask for it? The more I thought about this as an explanation, the more infuriated I became. I would never be a beseeching woman.
Yet on another level still, the book-dedication thing made me so crushingly sad—this beautiful, difficult, suspicious, paradoxical man was so emotionally barricaded, such a colossus unto himself (the guy was his own mountain), that he had no one close enough to whom to dedicate a book.
But no. No, that couldn’t have been right. That wasn’t right. There were many, many people in David’s life, many people who loved him, many people who were, or considered themselves to be, close to him—to the extent that anyone could ever be close to David.
He said he was going to send the entire manuscript of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men for me to read. “It’s weird,” he added, “but I usually keep my stuff away from wom
en I’m going out with.”
He remarked that not only did he make a general rule of keeping his stuff away from girlfriends, but he would break up with a woman immediately if she dared to peek at his work. I disrespected him for this. I also disrespected him for having dated women he did not value intellectually. Also, how dysfunctional and dreadfully compartmentalized was that, to keep the most important part of himself away from the people who were, theoretically, closest to him?
He paused, his tone shifting again, going from vaguely malevolent to sweet as marzipan. “You know, we like each other.”
“Sure,” I said. “We do.”
“I still can’t believe it,” he said. “I still can’t believe how much we like each other.”
Back in New York, he’d remarked that when he’d been photographed for the Esquire contributors’ page for “Adult World,” he’d worried that I’d see the contact sheets from the shoot and would think he was ugly.
“Do you know how many people I meet a year?” he asked.
No, I didn’t. I hadn’t given the matter any thought.
“A lot,” he said.
OK, so what? I met a lot of people, too. Big deal. The difference was that I wasn’t meeting people because of anything inherently to do with “me”—people were interested in me only because of my job. But everyone also wanted something from him.
“And do you know how many I actually like?” David asked. “Maybe two.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m thrilled that I’m one of the two for the year. This is very exciting.”
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