The body is always a problem in Wallace fiction. David surely had to have been as great as Tolstoy, his closest peer (though his preference was for Dostoyevsky), in depicting how emotions are displayed on the body, and it was fascinating to see how “Incarnations” dealt with the expression of bodily pain. In the line “a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his lips,” I had wondered about adding an adjective to “lips”; David plumped for “bitty.” (We did both wonder if “bitty” was just slightly too cute, though, but “bitty” it was.) His biggest act of faith regarding my edits, he said, was changing the original spelling of “cigaret” (who wouldn’t have queried it?) to the standard “cigarette” everyone knows and loves. According to David, “cigarette” is, or can be, or was (but what era are we even talking about?), spelled “cigaret” in the mid-South, the setting of the story. Up until that point, I hadn’t known that “cigaret” was a thing.
In the end of “Incarnations,” the baby floats above itself and experiences a soul death, described in the story as the sun falling and rising like a yoyo (or, in the original version, yo-yo). I recalled the very same description of a sun going up and down through a window like a yo-yo in Infinite Jest, although the perspective is from the character Don Gately, an addict mid-binge, not a gravely injured child. I did what any close reader would have done and brought up the repetition with David.
“This is horrifying,” he said.
What, I shouldn’t have told him?
“Of course you should have. If you hadn’t, it would have been as if something neon had been hanging from my nose and you’d been too polite to say anything about it. But please don’t tell anyone. Dead man’s talk?”
This was classic David, trying to manage his own projection. And it was never a great situation whenever he sensed that your perception of him was not consistent with the one he wanted you to have, whenever he sensed that you had not accepted his self-inventions . . . but he was like all of us that way, I guess—we want to be observed only when we can control the image. Social media thrives on our hysteria to manage other people’s opinions of us, obviously.
“You always seem to know when I’m ripping myself off,” he said. “You’ve really got my number, don’t you?”
Oh, no. No, no, no, I didn’t think that—not for a minute.
David finally decided that using a hyphenated “yo-yo” in “Incarnations” looked, as he said, too prissy and anal for a story set in southern Indiana and written in a voice he characterized as “hillbilly,” and he decided to do it as one word. So: “yoyo” in “Incarnations” and “yo-yo” in Infinite Jest. This was just the kind of thing I found a little too fatally interesting and could talk to David about forever.
Oh, and hey, David, does the baby die at the end of the story?
“I don’t think so,” David said, in perfect alignment with his resistance to closure. “Do you?”
David sent a picture of his new dog, Werner Whimperer—named for the actor Werner Klemperer, famous way back when for his role as the bumbling, monocled POW-camp commandant Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes (and, interestingly, the son of the illustrious German conductor Otto Klemperer), and we entered a more easygoing relationship phase, thank God. I was preparing to go to a writers’ conference in Colorado, and David suggested that I try to relax a little bit there. He told me to take it easy for once. He wrote that I should drink a lot and bask in having people butter me up. “You deserve it,” he wrote. Often he’d say that he and I both seemed to have a hard time letting people be nice to us, and he was probably right about that. He wrote, “I think you’re a really good editor, better now than Esquire deserves, and f.y.i. I’ve told Franzen and G. Saunders and other people this . . .”
Well, thanks for that, I guess? (I mean, at least he wasn’t still going around bitching to people about me.) I really did hope I was getting to be a good editor. I knew I had more confidence than I used to. But David was always so negative about Esquire—that “apelike Esquire reader” comment of his back in the early days was just the beginning. Esquire was too corporate for David, too mainstream, not sufficiently literary.
“Hey, what do you want?” I’d ask him. “The Partisan Review?” I’d remind him Esquire was an excellent magazine (minus its woman problem) and would also gently ask him to recall that he’d agreed to pose for an Us magazine photo shoot in the eighties, and a writer who’d agreed to pose for Us magazine was not exactly allowed to grandstand about literary prestige. A part of David always believed I was a sellout for working at Esquire. That was the kind of thing some of us used to worry about.
“So why do you even submit your stories if you don’t want to be published here?” I asked.
“I don’t ‘want to be published’ in Esquire,” David said. “I want to be edited by you.”
And now we get to the issue of his IRS audit. David claimed that the Hearst accounting department (although in truth he also seemed to kind of blame me) had sent him the incorrect tax form two years before for his “Adult World” payment—a personal tax form was sent to him directly, he said, when it should have been sent to his agent. This alleged mix-up, he contended, had helped trigger an unpleasant audit then under way. He was extremely freaked out about this audit.
“Someday I will have my revenge,” he said ominously, although it was unclear whether his revenge would be exacted on the IRS, on the Hearst Corporation, or on me.
That summer, David had a residency at a writers’ colony in Marfa, Texas. The purpose of the residency was to get work done on the novel; afterward, he admitted that he didn’t accomplish one thing there and that all he’d done was torture people with his off-key singing and take someone else’s dog on walks.
He said he had been invited by the writer Lewis Hyde to read that fall at Kenyon College (where he would, five years later, deliver “This Is Water”), and it was on that trip when he would read “Incarnations of Burned Children” aloud for the first time.
“People seemed to like it, although I have no clue why,” he reported back. Afterward, “Incarnations” became a staple in the DFW read-aloud repertoire.
Later, he would remark to me that the story was the only good fiction he wrote the whole year.
“I worry that my fiction is good only when I’m using it as a means of seduction,” he said seductively.
Was he actually saying that “Incarnations of Burned Children,” a story about the horror of parenthood and the death of a human soul, was his version of a love story?
DAVID HAD REMARKED THAT AFTER INFINITE JEST WAS PUBLISHED, HE’D temporarily believed that he would never again have any of his work rejected for publication. “Wrong again,” he said. He could feel his students watching him, he said, could feel their eyes on him, could feel them thinking how easy everything was for him. What they didn’t understand was that nothing really ever changes and that everything was still a struggle, but an even worse struggle: “Now everyone’s waiting for me to fuck everything up.”
He was not incorrect. Of course I knew plenty of Wallace fanboys, but I also knew lots of Wallace opponents (both factions = unbearable; unoriginal observation: fanboys were younger than David, opponents were older). The criticism lobbed around most frequently about David’s work then: “too cold,” “too intellectual,” and “ugly.” (I heard “ugly” applied to his work rather often.) His adversaries, wet-lipped and beady-eyed as they were, always brought to mind the rival artist in Sunday in the Park with George, who says of Seurat’s paintings that they’re all mind and no heart, that there’s no life in his art.
It was also true that negative energies seemed ever more on the ascendant in this, the literary world, where, at its least lovable, the worst parts of academia and the worst parts of celebrity culture merged into one hard-to-take package.
It was getting to be just a bit too much sometimes. The competing for slots. The whole who’s-up-who’s-down of it all. The masculine idea of competition. The hell world of the literary star syste
m (it was Esquire’s Literary Universe all over again, all the time). The ranking, sorting, pigeonholing of authors. Who’s in the red-hot center? The heartburn created among the people I knew whenever a new batch of names of the very most exciting youngish writers came out in a magazine. “Everyone is worried that this list is going to be seen as a correction to the last list,” said a writer friend upon the rumors of the latest magazine list, concerned that if he didn’t appear on the new one (he had appeared on the last one), his career would be over. (“The list is life.”) To watch these brilliantly talented—and even occasionally dignified—adults be put through the processing machine. I wanted to tell them not to care too much about the opinions of people who had jobs like mine.
I actually almost sometimes wished that people didn’t care about books anymore, or at least not like this.
Questions: Is there any more tenuous, insecure, and impossible job than a writer’s? Are there ever any judgments more unforgiving than literary judgments? Why do we, or did we (back when we, for better or worse, cared a little more than we do now), insist on evaluating a writer’s career—the career which is the life—so much more ruthlessly than we do other jobs? We don’t say of an engineer, “Obviously, she’s not too bright—she’s never been able to combine quantum physics and general relativity into one unified theory.” Or of a schoolteacher, “Poor thing. He’ll never be Aristotle.” We don’t need our plumber to have won the Most Famous Plumber in the World trophy. But it’s just perfectly fine to dismiss the whole of a writer’s life and career with “His work is not going to survive in fifty years.” The bar for literary achievement is remorselessly high—and so are the stakes.
I was twenty-eight years old. I had been at Esquire for three years. I was still frequently reminded that people would kill (kill me?) for my position. I was still frequently reminded that I had a dream job. But something was happening. I could feel the world changing around me.
The fiction we published was often formidable and important, but my big secret was that I didn’t have much confidence that many people actually read it. People of course still read and even talked about the fiction in The New Yorker, but Esquire? And when I started at the magazine, I would acquire a short story, and it would be published with reasonable promptness. Now it was taking longer to schedule my pieces. I was also having a harder time getting long-form book reviews into the magazine, and there was limited interest at Esquire in most literary critics . . . but the thing was, I must say that I didn’t even disagree with the thinking: it really was starting to seem as if the critic didn’t have all that much to say anymore. Maybe everything was going the way of the star system—a world governed by star ratings. Maybe people no longer believed they needed an authority to tell them what to think, and maybe the culture of expertise was on its way out.
I was a rationalist, a realist (in some ways at least), and I tried to take a pragmatic view: the industry was evolving and budgets were shrinking. What practical value was actually brought to the magazine by my sections? I used to make the hilarious joke that I edited the “Please Don’t Read Me” parts of Esquire—nothing to appeal to advertisers, no celebrities, no boobs, no bespoke suits, no handmade wingtip shoes, nothing newsworthy, nothing crudely relevant.
I still found so much about my job meaningful, but I now worried that it wasn’t enough. I had always found my salvation in great writing, and I got to work with the remarkably talented people who wrote the literature I loved. I’d learned so much from them. Less nobly, I could get anyone on the phone if I wanted to (whether I wanted to is another question), and I could also be useful helping with an emerging writer’s career . . . but that also wasn’t enough. I had a very nice regular table at Aquavit, and I’d been to far too many cocktail parties and dinners. (Whenever I told David about an event I’d attended that he gauged a little too obnoxiously insider-y—meaning: I had an encounter with someone more famous than he—he’d say, “Why, you little shit.”) I will admit that I now knew how it was to think you should be admired at least for getting in the room—whatever room that was. But what did any of it actually mean?
I WENT TO A DINNER FOR THE WRITER JOHN BARTH. THE DINNER WAS A publicity event in the campaign for his new novel, Coming Soon!!!, and its three frenzied exclamation marks. It had been a number of years since his last book, and Barth, then in his seventies, was being “relaunched” as an author, I guess you’d say, reintroduced—or introduced, as the case may have been—to a new generation of book reviewers and book-review editors. In a private room in a restaurant at a downtown hotel came the tapping of a spoon on a water glass. The room quieted down, and Barth’s publisher gave a nice speech about the great man’s virtuosic talent, his titanic stature in the world of avant-garde literary fiction, and his enduring influence—there would be, she said, no David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers without him.
It’s certainly true that Barth was a Wallace forefather, a major influence on him as a very young writer, but David’s maturing view of Barth’s work, as exemplified in David’s weird, convoluted, and extremely boring earlyish novella (written, incidentally, in the late eighties, at a moment of Peak Carver) “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” is ambivalent at best. “Westward” is a direct confrontation with Barth’s famous story “Lost in the Funhouse” and a harangue (sort of—it’s complicated) against the deficiencies and limitations of clever, academic metafiction. John Barth and David Foster Wallace both appear in “Westward” as characters: Barth as the famed writing professor and metafictionist Professor Ambrose (Ambrose is also the name of the protagonist in “Lost in the Funhouse”), and David as two characters—an M.F.A. student (and competitive archer) in Ambrose’s class, who is “hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose’s bald crown,” and as a character in a story (“Dave”) who murders his “neurasthenic,” “mildly wacko” girlfriend. (Nice one, “Dave.”) Or maybe David is three characters, if you also count the intrusive narrator (I said “Westward” was convoluted), but the point is that Barth/Ambrose, though affectionately drawn, served as patriarch in this particular patricide.
The story in Coming Soon!!! has to do with a rivalry between an older avant-garde novelist (character name: Novelist Emeritus, and he looks a lot like John Barth) and a younger novelist (character name: Novelist Aspirant; let’s just think of him as the David Foster Wallace who wrote “Westward”), who wants to reinvent the older man’s first novel (which happens to be Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera) in hypertext. Every sentence of this exhaustingly self-referential book burbles with the terrors of the once king, no longer absolute in his powers, and I will admit that I’ve been trying to read it for nearly twenty years.
The night of the dinner, Barth had on a black beret, worn at a jaunty angle upon his bald crown, and looked just like John Barth. He made the rounds to each table, and when he took a seat at ours, he talked wittily about hot-air balloons, which was just the sort of thing you’d expect John Barth to talk about. As he charmingly held court (unlike a lot of writers, he was very good at talking), I was thinking about how weird it was that John Barth was seated right there, performing for us. (Who were we, relative to him? Who was I?) Here was the novelist emeritus who once stood at the vanguard of American postmodern fiction, a truly innovative artist who had produced an original, hilarious body of work (although in truth a lot of it was also pretty bad), and still it wasn’t enough. Each book is always a starting over, for every writer. I was thinking then about how I had always been so terrified of this line from “Lost in the Funhouse”: “There ought to be a button you could push to end your life absolutely without pain; disappear in a flick, like turning out a light,” because someone who could write that was someone who knew a lot about despair, and I was thinking about how Barth, with his jauntily angled beret perched upon that great big bald crown, was being reintroduced to whippersnappers such as myself, and about how we all become self-parodies in the end, and about how the whole Barth project concerning
the internal problems of narrative in literary fiction maybe didn’t even seem all that pertinent anymore.
Barth wrote a short “review” of Coming Soon!!! for Esquire. At a later date, someone at his publishing house said to me with a weary sigh that his piece in the magazine was the only good review the book got.
More and more often, I’d have an encounter with some veteran publishing professional who seemed to perhaps be nursing some vague cosmic grudge, as if something in life had eluded him—but what? I now understood that there was a huge fatigue risk with these publishing jobs; people would eventually reach a point of burnout—or maybe “malaise” is a better word—and then they would become resistant readers. I was always reminding myself never to become like that, reading suspiciously, my formerly lively mind ground to purest power. (I also had to make sure, no matter what, that I didn’t become one of those ghastly voices who writes in rejection letters, “I found much to admire about his work, but, alas, I’m not the perfect champion for this one. I’m afraid I must step aside, but I’ll be cheering from the sidelines. . . .”)
One of the great things about David: conversations with him about books were always so uncynical. I really needed that in my life. And talking to David about writers and writing—what could have been better? The topic remained, I think, his most consistent source of optimism. Even though he was of course rabidly competitive, and even if he didn’t like the work, he was always on the writer’s side—never on the publisher’s, never on the reviewer’s; for example, you so did not want to say to David about another writer’s “long-anticipated” novel, “Hey, what took him so long?” He’d be sure to scold: “Now you’re sounding like one of them. And you do not want to sound like one of them.”
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