Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  Which was on purpose. As a student, David had been put off by the campus-writer look—creamy eyes, sensitive politics. He called them “the beret guys. Boy, I remember, one reason I still don’t like to call myself a writer is that I don’t ever want to be mistaken for that type of person.”

  Which didn’t prepare you for the company—which was astonishingly ample, gentle, comic, overflowing. It makes sense. Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you’d like to hang out with. Chapters, pages, novels, articles are the next best thing. Even when it’s just a good factual writer, you want to hang around them to get the facts, the way you’d sit next to a brainy kid at a test to copy off their answer sheet. David’s writing self—it’s most pronounced in his essays—was the best friend you’d ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style.

  Mark Costello met David at Amherst. They became friends through the housing lottery. “Dave had figured out all the math for how to get the best room, the best game theory way to do it. Go in with one other person. Ask for a double, because no one else was going to do that. And then we proceeded to draw the worst number in western Massachusetts. We lived in a single that’d been forced into a double, right over the Dumpsters.” The roommates walked the campus; crossing a green, it became the Dave Show. He would grab and imitate how people walked, talked, angled their heads, pictured their lives. “Not to mirror what they did, but to sort of capture them. I can’t think of anybody else I’ve met in my life who could do that,” Costello said. “Incredibly quick, incredibly funny. Dave had this ability to be inside someone else’s skin.”

  The writer Mary Karr dated David in the early 1990s, when he was coming back from the worst period in his life. The ground must have still had a postconvalescent wobbliness underfoot—but there was David, big-booted, pocketing everything, happy, a man on an information safari. “Data went into his mind, and it would just shoot off sparks. Wildly funny, unbelievable wattage, such a massive interest in and curiosity about his place in the world. He had more frames per second than the rest of us, he just never stopped. He was just constantly devouring the universe.”

  This was the time when David began publishing his stuff in Harper’s magazine. When a piece ran, staffers “would be walking in the hallways trading lines,” Charis Conn told me. “Or if people had any conversation with him about any part of it, they would tell each other. It was just the thrill of this writer—everything he had to write and everything he had to say.” Conn, a Harper’s editor and writer, had pulled David into the magazine; when David visited the city, they’d go on rounds, a full-screen version of Amherst Dave. “Him in New York City—that was a show on its own. Sort of gee-whizzing everything, amazed by everything. He was so much smarter than anyone, including you, and yet his attitude was, he was genuinely pleased to be wherever he was, most of the time. If he was with a congenial companion. Amazed and interested in everything. How could he write what he wrote if he wasn’t looking at everything all the time? And you got to be in his senses, so you got to see more. He’s using all six and a half senses at once, which can drive you crazy. But he shared it with us, which was nice of him to do. Talking to him was (a) a delightful social experience, and also a literary experience.”

  Just knowing him could land you in some funny spots, make the world turn Wallace-ish—embarrassing, surprising, alive. When David finished Infinite Jest, he enrolled Conn in a tiny band: product testers, the literary focus group he mailed the manuscript to. She read back-and-forthing to work on the subway. The stack of book, the pile of novel, riding next to her in its own seat. Commuters would look at it, at her, laugh. “It was a spectacle, it was ridiculous. People thought it was funny. I was very proud of it, I loved it. Nobody knew what it was. But it was a nice feeling.”

  David met Jon Franzen in the most natural way for a writer; as a reader, as a fan. He mailed Franzen a nice letter about his first book, Franzen replied, they arranged a meet. And no David. This was right in the middle of the bleak period, when simple calendar stuff turned challenging. “He just flaked,” Jon recalled. “He didn’t show up. That was a fairly substance-filled period in his life.” By the middle part of the ’90s, Franzen found an easy valuation for David’s company: “I would always use any opportunity to hang out with Dave.” In 1995, banging together a big piece on the reasons for writing and reading, Franzen boarded a train for Connecticut and David. “We met in a parking lot and we hung out for about three hours, just sitting on the edge of the parking lot. I kept saying, ‘I need quotes for the piece, I need quotes for the piece!’” It’s nice to imagine them there, these two writers who would someday write famous books, talking for hours among the fast-asleep cars and concrete dividers. What they decided—David proposed it—was that the point of books was to combat loneliness.

  In New York on publishing trips, David bunked with Franzen. This was the just-before-fame moment, when a writer is still picking up his own expenses. “When he used to come stay with me—this was before he got his diet sorted out—as far as I could tell, he subsisted on those cellophane-wrapped Blondies from delis and chewing tobacco. The first thing he did when he got to the apartment would be to select the biggest tomato can from my recycling bag and appropriate it. You know, he was very good about only spitting in the can. And about washing the can out very carefully and putting it back into the recycling. So the apartment would always have this faintly wintergreen smell of the can after he left.”

  Franzen tried, a single time, to haul David to a literary party. They trooped through the front door together; by the time Franzen hit the kitchen, David had vanished. “I went back and proceeded to search the whole place. It turned out he had walked into the bathroom to lose me, then turned on his heels and walked right back out the front door. To my apartment, where I returned an hour and a half later, to find him trading stories that embarrassed me with my then-girlfriend.”

  Meetings and departures were fraught; for one thing, David always had the ability, in conversation, to hear a few extra steps down the hall. David put a great examination of departures—half in text, half marooned on a footnote—in the essay he did about spoken English. Four nights after he died, I pulled out the book and read it over the phone to a friend, to show her how awake and funny David had been. Halfway through I started remembering how unenthusiastic I’d been about getting out of his hair; it wasn’t about me, but it had the queasy feeling of a photo taken before you could pose, suck in the cheek and chin gut. “Suppose you and I are acquaintances,” he writes, “and we’re in my apartment having a conversation, and that at some point I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore. Very delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to handle it: ‘Wow, look at the time’; ‘Could we finish this up later?’; ‘Could you please leave now? ; ‘Go’; ‘Get out’; ‘Get the hell out of here’; ‘Didn’t you say you had to be someplace?’; ‘Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend’; ‘Off you go then, love’; or that sly old telephone-conversation-ender, ‘Well, I’m going to let you go now’ … in real life, I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed … and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight—‘I want to terminate the conversation and have you not be in my apartment anymore’—which evidentially makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic … I’ve actually lost friends this way.”

  When it came to work, he was sharp and modest, with a contractor’s strategic sense of what types of projects he could build well. People who set out to be writers are as glutted with careers and lifetime stats as athletes in training or the people who join fantasy baseball leagues. It’s just that the numbers and ballparks are so much more domestic: age at first publication, age at first award, first marriage,
first crisis, and sometimes age at first, second, or third divorce. (David will make fun of me for memorizing this stuff. Feel free to join in.) When we met, David had the confidence of having just published Infinite Jest, which is the confidence of knowing he’d pushed everything aside and practiced his trade the hardest he could. This is a generous confidence. I kept thinking of what Hemingway wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, before they headed on a train to Rouen to pick up a car. Fitzgerald had just written his best novel:

  He asked questions and told me about writers and publishers and agents and critics [and] the gossip and economics of being a successful writer, and he was cynical and funny and very jolly and charming and endearing, even if you were careful about anyone becoming endearing. He spoke slightingly but without bitterness of everything he had written, and I knew his new book must be very good for him to speak, without bitterness, of the faults of past books. He wanted me to read the new book, The Great Gatsby … To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine …

  A few months after his death, David’s sister Amy wrote me. Interviewers were coming, asking what David was like, but the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias, low points. “My own anxieties are many,” she wrote. “My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky, generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and suffer from depression. There was a lot of happiness in his life. He loved to be silly, he made exquisite fun of himself and others. Part of me still expects to wake up from this, but everywhere I turn is proof that he’s really most sincerely dead. Will he be remembered as a real, living person?”

  That’s the other thing this book would like to be: a record of what David was like, when he was thirty-four and all his cards had turned over good, every one of his ships had sailed back into harbor.

  In February of 1996, I’d been assigned to write about David, I was sitting at a party, when a friend plopped down next to me on the sofa. “Poor David Foster Wallace,” she said. “It’s not his fault, this kind of attention, it’s weird, it can be hard to synthesize unless you’re very strong. Meanwhile, all these relationships are being screwed up by David Foster Wallace.” She flicked her face to people at the compass points of the room. “All these men—because they secretly want to be David Foster Wallace—they flip out whenever he’s in the paper. All the girls are like, ‘David Foster Wallace, he’s really cool.’ So the guys are like, ‘I hate David Foster Wallace.’ Every anxious writer I know is obsessed with him, because he did what they wanted to do.” I shrugged and blinked, to say I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. At thirty, you put lots of faith in misunderstanding and the magic of ignorance: it’s as though admitting to gravity means you’re going to fall, or saying the word “tuberculosis” means immediate fever and a cough.

  In fact, a personal hardship, my own girlfriend had been reading only him, steadily, languorously. One afternoon, she took a cigarette with her to the kitchen to cool off, and I found this e-mail on her computer. She’d sent questions to an editor friend, who’d written back:

  Mr. Wallace is cool-looking. A big hulking guy with long stringy hair. Looks sort of like a rock star. Perspires freely. Wears a do-rag, and participates in the urban American experience thusly. Is unmarried, I believe. What were your other questions?

  Life is the accumulation of flukes. (A passionate belief in the reverse was what I was abandoning at the time I met David. I believed a really good person could make everything in their lives on purpose.) I ended up on this story because Jann Wenner, the vigorous and interesting and fast-acting man who owns the magazine I work for, happened to open The New York Times to a photo of David. In early 1996, David’s picture had become an everywhere fact: the tiny box, the tilted head with bandanna, stubble, long hair. “Oh,” Jann said. “He’s one of us. Send Lipsky.”

  And here’s me—career and ailments. (It’s not that David was immune to the glossy, braggy parts of a writer’s life; he called them the greasy side and had this fear that he’d end up a party fixture, one of the rotating, nonworking famous who horn in on other writers’ photos. I told this to Mark Costello, who laughed: “Yeah, but by then he was sober, so you know you’re knocking out a whole strut from under the literary engine.” He paused, then deadpanned, “And I also don’t know to what degree Dave would like to spend time at events where other people were the centers of attention.”) Actually, just to put that off for a second, let me tell you about my tape recorder. The one I placed on the magazines in David’s living room. When you meet someone for the first time, they mostly seem a perfect ambassador for their job. It’s the impossible remarks that carry and strand a person in specificity. David looked like a young writer having a pretty easy ride of it. To him, I was simply a reporter—whatever snazzy cultural box that opened—with expensive props, and he got a kick out of my repeating especially sharp things he said into the tape. I was a wily, seasoned professional, somebody who’d bagged lots of celebrity game, and had crashed into the Illinois wilds on the hunt for one more.

  Actually, David was only the third famous person I’d ever interviewed, and the first writer. Buying the tape recorder—it cost $320—had made my palms sweat and sent my heart up to my mouth and throat on a brief walking tour. When I met David, I was only twenty-eight months past an almost perfect financial collapse. That was my ailment. It turned out spending time in college, waking up each morning to statues and gardens, had not been especially good preparation for sidewalks and billing statements. Every week our mailboxes got stuffed with fresh offers for Visa and Discover cards, so I came out of college going great guns in the credit world. A classic romance—flashy courtship, accusatory divorce. I lost credit cards, telephone numbers, basic cable channels, apartments. Depositing money into my pocket was like releasing it into a nuclear whirlpool: I’d reach back a second later, and instant disintegration. I stopped carrying a wallet. It seemed nostalgic. ATM visits turned impossibly dramatic. Cruxes: a man meeting his fate. I became the kind of customer who shies away from his on-screen balance, the way good-hearted drivers will avert their eyes from a wreck. This continued to happen for years, until I lost the bank account too. In 1994, I went to apply for a New York lease. I filled in my social security number. I have no idea what flashers and alarm bells this set off. But when I showed up the next morning, the landlord—a big Eastern European, a man building a respectable life on a far-off shore—told me he was controlling himself from wanting to kick my butt. He came and stood very close to me. “Do you know what your credit report looks like?” “No,” I said. “Well, I am not going to tell you.”

  I’d steered by that movie-ish American idea about ambition and arrival: to get to a place, the best route is to live like you’re there already. It’s a magic idea, and it’s also the way a language lab works. Hear and speak French only, eventually your language improves. (It’s also what college preps you for, the columns and rolling grounds; you’d become an Athenian, or you’ll be loaded.) If you think and speak only novels, eventually the world will bookstore around you. Lowering your sights isn’t sensible—it’s bad luck, an invitation to a more general sinking. I’d lived for seven years only like a fiction writer, published two books, and verified absolutely that this approach doesn’t work.

  I got a job at Rolling Stone. And suddenly having money was like stepping out of a storm, shaking the damp from your umbrella in a bright quiet auditorium. All at once, no dark, no wet, no noise. The Lewis-and-Clark, the financial explorer’s sense of your early twenties, when every day and billing cycle is a river forded, pasture mapped, a flag planted, I got to relive it in my late twenties. First bank account, first newspaper home delivery, first credit card (secured). People would guess the best part of journalism was the travel. Not the tray meals or the exchange of skylines. The being included, the knowing that somebody had taken the trouble to book a flight, reserve a car and a hotel bed,
because in the whole world they needed only you to complete the assignment. Every boarding pass—every flight crew, with the hushed smiles and nighttime lighting—felt like an amazingly tactful compliment.

  I recovered from being poor the way you do from a virus: suspiciously, gratefully, not wanting to test my luck. It was such a relief to pay for the bus, to sit down at a restaurant without the menu changing into italics and exclamation points, that for years I didn’t disagree with anything anybody said who could pay me a salary. (Disagreement might return as a possibility in my thirties. No, the late twenties were going to have to be the compliant years.) I rented part of a giant, dusty apartment—long hallways and barn rooms—across the street from the Museum of Natural History. I had a private entrance, my roommates were an old, not terribly well-matched couple called the Bechsteins. The fights were noisy, endless, wrenching. Anna Bechstein, when she watched TV, wanted to be joined at the set by her husband, Arthur. His wish was even smaller, and easier to grant. He wanted to be left alone. She’d moan, “You knew, you knew, how could you, you cheated me of something I could have watched with you. And it was funny!” And I’d take notes. During the day, I’d go hang around the desks and windows and blue-ribbon bathrooms and great jackets and buzz of the magazine, everybody cool and the feel of an interesting future tingling over every head like an upstairs party or the runs of excellent weather you get in California. Then I’d go home and listen to the Bechsteins heartbreakingly argue. I liked to try to imagine the two worlds coming into contact. Jann Wenner, all stubble and glamour, dropping by with a folder I’d left at the office. The four of us meeting in the doorway—Jann, me, Arthur, Anna—and me explaining dreamily, “Jann, these are my roommates. The Bechsteins. They’re married.”