Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubTHE EDITOR’S DESK: Unfinished Notes On David Foster Wallace
I just finished “The Unfinished,” D.T. Max’ fantastic posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace. The article was so sad, but also profound. “His goal,” Max writes, “had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled and meaningful life.” It was also Wallace’s goal to lead that kind of life. But it was elusive. Wallace was engaged intimately with the question of meaning.
Some brief notes:
Wallace had been taking Nardil, an antidepressant, since college. “He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant.” To me, this is among the more important modern questions. Are we distant, or is it the drugs? We have no control group. We need clones to live our lives for us without pills so we can look at them and see if we were more or less, and what the trade-offs were.
The Broom of The System was published while Wallace was in the second year of an MFA program at the University of Arizona. “The day after he handed out copies of Broom he was upset to find one at the secondhand bookstore.” I’ve had this experience twice, both times with my novel What It Means To Love You, which I had inscribed to friends whose copies found their way into used bookstores.
Max also covers the disappointment Wallace felt when Girl with Curious Hair came out in August, 1989, to mixed reviews and little attention. “He thought he’d written a better book than Broom and then the publication was this big fat zero.” Almost every writer I know goes through this. You spend years on a book and nobody 
reads it. You lie to yourself, say it’s enough just to be published. But it isn’t. Because the book comes out and it doesn’t get reviewed, and it doesn’t sell. The honest writer knows that there are better books out there. Why would someone read their imperfect first novel or “really good” story collection when that person hasn’t read 1984 yet, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The White Album, Valencia, Catch-22, etc. There are very few books that demand to be on the top of the pile. So many writers become so resentful. All they see is the more undeserving books, i.e. The Nanny Diaries, that make some author millions of dollars. It’s never a question of admitting your book isn’t as good as On The Road. Instead the author asks, “Why is that other crappy book having more success than my ‘Really Good’ book?” I don’t think I’ve ever known an author who was happier after her book came out than before. I’m not referring to Wallace here. Wallace actually did write books that belonged on the top of the pile. Books that were unique to their time, generous, heavy with genius. Infinite Jest is many people’s favorite book, the ultimate goal of the serious writer. Consider The Lobster is my personal favorite non-fiction collection.
Referring to a time when the writing was going well, “I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later there’d be this mess of filled up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well fucked and well blessed.”
I’m in love with Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr. He tattooed her name on his arm inside a heart. They split up. “One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was ‘the brokenness.’” Later, when Wallace meets his wife, he puts a line through Karr’s name and an asterisk and has his wife’s name tattooed further down, like a footnote.
Regarding Infinite Jest Wallace was uncomfortable with some of the attention. He wrote to Don DeLillo, he had, “tried my best best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the ‘hype’ around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype.”
From a letter to Wallace from DeLillo: “Some writers may have to do 2, 3 books, say in midcareer, before they remember that writing can be fun.”
To DeLillo, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does.”
Toward the end of the profile Max quotes an early short story, “The Planet Trillaphon,” that Wallace wrote while still in college, about a character on antidepressants. “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old earth.”
**
More from The Rumpus on David Foster Wallace
March 9th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I loved this article too. The brokenness of his desk and his heart stood out, but so did the way he tidied up his final manuscript, knowing Green would find it.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Every article on Wallace just makes me angrier and angrier at the psychiatric profession. Every creative person who suffers from depression and has to go on medication deals with the things that Wallace dealt with, yet few psychiatrists and psychologists know how to help with these issues. I respect Wallace’s decision to go off his meds, but he should have had much more professional support. Actually, I have no idea how much professional support he had, but whatever it was was inadequate.
In many ways Wallace, and his fans, were very lucky that he found medication that worked well enough so early in his life. Without it, we probably would not have had any of these incredible books.
I’m sorry this guy suffered so much when he gave so much joy to so many readers.
March 10th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Marie – I’m a psychotherapist with an undergraduate degree in English, equally passionate about literature and therapy. There are so many unanswered questions, so little has been revealed about this aspect of David’s death, that I have to believe/hope that the family is litigating like mad. There are a lot of questions: why was David on Nardil (a very old and difficult medication, albeit for a *few* people the only effective one) for so many years? How much did he use other substances? How many times was he hospitalized over the years and, especially in 2008? How much consultation did his mental health team do with other professionals?
This is not to say that anything treatment would have been successful. It’s also not to say that people don’t have a right to end their lives. However, aside from “First, do no harm…,” one of the first tenents of psychiatric care is that safety *always* trumps Dr./patient privilege. Those caring for David had every obligation to keep him hospitalized and upon release implement a precise plan for managing his illness.
The psychiatric profession in general has grown in ways that I could never have imagined 20 years ago when I did my training. There are psychopharmacologists who practically create chemical poetry in some patients, who can stop psychosis in its tracks, can restore those who would have been in asylums forever in the past. The vast array of medications and talk therapies now is revolutionary and will affect artists in ways we can’t see. Yet.
March 11th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I’m your control group–a Gen X artist not on any meds. What’s the effect? The main things seems to be I don’t like Radiohead.
Also, a note on Nardil–apparently it stops you from dreaming.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:31 am
I hope you never get on any meds. Your art is perfect.