David Foster Wallace speaks to us from beyond the grave in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—but should we be listening?
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As I’m sure you know, David Foster Wallace, a writer celebrated by many as our generation’s very own, true, certifiable literary genius—of a kind America had not been able to credibly boast for a very long time—hanged himself in his home in Claremont, California, in September of 2008.
In April of 2009, Little, Brown published This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life a transcript of Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It’s a good speech that expresses an invaluable sentiment about selfless living. It is approximately 94 sentences long and was—until recently—available online, for free. The book contains 144 pages and lists for $14.99. You do the math.
In April, 2011, LB will publish the Wallace’s unfinished last novel, The Pale King, the early excerpts of which are, in my opinion, staggeringly good. For this I am thankful to Michael Pietsch and Little, Brown, and to Wallace himself, who apparently prepped the unfinished manuscript for mailing before leaving this world behind.
Now, too, you may go out and purchase Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—another transcript, this of an extended interview with Wallace that Rolling Stone assigned to writer David Lipsky in 1996, during the final days of the book tour for Wallace’s juggernaut second novel, Infinite Jest. Though they killed the original feature story, a retooled version of the interview finally ran in RS in 2009, on the occasion of Wallace’s death. The raw ore of the transcript is left more or less unrefined by Lipsky in Although of Course, and though I bought it on sight—in my haste thinking it was a formal biography—I now can’t help but wonder, “Do we really need this?”
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It seems inevitable that some people will purchase Although of Course in search of clues as to Wallace’s final motivations. Wallace, who died at 46, was more than a decade younger when the interview was conducted. Can a 34-year old writer who still teaches at a state college in Illinois, and whose new 1100-page monster has just hit the shelves, and a 46-year old cultural icon even be considered the same person? Is there anything but sentimental value to be found in the faded portrait of an author, one that may no longer be germane? The answer is yeah. But not for the reasons you might think.
There is a contingent that will suggest the entirety of this posthumous release is opportunistic, in bad taste, simply gross. Part of that argument rests on the fact that some of these publications are not author-sanctioned. It’s the squeaky little voice of conscience that struggles to make itself heard over the din of necrophilia that erupts whenever someone famous dies tragically. We heard it trail after Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith. But the question of whether or not any of this is in good taste is really pretty uninteresting to me. Celebrity is an intrinsically morbid phenomenon. It lusts to be the agent of death, and then picks the bones clean in self-congratulation when it succeeds. The Bacchante tore Orpheus to pieces and, in some stories, ate the pieces, after all. What reasonable expectation should an author have of controlling his body of work from beyond the grave? Moreover, is it reasonable to believe that the things one meant to suppress were well-enough hidden that they’ll be any surprise once they come to light?
Let’s be honest. What we’re talking about here is a person’s right to manipulate how others see them, something Wallace apparently struggled with every day of his life, if his writing and interviews are any indication. It’s an inalienable right, but one that depends entirely on our ability to outwit our audience—and so it’s a right that one inevitably loses in death. Death is nothing if not the ultimate loss of control.
If it’s condescending for us to appoint ourselves the stewards of a dead man’s memory, it’s also kind of superstitious. It suggests that we believe the author can see us from his cloud somewhere, that he can disapprove of all the hideous things we’re attaching to his memory. Concerns about posthumously released work should center around the living—not the dead.
And so rather than ask whether Wallace would have approved, a more important question we might ask, especially as more of his work comes to light, is: “Is this good for us?”
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I’ve written about the occasion of David Foster Wallace’s death before. At the time, I consciously avoided discussing his suicide for two very specific reasons. The first was that I could imagine how horrible it was for those who actually knew and loved him, to stomach the glut of interpretation. The second is that I have an aversion to the interpretation of suicide altogether.
Any suicide has two meanings: that which the deceased understands, and which he takes to the grave; and that put together by those left behind, a fairy tale written by the living to try to understand their loss. But the reasons we might speculate for why a person has taken their own life have less to do with the truth of their choice than with our attempts to make ourselves relevant to that choice—because suicide is a death that suggests we were, in fact, irrelevant in the face of some ineffable sorrow.
For the people who experience suicide first-hand, this making of meaning is utterly necessary. In the case of celebrity suicide, it’s an impulse taken up and easily perverted by the public, who grieve earnestly but ignorantly and very often selfishly.
For instance, when I learned (via text message) that Wallace had killed himself, I felt a tiny flutter of validation under my immediate horror and grief: “This proves his genius.” Now the media have turned that whisper into a shout. Read any of the profiles occasioned by his death, or any number of the reviews of Lipsky’s book, and what you will find are otherwise sober biographers unable to resist the impulse to equate Wallace’s suicide with his genius. It’s almost as if we are trying to include Wallace’s death in his body of work, as if we want to believe it was some kind of message we can understand. Wallace was profound, incisive, sui generis. We want his death to be those things, too.
It isn’t. It can’t be.
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The great strength of Lipsky’s book is that it is unedited. Reading Although of Course, my initial disappointment gave way to a deep appreciation. By letting Wallace speak uncensored—or, more specifically, by denying the 34 year old the right to edit himself—Lipsky has given us what we urgently need in the wake of Wallace’s suicide, if only we will let ourselves acknowledge it: a picture of an inconsistent, flawed human being.
Wallace’s brilliance is available on-demand. Although much is made in reviews of Lipsky’s book of Wallace’s reluctance to sit for interviews, a wealth of such material has been accessible through the fansite The Howling Fantods for nearly as long as Lipsky’s has languished unread. And to answer my own question about the continuity of Wallaces over time: In my opinion, the material offered online shows a consistent and insightful worldview throughout his career.
That continuity is almost precisely the problem: To look at these interviews, one might assume that David Foster Wallace was incapable of anything but profundity. It adds to the temptation to appropriate his suicide for petty intellectual exercise. What Lipsky offers instead is a young man with a crush on Alanis Morrisette; who intellectualizes this crush in a way that might be familiar to the similarly overeducated; who does not seem particularly annoyed by dog shit on his carpet; who speaks in a jangling, clipped drawl that a merciless Lipsky represents orthographically to the point of irritating the reader; who jokes in far too convincing a way for far too long about his disappointment that Infinite Jest is not yet getting him laid.
None of this is done out of malice. One feels a genuine love at the heart of Lipsky’s literary photograph. He showcases a young, expansive mind at work that was, at times, small and even a little creepy in ways that we could all recognize if we would only admit our own, similar failings, if we would only allow our geniuses the inconsistencies of being that we suffer every day.
You can choose. Wallace’s suicide can stand on its own as the last, tragic act of a medically depressed man who was, in that moment, fleeing pain and incapable of rational thought. Or you can choose to make his final act the antithesis of a career that championed selflessness, sacrifice, and humility. You can choose to insist it was the author that took his own life and not the man, and, in so doing, leave yourself with the unanswerable question of that contradiction, and of the ultimate value of his work in light of it.
A friend of mine says this essay ends abruptly, that it doesn’t give a satisfying sense of completion or meaning when all is said and done. That it doesn’t offer consolation.
Okay.
16 responses
Thoughtfully and eloquently done, Tye. Thanks for this.
I enjoyed your piece…even like the ending. I think of it this way: DFW was a genius AND he killed himself (not BUT he killed himself or SO he killed himself). And, anyhow, the genius part is largely for public consumption. To his family and close friends I’m sure they think of him in a more humane way. Genius is a label, impersonal, something for the onlookers like most of us.
Just yesterday, I was helping to organize the apartment of friend who committed suicide in the same manner as Wallace. Ulysses, an issue of the Believer, and Infinite Jest were his bedside reading material. It’s hard not to try ascribe some meaning to it, to add it to our little fractured tale about our friend’s death.
He was no person of public standing, although many of us considered him a comic genius – always able to deliver laughter. His laughter might be what stays in my memory the longest, but there’s little else except photos, and words of friends, to have any chance of knowing anything about him – the countless stories of his selflessness, sacrifice and humility.
I know what my choice is for my friend. But it also offers no consolation.
Thanks for the essay…
Art + Illness = Illness
The choice of book title to include “End Up”–purposely retroactively portentous?
I read the Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water” soon after Wallace’s death and thought it talked about his depression, the clues to his future tragedy were there. But of course I read it with the knowledge of his death fresh in my own mind. The sadness apparent in the Kenyon commencement speech overshadowed any “invaluable sentiment about selfless living.” I will probably read Lipsky’s book but not yet. It’s too soon for me.
Dan S. Here’s a quote that might interest you: “When two illnesses arrive at the same time, the stronger silences the weaker.” —Hippocrates
I think of artists as acting on their compulsions, which is defined in our society–via the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders–as a disease. I don’t agree with this idea myself, loving artists for indulging in this way that can delight the rest of us indulging in less worthy compulsions. Artists are rightly excused from chopping wood and hauling it because they can create art–or at least some artists receive this dispensation from life’s other requirements.
The book is, among many other things, an invaluable record of a genius writer talking at great length about art/literature/film, and what he believed they were capable of and should aspire to. Despite Lipsky’s sometimes inane, bathetic attempt to psychoanalyze Wallace, the book is a wonderful record.
Maybe, in fact, in part, because of this.
Lipsky’s raw transcription offers people who didn’t know Wallace personally the chance to see him struggling to express himself and feel understood and navigate complicated social and personal dynamics. In the process, he says a lot of interesting, moving, insightful and even inspiring stuff. I’m terribly grateful to everyone who made it possible for this conversation to be made public. I feel like a privileged listener, and I have no doubt that its usefulness and meaning will vary widely among interested readers.
Talking to Lipsky, Wallace clarifies the year he imagines Infinite Jest is set: 2009, a year when he hoped his own kids would be roughly coming of age. I gave my 17-year-old son Infinite Jest in 2008, on a hunch. It became his favorite book. He read it out loud to his girlfriend during 2009, a tough year of his transition to college. Lipsky’s book gives my son access to some of Wallace’s gut-wrenching personal/artistic turmoil, which feels very close to his own as a musician, and guess what? He feels less alone. Given Wallace’s own obsession with the particular 21st-century quality of feeling alone, including his own tendency to feel isolated, as well as his desire to write books that would make a difference in people’s lives, I only regret that he’s not around to receive an ordinary fan letter from me, thanking him for all he has done to keep my son company through many dark times.
At risk of devolving this (excellent) conversation back into the suicide speculation that Tye warns us about, I think it’s worth mentioning this: treating DFW’s art and his misery as separate entities to reconcile is not quite on target. One never really won out over the other; in fact, they nourished each other.
Example: They say DFW was never more miserable than when he was writing. Yet, when he wrote about misery (try reading “The Depressed Person” from “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” in one sitting), it was some of the most powerful stuff he could summon.
So rather than proposing the equation “Art + Illness = Illness,” maybe we should have something like “Art + Illness = Art via Illness.”
Or maybe it’s just “Art+Illness=Art.”
Interesting piece, Tye. Yep to the ugly impulse. I think my second thought, horribly, was “Did he leave a note?”
Two “pieces” come to mind that challenge that temptation to anneal DFW’s death (and life) to his work. One is D. T. Max’s “The Unfinished” in the New Yorker, which, if anything, highlights the extent to which DFW’s death seems horribly contingent—a product of the ups and downs of going off Nardil and trying other antidepressants. Anybody who’s had their neurochemistry experimented with knows how violent and acute those episodes can be, and how distant they can seem when you’re on the other side of them. In this account, his suicide pretty forcefully doesn’t “mean,” and the way it characterizes DFW’s experience of himself on antidepressants nicely encapsulates the conundrum of adjudicating “medicated genius.”
The other refreshing lapse in profundity (in my opinion) is his old interview with Charlie Rose, where he’s uncomfortable and self-conscious and declares and re-declares his concerns about how he’s coming across. He’s incurably meta in a human and not-so-attractive way. Whereupon Charlie gets all Whitmanesque on him:
DFW: “I’m gonna look pretentious talking about this.â€
Charlie: “Quit worrying about how you’re going to look! Just be!â€
DFW: “You confront your own vanity when you’re going on TV.â€
Not so much deep as flatly true, I think. And interesting to see him feel it.
Ha! Am a moron for not realizing that’s exactly the article you’re talking about. Apologies for the public brain-flatulence–we’re all assholes some of the time, and that’s what I am for not clicking on all the links. I will say I’ve seen more egregious examples in the same vein. Sigh.
thanks for writing this.
i am trying to practice selflessness, sacrifice and humility and failing at every turn. haven’t figured out what art+illness means for me yet.
DFW meant a lot to me and so do the people who honor him. lots of love to all of you
Great piece.
When DFW died, I didn’t know what I was dreading more: The instant, strident lionization that was in motion before the body was cold, or the crass commercialistic bone-picking that was surely to follow on its heels. Whether you truly think DFW was a genius or, like me, find him generally overrated (The Broom of the System is almost unreadable to me, and Infinite Jest is an impenetrable, bloated opus of self-indulgence), his suicide–like all suicides–needs to be seen without romantic revision. He was ill. He suffered. Apparently, he suffered enough that death was preferable. This doesn’t make him a genius, it makes him human. The genius part you can figure out for yourself.
The actual quote from the Charlie Rose interview goes –
DFW: Well I’m just going to look pretentious talking about this. It’s—
CR: Why’re you—quit worrying about how you’re gonna look and just be.
DFW: I have got news for you. Coming on a television show stimulates your what-am-I-gonna-look-like gland like no other experience.
Vicki, Byard, amy, et. al. –
Thank you for helping me think through the pithy statement:
Art + Illness = Illness
One of the questions each of us faces when we begin to “do art” is the state of our mental health. On the one hand, we may recognize that few seem to share our particular compulsion. On the other hand, we might wonder if we’re sufficiently unhinged to do great work, given the amount of eccentricity apparent in so many of those we admire.
So we ask ourselves: would drugs mimic insanity closely enough that I could make good art? Or, conversely, would commercial pharmaceuticals so distance me from the core of my neuroses that I will no longer feel that “muse?” Was my childhood sufficiently dysfunctional? Shall I sabotage another relationship to create the inspirational pain that apparently motivated my last successful art activity? Is being chronically disorganized and irresponsible just part of the whole artistic syndrome with which I surround myself?
The idea that good art is created through or inspired by illness leads me to two thoughts.
1) Simply because a “crazy” person might make good art does not mean that the good art comes from craziness, or that all who make art are crazy. I’m going to speculate that the distribution of neuroses and psychoses within the artistic community is about the same as in the non-artistic community, the apparent difference being largely the result of differential access to the medium through which one’s mental states can be exhibited for public consumption.
2) Reducing art to mental illness trivializes both art and mental illness. As anyone who has given it a serious run knows, this art shit is hard. Certainly, the occasional savant might appear, and he or she might have a healthy serving of unhealthiness to boot. But the number of savants making good art pales in comparison to the number of people who buckle down and get it done through work, practice, and the ambition to fulfill their particular vision. And, I assume, likewise, that there is a percentage of folks whose mental or organic imbalances prevent them from working at their best.
This memoir shows clearly, repeatedly, that DFW felt his best and worked at his best when he kept his demons at bay. He professes to working really really hard at his craft. But more than that, he described how he worked hard at his awareness of himself. He dug until he found his weaknesses (“I am smarter that others,” “I’m not doing this for art sake but for self-glorification,” etc.), and then held his work up to the light of these weaknesses: “Am I doing this to satisfy this completely non-artistic concern of mine?”
Through this process of self-discovery he found that he could not do his best work while he was sick, or doing things that made him feel sick. Mental illness did not inspire or drive his art, but had to be kept at bay to make it possible for him to work. When this became impossible, illness — not art — got the win.
Tye, I was very glad to hear your thoughts on this book. I approached Although Of Course with the same trepidation I had for Infinite Jest: a sort of who-the-hell-does-he(take your pick of antecedents/Davids)-think-he-is). But then found myself with the same reaction as well: a pretty deep affection for works both satisfyingly complex and surprisingly compassionate. Flaws and all, and in spite of myself, I found both worth my time and meant to be reread.
Your point about our right to edit ourselves and our nod to him up on the cloud reserved for favorite authors is a very, very good one. I kept feeling guilty for reading/spending money on such a “memento” even as I devoured it and hoped it would be more than that. Aside from the occasional cringe from moments in the book where Lipsky 1) psychoanalyzes Wallace or, worse, 2) leaves in something Wallace obviously (and at the time) requested not be included (and leaves, along with them, his request)(tacky!), I found it to be as kind and engaging as a conversation with my own close friends and a refreshing alternative to all the posthumous mythologizing.
Thanks for this piece!
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