Seven False Starts About the Death of Wallace

1. Now There’s Not
By now you may have heard. David Foster Wallace—author of the splendidly outrageous 3-pound mega-novel Infinite Jest, MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, the most influential and innovative fiction stylist of his generation, the smartest, funniest, strangest, most endearing and (let’s just say it) the greatest writer under 50 in America—killed himself at his Claremont home on Sept. 12. He hung himself. By mid-morning on Sunday the 13th, thousands of his readers were placing disbelieving phone calls, sending disconsolate e-mails (I got one whose subject line said simply, “fuck”), and posting grieving Web site comments to their disbelieving, disconsolate and grieving friends and fellow readers. A recent New York Times piece compared the shock that Wallace’s suicide created among the literary community to how Kurt Cobain’s suicide affected the rock world, and there’s something to that. For many of us—even for those like me who didn’t even know him (I met him once, for five minutes)—his death felt like a fierce personal blow, close to home, family-intimate, and the weeks since have been like stepping through a Kubler-Ross minefield of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, but not yet—not even close—acceptance. I find myself rereading the essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again with the usual sloppy grin on my face—some of them can make you laugh so hard they have literally given my fiancee asthma attacks—only to realize that much of the pleasure his writing has always given me comes from the comforting fact that, until now, there’s always stood a human being somewhere on the other side of that ingenious prose, that someone as sweet, knowing, beguilingly hilarious and drop-dead brilliant as Dave Wallace was somewhere, reliably, on the planet. Now there’s not, and I keep getting blindsided by that knowledge.

2. Two Little Fish Swimming in the Sea

David Foster Wallace, who was found dead at his Claremont home on the evening of Sept. 12, could write like a 16-year-old boy channeling a Nobel Prize winner—Stephen Hawking speaking through Holden Caulfield, a searingly brilliant prodigy attached to a little boy lost. He used schoolboy phraseology like “plus” (instead of “in addition to”) or “stuff like that” (for “any number of other phenomena”), even when he was talking about Wittgenstein’s language philosophy or Georg Cantor’s Contributions to the Theory of the Founding of Finite Numbers. He was the first, to my knowledge, to use the word “toxic” as we do now: not as a narrow synonym for “poisonous,” but as an all-purpose term to describe things that are so offensive, ugly, evil. He’d begin 400-word-long sentences with “And but so when . . . ” as if he were so excited to get to his main complicated point that he couldn’t help but trip over his language to get to it. A sense of vulnerability this ingenuous, combined with an IQ this stratospheric, is really unprecedented in our literature—even Thomas Pynchon doesn’t really compare. What’s more, he wrote about us—Americans living in the “Total Noise,” as he put it, of mass-media immersion, where mass-produced commercial imagery and discourse (from TV, movies, computers, cell phones, video games, all the rest) are so ubiquitous we neither recognize ourselves nor the ubiquity of the noise, and so we’re like the little fish in the joke that began Wallace’s now-famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys. How’s the water?’ And the two fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks at the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’ ”

Wallace gave us new sets of senses to experience the strange postmodern ocean we’re all swimming in—not to mention new gills to breathe. 

3. Best Writer of His Generation Victim of Suicide

David Foster Wallace, often celebrated as the best writer of his generation, was found dead in the backyard patio of his Claremont home on Sept. 12, a victim of an apparent suicide.

His wife, the artist Karen Green, discovered his body at approximately 9:30 p.m. after being away for four hours. According to police and autopsy reports, Wallace hung himself with a black belt that he had nailed to a wooden patio support and then secured around his neck. When his wife found his body, she herself cut the belt from which her husband was hanging. “There was a lawn chair that was knocked over on its side next to the decedent,” according to the report. In addition, “duct tape [was] around both wrists.”

Also according to the autopsy report, the “decedent had a history of depression and two prior suicide attempts,” and two weeks earlier had been prescribed a regimen of Nardil, Klonopin and Restoril to treat depression, panic attacks and sleeplessness. He was found with a tattoo of a heart and the word “Karen” on his upper right arm.

According to his father, philosophy professor James Donald Wallace, Wallace had suffered from acute clinical depression for many years and had been on powerful anti-depressant medications for two decades, drugs that had given him the stability to live and work. When Wallace began to suffer debilitating side effects from the drugs in 2007, he decided to try to get off pharmaceuticals altogether. “Getting off the medication was just catastrophic,” his father said. “Severe depression came back. They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalized twice. Over the summer, he had a series of electroconvulsive therapy treatments which just really left him very shaky and very fragile and unable to sleep.” Normally beefy, the 6-foot-2 Wallace lost nearly 70 pounds and at his death weighed 161. (“The decedent appears thin,” the autopsy report said.)

A suicide note was left at the scene.

To many of his admirers, just as alarming as the facts of his death is the fact that the prolific author of the 1079-page Infinite Jest, along with the long novel The Broom of the System, three hefty books of stories and novellas (Girl With Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion), two books of essays (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster) and an idiosyncratic but technically rigorous monograph on the history of the mathematical concept of infinity, Everything and More, no longer seemed to be able to practice his profession. “I don’t think he’d been able to write for more than a year,” his father said.

Along with his wife and father, Wallace is survived by his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, and a sister, Amy Wallace Havens.

Plus his two dogs.

Memorials were held at Pomona College, where Wallace taught literature and creative writing, at Amherst College, where he attended college, and at New York University. 

4. What Franzen Mentioned

After we heard about Dave Wallace’s suicide, after we made our calls and wrote our e-mails and scoured the Web for any details we could find, after we printed out at least 300 pages of fiction and essays that he never collected in books (all available through the Howling Fantods Web site), and after we stacked his heavy tomes at our bedside and began reading passages to each other, and started to reread Infinite Jest silently in bed, in parallel, and occasionally wondering aloud about some mystery, like “Do you think that maybe not being able to write was the final straw?” or “The first story he ever published, when he was still a kid at Amherst, is entirely about suicidal depression,” and after marveling at DFW’s ability to capture the details of suicidal depression, with which both of us have more than a passing familiarity, and after turning out the lights and holding each other and closing our eyes and having images of what happened in his Claremont home swirl through our minds—this was before the autopsy report came out—and after getting up in the middle of the night to scour more Web sites or read “Good Old Neon,” which is one of those stories that capture so indelibly the details of suicidality; well, after all that, we still didn’t know what to do. My fiancee, Angel, got up one morning, drove to Claremont and just sort of hung out for a little while in front of Wallace’s house, trying to get some feel, something, and for some reason took pictures of the house, including one with two cars—presumably Wallace’s and his wife’s—sitting in their carports like two pairs of slippers beside a bed. And when that didn’t help either, we decided to fly all the way to New York for the memorial service.

It wasn’t closure, but it helped. It was held at NYU’s Skirball Center, right off Washington Square, in the Village, on a brisk autumn afternoon. I brought a tape recorder to record the proceedings, but the sound turned out to be so faint that I wasn’t able to capture much of anything (Harper’s magazine is supposedly going to run a transcript of the afternoon’s talks in a future issue), so I’m just going to give you my impressions:

There were maybe 400 people there, far too few for a writer this important, this beloved. (When a great European writer dies, their funeral processions can trail for kilometers, and prime ministers release statements, and celebratory gedenschrifts abound. Given Wallace’s tortured ambivalence about fame, I’m guessing he would have been both horrified and secretly appreciative of such Eurostyle treatment.) It was a serious and dignified event, and nobody clapped between the speeches. Some of the best writers of Wallace’s generation were present—Mark Costello, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, George Saunders, Zadie Smith—as was Don DeLillo, doubtless the literary grandpappy of DFW’s generation, who gave a short, Olympian speech saying that DFW was a “great writer” whose subjects were “youth and loss,” and who ended his talk by simply calling Wallace’s writing (quintessentially) “American.” Costello, who was DFW’s dorm roommate at Amherst in the early 1980s, recalled Wallace’s 45-minute toothbrushing sessions, his touchingly obsessive attachment to a hoodie his mother had given him, and the hypertrophied, nearly paralyzing sense of self-awareness and self-consciousness that young Wallace gave off, traits that would give DFW both his major subject and account for the hilarious tortuousness of his style. Antrim talked about how Wallace had once talked him through his own suicidal episode. Editors, family members and fellow writers spoke of his sweet tentativeness, the extraordinary sympathy he felt for other people’s pain, the almost impenetrable loneliness he often exuded and the paralyzing pressure he put himself under—all this combined with ironclad and often immovable ideas about exactly how his writing should or should not be edited, an intelligence so high-octane that even very high-powered, disciplined thinkers like Jonathan Franzen were intimidated by him, and a fierce ambition that sought to knock everybody off their feet and write fiction for the ages. At least four of the speakers were crying as they walked offstage. Nobody, except Franzen, mentioned the suicide, perhaps out of deference to the sensibilities of Karen Green, Wallace’s wife (who, passing conversation had it, has been absolutely torn up by it) and his parents, who sat near the front of the stage. Nobody, except Franzen, talked about his anger over the suicide. And only Franzen—not even Zadie Smith or George Saunders, who were wonderfully eloquent about DFW’s work—mentioned what Wallace said American writing in the millennial era should be about: “a way out of loneliness.”

5. About the Note

When David Foster Wallace, the American author notable for prolix gargantuan fictions which mapped in exhaustive fashion contemporary consciousness in all its inbent, spiraling complexities, committed suicide on Sept. 12 at the age of 46, he left a note behind, presumably for his wife Karen Green. One wonders, of course, what the note said. One wonders whether it was long and complicated, as his fiction was, whether it was characterized by the same endless loops of self-consciousness and self-ironizing gestures that one finds in, say, the brilliant stories “Octet” or “Good Old Neon.” One wonders whether DFW was able to find some final thing to say. One wonders whether it held for his wife anything like the solace that Virginia Woolf’s suicide note did for her husband, viz.: “I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that,” etc. One wonders if one is being an asshole to wonder such things. One wonders whether one should be using the pronoun “one” to refer to oneself at a time like this. If it’s pretentious, not to mention impertinent or just really inappropriate, to write so fake-objectively about something that means so much to you. And so but then you stop using “one” and start imitating Wallace’s own voice, which is one of the few ways you can feel connected to him, which it feels so necessary to do, suddenly. And then you start feeling a little stupid about that, too. Because what can help, really, right now?

6. The Munch-Like Screamer Therein

When author David Foster Wallace hung himself in the backyard patio of his Claremont home on Sept. 12, he placed himself in the tragic company of other artists whose work and careers are almost always read, examined, picked apart, in the light of their final acts. Think of Virginia Woolf, of course, and how her throwing herself into a river forced us to read To the Lighthouse, or The Waves, or Mrs. Dalloway. Think of how Hemingway shooting himself makes us read “Indian Camp.” Think of how inevitable the darkening tones of Mark Rothko’s canvases look in light of his suicide. Think of the brittle rage in the lines of Sylvia Plath. The woozy lost-touchedness of Richard Brautigan. The throat-busting wail of Kurt Cobain, the swaggering despairs of Hunter S. Thompson, the I’m-courting-looniness of Spaulding Gray. It’s impossible now to look at the staggering range of Wallace’s output—from his first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” through the latest essays in Consider the Lobster—without hearing the Munch-like screamer therein.

7. A Way Out of Loneliness

“The intense concentration of self in such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

What I loved most about the work of David Foster Wallace, who hung himself in the backyard of his Claremont home on Sept. 12, ending a life that by all accounts had become physically and psychically unendurable but which had produced at least one viable stab at the Great American Novel (Infinite Jest), a book of non-fiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing) that re-vivified the first-person journalistic essay, and a group of novellas and short stories that took American fiction a few miles closer to its own particular heart of darkness, was that he brought a new excitement about the possibilities of language back to American letters and inspired a whole new generation to turn to writing—not to film, not to TV, not to rock or hip-hop or whatever artistic forms the Internet was inventing—as its central form of expression. (We wouldn’t have Dave Eggers or his spawn—McSweeney’s, The Believer, etc.—without him, and his stamp is on everything from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections to Scott Douglas’s recent Quiet Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian.) He made prose fiction “where it’s at,” gave language back its pride of place in a world whose artists were more and more given over to sound and images. The excitement he generated with Infinite Jest in 1996 was similar to what Hemingway created with The Sun Also Rises or what Dylan Thomas gave American readers after World War II with “Fern Hill” or “Do Not Go Gentle…”: people read it and thought, “Oh my God, I didn’t know art could do this, could get this close to what it feels and means to be alive today.”

He created that excitement by giving us “the intense concentration of self in such a heartless immensity” that Melville talked about in Moby Dick. Now the heartless immensity, these days, is Total Noise culture, or, as DFW put it, “a culture and volume of info. and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value.” It’s a culture so commercialized, bureaucratized, advertised, media-tized, so addicted to entertainment, success, and good old drugs and pharmaceuticals that the sound of the witheringly alone self is like the squeak of a broken toy beneath a garbage dump. Yet Wallace gives that squeak the intense concentration of his talent, and gives us back representations of human beings who are laden with the seriocomic struggles of solitary characters trying to hear the redeeming little squeak of self under the garbage, and trying to connect desperately with other squeaking selves. The intense concentration of self in the heartless immensity. Who can tell it? Dave Wallace could. He told it, he did, and in doing so, he gave the private despairs and awful solitudes of Total Noise culture a public voice and thus showed us a way out of loneliness.

Not his—it is heartbreaking to say—but ours.

And plus he was funny doing it.

R.I.P.D.F.W.