MALE SPEAKER: Thanks, everyone,
for coming.
It's my pleasure to introduce DT
Max today to talk about, in
my opinion, one of the best
writers of the generation,
David Foster Wallace, who as
you presumably know is the
author of "Infinite Jest," "The
Broom of the System,"
"Oblivion," "A Supposedly
Wonderful Thing I'll Never Do
Again," a handful of other
somewhat seminal works of the
late 20th century.
It would be a bit of a Herculean
task to document his
life in such an enthusiastic
and exhaustively researched
fashion, but I think, as Dave
Eggers, put it, we should feel
grateful that this story was
told by someone as talented
and as responsible as D.
T. Max, which I agree.
So, ladies and gentlemen,
DT Max.
DT MAX: Thanks very much, Chris,
and thanks to Google
for bringing me here, actually
just from Stanford, where I
have a fellowship this week.
Can everybody hear OK?
We're all good on that front?
So I don't know how much you
all know about David Foster
Wallace, but I'm going to work
on the basis that you at least
know something if you're here,
because there's lots of other
places that you could also
be at this hour.
And I'm aware that we have
exactly one hour--
is that right--
and that you all will begin to
sort of bleed away at five of
for your next place
you have to be.
So, Wallace, author of Infinite
Jest as Chris said--
brilliant, brilliant,
brilliant novelist.
I'm going to read you a short
section from the book, and I'm
going to do that just so you
get sort of a sense of my
approach to biography, which
is maybe a little bit
different than what
you might expect.
And this section I'm going to
read to you is from when David
is 29 years old and he's not yet
the world famous author of
Infinite Jest.
He's, in fact, the kind of
beaten up, tired, and
exhausted kind of failed
graduate student in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
What happens is that David, he
grows up in the Midwest in
Champaign Urbana.
His father is a professor of
philosophy, his mother is a
really, really, really over
qualified teacher at Parkland
Community College.
She's an English teacher.
English is a foreign language,
I think, primarily.
But she is certainly as big a
talent as David's father was,
just in a smaller stage.
And David is pretty easily and
pretty quickly noticed in
Urbana as one of the
smarter kids
around, but not the smartest.
He does not graduate at
the top of his class.
In fact, he grows smarter
and smarter,
and he goes to college.
He goes to Amherst where
his father went.
And David begins to have both
enormous academic success and
enormous emotional problems
sort of at the same time.
I suppose most of you probably
know that David committed
suicide in 2008.
He had a lifelong depression,
which was treated successfully
for part of his life.
And at the very end of his
life, because he wasn't
writing well anymore, he decided
to go off of the
antidepressant that he'd been on
for about 20 years, and was
never able to kind
of restabilize.
Treating depression is, in a lot
of ways, I think, more an
art than a science.
But that's all later.
Right now, David has published
an early work, which Chris
says is the only book of
Wallace's he has not read
called "Broom of the System."
That's David's first novel,
which I absolutely adore, so
we'll have to quarrel over
that afterward with
the cameras off.
Then he writes a book called
"Girl with Curious Hair,"
which is absolutely fascinating,
almost academic
approach to postmodernist
fiction, an
attempt understand why--
well, what postmodernist
fiction is is
the fiction of Pynchon.
You guys have this extreme
reading thing going on?
A lot of your extreme reading
type people--
[INAUDIBLE]
and Pynchon and your Richard
Powers and John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
Anyway, David has an enormous
success with that first book
when he's still in
graduate school.
And the second book does
nothing at all.
It basically completely
disappears.
It throws David into a crisis,
because the only thing that
worries David Foster Wallace
more than success is failure.
And so David winds up--
really, partially for self
medication and partially, I
think, because he's so
disappointed in what's going
on with his writing--
becoming both an
alcoholic and a pot addict.
He's only been a pot addict
since high school, really, and
it's essentially a form of self
medication, I would say.
But he winds up unable
to write anymore.
He's written the second book
and the second book is
brilliant, but it also
sort of closes--
it's hard to explain--
all the possible doors
in fiction for him.
David feels he's written the
last thing he needs to write.
So at the age of 29,
unfortunately, he's a writer
who no longer has anything
he wants to write.
It's a very uncomfortable
position.
And he decides to
change careers.
And being the smartest guy in
any room, he decides he's
going to become a philosophy
professor, but
he's going to Harvard.
Even though he's been out of
school for like seven or eight
years, or at least out of
undergraduate life, he's going
to go and be a philosophy
professor.
And he goes to Harvard.
And Harvard philosophy classes
are like boot camp.
I mean, graduate school there is
as difficult as med school.
And David is no longer a guy
with the focus, and this is a
guy who is both an addict
and a writer-- two lousy
preparations for graduate
school, if you ask me.
I don't know which
one is worse.
And so poor David lasts
all of three weeks.
And being a very smart guy--
all this book comes out of
originally a "New Yorker"
piece I wrote shortly after
David's death in 2008.
And at that time, I had thought
that David had--
basically, he goes to the
Harvard Health Services and
announces that he's thinking
of committing suicide.
I mean, he had tried to commit
suicide earlier.
It was a very credible threat.
And at that point, it activates
a series of
protocols and David is whisked
away from Harvard to McLean
Psychiatric Hospital, which is a
Harvard associated facility.
And I kid you not, if David
had to go to a psychiatric
facility, it had
to be Harvard.
He would accept nothing
but the best.
And so he goes in and of course,
of three days from
being a Harvard philosophy
student-- a failed Harvard
philosophy student, really--
to a resident of McLean,
where he dries out.
And after about a month at
McLean, he's fully expecting
to go back and be a Harvard
philosophy student, because
it's all Harvard, right?
It's like, why not?
But it turns out they're not
going to let him go back--
that if he's serious about
kicking his addiction, he's
got to go to a halfway house.
And a halfway house is basically
a facility--
they're strange facilities.
They're usually paid
for by the state,
sometimes by insurance.
But the main goal there is to
achieve a mindset where when
you go back out in the world,
you're no longer an addict.
So David winds up at a halfway
house called Granada House,
and that's what I'm going
to read you from.
And since there seems to be no
flat surface here, I"m going
to put this over here.
That won't work.
All right.
So here we are--
David's 28, he's a failed
author, he doesn't know what
to write anymore, and he
goes to a very, very
rough halfway house.
Anyone who has read "Infinite
Jest" will recognize
immediately the halfway house
is fictionalized.
It really takes up almost
half of "Infinite Jest."
Let me check the time.
All right-- we're good.
Grenada House was on the grounds
of the Brighton Marine
Hospital, near the Massachusetts
Turnpike.
Wallace found it funny that
a Marine hospital would be
nowhere near water.
The compound consisted
of seven buildings--
seven moons orbiting a dead
planet, as he would later
describe it in "Infinite Jest",
all leased to various
substance abuse groups.
Wallace met Deb Larson,
the director, at his
new temporary home.
Tall and blonde, she
walked with a limp.
Drunk, she had fallen in her
kitchen, hitting her head,
causing a partial paralysis.
Even then, she hadn't
stopped drinking.
Wallace respected and liked
her immediately.
She was pretty and smart, and
gave him a link to an old life
that was still his present.
You could almost see Harvard
from the top
floor of the building.
And it's true.
I've been to where--
the halfway house has moved, but
if you go to the halfway
house, it is really just across
the Charles River from
everything that David
held dear.
And you sense how bizarre it
would be for him to have sort
of gone from one to the
other in a month.
Recovery facilities tried to
control the stress levels of
their participants, and one
activity that they generally
prohibited was school.
Wallace had no choice but to
call the philosophy department
at Harvard and ask for
a leave of absence.
He was too humiliated to go
back and get the vegetable
juicer, a gift from his mother,
that he had left
behind in the department
office.
Now he was expected to
find low level work.
Wallace, whose only experience
was essentially teaching and
writing, cast around and was
able, probably thanks to the
presence of the head of Amherst
College Security on
his resume, to get hired as a
guard at Lotus Development, a
large software company.
Anyone remember Lotus?
Lotus people?
OK.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Granada House rules stipulated
a 40 hour work week, so
Wallace got up at 4:30 in the
morning to take the Green Line
and worked until 2:00 PM,
walking a vast disk packaging
plant in Lechmere, clocking in
his whereabouts every 10
minutes and twirling his baton,
or so he later said.
Actually I don't think David
ever did this, but it's in the
letters he wrote.
What I think he actually did,
because there are other
letters that he wrote,
which I was given--
I think what he actually is sat
in a chair and watched a
video monitor, just like every
other security guard that
you've ever seen.
But for David, it was all about
sort of fictionalizing
the experience, as
you'll find out.
And for him, it was far more
kind of appealing that he
would be a character out of,
really, a Keystone Cops movie,
twirling his baton and punching
in the clock, but I
don't think he did it.
He would tear pages out of his
notebook and send letters to
his friends, maintaining contact
with a small group of
editors and writers who
were vital to him.
The Lotus experience, he
recalled in a later interview,
reminded him of every
bad '60s novel
about meaningless authority.
You guys are reading
"Catch-22,"
right, in this group?
So there's your--
not a bad situation.
Anyway, you get the idea.
But at the time, he bore
it exceptionally well.
Give me a little time to get
used to no recreational
materials, and wearing a
polyester uniform, and living
with four tattooed ex-cons, and
I'll be right as rain, he
wrote a friend with ironic
brio shortly after.
But in his heart,
he was stunned.
I am, he wrote one of his
Amherst professors, OK, though
very humiliated and confused.
He was sharing a barracks-like
room with four men, one of
whom, he wrote, Rich C., had had
a stroke while on cocaine
and had a withered right side.
Mr. Howard, he
Told his editor at WW Norton,
the book publisher, everyone
here has a tattoo or a criminal
record or both.
To his professor, he reported,
most of the guys in the house
are inmates on release.
And while they're basically
decent folk, it's just not a
crowd I'm much at home with.
Heavy metal music, black
t-shirts and Harleys, vivid
tattoos, discussion of hard
versus soft time, parole
boards, gunshot wounds, and
Walpole, Massachusetts
toughest prison.
One of my examples of the fact
that David was always a
writer, even in this moment
when he's just absolutely
destitute is these letters that
he wrote from the halfway
house are amazing.
And I love the fact that in
writing this letter, he
bothers to put in the word
"vivid" for vivid tattoos.
Now that's a writer,
no matter what.
If the tattoo looked a certain
way, he had to tell
everybody about it.
Wallace continued at his
security job for more than two
months, and then unable
to bear getting up
so early, he quit.
He went to work as a front desk
attendant at the Mount
Auburn Club, a health club
at nearby Watertown.
His job was to check
members in.
He called himself a glorified
towel boy.
But one day, Michael Ryan,
a poet who had received a
Whiting Award alongside
him two years
before, came in to exercise.
Wallace dove below the
reception desk and
quit the same day.
His friends were accustomed
to his exaggerations and
inventions over the years that
came with his clownish,
hyperbolic personality.
But when they visited him at the
halfway house, they found
that what he had said
was actually true.
He had stepped through
the looking-glass.
His friend, Debra Spark, a
fiction writer, remembers
sitting in on a group therapy
session with Wallace one day,
being amazed to hear someone
recount killing someone else
while drunk.
All the same, Wallace
found his place.
Order, no matter how foreign the
context, was always easier
for him than the unstructured
world that lay outside.
He met with a counselor, and
nearly every evening, he drove
to a different part of the city
with other halfway house
members for substance
abuse meetings.
His sponsor was named Jimmy,
a motorhead from the South
Shores, Wallace called
him in a letter.
And Wallace read "The Big Book,"
the founding text of
Alcoholics Anonymous, and
enjoyed making fun of its
cheesy 1930s ad man vocabulary
to his friends.
Tosspot.
Dave Sheen heels.
Boiled as an owl.
He laughed at them, but he also
knew he needed them, or
he would die, Mark
Costello, his
college roommate, remembers.
And if Wallace found himself in
unfamiliar territory, the
residents didn't know what
to make of him either.
One remembers wondering,
this guy could
probably go to Betty Ford.
Why is he here with
us welfare babies?
No one really cared for
his cleverness.
He was, to them, a type they'd
seen before, someone who, as
Wallace would later write in
"Infinite Jest," tries to
erect denial-type fortifications
with some kind
of intellectualish
showing off.
Wallace was back in high school,
trying to figure out
his place in the pack.
It's a rough crowd, he wrote his
old Arizona sponsor, and
sometimes I'm scared or
feel superior or both.
Yet a piece of him
was beginning to
adjust to the new situation.
He remembered his last failed
attempt to get sober and how
he was no longer writing, and
asked himself what was it he
had to lose?
He came to understand that the
key this time was modesty.
He knew it was imperative to
abandon the sense of himself
as the smartest person in the
room, a person too smart to be
like one of the people in the
room because he was one of the
people in the room.
I try hard to listen and do what
they say, he wrote Rich
C. I'm trying to do it easy
this time, not get an A+.
I just don't have enough gas
right now to do anything fast
or well, and I'm trying
to accept this.
Not that things came easily.
The simple aphorisms of
the program seemed
ridiculous to him.
And if he objected to them,
someone inevitably answered
him with another, telling him,
for example, to do what was in
front of him to do, or to take
it one day at a time, driving
him even crazier.
He was astonished to find people
talking about a higher
power without any evidence
beyond their wish that there
should be one.
They got down on their
knees and said the
thankfulness prayer.
Wallace tried once at Granada
House, he had told his friend
Mark Costello, but it
felt hypocritical.
All the same, he liked to
quote one of the veteran
recovery members, the group
known in "Infinite Jest" as
the Crocodiles, who used to say,
it's not about whether or
not you believe, asshole, it's
about getting down on your
knees and asking.
There were many times when he
was sure he would start
drinking again.
I'm scared, he wrote his
old Arizona sponsor.
I still don't know what's
going to happen.
He asked his friend for some
words of encouragement, and
just when he thought he would
give up, a letter arrived in
which his former sponsor
recounted the last time he'd
been detox.
They gave me Librium,
he wrote.
And I threw them over my left
shoulder for luck, and I've
had good luck ever since.
The image, Wallace wrote his
sponsor years later in thanks,
was just the good MFA-caliber
trope I needed.
Stunned as he was, Wallace
understood from the beginning
that his fall from grace was
also a literary opportunity.
He had been hypothesizing
beforehand about a nation
enthralled to its appetites, and
here he was living among
its casualties.
So in the midst of his misery,
he was alive to the new
information that
he was getting.
The communal house, he would
later write in "Infinite
Jest," reeks of passing time.
It is the humidity of early
sobriety, hanging and palpable.
Wallace was known for sitting
quietly, listening as
residents talked for hours about
their lives and their
addictions.
Later, residents would often
be surprised to find that
though he had heard their
stories, they had not
actually heard his.
This was the sort of access to
interior lives that a novelist
could not get elsewhere.
And I always think of, there's
a story about Vladimir
Nabokov-- is he in the
extreme curriculum?
Vladimir Nabokov.
Anyway, he wrote the book
"Lolita," which is about,
really, an 11-year-old
girl, the famous
nymphette of the title.
And he had no idea how an
11-year-old girl spoke.
He just had no idea.
You'd be amazed how hard it
is, as a journalist or a
novelist, to actually catch
uninflected speech. 'Cause you
know when you enter the
room, you change the
conversation, right?
So Nabokov used to get on
the school bus in the
town where he lived--
I think it was Ithaca-- and he
would hide behind the backseat
with a notepad and scribble down
all the little things the
11-year-olds said.
These days, that could
get you arrested.
But it was a more
innocent time.
Wallace was finding, as he later
told an interviewer,
that nobody is as gregarious as
somebody who has recently
stopped using drugs.
Wallace's notebooks were a
familiar sight in the communal
rooms and recovery meetings,
trapping little inspirations
before they could get away.
Within a few months of arriving,
he had already
drafted a scene centered on
one of the most intriguing
residents at Granada
House, Big Craig.
Big Craig--
Don Gately in the novel--
was one of the Granada House
supervisors, and sometimes the
house cook.
If anyone has read the book,
there's a beautiful moment
where this massive guy is sort
of ladling out these
overcooked noodles,
I think it is.
And he's really proud
of his cooking.
That's the beautiful
touch of it.
He really, he really thinks
he's archived
something in the kitchen.
Craig was in his mid-20s,
sober and just huge, as
Wallace would later write in
"Infinite Jest," looking less
built than poured, with the
smooth immovability of an
Easter Island statue.
And that is, by the way, all
exactly how Big Craig looked.
I had assumed that that was--
one of the tricky things about
David Foster Wallace is that
the non-fiction is often
embellished.
The fiction's often
actually reported.
And in this case, you know, Big
Craig sent me a picture,
of all things, of him and David
and a couple of other
residents of the halfway house
on a fishing cruise.
Which I had no idea that you
could be in a halfway house
and charter a boat and
go fishing, but
apparently you can.
And Big Craig looked so much
like Don Gately in the novel.
Remember, there's a description
of Don Gately in
the novel as having a Prince
Valiant haircut?
What is a Prince Valiant
haircut?
But it's true.
Don Gately has like a few--
he has these few little strands
of hair going down,
and he looks exactly like
Prince Valiant.
And he looks--
it's hard to explain how a
person could look more poured
than built, but he had sort
of a lack of sharp angles.
And so he had this massive head
and then these tremendous
shoulders coming down,
and huge torso.
Best part of all, he was wearing
a Harvard College
sweatshirt, which he'd clearly
swapped with David for
something far tougher,
like a Walpole--
he'd been in prison.
I mean, obviously, David
wanted to be tough.
And Don Gately, the Don Gately
character, was thrilled to be
in the presence of this
character who had wandered
from Harvard across the river.
Craig had grown up on the North
Shore and been a burglar
and Demerol addict.
Friends closed elevator doors
on his head for fun when he
was a teenager, a detail Wallace
would of course put
into "Infinite Jest" too.
But he turned out not only to
come from a different world,
but also to be quite sensitive,
and it did not take
Wallace long to see the
possibilities and the love
with an interior life.
There was a sort of Dostoevskian
gloss to him, the
redeemed criminal, and
Dostoevsky was
on Wallace's mind.
He wrote to his Amherst
professor shortly after
arriving that going from Harvard
to here is like "House
of the Dead," with my weeks in
drug treatment composing the
staged execution
and last-minute
reprieve from same.
The reprieve, he hoped, would
spur the same creative surge
as it had in the Russian.
Thank you.
So that's the reading.
[APPLAUSE]
And now we throw it
open to questions.
And if there are no real
questions, Chris has promised
to throw in a couple of potted
questions, to kind
of break the ice.
And there's a microphone for
all who do have questions.
And I'm going to get
my iced tea again.
Because there are no flat
surfaces at this lectern.
Oh, there is one, but that
would ruin the visual.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks for coming.
DT MAX: Yeah, sure.
AUDIENCE: I was interested in
Wallace's relationship to fame
and being in the spotlight.
There are a number of passages
in the book where he
alternately seems completely
comfortable and like he
controls the room, and then a
puddle of sweat who wants to
avoid all attention.
So did you see in your research
that he changed in
that way over the course
of his life?
It was hard for me--
Well, when you refer to the
passages where he's
comfortable, is that from a
book, or from something--
Like one of the first readings
he did, I think, you say that
he was extremely comfortable
[INAUDIBLE].
He read forth, and they said
he owned the room.
It was the literary event where
he's premiering, I guess
it was "Broom," or "Girl."
It was "Broom," yeah.
AUDIENCE: And then he's hiding
in the back the whole time,
and there are rumors
going on about him.
DT MAX: Yeah, before
he sort of--
yeah, this was in, I think,
1987, David's first public
reading in New York for "Broom
of the System," and he
apparently it was just this
incredible reading, where he
just totally mesmerized
everybody.
But beforehand, at the
restaurant, where he went with
his editor and the other
writers, he was excusing
himself every five minutes to
go vomit in the bathroom.
You know, I think that--
he was shy, but he
was also somebody
desperate for public love.
And when you're shy and
desperate for public love, you
get into a very difficult
situation, where you both
really want to read in public,
but you also are sort of
dreading the experience.
And I think one of the things
about David is that he
really-- you know, everyone
says, oh, he
didn't want to be famous.
David wanted to be famous.
I mean, David desperately
wanted readers.
He wanted fame.
There's an early letter-- one of
the really fun things about
writing the biography was that
people gave me lots and lots
of his correspondence.
One of the weird things about
correspondence is you don't
think about it unless you're a
writer or a public figure, but
the letters that you send out,
those are the ones the
biographer wants.
And those are in other
people's hands.
So you don't have to save
your correspondence.
In fact, David saved
almost nothing.
But all these people saved
David's letters, so David's
voice, for me, was captured
in all these moments.
I mean, I'm a writer
who's very, very
interested in voice.
You can hear all the letters,
even in the little section
that I read to you.
You know, there's an early
letter where he just gotten
"Broom of the System" accepted
for publication, and he was a
whopping 24 years
old, I think.
And he writes one of his friends
from Amherst and asks
his friend to insert a mention
in the Amherst Alumni Bulletin
without letting the Amherst
Alumni Bulletin editor know
that he was behind it.
I mean, David really,
really craved fame.
And then when he got fame, he
found it was very, very
uncomfortable.
He just never really understood
what his value was,
and I think for him, things got
very confusing when people
would come up to him
and say, oh, you're
David Foster Wallace.
He would always say, no,
I'm David Wallace.
That's my writing name.
Not DT Max, Daniel Max.
Like this distinction.
And the only that bothered him
more than being noticed, of
course, was not being noticed.
So for instance, with "Girl With
Curious Hair," that was a
book that sold, I think, 2,200
copies in hardcover, which is
really almost not being
published at all in American.
I mean, you could imagine, you
could put 2,200 copies in a
closet, practically.
And that devastated him.
And yet when "Infinite Jest"
is published and it's this
enormous hit, like this
phenomenon, and in some ways
realizes all of David's
dreams, it
also becomes his nightmare.
And later on, he's unable to
write, in part because he
feels like he's being haunted
by the specter of this novel
that was such a success, and
everybody will expect another
brilliant, brilliant
novel from him.
The whole sort of dichotomy is
summarized very well in--
he was interviewed by a very,
very good interviewer named
Larry McCaffery, I
think in 1991.
And McCaffery asked
him about fame.
And David says something, he
said, I'm an exhibitionist who
wants to hide but
fails at hiding.
Therefore, somehow, I succeed.
So that was his own very meta,
very David Foster Wallace.
And then the best part is when
he got the transcript of the
interview to approve,
that sort of
interview, he cut that line.
So he hid again.
Were you surprised by anything
you learned over the course of
doing research for the book?
I was surprised by so much.
There's two stages
to the book.
The book begins as a "New
Yorker" article.
I'm a staff writer at the "New
Yorker," and so I was asked by
the editor of the magazine
shortly after David's death,
did I want to write
about David?
And I can't tell you--
I'd read Wallace's writing and
always loved "Broom of the
System." Sorry Chris, I did.
It was my favorite book.
It's a free country.
And I was horrified in the early
research on the book to
discover a letter from David
to Jonathan Franzen, the
novelist, where he says to
Franzen that-- this is like in
1991, four years after "Broom
of the System." He says that
he finds nothing to
like in the book.
It could've been written
by a smart 14-year-old.
And I was horrified.
He didn't even say a very
smart 14-year-old.
So I had invested all this love
in this thing that he
looked on as sort
of juvenilia.
But I knew nothing
about David.
I didn't know about
his depression.
I didn't know about his
addiction history.
I didn't know about
his struggles--
struggles with women is really
the wrong phrase, but his
difficulty with women.
I didn't know about his--
I didn't know that he was vastly
overdue on the last
novel, which would be "The Pale
King," the book that was
finally published.
And on a deeper level, I didn't
really know how deeply
he suffered.
I didn't know that ever since
he'd been in high school, he'd
experienced either anxiety
or depression.
And on the flip-side, I also
didn't know how funny he was.
I mean, one of the reasons I
continued into the book after
the New Yorker piece--
because you can stop.
You've had your flirtation,
and you can go on and do
something else.
It's one of the nice things
about a magazine article, even
a long one.
And I remember thinking
a couple of things.
The article came out about six
months after David's death.
And one thing was I kept wishing
I could still read
David Foster Wallace.
Like, why did I have to go
and read other people?
I was really hooked
by the voice.
I'd always liked David's
writing-- even
loved some of it.
But it really began to inhabit
me in a way that may be
familiar to some of you.
Like it really became the voice
in my head, which is the
miracle of David, is it's
the voice in your head.
If it works for you, he's
not just a writer.
He becomes the voice in your
head, almost like he
appropriates your brain.
And you see everything the way
David would have seen it.
I mean, I walk around now, and
I can look at this room, and
I'm having David-type
thoughts.
Or I get on an airplane, and
David has a wonderful
description of the
people who--
I can't remember it offhand,
but the people who pretend
they're in no hurry, so they let
everyone else rush off the
airplane, and then they gather
up their bags and sort of
pretend to saunter off,
and how what a
thin facade that is.
They're actually having
more fun than
anyone else on an airplane.
Or David--
I was on the airplane flying
out west, and there was a
Gwyneth Paltrow movie.
And I used to like
Gwyneth Paltrow.
And David says in some letter
that I have, it's actually not
in the book, but he describes
her as looking like the ghost
of a horse.
And now I can't get
it out of my head.
Like even this perfectly good
actress, like, OK, there's the
ghost of a horse.
Or he has a wonderful
phrase about babies.
This is, I think, a conversation
he had with his
friend Mark Costello, where he
says, babies are famous to
themselves.
And I think that's such a
perfect way to capture the way
that babies have their own kind
of little ego-sphere.
Nothing can make a baby--
if a baby's happy, a baby's
happy despite anything going
on around him or her.
And I just think he was this
incredible observer.
So I didn't want to
read anyone else.
I didn't really want
to talk to--
I didn't want to do
anything else.
And then secondly, it was
clear that David had--
and I think his death
accelerated this, but I don't
think it originated it.
He had begun to kind of capture
just an amazing number
of readers, not just
as a writer--
because, I mean, to be honest,
an 1,100-page book is always
going to have limitations
on its readership.
Like it's difficult, and I don't
think it's as difficult
as people think it is.
You guys have had it,
already, right?
It was part of the--
so yeah.
It's a book where it's hard
to orient yourself, but it
doesn't actually present the
obstacles, say, "Finnegan's
Wake" presents.
I mean, he wanted readers.
David always wanted readers.
The great battle for David was
between making it too easy,
which would make it part of our
addictive culture, and too
difficult, which means
you wouldn't--
he had to calibrate the
medicine perfectly.
But after his death, he was
incredible how people were
just online talking about
missing David Foster Wallace
in the world, in a way that
I don't think I'd really
entirely understood
when he was alive.
You know, if you go online,
you can see people with
tattoos that say, this is water,
which is the name of
the wonderful sort of
commencement address he gave
in 2005 at Kenyon College.
Some people have the date they
started "Infinite Jest" and
the date they finished "Infinite
Jest" on their arms.
I mean, this is not a normal
response to a writer.
It's really a response to a kind
of a person who clearly
is reaching people in a
whole, bigger and more
thorough-going way.
So I never wanted to write a
biography, what I would call
an aesthete's biography, a
biography about how beautiful
someone else wrote.
Because the contradiction in
that is sort of obvious.
The disconnect is like going to
an art gallery and saying,
oh, that painting's
so beautiful.
I mean, what can you do when
faced with beauty, except
acknowledge beauty?
But with David, there was a
whole question about, like,
who is this moral being?
This seer, in a sense, who's
grown up around us?
There's this cliche of, like,
Saint Dave, the idea that
there's this person who really
understood us in our
generation or generations, in
our modern life, in our
media-saturated life, in our
computer-saturated life.
There's a wonderful line from
David that's in his notebooks.
He says, would that we
scrutinize our technology with
the same care we give
to our people.
And I thought that was really
an interesting observation.
So I just wanted
to keep going.
It just had to be what I did.
And you know, it was in some
sense a voyage for me of
exploration, a voyage of love.
I mean, I loved David
when I began.
There's a lot of things in the
book that probably David would
not have been thrilled
to have in the book.
But I mean, I emerged
more in love.
I don't think that a seer, or
whatever you want to call
David today, has to
be a person--
I mean, I think the model
is Thomas Merton.
I don't know how many of you
ever read Thomas Merton, but
there's an absolutely
extraordinarily sort of
chaotic life that leads
to some sort of
clarity at the end.
But what makes David
more special for
me than Thomas Merton--
Thomas Merton had a very secular
life and then he
became a Catholic.
I think he became a monk,
right, I believe?
But David found, to my
mind, a harder route.
He became a kind of secular, or
tried to become-- because
it was always about trying with
David-- tried to become a
kind of secular saint.
And so when he died, everyone
was like, well, the world
feels emptier without him.
I don't understand how to live
in this world without him.
And that was really
meaningful to me.
That really clinched my need to
write about him and sort of
think about him.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have a
question about "The Pale King"
and kind of how the themes fit
in with his battle with
depression.
A lot of the novel is concerned
with finding meaning
in the mundane and the really
boring and everyday.
I mean, even with that
one character,
she's like a nirvana--
DT MAX: Yeah, Drinian.
He levitates.
He's so--
AUDIENCE: Levitating while he's
doing his tax auditing.
And then the fact that he
committed suicide in the midst
of writing that, does that
represent to you a failure to
find that meaning?
DT MAX: Well, I mean, it's
a great question.
For me--
OK, so the story is "The Pale
King." and "The Pale King"--
I don't know how many of you
have read it, it was published
after David's death-- is really
about trying to find
some sort of larger, almost
Buddhist comfort or space in
the midst of our totally,
totally noisy,
totally crowded landscape.
And for David, the metaphor
was obvious.
It was also about
being a writer.
Like what does a writer do but
try and push away all the
ancillary noises to find your
own sweet spot as a writer?
And so it's a kind of a treble
failure, in the sense that he
didn't finish the book, he went
off of an antidepressant
in order to try to finish
the book. 'Cause some
antidepressants--
I think, actually, most-- make
the people who take them feel
in some ways a little bit
distant, like a little bit of
a kind of divider between
themselves and the world.
And David felt that, and he felt
it was interfering with
his writing.
You know, I wouldn't use
the word failure.
I think what David's death and
the non-completion of "The
Pale King" show us is just
how damn hard it is.
I mean, first of all, he took
the kind of project that
nobody should take on without
a physician's certificate.
I mean, writing and literature
and novels and fiction are, on
one level, a form of
entertainment.
Or at least they have to
interest you, right?
So if you write a novel about
boredom, there's a
contradiction right
in there, right?
Built in there is the
contradiction that if I'm
really going to capture
boredom for you or
mindfulness, it's going to be so
quiet that you're not going
to want to read the book.
I mean, you're going to put it
on your chest every night, and
you know, call it
"Infinite Rest." [LAUGHTER]
DT MAX: I mean, it would be a
book you would never finish.
So anyway, that's part of this
battle that he fights.
One of the curious things
about the book--
I was just recently
in the archives.
David's papers are in Austin
at the University of Texas.
If anybody goes there and has
any interest in David, they
have a very good
access system.
You don't have to be a
bona fide scholar,
whatever that is.
And I really recommend going and
looking at the drafts of
"Infinite Jest." It's really
stunning to see it.
But in early versions of the
book, Drinian is actually an
actor in porn movies.
And so the book somehow goes on
this long journey from him
being a symbol of the profane
to some sort of
symbol of the sacred.
I mean, it's less contradictory
than you think,
because Drinian's always
somehow otherworldly.
I mean, he's part of this
technology, which I think is
invented where--
David was deeply interested in
porn, which is, I think, a
fancy way of saying that
he also kind of
liked to watch porn.
But he was as guilt-obsessed
as any Midwestern young boy
could possibly be with this.
And so in the set-up for the
book, or the original version,
Drinian is somebody you can,
using some sort of computer
technology, put yourself
in his place.
So it's you in the porn movie.
And so it's Drinian's very
non-corporeality, if that's a
word, it's his lack of bodily
embodiment, that makes him
perfect for the movie.
And so in that sense, it's not
so different from the Drinian
in "The Pale King" whose
interest in people is so
intense and so encompassing that
it literally floats up in
the air as he's talking.
So I see quarter of.
And you guys are running
on a tight timetable.
Do we do one more quickie,
if there is one?
Do you want to throw
a potted one in?
AUDIENCE: I was going
to ask if you found
anything that informed--
we were talking about
female characters--
if through your research, you
found anything that would shed
light on how his female
characters were portrayed.
DT MAX: Well, the original sort
of rap on David was he
couldn't write women.
And in fact, earlier--
not now-- he was primarily kind
of a young man's writer,
sort of in the--
I don't know quite who else.
Perhaps Pynchon also
has that bias.
But for whatever reason, I think
because David is now
known in a certain way as much
for the life he tried to live
as for exactly what he wrote,
interest in him has sort of
blossomed way out of the sort
of our original kind of male
graduate student demographic.
But David, I don't think--
David didn't understand women, I
think, is probably sort of a
fair statement.
But I also think it's a fair
statement that David really
didn't understand men.
I mean, he wasn't a guy who
drew traditional developed
characters.
I mean, Don Gately in "Infinite
Jest," or Hal--
one reason I think we read
David with more and more
intensity now than we did even
15 years ago is because
David's idea of what people look
like is a little bit the
way they come across
on a computer.
That's a little bit hard for
me to break out in the 25
seconds left.
But basically, the rounded
character of Victorian
19th-century life, that's
literally not how
David saw the world.
David insisted his books were
realism for a world that was
no longer real.
And if you read "Infinite Jest,"
you can see that in a
way, it is our life.
But it's also not our life.
It's different than 19th-century
fiction.
It's different than
Charles Dickens.
It's different than
George Eliot.
It's different than
Thomas Hardy.
But it's also recognizably in
their tradition as well.
I mean, David never saw himself
as experimental.
He did not see himself
as being like
Pynchon or John Barth.
He saw himself as a realist.
He saw himself in a different
tradition.
So I mean, the short answer is,
that's how he saw women.
That was women to him.
The longer answer is like, did
David have a woman problem, a
women problem, however
you say it?
Well, I mean, the women who knew
him thought the opposite.
I mean, he was famous for--
he was Drinian-like.
He had this ability to focus.
And I can't tell you how many
times I would be with a woman
who had dated David or whatever,
and she would be
sitting there, and part of
biography is not so glamorous.
When you go to different towns
where people knew the person,
you go in and you look at the
house they lived in, you talk
to the people who are willing
to talk to you.
And they'd be like, you know,
David was like a drug to me.
And he was.
And some people, many, many
people insist that was also, I
think, in some ways part
of what limited--
he didn't see anybody.
You don't go to David for
what you get out of--
I don't know.
I don't want to throw some
novelist under the bus here.
But you get the idea.
Like you don't go for a
fully-rounded, modulated
figure of somebody who gradually
evolves into a late
epiphany in the novel, becomes
a slightly different person.
Alice Munro?
I don't know.
She's a wonderful writer,
so I don't mean to
be putting her down.
That's not David.
Like David, in some ways he's
binary, and in some ways, he's
utterly, utterly modern,
almost futuristic.
That's how we saw all of us.
And so I don't really think
it's a gender thing.
I think if there's a cliche to
be invoked, it's that if you
go to fiction for what has been
the historical role of
fiction, you probably emerge
slightly disappointed.
I'm not saying terribly
disappointed, because David's
a beautiful writer,
no matter what.
But if you go to try to
understand, as it were, the
news, the news of who we are
and what's going on--
I mean, in this building, among
other places, there's no
better place to go than
David Foster Wallace.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned the kind
of veneration of Saint
Dave, which I know his something
that Franzen pretty
publicly called in that "New
Yorker" piece about going to
grieve and bird-watch.
How conscious do think
David was?
Did you find any references
about how he wanted to be
perceived in terms
of his legacy?
Well, I mean, I don't think the
whole Saint Dave thing was
something he was really
deliberately working on.
But it's such a complicated
question.
I mean, David wanted
to be read.
He wanted to be regarded
as a writer.
I don't think he all that much
really was desperate to be
regarded as some sort of
sage for our time.
I think the idea would have
made him, as he would have
said, run for the bathroom.
That said, he was a
contradictory guy, like many,
many writers.
Writers are small
public figures.
I think he was probably aware
of the potential.
I mean, he only had to see the
fact that the generation of
writers whom he admired, who
were passing, like John
Updike, they had no such
public presence.
I think a lot of it also
happened after his
death, to be honest.
I think David's suicide really
changed the freedom we give
ourselves to interpret him.
Because to some extent, he just
wasn't there to push back
against it anymore.
I mean, I can easily imagine
that David, had he lived and
had this whole Saint Dave
thing expanded, he could
easily have written some sort of
essay about not wanting to
be a saint with lots of meta
levels and lots of humor.
And only after you finish it
would you realize that was
what it was about.
And all the time, he'd
be wondering, did he
want to be a saint?
I'll end with one anecdote,
a really small anecdote.
When David was writing the
speech that would be the
Kenyon College address,
which is
really about being mindful--
it's an extraordinary
commencement speech, unlike
anything you've heard at your
colleges or I've heard at my
college, about the
need to really be
mindful in your life.
Not just to achieve,
but to actually be
aware, to be present.
So he's writing this speech,
and it's really in a lot of
ways derived from the sort of
things he learned in his
12-step program.
And they were all the basic
cliches that he was fighting
so hard against at Granada
House, like do what's in front
of you to do, and you know, a
kind heart will never drink.
I don't remember all
the exact phrases.
But anyway, stuff that would
drive him crazy.
Really crazy .
So he's writing the speech, and
it really is in a sense,
one wonderful cliche strung
along after another.
But when you read it, you'll
see the power of it.
But he and his wife Karen, at
the time, while he was writing
the speech, he suggested that
maybe she should do a sort of
soft-shoe routine behind
him while he read it.
So he'd be saying, the important
thing is and to
decide what to pay attention
to, and if
not, you'll be hosed.
And there would be Karen, doo,
do-doo, and making fun of the
whole thing.
At the same time as he thought
it was the most important
thing he'd ever written, I'm
sure he also thought it was
like a huge joke and that any
5-year-old had figured these
things out years ago.
It's one thing that's
interesting about him, is that
this brilliant guy went on this
vast circuit, and in the
end, comes back to understand
the sort of truisms that
you're really taught when you're
five or six, or in your
first Bible class.
But it's the struggle,
and it's the process.
And it's the need that he had to
make it clear for himself,
personally, that's so powerful
in his story.
That's why people want
to associate with--
we all go on some
version of this.
I think almost all of us go
on some version of the
journey he went on.
His was more intense.
It was more beautifully
verbalized.
And it had more peaks and
valleys, with the dreadful
valley at the end.
But I think we all recognize
this battle to make sense out
of the modern world
for ourselves.
I don't mean in some sort of
political way, but in an
absolutely personal way.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very
much for coming.
DT MAX: Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
[APPLAUSE]
