The DFW Memorial

It was clear that he was loved, and that even though they might not have understood him fully, they loved him in return. It was clear that his intellect was giant enough to write a book on Infinity, but his soul was playful enough to swan around college dorms in green hooded sweatshirts, ratty blue terrycloth robes and unlaced Timberland boots in order to enact a nightly tooth-brushing ritual that took over forty-five minutes. It was clear that his suicide remains all too explainable in light of the long-standing depression and yet, ultimately, inexplicable.

What was clearest of all at the public memorial for David Foster Wallace held yesterday afternoon at the Skirball Center near Washington Square was that, to paraphrase George Saunders, in time, but not yet, we'll understand the treasure we have in Wallace's existing work even as we lament being robbed of what would have come in the future. So sure, there were funny, mordant and poignant personal reminiscences, from Mark Costello's tales of being DFW's roommate at Amherst (where he'd spoken at a similar memorial on Monday) and thereafter, sister Amy Wallace Havens admitting "he was not an easy brother...forget winning an argument or having the last word - ever" and George Saunders' fear he would be intimidated by Wallace's formidable intellect dissipated by meeting the unassuming young man at breakfast, clad in a Mighty Mouse t-shirt and eager to talk about anything and anyone but himself.  But ultimately, the dozen speakers focused on the work.

There were the battles by letter between Wallace and his longtime editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, over what to cut and what to save in INFINITE JEST. Gerald Howard speaking in amazement over DFW's first reading - on a bill with T.C. Boyle and other veteran writers - that "blew the room away". Colin Harrison, now at Scribner doing for books what he used to do at Harper's, reading long passages from the essay that became "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and framing it with a phone call where, after Wallace asked "so what was that magazine assignment again?" Harrison admitted there was no way to constrain the writer's imagination and neuroses. Don DeLillo kept his remarks brief and focused on the Infinity book. Zadie Smith kept personal feelings to a minimum - "he was my friend and pen pal, but I knew his work first" - and shared her thoughts on BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN in a quivering, mellifluous alto. Donald Antrim prefaced a resounding excerpt from "McCain's Promise" that concentrated on the difference between leadership and salesmanship with a heartbreaking account of how Wallace, by telephone, shared his depression history to a hospitalized, suicidal Antrim and helped talked the latter off the abyss's edge.

Hearing that brought home just how prescient Wallace was and how his final, devastating bout with depression robbed him - and thereby his readers - of an essay he was likely born to write: a piece on Barack Obama and rhetoric, commissioned earlier this year by GQ. Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's agent throughout ("we grew up in publishing together") described conversations between the two and Wallace's wife Karen on their enthusiasm and excitement over Obama as presidential candidate. The assignment was to focus less on Obama (there was no way he'd get close to the candidate, Nadell said) and more on his speechwriters, those young turks tasked with putting the words of inspiration in Obama's mouth during stump speeches, town hall meetings and of course, the Democratic National Convention.

I was glad I went. Don't get me wrong. But I left early, missing the final two speeches by Jonathan Franzen (who, it seemed, repeated some of his words from the Pomona College memorial) and New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, because I couldn't stop wondering where we'd be at a year from now. Every time letters were mentioned or read from, I projected to the inevitable book containing DFW's edited correspondence. There are public memorials slated for Vancouver, Arizona and probably many other places. But how much is too much? When does group memorial stop being genuine and start being disingenuous? Nadell, Pietsch & co. may have protected Wallace from the highs and lows of fame, but can they really guard against the eventual clamor for the cottage death industry trading on current and unpublished works? Was Elizabeth Wurtzel's display of narcissism a one-off, or the sign of what's to come?

It's too soon to come up with answers. Not when those who knew Wallace best, and those who only knew him through his work, are still paying off "the bill that comes through for love," as Saunders characterized the grief that still feels raw for so many.No doubt this is territory where one can only make it up as one goes along. What's not in doubt is the sense of artistic loss, the void in contemporary American fiction that cannot possibly be filled. I suspect many of the people in attendance at Skirball felt they admired and appreciated DFW's work when he was alive - but with him gone, that level of admiration feels nowhere near enough.

Comments

[Jackson West]

Thanks for this.

[Lawrence Tate]

In posts at the NY Times' Paper Cuts and elsewhere I've noted the seeming decline and fall of publishers' interest in literary biographies, and wondered if apathy toward reading the lives of writers portends apathy toward reading what they write.

DFW's case, though, leads me to think that it may be best that a major writer, upon his or her death, no longer automatically qualifies as material for a book deal. Everything that would be in such a book we'll learn about online anyway, in the blogs of old girlfriends and students, etc.

And a book automatically means a movie deal (if not necessarily a film, at least until the suits forget how badly "Sylvia" tanked). Do we really need [insert name of your "favorite" dopey actor gunning for a "serious," "Oscar-contender" project] ambling around the local multiplex in a bandanna? With [insert etc] as The Wife, Beau Bridges and Jane Alexander as The Parents, John Turturro as Franzen, Christina Ricci reprising as Liz Wurtzel?

Well...Turturro as Franzen would be fun. But that should be in a movie about someone else. Not DFW.

[mrmystery]

Was Elizabeth Wurtzel's display of narcissism a one-off, or the sign of what's to come?

I'm betting on it being a sign. A dull, dim, self-absorbed sign.

[Ed Nawotka]

The self-propagating literary memorial for a genius too-little appreciated during his life is just the sort of thing that DFW would have turned into a great short story.

[Kate Rogers]

I was there too. Thanks so much for posting your impressions. (One note: I think Saunders called grief "the bill that comes due for love," not "comes through."
?)

[Kevin Wignall]

I just don't get any of this. I haven't said anything before because it's sad for him and his family that a troubled guy killed himself. But I don't get all the hooplah.

I'm not suggesting that you're wrong or disingenuous in placing Wallace on a pedestal, but I'm not sure what he did to earn that respect. The pieces of writing I've read of his are... okay, but not great. I've read a little of "Infinite Jest" (brevity is the soul of wit, of course, and a better writer might have said it in 300 pages) and, as with many of the writers mentioned in the same breath as Wallace, I found it pretty good and pretty self-indulgent, the work of a talented student, but little more than that.

Again, I stress that this might be a failure of understanding on my part, and perhaps history will prove all of you right and me wrong. But I can't help feeling that it's symptomatic of our age - an age of instant gratification, in which celebrity has replaced fame, in which the commonplace is lauded as heroic or brilliant or unique - that even genius has become an ersatz commodity.

[Leonard T. Carruthers]

I find it all a bit uncomfortable as well. It's not as if the man died racing into a fire to save burning children. He killed himself. He chose to die. Not only that, he hung himself in his own home and left his swinging corpse for his wife to find. Regardless of how fine a writer he might have been, how much do we want to celebrate this man? He clearly didn't lament his own death---in fact, he chose it---so why should we?

[Kevin Wignall]

Hmm, that's a difficult one, Leonard. I think in the case of suicide we have to allow for a person being in an irrational state of mind.

I suppose my argument is that if Wallace had lived to 80, the strap-line for his obit might easily have read, "Writer and academic who failed to live up to early promise" (actually, some of the UK obits said that anyway). And my feeling - rightly or wrongly - is that he will only be a footnote (no pun intended) in 40 years. The suicide, sad at a personal level, has distorted that in the minds of some literary observers. There have been many great writers who died young - Alain-Fournier, Keats, Byron & Shelley, Odon von Horvath, Stephen Crane, Isabelle Eberhardt, to name a few - but perhaps because premature death is less common now, we're too keen to grasp a personal tragedy like Wallace's and present it as a thing of great cultural significance.

[Sarah]

A couple of things: I have not read INFINITE JEST, though I suspect I'll get to it eventually when I tackle some of the other big American works (THE RECOGNITIONS, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, etc.) But based off of the short fiction and especially the essays, the reason why Wallace's work resonates is that his inner curiosity outshone his intellect, his love of language circumvented any sense of pretentiousness and the way he used footnotes mimics a person's natural instinct to digress and include every stray thought. It's easily parodied but difficult, if not impossible, to replicate.

Obviously the prism which which we'd view DFW had he lived a long life would be different - especially if he ended up producing work that wasn't up to his usual standard (it was already starting to happen even before his final depression bout.) But I think his death is also the death of a kind of American fiction that, when it first appeared, blew off the doors of those who encountered it, even if they didn't fully understand it. Some call it "prodigious fiction" or whatnot, but I chalk it up to plain old curiosity about absolutely everything around them that it infects everyone in reasonable proximity.

[Kevin Wignall]

That's an interesting viewpoint, Sarah, and again, I want to stress that this wouldn't be the first time (!) that my view is far removed from the received wisdom.

It's interesting that you mention the term "prodigious fiction" which instantly reminds me of "prog rock". You then go on to mention his curiosity about everything around him. I don't know many writers who don't share that same curiosity, but the job of any artist is to distil. For the writers of rock and pop songs, that means putting all of what you want to say about love and heartache into three minutes, for writers of fiction it means eliminating the digressions and telling your story in the smallest possible space.

But then, some people like prog rock, and that's fair enough.

[Naomi Darvell]

Something like this happens; we react; as surely as night follows day, we start scrutinizing our reactions. I think it's really unfortunate that it always seems to come around to comments along the lines of, "He wasn't all that."

Sure, there will always be people like Wurtzel who make it all about themselves. Has she ever done otherwise?

[Kevin Wignall]

"I think it's really unfortunate that it always seems to come around to comments along the lines of, "He wasn't all that." "

Naomi, as long as it's done respectfully, I don't see a problem with this - surely it's a part of the critical dust settling, and yes, by its very nature, that takes place posthumously. There have been many writers lionized in their lifetimes who fell off the map within a few decades of their deaths, just as there have been some - Kate Chopin always springs to mind - given a fairer deal by posterity than they ever received in their lifetimes.

I can't speak for Wurzel - don't know much about her. I do remember Anthony Burgess dismissing Graham Greene as a "minor novelist" after the latter's death, and that smacked of someone trying to hold back the incoming tide. But again, posterity is capricious and can make fools of all of us.

[Dan]

What Kevin said. I've read different sections of "Infinite Jest," and have always ended up being worn out by the undercurrent (deluge?) of self indulgence that holds it all together. Talent that screams "Look at me" on page after page is always a lot more entertaining when you're an undergrad, or when you're a writer going through a self-absorbed phase of worry over craft, art, expression, and so on. It doesn't have the same charm as you get older, and more introspective. Maybe because you've learned to look past the flash and dash.

He always struck me as one of those artists whose work was best digested in smaller portions. I think that's why his essays and short pieces came across so well -- flashes of brilliance that didn't have time to make your eyes ache from the constant glare.

So I, too, have been a little baffled by some of the postmortem declarations of greatness, especially when he never seemed to harness his talent for the best possible use in the long form.