Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace Read online

  EVERY LOVE STORY

  IS A GHOST STORY

  ALSO BY D. T. MAX

  The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery

  EVERY LOVE STORY

  IS A GHOST STORY

  A LIFE OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  D. T. Max

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © D. T. Max, 2012

  All rights reserved

  A portion of this book appeared in different form as “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest” in The New Yorker.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the unpublished writings of David Foster Wallace. Copyright © 2012 The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Used by permission of The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

  Max, D. T. (Daniel T.)

  Every love story is a ghost story : a life of David Foster Wallace / D.T. Max.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60111-2

  1. Wallace, David Foster. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3573.A425635Z83 2012

  813’.54—dc23 [B] 2012008488

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Warnock Pro

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Flora and for Jules forever

  What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

  —GOOD OLD NEON, 2001

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  “Call Me Dave”

  CHAPTER 2

  “The Real ‘Waller’”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Westward!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Into the Funhouse

  CHAPTER 5

  “Please Don’t Give Up on Me”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Unalone and Unstressed”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Roars and Hisses”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Pale King

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  Works by Wallace

  INDEX

  CHAPTER 1

  “Call Me Dave”

  Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s. He was born in Ithaca, New York, on February 21, 1962. His father, James, was a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell, from a family of professionals. David’s mother, Sally Foster, came from a more rural background, with family in Maine and New Brunswick, her father a potato farmer. Her grandfather was a Baptist minister who taught her to read with the Bible. She had gotten a scholarship to a boarding school and from there gone to Mount Holyoke College to study English. She became the student body president and the first member of her family to get a bachelor’s degree.

  Jim and Sally had their daughter, Amy, two years after David, by which time the family had moved to Champaign-Urbana, twin cities in central Illinois and the home of the state’s most important public university. The family had not wanted to leave Cornell—Sally and Jim loved the rolling landscape of the region—but Wallace had been offered a job in the philosophy department in the university and felt he could not turn it down. The couple were amazed when they arrived to see how bleak their new city was, how flat and bare. But soon, happily, Jim’s appointment turned into a tenure-track post, Sally went back to school to get her master’s in English literature, and the family settled in, eventually, in 1969, buying a small yellow two-story house on a one-block-long street in Urbana, near the university. Just a few blocks beyond were fields of corn and soybeans, prairie farmland extending as far as the eye could see, endless horizons.

  Here, Wallace and his sister grew up alongside others like themselves, in houses where learning was highly valued. But midwestern virtues of normality, kindness, and community also dominated. Showing off was discouraged, friendliness important. The Wallace house was modest in size and looked out at other modest-sized houses. You were always near your neighbors and kids in the neighborhood lived much of their lives, a friend remembers, on their bikes, in packs. Every other kid in that era, it seemed, was named David.

  There was elementary school at Yankee Ridge and then homework. The Wallaces ate at 5:45 p.m. Afterward, Jim Wallace would read stories to Amy and David. And then every night the children would get fifteen minutes each in their beds to talk to Sally about anything that was on their minds. Lights-out was at 8:30 p.m., later as the years went on. After the children were asleep, the Wallace parents would talk, catch up with each other, watch the 10 p.m. evening news, and Jim would turn the lights out at 10:30 exactly. He came home every week from the library with an armful of books. Sally especially loved novels, from John Irving to college classics she’d reread. In David’s eyes, the household was a perfect, smoothly running machine; he would later tell interviewers of his memory of his parents lying in bed, holding hands, reading Ulysses to each other.

  For David, his mother was the center of the universe. She cooked his favorites, roast beef and macaroni and cheese, and baked his chocolate birthday cake and drove the children where they needed to go in her VW Bug. Later, after an accident, she replaced it with a Gremlin. She made beef bourguignonne on David’s birthday and sewed labels into his clothes (some of which Wallace would still wear in college).

  No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: “greebles” meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; “twanger” was the word for something whose name you didn’t know or couldn’t remember. She loved the word “fantods,” meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of “the howling fanto
ds,” this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace’s work.

  To outside eyes, Sally’s enthusiasm for correct usage might seem extreme. When someone made a grammatical mistake at the Wallace dinner table, she would cough into her napkin repeatedly until the speaker saw the error. She protested to supermarkets whenever she saw the sign “Ten items or less” posted above their express checkout lines. (Wallace would later give this campaign in Infinite Jest to the predatory mother figure of Avril Incandenza, cofounder of “Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts.”) For Sally, grammar was more than just a tool. It gave membership in the club of educated persons. The intimation that so much was at stake in each utterance thrilled David, and added to the excitement of having a gifted mother. As did her sensitivity—Sally hated to shout. If she was upset by something she would write a note. And if David or Amy had a response, they would slip it back under her door in turn. Even as a little boy, Wallace was attuned to the delicate drama of personality. He wrote when he was around five years old—and one hears in the words the sigh of the woman who prompted it:

  My mother works so hard

  And for bread she needs some lard.

  She bakes the bread. And makes the bed.

  And when she’s threw

  She feels she’s dayd.

  The boy loved his father too, an affectionate if slightly abstracted figure, the firm, gentle man who read to him every night at the dinner table. “My father’s got a beautiful reading voice,” Wallace told an interviewer when he was in his mid-thirties,

  and I remember me being five and Amy being three, and Dad reading Moby Dick to us—the unexpurgated Moby Dick. Before—I think halfway through Mom pulled him aside and explained to him that, um, little kids were not apt to find, you know, cetology, all that interesting. Um, so they were—but I think by the end, Amy was exempted. And I did it just as this kind of “Dad I love you, I’m gonna sit here and listen.”

  The memory is exaggerated—Wallace’s father says he knew enough not to read Moby-Dick, certainly not its duller parts, to small children—but it captures well the relationships in the family as David saw them: the kind, somewhat otherworldly father, the noncombatant younger sister, and David in the center, at once shielded by his mother and trying to break free of her dominion.

  Wallace’s childhood was happy and ordinary. He would emphasize this in later years. He was a skinny, gap-toothed kid with flaccid hair cut in bangs. He liked the Chicago Bears, loved their star linebacker Dick Butkus (he would make “a great sergeant in the war of Vietnam,” he wrote in a school assignment), and wanted to be a football player too, or a brain surgeon, to help his mother’s nerves. He thought of himself as normal—and was normal. But he was also identifiably from a talented family, one in love, not unlike Salinger’s Glass family, with the ability to impose their notional world on the real one. “Behave,” his mother once told him when he was three. “I am ‘have,’” David responded. On a car trip when he was eight or nine, the family agreed to substitute “3.14159” for every mention of the word “pie” in their conversation. Wallace was verbal but he was not particularly literary; in fact he saw himself as at least as good at logic and puzzles. One childhood friend remembers going to a book signing of Wallace’s and being amazed when his friend could still throw out a twenty-five-digit number they’d all memorized together as kids.

  From Wallace’s autobiographical sketch, written sometime around fourth grade:

  Dark, semi long hair dark brown eyes…. Likes underwater swimming football, T.V. reading. Height 55 inches weight 69 ½ pounds.

  At the bottom of such short essays, Wallace liked to practice signing his name: Dave W. David W. “Hi,” he introduced himself in a letter to his teacher when he was nine. “My name is David W. But just call me Dave.” “David Foster Wallace,” he put above another poem about Vikings when he was six or seven (“If you see a Viking today / it’s best you go some other way”), trying on his middle name—his mother’s family name—for size.

  Wallace’s writing as a child was ordinary too, mostly, though when he had the opportunity, his sense of humor came out. He had a fondness for parody. “Dougnu-Froots,” he wrote in a grade school experiment in writing, are “inexpensive, colorful, tasty little angels of mercy to your hungry stomach,” and Burpo Soda boasted “the taste of wetness—if you’re not thirsty, you better change the channel.” He had a mind that moved naturally to puns and satires, the obverse face of a thing.

  The Wallace home was one where there was always room for an appeal. From the age of ten David would write memos to his parents detailing injustices, so it was natural for him to assume that the rest of the world would be as interested in his opinion. This approach led, predictably, to friction with many grown-ups. David’s cries of “Why?” and “That doesn’t make sense!” were familiar at Yankee Ridge Elementary, where he went from 1969 to 1974, and though teachers saw how smart he was, many found him a handful. One day at Crystal Lake Day Camp, where he and Amy went many summers, he grew tired of the counselors and their rules and simply walked several miles back to his house. (His mother drove back to the camp in a fury and asked them to produce her son. When they could not, she said, “Because he’s at home!”)

  When David was ten, his mother began teaching English full-time at Parkland Community College. Their father might be home working on a book; other times a key was left under the mat. His hours were filled by reading. Wallace devoured the Hardy Boys and The Wizard of Oz, and Thornton Burgess’s Old Mother West Wind. He liked adventure and fantasy and inhabited the typical imaginative life of a young boy, enjoying the tension in the journey from threat to triumph. He studied books about sharks and memorized dates and places of attack. A book called Bertie Comes Through, about an awkward teenager who perseveres (“‘At least I’m in there trying,’ says Bertie to himself”), he read over and over. In sixth grade, when he was twelve, he helped his elementary school get to the championships in the Battle of the Books—an “interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competition,” as he fictionalized it in Infinite Jest. Dave was in the local paper with a picture, hand up, pouncing on a question. His name appeared again that same year when a poem he wrote about Boneyard Creek, an old irrigation ditch that passed behind the local library, shared first prize:

  Did you know that rats breed there?

  That garbage is their favorite lair.

  Wallace won $50 for it. He read Dune, the long science fantasy novel, P. G. Wodehouse’s comedies, and went to a lot of movies, including Jaws, of course, which sealed his fear of sharks, and when he was older, Being There, starring Peter Sellers, which he saw over and over and which fascinated him with its portrait of a man who learns everything he knows from television. One Saturday afternoon a month Sally would drop her two children at the movie theaters in downtown Urbana or Champaign to see whatever they wanted. If there was an R-rated movie Sally would write them a note so they could get in.

  And finally there was television itself. As a family, the Wallaces watched Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, and M*A*S*H. Jim and Sally believed in responsibility and autonomy, so when David was twelve he was given his own black-and-white set. Champaign-Urbana had only four stations—the three national networks and a public television one—but David would sit on the scratchy green couch in his bedroom for hours and watch and watch: reruns of Hogan’s Heroes, Star Trek, Night Gallery, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The cartoons on Saturday morning he loved too, and Saturday night’s Creature Features, which was so scary he’d take his little set into his closet. He even watched soap operas—Guiding Light was his favorite—and game shows, The Price Is Right. His TV watching was intense and extensive enough to worry his parents, and in later years he would acknowledge that television was a major influence in his childhood, the key factor in “this schizogenic experience I had growing up,” as he called it to an interviewer in his early thirties, “being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand,
watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other.” He added, “Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me.”1

  Aggression was not welcome in the Wallace household—the only shows the parents restricted were violent ones—but David could be malicious. The preferred object of his anger was his sister. When she was three, he knocked out her front teeth in what was always known in the family as a tug-of-war accident. When he was in ninth grade, he got so mad at her after a slight dispute that he pushed her down and dragged her through the backyard through the excrement left by their dog. In exchange for her silence, Wallace traded her his beloved Motobécane, a bicycle that had taken him months of allowance and lawn mowing to buy.2 He told his parents an elaborate cover story that they never believed. Even when they were teens, he would taunt Amy mercilessly, telling her she was ugly or fat, or would make exaggerated gestures of shrinking from her as she walked down the hall or wry faces when she would take a second helping.

  This meanness stands out in the context of the rest of Wallace’s life. His classmates remember him as cheerful, popular, funny, in the upper middle of the pack academically. But he saw himself as insignificant, unattractive, on the outside. Some of the things he wanted to be true weren’t. In later years he would claim his athletic skills had been formidable—he was, he would say, “a really serious jock”—but in fact he was not good at sports. He didn’t play football after school in the pickup games and was famously bad at basketball. He was graceless and used a hook shot to avoid contact. At night at home he would lie in bed and think of all the things that were wrong with his body. As he remembered in a later note:

  Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference.