Karr did not admire Wallace’s writing. She read Girl with Curious Hair and “told him it was not a great book,” she remembers, praising only “Here and There”: “His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things.” She advocated more direct prose.11 But Karr was not impervious to his restless mind and contacted a friend who ran the writing program at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry, to recommend Wallace for a job there and assure him that if he proved too unstable to teach the class, she would step in. Henry agreed to take Wallace on as an adjunct professor in the fall of 1990.
In that month he began his reluctant return to academia. He took the Green Line subway to Emerson, “a hip kids’ college in the Back Bay,” as he described it to Markson. The combined rejection of the stories he most admired by the two people whose opinions he admired most — Franzen and Karr — was beginning to tell. When DeWitt Henry put up an advertisement for Girl with Curious Hair on a bulletin board, Wallace pulled it down, saying he was embarrassed by the book. A few weeks into the semester Wallace checked in with Franzen. “Teaching is going OK,” he wrote his friend. “I’d forgotten how young college students are. They’re infants, though: you can see the veins in their little eyelids, you almost have to cradle their heads to help their necks support the skull’s weight.” He found he was popular, known for a loose style and an appealing willingness to digress. “We spend most of our time talking about Twin Peaks and The Simpsons so they think I am an okay caballero,” he told Markson. This was clearly a very different approach than the one he had taken at Arizona and Amherst, where his commitment to his students was preternatural and even a little maniacal, but Wallace was tired and confused: the stage didn’t feel like a stage without drugs and alcohol; it felt like a classroom.
Wallace did have one literary project in which he was putting his energy. Harper’s had asked him to write a 1000 word piece on television for a forum. It had of course sprung to larger-than-life dimensions, consuming his untapped energy. TV remained a subject of paramount interest to him. When he had accepted the assignment, he had joked to Markson, who had been a friend of Malcolm Lowry, that having him write about television was “rather like asking the Consul in his late stages to write a haiku on the history of distillation.” He found interesting tidbits in Widener Library at Harvard to suggest he might be an outlier but he wasn’t a singleton. In recent years, he learned, for instance, educated viewers had come to watch as much TV as uneducated ones; six hours a day was now the national average. He wrote page after page as he tried to wrestle the filthy machine to the mat. He had little hopes of the work being published, so what he was doing was memorandizing himself, though, as he told Markson, even the kill fee — around $1,000—would be “sumptuous.”
The assertion that television promoted passivity was not new — it was standard in the works of cultural critics like Todd Gitlin and Mark Crispin Miller — but for Wallace the charge wasn’t theoretical; it was personal, crucial. TV’s treacly predictability held him in strange thrall, and during periods of collapse he seemed almost literally attached to it. The students he was teaching made him feel the problem was worse than he had known. They were the Letterman generation he had imagined in “My Appearance,” proud of their knowingness. “They’re all ‘television’ majors, whatever that means,” he complained to Markson, adding that he’d had his wrist slapped by his department for “‘frustrating’ the students” with a DeLillo novel (he does not say which) by which he meant to wake them up: “Most…desire to read nothing harder than news headlines off TV cue cards.”
Wallace knew he did not want to stay at Emerson long. He thought about applying for a fellowship but realized he had nothing to propose to fund. “I want to start trying some creative writing again,” he wrote Moore in November 1990, “but I find now that I am terrified to start, have forgotten most of what I (thought I had) learned, and feel like the little reptile section of my brain that used to be in charge of really good writing is now either dead or playing possum in protest.” But whereas a few years before his frustrations would have sent him on a pot binge, his daily recovery sessions taught him how to wait it out. He had just finished his first year of sobriety, a significant event for him. There were still meetings, time with his sponsor, and he also eventually saw a private therapist at Karr’s urging. Predictably, he found therapy both appealingly and apprehensively absorbing. But it gave him another tool to deal with moments of frustration such as this one. “There is absolutely nothing I can do except accept the situation as it is and wait patiently for some fullness-of-time-type change,” he wrote Moore. “The alternative to patience is going back to the way I used to live, which Drs. and non-hysterics at the rehab told me would have killed me, and in a most gnarly and inglorious way, before I was 30.”
Still, acceptance wasn’t a lesson that he took in evenly in all aspects of his life. Where the alcohol and pot had held sway there was now an enormous amount of anger that was not easily acknowledged. Big Craig happened to watch a car cut off Wallace one day when the latter was driving near Foster Street. In fury Wallace rammed his car into the other person’s. “He got out of the car, scratching his head,” Big Craig remembers. “‘Oh Gee, what happened?’”
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, Wallace’s collaboration with Mark Costello, who was now an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, came out in November 1990, a volley from the past. “Signifying Rappers is the first serious consideration of rap and its position as a vital force in American cultural consciousness,” an ad for the book in the Voice Literary Supplement declared. But Wallace cautioned in the book’s pages, “If you’re reading this in print it’s already dated.” And he was right. By the time the book was published, rap had ceased to be a revelation, though it was still in the news. Its threat to be, as Wallace put it in the book, the “prolegomena to any future uprising,” had been contained. Tipper Gore and George Will had denounced it, the noted professor Henry Louis Gates supported it, and a Florida prosecutor was bringing charges against 2 Live Crew for obscenity. The publisher’s press release offered, “The Authors — white, educated, middle class — occupy a peculiar position, at once marginal and crucial to rap’s us and them equations.” Few reviewers or readers seemed to know what to make of the joint effort. The authors’ stance that rap was “quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today” felt at once too clever and obvious. The way their alternating short takes on rap resembled rap’s own samplings went unappreciated. At the least, Wallace got to set out his new awareness of the power of addiction. He might have been looking around the Granada House common area when he wrote of a
centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased.12
Or it may have been his idea of the student body at Emerson.
Though the book attracted little notice, Wallace welcomed its appearance. He was happy to have it in his hands at a moment when he had so little else to show for his work. “I’ve gone from thinking it slight and silly to something I want to send to friends,” he wrote Moore, who arranged a review of the book in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Wallace was so poor that Moore gave him a free subscription so he could read the piece. Wallace asked him whether he might help him find a way out of teaching. “I am the best copyeditor I’ve ever seen,” he bragged, wondering if he could make enough at the trade to “move to the midwest and live in a hovel.” Moore responded that the Dalkey Archive at Illinois State University was looking for a publicity director. Wallace begged off, saying he “couldn’t even take prom-rejection in high school.”