But no sooner were he and Karr finally a couple than problems emerged. By the fall he was mad at her for never quite integrating him into her family; she was mad at him for never thinking about anyone’s needs but his own. He responded with more protestations of love, writing from around the corner, as she remembered. “I want you to know that I AM here,” he wrote her, “I AM with you…. Mary, I am going nowhere but to you if you will have me. As you move closer to being available to me…I become more, not less, devoted to you and to my love for you and to my desire to have a life with you if you want me.”
He went on in loving quasi-complaint:
What I feel is that I’ll find no other woman whom I love this way, who makes my nervous system shimmy and Poor Old say Sig Heil as you do, who makes me laugh as belly-deep, who teaches me in so many ways she doesn’t know — as people who are real to each other teach each other, without intent or agenda — with whom I disagree in such interesting ways.
Wallace turned to his recovery groups for companionship. His sponsor, a garrulous older real estate investor with, as others remember, a spectacular sock collection, was there to give him counsel. Mostly Wallace talked to him about Karr and their unhappy relationship. “I had the impression of hurling things,” the man remembers; “you could not please Mary.” He invited Wallace to join a men’s group he was involved in, which Wallace nicknamed “the catacombs.” They would meet at different members’ houses each week, and when they got to Wallace’s they sat amid the tower of manuscript pages and piles of books. He told them he had always looked on how to get women into bed as “a physics problem”; Mary, though, obeyed no law he understood.
That fall Mark Leyner was invited to Syracuse as part of a reading series at the university. Leyner was at the height of his celebrity. He had just published Et Tu, Babe and been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, where he had been surprised to find Wallace, with whom he had previously been friendly, call him “a kind of antichrist.” Now he smoothly worked his way through his material to the large crowd. As he riffed, he bobbed back and forth like a boxer, or the writer of the moment he was. He singled Wallace’s fiction out for praise but then made fun of alcoholism and said that people who wore bandanas reminded him of the cabin boys on The Love Boat. He insisted that the goal of writers was “to entertain,” if “in a very unique way.” At the very end, a hand came up from the back row: it was Wallace, scruffy, in a bandana. “Is it sufficient to entertain people as spectacularly as you have,” he asked now, in his thin voice, “or should there be a further moral purpose to your work?” Leyner replied that he felt entertainment was itself a moral goal and mentioned the well-known moment in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels in which a Mickey Mouse cartoon helps convicts forget their hard lives for a moment. Wallace clearly wasn’t satisfied with Leyner’s answer — to give addicts more of the drug wasn’t to cure them — but time was up. Karr drove Leyner to the train station. Wallace, along for the ride, seemed to him grateful to be in her presence.
Ever since Boston, Wallace had been seeing therapists. Unsurprisingly, during these sessions his attention came to rest on his mother. Sometime in therapy he became certain that his mother had been abused as a child by her father. As he understood it, she had repressed the memory of the transgression and thus repression and control had become her way of dealing with the world, including the problems in her marriage. From this Wallace grew convinced, as he wrote Karr, that his mother’s hidden life—“so much hidden pain and lying”—was key to understanding his own situation. Her insistence that all was well, her desire to protect him, he believed, had set the stage for the denial of his own pain that lay behind his drug use and alcoholism. The link was so clear, he wrote Karr, that his mother might just as well have taught him “how to bartend and de-seed dope.” Once her story was unearthed, the healing might begin. The truth hurt, he wrote Karr, but, he was convinced, “it heals too.”
Wallace had entered therapy with some trepidation. He was not from a culture that routinely dug up past upsets. But Karr had encouraged him in his investigations,30 and by the time that he left for Syracuse he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he’d once been to crack logical paradoxes. He went to group therapy and also had a private therapist, whom he paid cash because he had no health insurance. His hope was that his background or upbringing might at least partly explain his depressions and addictions. Yes, he had a chemical imbalance, but why? What had happened to make him into this anxious, agitated, and needy thirty-year-old?
He wrote some speculations in the margins of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book Karr gave him. He recognized himself in Miller’s description of the unhappy, talented child. “Ouch” and “Gulp,” he speckled in the margins. After Miller wrote:
As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his vital growth will be violently interrupted.
Wallace penciled “SFW,” his mother’s initials. (Inadvertently proving her reach, next to the word “effect” in the same paragraph, he wrote, “s/b [should be] affect.”) He ascribed his current predicament to having a “narcissistically-deprived Mom.” There is an intemperateness to Wallace’s explorations of his childhood here, the anger he felt at his mother’s supposed obfuscations unleashed again as he discovers his own — but then he had come to believe the one had led directly to the other.
He read John Bradshaw’s Bradshaw on the Family, a pop bestseller on dysfunction and childhood, and where Bradshaw wrote that low-self esteem translated into “believing that your worth and happiness lie outside of you,” he noted, “Writing Success Fame Sex.” Wallace wanted to become the sort of person for whom desire for the last three did not motivate the first. That was one of the goals of the therapy, as it was, indirectly, of recovery. As he worked his way through his past, on the advice of a therapist he told his mother that they should stop talking, which led to an estrangement that would last on and off for some five years.
As the fall turned into a remarkably snowy winter, Wallace’s relationship with Karr deteriorated further. The two fought bitterly. Karr, Wallace wrote Franzen, was prone to “terrible temper-outbursts.” She found him spoiled, a mama’s boy using rehab as an excuse for self-absorption. Her needs were more concrete — food, money, child care for her son. He still wrote her constantly, even though he was just around the corner. He printed out in huge letters on a computer the words “MARRY ME” and added, “No shit, Mary Karr, do not doubt my seriousness on this. Or the fact that I’m a gila-jawed bulldog once I’ve finally made a commitment, a promise. My expectation is not that it would be easy, or all the time pleasant. My expectation is that it would be real, and illuminated.” Karr knew it would not work out, she remembers, when one day she asked Wallace to pick up Dev from school and Wallace said he needed his car to go to the gym instead. Thinking back on all his failed relationships, in the margin of Bradshaw he blamed them on his “fantasy bond” with his mother.
In April 1992, Nadell submitted the first 250 pages of Wallace’s novel—“structurally…not much like any other novels I’ve seen,” as Wallace had written in his cover letter — to Howard at Norton. The submission contained the major lines of the novel — the Incandenza family, Gately and Ennet House, and the plot to find the master copy of “Infinite Jest,” a movie so absorbing that watching it could kill you. In a country addicted to television, it would be the ultimate weapon, an entertainment neutron bomb. The novel was set in the near future but no reader could mistake it for anything other than a commentary on the present day. Reading the manuscript, Howard was amazed by the changes he saw in his author’s writing. Wallace had gone from a clever writer to a profound one, from one with lots of ways to say little to one with one way to say something important. He now saw Wallace’s addiction, descent, and recovery as “a ceremony of purification.” He was eager to publish the new work, but Norton was a conservative house. Its taste was mainstream (it would soon have a huge success with Patrick O’Brian, the purveyor of seafaring tales), and did not put out much in the way of avant-garde writing—Girl with Curious Hair was an exception, but it had sold only twenty-two hundred hardcover copies. Howard went to his editorial board and asked how much he might offer. They authorized him to pay an advance of $35,000. Wallace calculated what would be left to live on after expenses and his agent’s commission. He was taking the psychic risk of asking for an advance so he could write without teaching, but $5,000–$6,000 a year wouldn’t do it.