Nadell quickly found another bidder, Michael Pietsch, an editor at Little, Brown, who in June 1992 bought the book for $80,000. Pietsch had worked with other innovative writers like Rick Moody and had been quietly supportive of Wallace’s work when few were — when Wallace had just graduated from Arizona he had tried to help him place some stories in magazines. Pietsch told Nadell he wanted to publish Infinite Jest “more than I want to breathe.” Wallace wrote Pietsch to accept his offer, citing his “gut instinct (I have so few gut instincts I am reverent when one manifests).” He thanked him for advancing enough money that he could “get health insurance and fix my car if it breaks and buy books so I can mark them up.”
Wallace avoided confrontation with authority figures, so it is a testimony to his faith in his judgment this time that he now wrote Howard with frankness, assuring the editor who had been through so much with him that his decision to sign with Little, Brown was not “a…go-for-the-gold-type pressure situation.” He explained, “I not only wanted to quit dicking around with teaching and try to be a professional writer, but also wanted to try to live like a grown-up while I did so…. If that compromise seems venal or ungrateful,” he added, “so be it.” He said he was “qualmless” but finished on a more conciliatory point for the editor who had meant so much to him:
You have believed in me and supported me and given me good counsel and good faith at every turn; you are more important to me than I bet you could believe.
With Pietsch, Wallace had some immediate damage control to do: his new editor also edited Leyner. How to tell him that in his essay on television, still forthcoming, he spent a half dozen pages flaying one of Pietsch’s best-known writers? Harper’s and he had finally agreed that the television piece was wrong for the magazine, but Steve Moore had picked it up for the Review of Contemporary Fiction and, titled “E Unibus Pluram” (“Out of One, Many”), it was to come out the next summer. Wallace wrote to his new editor to explain what he found missing in Leyner’s writing, almost as if writing a review of his earlier self:
Brains and wit and technical tightrope-calisthenics are powerful tools in fiction, but I believe that when they’re used primarily to keep the reader at arm’s length they’re being abused — they are functioning as defense mechanisms. Leyner is a hidden writer, as so many exhibitionists and actors and comedians and intellectuals are hidden. I do not wish to be a hidden person, or a hidden writer: it is lonely.
He promised Pietsch that Infinite Jest would supply the element missing in Leyner’s work, would make, as he’d written about Wittgenstein’s Mistress, “the head throb heartlike”:
I want to improve as a writer, and I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff, and my gut tells me you can help me.
As an editor, Pietsch was used to being in loco parentis; he felt no need to take sides. He responded, “My notion about Mark Leyner is that he doesn’t feel any compulsion to do more in his work than entertain, surprise, and dazzle…. It’s fine to want more from a book but that doesn’t lessen the legitimacy of his accomplishment.” But he added, “All that notwithstanding, it was with delight I read of your intention to pursue selves and stories.”
Wallace returned to work. “I am both bogged down and forging ahead on the Project, if that’s coherent,” he wrote Franzen in September. “Word on the streets is that fall here is beautiful but very brief: snows swirl by Halloween.” He worried what winter would be like, though on the plus side his apartment was so small that his body heat or “at the very outside one space heater is apt to warm the whole facility.” To escape the town he had taken to calling “Drearacuse,” he sometimes drove to New York for the weekend and stayed with Costello. He would make an arrangement to meet a young woman for coffee and then, as Costello remembers, come back Sunday night and get his bag.
Other than women and his old friend, New York held little interest for Wallace. (“My whole nervous system seems to be on the outside of my body when I’m in NYC,” he would later protest to Alice Turner.) One exception was a community garden on Avenue B and 6th Street in the East Village, near where Costello lived. There a street sculptor was engaged in building a monument called the “Tower of Toys.” Homeless and barefoot, the sculptor would climb up and nail or attach yet one more plank or pole. While he watched the seemingly endless project, Wallace would complain to Costello about Karr.
In the spring of 1993 Wallace got an unexpected job offer. The English department at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, about an hour from where he had grown up, was hiring. The school was an oddity, a large public college with an interest in avant-garde fiction. The English department ran something called the Unit for Contemporary Literature,31under which auspices it hosted the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the Dalkey Archive Press, the publisher of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. When he had heard of the job opening, Steve Moore had contacted Wallace. Wallace had promised himself not to teach while he finished Infinite Jest, but he had been writing the manuscript steadily and successfully. So in bandana and boots, he went for a brief interview at the MLA conference in New York in December 1992. He was unusually self-confident, perhaps buoyed by a sense that Infinite Jest was on target. “You should know I am really really smart,” he told the English department members who met him. He sent a résumé with his publications and on the second page added entries for “REVIEWS IF ANYBODY CARES…” and “PRIZES &c (IF ANYBODY CARES…).” In February he flew to Illinois for two days of interviews and readings. To a small group of faculty and students he read the Don Gately crime scene and a section about Lyle, the guru who haunts the Enfield Academy weight room licking sweat off the players and dispensing advice in return. During a question-and-answer session, when a faculty member asked why they should hire him, he responded, “Who else?” Then the faculty committee went out with him to a local Chinese restaurant, where he told the department chair, Charlie Harris, a Barth expert, that Barth was dead.