By now the department was getting the idea that this was not the same author who had written Girl with Curious Hair, but they did not mind, it seemed. They found Wallace stunningly smart and committed. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace quoted Emerson that once or twice in a lifetime one met a man who “carries the holiday in his eye.” Wallace seemed to them such a person.
Good as the visit was, Wallace still did not expect to get the job. “I alert you in advance,” he had joked in a note to Harris when he first applied, “that I am both caucasian and male.” The department was under pressure to hire more women, but everyone was deeply impressed with Wallace. They did not know what had happened in Arizona or Amherst or Boston, though Wallace’s fragmented teaching history must surely have suggested problems in the past. “What we wanted was the writer,” remembers Curtis White, a professor in the department who had helped organize the Unit for Contemporary Literature. “We hoped for the best on the rest of it.”
Wallace wanted the job as much as ISU seemed to want him to have it; he was ripe to go somewhere. He had been working at maximum speed. Fiction wasn’t the problem, for once. “Full-time writing is going OK volume-wise,” he wrote Debra Spark at the time, “but I find the isolation and lack of contact with people awfully hard to take.” He explained, “Things are sad here. Mary and I have agreed, not as amicably as one might wish, that we do not work as a couple…. We are both angry at one another, though in my case the anger’s just about been replaced by a very dark sadness. She was my best friend in the world, and we both gave up a lot and worked very hard to try to make this work.” One night Wallace tried to push Karr from a moving car. Soon afterward, he got so mad at her that he threw her coffee table at her. He sent her $100 for the remnants. She had a friend who was a lawyer write back to say she still owned the table, all he’d bought was the “brokenness.”
Portions of Infinite Jest were beginning to appear in literary magazines. “Three Protrusions,” the excerpt in which Ken Erdedy waits for his pot, had been the first in a widely read one, appearing in Grand Street in the spring of 1992. It was a virtuoso, voicy story, not dissimilar in style to Wallace’s earlier work. A year later, a more intriguing excerpt about Ennet House appeared in Conjunctions, in its “Unfinished Business” issue. Wallace wrote a preface assuring readers his would not remain so: “NYC guys in serious business suits have paid $ for something they’re legally entitled to by 1/1/94.” Aware that he had an opportunity to introduce a different David Foster Wallace, a writer with deeper goals and purer motivations, he continued:
Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
The fifty pages that followed were a kaleidoscope of first-person testimonials — stories of “hitting bottom”—lifted from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, with rummies and meth heads taking over a fictional world where, since he began tearing through his senior thesis, no one had ever known pain deeper than a breakup before. Gately made his appearance too, another new kind of character for Wallace:
And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to get down on his big knees by his undersized Ennet House bunk and ask for help from something he still didn’t believe in, ask for his own sick spidered will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.
The response to the Conjunctions publication was highly favorable. “Fun’s new administration” was finding Wallace readers. And as the Conjunctions excerpt appeared, Illinois State had written to offer Wallace a job that would lead to tenure. Wallace was thrilled, even more so when Charlie Harris agreed to let him teach just two classes a semester. The arrangement was so generous that Wallace immediately worried it wouldn’t last. He had visions of a replacement department head “upping it to three or four and you being in Burma or something” on sabbatical. Could he get, he asked Harris, kind of joking, a letter “preferably notarized by at least an appellate-level jurist” confirming the arrangement? Harris promised him it was forthcoming.
Despite, as he wrote to Don DeLillo, with whom he had struck up a correspondence with the encouragement of Franzen, “a certain icky sense about availing myself of academic patronage,” he felt he had made a good decision.32 It did not bother him overmuch that, as he wrote Washington, he would be “the least weird writer there.” He explained to Dale Peterson at Amherst, “The chairman is a dreamboat, everybody seems at once passionate and low-ego about teaching writing, and there was an utter absence of the Machiavellian politics that made Arizona such a gnarly place to be…. If I do not like teaching at ISU,” he explained, “I won’t like it anywhere, and I can retire from the field assured that I’ve experienced academia at its nicest.”
CHAPTER 6. “Unalone and Unstressed”
In July 1993 the director of the Dalkey Archive, John O’Brien, and his son, met Wallace in front of his new house on North Fell Avenue in Bloomington. The two groaned as they carried Wallace’s weights up the stairs. Wallace had rented the house sight unseen from one of the members of the search committee. It turned out to be pretty, with a fireplace and a screened-in porch, opposite a park. Wallace brought his silver velour recliner, put a spit can nearby, and papered the bathroom with manuscript pages from Infinite Jest, tennis competition charts, and an adult diaper wrapper.1
Returning to the Midwest brought mixed feelings for the thirty-one-year-old writer. He was particularly wary about being so close to his mother while he was fictionalizing her in his novel. He was drawing her as the lens of therapy had revealed her to him. Avril Incandenza is the seductive puppetmaster of Enfield Tennis Academy. When she speaks, Wallace wrote, everyone inclines their heads to her “very subtly and slightly, like heliotropes.”
And Wallace missed Karr. He had spent the last few months of his time in Syracuse mostly in exile, anxious he’d have to be recording the arrival and departure of “different masculine-model cars” in front of her house, as he wrote Corey Washington in March. He had brought her with him though as a character in his book. Joelle Van Dyne, also known as Madame Psychosis, is a radio show host and drug addict in recovery at Ennet House, a woman who keeps her face veiled either because it is hideously disfigured or because she is so beautiful that every man who sees it falls in love with her. She stars in “Infinite Jest,” the lethal video cartridge.
Predictably, Wallace worried about going back to teaching. He had been writing at an unequaled pace for two years and feared the change to his routine. But he was also an adult now, a man three and a half years sober with a job and a house and an advance for the book he was well under way with. That’s what it meant to live under the new administration of fun: no more irony and distance, commitment not spectation (a favorite word of his), involvement. And even, where possible, the hope of redemption. “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished,” he told Larry McCaffery in the Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, which came out just as he arrived in Bloomington, “but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” The writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wallace had always preferred certainty to unclarity, passion to incrementalism, and now he was a full-fledged apostle of sincerity. He had no tolerance for the person he was and gave no quarter to writers whom he thought were like the writer he used to be. When Steve Moore wrote him to recommend a novel he was publishing, praising its “sardonic worldview perfect for the irony-filled nineties,” Wallace shot back that this was “like saying ‘a kerosen[e]-filled fire extinguisher perfect for the blazing housefire.’”