He asked for a high level of commitment, but he gave it too. No one worked harder. He read every story three times and marked it up with each pass — once for first impressions, a second time to evaluate how well it did as a work of fiction, and a third time as if it were about to go to press. He would append long letters of analysis and critique to even routine undergraduate efforts. And for the graduate students, many of whom had been drawn to ISU by its reputation as a safe place for theoretical fiction, the first day of class Wallace sometimes put the names of major literary theorists on the blackboard and said, “I know about all this stuff. You don’t need to remind me of it.” Anyone who thought he was going to champion the department’s tradition soon realized he or she was wrong; his goals were traditional. The story should connect reader and writer. “Go somewhere it is difficult to get to. Try to tell about something you care about,” he would say. Or, “What is at stake in this story?” he would ask, parroting just the question he’d found so irksome from the professors at Arizona almost a decade before. If a story shied away from its emotional potential, Wallace would write on their papers, “This is a skater. See me.” And to those who insisted on the intellect over the heart, he’d order, “Write about a kid whose bunny died.” He was making a clear statement about the purpose of fiction. If the heart throbbed, who cared what the head did?
Wallace was relieved to find he could work on Infinite Jest and teach at the same time. The first semester he taught he was also moving forward again on the book. As he had with Karr, he gave Kymberly Harris new sections to read and comment on. But Harris had not come to Bloomington to be a muse or literary widow; she wanted Wallace to go out with her for dinner, to see her in plays, to be available for conversation. Wallace wanted to work. They broke up, got back together, each iteration making their mutual need more intense, a pattern he knew from Walden and Karr. He closed the door and wrote; she went out without him. Yet he did not want to be as alone as this left him. Writing all day was too solitary; being with Kymberly was too much company. So Wallace adopted a rescued Labrador pup that he named Jeeves (formally, Very Good Jeeves, the name of a story collection by P. G. Wodehouse that Wallace had loved as a boy). The dog gave Wallace great pleasure. He had the run of the house, slept in Wallace’s bed, and ate food out of his mouth; Wallace particularly liked a little sideways dance Jeeves did before he got his dinner. He understood that a dog was not a relationship with another person and yet he saw the advantages. Dogs didn’t have acting careers; they didn’t compete with you for grant money; and when you lavished love on them it made you feel good about yourself. As he would tell an interviewer after Infinite Jest came out, “It’s just much easier having dogs. You don’t get laid; but you also don’t get the feeling you’re hurting their feelings all the time.”
But it turned out that Wallace was too busy for the demands even a canine made. Jeeves would chew on his foot while he typed, then hump the velour recliner. He would relieve himself in the living room. Harris would come over to find her $100 pairs of shoes ruined and her underwear eaten. And Jeeves’s barking drove Wallace crazy; he tried to wear earplugs while he worked, then added airline headphones. He found himself unable to set limits. In some way Jeeves was an avatar of him — or of how he saw himself — ungainly, honest, quick to give his love, a rebounder from constant disappointment. Any form of discipline for Jeeves just seemed to him cruelty; he felt keenly the least whimper of pain from the animal. It was easier for him to be mean to a person than a pet.
In desperation, Wallace reached out to his friends from the university and in his recovery group. John O’Brien sent over his dog trainer, but Wallace couldn’t bear to see Jeeves disciplined. His sensitivity became a joke among his friends — this was after all farm country. Finally, a retired engineer from his recovery group started taking the Lab puppy for walks in nearby Miller Park, while Wallace strove to work. Still, he complained when Jeeves came home covered with green slime from the pond there. “What am I supposed to do,” he demanded, “send him through a car wash?”
Gale Walden had appeared in Illinois to look after her grandfather in Champaign, who was ill. She had also gotten a job at the Review of Contemporary Fiction. She and Wallace had barely been in touch since he had warned her away in Boston. Sometimes the two would meet now at diners, halfway between Champaign and Bloomington. They picked corn together on her grandfather’s land, and she cooked it for him. A more mature friendship was emerging. She would sometimes come by his house and be amazed at the chaos—“papers, file cabinets, multiple Harper’s magazines, toys Jeeves had torn up, and really a lot of herbal tea, which I thought was probably a female influence,” she remembers. He had papered the bathroom with pages from his novel. He told Walden he was putting everything he had into it. To her he seemed happy in a new way.
As 1993 drew to a close, Wallace had nearly finished his draft. He had made some of the cuts Pietsch had suggested and he had continued to expand Don Gately’s role, so that Gately was beginning to take the book over from Hal Incandenza. The change limned his own journey post-sobriety, from clever to mindful. Late in the novel, Gately is shot trying to protect his Ennet House charges and lies in a hospital, enduring the pain without morphine. In what is effectively the climactic scene of a novel without climaxes, he resists artificial pain relief with great effort:
He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear.…It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. …He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all…. But he could choose not to listen.
In November, Wallace returned to Boston for a panel at the Arlington Center for the Arts. The subject was the future of fiction. There were about thirty people in the audience and the host was Sven Birkerts. Birkerts and Wallace had met once since the former had given Girl with Curious Hair its first serious consideration, during Wallace’s short stint as a student at Harvard. At the time, Birkerts had been stunned by Wallace’s rapid-fire thought, enthusiasm for postmodernism, and need for cigarettes. Birkerts had also invited Franzen. To the audience, Wallace seemed the most cheerful of the three participants, the one with the most sense that successful fiction was still possible. Stranded overnight on the way home at O’Hare Airport, he wrote a long note (“HOPE THIS IS READABLE; I USED BLOCK CAPS, IN HOPES”) to Birkerts, trying to explain just how much he had changed. He told Birkerts that the critic cared more for “Little Expressionless Animals” than the author did now. The note also contained an early suggestion that capturing human verities when you had Wallace’s racing, recursive mind might at times be hard: