His grammar obsession quickly became well known. “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he would tell students, seeing a particular blunder. Or, “This actually hurts my brain.” He would consult his mother’s book, Practically Painless English, to answer any challenges and would sometimes trot out her old feint of fake-coughing when a student fell into a grammatical solecism. He used the modifier “only” in class to show the power careful usage wielded:
You have been entrusted to feed your neighbor’s dog for a week while he (the neighbor) is out of town. The neighbor returns home; something has gone awry; you are questioned.
“I fed the dog.”
“Did you feed the parakeet?”
“I fed only the dog.”
“Did anyone else feed the dog?”
“Only I fed the dog.”
“Did you fondle/molest the dog?”
“I only fed the dog!”
His voice cracked with pleasure as he spoke the last line.
Wallace stood out in Claremont. His earnestness, part midwestern childhood, part defense mechanism, was unusual on a campus where the tone was muted cool, sun-drenched Ivy. Wallace once tried to get approved a course called “Extremely Advanced Essay Writing,” but the registrar objected that no “Advanced Essay Writing” class had been offered before. Still, Wallace’s arrival was a triumph for both the department and the university, this middle-aged monstre sacré in his iconoclastic outfits — bandana, beaten-up hiking shorts, and double athletic socks inside unlaced hiking boots. The Los Angeles Times, in covering his arrival, noted with approval his Pomona College sweatshirt with the arms cut off.
Wallace very much wanted Green to be in the same city with him. He did not want to wait until Stirling graduated high school in 2005. In the summer of 2003, Green bought a house in Cave Creek, Arizona. Wallace made the six-hour drive once a week. He worked in an upstairs room and read Tom Clancy novels by the pool, “burning his shoulders to a crisp,” as Green remembers. There was a local recovery group he liked too.
In August 2003 Wallace went to Maine with Green on an assignment for Gourmet. She had never met his parents before but his relationship with his mother had gotten easier with time and they bonded as a group. His editors were hoping he would reprise his role as the elite’s correspondent in the heartland, but, having promised to do his “own eccentric researching,” he came back with something decidedly more delicate than the state fair or the cruise piece. He had always been interested in what animals feel — their inability to protect themselves touched him as human pain didn’t — and over the years he had begun to wonder what right we had to be cruel to them. In Maine he found a scene worthy of Hogarth: thousands of lobsters being boiled alive at the “enormous, pungent and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival,” where “friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking and chewing and dribbling. It’s hot, and the sagged roof traps the steam and the smells.” Who, he wanted to know, gave us such dominion? But Wallace was and had always been averse to hectoring — it seemed rude to him — and in the piece he took pains to distance himself, physically and rhetorically, from the PETA representative, “Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas,” who, he writes, papered the festival at the harbor with his leaflet “Being Boiled Hurts.” Instead, Wallace posed the problem with lobster eating as a series of ethical questions, writing in the faux-naïve voice of the curious midwestern boy he still in some ways was: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” He went on slyly:
For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and — presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands?…If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with [such] confusions and convictions…what makes it feel truly okay, inside, to just dimiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here — I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?
Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone’s behavior (it did not change his own — at the festival one evening, Green remembers, he enjoyed two lobsters for dinner), but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency.
In general, Pomona had a mellowing effect on Wallace. In September 2002, for instance, he had gone east for the New Yorker festival. He was to read alongside Franzen, and the two, who had never shared a stage before, jockeyed for the order, with Wallace feigning not to know that the second reader had the more prestigious slot. For Franzen, it was a microcosm of something that always bothered him in their friendship: Wallace didn’t like acknowledging how competitive they were. In the end, Wallace went first in the heat and read two sections of his long, unfinished novel. One was about Leonard Stecyk, the smarmy young man whose desire to behave perfectly with everyone leads to a wedgie in school (he grows up to be an IRS agent),2 and the other was a Kafkaesque story about an implacable infant who turns up in an agency office and drives the examiners crazy. “My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant,” the narrator, an unnamed auditor, recounts, “I can describe only as— fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger — fierce, intimidating, aggressive.”3 The crowd was highly appreciative; Wallace had brought a towel for his own perspiration and was happy to see his friend also sweating. “I…did not think he could,” he wrote DeLillo afterward. But, graciously, Franzen had spared him the news that the author they both most admired was himself in the audience. “He’s kind in his way,” Wallace acknowledged afterward of his friend.4
Wallace had had three significant projects to work on as he settled in at Pomona: the ever-present Long Thing, a new story collection he had proposed to Pietsch, and a round of editorial queries on his book on Cantor and set theory. On the math book, he had pushed himself hard in the spring of 2002, his last semester in Bloomington, devoting almost all his time to it and getting a draft in just before leaving. Characteristically, the project had gone from a dare (“I’m doing a book about math!” he’d written Moore. “You?”) to a task (to DeLillo, just before moving to Pomona, he called it his “wretched math book”). But all the same, after a lot of effort he felt he had done good work and struck a balance between the biographical and the mathematical. He had hired a University of Illinois graduate student to go over the equations and technical details to make sure they were accurate too. But in September 2002, he wrote DeLillo in frustration that what had seemed done was not. “Both the math-editor and the general editor want repairs,” he complained. A book he had thought would take him four months of part-time work had now taken eleven of nearly full-time work. “I never want to see another Fourier series as long as I live,” he added, pride peeking out from beneath the irritation. And the copyedit was living up to his nightmares. Nine months later he was back to DeLillo with this new complaint: “The galleys for this blasted math book were such a mess that they’re having to typeset the whole thing over.” When the publisher asked for a small essay for its catalog on how he had come to write the book, Wallace responded with a meta-refusaclass="underline"