3. All the same Wallace liked to quote one of the veteran recovery members, the group known in Infinite Jest as “the crocodiles,” who told him, “It’s not about whether or not you believe, asshole, it’s about getting down and asking.”
4. Members of recovery groups were supposed to be anonymous. So when Infinite Jest with its many scenes set in a thinly fictionalized Granada House came out, Wallace was forced to dissemble. “I mean,” he told an interviewer, “I got very assertive research and finagle-wise. I mean, I hung out. There were twelve halfway houses in Boston, three of which I spent literally hundreds of hours at.”
5. Big Craig didn’t trust Wallace when he first met him. Marijuana was a lightweight addiction in his eyes. Craig was just out of prison; Wallace was just out of Harvard. “My suspicions were that he was looking for material for a book,” he remembers.
6. Wallace was well aware that suffering could help a writer produce his best work. In Somerville he had read Paul De Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and wrote “brilliant” when he came upon the following disquisition on authorship: “The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification.”
7. The exchange was not entirely so serious. Wallace also gave Franzen some practical advice for his upcoming stay at Yaddo: “Seek out the artists and composers. I’ve found them almost without exception nicer!! Less cliquish, and less apt to fuck with your head than the fiction writers. Poets tend to be OK as long as they’re old. Avoid any fiction writer you don’t already know. Do not fuck anyone (you’ll pay a huge psychic price later).”
8. A few years later he would tell a recovery audience that during this time the only way he could stop his whirring brain was either to masturbate or go to a movie and sit in the front row.
9. Wallace similarly hyped Costello to Karr. “I expected to meet some guy that was like seven feet tall, wearin’ a cowboy hat, chewing tobacco, with his dick coming out the bottom of his pant leg,” she remembers.
10. “The big reason” for the prohibition, Wallace explained ably in Infinite Jest, “is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by…and intense romantic involvements…tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender.”
11. Around this time Karr was working on an essay on poetry called “Against Decoration,” published in Parnassus in 1991, where she took as the twin poles of authorial error “absence of emotion” and “lack of clarity.” She urged poets to move their readers, writing that emotional response was the main goal of art, and was not shy in passing on the same message to Wallace. When he told her he had put certain scenes into Infinite Jest because they were “cool,” she responded, “that’s what my fucking five year old says about Spiderman.”
12. The book was a platform for some of the themes Wallace had first tried out in Arizona, especially the damage wrought by irony. “Serious rap’s so painfully real,” he wrote, “because it’s utterly mastered the special 80s move, the ‘postmodern’ inversion that’s so much sadder and deeper than just self-reference: rap resolves its own contradictions by genuflecting to them.”
13. Big Craig had a role in inspiring the climactic scene in Infinite Jest too. He had his wisdom teeth out with only Novocaine.
14. A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.
15. When the critic Marshall Boswell wrote to Wallace in May 2002 to ask when he had started Infinite Jest, Wallace replied, “It doesn’t work like that for me. I started IJ or somethin’ like it several times. ’86,’88,’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91–’92 all of a sudden it did.”
16. At Arizona Wallace wrote a character sketch, which he called “Las Meninas,” in which a young African American woman named Wardine is beaten by her mother, who is jealous that her boyfriend is attracted to her daughter. Likely for some years the sketch stood alone, but in Infinite Jest it becomes connected to other stories. Wardine’s mother’s boyfriend lives in the same housing project where an addict named Poor Tony goes to buy drugs (the project was actually close to Granada House). Poor Tony, a transvestite, in turn winds up visiting a store run by a pair of Quebecois terrorists.
17. There exists an early two-page draft of a scene from Infinite Jest titled “What Are You Exactly.” In the brief scene, Hal (called “David”) goes for a visit to a man described as a professional conversationalist, who turns out to be his father in disguise. The scene is reminiscent of the therapy sessions between Lenore and Dr. J. in Broom; both share an unacknowledged sadness and a brittle despair.
18. The word “Incandenza” also appears on a list of character names Wallace made on the title page of Erotic Communications, a collection of readings that he used in Somerville for his research on pornography.
19. The addicts’ time at Ennet House is in some way therapy for an overdose of consumerism. In the margins of his copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, Wallace noted, “AA’s = those driven mad w/ fear by the paradigm of scarcity in a commodity/capitalist economy; require return to basically 1st-century communism of spirit.”
20. She diverges from Wallace grammatically when she asks her psychiatrist, “Listen, have you ever felt sick, I mean nauseous? Like you knew you were going to throw up?”
21. Both Gompert and Erdedy wind up in Ennet House, along with others of Wallace’s troubled legions, the facility proving an effective fictional device for Wallace. For where else do addicts congregate but a rehab house? It is their Rick’s.
22. In the letter to Larson, sent nearly two years after the incident, Wallace says that he kept his plan from Karr for fear she’d think he was “crazy and reject me.”
23. He also went to various locksmiths in Boston and explained that he was a postmodern novelist doing research on how to disarm a burglar alarm system. “Finally,” remembers Mark Costello, “the fifth didn’t throw him out.”
24. Wallace had an interest in his family’s Scottish origins. He went to see Braveheart, the story of William Wallace, the national hero, when it came out in 1995. And as he moved from city to city, among the few possessions he brought with him was a painting of a Scottish battle scene his father had given him.
25. As Rick Vigorous comments in Broom, “It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or of any use to those who are.”
26. “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink” was a standard warning against self-pity in recovery, one that Wallace would cite in Infinite Jest.