Wallace, David Foster | A highly intimate collection of correspondence with one of Wallace’s closest friends

Wallace, David Foster

An intimate group of letters from the early stages of the author’s career, with a presentation copy of his first book

Twenty-six letters, from David Foster Wallace, to Corey Washington, various places, 30 June 1983 – 15 September 1996. Twenty-one typed letters, four autograph letters, many with the author’s emendations and postscripts in pencil or ink, some with doodles, all variously signed “Dave W,” “Dave Wallace,” “David Wallace,” and “Dave,” with their original envelopes; original folds, occasional stray spots.

[With:] The Broom of the System. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987. 8vo (165 x 100 mm). Inscribed on the half-title; p. 131/132 dogeared, toned throughout as usual, bookmark loosely inserted. Publisher’s pictorial wraps; corners just barely bumped, minor scratches to fore-edge.

“… but my head is still pretty normal sized, … mostly since there’s a good chance that only me and Mom (and, of course, you, or I will kick your ass but good) will buy the book and the house will take a huge loss and my name will be economic and literary mud—even shit …”

A highly intimate collection of correspondence with one of Wallace’s closest friends. Sent during his college years, throughout his time in his MFA, and up through the publication of his seminal novel, Infinite Jest, these letters capture the earliest stages of Wallace’s career, and document the struggles that would also define his life.

Wallace met Corey Washington, a preternaturally talented fifteen-year-old freshman, during his sophomore year at Amherst College. Wallace had long given nicknames to his friends, and he lovingly referred to Washington as “Core,” as well as several other epithets seen throughout these letters—such as “Reactor Core Cooling Water Containment Chamber,” “Coolant Water Temperature and Pressure Gauge,” “Radiation Detector Gauge,” “Reactor,” and more. Washington fell in with the burgeoning author’s group of friends, including Nat Larson, Miller Maley, and Wallace’s roommate and closest friend, Mark Costello. In D.T. Max’s biography, he draws on the young freshman’s memory to paint the scene of this friend group: “In their undertrafficked corner of the dining hall, the conversation among the group bounced between social and sexual frustration, intellectual enthusiasm, and nerdy inquiry. Washington remembers the roving subjects as ‘Wittgenstein, the New Deal, Cantor, current politics, mathematical logic, Descartes, hot girls, Kant, etc.’” (27).

Indeed, almost exactly that range of subjects, save the New Deal, is reflected here in this collection of correspondence. The earliest two letters from Wallace, dated “Day before July 1, 1983” and 15 July, were sent to Washington at Stanford, where he was conducting research at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory over summer break. In them, one can see not only the tenor of these friendships and Wallace’s sense of humor, but also the issues that made up Wallace’s thinking throughout his life. The letters move swiftly between discussions of calculus, Cantor, and formal logic: “Now, I have a bit of bad news. … I decided not to take that Calculus course after all. … It is just too much when the smell of flowers is in the air and the birds are singing and the pop of frosty Old Mil cans can be heard from the classroom window. I rose one day and said ‘No.’ … I’ve doubled the hours for my logic course[.] … We have done set theory, with Cantor and the diagonal proof and uncountable infinities and the continuum hypothesis and all that. I find it deeply, viscerally interesting”; “I don’t like math that much, I like metamath a lot. It seems sort of cheaty to learn proofs of concepts in calculus when I don’t even have a good grasp of the concepts—something like throwing a girl’s skirt over her head and kissing her on the bare stomach before you’ve even introduced yourself or taken her for a malted or anything. Still, I think it’s cool: right now we’re using Krafty Kurt’s Compactness Theorem to construct a proof of the assertion that there exists a natural number greater than all other natural numbers…”).

Interwoven with these mathematical and logical interests are discussions of girls and crushes: “I suppose you know that [he] had a monster-sized crush on her for about the whole of last year—you should drop him a line and lie and stuff and say how you’re doing all this wild, corn-oil-type stuff with [her]—he would go absolutely nuts, I’m sure”; “I am shocked by your revelation that you in any way thought of and desired [her] in a carnal fashion—my impression had always been that you admired her running stride and her mind in that order and exhaustively.”

Wallace also mentions two of his constant fixations, tennis and drugs: “I have been playing a lot of tennis and have to go out of town for a tournament next week. I also have been abusing drugs. … I was clean for over a year and now I’m right back in the murky, sweet-smelling depths of sin that I occupied two years ago”; “I am going to stop smoking pot all the time VERY SOON, in the next week or so at the latest. Enough is enough.” And he touches down on literature, albeit only briefly: “Besides all that, I am reading a lot of fairly fun stuff on my own, stuff assigned by me or by Mark”; “[I] was gratified to learn that my letter had found you, courtesy of W.A.S.T.E. and the indomitable Trystero community of letter-deliverers (Pynchon has the story on all this in “The Crying of Lot 49” which I recommend highly to you as a cool and short thing for a cool and short guy to read”).

Two more letters continue in this fashion, with a letter from 20 August 1983 that signs off “Have a good time. I’ll see you in a couple weeks,” before the correspondence first illustrates the depression that also defined Wallace’s life. The writer had his first major depressive episode in the spring of 1982, forcing him to return home partway through his freshman year (during which he first began to write fiction seriously). Not long after that letter to “Core,” he fell into his next bout of mental illness: anxiety attacks became regular, and he sought out psychiatric medicine to help him. He returned to campus in the fall, but he quickly found himself in the throes of suicidal ideation and, without telling anyone, he withdrew from Amherst a second time. This event is documented in two moving, honest letters here:

“Dear Corey,

This is just a small letter to apologize for melting off and not saying anything to you. You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real ‘Waller’: an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit.

I hope to get back to school before Spring, provided I am let out by then. I may have a slight lobotomy, but I’m told that it can only make me more agreeable, and will eliminate all but the four basic human needs, about which we can talk some other time.

Yours Truly,

—Dave Wallace”

“Dear Corey,

Having returned from a rough day of feeding the pigeons in the park not five minutes ago and having immediately torn open your kind letter and read it, I am now at Mom’s with a typewriter …

I am very sorry if the fact that I didn’t call you back and am not drowning you in letters gives the impression that I stopped giving a damn or was mad or something. I am ambivalent about communicating with my friends at school for a few reasons, none of which are earthshaking or even stand up under rigorous examination. One is the content of whatever I say. I can be reasonably glib and act like everything’s OK, in which case you will quite justifiably wonder just why the hell I had to go home and get my head shrunk if everything seemed so marvey. The Other alternative is to be very dire and down and deranged and depressed, legitimizing my present location somewhat, but certainly not giving much pleasure to the reader, and who needs that? … I have since junior high suffered from a number of unpleasant neuroses, some of which Mark C. knows about and can fill you in on, but for the last few years I have been increasingly bothered by a tendency toward depressive episodes that had been getting progressively more frequent and more severe. … This summer I began going to this doctor all in secret from my parents and stuff and began taking this anti-depressant medication called Tofranil. That fucked me up a lot, especially as the summer wore on: I couldn’t read very well, and I was trying to do stuff like read Uncle Ludwig’s Investigations … it was awful. The medication (dope, really) actually seemed in my case to make the depression worse, and I finally fell into a pit about the last week in August that was worse than anything I have ever experienced, and it got worse and worse, even as I left all happy-seeming (an insane desire to hide the festering pus-swollen cancre [sic] at the center of my brain was an enduring and is a recalcitrant symptom) for Amherst. … One hideous symptom of severe depression is that it is impossible to do anything and to do nothing; as a devotee of Jumping Joe’s Celebrated Excluded Middle I am sure you can see that this is an Intolerable Situation. I came very close to doing something stupid and irrevocable at Amherst, but finally opted, sensibly or wimpishly, depending on whether your point of view is that of my parents or that of Charlie M., to try to get better so that I could exist. …

… I will ask formally that you not leave Amherst before getting your degree (i.e., that you stick around next year); it looks like I will be there the whole year, will need my friends very much, and promise to juggle or make fart jokes to keep you amused if things get dire or anything.

So long for now, and thank you for your letters.

Yours Truly,

Dave W.”

Beyond this frank self-portrait, this second letter additionally illuminates one of the central tensions that Wallace felt, both in life and in his writing, around his condition. He names it plainly, if unintentionally: if he is to write about this range of experience honestly, “to be very dire and down and deranged and depressed,” would “certainly not giv[e] much pleasure to the reader, and who needs that?” While Wallace’s formal inventiveness, interest in metafiction, and fondness for difficult and experimental literature, were undoubtedly aesthetically motivated and principled, his aversion to realist fiction also served to mask his discomfort with the realities of emotional life. Wallace would soon be thrust into facing this tendency, unsuccessfully at first, during his MFA at the University of Arizona, where his teachers emphasized the tenets of realist fiction, against which the young author rebelled. Published while he was still a graduate student, his first novel, The Broom of the System—a philosophically tortured yet hysterical postmodern game of a novel, steeped in the work of Thomas Pynchon—was something he would, much later in his career, rebuke on the grounds that it prized intellectual spectacle over the details of lived life. That this letter ends with a descent into clowning and fart joked, “if things get dire” is revealing.

The sale of that first novel that launched his career, also included with this collection of correspondence, is documented in these letters. On 30 December, Wallace writes, “The only major news is that, regarding the [E]nglish thesis, I have obtained a literary agent, and through her, the book was auctioned and just recently sold to Viking press for rather a lot of money.” He then, in a typically boastful way while transparently attempting to mask that pride with self-minimizing, he encourages Washington to tell the Amherst faculty, “for the simple reason that the agent thinks this could be rather popular with people between 18 and 35, and the more people who know about it ahead of time the more chance of it selling well enough for me to sell my next project, too.”

While Wallace had mostly moved away from the writing of Broom by the time of his MFA, he was writing another kind of experimental fiction, minimalist and disinterested in conventions of character-driven narratives. He found himself struggling against his professors, who pushed him towards straightforward representations of “American life.” Though he was writing, he was also struggling. In the 6 November letter, Wallace writes to Corey, “Things are bad to fair here. … I mostly sit around smoking pot, cigarettes, worrying about not working, worrying about the tension between worry and the absence of any action fueled by that worry.” This, too, would remain a defining feature of Wallace’s experience with writing: writing was the only thing that made the author feel alive, yet he spent most of his time worrying about writing, or more often worrying about not writing, or worrying about that worry. The depression that consumed his life, and ultimately took it from him, prevented him from the one thing that made him feel vitally alive, and toward him toward avoidance and addiction—to television, alcohol, drugs, and sex.

Altogether, these letters paint a highly intimate portrait of the author, showing him in all aspects, not merely those he felt unselfconscious about expressing to the public. Here, one can not only see the power of the writer’s young mind and the mental struggles that would define his 46 years, but also, implicitly, the seeds that would shape his later fiction—novels so invested in emphatically reasserting the primacy of empathy and sincerity against postmodern irony.

A remarkable collection of letters from a titan of contemporary literature.

“About this ‘Voice of a New Generation’ thing. This ‘Dave’s-too-cool-to-deal-with-old-friends’ thing. The thing to realize is that literary fiction as a world is much like philosophy. It has its rising stars and falling titans and cliques and jealousies. It’s also largely ignored by those not in it. Now, not quite as much as [philosophy], because fiction lies on some continuum between academia and popular entertainment. Ellis and McInerney and Janowitz, Updike and Bellow et al are ‘stars’ in a way that Sellars and Davidson and Dretske and Rorty are not. … [T]he thing to realize is that having some success and attention as a fiction writer means a degree of ‘celebrity’ roughly equivalent to that of, say, a small-market local TV weatherman. What William Hurt in The Big Chill calls ‘a small, deeply disturbed following.’ … My friends and my work are the great treasures in my life, though neither are exactly pain- and grief-free. … I will always be your friend, Corey …”

REFERENCES:

D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, New York: Penguin