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Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008
- University of Iowa Press
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177 Jonathan Franzen Infor mal R emar ks from the David Foster Wallace Memor ial Service in New Yor k on October 23, 2008 Like a lot of writers, but even more than most, Dave loved to be in control of things. He was easily stressed by chaotic social situations . I only ever twice saw him go to a party without Karen. One of them, hosted by Adam Begley, I almost physically had to drag him to, and as soon as we were through the front door and I took my eye off him for one second, he made a U- turn and went back to my apartment to chew tobacco and read a book. The second party he had no choice but to stay for, because it was celebrating the publication of Infinite Jest. He survived it by saying thank you, again and again, with painfully exaggerated formality. One thing that made Dave an extraordinary college teacher was the formal structure of the job. Within those confines, he could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise. The structure of interviews was safe in a similar way. When Dave was the subject, he could relax into taking care of his interviewer. When he was the journalist himself, he did his best work when he was able to find a technician—a cameraman following John McCain, a board operator on a radio show—who was thrilled to meet somebody genuinely interested in the arcana of his job. Dave loved details for their own sake, but details were also an outlet for the love bottled up in his heart: a way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being. 178 Commu nit y Which was, approximately, the description of literature that he and I came up with in our conversations and correspondence in the early 1990s. I’d loved Dave from the very first letter I ever got from him, but the first two times I tried to meet him in person, up in Cambridge, he flat- out stood me up. Even after we did start hanging out, our meetings were often stressful and rushed—much less intimate than exchanging letters. Having loved him at first sight, I was always straining to prove that I could be funny enough and smart enough, and he had a way of gazing off at a point a few miles distant which made me feel as if I were failing to make my case. Not many things in my life ever gave me a greater sense of achievement than getting a laugh out of Dave. But that “neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being”: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. “A way out of loneliness” was the formulation we agreed to agree on. And nowhere was Dave more totally and gorgeously able to maintain control than in his written language. He had the most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive. Way out at word number 70 or 100 or 140 in a sentence deep into a three-page paragraph of macabre humor or fabulously reticulated self- consciousness, you could smell the ozone from the crackling precision of his sentence structure, his effortless and pitch- perfect shifting among ten different levels of high, low, middle, technical, hipster, nerdy, philosophical, vernacular, vaudevillian, hortatory, tough- guy, broken- hearted, lyrical diction. Those sentences and those pages, when he was able to be producing them, were as true and safe and happy a home as any he had during most of the twenty years I knew him. So I could tell you stories about the bickering little road trip he and I once took, or I could tell you about the wintergreen scent that his chew gave to my little apartment whenever he stayed with me, or I could tell you about the awkward chess games we played and the even more awkward tennis rallying we sometimes did—the comforting structure of the games versus the weird deep fraternal rivalries boiling along underneath—but truly the main thing was the writing. For most of the time I knew Dave, the most intense interaction I had with him was sitting alone in my armchair, night after night, for ten days, and reading the manuscript [52.91.67.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:27 GMT) 179 Infor m a l R em ar ks | Jonath a n Fr...