DeLillo, DFW, and Places of Mortal Drama

TL;DR

A first-person eyewitness report from an archivist who spent a lunch hour in the Harry Ransom Center reading room in November 2008 with the Don DeLillo Papers open in front of him — the folder that holds Wallace's 1992–2003 correspondence with DeLillo. Written eight years before Graham Foster's scholarly article and entirely independently, it quotes the same early Wallace letter admitting the Eschaton material owes "a rather uncomfortable debt" to End Zone — making it the earliest and second witness to that wording. It also quotes the October 1995 page-proofs letter (the "LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER" phrase) and scattered other letters, and reads the whole correspondence as the record of DeLillo's generous mentorship of a younger writer who "wrote DeLillo out of the blue with a kind of fan letter in 1992."

Key claims

• The blogger read the DeLillo Papers at the HRC while attending a symposium, "Creating a Usable Past: Writers, Archives, and Institutions." The folder is "not a huge body of material — just one folder, although it's a fat folder" — DeLillo's correspondence with Wallace, "primarily DFW to DeLillo, with a few of DeLillo's responses, from 1992 to 2003."
• The Eschaton/End Zone debt. Having read "the chapter near the end [of End Zone] that is clearly the ancestor of the Eschaton section of Infinite Jest," the blogger found the confirmation in the correspondence: "in one of his first letters DFW says, 'part of a long thing I'm in the middle of has a section that I've gone back and seen owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley.'" (The blogger closes the quotation at "Major Staley"; the scholarly carrier of the same letter extends it by two words, "in End Zone" — the wording agrees exactly as far as both run.)
• The October 1995 anxieties letter. "A fantastic letter from October 1995, just before publication of IJ," in which Wallace "lays bare a number of his anxieties about his own work ethic" and the tension between "fun" and "discipline," wanting to be a "Respectful writer" — quoting "…I'd far prefer finding out some way to become [a Respectful writer] w/o time and pain and the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER."
• Other letters quoted in passing: Wallace on hating Lynch's Lost Highway ("I swear it looked promising in dailies") and recommending Twin Peaks, Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, and The Matrix; a 2000 note on digital media ("It's too unphysical. There's nothing to hold and get coffee stains on…"); and a Christmas-card line, "Men's rooms are place [sic] of mortal drama, in my opinion. If I ever wrote a play, it'd be set in a men's room."
• The mentorship reading. "It's clear (even from the other side of the correspondence) what a considerate, thoughtful, and generous mentor-figure DeLillo was to DFW"; Wallace thought Underworld "DeLillo's best work by far," and DeLillo "read an advance copy [of IJ] and provided DFW feedback."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's Eschaton set piece owes an acknowledged debt to the war game in DeLillo's End Zone

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's early (1992) letter to DeLillo, read at the HRC: a long thing in progress "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley." [blog body, first bullet]
  • [inference] The blogger's own prior reading of End Zone: "the chapter near the end… clearly the ancestor of the Eschaton section," "a war game built on apocalypse scenarios and menacing all-caps alliances."
• Notes: The blogger entertains its own counter-tension on the datum, and this must be recorded (counterevidence clause): he wonders whether Wallace's "unconscious debt" framing was sincere, or whether Wallace "was being a bit coy with DeLillo… really quite conscious of the war game section of EZ while writing the Eschaton game, but framed the similarity as unconscious and inadvertent to win the approval of one of his literary heroes" — before concluding he "can't imagine DFW not being up front about something like this." The scholarly carrier of the same letter quotes two more words, extending the span through "in End Zone" — a difference of quotation extent, not a wording contradiction.

THEORY: DeLillo was a genuine mentor to Wallace across an eight-year correspondence

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] The correspondence itself (1992–2003), read whole: Wallace "wrote DeLillo out of the blue with a kind of fan letter in 1992 and ended up writing him fairly often for 8 years or so"; DeLillo "read an advance copy [of IJ] and provided DFW feedback." [blog body, mentor bullet]
• Notes: A reader/eyewitness reading of the archive, not a textual claim about the novel. Corroborates the mentor-figure framing already in the registry's delillo-influence entry.

Themes

Literary influence and mentorship (DeLillo and Wallace) · the Eschaton/End Zone war-game lineage · the archive as a place of intimacy with a writer's mind ("a reading room is a place of mortal drama") · Wallace's anxieties about work ethic, "fun" vs "discipline," and not showing off.

Cross-references

• foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit — the scholarly carrier of the same 1992 debt-letter, eight years later; the two quote identical wording on the span they share.
• hrc-letters-1995-rcm-scans — digests the scans of the October 1995 DeLillo letter this post also quotes ("LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER"); this blog is an independent witness to that letter's wording.
• dfwwords-enfield-end-zone — the fan-blog End Zone/ETA parallel catalogue whose "rather uncomfortable debt" datum is now second-witnessed here.

Notable passages

• On the debt (Wallace's early-1992 letter, quoted by the blogger): a long thing in progress "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley."
• On the archive: the folder is "not a huge body of material — just one folder, although it's a fat folder."
• Wallace on ambition (October 1995 letter): "…I'd far prefer finding out some way to become [a Respectful writer] w/o time and pain and the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER."
• The Christmas-card line: "Men's rooms are place [sic] of mortal drama, in my opinion. If I ever wrote a play, it'd be set in a men's room."