'Neurotic and Obsessive' but 'Not Too Intransigent or Defensive': Editing David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

A compact, well-sourced essay on how Wallace was edited — how he resisted and accepted editorial change across his career, drawing on Steven Moore, Michael Pietsch, Gerry Howard, Bonnie Nadell, and D.T. Max. For Infinite Jest it is a genetic-criticism resource: it collates the record of what was cut, what was added late, how the endnotes were argued for, and several specific name and phrasing changes between the December-1993 draft and the 1996 book. Its thesis — "there is a consensus that David Wallace’s best editor was David Wallace" — is biographical, but the compositional record it assembles is its lasting value.

Key claims

The three-copy December 1993 draft. In December 1993 Wallace printed three copies of the manuscript "he had taken to calling the “longer thing”" and gave one each to Pietsch, "a woman he was trying to impress," and Steven Moore (managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction), whose edits Wallace wanted to compare with Pietsch's. Moore describes the draft as a physical mess — a "patchwork of different fonts and point sizes," paginated "in a nesting pattern (e.g., p. 22 is followed by 22A-J before resuming with p. 23" and with "Several states of revision are present", from heavily overwritten early pages to clean final drafts, plus marginal notes and "adjustments to chronology (which seems to have given Wallace quite a bit of trouble)".
The cut-then-add pattern. Wallace "cut about 40 pages from" the first draft on Pietsch/Moore's suggestions, "but before publication he added more than 200 pages of additional material, including an opening chapter that many critics have praised as the novel’s best and more than 100 pages of (often footnoted) endnotes" — followed by "another round of cuts." Separately, Pietsch's own figure (via D.T. Max) is that Wallace cut about "250 manuscript pages" and reworked large swaths, notably "the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and the Orin Incandenza football stories."
The unfinished-strands defense (Wallace to Pietsch). Answering Pietsch's worries about unresolved plot strings, Wallace fired back: "We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin." He claimed he could supply "5000 words" of theoretico-structural argument "but let’s spare one another, shall we?"
Specific draft→book changes (documented by Moore, quoted by Farber). The softening of Orin's womanizing: the book's "gentle note that Orin ‘had already drawn idle little sideways 8’s on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds’" (scene 068) "replaces the MS’s coarser ‘had already gone about penetrating a huge cross-section of BU’s incoming freshwomen." Other changes: "'Queer Tony' becomes 'Poor Tony'"; Wallace "favors the acronym of “prettiest girl of all time” to the phrase itself"; "Charles Tavis imitates Pierre Trudeau, not Richard Nixon"; and "the “Year of the Twinkie” becomes the “Year of the Whopper.”" Farber reads these as evidence of "Wallace’s vice-like grip on authorial prerogative" over "a 1079-page book."
The endnotes were argued for, not assumed. Pietsch preferred footnotes; Wallace defended endnotes in a letter (via Max) as letting him "make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story," and to mimic the information-flood and data-triage he expected of near-future US life, plus verisimilitude and a physical "back and forth" that "cutely mimics" the book's thematic concerns. The published book kept "almost 100 … pages of endnotes"; Pietsch persuaded him to cut "hundreds more."
The editorial temperament. Wallace was shy and deferential in person (addressing editors by surname, playing with Pietsch's kids at a cookout) but "arch and confident" in letters about the work; Pietsch's brutal editing question was "Can the book possibly live without this?" Farber's summary: "there is a consensus that David Wallace’s best editor was David Wallace."
Career frame. Wallace was more receptive to editing on his novels than his magazine pieces (the Consider the Lobster copyright-page note about "edited, heavily edited, or … bowdlerized form"; the "Host" and "Up, Simba" fights); and more receptive on Infinite Jest than he had been as a deferential-in-ignoring Amherst senior editing The Broom of the System with Gerry Howard.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The novel's unresolved plot strands are deliberate structural design, not incompletion — Wallace could argue the choice at length and defended it against his editor

Crux: designed-holes
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [author] Wallace's letter to Pietsch, quoted via D.T. Max: "We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin." He could give "5000 words" of theoretico-structural argument "but let’s spare one another, shall we?" [p. 7]
- [secondary] Farber frames this as Wallace preferring "maverick positions on the structural shape of the novel" even while accepting other cuts. [p. 7]
Notes: Also bears on ending-missing-year: the graded knowledge Wallace claims (Gately full, Hal ~50%, Orin hints) is a compositional statement of how much closure each strand was designed to carry. Cite-as-written; the "5000 words of theoretico-structural argument" were, per the letter, never supplied.

THEORY: The endnotes are a functional design device — a controlled way to fracture a linear text and mimic near-future information-flood, argued for over Pietsch's preference for footnotes

Crux: endnotes-function
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [author] Wallace's letter (via Max): endnotes let him "make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story," to mimic the near-future information-flood and data-triage. [p. 8]
- [author] To Charlie Rose (1997): "reality is fractured right now … I am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disoriented." [p. 8]
Notes: Farber records the resistance in-source — Pietsch "preferred the easier to read footnotes" and got Wallace to cut "hundreds more" endnotes — so the design was negotiated, not unilateral.

Themes

Composition and revision history; the endnote apparatus and its rationale; authorial control vs. editorial pressure; the near-future information-flood the book models formally.

Cross-references

riles-in-dfw-archive-part1 — the HRC-draft firsthand visit; Farber's "opening chapter … added late" and the +200-pages figure corroborate the archive's late-addition of the Year-of-Glad opening.
cafoscari-comparative-reading-ij-2021 — den Dulk's genetic dating of the opening to a June-1994 typescript agrees with the "added more than 200 pages … including an opening chapter" account.
dfwwords-galleys-vs-first-printing — the galley/first-printing collation is the very-late layer; Farber's is the 1993-draft→1996-book layer, one revision stratum earlier.
infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij and observer-gerry-howard-editing-dfw-2008 — Pietsch's and Howard's own first-person accounts of editing Wallace; Farber draws on and synthesizes both.
The Orin-softening change lands in the published text at scene 068 (Orin's B.U.-coeds passage, pp. 283-299).

Notable passages

Wallace to Pietsch on the ending: "We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin."
Moore on the draft: "Several states of revision are present".
Farber's thesis: "there is a consensus that David Wallace’s best editor was David Wallace."
Pietsch's editing question: "Can the book possibly live without this?"