Five Dials No. 10: Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace 1962–2008

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TL;DR

The printed program of the David Foster Wallace memorial held at NYU's Skirball Center on 23 October 2008 — nine tributes (his sister Amy Wallace-Havens, agent Bonnie Nadell, editors Gerry Howard, Colin Harrison and Michael Pietsch, and the writers Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen), gathered by Five Dials. Most of it is grief and portrait: the kind, bandana-wearing, painfully modest man behind the formidable prose. But three tributes carry composition testimony of the first importance. Nadell recalls that Broom of the System's missing final scene was deliberate, defended by Wallace on Wittgensteinian grounds. Pietsch reproduces Wallace's actual margin notes fighting Infinite Jest's cuts — the "you rotter," the bared canines, the "5,000 words of theoretico–structural arguments" — in what is their earliest print appearance, months before the editor's better-known 2009 account. Franzen describes reading the Infinite Jest manuscript alone across ten nights and names its design: a thousand pages whose humor "became less and less and less funny, section by section," until the title might as well have been Infinite Sadness.

Key claims

Amy Wallace-Havens (sister). A grief portrait of the brother who taught her to throw a ball and "not to throw like a girl"; on the illness, "It was the writing that made it so much less lonely to be in his head," and it was "the fear that he would never be well enough to write again that finally consumed him." She imagines a heaven of chocolate Pop-Tarts and the whistled-up dogs.
Bonnie Nadell (agent, from 1985). She recognized his gift at once (the query letter used "diachronic"; he'd sent the eighth chapter of Broom, not the first). Her composition testimony: "The Broom of the System ends without the last word and doesn't really have a final scene," and when she — "with the wisdom of a twenty-five-year-old" — tried to get him to wrap it up traditionally, "He proceeded to explain to me, using Wittgensteinian philosophy, why it was written like that and needed to remain just as it was." Editor Gerry Howard had "the same conversation" months later; "The book was published as David wanted." On his relation to fame: "He never read his reviews or wanted to know print runs or sales figures."
Gerry Howard (Penguin editor, first two books). Broom as "a neo-postmodern extravaganza"; his aside "hysterical realism, yo"; the McBurney YMCA reading where Wallace, at his first reading ever, "read the epileptic baby/John Irving send-up section of Broom with incredible brio" and "blew that room away." His verdict: Wallace "was the most idealistic of ironists, and his vision of the world was fuelled by deep wells of sincerity and a dogged quest for authenticity."
Colin Harrison (Harper's editor). The origin of the cruise essay ("Shipping Out"): the 1995 call from the Zenith, Harrison's decision to give "Dave no editorial guidance whatsoever," and the resulting ocean-liner of a piece, "way too big to dock," that got twenty-four entire pages of the magazine.
Michael Pietsch (Little, Brown editor of Infinite Jest). Calls the novel "one of the great American works of fiction," one that "depicts contemporary life as a surfeit of pleasures and indulgences that can make connection with other people lethally difficult." His tribute reproduces a run of Wallace's margin replies to cut-requests (see the theory block and the passages below): p. 52 "which I will cut, you rotter"; p. 82 cut then restored an "hour later"; p. 133 "Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut"; pp. 327−30 "my canines are bared on this one"; pp. 739−48 baring teeth "the way back to the second molar"; p. 785ff "5,000 words of theoretico–structural arguments". Of one proposed scene cut Wallace wrote that it "introduces three characters, five themes and two settings." Pietsch closes on Wallace's line, "I want to author things that restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff".
Don DeLillo. On Everything and More: the title "might also be a description of the novel Infinite Jest, his dead serious frolic of addicted humanity."
Zadie Smith. Brief Interviews read not as ironic misogyny but through gift, prayer, and faith — "the important word wasn't irony but gift": "His is a serious kind of satire, if by satire we mean 'the indirect praise of good things'." She glosses "You get to decide what you worship."
George Saunders. Wallace as "a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg," a "wake-up artist" and "a celebrationist"; the pledge that "mostly we're asleep, but we can wake up."
Jonathan Franzen. The most intense interaction he had with Wallace was "sitting alone in my armchair, night after night, for ten days, and reading the manuscript of Infinite Jest" — "the book in which, for the first time, he'd arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged." Fiction, they'd agreed, was "A way out of loneliness". Franzen's design claim and his account of the Nardil decision anchor the theory and biography material below.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's unresolved endings are deliberate design he defended on principle — Broom of the System's missing final scene was intentional (argued on Wittgensteinian grounds), and Infinite Jest's thousand-page structure was arranged exactly as he wanted, down to a humor engineered to decay into sadness

Crux: designed-holes
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Nadell: "The Broom of the System ends without the last word and doesn't really have a final scene," and Wallace explained "using Wittgensteinian philosophy, why it was written like that and needed to remain just as it was" — Gerry Howard had "the same conversation", and "The book was published as David wanted." [Nadell tribute]
- [secondary] Franzen: Infinite Jest was "the book in which, for the first time, he'd arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged." [Franzen tribute]
- [secondary] Franzen on the designed tonal arc: "he produced a thousand pages of world-class jest which, although the mode and quality of the humour never wavered, became less and less and less funny, section by section, until, by the end of the book, you felt the book's title might just as well have been Infinite Sadness. Dave nailed it like nobody else ever had." [Franzen tribute]
Notes: Composition-grade. The Broom non-ending is attested as deliberate by the two people who tried and failed to change it (agent Nadell, editor Howard) — a designed-holes datum from the earliest work, defended by the author on Wittgensteinian grounds. Franzen's "arranged … the way he wanted" and the funny-to-sad descent extend the deliberate-design reading to Infinite Jest itself and are also prose-design (next block). Cite-as-written; the source raises no counterevidence against the design reading.

THEORY: Infinite Jest's prose is engineered at every scale — punctuation and rhythm precise to the mark, and a tonal architecture built to descend from comedy into sadness across the book's length

Crux: prose-tempo-design
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Franzen: "At the most microscopic level: Dave Wallace was as passionate and precise a punctuator of prose as has ever walked this earth." [Franzen tribute]
- [secondary] Franzen: the humor "became less and less and less funny, section by section," until Infinite Sadness — a designed arc across the thousand pages. [Franzen tribute]
Notes: Endorses the prose-as-engineered-experience reading from the friend-and-fellow-novelist chair, and adds a claim the translators' craft testimony (Blumenbach's punctuation-as-breath, Kaltsas on the sentence design) states at sentence level: here the engineering extends to a tonal arc across the whole length.

THEORY: Wallace is fundamentally a sincere, faith-serious writer using irony as an instrument — his satire is "the indirect praise of good things," and his work aims to wake readers into connection, not to perform cleverness

Crux: sincerity-definition
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Zadie Smith: "His is a serious kind of satire, if by satire we mean 'the indirect praise of good things'"; in Brief Interviews "the important word wasn't irony but gift." [Smith tribute]
- [secondary] Gerry Howard: Wallace "was the most idealistic of ironists," his vision "fuelled by deep wells of sincerity and a dogged quest for authenticity." [Howard tribute]
- [secondary] George Saunders: "a great American Buddhist writer," a "wake-up artist" and "a celebrationist," whose lesson is that "mostly we're asleep, but we can wake up." [Saunders tribute]
Notes: Three independent memorial readings of Wallace as post-ironic / sincerity-serious, delivered within weeks of his death — reception evidence, not a plot crux. Convergent with the humanist-postmodernism reading in Bilevich.

Themes

Memory and grief (the memorial's dominant register); composition and editing (Broom's deliberate non-ending; the Infinite Jest cut-war margin notes; Franzen's ten-night manuscript read); irony and sincerity (the idealistic-ironist reading, the gift/prayer reading, the wake-up artist); prose and design (the precise punctuator, the funny-to-sad arc); depression and its course (the medication decision, the illness his sister describes as having "essentially metastasized"); fame and privacy (his refusal of TV, reviews, sales figures).

Cross-references

Pietsch's Infinite Jest margin notes here are the earliest print appearance of the set his better-known Infinite Summer essay reproduced the following summer: Michael Pietsch: Editing Infinite Jest (2009, adapted from a Sonora Review Q&A of May 2009). The two printings differ in house style (favourite/favorite, disk/disc, "5,000"/"5000") but carry the same marginalia; D.T. Max's "The Unfinished" holds the related "5000 words of theoretico-structural argument" (singular) variant.
Nadell's Broom-non-ending testimony here sits beside her separately recorded belief about Infinite Jest's design — "It's all about fractals" (the McNally making-of conversation; Pietsch's 2016 Infinite Winter interview) — two different Nadell claims about Wallace's architecture, both the agent's account.
Pietsch's "surfeit of pleasures … connection … lethally difficult" framing connects to the novel's entertainment-and-addiction readings.
The sincerity readings (Smith, Howard, Saunders) converge with Bilevich's humanist-postmodernism essay and the irony-and-sincerity theme.
Audio of these eulogies exists (the DFW Audio Project's recordings of the Skirball memorial); this printed program is the authoritative text of what was said.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the printed tributes (British spellings and punctuation as printed).

Nadell, on Broom: "The Broom of the System ends without the last word and doesn't really have a final scene. I, with the wisdom of a twenty-five-year-old, tried to convince David to wrap up the story in a traditional fashion before I sent it out to publishers. He proceeded to explain to me, using Wittgensteinian philosophy, why it was written like that and needed to remain just as it was."
Wallace's margin notes to Pietsch, fighting the Infinite Jest cuts:
- "p. 52. This is one of my personal favourite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter."
- "p. 82. I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back."
- "p. 133. Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I'll also erase it from the back-up disk so I can't come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I'm finding)."
- "pp. 327−30. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on your part, my canines are bared on this one."
- "pp. 739−48. I've rewritten it – for about the eleventh time – for clarity, but I bare teeth all the way back to the second molar on cutting it."
- "p. 785ff– I can give you 5,000 words of theoretico–structural arguments for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?"
Pietsch, of one proposed scene cut: "Of one scene I proposed cutting he wrote: 'Well, it introduces three characters, five themes and two settings.'"
Wallace, via Pietsch: "I want to author things that restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff".
Franzen: "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 of Infinite Jest. That was the book in which, for the first time, he'd arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged."
Franzen: "At the most microscopic level: Dave Wallace was as passionate and precise a punctuator of prose as has ever walked this earth."
Zadie Smith: "His is a serious kind of satire, if by satire we mean 'the indirect praise of good things'."
DeLillo, on the title Everything and More: "It might also be a description of the novel Infinite Jest, his dead serious frolic of addicted humanity."
Amy Wallace-Havens: "It was the writing that made it so much less lonely to be in his head."