The Great Concavity Ep. 8: D.T. Max on biography, the letters, and how Infinite Jest got assembled (Jan 18, 2016)

TL;DR

Recorded MLK Day 2016 (Max's Poland spinal-cord piece had run that week), a ~45-minute conversation between the biographer and a host (Bucher) who was one of his research assets. Less polished than the Harvard event but more methodological: how Every Love Story got made (letters over interviews, the fan hive-mind as research engine), an explicit warning about quoting Wallace's recipient-tailored letters at face value, and — the headline for this archive — Max's on-air best-guess reconstruction of how IJ's tennis and AA halves were drafted and fused, which he flags is not in the book. ASR transcript: paraphrase only; Max is audibly fuzzy on some dates and says so.

Key claims

• IJ composition sequence (Max's explicit best guess — Bucher points out on air that it isn't in the biography, and Max owns it as still his best one): the comic/non-AA material dates back furthest — some pages date, Max is certain, all the way back to Arizona, much of the rest plausibly to Syracuse; Wallace likely drafted the tennis-academy material in whole or part first, then began the AA material (which he could not have written before his 1989 halfway-house experience), then went back and rewrote the tennis material so it would live with the AA material — the drafting, in his aired judgment, was not modular. He anchors this in the letter to Mary Karr quoted in the biography: boxes of earlier attempts that had failed to cohere and now were cohering (Max's on-air recollection of the letter's gist). He repeats the two-books framing — plainly two books in there, he says, side by side, each made more interesting by the juxtaposition — and says the comic-juvenilia register (Clang Birds, the Enema Bandit-type gags in the Ransom Center juvenilia) survives into IJ — readers misled by the title into expecting a rollicking comedy annoyed Wallace, who wanted a sad book; Markson, by contrast, read the whole thing and, per Max, laughed himself silly.
• What Wallace was writing in Boston with Mark Costello is, per Max, known from Costello and the letters: the porn novel that, much changed, became early drafts of The Pale King, plus "Order and Flux in Northampton" — i.e., the Somerville period is not where the IJ comic material came from.
• The late-80s dry run: Max says the end-of-life sequence (going off the medication, collapse) had an absolute dry run, in his phrase, in the post-MFA Arizona period — he reaches for 1988, admits he lacks his notes; the hosts correct the frame (MFA summer 1987 → bleak Amherst fall → back to Arizona, where he joined AA). Max says he learned the AA membership itself only for the book, not the 2009 magazine piece — the fact had stayed genuinely obscure.
• Origin of the biography: Remnick assigned the posthumous piece; Max corrects the hosts on air — "The Unfinished" ran March 2009, not May. He calls the Lish/Carver parallel (his famous piece on Carver being involuntarily rewritten) coincidental to the assignment: he didn't know a half-finished novel existed when he started, though Wallace's going off his medication out of distress over his inability to write well entered the picture very early in the interviewing.
• Wallace knew who Max was: in one of the commonplace books now at the Ransom Center, Wallace copied a quote from the Carver/Lish piece and annotated it with an approving note crediting Dan Max by name for the phrase. Max had seen Wallace across the room at the IJ publication party and deliberately didn't introduce himself — a decision he still endorses.
• Defense of The Broom of the System: Max remains a fan — his image, as aired: a puppy with outsized paws — calls it probably the funniest thing Wallace ever wrote, and argues readers needn't follow Wallace's self-hating repudiation of it; he notes the choice of a female protagonist in a young man's first novel as the more interesting fact, while conceding the comedy is derivative (the Bombardini scene as an out-and-out Monty Python bit, the Mr. Creosote bucket gag included).
• Methodology — letters over interviews: the biography lives, as Max frames it, through Wallace's letter writing. Max rates interviews low as disclosure (Wallace ran canned answers); letters are self-presentation too, but the best kind. He felt ready to submit the manuscript when a newly discovered cache of letters sounded just like the ones he had — the epistolary persona had become consistent and predictable.
• The context warning (new, against his own book's future misuse): Wallace wrote differently about the same writers and movies to different correspondents — always trying to impress DeLillo, putting down friends to him; Max explicitly hopes a future Byrne letters volume won't license "Wallace thought X of Gaddis/Gass" claims, because table-talk with a different interlocutor would yield a different opinion. His persona was still under construction pre-IJ; later it stabilizes, but the meaningful correspondence pool shrinks to roughly Franzen plus fans.
• DeLillo correspondence arc: the salutations move from a formal "Mr. DeLillo" opening to first-name terms and finally the nickname "D-squared" — apprentice to peer/friend, verging, in Max's telling, on playful insolence; DeLillo (who sold his received letters to the Ransom Center) answers to Dave or David throughout. Max quoted these letters in a c. 2007 Ransom Center piece, pre-dating the biography. Byrne's planned letters edition is on hold without estate permission; Byrne's organizing arc (apprentice writing up → peers → younger writers writing to him) is praised by Max as genuinely useful for beginning writers.
• Fan-mail practice: Bucher's testimony — anyone who sent Wallace a letter got a reply, up to the very end, often as annotations on your own letter mailed back; Bucher claims he could name dozens holding replies the way believers hold relics. Max's favorite line from the letters has Wallace declaring himself second to no Gentile in his admiration of Ozick (as Max recalls it on air).
• Under-mined sources Max flags for future scholars: radio interviews (unsearchable, so he barely used them; Silverblatt excepted — the best thinking on Wallace Max says he ever came across, and Wallace was impressed too); the earliest interviews (WSJ 1987 print; Arrival magazine; a WBUR Boston interview from the Somerville/Costello era around Girl with Curious Hair; the 1996 Chris Lydon tape thought lost and recovered); and the 1985 cassette-tape letters Wallace, Costello, and Corey Washington mailed each other after college — Max heard Wallace's young voice on them, a listen he describes as precious, wonderful stuff.
• On the book's making: deal by fall 2009, out September 2012, written close to deadline; the fall-2009 CUNY "Footnotes" conference is where he first heard the Ransom-sale rumor; the Howling Fantods and wallace-l hive-mind made it the least lonely book he's written. No photos in the book by design (he wanted it to read as a memoir told by the one person who hadn't lived the life, with Wallace-on-the-cover sufficing) — a properly illustrated later edition strikes him as a real possibility, and a revised edition as a certainty, but he's waiting on new textual scholarship (he names David Hering's forthcoming book) and the slow surfacing of witnesses' papers — Wallace died young, so the usual deposit-on-death cycle will take decades.
• Translation news: a Polish edition (Brief Interviews, per Bucher) is finally coming via publisher Piotr Marecki's circle; the German IJ runs ~1,400 pages; no follow-up literary biography is coming — a strict one-off, per Max.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ is two books — the older comic/tennis material and the later AA material — living side by side, fused by a rewrite pass rather than assembled modularly

• Crux: two-books-fusion
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [inference] Max's on-air reconstruction (self-flagged as beyond the biography and still his best guess): Wallace drafted the tennis-academy material first in whole or in part, then began the AA material, then went back and rewrote the tennis material so it would live with the AA material — not modular, in his aired judgment. [00:11–00:12]
  • [draft] The letter to Mary Karr that Max cites to the biography: boxes of earlier attempts that had failed to cohere and now were cohering (his on-air recollection of the letter's gist) — read as the older comic material being fused in. [00:11]
  • [inference] Wallace could not have written the AA material before the 1989 halfway-house experience (he was actually in AA, which Max learned only for the book), so the AA half necessarily postdates the comic half. [00:12–00:13]
  • [draft] Some comic pages date back, Max is certain, to Arizona; much of the rest plausibly to Syracuse; the comic register of the unpublished Ransom Center juvenilia (Clang Birds, Enema Bandit-type gags) survives into IJ. [00:10–00:12]
  • [inference] Elimination of the Somerville period: what Wallace wrote there with Costello is known from Costello and the letters — the porn novel that became early Pale King drafts, plus "Order and Flux in Northampton" — so the IJ comic material must date to Arizona/Syracuse instead. [00:14]
• Notes: The interpretive kernel is Max's gloss that the novel plainly holds two books, side by side, each made more interesting by the juxtaposition [00:11]. Bucher supplies the Syracuse-fusion framing on-air and Max concurs. Softer than the Harvard event's two-Davids-written-separately claim — here the stress falls on the rewrite-to-cohere pass. Max explicitly awaits textual scholarship (Hering's forthcoming book) to confirm or overturn it.

No other theory blocks: the episode takes no position on the ending mechanics, Hal's collapse, the DMZ, or the wraith; the rest is biographical and methodological testimony held in Key claims, citable downstream as [author]/[draft]-grade evidence.

Themes

Family-hamlet and depression-anhedonia only obliquely (the medication withdrawal, self-hatred turned on the early work); irony-sincerity (the comic-juvenilia register surviving into IJ vs. the sad book Wallace intended); communication-solipsism at the meta level — the letters as performed selves tailored per recipient, interviews as canned performance, which is practically a Wallace theme enacted by Wallace.

Cross-references

• dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the seed piece (date corrected on air to March 2009, matching that note); dtmax-every-love-story — the book whose methodology this episode narrates; its Karr chapters are digested there (the specific failed-to-cohere letter Max recalls on air is not quoted in that digest).
• harvard-dtmax-wood-dfw — the other long spoken Max source; its two-Davids-written-separately claim is the stronger sibling of this episode's not-modular reconstruction, and its late-80s dress-rehearsal claim recurs here with fuzzier dating.
• themes/structure-and-hamlet — the composition-sequence guess belongs alongside Pietsch's shattered-glass first impression.
• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — Max's singling-out of Silverblatt independently ratifies the archive's reliance on that interview.
• gc-ep001-intro-discussing-dfw — Bucher's fan-infrastructure role, here seen from the biographer's side (Lipsky steered Max toward Bucher as a must-meet).
• lipsky-becoming-yourself — Lipsky's Rolling Stone piece named as the predecessor that lacked the work-to-come material.
• mccaffery-1993-interview / burn-conversations-with-dfw — the canned-answers caution applies to the archive's whole interview shelf.