Wallace to DeLillo, October 10, 1995 + Wallace to Pietsch, September 20, 1995 (page-proofs-era letters), with the Harrison 2006 letter and the childhood Viking Poem

TL;DR

Two typed Wallace letters from the Infinite Jest page-proofs autumn of 1995, in scans of the Ransom Center originals — the fullest first-person record of what finishing the book felt like. To DeLillo (October 10), a writing-psychology confession built around DeLillo's own sentence "The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.": Wallace says IJ is less self-indulgent than anything before it and better fiction — but that writing now comes with "dread and terror and inadequacy-shit" where Fun used to be, and asks how to "turn terror into Respect and dread into a kind of stolidly productive humility." To Pietsch (September 20), the anti-hype letter: recoiling from Little, Brown's "Masterpiece" postcards ("I'm 33 years old; I don't have a 'masterpiece.'"), bracing for commercial failure, and asking that his own name be shrunk 25% so it stops dwarfing the book's title. Two minor archive items ride along: a friendly 2006 Jim Harrison letter (poetry, Lorca, the sciences — no IJ content) and the childhood "Viking Poem," the sheet the Ransom Center identifies as carrying the earliest known "David Foster Wallace" signature.

Key claims

The DeLillo letter (October 10, 1995, two pages, typed, signed "Dave Wallace")

• The occasion: Wallace has sent DeLillo the book ("the BM") and implores him to feel no obligation to read it faster than he likes — a footnote adds "(or at all, actually)" — and to ignore any blurb-pressure from "Little/Brown's Pietsch": "I did not have the BM sent to you because I hoped for a blurb," but because "I stand a decent chance of learning something." [p1]
• The prompt is DeLillo's note of 9/19, which Wallace quotes twice: "And discipline is never an issue (as it was in earlier years)." and "The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect." He asks how that "education of the will" took place, suspecting it was not "nothing but a matter of time natural attritive/osmotic action" (as typed). [p1]
• The self-diagnosis: what presents as a Discipline problem "is actually probably more a problem with Dedication"; he struggles between wanting to have Fun when writing and to be Serious when writing. His first book was "the most Fun I've ever had writing," but its only remotely Serious element "was that I very Seriously wanted the world to think I was a really good fiction-writer. I cringe, now, to look at how so much of my first stuff seems so excruciatingly obviously exhibitionistic and so Seriously approval-hungry." [p1]
• The IJ self-assessment, pre-publication: "I think IJ is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I'd done before it, and that the stuff I've done since finishing IJ is even less ego-hobbled." The growth he claims is starting "truly to 'Respect' fiction" and to live with "how very very small a part of any Big Picture I am." He names the struggle "the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER." [p1]
• The dread confession: "I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less Fun than it was. I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit, now, when I'm trying to write. I didn't used to. Maybe the terror is part of the necessary reverence" — but it "can't -- cannot -- be the goal and terminus"; "there must be some way to turn terror into Respect and dread into a kind of stolidly productive humility." (Footnote: "You are heartily welcome to let me know what this way is, if you know what it might be.") [p2]
• Fun as the point: he had less fun writing IJ than earlier work "even though I know in my tummy that it's better fiction" — yet "Fun is still the whole point, somehow, no? Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange?" — pleasure "more rarified, doubtless, than M&M's or a good wank, but nevertheless pleasure?" He reads DeLillo's fiction as marrying Fun and Seriousness — "a sense of Play that's somehow even Funner because it's not sophomoric or self-aggrandizing" — allowing that "maybe your work is this form of profound marriage only to and for me." Closes: "I'm about as professionally flummoxed as I've ever been." [p2]
• The Leyner footnote: "I have in mind Mark Leyner when I refer to 'self-aggrandizing Fun' -- I don't know whether you know his stuff, but he is the Prince of Darkness to me." [p2] — the private, sharper version of the Leyner verdict in "E Unibus Pluram."
• Page-proofs timestamp: "an advantage to proofreading page-proofs (PP's) is that I'm too tired to care." [p1]

The Pietsch letter (September 20, 1995, one page, typed, signed "V.D., Dave Wallace")

• The occasion: Little, Brown's promotional postcards have arrived, and "'Mixed' doesn't even start to describe the attendant feelings here." Wallace thinks IJ "a pretty good book artistically or literarily or whatever" and is "slobberingly grateful" — but believes it "probably too hard and too strange for many people actually to want to buy and read."
• The anti-hype push-back, in his own words at the time: "'Masterpiece'? I'm 33 years old; I don't have a 'masterpiece.'" And of "The literary event of '96": "What if it isn't? What if nobody buys it? I'm getting ready, inside, for that possibility; but are you guys?" He offers "an advance apology -- to you, M.P., in particular" should IJ fall "on its economic face with a huge moist splat."
• The name-shrink request: on the postcards his name is still bigger than the book's title; he'd asked for this to be corrected and gotten "acquiescence-sounds." "Having a 2-book writer's name bigger than the title is absurd. If you don't agree, treat it like a personal favor to me, and shrink my poor old name by 25% starting with the bound galleys. Please."
• Timestamp: "Still slogging on the page proofs." — the letter catches him mid-proofs, in the same weeks the October letter to DeLillo describes as proofreading exhaustion.
• Address datum: RR2 Box 361, Bloomington 61704 IL (with phone) — a different Bloomington address from the 1214 North Fell Ave. of the December 1994 Pietsch letter.

Minor items

• Jim Harrison to Wallace, "late July 06" (handwritten, Harrison's Livingston, Montana letterhead): a warm non-literary-business note — an earlier letter came back undelivered ("Cosi va la vita," as read); Harrison encloses poetry; he'd needed since age eighteen to see where Lorca was executed and went to Granada in March; he thought of Wallace and "yr book on math" (Everything and More) while staying at the Hearst Ranch among two "physicist-math inventor guys," one the inventor of "that millennium clock" and a protégé of Feynman (readings moderately confident); novelists, he notes, are "largely ignorant of the sciences," though his brother's years as Yale's science librarian left him "exposed mildly enough to insure wonderment" (as read); he signs off wishing Wallace luck "in that Wal-Mart of words, Am. Publishing" (as read). No Infinite Jest content; the returned letter implies a Wallace address change ca. 2005–06.
• The childhood "Viking Poem" (pencil on ruled paper): twelve rhymed lines on the strength and menace of Vikings ("If you were to see a viking today / It's best you go some other way," childhood spellings preserved — "There ships were made of real strong wood"). The header reads "David Foster Wallace," — the sheet the Ransom Center identifies as the earliest known use of the full three-name signature — while the enormous practiced cursive signature filling the bottom half of the page is plain "David Wallace."

Theories & evidence

The letters are compositional and biographical testimony; they advance no theory about the novel's plot cruxes. One interpretive record is genuinely in scope:

THEORY: DeLillo was a working correspondent and model through IJ's completion — the writer Wallace chose for his most unguarded account of what the book cost

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] The letter's whole frame: Wallace sends IJ to DeLillo not for a blurb but "because your own fiction is important to me and because I think you're smart and because... I stand a decent chance of learning something." [p1]
  • [author] DeLillo as the model of the Fun/Seriousness marriage: Americana, Libra, The Day Room named; "your own fiction seems to me to marry Fun and Seriousness in a profound way"; the imagined "great gouts of Americana hurled daily at the page in the stoveless apartment." [p1–p2]
  • [author] The correspondence is two-way and ongoing: Wallace quotes DeLillo's note of 9/19 back to him twice and builds the letter around those sentences. [p1]
  • [author] The IJ self-assessment delivered to DeLillo specifically: better and less self-indulgent than anything before, at the cost of the Fun — the dread-and-terror passage. [p1–p2]
• Notes: primary-document confirmation of the correspondence the anniversary retrospectives describe secondhand. Wallace's stance toward DeLillo here is apprentice-to-master ("I tend both to think I'm uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire"), with the self-aware caveat that the reading may be "some weird subjective misprision."

Themes

Composition history at the page-proofs stage (exhaustion, "too tired to care") · the psychology of finishing IJ: Fun replaced by dread and terror, and the ambition to convert terror into Respect · the anti-hype posture as contemporaneous fact, not retrospective legend (masterpiece push-back, name-shrink request, pre-braced commercial failure) · Broom-era self-judgment (exhibitionistic, approval-hungry) · DeLillo as chosen master · early biography texture (the Viking Poem signature).

Cross-references

• rcmag-barnard-20-years-ij — the 2016 Ransom Center anniversary article that published these two letters' scans; it quotes short excerpts of both, and this note digests the full documents.
• pietsch-letter-dec-1994 — the other side of the editorial correspondence, nine months earlier: Pietsch's December 1994 cut-suggestion letter with Wallace's marginalia. The September 1995 letter shows the same author-editor relationship at the finish line ("M.P.--", "V.D.,").
• dtmax-every-love-story — the biography's account of the 1995 correspondence with both men; the dread-and-terror and masterpiece material there is now primary-verified against the documents themselves.
• bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 — DeLillo's 2011 broadcast recollection of Wallace's letters from this period (his memory of a confession that the pleasure of writing had given way to dread and terror).
• The manuscript-differences record's endnote-system entries — "Still slogging on the page proofs" (Sept. 20) and the DeLillo letter's proofreading fatigue (Oct. 10) are dated waypoints inside the window in which the endnote apparatus took its final shape.
• e-unibus-pluram — the Leyner footnote is the private register of the essay's public Leyner verdict.
• broom-of-the-system — "the most Fun I've ever had writing" / "excruciatingly obviously exhibitionistic": the author's own 1995 judgment of the first book.

Notable passages

All spans transcribed from the scans (typed layer; original spelling and double-hyphens preserved).

• "The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect." — DeLillo, quoted back to him by Wallace [DeLillo letter, p1]
• "I did not have the BM sent to you because I hoped for a blurb. I sent it to you because your own fiction is important to me and because I think you're smart and because, if you do end up reading it and end up saying anything to me about it, I stand a decent chance of learning something." [p1]
• "I know that my first book was the most Fun I've ever had writing, but I know also that the only remotely Serious thing about it was that I very Seriously wanted the world to think I was a really good fiction-writer. I cringe, now, to look at how so much of my first stuff seems so excruciatingly obviously exhibitionistic and so Seriously approval-hungry." [p1]
• "I think IJ is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I'd done before it, and that the stuff I've done since finishing IJ is even less ego-hobbled." [p1]
• "I would like to be a Respectful writer, I believe...though I know I'd far prefer finding out some way to become that w/o time and pain and the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER." [p1]
• "I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less Fun than it was. I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit, now, when I'm trying to write. I didn't used to." [p2]
• "In other words there must be some way to turn terror into Respect and dread into a kind of stolidly productive humility." [p2]
• "But Fun is still the whole point, somehow, no? Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange?" [p2]
• "I'm about as professionally flummoxed as I've ever been." [p2]
• "I have in mind Mark Leyner when I refer to 'self-aggrandizing Fun' -- I don't know whether you know his stuff, but he is the Prince of Darkness to me." [p2, footnote; inner quote marks as typed are double]
• "'Masterpiece'? I'm 33 years old; I don't have a 'masterpiece.'" [Pietsch letter; quote marks double as typed]
• "'The literary event of '96'? What if it isn't? What if nobody buys it? I'm getting ready, inside, for that possibility; but are you guys?" [Pietsch letter; "What if it isn't?" and "What if nobody buys it?" underlined in the original]
• "Consider this an advance apology -- to you, M.P., in particular -- if it does." [Pietsch letter]
• "Having a 2-book writer's name bigger than the title is absurd. If you don't agree, treat it like a personal favor to me, and shrink my poor old name by 25% starting with the bound galleys. Please." [Pietsch letter]
• "Still slogging on the page proofs." [Pietsch letter]