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Karen Green: 'David Foster Wallace was so tender'

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TL;DR

Tim Adams's Observer interview with Karen Green, the artist and Wallace's widow — the first she gave at length, timed to The Pale King's April 2011 publication. It is chiefly a portrait of grief and of Green's own art (the "forgiveness machine"), but it carries two things worth keeping. First, her firsthand account of The Pale King's provenance: Wallace left the notes and finished chapters in a neat, lamp-lit pile on his desk, and she has "no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted"; she and agent Bonnie Nadell gathered the rest and handed it to Michael Pietsch to edit. Second, testimony about his voice — that Wallace, as she read him, found his own established prose voice "very constraining" and was struggling to change it, to let what they jokingly called his "inner sap" into the work; Adams corroborates with Wallace's own 2005 email about verbal habits "gone from discovery to technique to tic." Throughout she refuses the tormented-genius myth: the illness, she insists, "was a monster that just ate him up," and everything else was secondary to it.

Key claims

  • The Pale King was meant to be published (provenance). Asked what she is certain of, Green answers: "The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything." In the shock of grief she and "Wallace's long-time agent, Bonnie Nadell, went through what else he had written that seemed to fit with the manuscript"; all of it — hard drives, files, notebooks, floppy disks — went to Michael Pietsch. "I know he wanted Michael to edit it," she says; handing it over, she told him, "Have a nice divorce."
  • She read it only just before the interview. She had tried before and got to page two, finding it so unnerving she couldn't leave the house for three days; this time she went through it in a couple of days, and found it "actually fun to feel him around the place again."
  • The voice he was trying to escape (her account, with Wallace's own words behind it). Asked whether the best of him made it into the writing, she says no: "The writer's voice took on a life of its own, which I think he found very constraining. I think part of what he was struggling with was how to change that voice." Cleverness, she adds, "is the hardest thing to give up." Their long-running jokey argument was about his "inner sap": "I thought the inner sap should be allowed out sometimes," she recalls — the parts where he let it in "are those bits of the book I loved the most." Adams sets beside this Wallace's own July 2005 email to Jonathan Franzen: "I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic."
  • She refuses the tormented-genius myth. She gets emails from readers who "want the pain to be a prerequisite for the creativity," and rejects it: "People don't understand how ill he was. It was a monster that just ate him up. And at that point everything was secondary to the illness. Not just writing. Everything else: food, love, shelter…" She resists reading the suicide as meaningful or artistic, and fears The Pale King being read "as an extended suicide note."
  • The medication decision. "By 2007 he had been on the same medication, Nardil, for 20 years"; believing it was harming him and blocking his writing, "On the advice of a doctor, he stopped taking Nardil," became unstable, tried other drugs and electroconvulsive therapy without lasting relief.
  • The public appropriation of a private act. Wallace's suicide "turned him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince, the good part of him"; she avoids Google and the circulated autopsy report. Her last word, by email: "David's work is extraordinary and cause for celebration, but not from me."
  • How they met. Green found Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in a thrift store, was struck by "The Depressed Person," and faxed Wallace to ask if she could rework it into an artwork; he faxed back agreeing "at the same time correcting her grammar." He "wrote a piece about Roger Federer [for the New York Times ] which he really enjoyed doing, but that was rare for him."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace experienced his own famous, hyper-clever prose voice as a trap, and in his last years was actively struggling to change it — to admit more sincerity, heart, and "inner sap" into the work

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's own July 2005 email to Franzen, quoted by Adams: "I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It's a dark time workwise, and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects." [interview, Adams's narration]
    • [secondary] Green (spousal testimony): "The writer's voice took on a life of its own, which I think he found very constraining. I think part of what he was struggling with was how to change that voice." [interview]
    • [secondary] The "inner sap" argument: "I thought the inner sap should be allowed out sometimes," and the passages where he let it in were the ones she "loved the most." [interview]
  • Notes: The strongest form of the sincerity-turn evidence this source carries is the [author] email — Wallace's own words on his voice as habit "gone from discovery to technique to tic" — with Green's spousal testimony as the interpretive frame around it. Attribution discipline: "very constraining" is GREEN'S hedged account of what Wallace felt ("which I think he found"), not a Wallace statement; the email is Wallace direct, via Adams's quotation. Convergent with the memorial readings (the "idealistic ironist" in Five Dials) and the academic humanist framing (Bilevich), but distinct in kind: biographical testimony about intent, not a reading of a text. Reception/biography-grade; not a plot crux.

Themes

Grief and mourning (the forgiveness machine; the language of grief; the post-traumatic stress she describes from finding him); The Pale King (its provenance, its boredom theme, the fear of it read as a suicide note); irony and sincerity (the constraining voice; the "inner sap"; cleverness as the hardest thing to give up); depression and its course (the Nardil cessation, electroshock, the illness as "a monster"); the myth of the tormented genius, refused; privacy and the "celebrity writer dude" appropriation; the marriage (domestication, "Don't die.").

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim (the raw uses straight apostrophes throughout — reproduced as-is). Grief testimony — quoted soberly, only where it carries fact about the work or Wallace's intent.

  • On The Pale King's provenance: "The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted."
  • On the handoff: "I know he wanted Michael to edit it" … "Have a nice divorce."
  • Wallace, July 2005, to Franzen: "I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It's a dark time workwise, and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects."
  • On the voice: "The writer's voice took on a life of its own, which I think he found very constraining. I think part of what he was struggling with was how to change that voice."
  • On the "inner sap": "I thought the inner sap should be allowed out sometimes."
  • On the illness: "It was a monster that just ate him up." / "People don't understand how ill he was."
  • Her last word: "David's work is extraordinary and cause for celebration, but not from me."

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