Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

A September 2008 New York Observer memorial interview with Gerry Howard, the editor who discovered Wallace — acquiring The Broom of the System off his rookie agent Bonnie Nadell and later publishing Girl With Curious Hair. It is mostly warm biographical recollection: the very young, abashed Wallace who called Howard "Mister," the single-spaced typo-free letters, the McBurney YMCA reading where a terrified Wallace vomited from nerves and then gave "maybe the best reading" Howard had ever seen. For Infinite Jest specifically it offers one thing of interpretive interest, and it predates IJ: Howard's account of trying and failing to talk Wallace into a conventional payoff ending for Broom — Wallace instead cut the convergence off with a single line ("Hey!") and defended the anti-climax in a long letter. That editorial instinct against closure prefigures the designed non-closure IJ is built on. Otherwise this is a context/biography note; it advances no reading of IJ.

Key claims

• Howard is Wallace's first editor, not his IJ editor. He acquired The Broom of the System for Penguin's Contemporary American Fiction series in the mid-1980s (via Nadell, whom he already knew), then took Girl With Curious Hair to Norton. He read Broom as "a total throwback" to late-'60s/'70s metafiction: "It was meta, it was imperial, it was linguistically adroit, to say the least. And you could smell Pynchon and Coover and Elkin all over it."
• Wallace was barely editable, by design. Howard: "I'm sure I may have changed a comma to a semicolon or maybe fixed a couple of words in Broom of the System but yeah, he knew what he was about, David, even if I didn't."
• The anti-closure anecdote (the IJ-relevant datum). Toward the end of Broom, "David has herded all of the main characters in the novel into one room and all of the tangled plotlines of the novel are converging" — and instead of the "spectacular set piece" the reader is primed for, Wallace ends the chapter on one line of dialogue ("Hey!"). Howard: "he just sets you up for a spectacular set piece and then pulls the rug right out from under you." He wrote Wallace urging a real payoff; Wallace replied with a "five or six page, single spaced letter" conceding the point in principle but explaining why he "can't. And won't." Howard backed down: "This wasn't something I was gonna win."
• The letters. "His letters to me were just incredible, page after page … Single-spaced, typed out, no typos, no grammatical mistakes." Those letters are, as of 2008, in the Viking Penguin archives.
• The McBurney YMCA reading. At Wallace's first-ever public reading (a four-reader Penguin showcase, alphabetical order, Wallace last after Conroy, Colwin, and Boyle), "he was heading off to the bathroom to throw up from nervousness" — then opened by slowly pouring and drinking a glass of water and deadpanning that he had always wanted to do that. Howard: "It was maybe the best reading I've ever seen."

Theories & evidence

The piece advances no reading of Infinite Jest itself; it is editorial and biographical testimony about the pre-IJ books. The one item of interpretive interest is a Broom of the System anecdote that prefigures IJ's anti-closure design, carried below.

CONNECTION: Wallace's editorial refusal to deliver Broom's set-piece payoff prefigures the designed non-closure of Infinite Jest

• Crux: designed-holes
• Real-world: [secondary] Howard's account: Wallace herds every Broom plotline into one room, primes the reader for "a spectacular piece of comic vaudeville", then cuts the chapter off on a single line of dialogue — the raw's double-quoted "Hey!" — rather than supply the expected climax, and defends the withheld payoff in a long letter. [Observer interview]
• IJ echo: IJ's constitutive refusal of closure — the withheld "missing year," the ending that sends the reader back to page 3 (the designed-holes / annular-structure reading) — the mature realization of the same instinct against the conventional set-piece resolution.
• Weight: prefiguration
• Notes: Scoped to Broom (1987), not IJ; this is authorial-behavior evidence (an editor's firsthand account of Wallace defending non-closure a decade before IJ), not a reading of IJ itself. Howard was not IJ's editor, so this carries no weight on IJ's own editing history.

Themes

The craft and stubbornness of composition (Wallace "knew what he was about"); resistance to conventional narrative closure (the Broom ending); the young writer's terror and performance (the reading, the vomiting, the deadpan); authorship and the editorial relationship.

Cross-references

• observer-leyner-remembers-dfw-2008 — the companion NY Observer memorial from the same "Media Mob" series, same week.
• mccaffery-1993-interview and lipsky-becoming-yourself — Wallace's own accounts of the Broom and Arizona-MFA years Howard recalls from the editor's side.
• memorial-rollingstone-lipsky-lost-years-last-days-2008 — Lipsky's obituary, which narrates the same Nadell/Howard discovery and the U2-T-shirt first meeting from Wallace's and Howard's testimony.
• The theories about the novel's designed non-closure — the reading this Broom anecdote prefigures.

Notable passages

• On first reading Broom: "It was meta, it was imperial, it was linguistically adroit, to say the least. And you could smell Pynchon and Coover and Elkin all over it."
• On editing Wallace: "he knew what he was about, David, even if I didn't."
• On the Broom ending: "he just sets you up for a spectacular set piece and then pulls the rug right out from under you."
• On the letters: "His letters to me were just incredible, page after page" — "Single-spaced, typed out, no typos, no grammatical mistakes."
• On the reading: "It was maybe the best reading I've ever seen."