IJ study archive

Remembering David Foster Wallace — To the Best of Our Knowledge special hour (WPR/PRI, 2009)

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TL;DR

Public radio's fullest memorial construction: a one-hour To the Best of Our Knowledge special assembled in the months after Wallace's death, built from new interviews (D.T. Max on The Pale King and the antidepressant chain; David Lipsky on the biography from Amherst to the last year; Michael Pietsch on editing Infinite Jest and receiving the unfinished manuscript; Amy Wallace-Havens on her brother), critic eulogies (Laura Miller, Lev Grossman), re-aired excerpts of the program's own 1996, 1997, and 2004 Wallace interviews, an exclusive reading from the then-unpublished Pale King, and a then-never-broadcast stretch of the Kenyon commencement audio. The headline new material is Pietsch: Infinite Jest signed on about 250 pages, the editorial give-and-take he glosses as thumb wrestling, and the first-person account of being called to Claremont to collect the Pale King pages. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation.

Key claims

  • The frame (Fleming): Wallace remade the terrain of American letters; a literary rock star in his early thirties for Infinite Jest, which Time later placed on its all-time-100 list; his novels dissect media-saturated culture; after the September 2008 suicide the internet filled with tributes [00:00:00–00:01:08].
  • Laura Miller: her era's most important writer, on the strength of the effort he poured — more than anyone else's — into the question of living with such awareness of our appearance in others' eyes that simply being ourselves nearly slips out of reach — the quest for authenticity of the self as his central theme; he tackled head-on the problem of writing meaningfully in a culture where broadcast media dwarf the written word; his work demanded and rewarded her best as a reader and critic [00:01:53–00:02:46].
  • D.T. Max on The Pale King [00:04:02–00:11:18]: the unfinished novel found in the Claremont garage workspace; its real subject a fulfilled existence unhooked from constant stimulation — breaking through boredom to contentment and mindfulness; IRS agents in Peoria chosen precisely because the work is surpassingly boring, each character surmounting the boredom or crushed by it (one repeats a number mantra to mindfulness; one levitates when fully in the moment on the returns). The book was well underway — a draft, with parts written and rewritten over and over, his style of composition. Why it tortured him: fiction about boredom is an extremely hard task, and he carried the monkey of believing he had outgrown his own style — that it had become a cliche, been appropriated, and that critics waited to shoot him dead for trotting it out again; audiences, Max notes, always want Freebird again, and Wallace was done, moving on, and unsatisfiable by temperament.
  • Max on the medication chain [00:09:04–00:11:18]: Wallace went off the antidepressant Nardil — taken for essentially his whole writing career — about a year before his death, partly because it distanced him from the world, partly because of its hard tolerability and its reputation as a short-term drug; he never really stabilized afterward, and in Max's account did no work on the novel in that last year. Max declines the direct despair-about-the-book causation (no looked-at-the-manuscript-Tuesday, decided-Thursday story): by the end the depression was so physically brutal — closer to being beaten in every atom of the body than to sadness — that sheer survival consumed everything he had, with nothing left over for assessing the novel. But asked the counterfactual, Max states his strong belief that had The Pale King been advancing smoothly, Wallace would be alive [00:11:18].
  • Lev Grossman [00:16:30–00:17:15]: the Woody Allen joke about gazing into the soul of the boy at the next desk — Wallace gazed into everybody's; the greatest writer of dialogue there was, rendering American speech accurately, lovingly, hilariously, making you love how Americans talk; a ventriloquist who took the corrupted language into himself, tolerated its sickness, and reproduced it so we could see what was wrong with it — and having watched him do that, readers can forgive themselves for believing he could endure anything.
  • Re-aired excerpts, previously digested elsewhere: the 1996 Infinite Jest interview excerpts (lethal entertainment, moth energies, virtual-reality pornography, the lostness diagnosis, long-difficult-but-fun) framed by the program as its discovery of a prophet's voice for the era [00:17:15–00:20:43]; the 2004 Oblivion interview excerpt (grad-school scorn for pop culture, the romantics' trees, irony and the inner sap, The Simpsons verdict) [00:11:18–00:15:17]; the 1997 cruise-essay segment (the I've-seen catalogue read aloud; fun with a capital F; the solo traveler among couples; the tray-and-towel overservice comedy) [00:36:46 ff., approximate].
  • David Lipsky, biography [00:21:34 ff.]: Broom of the System drafted in the senior year at Amherst and published as the lead title of a new paperback imprint (which he tentatively places at HarperCollins — the archive's record says the Viking Penguin contemporary-fiction line; recorded as said, with his own on-air hedge); the Harvard philosophy PhD on a full ride, undertaken in the belief writing could stay a sideline; the workload, heavy self-medicating drinking, and what Wallace later called the bleakest time of his life; checking himself into the Harvard health service over thoughts of self-harm; McLean Hospital (host, he notes, to Plath and Lowell); Nardil from about November 1989, after which everything he is famous for was written. Going off it: living in California, happily married at last, holding the Roy E. Disney chair in creative writing at Pomona — a subsidized academic chair, Lipsky observes, a detail any Infinite Jest reader will find comic — he took a bad food-drug interaction as the occasion to try life off the drug from June 2007; about fifteen or sixteen months of other antidepressants failed, and the Nardil no longer worked on return, a known risk of leaving a successful agent. Lipsky's framing against the genius-gone-bad and candle-burning readings: a story of an incredibly confident, intelligent, vividly charming person who made a mistake out of strength and optimism. The last months: seventy pounds lost in a year, no sleep, his parents out to stay with him, sitting on the floor, afraid his students would see him — and his father's remark that hugging him is all those students would ever have done. On the posthumous outpouring: what stunned people was not just how funny the work is but how humane — an argument that if you moderate the I-want voice and take pleasure in the irritating, life becomes funny, sharp, and alive — which made the author's death by his own hand the more stunning [00:23:38 ff., approximate].
  • Michael Pietsch on editing IJ [00:29:10 ff., approximate]: word had spread that Wallace was working on something really big before Little, Brown saw a page; the contract was signed on about the first 250 pages, already very long, with no way to know how much longer it would get; watching the chapters come in was among the most exciting experiences of his editing life. Wallace called the editorial process thumb wrestling; a large share of suggestions he took with grace — hundreds of pages of manuscript notes — marking the occasional margin refusal with a bared-canines warning while noting how many prior suggestions he had conceded entirely. Pietsch's self-described value: an extremely patient reader who could still say when few people would scale a given wall with him — pacing and patience, not line-by-line combat.
  • Pietsch on The Pale King [00:29:10 ff., approximate]: weeks after the death, Wallace's agent and Karen Green found a thick sheaf of pages waiting on the desk and invited Pietsch to Claremont to read everything left behind; an enormous amount of work on the novel existed. Expecting grief, he found the opposite — reading it was being in Wallace's presence again, something Wallace had made that he had never seen, a sad delight; publication then scheduled for summer 2010 (it ultimately appeared in 2011).
  • The exclusive Pale King reading: actress Carrie Coon reads a passage — the girl who grows up around Peoria and later works for the IRS, her institutionalized mother, the shoplifting years, the men in the campers, and the dream of the bench by the pond — introduced as granted exclusively for this broadcast [00:29:10 ff., approximate].
  • Amy Wallace-Havens [00:36:46 ff., approximate]: an edited cut of a longer session the archive holds in full (amy-wallace-havens-unedited-interview-2009 — the program's own outro directs listeners to the unedited interview on its website). In the aired cut: her brother took a book to parties and never used ATMs, and was the best listener she has met; benevolently sadistic as a boy (the Captain Phlegm and sidekick Goat Bile winter routine, a role she begged for and was denied); his sophomore-year return home from Amherst stunned the family — sitting in his room asking how people function, how she could serve ice cream at her job without wanting to run out the back door; therapy and medication brought marked improvement. Karen got him on every level, and marriage soothed his lifelong sense of not feeling like a grown-up. Of the end: he was brave and tried so hard that she never felt a minute's anger. Her chosen memory: the cross-country drive in a Volkswagen Rabbit when the boom-box batteries died in Texas and he spent two hundred miles trying to teach his tone-deaf sister to sing harmony before apologizing with a Hostess cupcake — and the sound of his soft, distinctive voice greeting her by name on the phone, which she still hears.
  • The closer: a then-never-broadcast excerpt of the May 21, 2005 Kenyon commencement audio — no such thing as not worshipping; worship money, body, power, or intellect and it will eat you alive; the insidiousness of default settings; the men-and-money world that calls itself real, running on fear, anger, and self-worship; and real freedom as attention, awareness, discipline, and daily unglamorous care for other people [00:36:46 ff., approximate].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Pale King was a genuinely advanced but unfinishable project — boredom-as-subject plus a repudiated style stalled it, the Nardil decision followed, and the book's failure and the death are linked

  • Crux: pale-king-incompletion
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Max: the book well underway — a draft, sections written and rewritten; the subject living without stimulation, boredom broken through to mindfulness; IRS Peoria chosen for maximal boredom; the mantra and levitation exhibits [00:04:02–00:05:34]
    • [secondary] Max: the double bind that stalled it — fiction about boredom as an extremely hard task, plus the belief he had outgrown a style critics were waiting to punish him for repeating [00:06:16–00:07:41]
    • [secondary] Max: no work on the novel in the last year off Nardil; the explicit counterfactual — strong belief that a smoothly progressing Pale King would have kept him alive [00:09:46–00:11:18]
    • [secondary] Pietsch: the substantial stack on the desk, the enormous amount of existing work, and the editing-for-publication plan, summer 2010 as then scheduled [00:29:10 ff., approximate]
  • Notes: Counter-testimony inside the same hour: Max himself declines the direct writing-despair causation (the end-stage depression was physically overwhelming; no Tuesday-manuscript, Thursday-decision chain) [00:10:26]; and Lipsky reframes the whole arc as a mistake made from strength and optimism rather than genius-gone-bad, stressing the pharmacological mechanics (Nardil non-response on reinstatement) over the literary ones [00:23:38 ff.]. Both qualifications are the hour's own and belong to any use of the Max counterfactual.

THEORY: Infinite Jest reached print through a real editorial negotiation — signed unfinished, shaped by patience-and-pacing feedback that Wallace mostly accepted and occasionally refused

  • Crux: ij-cuts
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Pietsch: contract signed on about the first 250 pages, total length unknown even to the publisher; chapters arriving serially [00:29:10 ff., approximate]
    • [secondary] Pietsch: Wallace's thumb-wrestling gloss on editing; hundreds of pages of manuscript notes; the margin economy of the bared-canines refusal offered against a run of conceded suggestions — gracious acceptance as the default, refusal as the marked case [00:29:10 ff., approximate]
    • [secondary] Pietsch on his own role: the extremely patient reader who could still warn when few would scale a wall with him — pacing judgments rather than line edits [00:29:10 ff., approximate]
  • Notes: Editor-grade, first-person, but a memorial-hour summary rather than a documentary accounting; it corroborates the mercy-cuts testimony Wallace gave on Bookworm in 1996 and the fuller editing record in the New Yorker profile (dtmax-2009-the-unfinished) without quantifying what was cut.

THEORY: Wallace was a prophetic voice — the 1996 media-world testimony re-aired as fulfilled prediction

  • Crux: media-prescience
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Fleming's introduction credits the novels with an unsparing anatomy of a culture soaked in media [00:00:00]
    • [secondary] The program's own framing of its 1996 tape: in interviewing him then, it discovered he was not only a huge literary talent but a prophetic voice for our time — followed by the curated lethal-entertainment and virtual-reality-pornography excerpts [00:17:15–00:20:43]
  • Notes: The excerpts themselves are 1996 author testimony owned by the archive's note on that interview (ttbook-1996-ij); only the 2009 prophetic-voice frame is new evidence here. This is the same broadcaster's second retrospective prescience claim on its own tape (a 2018 rebroadcast intro makes a third), a pattern worth counting once per airing.

THEORY: Everybody worships — the Kenyon diagnosis positioned as Wallace's parting statement

  • Crux: worship-attention
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] The aired commencement excerpt: no such thing as not worshipping, only the choice of what to worship; money, body, power, and intellect each eating their worshipper alive; default settings as the insidious unconscious form; real freedom as attention, awareness, discipline, and petty daily sacrifice for others [00:36:46 ff., approximate]
    • [secondary] Curatorial: the hour closes on this excerpt, presented as previously unbroadcast audio, making it the special's summary of the man [00:36:46 ff., approximate]
  • Notes: The text is the print-published This Is Water; quote authority stays with print (this-is-water), not this tape. Same-hour echoes recorded for the pairing file: Miller's authenticity-of-self thesis [00:02:46] and Lipsky's account of the work as moderating the I-want voice [00:23:38 ff.].

No other blocks. The hour's remaining new material is biography and reception (Grossman's ventriloquism reading, Miller's authenticity theme, the Amy material), none of it scoped to an Infinite Jest crux.

Themes

Memorial reception (the making of the posthumous Wallace: prophet, saint of attention, greatest-of-generation); composition and publication (Infinite Jest's editing, The Pale King's recovery from the desk); boredom and attention (the Pale King thesis as the late mirror of the entertainment thesis); depression and medication (the Nardil chain told twice, with different emphases); worship and self-surrender (the Kenyon closer); family (the sister's Wallace, unliterary and specific).

Cross-references

Advances