‘I AM NOT A PARTICULARLY SMART OR IMAGINATIVE MAN, BUT . . . ’
Letters from David Foster Wallace go up for sale
ISTANBUL—Last week a friend DM’d me to say that some letters that David Foster Wallace wrote in the 1990s to the editor and critic Sven Birkerts were up for auction on eBay. “Some good stuff,” Steve wrote. Indeed, the two letters I’ve seen will be fascinating to anybody interested in contemporary U.S. literature. In one, typed and dated “10-15-97” (see above) discusses his recent and ever since infamous review in the New York Observer of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time as well as Birkerts’ essay in the same issue “Roth, Mailer, Bellow Running Out of Gas,” in which some blows are landed on Updike too, though he was spared from the headline to avoid repetition. (That one has been sold.) I sent a screenshot of it to a few reporters I worked with at the Observer fourteen years later (Nate Freeman, now of Vanity Fair, wrote back: “‘There’s a nasty, kind of sneering tone to the whole paper.’ High praise, Dave!”) and to my friend the novelist Lauren Oyler, who a couple of years ago in a Harper’s Magazine piece about the Goop Cruise staked a claim to being the Millennial female DFW. She pointed me to an earlier letter to Birkerts, three handwritten pages dated “11/14” in 1993 from a coffee shop at O’Hare Airport where Wallace was stranded in the middle of the night, that is being auctioned for an asking price of $7,500. (Birkerts’ dedicated copy of Signifying Rappers, the book Wallace co-authored with his Amherst roommate, the novelist Mark Costello, is listed too, but it sold yesterday.) I saw Oyler that night at the Fitzcarraldo Editions Summer Party on a rooftop in Peckham. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that second letter about Infinite Jest,” she said. “It belongs in an archive!” Apparently, she’s also the literary Indiana Jones.
These days I’m not so sure the physical possession of letters and other literary materials, whether in archives or with collectors, is a crucial question. In 2013, a scholar got in touch with me because he was compiling a volume of Wallace’s correspondence. It was 2007, I was working at Harper’s, and I noticed that Wallace had read an as yet unpublished text at a literary festival in the isle of Capri in Italy. I wrote to his agent, Bonnie Nadell, and we published it under the title “The Compliance Branch.” Our correspondence consisted of a few emails and one voicemail when I hadn’t heard from him the night the magazine was closing. He wished me a merry Christmas, told me the proofs all looked fine, and begged me not to give anyone his number “or else my wife will castrate me.” That spring I wrote to him one more time suggesting he report for the magazine on tennis at the Beijing Olympics, but he said he wasn’t well enough for the trip. After his death that autumn, we published some letters he’d written to Anne Fadiman and her writing students at Yale. “The Compliance Branch” eventually appeared as a passage in his posthumous 2011 novel The Pale King. I doubt my emails from him will make it into any published volume because they’re not too interesting unless you’re interested in the trivia of textual emendation: we argued about commas and he accepted my cutting one; I questioned a non-literal use of the word “literally” and let him stet me after I noticed James Joyce had pulled the same move in the first line of “The Dead.” It was all very fun for me because grammar and usage are things I care about and I was talking about them with one of my heroes, but a lot of literary correspondence, especially the nitty-gritty of line and copy editing, is quite dull when you look at it years later. Still, his prickly charm was there. As I often did, I stuck a provisional title on the piece: “The Infant.” He wrote back: “‘The Infant’ is not a very good title, at least in my opinion. This chunklet is part of a larger chunklet whose working title is ‘The Compliance Branch,’ so maybe you’d be willing to do that? It’s mildly cryptic, but ‘The Infant’ is just too bald and clunky.” We were more than willing. I wish I could have slugged the piece “CHUNKLET.” But all told, it was a minor interaction. Many of my colleagues at Harper’s had worked more closely with him over a longer time. One of them had a small tree in her office that he had given her as a gift.
The letters to Birkerts are far more substantive, shedding light on one of the major questions about his fiction, the physical nature of his writing process and routine, and one of his major pieces of literary criticism.