Read Online Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max - Free Book Online

depressed”; we say, “Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!” That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time
already
killed themselves, where it really counts…. When they “commit suicide,” they’re just being orderly. 9
     
    Wallace wrote Washington a bit of doggerel to herald his return for the second semester of the 1983–84 school year:
    Roses are Red.
    Violets are Blue;
    I am well
    And hope you are too.
    Wittgenstein,
    Was a raving fairy;
    I’ll be in Amherst
    In January.
     
    Charlie McLagan, leaving his parents’ house in suburban Chicago, picked him up in Urbana and drove him east in the family’s station wagon. They listened to Joy Division and Brian Eno as they sped along the interstate. McLagan was himself taking a year off, and Wallace stayed with him and his roommate for a week in Boston. McLagan thought Wallace seemed different now—fragile, tentative, apologizing for everything he did, whether it was playing the TV too loud or using up the soap in the shower(he washed his hair with soap, not wanting to waste his friend’s shampoo). McLagan’s roommate joked to him that Wallace seemed on the point of apologizing for using the oxygen in the air. On New Year’s Eve, the three went to a nudie bar in the Combat Zone. Wallace said he found it depressing. McLagan told him he needed to toughen up. “This is reality,” he pronounced.
    When the semester started, Wallace showed his new commitment to fiction. He believed that if he was going to write better, he had to study it, just as he had philosophy. So during the next two semesters he took classes in the American novel and modern British poetry, finding himself particularly drawn to Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel
McTeague
in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter. He took a course in literary approaches and theory and reveled in Jacques Derrida’s essays, “The Double Session” and “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Norris’s novel showed how much room there was for the bizarre in fiction, even in supposedly realist works; Eliot, whose poem has dozens of famously ambiguous endnotes, suggested a place for self-consciousness in literary creativity. (Wallace would one day say that he loved endnotes because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”) Derrida would be the longest-lasting influence of the three. Wallace told his professor, Andrew Parker, that he was happy to find a philosopher who cared about literature.
    The biggest innovation in Wallace’s life was a class in creative writing he signed up for. For him, this was an extraordinary departure. He still did not like the literary environment at school. It seemed effeminate and sensitive and self-absorbed. And then, too, he was a young man from the Midwest, and midwestern boys might teach or read or make ironic fun of novels, but they did not go to college to learn how to write them; fiction wasn’t quite school and it wasn’t quite work. Wallace’s attitude might be summed up by a comment the narrator makes in “Planet Trillaphon” about May: “She wanted to write made-up stories for a living. I said I didn’t know that could be done.”
    Amherst was similarly skeptical of creative writing. The school offered only one class, under the sponsorship of the English department. That year its teacher was Alan Lelchuk, the school’s visiting writer. The veteran novelist immediately noticed the skinny boy in the back with the backward baseball cap and strong opinions. Wallace submitted a story; Lelchuktold him the writing was shallow and tricky, “philosophy with zingers.” The young man would have, Lelchuk remembers, a clever thought and then “three wise-ass sentences around it.” Lelchuk called Wallace in to discuss it with him, expecting the student might get angry and quit the class. He told Wallace that he could be a philosopher or a writer, and if he wanted to be a