September 17 2008
Eric Myers just emailed this to me, out of the blue (relatively speaking). I wish I had anything to add except my unrefined confusion: I am torn between the disappointment of someone of such intelligence and vigor just pussing out out and giving up (after all, Kurt Vonnegut never gave up), the sense that it’s the easiest thing in the world to do and that if he wanted it he certainly earned it, and the acceptance that I have no idea what it was like inside his head or of what the choice consisted.
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH BEAUTIFUL MEN
David Foster Wallace is dead.
Long live David Foster Wallace.
He was a friend of mine. Not in any conventional sense. But as I trust he was to so many people he’d never met, who only knew him through his writing. A beacon of brilliance and insight in this, The Absurd World We Have No Choice But to Inhabit. This Absurd World—both outer and inner—that ultimately defeated him, despite all his accomplishments and accolades.
I met DFW at a reading in San Francisco in early 2006. I hate readings and rarely attend them. Typically I find them to be desiccated and dryasdust, a pale imitation of the rich, imaginative world conjured by the writer’s words, devoid of any performative integrity that would justify the audience’s attention—attention that could be more productively applied to reading solo in the comfort of one’s one room/womb. But his words moved me that night, his recounting of the psychological landscape of Illinois in the wake of September 11. And so I hovered amidst the autograph hounds after the reading.
Or, more like: I positioned myself by the author’s table to be able to have my own brief encounter before the hordes descended.
I was the first in line.
David grabbed his pen in anticipation of the audience’s desires, but I had no book to sign. I merely sought a few words unencumbered by the baggage of pen and paper.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied.
“I’ve always appreciated you as a writer, but now—after hearing you read— I can appreciate you as a human being.”
(This is what I go to readings for—to get a sense of the humanity/energy/intention of writers I adore. More often than not, I am disappointed—deluged by a tidal wave of ego and arrogance that so often attend the success writers of his stature have achieved. But not this time. His humility and humanity were palpable in the room, his desire to selflessly distill our collective human experience so clearly—in a way that so very few can do.)
He looked at me as if I had just offered him my priapistic soul on a skewer, as if he’d never been paid that compliment before. As if he had no idea that his humanity was so much more valuable than his writerly gifts. Or that his humanity was the only reason that his gifts had been able to manifest as brilliantly as they had.
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes stuttering and his poise momentarily disrupted. He seemed discomfited. Had he never heard this before? Had his brain always been praised while his soul remained malnourished?
I didn’t want to keep him from the hundreds of adoring souls in the room, so I said my goodbyes. I wish I hadn’t walked away so quickly. Perhaps a victim of my own ego, I had no desire to be one of the horde.
I tried to follow up via email, but David was an impossible one to locate, even to those well versed in the arcane rituals of Internet interrogation. His email address was simply AWOL. And so I went on with my life, looking forward to his next book.
And that was that.
And now that is all.
David Foster Wallace is dead.
The irony runs deep. As do the cliches. One of the most innovative and original literary voices of our time, a suicide. The cliche of the tortured genius. One so unbridled in his imagination ultimately succumbing to the strictures and restrictions and remonstrances of This, The Absurd World We Have No Choice But To Inhabit.
David Foster Wallace is dead.
Long live David Foster Wallace.
I’m sure he’ll be back.
Let’s take better care of him next time.
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