I imagined it would go like this:
He was late. I was dressed up. Sorta. Clean jeans. Hair down. He came into the restaurant – linen table cloths, candles, no salt, no pepper on the table ’cause the chef knew the food’d be just right. He spotted me, came over, a sea of apologies that quickly devolved into a rant on traffic, “why the fuckers have to merge left to go slow is beyond me” but this wasn’t his town and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be here anyway. Here meaning – CA, not the table across from me, he quickly added.
It was short. We weren’t interested. Physically that is. I knew he knew much more than I ever could hope to imagine. And he knew that I knew too much to be blind but not enough to keep pace.
I had ravioli with basil. Tomatoes. He had fish. We both had wine.
We hadn’t talked since, a mutual goodbye, a check to cheek graze and the sort of “I’ll call you” that means we never will.
His preferred company was himself. His smile, when it was there, infectious.
And when he hung himself on Friday, I wondered – what it was that finally tipped the scales that had been leaning that way for so long – was it a student that mouthed off, was it a cancer in the liver only he knew about, was it simply that the abyss of the next book was too much, or was it that Friday, you know man, Friday, it sucked. Traffic. Didn’t feel like cooking. Anything. Finally, everything, really, that paled in comparison. Was it planned or a spur of the moment decision that was years in the making, a temptation he couldn’t resist once his wife was out the door, a reservation he actually kept.
He will be missed.
It is so strange, MB mentions an NPR story. We chat in abstract terms. The book, the prize, the reason. Then to see this now, still abstract and yet immediate and intimate in a way that belies the casual speculation. I think of seeing the Vietnam exihibit in DC for the first time. I had seen a million photos, read the stories. But nothing prepared me for the mirrored reflection of my face behind the etched names. There but for fortune go you or I . . . it could be any of us. It is all of us. This is a beautiful moment of silence for your friend.
In shock. We met several years ago at a bookstore; he signed my first edition. I have always loved that book, lugging it from apartment to apartment where it has sat on the same shelf, semaphoring in secret code. It’s such a shame.
Would someone like to recommend something by David Foster Wallace, for the uninitiated? Than you Dorothy. This is a lovely tribute.
You might start with the very first story in “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (I think it’s called “Thirteen”?), which is fantastic, and his famous article (for Harper’s?) on the horrors of a 7-day cruise is the title story in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” From there, just go and go. The deeper you dig, the dumber you will feel but the less you will mind because of the sheer thrill of being in the presence of such brilliance.
I want to read an essay by David Foster Wallace in which he develops at more length this thought about the experience of reading literature, which he puts forth on the Charlie Rose show in response to Mark Leyner’s assertion that writing is an obsessive activity with no object other than the text:
Does such an essay exist? I have only read Infinite Jest, none of his other work, I’m looking to remedy this situation.
At my site I’ve linked several blog posts about his passing that I found meaningful, I’m going to add this one to the list.
The cruise article is the first thing I read by him – truly brilliant. The footnotes in later works never seemed to live up to those.
And this was a lovely post, gale. Thank you.
i always felt a bond with him because of our junior tennis backgrounds-the cruise article is a must read but the one on michael joyce and pro tennis is my absolute favorite.
The NYT obit quotes his father on DFW’s crippling depression and its treatment, which recently included hospitalization and electro-shock therapy. This just makes me so sad.
I rolled around in bed with Girl With Curious Hair for days, rereading, letting each story sift through me, digesting all the layers and layers– knowing I’d missed layers. Only Alice Munro has affected me in such a way.
Thanks for the obit link, Tim. This explains a lot I didn’t know. More layers.
HERE is a piece from Rolling Stone about John McCain. And HERE are some of his reflections after 9/11.
“Authority and American Usage” (aka, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” in its original Harper’s form) is one of the most exhilaratingly intelligent essays I’ve ever read (it’s also collected in the recent Consider the Lobster). It makes you feel smart and stupid at the same time. Mostly stupid, though.
The “Tense Present” article really got LanguageHat’s goat.
I had just discussed “a href=”http://www.esquire.com/fiction/fiction/incarnations-burned-children-0900?click=main_sr”>”Incarnations of Burned Children” with my students this past Wednesday. So bizarre and incredibly sad.
oops. here it is.
Surreal, as most sudden deaths are…
Here’s a story in the NY Observer about the possibility of any posthumous publication of what DFW was working on. Doesn’t look likely, but it may turn up in some form.
It’s amusing (but perhaps disturbing to those of us who are heavily invested in academic honesty) to think that he may have written undergrad theses for up to 10 friends when he was at Amherst.