Remembering David Foster Wallace, who died 12 years ago
David Foster Wallace died as suicide twelve years ago, 9/12/2008, aged 46. He was an American writer who became famous like a Rockstar, and in the end he killed himself just like a Rockstar. I’m going to talk about his life, his writing, his death and how much I keep missing him.
In our life, there are two things hiding secrets: the secret of success and the secret of suicide. No matter how hard we try, but we’ll never be able to know success and suicide formulas. We’ll never know why someone, compared to another person with similar skills, the same talent, a similar appearance will be a great success as opposed to the other one and we’ll never know why someone chooses to commit suicide.
About Wallace, I’m pretty sure his great success isn’t determined by his operas. Let me be clear: I love David very much, I started reading him when his first awesome storybook “Girl with curious hair” was published and I guess I’m one of the not so many people who — really — read “Infinite Jest” in its entirety. I’m talking of David’s novel 1200 pages long, a dystopian novel, at times hilarious, at times dramatic or tragic, filled with digressions and many weird or amazing footnotes, but above all: made special by instants of pure brightness. As though, into the long and sometimes overconfident flow of “Infinite Jest” narration, Wallace had, occasionally, some enlightenment to set on fire a dark, dark road.
In his short stories, David’s writing is always perfect. In my opinion, Wallace gives his best in all his storybooks, like Raymond Carver, who proudly said “I’m a short tales writer, I can’t and I won’t write a novel.” David’s short tales are the best medium he could find to express his narration where time is extended and cut in small pieces, like a jigsaw that, in the end, will be rebuilt. But nothing can reveal the secret of his success, not even his beautiful storybooks.
David Foster Wallace was an American writer in a special time, over two millennia. What helped him to succeed as a writer: first, he was the son of the prevailing culture and prevailing language; second, he was a narcissist in a typically American way. Sometimes American people, even when they are so nice and talented as David was, forget there’s a whole world around the United States of America. In an interview given to Laura Miller, in 1996, after “Infinite Jest” publishing, David said:
“The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for, and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it’s the same thing.”
He’s describing the perfect way a lot of upper-middle-class young men and women felt, all over the world, in the eighties, from Europe, South-America, Japan, Australia but David thought it was just “an American type of sadness.”
David had American culture, American language, and American narcissism, but a strong intuition and analytical skills too, perhaps due to his great love for math. He said, in the nineties:
“I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral.”
I wonder what David would have thought of today’s internet and Social Media, but I can imagine he would hate hyper-capitalism and he would like Social Media: his Twitter account would have racked up such a million followers and he’d feel pretty good about it. By the end of it, I think what made Wallace succeed was Wallace himself. Today this might not be possible. Today Publishing is falling apart. Today, among the few books that are published, there are no storybooks and no novels longer than 200 pages. Today no editor would publish Ulysses by Joyce or One hundred years of solitude by Garcìa Marquez, much less Infinite Jest.
The nineties, especially the early nineties, were a different world. The two famous Rockstars who reached fame almost simultaneously and very fast: Foster Wallace in literature and Kurt Cobain in rock music. They sold high-quality literature and music, they represented the newest thing in their respective fields, they had a very attractive look: David Foster Wallace was the long-haired with bandana Writer and Kurt Cobain was the blonde, beautiful Rocker with the sad smile.
But still, what people were mostly looking for, buying their books or music, was their Innermost Essence, which contained the rare and not heritable “Great Communicator” marker. That special marker sometimes arises together with depression and desperation, with ticking time suicide, all things that attract people as the Siren Call. An amazing, unidentifiable Death Song.
Everybody knows Cobain and Wallace both died by suicide and about Kurt’s death there was talk, again and again, photos have been shown, we listened to irrational rumors and delirious speeches too, but, little by little, everyone understood that Cobain’s short life had always been the “Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold.”
Instead, about David’s death, a curtain of silence fell from the first moments. A curtain of silence passed as “decency”, that strongly clashed with the “pop culture” always seen by Wallace as an integral part of his writing and life. Among the things half-spoken about his death, the worst — in my opinion — is the one regarding his supposed suicide note. His wife says David left her a suicide note he wrote before killing himself. She never wanted to show it, even if she knows that a writer’s suicide note cannot be a private thing because it belongs to all the world. There’s a whole literature made by suicide notes: by Virginia Woolf, Majakovskij, Cesare Pavese, Kurt Cobain, just to mention some of the most famous suicide notes and no one has yet dared to silence or censor one of those notes.
David’s wife belongs to the wide category of dead artists’ wives/mothers, who start to look for and pull out every draft, letter, thought, aborted tale or article, few lines of some, and everything they can give to the prints (same in the music field, of course) and, when there’s nothing more to be found, writing a “book” themselves telling their love, wedding or motherhood about the famous dead. That’s why doesn’t make sense that David’s wife wanted to keep to herself just his husband’s “suicide note”.
What I know for sure is that David was compulsively perfectionistic and had deep professional ethics; I guess he would never let print an incomplete novel like “The Pale King” without double-check, fix, adjust every single paragraph on his own.
No matter how a hypocrisy web has been made around David’s death: every single suicide speaks itself and nobody can silence it. Sylvia Plath, one of the greatest American Poets and experienced in the “dying art” said that, when we talk of suicide, we’d never talk about “why” but just about “how”. “The why” is often meaningless: David suffered from depression, like many of us, but if all depressed people committed suicide, we’d have massacres each day. Instead, “the how” never lies. Among the many possible ways to commit suicide, hanging is the most violent, especially toward those who are going to find us.
In the United States of America, where if you need to buy a gun you just have to enter a supermarket, to choose the hanging as suicide has a strong punishment meaning: punishment against yourself and against the one who will find you. In the end, whatever mechanism has come full circle, turning David’s secret Death Song into suicide, he knew damn well his wife was going to be the first one to find him.
Among the many things that David Foster Wallace wrote — novels, storybooks, articles, essays — we can find illuminating sentences about suffering from depression but nothing about suicide. I don’t mean a character’s suicide, where the author is not emotionally involved; I’m talking about real suicide, however kept hidden and disguised as something different.
Then I started reading all David things once again, looking for that “something different” and in the end I found it. “True suicide” is hidden in one of his best tales, from the storybook “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”; the tale is called “Forever Overhead” and talks about a thirteen years old boy in a public swimming-pool, climbing on board to dive. Time is crystallized and, same time, it’s very, very fast, in the way just Wallace was able to narrate. I finally understood that David, talking of the boy’s dive, was telling us the “suicide he felt inside”: heartbreaking, true, unexplainable, inescapable.
From “Forever Overhead”:
“Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story.
Hey kid are you okay.
There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
Hey kid he says. Hey kid are you okay.
Metal flowers bloom on your tongue. No more time for thinking. Now that there is time you don’t have time.
Hey.
…
Look down. Now it moves in the sun, full of hard coins of light that shimmer red as they stretch away into a mist that is your own sweet salt. The coins crack into new moons, long shards of light from the hearts of sad stars. The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard. A kind of blind.
You have been taken off guard. Happy Birthday. Did you think it over. Yes and no. Hey kid.
Two black spots, violence, and disappear into a well of time. Height is not the problem. It all changes when you get backdown. When you hit, with your weight.
So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?
The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think.
From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.
The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever.
Step into the skin and disappear.
Hello.”
Hello David. We miss you. We miss you so much.
