John Warner is the author of the leading volume of fake writing advice, Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice From a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant. He teaches at Clemson University.
Twice in my life, when I had no one, David Foster Wallace was there for me. The first time was Labor Day weekend, 1988, my freshman year of college at the University of Illinois.93 No one had told me that even though it was only the second week of school that everyone was supposed to go home. My dorm complex, “the six pack,”94 looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, space for many with very few present. Occasionally I’d hear Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” coming from some other lonely soul’s boom box echoing through the central courtyard, but for the most part it was me and my six inch (not a misprint) black and white television and an advance copy of Wallace’s story collection, Girl with Curious Hair.
My mom owned an independent bookstore at the time and one of her sales reps must’ve said something like, “this is what the kids are reading these days,” and so she’d sent it to me. A week and a half into school, I was off to an uninspired start, enrolled in 15 hours worth of gut courses, 1200 person lectures with little accountability and even less intellectual stimulation. I enjoyed the free time they left me to nap, but I was well on my way to sleepwalking through my education. Out of sheer boredom I picked up the book and began reading and those stories became my companions through the long weekend.
Since the English AP exam at the time stopped well short of postmodernism, I didn’t know that such things existed, but the first story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” with Alex Trebek as a character literally tickled me. I had an instant sensation that unlike most of what I’d been fed in high school, this Wallace guy had things to say about the world I lived in. Even now there’s very few writers who manage to write about the world we inhabit today instead of ones in the past.
His fascinations – television, politics, the way people can be casually cruel or unusually kind to each other – were mine. While up to that time I might’ve said that I had an “interest” in writing, I didn’t really know that these subjects were in bounds for a writer. I’d assumed they were too, I don’t know, small. Wallace proved to me that the opposite was true.
Fast forward nine years when I had my own individual Infinite Summer. That interest in writing had metastasized into an MFA degree from McNeese St. University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.95 I’d turned in a thesis that I’d begun to loath even as it came off the printer. The stories were primarily ersatz Carver, the kind of competent, shapely tale that got through workshop with minimal fuss, but for sure didn’t excite anyone, least of all me. I was a justifiably unpublished sub-mediocrity and it looked like it was about time to pick up an LSAT prep book.
I had three months left on a lease and nowhere to live after that, so for the summer following graduation I stayed in Lake Charles with the only possessions I hadn’t sold at a yard sale or shipped back home: a bed roll, a lamp, and a copy of Infinite Jest, and my dog.96 Some friends had stuck around as well, so days were spent shooting pool or watching movies, maybe drinking too early and too much and nights it was me and the lamp and the dog and the book. I’d become a certified Wallace fan by that point, having devoured A Supposedly Fun Thing… and Broom of the System. His essay on the Illinois State Fair cemented our bond as Midwesterners. I thought he was, to put it plainly, a fucking genius. Nights, I listened to the condensation drip from the window air-conditioner and read, sometimes just a few pages, other times for hours. Where writing and creativity had begun to look hopelessly narrow, Infinite Jest, cracked the world back open.
Once again, reading David Foster Wallace showed me what was possible. But as intimidating as his brilliance was and is, above all, the book demonstrates that if you want to write something at all compelling you’ve got to bore in on what interests you and just work that shit until the goods come out the other side. During my graduate studies I’d lost that feeling, or more accurately, I’d never found it because I was too wrapped up in what the circumscribed group of workshoppers were going to say. I’d been keeping my neck firmly tucked toward my shell lest it get lopped off.
Summer over, having not written a word for better than three months I moved back to Chicago, into my parents’ basement. I was twenty-seven, broke, jobless and imagined a future life as a kind of mole-man, my eyes saucering from the lack of natural illumination as I spent more and more time underground. One day I started typing a dialog between a man looking for a job and a career counselor and all of the sudden the career counselor is talking about gung fu and the Ultimate Fighting Championships and a poem by W.D. Snodgrass97 and there’s a little fillip in my stomach that I haven’t felt for quite some time. That dialog and what followed it became the first story98 I ever published and it wouldn’t have happened without Infinite Jest reminding me what’s possible (namely anything).
A couple of years later I had the chance to tell David Foster Wallace about all this, to thank him personally for his example and inspiration, but I choked. I’d been invited to tag along to a dinner with Wallace and about six others after a reading by a friend of mine at Illinois State where Wallace was teaching at the time. He was low key and cool, obviously smart, but not showy about it and as the dinner progressed, the words I might use to convey my admiration roiled around my head without finding any purchase. The best I could do was telling him that I “really enjoyed” his writing at the time of our farewells.
After his passing, as I read the tributes to the man that had been pouring into the McSweeney’s website, more grief fell out of me than I thought possible for someone I’d met once, briefly. I told a friend about this and very seriously he said, “It’s like he’s your Princess Diana.”
Comments
17 responses to “John Warner: My Own Infinite Summer”
What a lovely post, Mr. Warner; I enjoyed it so much. Lamp, book, dog, you know, what else is there?
I managed to avoid grad school (which really have you ever spoken with a single person who didn’t find it utterly hateful and soul-destroying?? Why are we like this, anyway? How come school can’t be fun anymore?) but IJ brought me back into the world in much the same way. I guess I’d been sort of hiding out in the 18th century, mentally speaking.
I think your friend is exactly right about Princess Diana. That is a mighty aperçu.
FWIW I loved grad school, nearly every second of it.
The secret is to go work a really shitty job for a few years. Oh, and be interested in something math-y or science-y where they support you.
Then every time they hand you a check and all you’ve been doing all month is learning about interesting stuff and hanging with really smart people, you’ll go, “Oh, you pay me for this? Seriously? Cool!”
I absolutely loved grad school. It was non-stop magnificent and inspiring. More folks should try philosophy, and I think there’d be less griping.
It gave me such pleasure to read these accounts, and to learn that things were different and better than I thought, at least for some. Thank you so much.
To be fair, I have no lasting regrets about grad school and I’ve always seen it as a necessary step on my own personal path. I developed the discipline to write without deadline. I spent three years thinking/talking/writing about reading and writing. I started teaching, which is something I love and continue to do. I was never personally unhappy while in school. I just recognized that my own work wasn’t anywhere near what I hoped for myself and had a hard time wrestling with that.
Really, though, that’s the endless struggle. The work is never going to be what I hope for it. Without some struggles, I don’t think I would’ve come out the other side of that particular problem.
Take out “MFA program” and substitute “pediatric residency,” and swap out “bedroll” for “mattress on the floor of your tiny bedroom,” and that’s almost exactly how it was for me the first time I read IJ.
Thanks for this lovely, touching and inspiring remembrance. I wonder what I would have managed to say if I had ever met the man who wrote so much that meant so much to me. Frankly, I would probably have burst into tears.
So the story actually reached out with its little noncorporeal fingers and poked around playfully at your abdomen, feet, etc., eliciting, from you, sounds of mirth and uncontrollable reflexive attempts at escape?
Excellent.
I listend to this interview the other day. It it David Foster Wallace with Lewis Burke Frumkes.
I thought you might be interested.
http://lewisfrumkes.com/radioshow/david-foster-wallace-interview
May be “He’s your John Lennon” for those of us a little older, but I loved your Princess Diana closer. A+ essay.
Your post reminded me of something I’ve mused about ever since DFW’s death. I’m not generally one to mourn people I didn’t know personally, no matter how much their work has affected me, but his death still hits me hard from time to time. It’s more than just feeling sympathy for the people who knew and loved him (though if you want to conjure up some of that, just read the Rolling Stone article about his depression and the last year of his life), and it’s more than just the totally selfish sense of loss that I won’t get to look forward to reading more of his work in the future. It’s hard to articulate.
I’ve got something of an obsession with Bob Dylan, and my in-laws joke that I’ll be inconsolable when he dies. True, I’ll miss going to his concerts, and I’ll miss awaiting new albums, and I’ll feel bad for the people who really knew him. But I don’t think I’ll feel the same grief I still feel for DFW, despite the fact that I’ve invested a lot more of my time and energy into my Dylan obsession yet have the same personal connection to both men (as in, none whatsoever).
I think Sam Anderson put the grief so many of us feel quite brilliantly in his remembrance for Wallace. He said, simply, “I didn’t realize, until he was gone, how much emotional energy I’d invested in the fact that he was actually a living human being.”
Oh I so agree with you – it is with such a bittersweet wonder that I am reading his works now. There just has to be some kind of humankind wake up message in it all but I’m sure still grappling for it
I’d be interested to read that story!
It’s in the 3rd edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly if you can track one down. I forgot until I just looked at it again that the story also has a story by DFW printed on the spine, “Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders.”
David Foster Wallace is kinda like Elliott Smith for me. I got into Elliott Smith just a year or two after he died, and was really sad to hear that – his music is wonderful, and it sucked to think that I couldn’t have gotten to ever look forward to hoping for new albums or ever actually meeting the guy. Fast-forward to 2009, and here I am having just finished Infinite Jest, DFW having died not even a year ago.
It’s sad, and the feeling I get from it is weird – it’s like, in a way that makes no sense, “if only I had been a fan before he killed himself, maybe I could have done something”. Even though I wouldn’t have.
Oh well.
I can totally relate to this. Elliott Smith and DFW kind of look alike, too. They also killed themselves in strangely self-violent ways, too (out of general decency I’ll avoid elaborating this point)(and yes, suicide is patently self-violent, but I was referring to the element of sad and shocking savagery in their respective felos de se).
And their art affected me similarly, too, in that E.S.’s songs and D.F.W.’s writing puts me in touch with a sense of almost primordial, childhood loss that still affects now and then. My first memory is of a group of us gathered around a sewer looking down at a small, red, plastic boot that had fallen off my friend’s Superman doll. E.S.’s song “Clementine” is that memory’s soundtrack and D.F.W.’s descriptions of the Black Sail seem to speak to that lost boot.
Not that anyone gives a long, segmented shit about my childhood memories, but I’m trying to elucidate by way of one, personal memory what both E.S. and DFW’s art does for me.
I came to both DFW and Elliott Smith about the exact same time, January 2006, and I have a memory of looping “Either/Or,” and specifically the song, “2:45 AM,” while reading “Consider the Lobster.”
I’ve had the same thought you had about wishing I would have/could have reached out before either artist killed himself.
Lovely post. I can’t bear to talk about his death, so I’ll sidestep the elephant in the room this week.
“Reading David Foster Wallace showed me what was possible.”
Yes. On so, so many levels.
“Twice in my life, when I had no one, David Foster Wallace was there for me.”
Yes. Twice when I had no one to understand me and no one whom I understood.
“…the book demonstrates that if you want to write something at all compelling you’ve got to bore in on what interests you and just work that shit until the goods come out the other side.”
Yes. How very sausage-process evoking.
[And I have to agree with the commenters who adored grad school. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. And may again, soon.]