Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, and was David Foster Wallace’s editor. He adapted the following from “Editing Wallace,” a Q&A with Rick Moody, published in Sonora Review 55, May 2009.
In April 1992 I received on submission from David Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, around 150 pages of Infinite Jest, the opening section. They were wild, smart, funny, sad, and unlike any pages of manuscript I'd ever held in my hands. The range of voices and settings sent me reeling. The transvestite breakdown on the subway, the kid in the doctor's office. The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The Lung. Young Hal with his little brass one-hitter. Gately, Troelsch, Schacht. The names! Erdedy, Wardine, Madame Psychosis. I’d read chapters from it published as short stories in magazines and here at last was the gigantic construct that linked those wildly disparate pieces. What I remember is that David knew his book was going to be very, very long, and he was looking for someone whose editorial suggestions he thought he might listen to. I was lucky enough to be working at Little, Brown, a company that was willing to support this kind of endeavor. We signed a contract and waited.
When he was around two-thirds through the novel David sent me a giant stack of pages and asked for my thoughts. I protested that without the whole story it would be impossible to know what ultimately mattered. But I tried to give him an accounting of when I found it intolerably confusing or slow or just too hard to make sense of. I banged my head hardest against the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and the Orin Incandenza football stories and David revised those strands considerably.
We’d agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this? Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them.
Every decision was David's. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his. It is a common misconception that the writer turns the manuscript over to the editor, who then revises, shapes, and cuts at will. In fact the editor’s job is to earn the writer’s agreement that changes he or she suggests are worth making. David accepted many cuts—around 250 manuscript pages is what I recall. But he resisted others, for reasons that he usually explained.
Here are a few of those responses and explanations. They give a sense of how engaged David was in this process and of how much fun it was to work with him.
p. 52—This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter.
p. 82—I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back.
p. 133—Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up disc so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding.)
pp. 327-330. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on your part, my canines are bared on this one.
Ppp. 739-748. I’ve rewritten it—for about the 11th time—for clarity, but I bare teeth all the way back to the 2nd molar on cutting it.
P. 785ff—I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?
I keep trying to imagine encountering David’s books separate from the tall, athletic, casual, brilliant, concerned, funny man I knew—the way we encounter most writing, bodies of work whose creators we never meet, complete years before we encounter them. It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind. And I have to say that the David we encounter through Infinite Jest is pretty amazingly like the David I knew. When for a moment I manage to imagine myself as a reader opening up a copy of Infinite Jest for the first time, the way I opened V or Soldier’s Pay or Suttree or A Handful of Dust or The Canterbury Tales, I think Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Those responses are amazing. Did Wallace write anything that wasn’t brilliant? I would love to see one of his shopping lists. It probably has footnotes.
Dunno about his shopping lists, but his class syllabi/-uses were great and replete with footnotes anyway: http://alasophia.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-foster-wallaces-syllabus.html
P.S. Thanks to Mr. Pietsch for posting this–great insight. I think I want to check out that Sonora issue now.
Thank you so much for posting the link to the syllabus. I’m very grateful for an additional glimpse into the life he led apart from IJ.
These comments are great! I would to see more. Are there more anywhere to be seen / read / enjoyed? Thanks so much for the post. Reading it was something special.
The good folks at The Onion took a shot at what a DFW breakup letter to a girlfriend would be like. It’s at http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769
Also I can’t help recommending the gloriously titled “NASCAR cancels remainder of season following David Foster Wallace’s death”, which is surprisingly sweet.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season
Thank you so, so much for this.
However I am utterly sick with despair about the missing Swiftian line. Speaking of having mercy, Mr. Pietsch. I don’t suppose you could tell us what it was?
I agree! And poor old footnote 33. I want to hear about that prescriptive grammar exam!
Now, of course, I wish we could read everything that had been cut
Indeed. I’d be very interested in reading an uncut, annotated IJ. Could this be published someday? If The Pale King will come with notes and errata next year, how about IJ? Pretty please?
I agree. This is a little bit like Ezra Pound’s editing of Eliot’s Wasteland. The resulting poem was better, but the things that were cut were pretty interesting and it’s great that we have them.
Over on the forums(fora?) I was pondering an annotated/critical edition of IJ: http://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=140
I second calls for more of DFW’s rejoinders to you Mr. Pietsch, as well as any cut gems that could be shared.
Also, that syllabus is amazing – especially the Caveat Emptor section.
Thanks for posting this. It could be about 50,000 words longer, however.
From the DT Max story, we know many, many drafts of IJ exist, but a complete copy of what DFW finally turned in to LB would be amazing to see.
I’d also be interested in seeing some form of IJ with extra stuff. Funny thing is, after reading it, IJ somehow seemed short looking back on it. I guess that’s because once I hit the middle and things started working out, I never wanted the book to end.
I feel like a school girl writing to someone who, like, actually met the man…and I’m not, me, a school girl. Having read Terra Nostra and V and Gravity’s Rainbow in my youth, I wasn’t unprepared for brilliance and complexity. I was unprepared for the near fatal poignancy of it. I am half way through, guiltily chuckling at scences and episodes that defy “sharing.” I just want to know did DFW give any clue. It’s seems mean and immature to want to know, but I can’t help it. All of the “personal map obliterations”. . . Was he, did he seem connected more to certain characters…to Hal in particular. These may be unfair questions. It was really helpful, the one comment about it all coming together after the first half. But I’d read it through if there were complaints that nothing ever gets “confluential.” It’s scary though. Were you ever scared that the book was like the cartridge of the same name?
One thing I wish was indeed edited is the French in IJ which is way off. For example, ‘fauteuils de rollents’ is really ‘fauteuils roulants’ (P.88). Endnote 19 is ‘Une Personne de l’Importance Terrible’ but should be ‘une personne terriblement importante’. Also, Le Front de la Libération de la Québec really is Le Front de libération du Québec. Also, among cultural details that look strange is the fact that one character is said to be a separatist but is connected to English Québécois environments, a fact that would very rarely if ever happen in real. I understand how the book is not supposed to reflect current reality but I would have liked the French to reflect normal linguistic use. Otherwise, I really like the book.
Oh, forgot one minor cultural detail: a Québécois who wants independance would never refer to himself and others of the same opinion as ‘separatist’ but as a ‘sovereignist’.
Yeah, I don’t know where this whole Quebec thing is going, but I feel as though the French was treated a little carelessly. The syntax is closer to a French person from France speaking English than that of a Quebecer. Also, I’ve never heard a Quebecer say “gendarmes” (unless describing some incident in Paris).
Julie, a couple of things–
1. I’m not sure, but I think there has to be some significance in the FLQ being male in the book.
2. Recall that a lot of the English in IJ is also mangled–not only to reflect the fact that the book isn’t manifest in our reality but in another, though equally horrible/cartoonish one, but also, I think, for the sake of usage variety. People don’t always speak properly. Hal and Steeply are the most constant botchers of French, and I think the book’s depiction of the language is in no way meant to represent Standard French, Quebecois French, and/or any resultant basilects.
3. Hal also makes a number of mathematical errors, which is in keeping with his shaky French. A bit of info on those errors here: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/IJmath.htm
Not sure what to make of it, and though it’s clear that DFW was knowledgeable about math based on some of his other work, his book on infinity is kind of riddled with errors. And I don’t know anything about his French expertise. So I guess it’s up for grabs?
[…] Telegraph has a long article on Infinite Jest, Infinite Summer, and David Foster Wallace. In it, Michael Pietsch speaks a bit about Wallace’s final and incomplete novel, The Pale King, to be published […]