A Supposedly Fun Thing He'll Never Do Again

I've read more about David Foster Wallace than I have read his writings themselves. I have one of his works on my bookshelf (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), but over the years I've read snippets of his stuff here and there. Whether familiar with his works or not, though, I was nevertheless surprised when I read in today's newspaper that Wallace is dead, apparently accomplished through self-inflicted hanging at home in southern California.

Far be it for me to question a person's reasoning for suicide, but even in my amateur status as a scribe, I become somewhat nervous whenever I learn of a professional, famous writer deciding to see what dreams may come. Even those of us in the minor leagues, after all, usually cheer those who have made it to The Show, despite our petty jealousies.

After finishing the paper, I slid Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing from its place between Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect and Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, and I thumbed through its pages to see what I could see. On page 4 I found this: "In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from [Illinois] farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore." I like that quote, for it reminds me of the first time my father took me to play tennis on similar courts. Later in the book though, is this:

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out...,whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.

The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Dislike being watched.

There is more, but I think the point is well made. And, just to delve deeper into writing-type things, I opened John Gardner's classic On Becoming a Novelist, and found this in the preface:

The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow--long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. The writer may be undermined by creeping misanthropy, while the writer's wife, or husband, is growing sulky and embarrassed.

I certainly do not know if Wallace suffered from such frustration, but I do understand how any writer might suffer in such a way. Gardner also writes that while people will encourage others to be doctors and business executives and housewives, those same people will openly point out the lack of opportunities for dreamy eyed and idealistic writers. (When I was 13 or 14, my Aunt Wanda said this when I told her I wanted to be a writer: "Why?!" If I had said that I dreamed of being a brick-layer, she might have applauded.)

Hemingway, too, has something to say about writers, and I found this in his On Writing:

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Hemingway, like Wallace, offed himself, though he opted for a double-barrelled shotgun instead of a noose.

It is unfair, however, to say that writers either have or deserve extra helpings of angst, anxiety, and self-pity; they are, in fact, as a group, probably more prone to whining than are other professions. Often as I stroll through Sears or Target and see a man my age selling vacuum cleaners or plasma TVs, I try to imagine what his dreams are: is that what he envisioned for himself when he was 13 or 14?

Wallace, for whatever of his reasons, is dead, and I do not feel the same sense of loss I did upon learning that Raymond Carver was dead. People are killed or kill themselves every day, and I don't believe that a dead writer necessarily deserves more attention than anyone else. But I do think I might have missed something in Wallace's works, something I now might need to discover.