D. Max - Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story - A Life of David Foster Wallace

Wallace began his investigation as a novel. He immediately ran into difficulties. “I’m bogged down in research for something that’s scaring me a lot,” he wrote Franzen in May. “It’s so big and complicated and requires a voice I don’t seem to have in the old quiver.” He told his friend he was lucky to be enjoying his talent and wondered where his own voice for fiction had gone, putting his writing at “3.5 on a 10 scale.” 23He pushed forward and the pornography project gyrated between fiction and nonfiction. In a later essay in the Review of Contemporary Fiction , Costello remembered Wallace’s frenetic and intensive research method this way:

Wallace set timetables for his work, intricate as the Croton-on-Hudson local. Get up. Talk on phone with porn actress famous for giving screen blow jobs. Hang up. Ask: is the porn queen an actress? Look up actress in the OED. Actress: a female actor. Look up actor: one who acts in a drama. Surely a blow job is an act. OK then: is a blow job drama?

At some point, Wallace thought some actual on-set knowledge might help. He explained to Nadell, “You’d be surprised, or maybe not at the paucity of material on the actual nuts and bolts (no pun) of the adult film business.” He went on:

I just need access to sort of mundane facts that I think only hanging quietly out in the background of the real thing would afford: Questions of scripting, average time of shooting, average time of production from purchase of treatment through casting through rehearsals (are there rehearsals? I’d guess rarely) and choreography (obvious) and straight shooting and position-shooting (money shots, come shots, facial reactions, etc.) to editing, printing, distribution negotiations.

Always interested in how media changed the reality it was meant only to record, he focused on porn movie conventions: why the lesbian love scene, the masturbation scene?

Why do many of the movies have a kind of shadowy, dramatically superfluous character who seems to stand for the man watching film (truck driver in Debbie Does Dallas II, obnoxious airplane passenger in Mile-High Girls) and whose final access to female lead(s) effects film’s closure?

Nadell promised to try to help, as did Alice Turner at Playboy . Hurt feelings had healed between them; the two met again in New York when Wallace visited there. “Alice has been marvelous and generous as usual,” he wrote Nadell in late May, “and looks to have ways to pretty much grease the skids.” Turner told him he could use Playboy ’s name in his research. She had hopes he might write a novelist-visits-a-porn-set piece.

Nadell came to Somerville in June. Wallace moved to the futon and Nadell slept in his bed. She found her writer writing every morning. In the evening she would go with the two young men for cheap falafel or hamburgers or stay in and listen to music. Soon afterward in New York, she met Lee Smith, an editor at Antaeus who had been in touch with Wallace and Costello. She suggested that their rap collaboration would make a book and he agreed. Smith paid $2,000 as an advance. Wallace was pleased but scared; he wasn’t confident the world needed his nonfiction. Signifying Rappers , as the book was called after a song by Schoolly D, he wrote Steven Moore, “was not meant to carry a cardboard-bordered burden all by itself; it wasn’t meant to.”

In early July, Wallace started a long second visit to Yaddo. Just before, he flew to Los Angeles to research his porn novel and decided definitively while there that his approach to the subject ought to be through nonfiction. He was intrigued by how the women seemed to boss around the men, despite the latter’s large sex organs, and admired the veteran actresses in porn who handled desire with the cool of businesswomen. He watched dozens of sex scenes and interviewed some of the actors. He asked Joey Silvera, a porn actor in his thirties and the star of Slick Honey , how he could have so many erections in a day: “Is it natural glandular horniness or is it a professional thing? Are you all trained to be that way?” He was impressed, he told Tori Welles, the star of Torrid Without a Cause , by how much nicer porn actors were to one another than writers. While in Los Angeles, he also finished up another pass on his rap book and went to Compton to hear some rappers but got so scared he had to leave before he could find the concert — or so he told a friend. He signed a note to Nadell just after returning, “Stay Fly, and Shit…DF Fresh W.”

All this made it hard for him to settle down in Saratoga Springs afterward. The retreat felt different two years after he had last been in residence. The trendy writers whose camp follower he had at times wanted to be were gone and he himself was less impressionable. He believed he knew the limits on his audience and accepted them. “The thing I like about my own prison,” he wrote Moore shortly before arriving, “is I have tenure in my prison.” He had a room in the old main house, on the top floor, and he set up fans facing out of the windows (writers were not allowed to smoke in the building). He had brought along an impossible amount of work: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions , a postmodern novel he had always meant to read, his pornography manuscript, and his research material for his article on Wittgenstein’s Mistress . He assured Steven Moore that he would “carve out two days at Yaddo to reread the book, reread the Tractatus (gulp), and do the piece.” While there he also went quickly through Russell’s Foundations of Logical Atomism , to which Wittgenstein had been responding in the Tractatus . “Fine prep. For the innumerable times I’ll be having to do this sort of instant-mnemonic-pretense shit during the upcoming year,” he told his editor.

He was a dominant figure this time at Yaddo, one of the best-known writers there, with a book published and another soon to come out. Intriguing packages came for him at the mail table. “Let’s move on to the next vector,” he liked to say, when he meant: Let’s get out of here. He would play tapes of his interviews with porn stars for the curious in the common areas, but if you wanted to hear Tami Monroe, you had to come to his room. The others were amazed to learn he was giving up a career in fiction for one in philosophy. He told them it was to free himself from publishers and editors and their demands but at the same time opined that writers were tired of freedom and experimentation and looking for something to believe in. He said he was less worried that the New York Times Book Review would ignore Girl with Curious Hair than that they would put it in their “Briefly Noted” section. He met and became involved with Kathe Burkhart, a conceptual artist. Just as Gale Walden was less conventional than the young women he grew up with in Urbana, Burkhart was less conventional than Walden — he was curious about bondage, so one time she tied him up, using a jump rope he’d brought to exercise with.

Wallace had learned from past mistakes. This time he made sure he had pot at the retreat, and when he ran out, Burkhart flew to New York and got more. When her stay was over and she returned to New York for good, he took up with the novelist Ann Patchett. He wrote Nadell, astonished at the complexity of his dating life, that he was “looking into celibatee orders’.” One day, on a visit to his father’s family in Troy, New York, he drank most of a bottle of Glenlivet and threw up in his sleep: “Thank God I don’t pass out on my back; what a dumb way to die,” he wrote Burkhart, imagining the headline: “SENSITIVE AESTHETE DROWNS IN OWN PUKE! ARTISTE’S ASPIRATIONS ASPIRATED!” He added in another note, “You seem doomed to be involved with addicts.”