David Foster Wallace Symposium

good evening it's about four minutes after 7:00 so we're quite early for us I'm Tom Staley the director of the Ransom Center and I'm extremely pleased to welcome you here tonight especially those of you who are visiting Austin to attend the David Foster Wallace symposium on a summer day in 206 I opened the New York Times and came upon an essay on Roger Federer titled Federer as a religious experience the successful negotiation of the topspin forehand I thought was impossible to describe Wallace accomplished the impossible he described the indescribable this unique talented his his apparent not just in this particular essay but throughout Wallace's diverse writings he was just as a death but I think about Tracy Austin's breathtakingly insipid autobiography that's his quote as he was writing about critic Joseph Frank and that that's to say nothing of his remarkable fiction I think Wallace's essay Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky is a model of thoughtful criticism in the midst of murky philosophical waters and certainly very deep ones we're delighted that the papers of David Foster Wallace one of the most important writers of our time are preserved and accessible for study at the Ransom Center tonight the Ransom Center kicks off its symposium about David Foster Wallace's life works an archive with this event featuring two of Wallace's most significant colleagues his literary agent Fantine Adele and his editor Michael peach I can think of no better way to begin our symposium than with a conversation with these two individuals who were so central to bringing David Foster Wallace's writing into public publication bonnie and Michael will be introduced more fully in a few moments by our interlocutor this evening David Yulin tonight's event is part of our Harry Ransom lectures program our series of distinguished lectures and events featuring internationally recognized writers artists and figures in the arts and humanities we're grateful to George Mitchell and the University Cooperative Society for sponsoring this event and for enriching the intellectual life of our campus through their support of this lecture series we're fortunate to have one of the nation's most perceptive in the steam book critics as our moderator this evening David Yulin is book critic for the Los Angeles Times where he serves his book editor from 205 to 2010 and established the papers book section is one of the most important in the country he's the author of the lost art of reading why books matter in a distracted time and the myth of solid ground earthquakes predict prediction and the fault line between reason and faith he's also the editor of two anthologies of Southern California literature his essays and criticism have appeared in such publications as the Atlantic Monthly the nation the New York Times Book Review LA Weekly book forum and on National Public Radio's all things considered I'm very pleased to welcome our moderator this evening David Ulan thank you so much I'm delighted to be here I spent the entire day in the manuscript room looking at manuscripts and I think I need to move here I'm gonna briefly introduce the the the talent for the event Bonnie Nadel to my far left is president Hill Nadel literary agency which is based in Los Angeles she became David Foster Wallace's agent in 1985 which we'll be talking about and has represented all of his books since then and to my immediate left is Michael peach who was the executive vice president and publisher little brown and company which he joined in 1991 after working at Scribner in harmony books he worked with David Foster Wallace as editor on Infinite Jest a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again brief interviews with hideous men consider the lobster Oblivion and edited in many ways really constructed what we know of what we hold the the document we hold in our hand as as The Pale King which came out came out last year before we start I'd like to thank Tom Staley for his generosity for this magnificent event Megan Bernard Danielle Ziegler a Ransom Center in general and I think we should thank David Foster Wallace who is really the reason we're all here tonight so at the risk of appearing like an Angeleno which I guess I am at this point having lived there for a long time I'm gonna take out my little insidious device here because it's the only time peace that I have I don't wear a watch so I'm only gonna look at it periodically just to make sure that we're keeping track of the time I promise I won't take any calls we're we're going to we'd sort of talked a little bit before about how to how we want it to talk and one of the things that we thought we would do is is start with some broad context stuff talking to my ask Bonnie and Michael a little bit about how they started working with David some of the history of their work together in his career and then we kind of would hopefully move the narrative art will hopefully take us up - up - and into the Pale King so I'm gonna start and hopefully it will also become a conversation rather than a dual interview and now I'm putting the pressure on you guys well we'll start so but Bonnie we'll start with you because you started working with David first and you know the apart of the famous story which I guess is not apocryphal but maybe a little apocryphal is that you plucked his samples off of a slush pile when you were a young agent and when he was he was still in graduate school well it was he was still it so is that right that is correct I was I had moved to San Francisco from New York where I've worked in publishing and I became an agent but I became an agent with no clients and no books and so my job was to answer the phone and to read through what's known as the slush pile which is the many strips that are unsolicited that come to an agency and the man I worked for at the time who's now deceased is named Fred Hill and when I got there there were piles and piles of piles of manuscripts that he had not been reading so I started reading them and David at that point was getting his MFA at the University of Arizona at Tucson and he sent in what was the 8th chapter of broom of the system and sent a letter word said he had graduated from Amherst top of his class and he had written this novel as part of his senior thesis he used the word diachronic and i didn't know what the word diachronic meant so firstly i had to do was look up what it meant and that they meant out of order and that he was sending the 8th chapter as opposed to the first chapter which is of course what you always tell people to send when you're an agent and since I had nothing to do and I have no clients I could read way faster than anyone else who had submitted a manuscript - and I fell in love with this book it was about it was set in college it was set with people you know with young people who are sort of adrift and just starting their lives and I read this diachronic chapter probably within a day and asked him to send me all of Broome of the system and I remember sitting in cafes in San Francisco reading it and then calling him up and those were the days of course before internet before cellphones so you literally had to call someone until they answered the phone and David had a new answering machine and no way to find him and it turned out we had gone to very similar colleges on the East Coast he had gone to Amherst I've gone to Williams which are two their rivals and they played each other in football every year so we even though we didn't know each other in college we essentially knew had very similar experiences and I said I love this book and I want to take it out and I sold it fairly quickly though there was only one person in New York who wanted to buy it at the time and so David was published we started very young I mean I was 25 he was 24 at the time and that's how we started with Broome in the system I just want to add that you didn't submit it to me or maybe the way maybe they would have been - who knows that's because I didn't know you yet so I remember hearing some stories about David at the MFA program in Arizona and that is it true that he was not welcome there and that his work was considered wildly impossible by this by the write up by the teaching staff there he was not a favorite of the of the school I think was part of the problem is that at the time in the mid 80s like you'll remember this the two of you will remember this the style was very different it was Raymond Carver it was a very fiction and what David was writing was this wild crazy novel with the great Ohio desert in it and characters with names like Stonecipher beastmen and this was not what people were looking for people were looking for novels of like people who are drinking and saying four words in the chapter and broom of the system was said slightly in the future so that there was that kind of even though it's not a work of science fiction really there is a little bit of that futuristic manases I think before before genre fiction really sort of shed its its the stigma of genre fiction in a certain way right so he's playing around in what for literary program is taboo territory a little bit right that's true right because it was you know it was the great Ohio desert there were sewage everywhere things had names and he was he sort of took off on his own flight of fancy so Michael she didn't send you for him of the system I don't think so I didn't know yeah we have to investigate this a little further what litter agents do is this gradual seduction gradual seduction process so she had placed the room of the system with a very good publisher yeah but for some reason she was sending out stories he wrote to other editors saying you might like this guy and once I received the magazine this little magazine called a rival with the story called Lyndon in it I believe which is a story that was then collected and is included in his first his first collection of stories and I had not read room of the system yet but I read this short story and it is a story about Lyndon Johnson's secretary who's dying of AIDS and it was just the wildest piece of fiction I had ever held in my hands in my life I'd never heard anything remotely like it it kind of sent me sent me adrift in bliss and so bunny sent me another story and then and then eventually they came a moment when she and and she David was in New York and and she invited me to to meet him and I said I would love to meet this writer and we had an awkward dinner right we did we all had dinner and in I think a Mexican died of downtown and David at that point still was I'm sure sort of what one did or how one acted in these situations but I think we actually had a very nice dinner I think I remember he didn't eat dairy and I remember also that my bold tactic was to tell him how much I loved his his women characters I thought for a young male writer he is his idea of what the inside of a woman's woman's mind might be like felt very very intriguing and true to me not that I knew anything if I also remember I told him that having read having read the broom the system I don't think I would have had the courage to publish it I thought it was a kind of wildly difficult challenging book and I and I at that point my career I know it wouldn't have had a chance in hell of getting it acquired by the power of the companies I worked for and that sort of reverse gambit I think sort of helped him trust me or something so this is interesting I mean in in terms of kind of the courting process right recording Michael as an editor I mean you identified Michael as a as a good viable editor for David's work early on how did that I mean from from your and Michael when you first started reading the stories did was this a you know you said the the wildest piece of fiction you've read it did it immediately did he immediately seem to be someone you'd want to publish and did you begin kind of strategizing how to publish it was the atmosphere I just want to kind of set the context was the atmosphere even within a publishing house at that point where the you know the tendency was towards sort of minimalist realist fiction I mean was this a hard sell did you think it was gonna be a hard sell it was it was a moment and David wrote a very good essay about this in which very young literary writers were suddenly prized because this was around the time when the triumvirate Jay McInerney Fred Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz were suddenly all the bestsellers and just being 27 years old suddenly was was it had a commercial value which it doesn't usually have called the breath pack you may remember the brat pack movies it was also the moment when trade paperbacks were really vintage have the vintage contemporary series penguin contamination fiction so all of a sudden trade paperback as a first publication venue was gaining a lot of credibility so you can bring out books I guess more less expensively smaller advances right then then you would have take a risk on a young writer so there was there was there was an atmosphere where everyone was looking for everyone who's always looking for brilliant new writers and it seemed like there was it was a moment when that you might be able to get some attention for them because these other young writers were getting a lot of attention and I was always just drawn to two writers voices that were unlike other voices I'd heard and this was a singular voices I didn't count countered the way my counter seduction worked was I what you do is you send books and you write letters and back those those are days when you wrote letters on my files which arrived it's the ransoms that are today all the little Browns the files that are part of the collection here will be part of the collection here these long long letters we both wrote back and forth about books we'd read and books I'd sent in and what he was reading and I sent him some of the books that I had edited or liked and that he he was he responded to so through that we kind of formed some sense of sympathy as as readers and I guess he was forming in some level an idea of someone who in the future should he ever change publishers he might enjoy working with exactly and I mean part of what's in the archives are some early rejection letters actually from a whole lot of magazines and places because I mean where you all have to understand it's David Foster Wallace didn't become David Foster Wallace for probably about a decade until Michael published Infinite Jest and so there were years of people saying gee not for us or that's interesting but really not for us and these stories were outlandish they were totally different than what other people were doing and the only people I could get to publish these stories were tiny magazines run by people out of their apartments their garages I mean all these magazines that had published as early stories are long out of business they don't even exist anymore and it was one of these things where those were you know we're getting a writer published and getting a writer known is part of what an agent's job is and of course it's very hard to get a writer known when these magazines are print thousand copies out for cross but these were the stories that I would send Michael and say like look another story you should read right and actually and some of his really early influential stuff you know bus perm the essay about irony that appeared in the review of contemporary fiction great magazine but with a circulation of about 500 right so and I believe he edited the issue and which that's essay appeared so he was his own assigning editor always a great benefit for a writer I think as much do sure the whole issue so it really switched so Infinite Jest is the I mean it's clearly that the turning point where David becomes a cultural signifier in a certain sense let's talk about how how Infinite Jest came not necessary how came into being from a writing point of view but how it came into being as a as a published book this is Michael your first book with him as well well the way it started is that I had sent my David had sent me about two hundred and fifty pages of the book which I had submitted to Jerry Howard who at that point was David's editor and we couldn't come to terms and so I had sent not enough money right I was being the polite way of saying that and so I sent it to Michael and a few other people and Michael that point was a little brown and in a position where he could offer more money and that's how we started of course what we didn't know at the time is that those 250 pages or were only an eighth of the book at the time we thought it was probably about half the book I'm sure David knew wasn't half the book but he luckily did not tell us that at the time and Michael had it from your point of view how did once you saw this 250 page you you bought the book off of the 250 pages that's correct it was it was sold long before was it was complete I guess he was at a point he needed money to finance to live on while he wrote it and I had the enormous pleasure of reading those opening pages and the conversation that I recall and I don't I hope it's not entirely reconstructed from wishful thinking was that he said he was looking for an editor who he felt he would listen to when the editor made suggestions to perhaps shorten the work because he knew that the predetermined worked with before they had these epic battles but David said he never ended up changing anything I don't know if that's true but that's that that's the way he described it to me and he thought that I looked mean enough that he might and old enough that he might listen to my suggestions for because he and he said this because he knew he was writing something very very long and we all really didn't understand what he meant when he said very very long but but it's six hundred thousand words long right after after it that's after so talk I mean I'm wondering can you talk about this process because this is really interesting to me the the relationship between writer and editor the role that edit that an editor takes in kind of helping a writer shape a work thinking helping a writer think through a work like that especially a novel like this where in some ways you become almost a creative partner creative collaborator in some way I mean how what was the process like working on editing Infinite Jest as did you do it as he was writing it did you read big chunks and novel offer notes the the the process it it it's different in each case because your editors job is to work with the writer in the way that the writer wants to be worked with and David after those 20 or 50 pages went away for quite a long long time to write any wrote and wrote and wrote and at some point he felt that he wanted some words a response so he sent me a man a partial manuscript of I think six or 700 pages and asked for a response and you can imagine I assume with people in this room have read Infinite Jest reading half that book how can you imagine the shape of the rest of it enough to give a comment I mean so but that was what he asked me for and so I said I'm this is obviously provisional because I don't know where it's going yet so all I can tell you if is reading in this in these chapters in this order I can tell you the points at which I'm feeling really really confused I mean also the points are feeling incredibly happy and delighted in editors first and primary job is always to express abundant overwhelming delight and show that you appreciate what the writers set out to do because if they don't if they don't feel that you appreciate and understand what they set out to do why are they gonna listen to and you make suggestions for changes so I don't mean to be talking only about the the the the things that were there were the other things which I told him about which were the these are the moments where I just felt really confused or I really had a hard time staying awake it's just that it was very very long and so I just told him the parts where I just really was really counting a lot on the remaining pages to explain something that I really really didn't understand now so it's kind of a provisional response just to let him know where was hard because he wanted the book to be infinitely entertaining he knew it was gonna be long as we wanted to be sure people were really having fun all the way through so that the first partial response was on that on that measure and then and then another finally a long time later he sent in the whole complete work and and that was a long summer of reading and taking notes and taking you know just trying to chart it just make a map of it and and then we had started this epic correspondence just and say all in the archive page after page of just page number what's going on here a page number I don't understand this page number please cut this footnote and then in the archive also has David's notes which he said which I didn't see but just in the margin sort of a check mark saying meaning yes an angry face he would draw a saying out of my life and through this through several rounds of this he he compressed the novel he shortened it he took some passages that were sort of some past long chapters that were written in the point of voice of someone for whom English was not their first language and they were trying to be confusing here eyes I was too many stages of concealment so he he he took some things out he took out some wonderful things between the archive because our the pact insofar as we had a pact was the book should be as short as it possibly could be and still be itself because the just the demands of an eleven hundred page book on reading time and just knowing people do not approach massive works readily so that the goal was that if it could come out and the books did not collapse in on itself it would come out and a lot of things got put back in and a response to what an early suggestion deletion was this chapter introduces three characters four major themes and the setting but fine take out and he did because all that stuff came up the complicate came up comes up later it was a great delight of my life as an editor working with him there was never anything remotely as delightful as that that exchange and my contention is the editor is that you know the editor doesn't exist you're just someone who helped us helping the writer think and any change that he makes is the change that he'd made because that's the book he wanted how long did the process take I don't really remember how many months it was Bonnie might remember she was probably getting a whole different set of course but letters and finally I was he's not answering why isn't he answering does he hate the book I'm like doesn't hate the book he has to read 11e I think at the beginning it was 1,600 pages it came in something that was this big if you you know if you've heard of hurled it at someone you probably could have killed them and I was reading along at the time and I was David used to tell me I didn't have an abstract bone in my body which he meant both as a compliment and an insult and so between the two of us we would cut it and David also he despite the length of how he wrote he was actually really good about cutting he was not someone who was like don't change a comma don't change a Pyrrhic he was always someone who was willing to listen to an editor a magazine editor of publishing editor and was willing to work with someone and change it and cut it I mean I see Deborah here who worked with David at The New Yorker nodding because she will remember this too I mean he he was actually really reasonable for someone who had such a clear view of what he wanted something to be he really did listen some of the time I think he loved it I see working with I think what he loved best was working with copy editors the people whose the professionals whose job it is to make sure that the parallel semicolons line up and that your grammar is correct because that was a challenge at the level that he just like yes someone who knows what these but this what these terms mean and how language is actually constructed I think it was a form of delightful play for him in some ways right I mean he the sparring was half the fun but I would think that would right well I mean cuz then when you're talking about the language as the I mean as the obviously it's the medium that the language is also the subject in a lot of cases I think I mean that's to me the great tension or balance in the work is the play between the narrative and the language and how how precise the language is and how much attention to that linguistic detail is there which is you know what copy copy editors do once so once that book came out and established him in some way and now I mean in a way the team was in place or the team is in place you know long-term relationship writer it's the dream situation for a writer long in a long-term relationship with an agent long-term relationship with an editor both of whom get the work treasure it and and want to present it in the best possible way what is you know what was the progression I mean how did what we in terms of the next book it was there were there was there was you know a lot of collections there wasn't another novel we'll get to in a minute about about The Pale King or their what it was there was difficulty I guess in terms of a novel what's the you know where does from your point of view where does how did it move on from from Infinite Jest I'm just throwing this out to either one I hit four or both beautiful well the editing process was going on for Infinite Jest David was starting to write nonfiction and some of the best-loved essays a supposedly front they'll never do again where he takes a cruise the one about the State Fair he was starting to do essays partly because he needed money and partly because he realized that they were really fun to do and that some of what we'll talk about tomorrow at the panel about magazines and so the next logical step after Infinite Jest was to collect some of these essays because they were in different different magazines that were Harper's and then obviously some of these very small magazines and that was the next book that Michael did which was a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again and that's how it kept going and David what he was doing is he was constantly writing there were stories and as particularly stories that he'd been writing all along I mean stories he would have started as an MFA student stories he would have written while he was a teacher and that some were folded into Infinite Jest some of them wound up being part of the Pale King which we didn't realize until we started working on it that there were always pieces that wound up being taken from one place to another and voices and characters who would reappear and so that's how so the next book was nonfiction and then the book after that was brief interviews with hideous men and then another collection of essays know then oblivion that is not considered a lobster so so the output of work continued though clearly David was working on The Pale King all along but none of us we're seeing at the time well before you go the Cobell King so is there in terms of the archive I feel like we should talk a little bit about that too is is there a lot of unpublished work in the archive a lot of those kind of stories that weren't folded into or used for either weren't publishing collections or weren't folded into Infinite Jest or weren't folded into the PAL King what kind of unpublished material is in the archive there's there will be published later this year a collection of previously unpublished essays some of which go very very far back and one of which is the Roger Federer essay the collection is called both flesh and not and the title that was the yesterday archive has this the original title on which David gave that essay was Roger Federer both flesh and not and won and the original title of the title is the first I say collection a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again was the title he had given the cruise ship essay and Harper's Magazine insisted on a different title for reasons of length or aesthetic reasons he always delighted in restoring his full intent and in book form for our essays about which sometimes there are space reason limitations on them so there's a fair there are 20 20 I think essays in this collection that had not appeared before including one that I mentioned earlier of fictional fictional futures and the conspicuous conspicuously young an essay about what it's like to be a young writer and have your youth be a commodity and then some of the some of the most recent essays yes and then the other part that's in it are some of the vocabulary words since everybody knows David love dictionaries and love words and so the last thing we're figuring out about this book is sort of the number of words and definitions to put into it among his papers were hundreds of pages of just words with definitions just he was constantly teaching himself new words by writing them down and writing down the definition and you can do its hundreds of pages of words I've never seen before right and it's amazing how many words we don't know that's what I've now found out how many words I really have no idea what they mean I think we are likely to run those on the endpapers the way the tacks formed I can names ran on the end papers of The Pale King and besides that book of essays is there are there plans for other work coming out of other published other books coming out of the archive how how much more material do you think there is um there's not much more material there's a collection of uncollected fiction just as there is nonfiction which are stories that go way back and stories some of which have been popular published in tiny magazines and some stories that were not published at all and so that would be the last workers that we know of that goes all the way back to his first published story this which appeared in numerous numerous magazine is that correct right in 1984 so it goes back to sort of when he was still trying on voices and other voices other than his own well let's talk about The Pale King a little bit I mean let's talk about what you guys know about the genesis of it the the sort of history of it before you know what what the work process was at what point do you what at what point did David start working on it we think he probably started working on it in about 1997 or 1998 mm-hm we realized he was taking accounting courses when he was teaching in Illinois that he was teaching it I you and he was taking a bunch of accounting courses and David was not only was he an amazing writer but he understood math at a level that was very high and so he had we found all these accounting books and all these sort of tax documents and he was really studying the tax code in order to understand what he that if you're trying to be an IRS agent you actually have to understand the tax code and he also found this list of things where it's like how to scam the IRS how to you know pretend to go bankrupt all sorts of things that he used like for a line or two that wound up in The Pale King and you can imagine my delight when Bonnie called me and told me David's working on a book about the IRS yeah I was gonna ask you about that from a deters point of view a novel about the IRS that's uh that says bestseller yeah we actually had a pet had a focus group and we're trying to determine what he should do next now is only because taxes are the thing that everybody really wants to read about all the time well you know it's funny because I was having lunch with a friend of mine a writer in LA about a month ago and the pale King came up and he said this is this is genius to write about because this is the thing everybody is obsessed with we're all worried we're gonna get audited we all you know and and all of those rooms this is a guy who have just been audited okay so all of those rooms you know those agents are listening the stories it's just a place where it's it's a it's a you know a collector they collect stories that's what they do you're telling stories were talking story why you shouldn't pay more money or or whatever I was interesting filter through which true to read the book I read it through a somewhat different filter no less compelling I think but but it is the universal thing right I mean I think he was working he was trying to think of he's written essays about trying to you know he was trying to grasp the role that a the most human basic universal level he wrote essays about against tyranny in in favor of direct connection with human beings and I think he was trying to think about what do we all share it's right there in front of its death and taxes then you ready set out to write a book about death and taxes and but I just I I heard just this visa Kate very occasional David were very privately with regard to me he I would talk to him about the collections he was assembling and it was very clear to me he did not enjoy being probed about how's the new now I'll come in David right it was it was it was he told me he was working on something he told me who's working on a long thing as he called any color among other things but he was it made him very very anxious so I mostly asked Bonnie how it was going and from time to time he would he would use the long fact he's working a long thing to get out of doing other things we wanted him to do and connection with promoting an essay collection or a story collection but it was I didn't I didn't not really see a word of it or really know beyond these few words from Bonnie what he was what he was writing for all those years just that he was working on a novel right because you can imagine when someone says I'm doing a novel about accounting and the IRS in the 80s and I think my response was huh a long a long novel Davis is long you tremble it's like no kidding and unfortunate until obviously after his death so you never saw him he never saw any of it until you you never saw pages no no I mean there were tiny bits of it that he published there was a story called good people that was in The New Yorker which was a story about a critic for a Christian young man and woman and she's pregnant and that story is part of the pale King but at the time we didn't know it there is a story about an IRS agent and a very creepy baby that was published but we didn't know at the time they were just pieces unto themselves and we didn't really understand how they fit into a whole know they're another story called the soul is not a smithy which is a story that explores the hallucinatory expanses of boredom and a child children in a junior high school classroom that which is an amazing piece of work which when we began reading the novel is clear that that was a piece that he had also conceived as part of this larger story and then decided to publish on his own do you think that I mean he clearly had trouble having the book made him very anxious he had trouble in terms of piecing it together I mean it was a long complicated project do you think that or do either of you or both of you think that Infinite Jest cast a certain shadow that it was hard for him that the book was so iconic in so many ways that it was that that was a that it added an additional layer of pressure in terms of where do you think that it was just grappling with the material in the PAL game I think it probably did add another level of pressure I mean David always wanted to be able to go beyond where he'd gone before and so when Infinite Jest became so successful because I think until its publication none of us were really fully here this was going to work because it's very hard to know that people will actually devote the time to an eleven hundred page book and I do remember I mean and Michael and Little Brown had a lot of courage because at some point there were people who probably who said to you could you cut this could you cut this in half like I mean I think there are people who wanted you to cut it a lot at the time and when it became this iconic book it did create enormous pressures I mean David was a very ambitious writer to begin with he was not someone who would ever rest on his laurels and even doing nonfiction pieces where once these various funny wonderful essays came out people were like oh can you do another one like that and the answer was always like well no I don't want to do what I already did and for him he felt the fiction was always the hardest thing he ever it's the hardest thing for him and so there were times where he would be like I don't want to do any more magazine pieces I want to keep writing this long thing and he used it as much an excuse to me as he did to publishers which is like no I'm working on it it's gonna be ready and you know he'd been working on it for years I mean I certainly think there was a ten-year period where he was working on this book on and off mm-hmm Michael Jim you as Bonnie said he was his ambitious was his ambition was was the highest magnitude and I think he wanted to be to write something that did not feel to him like it was like Infinite Jest and Infinite Jest and comforts that encompassed so much I think he was my sense was that he was striving to arrive at forms and voices that he had not achieved before at the same time I think he was struggling with the material because writing his set himself what appears to me and think to be the greatest challenge writer consent to write a book about boredom that whose essence is the subject of boredom and how life the most mundane repetitious aspects of human experience which is the experience we have most often and the extent to that which that warps and informs our lives and and how we have to battle through that to arrive at anything that matters that is the greatest challenge is the opposite of what fiction does usually fiction cuts away those you know that there's the famous quote from Mel more Leonard which is that his book started selling when he finally learned to leave out the parts of people skip people his compress around compress around drama compress around the excitement and that's what most fiction is and his he set himself the test of the opposite banding around the dull parts and but then around the subject of dullness but making it ecstatically engaging that's the challenge I just think it was an almost superhuman challenge that he was that he was working at him friendly hardened with in my view extraordinary extraordin a success so let's talk about how the book got put to book as we know it because I think you know I mean clearly it's it's put together as an unfinished novel it's put together as a conditional project we don't know what the what the finished form was intended to be or what it might have been let's talk about how that got for I mean let's talk let's talk a little bit about how the book up put together money why don't we start with you talking about sort of what you found and at what point you thought there was something there well we knew there was something there from the very beginning there was no question there was something there when Karen green David's Widow and I went into the garage which was his office which was the spookiest place I think I've ever seen in my entire life there was a manuscript stacked on his desk so it's not like we didn't know it was there spooky can you just elaborate on spooky wine spooky dark it felt haunted I mean at the beginning it felt haunted I mean not to mention the spiders the would be like 25 lamps from the first store and everything else that was sort of in this room and so there was a period of time between when we knew it existed and when we actually decided to do something about it but that chunk that was but what did about a 200 250 page manuscript chunk that was sitting on the desk right that was spotlighted and in some way were right I mean there was a lamp on it yes that turns out to just be I mean well Michael I can ask you that that that isn't a fully self-contained you name and that got not all that made it into the finished book the book as we know it now or as we hold it is much different from that pile of paper well that part was what we thought was the beginning which is the character of David Wallace going to the IRS headquarters and it's him it's a character named David Wallace she was on this excruciating bus ride with screaming children and it's hot and he's sweating and then he's on this horrible car ride but these other IRS agents were all sweating next to him and we all thought that was the beginning at the time because it was sort of a very complete and very polished section and then of course it was only later as Michael was going through it that he realized it was not the first section because it seems like the opening chapters but it wasn't the opening chapters it turned out to be about the middle chapter 85 can you talk about the process of from an editor editorial point of view the I guess first just the process of excavation well the process began when I was invited by Bonnie and David's wife Karen to come to her home and their home and and look at these pages that they had begun to read and to see everything that they had found in his office that pertained to this novel that carried the title The Pale King in his files and I spent an afternoon with him and in in their home in the garage and Karen and Bonnie had gone through his files and pulled out everything that looked like it was a piece that was titled The Pale King or novel in progress or anything like that and it was a mass of material in plastic tubs and bags in in wire baskets and if there was it was novel in progress I mean I've never written a novel that I assume every writer has a lot of a lot of stuff that they work their way through and eventually you have something neat at the end and David died before he got to the meet at the end part so all the pieces were there and and pulled out and I first took this this truck the the the the portion on the desk back to the hotel I was staying at and began reading there and had a kind of ecstatic experience of encountering David as a character in a book that he'd written it was it was it was in this very Grievous time but delightful and I saw and I was thrilled to see how full and polished these chapters were that he he I'd never seen a word of it and so he I saw that he had completed great portions of this work and the first chapter is called authors for word and I did think is the author's for word that swept against Karen and Bonnie gave me leave to take all this material back home because it was clearly a long we've had some ups I've had mood Claremont for a couple of years and just and I just began reading in just whatever order I found it but first of these first hundred fifty pages which were beautifully polished and turned out to be a portion that David had pulled together in order to use contemplating sending it into for a new contract so that's why these chapters were polished up to the highest Sheen and all those chapters didn't did end up in the book for us but then there were more than something like 3,000 pages of manuscript in various forms a lot of it variant drafts of the same chapter but this enormous mass and as I read I've until they're reading just 150 pages or 250 pages it's not a novel it's not even it's a it's an abstract portion of a it's a shard right but as I read everything else I saw this enormous world that he invented with ecstatic with all these characters who who we're what we realized at some point is that we were seeing all their early lives and then we were seeing them as adults as IRS agents and that there's a but essentially it's like how do they get there and they all have these completely tortured childhoods for various reasons and that clearly made them all into IRS agents but that it took a while to sort of understand who these children were and also what David would do is change names all the time and so there was a long process where we had to figure out that the character who had one name on page you know 20 was the same character on page 500 and that was you know that was a big process because he was always trying out different names and then he would switch them and change the characters names and that made it a little bit more interesting yeah it was it was interesting it was it was it was a great puzzle why how these pieces these childhood pieces fit together with the with the this this main story about these these IRS agents coming to work dealing with work living through the extrordinary of Extraordinary p.m. if their of their of their work and then these these insane difficult childhoods but eventually it became clear that they there was finally a moment when the same name appeared in a child and one of the characters in the IRS these are the up childhood service and the reason the authors forward had finally emerged not to be the opening of the book was in a footnote and then in a draft much more clearly in the footnote it stated that for legal reasons the publishers the lawyers of little brown and company have required that this authors forward be put this number of pages away from the start because they want to they're forcing the writer Dave Wallace to conceal the fact that this is actually all nonfiction right and so that was part of the conceit of the book that the authors for it couldn't be at the start because of because it was really a memoir of being an IRS agent none of which is actually true so what is that I mean you know at the risk of getting into tricky material what is that like just to put I mean for you Michael what was that like to sit and try and figure out what this book was what this book looked like or you know I was all these it's in these fragments that are in different states of completion their hints about how things fit together and you're just talking about sort of the detective work involved and figure out where the author's forward needs to go but yet in the end it's an entirely conditional process I mean you've talked about this before that it really is your version the book that exists is your version as the editor of what the book might look like or what the book might have been intended to look like so I wonder if you can talk a bit about that that puzzle making process yeah it was enormous enormous puzzle and it was it was a it was a very long process because it involved just reading and reading and reading and reading just reading all the way through taking enormous notes so getting it all up in your head and then reading again with just with that with that rough sense that you have in your head with and taking more notes saying starting to identify the strands and I have enormous I won't hold them up cuz I look small to you but I have these color coded spreadsheets I couldn't imagine doing this without Excel to keep track of the characters and the variant drafts and to make sure that I had the most let the latest version of each chapter where there were many many chapters but it was just finding the logic of what was there and there was a clear strong central story the story of these agents coming to the IRS this this agent named David Foster Wallace this case of mistaken identity so this great elaborate this great elaborate confusion of his arrival which stretches for hundreds of pages and was and was a dramatic real-time narrative then there are the childhood stories which clearly they happened before the solid began and my job was to try to paste them or to start with the spine and then sort of paste them around the spine so you gradually understood and I put the story where you finally see the two names appear together relatively early but not right away so that the reader would be wondering what's going on but not have to get to the very end of the book to find out that that is what the who these characters are and then there are atmospheric pieces about life in the Midwest and I I chose I identified each chapter and by length by complexity by time period and just tried to find a flow of them that didn't ever leave you wildly confused and that broke up long passes with short funny passes David as you know is the great brilliant comic writers who's ever lived and so I tried to make sure that the comic cases came along pretty regularly regularly and it was just based on my reading of all of his work in the sense of it had similarities what I saw had similarities to Infinite Jest in that it was a lot of a lot of characters a lot of different settings a lot of time periods and so I knew from that how comfortable he was with stretching readers patience for right um unresolved unresolved material so I kind of base it off in an infinite justice so I wanted to ask you about that so I mean because of the kind of the influence of having worked with him for 15 years before you started working on this on this project that kind of intimacy I mean that must have been a really useful tool at least in terms of trying to channel what is in 10th most of them it might have been it's certainly that's what I had to work with it's nice and then there was a difficult question of how do you edit the work of a writer who's not there they talked about editing David while he's alive and the answer to any editing question is it's the author's decision absolutely the editor proposes and suggests and maybe tries to persuade but what the author wants is what is the book and when the author is not there to respond what you do well you turn to Bunny Nidal so what are you so bunny what do you would so as the representative what is I mean what is that process like did you guys did you feel that you could alter certain things obviously your your judiciously cutting and pasting I mean that's part of the key part of the process but in terms of line by line or places where you think it's confusing or or maybe a little excessive or whatever what what is well I suppose I mean Michael and I had a lot of conversations about this because it's after years of having conversations with David of like this is confusing this is too hard you need to cut this you need to give the reader a few more clues having I think what we decided is that even though he couldn't answer the conversation back we were sort of having the conversation with each other of how to cut and how to do things and I mean I think if anything we or we decided that it was better to leave to leave things as much as possible in his words and in his hands and so where we cut was where it was confusing or where it was clearly a mistake or we're a name was not meant to be that name and if you you know their address over so many years that we redid things for clarity but I also serve I think my feeling was that just because he couldn't be part of the conversation didn't mean that we shouldn't still have the conversation and so we had a bunch of a really extensive phone conversations where we went back and forth between what we thought was going on and I still remember there's one point where I'm like Michael I don't understand this I don't know that this is the same woman like I didn't get this at all and then I think we added we serve did something that we had a little bit there yeah because there's a couple of things where it needed to become a little clearer but we didn't change I mean there's no words that were changed in it because it it's you it's very much it was all David's work invited what my next dress to me was we should publish this with this sort of if this is something you know you would have asked him to change or that there's a really basic grammatical or computer edit that you know he would not a million years of let out of his out of his office um we should we should do it for I used to do that for business something like the kind of editing we knew he accepted from copy editor for Bates the basic sense we did take that liberty right and we should all should also we should also say that you know I mean some of this book or much of this book is just heart-stoppingly beautiful the writing in the book some of the writing is some of the most gorgeous writing that that I've ever read of his and so I think in that sense to it he you know he is funny and he is ambitious and I think sometimes we overlooked just the sec kind of sheer beauty of the sentences some of these sentences you know that description of some of the descriptions the midwest that you were referring to oh my god are just unbelievable like you know i think every child in America should be should get the pleasure of memorizing the opening chapter I think it's one of the greatest passages in the English language I just think it's gorgeous beyond beyond belief yeah absolutely you know if David was was always a boy of the Midwest and no matter even living in California I would say he never really became a Californian he could appreciate it but because he was such a Midwestern her through and through do you want to read a little bit of that we talked I mean you don't have to but we had talked to put you on slightly put you on the spot I saw you grabbing for the books I was the book I was grabbing for my excel file to scribble well let's make them read the book themselves it is interesting too that it's a book about boredom but it's also a book about acceptance so about coming to terms in a certain way or feels to me as a reader that it's a book about coming to terms in a certain sense I'm curious about your guys sense of that and how much of that you felt was sort of woven into what what was there and how much of it was what you pulled out of what was there I wouldn't say that anything in there is something that I pulled out or enhanced I mean I think this book is made up of everything that I felt everything that was there that fit together and was finished in the paperback we've added up we've added four chapters that did not make the that we did not include in the first in the first publication there were chapters that included the main characters but in settings that didn't really make sense with everything else that was there but they're interesting once you've read the book as extra material but I just I don't mean to be not be answering your question but just to say I would not say that I added any that's all there what do you think about acceptance is a subject of the book you know I mean the book is about mindfulness I mean David from from the speech that he gave a Kenyan in 2005 which became the book this is water I mean clearly what he was trying to figure out in his own life and what he was trying to convey to readers is of course a sense of of mindfulness about the world of how to how to accept you know how to accept certain things about yourself and how to accept certain things about the world and you know for these IRS agents accepting their lives as grim as they are and creating characters who have to do that well the can the point of that Kenyan address which is a beautiful piece of writing is basically you know be here be in your a moment now because or you know to quote ramadasu for some reason keeps coming up of all the 60s icons in the world you know I didn't realize be here now would be the profound philosophical statement I ever heard but that's what in some way he's talking about and it feels to me like that's what the point of The Pale King too is also in terms of those IRS agents whatever the circumstance be in european-- your experience now because whatever it is it's the only experience you're gonna get that is I think that mindfulness and acceptance and it occurs to me and I wonder your guys thoughts on this is that this is sort of it feels if you look at the whole body of work that this is where David was moving towards his arriven this idea becomes more and more prevalent in you know in the later work as the you know starting perhaps with that story with the smithy story which is in Oblivion which may be the first time I became a really focused on it in his work and certainly in that address and certainly in The Pale King I mean does do you think this is a mark of his process of maturation as a writer in some way I think so I mean David at the beginning was sort of like look ma no hands like I can do funny I can do sad I can do scared like I can do everything um and like a kid on a bike because he really could do everything and as he got older he realized that he didn't want to rely on the same tricks he always relied on and didn't want to be the look ma no hands writer you know and I mean also it's a process we all got older I mean the person who you are at 24 it's not the person you are 44 will ideally picture and grow up and I mean he was growing up as a writer just the same way he was growing up as a person yeah you know it was he was a very different man than he was when I first met him no I think he was trying to write about the things that mattered most to him in the world I think he was trying to address life's I feel like this book is that evidence of a life or death struggle with life with art he was writing about mindfulness in that you want to engage your life every second but a lot of those seconds are really boring right and I mean this book I mean it's funny about it sometimes but it's sometimes just staggering I mean it's it's it's it's up and it's up pretty far up very far and it's down as as far as the book can go at the same time so I think that I think he was just trying to think through understand life in first principles in this book is evidence of a great great mind struggling with the challenge of of ordinariness he had an extraordinary mind I think he was my experience is I have a sense he was bored a lot I think he didn't have many people he could play with at the level he wanted to engage it's wise he had great friends like Jonathan Franzen was I'm someone who we could gauge very powerful yet his he met a married Karen green a brilliant brilliant woman but I think for someone with the mind that enormous and complex I think the world can be a challenging place because I think it can be lonely so I think the book is record of this epic struggle with enormous consequence and we're lucky to have it well I want to thank you guys for a really scintillating hour of conversation thank you Michael you you

Channel: The University of Texas at Austin

Views: 24,850

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

Keywords: David Foster Wallace, Harry Ransom Center, Ransom Center, Bonnie Nadell, Michael Pietsch, David Ulin, Little, Brown and Company, David Foster Wallace Symposium, fiction

Id: DCbshd_CRrI

Length: 61min 8sec (3668 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2012