Editors on Wallace

moderating our final panel today is Bonnie Nadel president of the hill Nadella literary agency she became David Foster Wallace's agent in 1985 and has represented all of his books since and I'll also add that she was truly instrumental in the development of the symposium and were deeply grateful to her for that and I'm very pleased to welcome Bonnie and Adele it's also here and then I want to bring up our panelists who are Deborah tradesmen and Bill Tonelli and Colin Harrison and I'll once everybody's up here I'll explain who everybody is um right we'll put you here I guess ivory hadn't planned this part um David's stories and essays are for a lot of people the way into his work one might even call them the starter Wallace so if you're not ready to tackle Infinite Jest or The Pale King these are the ways that you would read his work and these three editors were instrumental in bringing his work to the magazine pages um Deborah tradesmen is fiction editor of The New Yorker when I first met Deborah she was managing editor of Grand Street Cohn Harrison was editor of Harper's Magazine when I first met him and is a executive editor at Scribner good enough um and Bill Tinelli was at Esquire when I first met him and then was at Rolling Stone when he was working with David's on various pieces so all three of these editors are we've all known each other for a while I bail know each other to some extent or another and I was going to start with with Colin because Colin did some of the first essays with David um the first one that probably is well known is called ticket to the fair which is about the Illinois State Fair and my first question to you Cup is whose idea was this how did this State Fair come about it was my idea but I don't know why I had that idea I I think that David had had some fiction in the magazine and something about him as a Midwestern sensibility had stuck in my head and somehow I became aware of the fact there was going to be an Illinois State Fair who knows how I found that outcome and this the sort of little piece of you know the neuron connected to the neuron I thought might be interesting to send David Wells to to the State Fair and see what happened and what would have and at the time it was a good time for magazines back then magazines were fat and there was no internet really to compete with magazines yet and I know that call you up or I called him up and said how about this and and we commissioned a probably a six thousand word piece and he sent in this enormous piece of writing thirty-five forty-five thousand words on something written huge and I remember thinking well this is fabulous and I took it to the editor of the magazine Lewis Lapham and he read it he thought was terrific and then the problem was how do we get into the magazine because it was not a magazine piece at that point it was it was a small planet and and we you know I think I probably called up David I said look David this is great we love it but we have to cut it and he probably made some sad noises and and we got to work on cutting it and I Fanta don't remember if I cut it first and then and he did a recut or whether he cut it but we worked on it and and we had to take some stuff out that was good but we also had to give it a shape so that work in that kind of magazine space and I think we you know it worked and was that was of course exciting to do and the voice of that ticket for the fair piece is sort of I mean it's not I wouldn't say it's like Woody Allen going to the State Fair but it's a particular voice and and then the next piece you and David did together was shipping out how do you think that voice evolved like how do you think David got that voice and how do you think the two voices were different from each other well in the in the the State Fair piece he very self-consciously makes mocks himself as a reporter and and talks about getting press credentials he's very excited about that he thinks that he should be having you know oppressed Paz and his Fedora or something and he's and he sort of mocks the the the regular oppressed is there to cover this not so a special event and he also mocks the East Coast magazine editor sensibility that has sent him there perhaps on yours and perhaps so he was having in every which way and I felt a little sand papered by that but I got over it and and enjoyed it and it certainly did set up the voice though for the piece which is of course highly self-conscious and an anxious and I think it then to follow on in the in the piece about the cruise ship there was no self-conscious constructing of a journalistic persona by then he'd done enough pieces that he had you know license to go do what he want him to do and and go looking for all the stuff that he found and I find the voice in the cruise ship piece darker than the voice in the state and State Fair piece I think that it's a it's a the ending though the conclusion is darker it's more about death and whereas the State Fair piece I think is more about communion Ryan we were talking about that earlier today where you pointed out the line where he says I feel happy here he's talking about sort of being in the cow barn right and it's smells like house but that been in the shipping out it's it's sort of how we amuse ourselves to death right I mean how many times did David Wells right I feel happy and all of his prose I'm not sure how many times it right I can't think of another yeah and um and then Deborah you started working with David when you were at Grand Street and started doing fiction with him and this is sort of a question which I'll ask all of you of course is what was it like to work with him on these first pieces and what does it like to work with a writer who is so Oh clear about what he wants to do I mean as an agent every time anyone would ask David to write a piece or you know I'd be like he writes long which is about like the understatement of the year um you know it's like it's a little cold in the Arctic and so for you know I know those were the first pieces out of Infinite Jest and them and stories and what was it like when you first started seeing those and what right I mean it was interesting he was I I would have first been a touch with him around 94 I think and he he had published a I think already at least one piece from Infinite Jest in progress in Grand Street before I'd gotten there and so some point he came to New York and I think we we had dinner and just talked generally about about fiction and then he sent some possible I mean the way he worked with Infinite Jest as as he was writing it he would periodically parcel out some small pieces of it and send these off to magazines as not he didn't call them stories he was clear about what they were but to run his stories and so I remember he sent a few pieces and and we took one of them and I think you know my editing relationship with him on on fiction which is all oh I worked on with him and ultimately kind of evolved over time I think that the very first time was sort of our trial by fire you know and he was he was um he he I think needed to get to a point with an editor where he trusted and so the first time he never knew what he was getting into and and he was you know probably I I've worked with some people who are very very precise about what they want in there at work but he was probably the most precise and the most sort of obsessed with with the tiniest details of the the syntax to the point to the point where when he would send it a manuscript almost always he would have this little thing at the top saying star star and be all non-standard syntax is intentional just just in case you didn't get it but so I felt the first time of working on something you know we were sort of feeling each other out and I was feeling out what I could what kinds of suggestions I could make that would be helpful and and what he wanted you know what was helpful to him and then I think that went well and then after that it became a much more easygoing editorial relationship where I would he would send a story and if I was going to end up running it whether grants reader in The New Yorker then we would go to work on it and there would be endless backs and forth and each each tiny little thing would be discussed at length but it was it was an unusual in the beginning it was unusual form of communication because we said in the 90s he was such an intensely private person and very paranoid about people getting in touch with him and he was very protective for instance of his phone number and you know only trust a few people seemed to be allowed to have his phone number or his address and and then when you would communicate with him by phone usually he didn't pick up the phone so um so you would get it would we had extended communications for your answering machine you know this was even pre voicemail where I would leave a very long message about everything I was suggesting for a story and then he would sort of call back at 2:00 in the morning right knew there was nobody in the office and it was it was clear avoidance of actually having to discuss it face to face or voice to voice and he would leave that you know half-hour message going over each point that he clearly sat down and prepared for and I'd have to go in in the morning press play and you know take notes on the proof and so sorry funny and and I when I moved to The New Yorker and I had his phone number and I was the deputy fiction editor and Bill Buford was the was the fiction editor at the time and I remember he wanted to talk to David about something and I was so paranoid about the phone number I actually went into Bill's office and dialed okay because if David found out I'd handed out his phone number to anyone you know it would have been that would have been the end of it for us he may relax a lot more later than it that sort of anxiety level decreased right I mean I I remember it's like I would leave messages and be okay call me back if you want to do this actually call me back whether you want to do it or not so that I'll know that you've heard the message he was the king of the 2:00 a.m. leave a message when no one's there Collin did he actually used to talk to you on the phone yeah we did talk on the phone because we did a lot of editing on the phone and I and it said these are some long phone calls because he would we would go over lots of stuff little stuff and sometimes we'd have you know insanely ornate conversations about the smallest thing and and of course he with both of those long pieces we had to cut them and cutting it a piece was complicated especially in a magazine space where you have to make the footnotes work on the same column beneath the text and so forth so we had to cut you know cut text order to accommodate footnotes and it was it was a fairly technical magazine edit as well as the just editing the language and I remember one point feeling that I there was that we were sort of going back and forth back forth and I didn't really get there's something I wasn't getting about working with him and and he was I think he may have been in the office we're working on the ending of one of those two pieces and I happened to watch him walk down the hall on the way to the men's room and I just turned the corner from something I was always doing something else too and I happened to just watch him walk and I and I realized that he was an athlete by the way he was walking and he didn't necessarily present that way he had the bandanna and the t-shirt and so forth but but he had this sort of bearish walk and I realized that that was how I was going to have to work with him because he was competitive and it wasn't necessarily that he was competitive with me he was just that he was competitive with whatever highest standard of the universe he was able to imagine for himself and and that was helpful I mean he's understood how really haunted he was by the idea of trying to be as good as possible and after that it worked a little bit better and you know I I want something he won some it worked but it was kind of exhilarating to work with him because you knew that you were going to work it was someone who you really had to be at the top of your game price it was like playing a tennis match exactly right and Bill and Bill when you were at rolling stone and doing these pieces I remember this was David was probably the last person not to have a computer and the McCain essays had to be done it was on a very tight deadline and that he was faxing things from somewhere in Illinois in the middle of the night do I remember well if the whole thing was a complicated and and rushed a situation where he was he would ask him if he would do Reid asked him and other writers if they would each do one candidate that was going to be this kind of big ambitious way to cover the campaign in 2000 and he responded he said yes and said that he wanted to do John McCain was great all the other writers ultimately flaked out and never did anything finish this news mccain looked like a candidate and then suddenly stopped looking like a candidate so we were kind of pulling back on actually sending david because we didn't spend the money obviously to send them and to really officially assign the piece and i was complicated because he needed to find a dog-sitter he had a dog with some emotional issues issues and so it was a very particular dog that had to be lined up before he could leave and so we could have everything else ready to fly him to wherever it was he had to go and his have his spot opening the bus but the dog said the thing had to be lined up first and then suddenly became one I guess New Hampshire he beat bush to everyone's surprise and suddenly he looked like a real candidate and so we had a rush David a rush the dog sitter into action to get David on the bus for that week and so he did the piece then some help between his week on the bus and when he's finished writing the piece McCain's candidacy starts to fall apart so now we're not sure if we even want the piece but he's still charging ahead on it and then I think he finally decided that we were to do it and I think on Tuesday morning Bertuzzi around noon he faxed me a twenty seven thousand word version and was this on Super Tuesday or this was before so to say you know Super Tuesday falls on someone here because then became I think super Susie Falls later because then McCain suddenly dies and that's when yawn chills the peace but before that he turns it at twenty seven thousand word piece faxed with no margin so to somehow try to disguise the fact that there's many fewer pages and 27 very small tight very small type yeah it was a father Meister god-like 7,000 7,000 words it made no space won't anything really literally a solid just worth words right and so he faxed it in we had had we had a team of interns or whoever typing this thing into the system right cuz you all were already on computer oh yeah mm right this thing it's called the internet you scan thing right exactly and but we closed aid of a 14,000 word piece on Friday he turned that in on Tuesday so Tuesday night I took it home and cut it in half and Wednesday morning we started you know rolling I've worked at magazines that have been very sensitive to writers and so the writers prerogative to the writers point of view in terms of storage but rolling stone was not really among those I saw where you got in Rome I still you entered into the more and so you know things had to happen fast and almost like a newspaper really more than a magazine a lot of ways and so from Wednesday morning until Friday night we were on the phone either he and I or he and a fact-checker were on the phone virtually you know knocking hours right and there's a same kind of situation where the Edit we went through every single change even if it was a change of punctuation in feminism the question of a comma or not a comma or capitalization these you know his weird pattern of capitalizations in this or not and every change was was I'd be extremely pleasant extremely generous extremely you know cooperative and all this stuff I talked to the fact-checking the other day about this and he said that David was one of the writers who he will remember as being completely helpful and having no attitude no big writer attitude were less of lesser writers who the ones who get fat check is the hardest times right but despite all this I mean all of you have worked with a great number of writers is this normal this kind of attention to detail I mean have you had this with other people I'll begin our answer and I'll say that it was very clear about David is the level of professionalism was so high that I mean when his manuscripts came to us and I imagine for the two of you there was there was literally no grammatical error no miss mistake nothing there was there was literally nothing that you could fault in that respect you could talk about that you know cutting and changing stuff but but he had it was you know ice perfect and and of course the writing was so fabulous that you knew you were dealing with someone who is very special and wanted to be equal to that person so I don't think any of us really minded you know this kind of labor made your job make you look good it was exciting yeah right and I know Bill in the McCain piece um in particular and I think this I know this is true of several editors where you sort of you had to go to the mat because it was when it was when McCain essentially had lost mm and Bush was clearly going to win and I vaguely recall you had to have some fights so he killed a young John when I was young I don't build the base because at this point it seems ridiculous to write to run a huge story about a guy who's not going to win this was not even really a real candidate at that point so why are we voting all this space all these pages to this guy and then he showed it to Terry McDonnell who had once upon a time had been one of the top editors at Newsweek I was also working for winner at the time and Terry said yeah I agree why run it now so all the grown-ups were against you know running it but I don't know nothing gone just like stood arguing at some point gets bored by the argument gets bored talking to editors but and you can play yeah so as long as you you can choose a year long enough you can win and then after that you after September 11th you assigned him a piece called The View for mrs. Thompson's or became called the view for mrs. Thompson's yes a map we were doing a special issue so we just you know called everybody who we wanted in it and I try to call him direct long short I contacted him through you as was the usual drop and it all started slightly I proposed that is the fact that in the entire time of our it's not really relationship we had kind of short intense bursts of of continuous contact but he only referred to me as mr. dinelli yes Oh at the beginning that he referred you as mr. Esmond you know when I met him I was 23 or 24 so I don't I don't think he did but but he certainly was very um maybe miss Stresemann right he was certainly very courtly and as to deal with as a writer he was always very you know open and and generous and and very very polite which which doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with his pickiness about the actual you know editing right because you always were mr. Tinelli in Oakland I don't know what I mean it yeah and and again especially the closing wrong stone which is extremely casual and the the lowest interned close Yan Yan and here suddenly was this guy who insisted on I thought that you're right it was quite in a way but it was also something distancing about it it was kind of like oh it was kind of a weird you know I'll be going other person I know if whoever did that was Elvis I know and early at least in his life would always refer to people people by mr. or miss and would never call people by their first names people himself as he was a big you know there was always mister and I think now kind of looking back you have to look back for all of it and say this was this kind of weird wall do you think mister do you think that's Midwestern politeness huh I think was a weird bull I edited million my writers from the Midwest they don't all and people who you know worked at the to it whatever but yeah nobody has ever no no writer that I know has ever referred to me as mr. dinelli right hi Colin but I mean I think when we all started we were young enough that you actually were called but he didn't call you mr. Harrison me that's correct but he I think he called our managing editor Alan bozo Bush mrs. Rosen butcher or something like that and I agree with Bill that it was a way of sort of creating an arm's length transaction with the editorial structure that he had to deal with and I I saw it happen and it was sort of amusing and I knew exactly what he was doing which was to just maintain a little bit of a separation right right and do you feel um as magazine editors over the years do you feel like there that there's sort of a David Wallace style that has both in fiction and nonfiction that people have sort of imitated and used and whether it's the use of dialogue or the use of sort of or sort of all the various his his whether you want to call them ticks or however when we're first of them that there's a style that is now imitated by other writers used by other writers in magazine in fiction both not right well I'm as people have been saying for the last 24 hours yeah he had he's had an enormous influence over fiction and at the same time is completely inimitable so anyone who actually tries to directly imitate what he does does it less well and looks bad so it's a conundrum but I you know I think there are there are there's a whole rainbow of books which have taken something from him or which have learned something from him or been inspired by something in his writing you know I don't think that we would have a heartbreaking work of staggering genius if we hadn't had Infinite Jest and that's not to say that Dave Eggers wouldn't have been a good writer but I think he I think Infinite Jest freed up a lot of fiction writers and that was a nonfiction pedal feet up a lot of younger writers to say I can do these things I can do something like this I can I don't have to follow these rules which he had already broken magazine writing is a little different yeah yeah I mean I I think that there was sort of a moment of high irony which people were sort of ended irony and David was certainly at the front end of that the funny thing is in talking about all this if you go back and read the pieces they they had there they still hold up and the reason they hold up is because he was such an excellent craftsman fad or trend of it to the otherwise and you know you just look at his eye in his ear he just an he could smell stuff and he had a great vocabulary he knew the names of things and he he was a very hardworking writer and in that way I think he kind of raised the bar for a lot of people not just people who might overtly imitate him but people perhaps even older and more sort of traditional reporters who said honey did I just need to be better because this guy is really good and bill would you say I mean from years of being at Esquire and Rolling Stone that there there became sort of the David Wallace style of you know editors saying I want the David Wallace take on well certainly ever you know everybody said they want David Wallace I don't know if they wanted you know looking for the other the second or third rank big both flaws but definitely when when Harper's run the two pieces they kind of fair on video or the state favorite of us and the cruise ship that suddenly then David became the the writer that every magazine editor I'm sure that you more awareness than anybody but he became that the writer every magazine every nonfiction editor wanted to the sign that's true and I mean there are certain I mean and there were certain pieces that would interest him in other pieces where he just would be like no I don't want to do this I mean you know whether it was like do you want to go the Academy Awards know do you want to thank do you want to go to you know Oxford and go to a conference on language no um the other thing which I'm sure all of you know is was David a good traveler I mean in that was he someone who liked to travel I mean your story about the dog sitter is emblematic of this I mean this is man who didn't have a passport I think till he was about 35 years old yeah I mean there's certain journalists who like sure put me on boat put me on a train put me on a plane um I feel like he was not someone who was like a big traveler as I recall there was there was there was a larger than normal amount of sort of process conversation about getting there you know on time here's what you need to do these are the people I mean some writers they just they're they you can parachute them into the jungle and they'll be drinking tea in the veranda right and he's not like that he needed some ham and I think the best that was his whole non-fiction persona at least news I mean they you know the title a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again really can just stand for everything exactly where he's concerned right right and I mean certainly for um the two of you in doing nonfiction with him he spent a great deal of time not actually interviewing the people he was supposed to interview uh he hid in a hotel room or whatever the room was he just he hid bright yeah that was a practically in the contract right and you had to understand that you were never gonna he was never actually want to speak with John McCain Franks is never gonna speak with John not only was he's not going to be able to get to John Kay but he wasn't really gonna try did you knew that the piece was gonna be better for the fact that he would never get there right I mean because your expectation of most people on a campaign trail and on a bus is that they actually spend the time with the other right buddy but if the candidate he worked in such a way that he created a McCain shaped space in the piece and I saw that that was really the only thing that was left unnoticed by David Wright whole the right John McCrae the actual man who he was supposed to follow right right I mean I knew this that like he would go and then not actually go anywhere he was supposed to go I mean like when he went on the cruise did he do any of the activities well why did he just observe here he called and I believe he called from the ship basically saying well I'm here as if that was the great accomplishment and and you know and now what am I supposed to do and and I knew David well enough to know that to be overly directive was completely the wrong thing because I wanted him to activate his anxieties because that were that was the radioactive stuff the fuel that he was powering him and and I also knew that if I was overly prescriptive he would be act he would respond against that he would push against that so I said David you know just just go or just do it right about what you see do some stuff have fun and you know that was unnerving enough that he had to then go go out of the ship and discover whatever he would discover but he did hide in the in the room quite a bit and if you go back there's discussions of how the bed has been made and the food has been arranged and the woman who cleans the room he never sees her but he fantasizes about her and so forth you know he's he is he was up to his usual tricks right I mean there's if I remember right there's like at least a thousand words on the toilet and how the toilet was yes oh yes which only someone who spends an awful lot of time in a room would think about well the funny thing is that he was 8 was he when he did something like that he was able he would go he would mind the topic so deeply and down to sort of a philosophical level that it would begin to connect with some of the other observations he made in the piece and he began to develop you know kind of thematic structure a unity that that paid off but right when you're reading you know about the the mechanics of these vacuum toilets on the cruise ship you know why are we here yeah but he wrote so well that it didn't matter it would just go with it you know right right and certainly in the fiction I mean it's it's different because of course the observations the power of observation is different but certainly in the pieces from Infinite Jest that Brandon grant straitened read in The New Yorker there are different things about the landscape and about Boston about the halfway house and all the different pieces if there's an intensity of observation I mean it that it's what makes that book come alive is simply the fact that no item of clothing no little you know scar on the ear goes on remarked on that every single thing is registered and and used to create a portrait which is a psychological portrait as well um I want to talk a little bit about David as a moral writer because I think certainly in the McCain piece which winds up being a lot about like why we should vote sort of in some ways why but Pale King is sort of why we pay taxes and why it's a good idea and then the view for mrs. Thompson's which is really about the Midwest in 9/11 and how even though it was very far from New York what it was like and sort of what you all think of David as a writer with a really deep moral core and moral sense I'll hazard a beginning of the intra that as we has been discussed he was very acutely aware of the alienation of society in the way that we were all brutalized by whatever you want to call it modernism post-modernism hypo capitalism and so forth and he really did feel that Americans and human beings were being were damaged animals in our environment and was trying to make comment on that and save himself and save others from it and I was rereading the State Fair piece on the way on the plane down here and I was thinking that he that they're the places where he's happiest or when he's confronting genuine innocence and other times where he's confronting much less than that he's a little bit more suspicious and ironic and so forth and there definitely is a moral gathering to his pieces and he arrives at a moment of moral instruction but he has entertained you so completely and sort of snuck up on you that that you don't feel that you were being preached to or hit over the head that he's kind of slipped it into the side of your head while you were watching something else and that to me is one of the pleasures of his work I think you know it's the salient thing for me and the fiction is that it is you know he's dealing very often with characters who have done atrocious things or or are doing atrocious things or are going to do atrocious things and and he manages to write about these things very honestly and you know with this kind of sweeping understanding of what is driving these acts and with a moral sense about them but without a judgmental sense and it's a very fine line to walk and it's very hard to look at characters who are who are laughable and not laugh at them and to look at characters who are doing bad things and not make them entirely bad it's very difficult to write about and especially to write about it in such a clever way as he did you know he was all was clever there was a sort of deep it was deeply infused with cleverness every everything that he wrote and this came up for us actually when I was working with him on a piece that ended up being part of Pale King which was we called good people which was a very short story about one of the characters in Pale King Lane Dean Jr who's gotten his girlfriend pregnant and he's meeting with her they're planning to go and get an abortion and she's having second thoughts and and you know like what I what I loved about this as a story which is how I first read it when he sent it to me and I think 2006 was the fact that you know these were these characters were fundamentalist Christians they were praying over their decision they were even asking what would Jesus do all these things which were not his perspective on life as far as I knew it but that he managed to present without making us you know us privileged atheists New Yorkers want to make fun of these characters you know we he did it was so much understanding and we had a conversation at the time or an email conversation about a title of this piece and originally well I can justify I brought his email about it so I maybe I get instead a pair for anything I'll just tell you what he said I'd originally had one or two sentences about trees filled with SAP in the park to go along with the all wood to go along with all the not too subtle greenery and bees in general fecundity of springtime and the pieces title was SAP I decided that this was Craven in a particularly pomo way visit easing the reader with the possibility that the title applied to Lane and that the author maybe saw him as sappy which I suppose I do in some ways and was sneering at him which I'm not so I gave the piece of title in which the possibility of irony mockery sneering was much much more remote though not I suppose impossible so I you know I said good idea you know good people then like the next day he writes back I'm curious how you felt about my little rant about SAP is the initial title did it make sense do you agree I myself am now totally confused does the title good people threatened to make the story seem too close too sentimental especially now with the naked Lea cliche heart reference in the final line you know so he he he went back and forth over all this and it you know he asked me do you agree that past a certain line you know this taste can turn everything arch and steering and to ironic or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with you know um so he was just he was always so wonderfully aware of of how he was writing from a moral perspective and of what you know what how much he was beholding to his characters to present them in a way that was honest and it wasn't sneering and yet often made them funny you know often we could laugh at them but but he didn't want it to cross that line into sneering right absolutely and though I mean bill certainly in the McCain piece where he's writing about the other journalists whoever first was the 12 monkeys um all right that's nearing Oh would we my precious I mean the 12 monkeys being I imagine the standard political reporters who are cover who are usually on the bus as they say right itself important guys roll guys in blue blazers and and blue oxford clothes shirts who grow he's up at the front or on the bus number one where's David was stud1 bus number two with really it was David and the sound technicians customer to that was I think he was the only it probably chose to go on that bus right right yeah well you know I guess we choose everything yeah I'm sure that he would have been more much more uncomfortable in bus number one right but in terms of that tomorrow I mean I think that was interesting because the piece was really about the of political campaigns well the included the journalistic obviously we're servers there's a great deal but and he as something even really comes out from behind the curtain and just discusses the fact that given who John McCain was and given how he conducted himself during Vietnam and prisoner work him even he was as admirable as a person as David could could find at least in politics did that mean then that he was gen when he said that he was being honest of a straight talk expressional that was he genuinely being honest or had they just realized that honesty was going to be good marketing tool to sell more and David I mean I fairly open there and I think it's unusual for him and I remember the time meeting it almost felt because he had come out from behind the repertory 'el shield and was discussing it even addressing and you Rolling Stone reader who I think he imagined as a kind of an 18 year old kid voting for the first time that was that level of innocence or lack of complicity and in all this and so is this really true is this it's okay because of Ja who John McCain was is can we then say yes this is all really true and this is really the question that all comes down to and he almost comes up he sneaks up on the point of saying yes this guy must be telling the truth because of who he is but then he wisely doesn't turn into an endorsement piece but that's really where that piece you know what it all came down to for him when she got passed over right because I mean I remember recording I think a lot of us at that stage we're having conversations of politically not agreeing with what John McCain represented but thinking that he was at the time the most admirable candidate in the race today we boy it was John McCain or Al Gore really at that point they seem to be you know those were gonna be your choices right so McCain looked a thousand times better right right and that he cuz I do remember being on the phone we'd be like why do we think he's good maybe he's you know maybe it is the next mark it's like the best marketing tool ever right is the truth right and David being on the bus with the sound technicians the next piece he did after that which was called host which was about a talk ship a talk radio show in LA a very virulent and very conservative talk show host and he spent most of his time with the sound technicians because he he was not someone who ever as we know spoke to the people in charge hey yeah hey you like the sound tax they probably were long hair and had Ben Stiller Ben understood right and do you feel like when he was doing this piece did the people on the McCain campaign have any idea who he was so I think there were there was probably one or two people in the press office who had a sense who this guy is where they seemed he was pre-google so but somehow they figured out that he was just this kind of literary guy writing for only stone which they expectations rolling stone were low to begin with in terms of respectability so it's not really expecting a lot from him in that and they really got you know I'm sure when they saw him on day one they got pretty much what they expected from Rolling Stone right right and when you sent him on the cruise I mean David already had long hair and a bandana was it hard to you know I mean did you just say we're booking this person on the cruise or you even remember how this all went I think that we we bought the ticket for him and it was my sense that trying to engage with the sort of the standard the public relations or publicity apparatus would be disaster and the best thing to do we just kind of sneak him sneak him on and because he he would he needed to sneak up on the situation and and he was not afraid of being abrasive at least visually with people he wasn't going to rearrange himself to fit into somebody's expectation and that was part of his way of it was a stance it was also alienating people a little bit but it strangely enough it also created access to other people too who were less intimidated by him and at that point you know he was a bear that you just let loose in the forest and let do what he wanted to do and you know I wasn't going to manage that I was gonna let he was a big boy he needed figured out for himself what you did right that you um it's funny because I have court you know I of course we get the phone calls of like what should I do about you know I mean when he was doing the host piece it was like they told me to go buy dinner and I'm like why are you buying dinner for all the people the radio station and he was like well they told me I should go buy dinner and he's like so where should I go I was like and I think I sent him to the cuckoo you know that was nearby he also was someone who didn't like driving the freeway so it's really hard to navigate Los Angeles without a freeway but I think I sort of explained him how he could get from you know not necessary claremont because we have to get on a freeway but how to get to the Cougar ooh and then to the radio station to feed the sound Tex and you know and I was like at that point he was writing for The Atlantic Monthly and I'm like I don't think this is really what you need to do but it was very clear that he was gonna go buy dinner and my only my job was to tell him how to get how to get there and how to buy dinner and bring it to the sound Tex see but by then any editor working with David knew that you were in the picture and would you know you were solving some of these problems backstage so it was part of it right that it's you know they when in doubt he would call me and say like what do I do about this right you know we're going to the lobster festival and not wanting to eat the lobsters for example though he did he ate all the lobsters you're talking um we were talking before this sort of about the idea of when a writer sort of becomes part of a magazine when David's or became a Harper's writer when he became a Rolling Stone writer when he became a New Yorker fiction writer and sort of what that house or when you become part of a magazine what that means and how sort of you adopt a writer well again I'll try to start a response to that question it for David I think doing the first non-fiction or journals and pieces for Harper's was was new for him and he was he was freed from the anxieties of writing fiction in the nonfiction space but he also was going to be packaged in a way that he had never been packaged before which is as you know someone you tease on the cover and he gets fact-checked and we have to you know there's no there's a lot of process that goes into being in a magazine and you know he's as bill was saying beforehand you know he's on your team and whether he likes her or not he's he's a part of your team for that issue and I think that he probably was aware that he was being taken advantage of in a sense and that we once people knew he owned town he was he was he was adding value to that particular magazine but he was also having value added to him by way of the imprimatur of the magazine and the exposure and he was you know one magazine that has hundreds of thousands of readers it's just accelerates the kind of process of who he was so there was a you know it could work both ways and I guess he got more comfortable with that as time went on I'm built great yeah I mean I you know like I said the first piece he addressed the Rolling Stone reader comes directly so I don't picture this I mean I I don't recall at any point you know either the pieces they did for Rolling Stone where he had to be shoehorned or he or his thing had to be changed I mean I think his Harper's piece is read completely like Harper's pieces and I think his Rolling Stone pieces I and I zooming he you know made or he just come without thinking about it knew who he was that he was writing for a particular person or a particular thing and you do have to i remember the headline prison became piece was I fit was up Simba or something about which none of us could even figure out what it meant and so we changed it and he barely complained and then said he was going to change it back when the thing was was republished was to find go ahead you know right but we didn't use just headline fourteen he didn't wasn't a problem right well that was like the first title of shipping at was a supposedly fun thing all right and and I said I said to David look I suppose that's a good title for this but yeah it doesn't work in the magazine space there's a certain amount of space just from the layout and then it Harper's actually had the titles of the pieces on the jack in the front of the the cover of the magazine and we had to work inside this format and so that's just part of the the kind of the nudging and the packaging and stuff that that took place and it was clear that he was going along with it there was kind of important size and moments on the phone but he went along with it he got it did he give you anywhere titles Deborah everything had a weird title um but it was less of it less of an issue for us but it I going back to the notion of being you know on a team for a magazine it's it's different with fiction obviously and I don't think that he ever took for granted his his status in terms of fiction even after he was in the New Yorkers 20 under forty issue in 1999 you know every story he sent me he'd say in the cover letter I think you have about a 10 percent chance of wanting to take this and you know is it was very and I think he honestly I don't think that was false modesty I think that was he honestly you know felt he was writing what he was writing and it might not be right for magazines it might not be right for anyone other than himself and and there was that constant doubt and self-questioning with it there was I hear that I think there was a little bit of a dodge in that because he would do the same thing when he said commission pieces you know Colin here's the piece that you the you would probably was only a 10% chance that you would take a 35,000 word piece exactly but it but he was again it was sort of creating that that sort of space for himself and little pass he's anticipating the worst yeah I'm sorry yeah he was David Foster Wallace some write the message even got to him that that you know anybody was gonna run would run it it would be easier to find you know fairly exalted home for anything that he wrote right yeah there was still that that kind of weird fake like I wouldn't actually think it was fake I think I think I think there was a lot of self-doubt every step of the way with him at least but maybe it's different on the nonfiction side right though there um the last piece you do with him Colin was the one about usage and being a snoot which actually had been turned down by somewhere that we no longer can remember where right and but you add up hello I I think you must have called me up and said what he did was too long and the people didn't get it or didn't understand and would you take a look at it and I said yes and as soon as I started reading I knew instantly we're going to do this and in that case there was none of this negotiation and it was a finished piece more or less ready to go yeah and you were at Esquire when the Michael Joyce piece came when deep right now details and that one had headed it's incredible number of times these stories get killed bought details assigns a piece to him about this tennis player I'd never do with it even a square Barry's another I guess it was long it's like a fifteen thousand word piece well it wasn't actually detail style right that was what they said they're like we can't use this this is not our style proceed it's just to interrupt the sort of meta conversation happening at the time wants magazine editors the way these pieces would sort of blow up magazines and you know they would go into a magazine and it was not a magazine piece that the magazine thought I would ever run and yet it was good and he was not only was he subverting certain you know journalistic forms and even in the forms of certain magazine pieces he was subverting the DNA of certain magazines themselves which was okay think about think about the lobster piece which he wrote from a right yeah and I and I remember you at the time calling me and saying you know I think there may be a problem because you know David was sent to this lobster festival in Maine by gourmet and they wanted a piece about it now he's written this kind of piece and we don't think there's a chance to help I want maybe you want to look at you know because and and then they actually did run with it and it was you know their best piece of the year I mean it was it was because gourmet as existed used to have like pages and pages of ads of the Beef Council the seafood council and if you write a piece that says is it moral to eat lobster or meat or anything and Petra thinks this is a great idea gourmet was not so happy um there's actually also an editor here J Jennings from Tennis Magazine where he assigned David a piece about the US Open and what David wrote was piece called democracy and Commerce which somehow Jade were you okay um did the tent to the US open like that do what I was getting we did have the tennis magazine had a relationship with the USDA so there was some back-and-forth but it was a story we were willing to go to so perceptive and acute about the event and sort of synthesize all the conversations that some of some of us have been working in tennis for year all complaints that we invoice about the US Open over you know decades were synthesized in this one piece and I don't I think that's true the USDA do they looked at this and said this is this is what the event is amazing they do that three days we got many more thanks but but many more compliments about about the piece and that may be because he'd already dealt with Colin I signed the piece at 3,500 words I think and it came in at eight thousand instead of fifteen thousand so it was still we ended up we were able to run the whole the whole piece and with the footnotes all in the right right place but it was it was one of the highlights of you know my my editing career certainly and you know there were top-ten tennis players who were saying that's the best thing I've ever read in Tennis Magazine and that's when you knew he knew he knew his stuff um and before we open up for questions I suppose um the last question to sort of talk about is which sort of goes back to you know the idea of David hiding in a room not interviewing McCain calling you up and saying what should I do is that magazines obviously fact check everything they run and there are places particularly in ticket the fair where let's say David's imagination ran away with him a little bit perhaps the twirling cheerleaders with the fire-breathing Anya and serve as as magazine editors what do you what do you do in a situation where it's so good and it's so fun to read but it might not necessarily have happened exactly that way well the magic trick that he was able to pull off is that the pieces did get by the fact checkers and because the things that could be fact checked were fact checked and they were true and the things that could not be fact checked you can either prove nor disprove and they were so fabulous that they you know they were true right jemelle and the discussion about this will go on for some time there was one there was one point in the piece where he said that some crack vials had fallen out of some kids writing as if er or one of these big rides and had fallen on a state trooper who was alertly eating a lemon pop up at the time and and alertly eating a lemon pop up was such a David ISM that you know it maybe it was true but yeah but I think that the broader point is that he was able to get at something deeper and larger and true that to to pin him against the wall with a kind of you know narrow-minded sense of of what was factually provable would have been very disastrous and a disservice to everybody involved until boy I mean we I checked our fact checker was with him on the phone almost as much time as I was and everything that could be fact checked and a lot of the pieces especially McCain piece could be was fact jacket if it was according to our fact checker wrong it was fixed and made right but I think David like all good writers knows when he can lie and when he can and so you know you can say certain things obviously the UK you can neither prove nor disprove but the state troopers eating and so I think that writers you know feel free to take I mean the the John Doggett a book it's out recently published the life whatever it's called lifespan of the fact it's kind of an entire you know that's the real fact-checking experience reason he's got every fact wrong practically oh and it's a whole dialogue between him and the and the fact checker and the editor kind of glancingly shows up in the piece and that's it comes you know but the fact checkers defect checked everything he I think he had one thing in the September eleventh piece where there's somebody's making a flag out of construction paper and crayons and somehow we seems to be kind of thing that it's impossible to fact-check and but somehow our fact checker discovers that it's not true and that became a problem and at that point the managing editor got a bother and almost blew up the piece and so you know yeah though it's not a fact that actually matters wellthanks matter okay but but somehow that we discovered it's kind of a you don't really want to discover that I want you this because once you discover then you have to do something about it and I think was one of those moments where I'm sure there's lots of stuff was made up but it but he was smart enough to make up the stuff that that you're not going to catch him on a lot of the stuff that was unfactual or it wasn't his internal processes and is you know ornate anxieties and feelings about people and so forth and you know how do you say David you didn't prove to us that you lusted after the woman who was cleaning your room and the ship I mean I prove that you know or disprove it and so bright or that you feel terrible about saying something to the wit greet the waiter on the ship and right and then you were worried he got in trouble right right yeah that you can call the pieces journalism and I think you should but you can also call them literary performances and I think that that's just as accurate you

Channel: The University of Texas at Austin

Views: 17,953

Rating: 4.9716311 out of 5

Keywords: David Foster Wallace, Harry Ransom Center, Ransom Center, Colin Harrison, Bill Tonelli, Deborah Treisman, Editors on Wallace, Bonnie Nadell, David Foster Wallace Symposium, fiction

Id: IAfuZRryjHk

Length: 61min 4sec (3664 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/sussej]

I hate these people for everything they say in this video