The Suicide of David Foster Wallace

Of the nearly 200 articles I’ve written since 2016, this article registered, by far, the greatest impact on my reader.

I am reminded of this, by a recent article from a young journalist who visits the house (now a shrine) in which David Foster Wallace grew up. Flooded with memories of her hero, she phones a close friend: “Do you know where I am..? DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM, RIGHT NOW!?”

Such is the power…the soul power…of David Foster Wallace upon millions of his fans. Theories about how and why this happened, but I do not want to join in the analysis. In the article, I have only one point to make: The suicide was preventable. Here’s an excerpt, unchanged from the original article (I Would Have Saved Him if I Could) which appeared on September 10, 2017:

The Suicide of David Foster Wallace

Karen Green, the devoted wife of David Foster Wallace, the loving, steadfast, true blue woman he had been waiting all his life to meet, believes she knows when her husband decided yet again to kill himself: September 6, 2008.” That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me on that Wednesday.” Two days later, Wallace found an opportunity. On the evening of Friday, September 12th he suggested that Green go out to prepare for a special event at the mall, which was about ten minutes away in the center of Claremont. She had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that he’d seen the chiropractor on Monday. “You don’t go to the chiropractor if you’re going to commit suicide,” she says.

This is the coda to — “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, a Life of David Foster Wallace” by D.T Max — one of the most deeply felt, magnificently crafted, heartbreaking, literary biographies I have ever read. Listen to how the author ends it: “After Green left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself.”

His wife returned home at 9:30 and found her husband in the garage. Bathed in light from many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages, his effort to show the world what is was like to be “a fucking human being.”

Here’s how D.T. Max concludes his stunning biography.

“He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but was the one he had chosen”.

“Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story”, it should be not noted is not a biography of a suicide. It is not a study of the roots of genius, not a celebration of a major American writer. It is an exhaustively researched profound exploration of an extraordinary life that consumed the better part of a decade of the author’s life.

It’s been said there were “multitudes in Wallace” and there are multitudes in this book. There is Wallace the straight A student through high school. Wallace, the handsome six foot two, two hundred pound jock who played citywide football, who became obsessed with tennis when he was twelve and toyed with the idea of becoming a tennis pro. Wallace, who, following in his father’s footsteps, would go to Amherst University, and win every prize there was to win. Who would write a heavy duty philosophy thesis, spend five years on “hard core math and logic,” publish his first short story in the Amherst literary magazine and, amazingly, almost immediately upon finishing graduate school who would not only complete but find an agent and publisher for his first experimental novel, “The Broom of the system.” Even more astonishingly, there was Wallace, a completely unknown writer who would be offered $25,000 from a beaming acquisition editor who boasted, “I am delighted to be in at the start of a brilliant career.”

So there was that: the meteoric rise of an unparalleled literary golden boy. But there was a dark side, a side that in hindsight had always been there: the perfectionistic, reclusive, overly polite, excessively anxious never satisfied person who later would describe himself as “emotionally delicate.” Plainly Wallace did not like this side of himself. Becoming an expert tennis player, someone who could beat just about anyone he played (who was not especially good) provided temporary relief from his gnawing sense of inferiority. But his primary protection against excruciating adolescent social anxieties was drugs. He started early (in his teens) and stayed for well over a decade. He drank heavily and smoked pot incessantly. What he had always thought of as minor bouts of depression that were thoroughly “normal”, became a major episode once he left home for Amherst and his separation anxiety kicked in in earnest. Bewildered and ashamed he fought furiously to exorcise his demons but could not. Telling no one but his closest friend as to the true reason, he left Amherst and quietly returned home. In subsequent years he would be hospitalized, he would be placed (in 1989) on Nardil, a first generation antidepressant with a laundry list of not inconsequential side effects and, against the advice of his better angels, he would consent to a terrifying course of electroshock treatments. Through it all, he would return to Amherst and continue to compile an unparalleled record of academic honors.

By now drinking and smoking pot had become a regular fixture of his life, until the day came — in a period which he would later refer to as “the darkest of my life — then or ever” when a failed but potentially fatal suicide attempt landed him in Boston’s McLean Hospital. It would be the occasion of his first and most indelible bottoming out experience: a straight talking psychiatrist telling him that he was “a hard core addict who would be dead by thirty if he didn’t stop doing drugs immediately.”

A stunned Wallace attempted to negotiate.” What if I just smoked a little pot?”

“Why not just inject yourself with a little heroin.”

The message received, Wallace became sober, but how to stay sober?

There are a thousand treatments on offer for hard core addicts. Wallace chose the one that was least psychological, least psychodynamic, the most popular and certainly the most secretive: Alcoholics Anonymous. Ignoring AA’s insistence that it was not a treatment plan for mentally ill, emotionally disturbed substance abusers, but an educational program designed primarily to stop the user from using, members were encouraged to steer clear of the medical model and its partnership with the billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. Its primary tool was the famous 12 step program founded by the legendary Bill Wilson. Negotiating the program successfully — which meant achieving and maintaining sobriety (forever if possible) — was called “twelve-stepping.” Members who fell off the wagon were exhorted to get back on and to “work the program.”

Wallace, being Wallace, had his own unique take on the undeniable superior success rate of AA. Although he would conscientiously accept a sponsor, faithfully attend the meetings, what he was looking for was not the moment of clarity allegedly produced by popular slogans such as “your best thinking got you here” but a full blown “Jungian rebirth.”

Whatever the cause, Wallace got sober and stayed sober. The real life characters he encountered in Granada House would find their fictional surrogates in the literature to come, the literature that would make him the toast of the literary town. In the early story “the Depressed Person” (in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) Wallace gives us a savagely hilarious take down of a beloved modern malaise. It doesn’t take a Freud to realize that the author is the depressed person, but Wallace, true to his central Illinois mid Western code — where you keep your friends close but your psychiatric diagnoses closer — prefers the safer ground of social parody. Dreading being labelled a “dweeb” or a “head”, he treasured whatever scrap of athletic prowess he could garner, even if it was in the oddball sport of tennis. Growing up, in the pantheon of his ideals, being a regular guy was the cool thing to be, but as he was to discover soon after entering Amherst, writing was what he had been born to do.

I first saw David Foster Wallace on the Charlie Rose show shortly after he had published “Infinite Jest”, the one thousand page juggernaut that would take the literary world by storm and, to everyone’s delight, became an improbable New York Times bestseller. It was a bit too much for the inexperienced, reclusive thirty four year old and when Charlie Rose came beckoning, he would have to be persuaded to appear. But appear he did, wearing his customary do-rag (presumably as a buffer against an admitted sweating problem) as well as a major chip on his shoulder. His body language alone — repeatedly fidgeting in his chair; steady avoidance of eye contact; making inappropriate, sometimes twitching faces; occasionally flashing a strange, forced smile addressed to no one and nothing in particular — made it clear he was there under protest. In retrospect, it was one of the most uncomfortable interviews I had ever watched and I could not wait for it to be over.

Now fast forward ten years. In the New York Times magazine section, just before the start of the 2006 U.S. Open, an article titled “Federer as a Religious Experience” caught my eye. (Full disclosure I am a five sigma tennis fan and Roger Federer is my all time favorite. Since his first grand slam win in 2003, I have watched in full each of his record 19 grand slam titles, some more than once. Amazingly, as I write this in September 2017, Federer at the age of thirty six is still in action, still competing, with at least a chance to win his twentieth grand slam.

The author of the article is David Foster Wallace and it is an offer I can not refuse. The author, to my surprise, is as enthusiastic a fan of Roger Federer as I am, and the article, to my delight, is a piece of unabashed hagiography. It is earnestly, beautifully written — but even if it were a piece of standard issue journeyman journalism — I would have loved it. Wallace is enthralled by what he considers Federer’s supernatural skill. Already, at twenty five, Federer is the undisputed best tennis player in the world, who already won eight grand slams. Along the way he has struck literally thousands of “jaw dropping” winners. Wallace selects two — one from the famous U.S Open finals with American icon Andre Agassi and one from the even more famous 2006 Wimbledon final, the very first time Federer and Nadal faced each other on grass. Calling upon his own impressive technical background in the sport plus his proven ability to soak up an astonishing array of details — to see things that others don’t see — Wallace wrote several pages of (strangely compelling) analysis of just two shots. Impressed in spite of myself I decided to give him a mulligan for his disappointing petulance on the Charlie Rose show. I would meet him on his own terms.

From then on, for the first time, I began to work my way slowly but steadily way through his books: “Consider The Lobster, Brief Interviews with Hideous men; A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, and selective parts of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. (I’ve never met anyone who’s actually finished it.)

Wallace on the page, I was happy to see, was far more appealing than Wallace on the tube. In college he had discovered that he had an ear for mimicry. “I was a forger…I could sound like anybody.” He had more, much more. As a stylist, he had a multi-octave voice that could range freely from the grungy lows of what he called “pop culture shit” to the rarefied surreal heights of postmodern metafiction heroes such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Very quickly I was forced to acknowledge he was one of the greatest prose stylists of the last one hundred years. His voice captured perfectly what Wallace called the muchness of everyday life, the never ending overload that “bombards you with five thousand pieces of information you don’t need every second.” Somehow Wallace’s jittery manic mind, his polymathic brilliance was ideally suited for the challenge.

His sentences, uncannily, seemed dynamically alive. Refusing to be still on the printed page, it was as though they were struggling to burst the known boundaries of language. The mind that was stage managing his protean craft seemed endlessly to be qualifying itself. His mind, not always in sync, was forever in flow. It has been said that Wallace was the first writer to give voice to the brain. That this is what it was like to be aware of proto thoughts, of the swarming chaos of half-glimpsed fleeting images of potentially vital ideas arriving stillborn in the mind. David Foster Wallace, it was claimed for the first time, had given a voice to the nameless dread of being a human being in a revolutionary virtual online reality. The reader, not surprisingly, never knows where the sentence is going (neither, it seems, does Wallace when he is in full flight). The impression is that the sentence is somehow being created before your eyes.

This however is not how Wallace himself thought. In the sense that no one ever spoke dialogue as reported by Hemingway or declaimed in godlike blank verse as written by Shakespeare, Wallace’s remarkable prose style is anything but an isomorphic translation of what transpired in his brain. It is a reflection of a savage parody, a rage at the muchness of the everyday world and an unparalleled ability to transmute a debilitating tower of babel into a cornucopia of linguistic delights.

It is a joy to read David Foster Wallace in full flight. It is like walking into a candy store of bon mots. And yet like the comic genius (Robin Williams) who can make everyone laugh but himself. Wallace was a truly tragic figure. A kind, soulful, loving but profoundly tortured, self-punishing sad man. Enamored by his exquisite sensitivity to what he called the twelve levels of consciousness, he was a phenomenologist of his own stream of consciousness extraordinaire, but someone who did not seem especially interested in his own dynamic unconscious.

Why did he commit suicide?

No one knows but theories abound. Here’s mine. As the straight talking psychiatrist at McLeans once told Wallace he was “a hard core addict who sought treatment in AA. The first generation antidepressant Nardil had kept him alive for twenty years but he needed more. He needed insights not slogans. He needed psychotherapy, not twelve stepping. He needed to realize how dangerous it is to switch medications, as Wallace recklessly did without professional guidance.

At the end, his primary justification for taking his life was that the pain was unbearable, that he could not take it anymore. He refused to consider that the pain though unbearable was not unending. It is in the nature of a deep depression that, regardless of its severity it is a transient phenomenon with time. This too will pass and with the powerhouse psychotropic medications of high tech psychopharmacology, it is hardly conceivable that Wallace’s suffering could not have been substantially relieved. At worst it might have been necessary to hospitalize him for a matter of months. To medicate him so heavily that he would feel closer to a zombie than a human being. That would be the price he would pay. The prize would be perhaps forty more years of fraught but glorious writing, of loving and being loved by his devoted wife, his adoring family, his multitude of readers who found so much joy, so much hope and so much wisdom in his marvelous works. It was all there waiting for him. But Wallace suffered from the addict’s curse: he hated to wait.

To murder the self is to acquire a new sense of the self — the self that murders. It is to attain a sense of empowerment, of agency so grandiosely transcendent that it can survive even death.

If he would only wait, hang on another month or two, a wonderful life was available, was there waiting in the wings to embrace him.

But Wallace was sick of waiting.

He wanted an immediate solution.

What he got was a permanent solution to a temporary crisis.

He played the suicide card.

- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).