Quantcast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

inDepth, Part 1: Respect, Privacy & David Foster Wallace

Two Minutes From the Charlie Rose Show, March 17th, 1997, Guest: David Foster Wallace

“Respect means a lot to you,” the esteemed talk show host says. “A sense that ‘I’m taken seriously and I’m respected for my work.’”

In response, the author gives a sardonic smile as the slight tilt to his chin gives way suddenly to an entire revolution of the neck. “You can read this on my face?”

Unflinching, the veteran interviewer digs his front foot into the ground beneath the table. He does his best to quantify his statement. “I can read it in terms of what’s been written of you,” he says. “And by what you’ve said.”

As he assembles his thoughts, the author mutters a few um’s and hmm’s. It’s obvious he’s reflecting on the circus surrounding the press coverage of his buzzworthy novel. He is culling these thoughts for the most fitting response. “There was a certain amount of ambivalence about, say, the reaction Infinite Jest got,” the author settles on.

“Because every writer dreams of having a lot of attention. But the fact of the matter is that this is a long, difficult book. And a lot of the attention started coming at a time—um, I can do elementary arithmetic— and a lot of people hadn’t had time to read the book yet. So, um, the stuff about me or some of the interesting rumors that had developed about the book and all of that stuff that was getting attention… I found that…”

He pauses for a second, still smiling. There are a few more um’s. In the end, the author completes his response rather succinctly. “I didn’t like that very much, just because I wanted people to read the book.”

The author’s voice deflates as he finishes. He’s made a fairly articulate response to the laziness of some of the reporting surrounding his novel, yet he promptly apologizes for what has “essentially been stuttering.” His head drops. The action is slight, yet the subsequent look of discomfort on his face is indicative of someone who has just taken an uppercut square to the jaw.

The host insists, quite earnestly, that the author hasn’t stuttered. The next few seconds are fleeting by definition, but while the conversation carries on seamlessly, the words that follow still carry the weight of a memorable imbroglio.

In the meantime, somewhere at home a writer’s pen is scratching hastily onto a notepad—probably one of the same people who concocted the premature analysis that the subject had first taken issue with. In a matter of minutes, the author has unwittingly provided one more fascinating quirk to add to the rest of them on the historian’s pallet, the amalgam of genius and struggles and idiosyncrasies that will one day be used to paint the definitive portrait of David Foster Wallace.

As I read and digested the gist of the recent media blitz on The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s 1997 appearance on the Charlie Rose Show replayed itself through an interminable loop in the back of my mind.

The scene described above took place just three minutes into the interview—itself a ten-minute serving of pure intellectual ambrosia—after Rose, perhaps the single best interviewer of his generation, asked Wallace an incredibly prescient question. He asked the man about respect. And in doing so the journalist had inadvertently addressed the onslaught of press that rode the sizable wake following the release of Infinite Jest; the conjectural pieces that tapped incessantly for the vein that might lead to Wallace’s wellspring of melancholy, which produced one of the 20th century’s best and saddest novels.

The fact that Wallace steered the conversation away from esteem and onto the subject of privacy wasn’t at all surprising. Clearly the author walked into the interview with a grinding axe, however polite and pleasant he may have been.

In his 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace wrote briefly on what it meant to be a novelist under the microscope. Note that this was a full three years before Infinite Jest:

“Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers… But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people.”

After describing briefly how obligations such as television interviews can prove bothersome, Wallace finished by saying: “The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention. Dislike being watched.”

And at the time of the Charlie Rose interview, it seemed to Wallace that the press had found his personal struggles much more interesting than his resulting work. While the interview went on just fine after the “stuttering” comment, this brief moment of vulnerability nevertheless cast a different air over the rest of the conversation; we learned through sarcastic barbs and body language exactly what Wallace thought about the coverage of his novel.

Tomorrow: In Part Two, we fast-forward 14 years and history seems to be repeating itself.

DEEPER DIVE:

View the interview for yourself (the part described above occurs just before Minute 4):


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

Trending Articles