Wallace Will Be Big Name on Campus

First, an It Boy of literature signs on to teach at Pomona College, where the number of English majors with a creative writing emphasis is a sweet 10--underwhelming enough to persuade shy novelist David Foster Wallace to leave Bloomington, Ill., for Claremont. Then the 12-member English department snaps up another buzzed-about novelist. Then the new “best colleges” list is released. ...

“We’re 120 years old,” English professor Rena Fraden said of Pomona College, “and I think we’re finally coming into our own.” Or, at least, with two hip novelists on board, Pomona is beginning to emerge from the shadow of the country’s top creative writing programs such as the University of Iowa’s. (Graduates of Iowa’s master’s degree program have included a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, and the faculty includes another precocious literary craftsman--novelist and short story writer Ethan Canin.)

Wallace, arguably the most lionized writer in a post-Thomas Pynchon coterie of younger novelists and essayists, is best known for his serio-comic 1,079-page novel, “Infinite Jest” (Little, Brown & Co.), which was published in 1996. In a phone interview, Wallace said he accepted the college’s offer after a three-day visit. “This is what happens at these really good little schools: non-neurotic, laid-back niceness, combined with everyone being really sharp, smart and interested in stuff,” Wallace said. “It was just a really nice vibe ....It really seems like a rare place.” (He couldn’t resist adding: “I know the old trick--you keep the scary ones bound and gagged in the closet.”)

Pomona--part of the Claremont Colleges’ consortium of seven campuses--is known for its academics and its intimate classes. The student-faculty ratio is 9 to 1. Last year’s freshman class had median SAT scores of 710 in math and 720 in verbal. (By comparison, in 2001, the national median SAT scores for college-bound seniors was 510 in math and 500 in verbal.) Famous graduates include dance legend Twyla Tharp and the late U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston.

In the latest spate of good news, Pomona tied for fifth on the annual U.S. News & World Report list of top-ranked liberal arts colleges, after Swarthmore College, Wellesley College and other well-known institutions. (Pomona has finished fifth in the controversial rankings in eight of the last 10 years.) Also, this fall, acclaimed novelist Janet Fitch (“White Oleander,” Little, Brown & Co.) begins her stint as the Moseley Fellow in Creative Writing. Fitch will teach an advanced fiction writing course.

And earlier this year, the college named Wallace, 39, as the first Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing. The $1.75-million endowed chair is a tenured position.

The college rarely grants immediate tenure but agreed to Wallace’s request for the job status, said Fraden, chairwoman of the English department. Wallace who has a tenured teaching position at Illinois State University, begins his new job next fall.

“Students were just phenomenally taken with him--the seriousness with which he took their work,” Fraden said.

“We weren’t looking for someone who’s a star. We wanted someone who would work with our students. ... It was just an easy decision on our part.”

This is a place where students often call their professors by their first names, where student petitions carry weight. Last fall, with the backing of the English department, students petitioned college President Peter Stanley, asking him to hire a professor of creative writing. Pomona’s last designated creative writing teacher was poet Robert Mezey, who retired two years ago.

The request landed on Stanley’s desk at a fortuitous time, just when he had a new endowed chair in hand. As it turned out, Pomona College alumnus Roy E. Disney, who graduated in 1951 with a degree in English, wanted to woo a nationally known fiction writer to the campus.

An English department search committee began by approaching Booker Prize honorees and the winners of other major literary awards in places including England and New York. The committee also placed job ads in publications, including the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books. Students were taken aback by the famous writers who responded. “I don’t think any of us expected anyone big, “ said senior Kristin Kearns, a search committee member.

Of roughly 100 responses, Wallace’s jumped out. The search committee’s wish list had pegged him as a top choice; English professors, in fact, had assigned his work in their classes.

On a campus visit last December, Wallace twice had dinner with students. Then-senior Paul Dahlgren was in the middle of reading “Infinite Jest” and didn’t know what to expect. “He’s this big, famous writer,” said Dahlgren, who since has graduated. “We were afraid he might be uptight or scary.” But he introduced himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Dave,” and was his episodically verbose self, “very, very funny, very relaxed,” said Dahlgren, 22. A language zealot, Wallace corrected the students’ grammar and, just for fun, marked errors in the college’s course catalog.

Wallace also led a creative writing workshop for 15 students. In a 75-minute session, the group critiqued two short stories written by students that had been distributed in advance. “It was absolutely amazing,” Dahlgren said. “What this class did for me--what other classes haven’t always been able to do--is that it really made me grasp, what is this person trying to do? How can we have them do it better?”

One student got a five-page handwritten critique from Wallace. “These were undergraduate stories that were complicated and interesting enough that they deserved serious responses,” Wallace said. “It’s not like I’m Dave W., Teaching Dynamo.”

Pomona’s offer came at a time in which Wallace was mulling over what to do when his MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant ran out. He thought about giving up teaching or switching to a small liberal arts school in the tradition of Amherst College, his alma mater. (Illinois State University’s enrollment is about 20,000; Pomona’s is 1,550.)

“My father [a philosophy professor] had the whole hand-on-shoulder talk with me after I got back” from Pomona, Wallace said. “He pointed out that it was silly to think about not teaching when I liked it so much for a while, and I haven’t tried teaching at a school where students are really serious. ... I’m a very selfish teacher. I expect to learn from students in class. I expect to be entertained and interested.”

A fan’s Web page and media reports have noted the irony of his accepting a position endowed by a Disney, when “Infinite Jest” mocks pervasive corporate sponsorships (their reach extends to “Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar,” for instance). But the professorship, Wallace pointed out, is endowed by an individual, not a corporation. Not that he sweats the distinction. Sentence fragments trouble him; his title does not.

His impending move to the West Coast from Illinois, where he grew up, is a new, bewildering layer of anxiety. He has a house to sell, two dogs to pack up and no idea where he will live but probably not in Los Angeles, which scares him. “My mind is so open,” he said, “that there’s a draft.”