Literary star, out of the limelight

On a warm, windblown evening in late March, David Foster Wallace showed up at an old-style Mexican place in Pomona called El Ranchero. He was wearing shorts and a Pomona College sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, so that he looked like a faintly menacing guy you might see late one night at a 7-Eleven buying Gatorade.

Wallace, the author of, most famously, the 1996 brick of a novel called “Infinite Jest,” is finishing his first year as the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona. He’s a literary star -- MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, compared before he was 35 to Pynchon, to DeLillo -- newly arrived in Southern California.

Landing him was a coup for Pomona College, but getting the word out has been another matter. A bucolic and progressive campus 35 miles east of Los Angeles, off the 10 freeway, the school is a geographically undesirable place from which to generate attention. This suits Wallace, who moved here from Illinois, just fine (the public information office was not even able to get him to take a faculty photo). What he says about L.A. is polite while conveying that he isn’t going native. He liked Union Station when he saw it, and attended the symphony when his parents visited. There have been a few readings, and once he went to Staples Center, to see tennis. Los Angeles and its world of special invitations evidently does not beckon him.

Wallace never completely agreed to be interviewed (even after the interview had started). Beforehand, in numerous phone calls, he assured me that driving to Pomona to talk to him about the course he is teaching this semester, an upper-division literature seminar called “Eclectic/Obscure Fictions for Writers,” was certain to end in thumb-twiddling disappointment for both of us.

He had nothing grand to say about the eclectic/obscure books, all novels, that he had chosen for his syllabus. But whatever, he said. If I wanted to schlep to Pomona, sit in traffic for two hours (“You’re a big boy,” is what he said), then he supposed we could have dinner. These negotiations -- always on Tuesdays, shortly after 5, Wallace saying he had to call back because he had a student with him -- took place for several months. His return calls were always punctual.

Now that he’d arrived at the restaurant, Wallace made no move to identify himself. In fact, he was still hiding, sitting at a small table near the entrance with his head held low. There were only two people at the bar, and one of them was a middle-aged lawyer nursing a drink. Wallace sat where he was. I saw glasses, a familiar-seeming hangdog face. He appeared to be ducking.

“OK, what to tell you that’s true and halfway interesting,” was one of the first things he said. “I’ve taught courses like this before. The last school I was at, Illinois State University -- in Normal, Ill., the Fighting Redbirds -- I worked largely with graduate students, so I taught what’s known as a graduate seminar. I haven’t done it with undergrads before, and so for that reason the format is both familiar and very, very new to me.”

The way he spoke -- in tightly wound, fully realized thought, his diction excellent, his tone formal, any high-mindedness kept in check by free-floating jargon -- sort of replicated the experience of reading him. It’s not that Wallace is a borg, finally. It’s that he’s socially awkward and very guarded, and so in person, his intelligence naturally becomes his greatest defense.

“It’s an odd question to ask me,” Wallace said, when he was asked if one should worry about never having read certain “classic” works of literature. “I worry about it, but for me it gets very muddled between what are my expectations for myself as a human being and what do I want to read professionally. Totally between you and me, use it if you want, but my mom and I both laugh. Mom teaches literature at a junior college; mom’s never read ‘Moby-Dick.’ I’ve never read ‘The Iliad.’ I know I’ve stood in gatherings and made facial expressions meant to communicate that I’ve read it, but in fact I haven’t.”

And yet, it came out, he has read the entire Tom Clancy oeuvre. On airplanes.

“Now, the last couple have been shaky,” he said. “But for a long time there was no better airplane reading than Tom Clancy. Have you ever? Forget it, he doesn’t need advertising.”

Wallace marveled at the way Clancy can suspend plot for a 25-page treatise on how a nuclear weapon works. “And it’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “I don’t know how this guy finds this stuff out and then is able to render it in language that an eighth-grader could understand.”

A private presence

Wallace, who is 41, arrived at Pomona tenured, his salary drawn from the interest from a $1.75-million endowment given the school by Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew and a Pomona alumnus. The mandate, in part, was to find a name writer.

With humility, Wallace allows that it’s a plum gig. He has taught through much of his rise in the literary world. Pomona, well-regarded, part of the Claremont College consortium of campuses, graduates roughly 35 English majors a year. Wallace teaches one course a semester and a few directed studies.

“I told him, ‘We’re hiring you to write -- you have to keep writing,’ ” said Rena Fraden, chair of the school’s English department.

She speaks about Wallace like a protective mother, guarding by proxy Wallace’s trepidation about being a public figure. As a colleague, she said, he’s hardly precious. He’s helping read applications for the school’s Mosley Fellow, in which a creative writer is brought in to teach a course. He goes to readings and plays tennis with Maria Donapetry, a Spanish professor. As Wallace would, she professes not to know why any of this is interesting.

“He is a presence here at the college, because being a presence here is very private,” she said.

Put up in one of the “weird little houses around the college,” Wallace says, “I’m poised, ready to write, 10 hours a day. Days I’m not teaching I’m home all day. Either working or reading, but thinking I oughta be working -- you know the whole drill.” He does not own a television. “I lived with a woman for a year, a really cool woman,” he said. “She had a satellite TV. Five hundred channels. It was a serious problem.”

Asked what he was writing, Wallace would only say that he’s finishing a nonfiction book on the inventor of set theory.

His first novel, “The Broom of the System,” was published when Wallace was in his mid-20s; his last book was a 1999 collection of experimental short stories called “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.”

But it was “Infinite Jest” -- a 1,079-page, obsessively footnoted, high-comic novel -- that made Wallace a literary cause celebre. The book is set in a near future in which years are not numbered but corporate-sponsored (“Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar,” etc.), and within its world are a junior tennis academy, a band of Quebecois separatists and addicts of various stripes and substances.

The novel turned Wallace, at 33, into a kind of literary rock star with a cultish Web-site following. Then came “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” a collection of essays, criticism and neojournalism. The journalism is the most winning, even brilliant -- Wallace on subjects including the state fair in his native Illinois and his experience aboard a luxury cruise ship, both pieces that initially ran in Harper’s magazine. An accomplished junior tennis player in his youth, Wallace wrote about the professional tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire and produced a humanized look at the margins of pro sports. It was also probably the only piece of sports writing to ever contain the sentence: “Bismarck’s epigram about diplomacy and sausage applies also to the way we Americans seem to feel about professional athletes.”

Recently, he has seen Jonathan Franzen, of “The Corrections” fame, achieve the kind of mainstream commercial success about which literary writers are supposed to be torn. Wallace calls Franzen “one of my few writer friends.”

“It’s very sexy this year to be able to say that; two years ago, nobody would have cared,” he foot-noted dryly.

Franzen’s career, of course, got turned upside-down: lots of touring, Oprah Book Club selection controversy, option money from A-list Hollywood producer Scott Rudin.

Wallace paused when the Franzen/Oprah imbroglio was brought up. He asked if this were still part of the interview, then said: “It’s good of you to tell me.”

He expressed “admiration mixed with a mild contempt for the increasingly savvy way” Franzen handled the controversy that ensued when he spurned Winfrey’s selection of “The Corrections” for her book club. He said the Franzen incident illustrates the trouble with whirlwind book tours, wherein the author moves in a state of surreal fatigue from airport to hotel room.

“There’s something very uncomfortable about the whole thing, and yet on the other hand, what kind of prima donna says, ‘Thank you, major corporation, for your advance, but now you’re not allowed to use your marketing tools to try to recoup your investment’? You know, the head just goes around and around and around.”

The subject -- Was it still Franzen? His own conflicted sense of writerly self? Both? -- had got him going.

“There’s a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it.”

“Shall I say something so obvious that you just won’t even put it in the article?” Wallace said. “A book is also a product. At least the books that we’re talking about.... Even a book that’s about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again ... hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.

“At a certain point,” Wallace said finally, “I just stopped thinking about it.”

Energized by students

The Wallace who conducted class, several weeks later, was altogether lighter. For everything else it is, teaching is an occasion for interaction within prescribed roles, and Wallace thrives in this social contract. Last week, tacked to the door of his office in Crookshank Hall, was a note from a student. “Dear Dave,” it read. “Thank you for the lamp. I like it a lot!”

In class, Wallace smiled, he joked. He took attendance. Nine of his 12 students were on hand. Two were barefoot. Wallace was wearing khaki shorts, two old shirts, black dress socks and white high-top sneakers. He was chewing gum. The faculty lounge in which Wallace conducts his class had just been host to a luncheon for graduating seniors, and Wallace encouraged his students to partake of the leftover creme brulee, the chocolate cake, the half-drunk bottles of Chardonnay and Merlot.

You could have used the scene to sell prospective liberal arts majors on the school -- come to Pomona, sip wine, don’t wear shoes, talk about interesting books with a famous writer. Except that as a teacher, Wallace is cool but rigorous. Students complete a small paper on each book, a 10-page midterm and a 20-page final.

“There’s a weird kind of flabby mythos around creative writing that it’s more subjective, more expressive, like high school was, and therefore attracts students who don’t think they have to work that hard. I’m sort of a fascist opponent to that pedagogy,” Wallace said.

For “Eclectic/Obscure Fictions for Writers” (his title), Wallace’s reading list consisted of nine books, a few of which he hadn’t read: “The Man Who Loved Children,” by Christina Stead; “Play It As It Lays,” by Joan Didion; “The Moviegoer,” by Walker Percy; “The Golden Notebook,” by Doris Lessing; “Desperate Characters,” by Paula Fox; “Giovanni’s Room,” by James Baldwin; “In Watermelon Sugar,” by Richard Brautigan; “Nightwood,” by Djuna Barnes; and “Speedboat,” by Renata Adler.

“The rationale for being at a very good school,” Wallace had said, “is, here’s an environment and here are students with whom you can tell the truth, and you can talk about things like who picked the books on the syllabus.”

On this day they were discussing the middle portion of Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook,” the early 1960s novel of seminal themes, namely feminism and postwar Communist Party politics. Two students led the discussion and Wallace put in a comment every now and then, but he hardly needed to. He apologized at one point for stopping the discussion to give a thumbnail recap on Communism in the ‘60s (“It’s pretty lame to just vomit that out in five minutes,” he said).

It was clear from the rhythm of the 90-minute class that his students had long since learned they wouldn’t be receiving Wallace’s wisdom as doctrinaire. There’s something touchy-feely-sounding about that, but Wallace is plain: His students give him a very good reason to leave the house.

Wallace seemed energized by the way the class had gone. He hadn’t had to listen to himself prattle on, and nearly everyone in the room participated. After the class ended, Wallace lingered with a few students. Finally he left for his office. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said.