"Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" by David Lipsky

I should of course begin by admit­ting that I approached the very exist­ence of this book with an irrit­a­tion that some might intu­it, or even insist, was born of resent­ment. “Really, David Lipsky?” I thought when I read the announce­ment of the pub­lish­ing deal that would res­ult in this book, said announce­ment, I thought, com­ing a little too oppor­tun­ist­ic­ally soon after David Foster Wallace’s September 2008 sui­cide. “Do you really need to be doing this?” Lipsky was/is a star journ­al­ist whose for­tunes have hardly begun to even peak, and among his achieve­ments was/is one of the bet­ter post-mortem fea­tures to about Wallace and the cir­cum­stances lead­ing up to his death, but again, my feel­ing was, does this need to hap­pen, and does it need to hap­pen so quickly?

My feel­ings were strong enough that I resolved, in that thor­oughly reas­on­able and even-handed way of mine, that I would nev­er even go near the book once it came out. Still, I leafed through a copy at a book­store, and was sim­ul­tan­eously grat­i­fied and also kind of smugly con­firmed in my pre­ju­dices (at least for the moment) to see that the major­ity of the book was in Wallace’s voice; the thing seemed to be a very long tran­scrip­tion of the con­ver­sa­tions Lipsky and Wallace had over five days on the last leg of the pro­mo­tion­al tour for Wallace’s nov­el Infinite Jest, for a Rolling Stone piece that, not unusu­ally giv­en Jann Wenner’s caprices, nev­er ran in that pub­lic­a­tion. But Tom Bissell, a great writer and a friend, who had also been a friend of Dave’s and was thor­oughly shatttered by Dave’s death, told me on a vis­it to New York that he had picked up Lipsky’s book at the air­port and that, yeah, his own pro­vi­sion­al mis­giv­ings aside, he was glad it exis­ted, because Lipsky was in fact writ­ing it from a good place, and because it did indeed cap­ture Dave’s con­ver­sa­tion­al voice. Anothe recom­mend­a­tion from anoth­er friend sealed things, and I picked up the book for real.

And was almost instant­an­eously peeved: “I’d been assigned to write about David, I was sit­ting at a party, when a friend plopped down next to me on the sofa. ‘Poor David Foster Wallace,’ she said. ‘It’s not his fault, this kind of atten­tion, it’s weird, it can be hard to syn­thes­ize unless you’re very strong. Meanwhile, all these rela­tion­ships are being screwed up by David Foster Wallace.’ She flicked her face to people at the com­pass points of the room. ‘All these men—because they secretly want to be David Foster Wallace—they flip out whenev­er he’s in the paper. All the girls are like ‘David Foster Wallace, he’s really cool.’ So the guys are like ‘I hate David Foster Wallace. Every anxious writer I know is obsessed with him, because he did what they wanted to do.’ ” I shud­der again as I input those words, and think again, good Christ, I am so glad that Lipsky and I only have a rel­at­ive few friends in com­mon, first off, and secondly, it was pre­cisely nev­er to have to even deal with the pos­sib­il­ity of inter­act­ing with such hor­rible assholes that Dave made it a point to stay away from New York City as much as pos­sible as the years went on. And yet. And yet that anec­dote is a per­fectly telling tid­bit about an atmo­sphere that was very real at that early point in 1996. I was cer­tainly, crush­ingly aware of it in the sum­mer of that year when I was told that I was gonna be put in charge of shep­herd­ing Dave’s piece on David Lynch home. 

“Your prob­lem is, you wanna be Lipsky. You wanna be the dude in the car with Dave.” So said a friend when I was con­fess­ing my mis­giv­ings about the book to him. The answer to that accus­a­tion is two-fold: “Yeah, duh,” and “But it’s more com­plic­ated than that.” (And nev­er even mind the ques­tion of wheth­er I wanna be the dude get­ting paid to share my memor­ies of Dave in a car or on the phone or at Caesar’s Palace or what­not, the answer to which would be, “Well yes, but…”) And still, the first part of the answer super­cedes the second. Once the book settles in and records the nicotine-and-diners-fueled trek Lipsky embarks on with Dave, it’s Dave’s voice that dom­in­ates, and Lipsky cap­tures it beau­ti­fully. Dave’s pain­ful, con­scien­tious self-consciousness, his quick­sil­ver powers of con­cen­tra­tion and verbal dis­til­la­tion, his mord­ant wit; it’s all there. And through­out Lipsky casts him­self as a some­what cal­low Boswell, and he can be, again, rel­at­ively annoy­ing in this role, but as my friend poin­ted out, he’s meant to be. To which I replied, well, that’s fine up to a point, but why so much? Particularly in the talk about movies. Dave at one point calls Die Hard “a great film,” and Lipsky eagerly agrees, chim­ing in, “Brilliant, right? Sharp script, smarter than most art movies,” indul­ging in a par­tic­u­lar mani­fest­a­tion of the Philistinism Of The Intelligent that’s endem­ic to, you may find, more than a few Rolling Stone writers. In any event, please. Wallace must have reckoned sim­il­arly, because he says back, “But also very for­mu­laic, and rather cyn­ic­ally reusing a lot of for­mu­las.” Correct again! It could be that Lipsky is actu­ally look­ing for this kind of argu­ment from the engaged read­er, but I have to say I was­n’t thrilled to get his thirty-year-old’s per­spect­ive on the late let­ters of Nabokov, either. So what are you going to do.

The fact is the book is replete with gems, and with Wallace-esque quirks that play well gen­er­ally but will play even bet­ter for those who knew him, even a little. Like the part where he and Lipsky are dis­cuss­ing Seven, and Dave objects to all the stuff with “Blythe Danner” at the end. Of course it’s not Blythe Danner, it’s Gwyneth Paltrow, who is Blythe Danner’s daugh­ter. That kind of mis­take is pecu­li­arly Dave’s, in that, even when he got some­thing wrong, which was rare, he was par­tially, inter­est­ingly right. The Première magazine ver­sion of the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” was pub­lished with a rather sim­il­ar error; in a ref­er­ence to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Dave refers to the “ablu­tions” therein of “Vivien Leigh.” Usually when an error such as that got pub­lished, it would have been an occa­sion of mor­ti­fic­a­tion for me; but in this case, giv­en that pretty much nobody noticed it except for one friend of mine, who poin­ted it out to me, I had to laugh. Given all of the people, myself and Dave included, who had pored over that piece over and over and over again and nev­er caught it, it was as if that error was meant to live. Nonetheless, it was cor­rec­ted for the essay’s inclu­sion in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. 

There’s also a won­der­ful bit in which Dave’s dis­cuss­ing writerly craft, and he tells Lipsky, “One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression—both in lines and between the lines—that you know an enorm­ous amount. That you know and have lived intim­ately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve end­ings. And it’s like—it’s some­thing that I’m fairly good at. Is I think I can seem, I think I can seem like I know a whole lot about stuff that in fact pretty much everything that I know is right there.” This was­n’t quite what Dave was talk­ing about, but I was reminded any­way of being in the big ball­room at Caesars for the AVN Awards in ’98 and sit­ting at out table and look­ing at some of the hanging ban­ners on the upper parts of the walls advert­ising upcom­ing events. One was for what I pre­sumed would be some kind of Cirque-du-Soleil-type thingie that was called “Kontakte.” Whipping out my own par­tic­u­lar brand of cal­low­ness, I poin­ted out the sign to Dave and said, “I did­n’t know Caesars’ was so big on Stockhausen.” “What do you mean,” he asked, and I was like, you know, Stockhausen, Karleinz Stockhausen, mod­ern­ist German com­poser, very severe, you named one of Incandenza’s film­mak­ing con­tem­por­ar­ies after him in Infinite Jest; “Kontakte” is a fam­ous piano piece of his. “Oh,” Dave said, “I really had little or no idea of who Stockhausen was/is when I put that in,” seem­ing in fact to not really recall put­ting it in at all; “I just liked the name.” But lik­ing the name and intu­it­ively know­ing how to use it so that it might work as an allu­sion that you’re not neces­sar­ily aware your mak­ing but which does, in fact, turn out to be some­what apt; there, then, is a trick of genius. 

My very favor­ite thing in the whole book is all of three lines worth of text, in which Lipsky recounts a break­fast with Dave in Dave’s Illinois home, on the last day the two spend togeth­er. Here Lipsky’s meth­od is to put non-Dave-talking stuff in brack­ets, so the pas­sage begins, “[On NPR, George Burns dead today.]” And then, Dave’s com­ment: “I won­der what George Burns died of: Maybe someone just dis­patched him with a club, fig­ur­ing that was the only way.”

After laugh­ing my ass off for sev­er­al minutes at that line, as I always do, I think, yes, yes, there’s Dave right there, the guy I was so priv­ileged to know even if slightly, the guy who could toss off a great line like that so per­fectly, so unos­ten­ta­tiously. And it brings me back to break­fast in Las Vegas with Dave and Evan Wright, then at Hustler, aspir­ing to Première and oth­er places, even­tu­ally the great Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair writer and author of Generation Kill, and for the nonce one of Dave’s guides in Porn World (I being the oth­er), and Nathaniel Welch, who was doing the pho­tos for the Première piece and was coin­cid­ent­ally enough a good friend of Evan’s; they had driv­en out from L.A. togeth­er. And we’re talk­ing about vari­ous modes of nicot­ine deliv­ery, as guys will, and Evan observes that menthol cigar­ettes really tear up the lungs, and without miss­ing a beat, and in that soft dry voice of his, Dave respon­ded, “As opposed to non-menthol cigar­ettes, which leave your lungs as clean and pink as a baby’s,” and crack­ing up the table. Yes. 

But let me quibble again just a little bit, with respect to Dave’s rela­tion­ship to fame and Lipsky’s per­cep­tion of/relationship to Dave’s rela­tion­ship to fame. A bit of this, I think, and I hope I’m not being unfair here, can be gleaned before read­ing a single word of the book. The cov­er photo of Dave and one of his dogs is pretty clearly a photo of a good-looking guy who is not par­tic­u­larly into being pho­to­graphed; either that or he could be work­ing at cre­at­ing the impres­sion of being a guy who does­n’t like being pho­to­graphed. The author photo of Lipsky on the back inner flap of the book is very clearly of a fel­low who’s com­fort­able being pho­to­graphed; who’s not only com­fort­able with being pho­to­graphed, but who may be fairly aware of how well his cheekbones can “pop” in a pho­to­graph. I’m not try­ing to be unkind here. But I think that Lipsky’s own per­spect­ive on fame col­ors his per­spect­ive on Dave’s per­spect­ive in ways that, to my mind, cre­ate inac­cur­ate con­clu­sions. To wit, in an aside after Dave makes a mild com­plaint about doing stuff (e.g., pub­li­city) he “does­n’t want” to do, Lipsky observes: “[Again: Trying to show how much he does­n’t like pub­li­city. Except if he isn
‘t a geni­us, there’s no good reas­on to read the nov­el. You don’t open a one-thousand-page book because you’ve heard the author’s a nice guy. You read it—once you pop the thing open at all—because you under­stand that the author is bril­liant. He’s grabbed the wrong les­son: The people who seem to adore the press the way, say, Pooh loves a honey jar, look fool­ish; but the people who seem to hate it also risk fool­ish­ness too, because the read­er knows how good press must feel, like hav­ing the pret­ti­est girl in school drop you a smile. Like hav­ing the whole coun­try rub against your toes and twist between your ankles.]”

And I think here Lipsky, speak­ing here as his more fully-formed, present day self, is truly and hon­estly and finally wrong—not just about Dave, but in a gen­er­al way, about the desirab­il­ity of fame in our cir­cum­stances. (Which is one reas­on why I end up wrest­ling with the unpleas­ant sus­pi­cion that some of his inter­pol­a­tions dur­ing his tran­scribed dis­cus­sions with Dave are not neces­sar­ily there to con­vey Lipsky’s own thirty-year-old, trying-to-impress-a-genius cal­low­ness.) Now it’s true that in our soci­ety as it is cur­rently con­struc­ted a deep ambi­val­ence or even anti­pathy towards pub­li­city does tend to make one look a trifle eccent­ric. It’s not that Dave was anti-happiness, or anti-pleasure. But he was deeply sus­pi­cious of the happiness-and-pleasure deliv­ery mech­an­isms that are, you’ll excuse the phrase, part and par­cel of Western cul­ture in late cap­it­al­ism. He could not accept the smile from the pret­ti­est girl in school, such as it was, at face value. His ques­tion would not be, “why is she smil­ing?” because yes, at some level Dave knew very well how spe­cial he was and what kind of tal­ent he had. The ques­tion would be, rather, “What does that smile want?” Both in gen­er­al, and from him. And I think Dave thought—and I agree—that the minute you stop ask­ing that ques­tion and just start rev­el­ing in praise, not so much like Pooh lick­ing the honey jar but a pig rolling in shit, you are exist­en­tially and pos­sibly intel­lec­tu­ally doomed. In the years after Infinite Jest blew up, Dave, in my exper­i­ence, actu­ally became even more sus­pi­cious and wary of the machine, as we’ll call it for now. And of the people who approached him, and the reas­ons they did. One reas­on I think Dave hit it off with Evan so well was because Evan really had little if no idea who Dave was at the time. They got along as two smart guys would almost nat­ur­ally get along, as opposed to one smart guy who wanted, on some level, to impress a geni­us. (Evan recounts some of of the details of his friend­ship with Dave in the intro­duc­tion to his latest col­lec­tion of pieces, Hella Nation, an account I have some issues with, factually—let’s just say we recol­lect cer­tain events per­tain­ing to his rela­tion­ship to Première very, very differently—but am always moved by in the end.) I recall how pain­ful it was, on occa­sion, try­ing to con­vince him to meet cer­tain friends of mine who were also writers and were also fans of his—“I really don’t know what the point would be,” was the final word on it from his end—so I don’t think, finally, that what Lipsky’s impli­citly try­ing to call Dave out on was any­thing like a pose. I don’t believe Dave was act­ively against hap­pi­ness, or pleas­ure, but he did believe in thor­oughly inspect­ing that damn horse’s mouth. Always. And like any good philo­soph­er, was always inter­ested in just what it was that the word “hap­pi­ness” meant, any damn way. The final point being that Dave genu­inely did not think the way that a lot of us do. Get over it. 

But finally, I’d have to say that this book is abso­lutely essen­tial read­ing for those who loved Wallace’s work, and for those who loved him. And I could see it mak­ing an excel­lent gate­way into the work for those who are still scep­tic­al. For that, Lipsky deserves big time gratitude.