My reactions to David Foster Wallace and his writing come in conflicting forms. First there’s the man himself. After hearing about his suicide last September, I wrote that I was stunned to learn about his psychological problems, which had been going on for decades. I’d read most if not all of his essays over the previous 15 years, and I didn’t have a clue that anything serious was wrong with him. In fact, his first collection, A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again, had helped me through a two-week bout with pneumonia in 1997, and his second, Consider the Lobster, was one of the secret highlights of a weeklong trip to Rome 10 years later. You can’t really go to that city, come back, and tell people that one of your favorite things about it was the book you read. But it was.
I was stunned all over again this past spring when the sad story of Wallace’s struggle with depression was laid out in the New Yorker. I felt some kinship with him. Like me, he had been a junior tennis player as a kid and had attended a small East Coast college, in his case Amherst. But there was obviously a lot of distance between us. My few failed forays into his 1,100 page novel Infinite Jest were enough to make me realize that Wallace’s mind went in all kind of directions that mine didn’t. I can remember reading his story in Esquire about tennis journeyman Michael Joyce in 1996 and thinking, That’s what tennis writing should be all about. It was an inspiration.
Then I became a tennis writer myself. You might have thought that, as someone who had read his stuff for years, I would have rejoiced at the sight of a cover story by Wallace in the New York Times sports magazine about Roger Federer. But when it appeared one Sunday in 2006, I didn’t rejoice; I groaned. For good reason: When I went to play squash that same afternoon, my opponent’s first words—I could hear them coming before they left his mouth—were, “Did you read the article by David Foster Wallace on Federer in the Times?”
“No, not yet," I answered in a dull monotone, "but I saw it.”
“It’s amazing, the best sports article I’ve read in a long time.”
We were warming up as he said this. He hit the ball softly toward me off the front wall. I slammed it back into the wall just a little harder than normal, thinking as I did so, “Really, the best sports article you’ve read in a long time. Better than anything I’ve ever written, even though I write about tennis for a ------ living?” Who was David Foster Wallace to parachute in and show me how to do my job? Why did it take the imprimatur of the New York Times to make people to consider a piece of writing worth talking about? Of course, I also knew the Federer piece was going to be top-notch and highly entertaining, which it was, even if I’ve come to see it as problematic (more on that later this week).
Now I'm crushed that there won't be more pieces from Wallace on the sport—tennis will be lesser without him, and how many writers can you say that about? He was not only a gifted and inspiring stylist, but he had the advantage of seeing the professional sport with an unjaded outsider’s eye, and the rec sport with an enthusiastic insider’s eye. As it is, we have the entire Wallace tennis oeuvre before us. Aside from sections of Infinite Jest, it consists, as far as I know, of five articles, four of which you can read on the web:
Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornadoes, from Harper’s in 1991
The String Theory, a profile of Michael Joyce, from Esquire in 1996 (I can’t get to some of the footnotes, which is a real problem since, like all DFW articles, they contain a lot of the article's most memorable observations, including one that I quote below)
Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open, from Tennis Magazine in 1996
Roger Federer as Religious Experience, from the NY Times in 2006
And from 1995, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a scathing review of her autobiography that I couldn’t find on the Internet, but which is collected in Consider the Lobster.
I’ve re-read Trig and the Joyce piece so far, and I’ll talk about those in the next post. I’m trying to place Wallace in the tennis-writing pantheon: What did he bring to the sport that no other writer has? Were there flaws in his seemingly flawless technique? If there were, they were overwhelmed by the scintillating freedom of his prose, which, except for Trig, was never as dense and difficult as his fiction. Even more important, though, was his conviction that tennis mattered, which may have been his ultimate contribution. Wallace articulated what so much of us know and love about the sport but could never dream of putting into sentences like his. Here’s an example to get us started:
Wallace describes Michael Joyce’s own love for tennis, which he was forced to play by his father:
The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it. . . . When he speaks of tennis and his career his eyes get round and pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who've devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s “choice” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest . . . since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.”
There we have the best description I’ve read of a pro’s relationship to the game: "It’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it."
Not bad for a footnote to a magazine article.
More DFW tomorrow.