This week on Page-Turner, D. T. Max is writing about documents and artifacts he drew on in writing “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” his recently published biography of David Foster Wallace.
Whenever I think about literary juvenilia I think of a line from Steven Millhauser’s masterful faux-biography of a child novelist, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright”: “Third grade surprised me: I had not anticipated desks.” All the same there is something about the aura of mystery and discomfort enfolding the adult David Foster Wallace that makes you want to search even his childhood writing for clues. You are looking both for evidence of his later mental travails but even more for the seeds of the spiny, sideways muscularity of his mature prose style. Such a distinctive style—really a way of seeing the world—can’t come out of nowhere, can it?
The Ransom Center at the University of Texas houses in its neat archival boxes whatever David’s parents saved of his early efforts, including various grade-school papers, what passes among little boys for memoir (“Dark, semi long hair dark brown eyes…. Likes underwater swimming football, T.V. reading. Height 55 inches weight 69 pounds”) and a few fake ad jingles he wrote, in all probability, when I was writing similar things in grade school, during that endless wait for puberty.
That’s not a ton of stuff, but the two likely earliest efforts are the more interesting: two poems, both of which, I’m guessing, spent at least a little time pinned to the Wallace family’s refrigerator. They are eye-catching, awkward, and certainly seem to suggest the atmosphere Wallace grew up in on a one-block street near the big public university in Champaign-Urbana. It was there that his mother, a grammar expert, used to invent words when there wasn’t a satisfying one already extent: “greebles,” for instance, meant the bits of lint and sock dust you brought into bed with you.
David’s mother held sway in that hot house, that much is evident. The locutions that burst forth in both poems make you imagine Sally Wallace racing around their neat two-story house, two precocious and demanding small children underfoot and the kettle whistling. The first, a poem about bread baking, goes:
The second begins with noticeable élan:
And continues:
There are moments in these poems that herald (or just accidentally foreshadow?) the mature David’s American plainsong voice, particularly the “real” and “really” of the second couplet in the Viking poem, but the voice one most strongly hears is again that of his mother. Not just the “dayd” in the bread poem—Sally, with a huff, throwing herself down on the couch, hands still dusty with flour and hours until her philosopher husband gets home—but what seven, eight, or nine-year-old employs the subjunctive: “It’s best you go some other way”? Only the son of a grammarian.
The poems present some dating problems. The bread-baking poem would seem to be earlier, with its wildly inconsistent handwriting. You feel Wallace, a bit of a troublemaker at school, is deliberately not staying between the lines. And what’s with that odd “David” dribbling down the page? Mr. Wallace, eyes on me!
On the other hand, the content of the bread poem seems more sophisticated than the Viking one, despite the latter’s more careful pencil-manship and general all-around sense of having met the wonder that is children’s reference books. That one also contains, as far as I found, the first attempt by David to include his mother’s unmarried name when signing his own. Wallace would later insist that this addition had been foisted on him by his agent, who, having earlier worked at Sierra Books, was aware of a nature writer named David Rains Wallace. “I would have called myself Seymour Butts if he’d told me to,” Wallace recalled with more wishfulness than truth in a note to Don DeLillo, in 2001. The bread poem, though, touches on another person’s emotions; it contains evidence of what psychologists call theory of mind: knowledge—this would not ultimately get much easier for David—that other people have feelings, too.
The other person’s emotions in this case are again those of his mother, and it’s fair to say that whatever their dates, both poems lend credence to Wallace’s later insistence, once the glow of childhood had faded, that he had felt very much under her thumb as a child. In the early nineteen-nineties, he would write in the margins of his copy of Alice Miller’s “Drama of the Gifted Child”—with all the remorselessness of a grown man examining his childhood to try to figure out why he was such an unhappy thirty-something—that as a boy he had tried to be “what narcissistically deprived Mom wants you to be—performer.”
Wallace’s poems, to echo Jeffrey Cartwright again on Edwin Mullhouse, are not art. I feel as the fictitious Cartwright does when he writes: “Edwin never amounted to much as a poet, and if I include this poem in my biography it is as evidence not of his artistry but of his misery.”
And in the end, Wallace left poetry for prose. At first his progress was not rapid. His efforts at fiction, even in his last year of high school, were indifferent; works like “Ralph and the Legal Milestone,” also now housed at the Ransom Center, still don’t herald the birth of a great writer. Yet just five years later, as a senior at Amherst, he would need less than a year to write “The Broom of the System.” Has there ever been a literary development as rapid as Wallace’s? I can’t think of any. But then, though he wasn’t a poet, he was certainly a genius.
D. T. Max is a New Yorker staff writer. For more of Max’s work on Wallace, see his 2009 piece on the writing of “The Pale King,” and [this excerpt from “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story”](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-excerpt-from-every-love-story-is-a-ghost-story-a-life-of-david-foster-wallace.html) that appeared on Page-Turner.
Illustration by Philip Burke.
