D.F.W.’s “Pale King” Archive, Now Open

This week the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin opened its “Pale King” holdings to researchers. This is material that the Ransom Center acquired along with the rest of David Foster Wallace's archive in 2010, but Wallace's publisher, Little Brown, retained it until after "The Pale King" was published. (There are multiple drafts of the sections that became Wallace’s novel, polished to a shine, as well as earlier versions of the narrative and a half-dozen notebooks.) “The Pale King” was Wallace’s final book, the one he kept at for ten years and that defeated him, and everyone looking in these six boxes should prepare herself for Wallace’s pain. It’s visible in the images that Ransom has made available, especially the one marked “WHAT IS PEORIA FOR?” (click the image above to expand), a piece of writing worked on during the summer of 2000, when Wallace had an uncomfortable fellowship at the Lannan Foundation’s Marfa retreat, in Texas. The typed draft is mostly on the back of Illinois State University stationery and putatively authored by “NOBODY AT ALL.” “Neither freewriting nor perfectionist paralysis,” Wallace writes below his title, an interim one for what became “The Pale King.” He adds, “And not just sustained bursts of language/voice—SCENES.” It’s not clear if Wallace meant this to stay in the text for the reader or was cheering himself on—or both.

Similarly, on another page in the archive, a list of names in the book that seems to come from around the same period (at right, click to expand), he characterizes his novel as “a tornado of characters,” reminiscent of a comment he made to his editor Michael Pietsch, that writing “The Pale King” was like trying to build a chicken coop in a tornado, itself a quote from Faulkner. Elsewhere, more aptly, he asks, “Tornado or stasis.”

I can remember feeling similar discomfort when I read through some of these pages while they were still in the offices of Little, Brown last winter. On one page, for instance, I saw the notation “please God, help” in a sad little heart-shaped bubble above a two-hundred-plus word sentence. This is written out on neatly lined paper for a section set in “Metamora,” a town in Indiana whose name Wallace could not resist, for obvious reasons. (The snaking sentence, played with somewhat, and minus the town name, is now in Section VIII of “The Pale King.”) Seeing these words reminded me in the most visceral way of a visit I paid to the Malcolm Lowry archives in 2007. Lowry and Wallace were in some ways opposites—Lowry epitomized the glamour of drinking; he died choking on his own vomit, while Wallace embodied the struggle for sobriety, the ethos of personal responsibility. Wallace found “Under the Volcano” so self-pitying he couldn’t read it, as he noted in a letter. But, in Lowry, one suspects, he also sensed an uncomfortably near relation, one who also struggled with an unfinishable novel, “October Ferry to Gabriola.” And in extremis Lowry too called on a higher power. Among his four thousand draft pages at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver are prayers to Flaubert, Turgenev, and “E. A. Poe.’ And he especially seeks the help of the patron saint of lost causes. “St. Jude, SOS,” he writes in one of his marginal scribbles.

What’s odd in Wallace’s case, though, is that while Lowry had lost the necessary focus to write a great book, I don’t think Wallace had. There is great energy in the drafts found in the archives, a wide imagination and a courage to try different things. The pages that follow the assertion that “WHAT IS PEORIA FOR?” has been written by “NOBODY AT ALL” contain an intricate phone conversation between two I.R.S. operatives, Reynolds and his subordinate Claude Sylvanshine. The phone call is a good setup for Wallace: a tricky mise en scène, an appealingly oblique way to convey information, a technique that sketches personality as absence. Wallace loved voice and the voices here are strong and assertive. The relationship between the duo emerges, delicate and unclear. (“Lovers? Roomies?” Wallace asks in square brackets in the draft. You can read the section in slightly different form starting on page 356 of “The Pale King”). No question energy and talent are on rich display. For Wallace the problem was now elsewhere. “How,” he asks at the bottom of the sheet next to the comment about a tornado, “do precis/characters cohere?”

His solution, never quite implemented in the book, was to make the story a battle between those who wanted to automatize the Service and those who resisted, with Reynolds and Sylvanshine on the pro-automation side. Not a great plot, yet from time to time it pays off. At the end of this draft section, Reynolds gets a bit too aggressive in telling Sylvanshine how to do his job. (Page 370 in the book.) Wallace has the following signoff between the two:

“All I’m doing is lining up a protocol for next weeks’ field-, Claudie.”

“What am I, a machine?”

Alongside these words Wallace writes “Strong.” It makes you happy to see.

_D.T. Max is a New Yorker staff writer. His book “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace” was recently published.

Read more of Max’s posts on Wallace for Page-Turner.

Top: Typescript coversheet draft of What is Peoria For?, one of the early titles for “The Pale King.” © David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Bottom: Handwritten list including characters in “The Pale King,” designated a “Tornado of Characters” in the left margin. © David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Images courtesy of Harry Ransom Center.