Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  If sex were all, then every trembling hand

  Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words

  —those wished-for words continued to signify the opening of a mouth, the offering of a body, the promise of intoxicating intimacy. And so it was highly awkward that the person I constantly heard these words from was my mother. She was the only woman in a house of males, and she lived with such an excess of unrequitable feeling that she couldn’t help reaching for romantic expressions of it. The cards and endearments that she bestowed on me were identical in spirit to the ones she’d once bestowed on my father. Long before I was born, her effusions had come to seem intolerably babyish to my father. To me, though, they weren’t nearly babyish enough. I went to elaborate lengths to avoid reciprocating them. I survived many stretches of my childhood, the long weeks in which the two of us were alone in the house together, by clinging to crucial distinctions in intensity between the phrases “I love you”; “I love you, too”; and “Love you.” The one thing that was vital was never, ever to say “I love you” or “I love you, Mom.” The least painful alternative was a muttered, essentially inaudible “Love you.” But “I love you, too,” if pronounced rapidly enough and with enough emphasis on the “too,” which implied rote responsiveness, could carry me through many an awkward moment. I don’t remember that she ever specifically called me out on my mumbling or gave me a hard time if (as sometimes happened) I was incapable of responding with anything more than an evasive grunt. But she also never told me that saying “I love you” was simply something she enjoyed doing because her heart was full of feeling, and that I shouldn’t feel I had to say “I love you” in return every time. And so, to this day, when I’m assaulted by the shouting of “I love you” into a cell phone, I hear coercion.

  My father, despite writing letters filled with life and curiosity, saw nothing wrong with consigning my mother to four decades of cooking and cleaning at home while he was enjoying his agency out in the world of men. It seems to be the rule, in both the small world of marriage and the big world of American life, that those without agency have sentimentality, and vice versa. The various post-9/11 hysterias, both the plague of I-love-yous and the widespread fear and hatred of the ragheads, were hysterias of the powerless and overwhelmed. If my mother had had greater scope for accomplishment, she might have tailored her sentiments more realistically to their objects.

  Cold or repressed or sexist though my father may appear by contemporary standards, I’m grateful that he never told me, in so many words, that he loved me. My father loved privacy, which is to say: he respected the public sphere. He believed in restraint and protocol and reason, because without them, he believed, it was impossible for a society to debate and make decisions in its best interest. It might have been nice, especially for me, if he’d learned how to be more demonstrative with my mother. But every time I hear one of those brayed parental cellular I-love-yous nowadays, I feel lucky to have had the dad I did. He loved his kids more than anything. And to know that he felt it and couldn’t say it; to know that he could trust me to know he felt it and never expect him to say it: this was the very core and substance of the love I felt for him. A love that I in turn was careful never to declare out loud to him.

  And yet: this was the easy part. Between me and the place where my dad is now—i.e., dead—nothing but silence can be transmitted. Nobody has more privacy than the dead. My dad and I aren’t saying a whole lot less to each other now than we did in many a year when he was alive. The person I find myself actively missing—mentally arguing with, wanting to show stuff to, wishing to see in my apartment, making fun of, feeling remorse about—is my mother. The part of me that’s angered by cellular intrusions comes from my father. The part of me that loves my BlackBerry and wants to lighten up and join the world comes from my mother. She was the more modern of the two of them, and although he, not she, was the one with agency, she ended up on the winning side. If she were still alive and still living in St. Louis, and if you happened to be sitting next to me in Lambert Airport, waiting for a New York–bound flight, you might have to suffer through hearing me tell her that I love her. I would keep my voice down, though.

  DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  [memorial service remarks, October 23, 2008]

  Like a lot of writers, but even more than most, Dave loved to be in control of things. He was easily stressed by chaotic social situations. I only ever saw him twice go to a party without Karen. One of them, hosted by Adam Begley, I almost physically had to drag him to, and as soon as we were through the front door and I took my eye off him for one second, he made a U-turn and went back to my apartment to chew tobacco and read a book. The second party he had no choice but to stay for, because it was celebrating the publication of Infinite Jest. He survived it by saying thank you, again and again, with painfully exaggerated formality.

  One thing that made Dave an extraordinary teacher was the formal structure of the job. Within those confines, he could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise. The structure of interviews was safe in a similar way. When Dave was the subject, he could relax into taking care of his interviewer. When he was the journalist himself, he did his best work when he was able to find a technician— a cameraman following John McCain, a board operator on a radio show—who was thrilled to meet somebody genuinely interested in the arcana of his job. Dave loved details for their own sake, but details were also an outlet for the love bottled up in his heart: a way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being.

  Which was, approximately, the description of literature that he and I came up with in our conversations and correspondence in the early nineties. I’d loved Dave from the very first letter I ever got from him, but the first two times I tried to meet him in person, up in Cambridge, he flat-out stood me up. Even after we did start hanging out, our meetings were often stressful and rushed—much less intimate than exchanging letters. Having loved him at first sight, I was always straining to prove that I could be funny enough and smart enough, and he had a way of gazing off at a point a few miles distant which made me feel as if I were failing to make my case. Not many things in my life ever gave me a greater sense of achievement than getting a laugh out of Dave.

  But that “neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being”: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. “A way out of loneliness” was the formulation we agreed to agree on. And nowhere was Dave more totally and gorgeously able to maintain control than in his written language. He had the most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive. Way out at word number 70 or 100 or 140 in a sentence deep into a three-page paragraph of macabre humor or fabulously reticulated self-consciousness, you could smell the ozone from the crackling precision of his sentence structure, his effortless and pitch-perfect shifting among levels of high, low, middle, technical, hipster, nerdy, philosophical, vernacular, vaudevillian, hortatory, tough-guy, brokenhearted, lyrical diction. Those sentences and those pages, when he was able to be producing them, were as true and safe and happy a home as any he had during most of the twenty years I knew him. So I could tell you stories about the bickering little road trip he and I once took, or I could tell you about the wintergreen scent that his chew gave to my apartment whenever he stayed with me, or I could tell you about the awkward chess games we played and the even more awkward tennis rallying we sometimes did—the comforting structure of the games versus the weird deep fraternal rivalries boiling along underneath—but truly the main thing was the writing. For most of the time I knew Dave, the most intense interaction I had with him was sitting alone in my armchair, night after night, for ten days, and reading the manuscript of Infinite Jest. That was the book in which, for the first time, he’d arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged. At the most microscopic level: Dave Wallace was as passionate and precise a punctuator of prose as has ever walked this earth. At the most gl
obal level: he produced a thousand pages of world-class jest which, although the mode and quality of the humor never wavered, became less and less and less funny, section by section, until, by the end of the book, you felt the book’s title might just as well have been Infinite Sadness. Dave nailed it like nobody else ever had.

  And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life, and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote from Infinite Jest), “So yo then, man, what’s your story?”

  One good, simple, modern story would go like this: “A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain. There was the person of Dave, and then there was the disease, and the disease killed the man as surely as cancer might have.” This story is at once sort of true and totally inadequate. If you’re satisfied with this story, you don’t need the stories that Dave wrote—particularly not those many, many stories in which the duality, the separateness, of person and disease is problematized or outright mocked. One obvious paradox, of course, is that Dave himself, at the end, did become, in a sense, satisfied with this simple story and stopped connecting with any of those more interesting stories he’d written in the past and might have written in the future. His suicidality got the upper hand and made everything in the world of the living irrelevant.

  But this doesn’t mean there are no more meaningful stories for us to tell. I could tell you ten different versions of how he arrived at the evening of September 12, some of them very dark, some of them very angering to me, and most of them taking into account Dave’s many adjustments, as an adult, in response to his near-death of suicide as a late adolescent. But there is one particular not-so-dark story that I know to be true and that I want to tell now, because it’s been such a great happiness and privilege and endlessly interesting challenge to be Dave’s friend.

  People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you’re afraid, and about five years ago, very noticeably, Dave stopped being so afraid. Part of this came of having settled into a good, stable situation at Pomona College. Another really huge part of it was his finally meeting a woman who was right for him and who, for the first time, opened up the possibility of his having a fuller and less rigidly structured life. I noticed, when we spoke on the phone, that he’d begun to tell me he loved me, and I suddenly felt, on my side, that I didn’t have to work so hard to make him laugh or to prove that I was smart. Karen and I managed to get him to Italy for a week, and instead of spending his days in his hotel room, watching TV, as he might have done a few years earlier, he was having lunch on the terrace and eating octopus and trudging along to dinner parties and actually enjoying hanging out with other writers casually. He surprised everyone, and maybe most of all himself. Here was a genuinely fun thing he might well have done again.

  About a year later, he decided to get himself off the medication that had lent stability to his life for more than twenty years. Again, there are a lot of different stories about why exactly he decided to do this. But one thing he made very clear to me, when we talked about it, was that he wanted a chance at a more ordinary life, with less freakish control and more ordinary pleasure. It was a decision that grew out of his love for Karen, out of his wish to produce a new and more mature kind of writing, and out of having glimpsed a different kind of future. It was an incredibly scary and brave thing for him to try, because Dave was full of love, but he was also full of fear—he had all too ready access to those depths of infinite sadness.

  So the year was up and down, and he had a crisis in June, and a very hard summer. When I saw him in July he was skinny again, like the late adolescent he’d been during his first big crisis. One of the last times I talked to him after that, in August, on the phone, he asked me to tell him a story of how things would get better. I repeated back to him a lot of what he’d been saying to me in our conversations over the previous year. I said he was in a terrible and dangerous place because he was trying to make real changes as a person and as a writer. I said that the last time he’d been through near-death experiences, he’d emerged and written, very quickly, a book that was light-years beyond what he’d been doing before his collapse. I said he was a stubborn control freak and know-it-all—“So are you!” he shot back at me—and I said that people like us are so afraid to relinquish control that sometimes the only way we can force ourselves to open up and change is to bring ourselves to an access of misery and the brink of self-destruction. I said he’d undertaken his change in medication because he wanted to grow up and have a better life. I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. And he said: “I like that story. Could you do me a favor and call me up every four or five days and tell me another story like it?”

  Unfortunately I only had one more chance to tell him the story, and by then he wasn’t hearing it. He was in horrible, minute-by-minute anxiety and pain. The next times I tried to call him, after that, he wasn’t picking up the phone or returning messages. He’d gone down into the well of infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story, and he didn’t make it out. But he had a beautiful, yearning innocence, and he was trying.

  THE CHINESE PUFFIN

  The puffin was a Christmas present from my brother Bob. It came in an unmarked plastic bag and appeared to be some sort of puppet or plush toy. It had a fleece-lined body and a big, orange, squeeze-inviting beak, and its eyes were set in triangles of black fur that lent it an expression of sorrow or anxiety or incipient disapproval. I warmed to the bird right away. I gave it a funny voice and personality and used it to entertain the Californian I live with. I sent Bob an enthusiastic thank-you note, in reply to which he informed me that the puffin was not a toy at all but a golf accessory. He’d bought it in the pro shop at Bandon Dunes, a golf resort in southwest Oregon, to remind me of the fun I could have golfing and birding in Oregon, where he lives. The puffin was a head cover for a golf driver.

  My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-size chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

  I do own a cheap set of clubs, but there was no way I was going to impale my puffin on one of them. For one thing, the Californian had taken to clutching it in bed every night. The puffin had quickly established itself as a minor household character. Out in the world of nature, real puffins (and many other pelagic birds) were suffering badly from overfishing of the oceans and degradation of their nest sites, but nature could be a cold and abstract thing to love from the middle of New York City. The toy was furry and immediate.

  In Jane Smiley’s great novel The Greenlanders, there’s a tale about a Norse farmer who brings a polar bear cub into his house and raises it as his son. Although the bear learns to read, it can’t help remaining a bear, with a bear’s huge appetite, and eventually it begins to eat up all the farmer’s sheep. The farmer knows he has to get rid of the bear, but he can never quite bring himself to do it, because (according to the story’s refrain) the bear has such beautiful soft fur and such beautiful dark eyes. Metaphorically, for Smiley, the bear represents a destructive passion too pleasurable to resist. But the story also works as a straightforward warning about sentimental idolatry. Homo sapiens is the animal that wants to believe, in defiance of harsh natural law, that other animals are part of its family. I can make a pretty good ethical argument for our responsibility to other species, and yet I sometimes wonder whether, at root, my concern for biodiversity and animal welfare might be a kind of regression t
o my childhood bedroom and its community of plush toys: a fantasy of cuddliness and interspecies harmony. Smiley’s smitten farmer is finally driven to offer the flesh of his own arm to his insatiable bear-child.

  Late last fall, while the Times was running a series of long articles about the crisis of pollution, water shortages, desertification, species loss, and deforestation in China and I was managing to read no more than fifty words of any of them, a terrific new Jeep commercial was airing during football games. You know: the one where a squirrel, a wolf, two horned larks, and an SUV driver join together in song while rolling down an empty highway through pristine forest. I especially enjoyed the moment when the wolf gulps down one of the larks, receives a disapproving look from the SUV driver, spits the lark back out unharmed, and bursts into song. I knew perfectly well that SUVs were even more hostile to horned larks than wolves were; I knew that my domestic appetites were part of the same beast that was devouring the natural world in China and elsewhere in Asia; and yet I loved the Jeep ad. I loved the worried eyes and soft fur of my golf accessory. I didn’t want to know what I knew. And yet: I couldn’t stand not knowing, either. One afternoon, with a kind of grim foreboding, I went to the bedroom and grabbed the puffin by its wings and stuck it underneath a bright lamp and turned it inside out, and there, sure enough, was the label: HANDMADE IN CHINA.