BOOKS I JUST READ

October 8th 2010

First Draft Version of Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace began working on his second novelin the fall of 1991—the outgrowth of an essay he wrote that season called “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”—and by the fall of 1993 had completed a working draft. He made two photocopies of the manuscript, sent one to Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, and loaned the second to a young woman whom he was trying to impress at the time (he later told me). Pietsch was enthusiastic about the manuscript but asked Wallace to consider shortening it, so Dave asked me if I’d be willing to read it and suggest cuts. (At that time we were both working in the same town, Normal, Illinois: Dave taught at Illinois State University, and I was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press, located on ISU’s campus.) Dave’s plan was to compare Pietsch’s suggested cuts with mine, and accept the ones on which we both agreed. (He also explained he was planning to add more material, though.) I instantly agreed, jokingly adding the condition that I could keep the manuscript afterward. (I would have read it anyway.) Dave agreed, and on 3 December 1993 he gave me the huge manuscript. I needed both hands to support it.

Why me? I guess because I’d been an early supporter of his. (What follows sounds uncomfortably like tooting my own horn, so I’ll keep it brief.) I had read The Broom of the System when it was published in 1987 and had been very impressed; even if not an entirely successful novel, it struck me as written by someone possessed of genius. A few months later I was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction to be called “Novelist As Critic.” It amounted to little more than inviting my favorite novelists to contribute an essay on any literary topic, the working assumption (which I still hold) being that novelists write better criticism than most professional critics. Since all of the authors I invited were well along in their careers, I thought I should have at least one emerging writer, so I wrote to Wallace in care of his publisher and invited him to submit something, an offer he found “intriguing” (he had never written an essay for publication before). His “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” appeared in the fall 1988 issue and confirmed my impression that he was brilliant. (Our typesetter, on the other hand—a wonderful middle-aged woman who had her doubts about much of the stuff we published—thought he sounded snotty.)

We stayed in touch. I suggested Conjunctions as someplace he might submit future stories (he’d never heard of it). For the summer 1989 issue of RCF,whose staff I had joined by that time, I wrote a favorable review of Girl with Curious Hair, and along about then I invited him to contribute to a special issue we were planning on novelist David Markson. Wallace was going through a difficult period, but he came through with another brilliant essay, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (RCF Summer 1990), which did nothing to alter our typesetter’s opinion of him but certainly kept my mine sky-high. In 1992 I informed him of an opening in the English department at ISU, for which he applied and was accepted, and later that year guest-editor Larry McCaffery and I decided he had to be part of the “Younger Writers Issue” we were planning for the summer 1993 RCF. For that Wallace submitted what would become his most famous essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (which had been rejected by Harper’s because of its length) along with several selections of what he had finally decided to call Infinite Jest. (As late as January 1993 he was calling it simply the “longer thing.”) So perhaps all this support, plus similar tastes in fiction (we both revere William Gaddis, for example), led him to entrust me with his manuscript.

First, a physical description: It’s a mess—a patchwork of different fonts and point sizes, with numerous handwritten corrections/additions on most pages, and paginated in a nesting pattern (e.g., p. 22 is followed by 22A-J before resuming with p. 23, which is followed by 23A-D, etc). Much of it is single-spaced, and what footnotes existed at this stage appear at the bottom of pages. (Most of those in the published book were added later.) Several states of revision are present: some pages are early versions, heavily overwritten with changes, while others are clean final drafts. Throughout there are notes in the margins, reminders to fix something or other, adjustments to chronology (which seems to have given Wallace quite a bit of trouble), even a few drawings and doodles. Merely flipping through the 4-inch-high manuscript would give even a seasoned editor the howling fantods.

What follows is a description of its contents. I’ll cite the manuscript page numbers (hereafter abbreviated MS), and following an = sign will give the equivalent pages in the published version of Infinite Jest (hereafter abbreviated IJ), unless the section was cut, in which case I’ll provide a brief summary. (For copyright reasons I’ll have to keep my quotations of unpublished material to a minimum.) And I’ll add color commentary on points that may be of interest to future scholars.

(READ THE REST)

- Steven Moore

Posted at 5:41pm.

bandoreli:

First Draft Version of Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace began working on his second novelin the fall of 1991—the outgrowth of an essay he wrote that season called “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”—and by the fall of 1993 had completed a working draft. He made two photocopies of the manuscript, sent one to Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown, and loaned the second to a young woman whom he was trying to impress at the time (he later told me). Pietsch was enthusiastic about the manuscript but asked Wallace to consider shortening it, so Dave asked me if I’d be willing to read it and suggest cuts. (At that time we were both working in the same town, Normal, Illinois: Dave taught at Illinois State University, and I was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press, located on ISU’s campus.) Dave’s plan was to compare Pietsch’s suggested cuts with mine, and accept the ones on which we both agreed. (He also explained he was planning to add more material, though.) I instantly agreed, jokingly adding the condition that I could keep the manuscript afterward. (I would have read it anyway.) Dave agreed, and on 3 December 1993 he gave me the huge manuscript. I needed both hands to support it.
Why me? I guess because I’d been an early supporter of his. (What follows sounds uncomfortably like tooting my own horn, so I’ll keep it brief.) I had read The Broom of the System when it was published in 1987 and had been very impressed; even if not an entirely successful novel, it struck me as written by someone possessed of genius. A few months later I was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction to be called “Novelist As Critic.” It amounted to little more than inviting my favorite novelists to contribute an essay on any literary topic, the working assumption (which I still hold) being that novelists write better criticism than most professional critics. Since all of the authors I invited were well along in their careers, I thought I should have at least one emerging writer, so I wrote to Wallace in care of his publisher and invited him to submit something, an offer he found “intriguing” (he had never written an essay for publication before). His “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” appeared in the fall 1988 issue and confirmed my impression that he was brilliant. (Our typesetter, on the other hand—a wonderful middle-aged woman who had her doubts about much of the stuff we published—thought he sounded snotty.)
We stayed in touch. I suggested Conjunctions as someplace he might submit future stories (he’d never heard of it). For the summer 1989 issue of RCF,whose staff I had joined by that time, I wrote a favorable review of Girl with Curious Hair, and along about then I invited him to contribute to a special issue we were planning on novelist David Markson. Wallace was going through a difficult period, but he came through with another brilliant essay, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (RCF Summer 1990), which did nothing to alter our typesetter’s opinion of him but certainly kept my mine sky-high. In 1992 I informed him of an opening in the English department at ISU, for which he applied and was accepted, and later that year guest-editor Larry McCaffery and I decided he had to be part of the “Younger Writers Issue” we were planning for the summer 1993 RCF. For that Wallace submitted what would become his most famous essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (which had been rejected by Harper’s because of its length) along with several selections of what he had finally decided to call Infinite Jest. (As late as January 1993 he was calling it simply the “longer thing.”) So perhaps all this support, plus similar tastes in fiction (we both revere William Gaddis, for example), led him to entrust me with his manuscript.
First, a physical description: It’s a mess—a patchwork of different fonts and point sizes, with numerous handwritten corrections/additions on most pages, and paginated in a nesting pattern (e.g., p. 22 is followed by 22A-J before resuming with p. 23, which is followed by 23A-D, etc). Much of it is single-spaced, and what footnotes existed at this stage appear at the bottom of pages. (Most of those in the published book were added later.) Several states of revision are present: some pages are early versions, heavily overwritten with changes, while others are clean final drafts. Throughout there are notes in the margins, reminders to fix something or other, adjustments to chronology (which seems to have given Wallace quite a bit of trouble), even a few drawings and doodles. Merely flipping through the 4-inch-high manuscript would give even a seasoned editor the howling fantods.
What follows is a description of its contents. I’ll cite the manuscript page numbers (hereafter abbreviated MS), and following an = sign will give the equivalent pages in the published version of Infinite Jest (hereafter abbreviated IJ), unless the section was cut, in which case I’ll provide a brief summary. (For copyright reasons I’ll have to keep my quotations of unpublished material to a minimum.) And I’ll add color commentary on points that may be of interest to future scholars.
(READ THE REST)
- Steven Moore

Notes: