Recently I saw The End of the Tour, the biopic about the interviews that David Lipsky
conducted with David Foster Wallace in the wake of the publication of his
acclaimed work Infinite Jest. To
be honest, for much of my life I have had mixed feelings about Wallace. I
remember that, when I first heard about his suicide (I was in Respite at the
time), I decided to blame myself. I thought that some comments I had made about
him to some acquaintances– that Infinite Jest was a massive hoax perpetrated on a credulous public
– had somehow got back to him and that he had killed himself as a result. This
was, I admit, a pretty bizarre and ridiculous delusion but was typical of my
mind-state then.
In the years since his death, I have accepted that I
actually do quite like Wallace quite a bit. I still have some issues with Infinite
Jest but I think his short stories are
era-defining works of art. I have read a fair few, thought not all, of his
other books: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, Consider
the Lobster, his graduate thesis on fate
and free will, and A
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (a
highly apposite title I think). Oblivion, in particular, is probably my all-time favourite book, especially the
story “The Soul is Not A Smithy”. (I am tempted to perform a critical analysis
of this work but, for once, I think I might do too much of a disservice to the
story by murdering it through interpretation.)
The End of the Tour is
an interesting film in more ways than one. It possesses a dynamic that is
subtle but unmistakable – in the early part of the film Lipsky and the audience
are teased by the idea that Wallace might be gay. This slight worry in the
viewer’s mind is exacerbated rather than eased by the fact that Wallace talks
incessantly about getting laid and about masturbation. Is the famous author
trying too hard? As the film goes on, however, the two men relax around each
other, recognizing that both are genuinely straight, and the audience relaxes
with them. This odd narrative tension, creating doubt about a character’s
sexuality and then allaying it, is by the way something I have observed in
other films and plays (although I cannot quite at this moment cite any as
examples).
Wallace was something of a rock-star author and his concerns
were far reaching. He was interested in addiction, depression, Wittgenstein and
the workings of the mass media. He struggled with depression his whole life. In
story after story, he argued persuasively that mental problems were the
consequence of the familial situation, and he specialized in presenting
characters virtually paralysed by self-critical self-consciousness. One of his
principal themes, though, which I want, perhaps perversely, to single out, was
masturbation – Wallace wrote about it a lot. Wallace's chief concern with respect to this was to show the central role that sexual
fantasy plays during the act of jerking off. Obviously no stranger to the private joys
of onanism himself, Wallace was suspicious of people who didn’t wank as much as he did.
From “Mister Squishy”, for example, this description of the unsympathetic
Laleman: “Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he masurabated, Laleman’s
fantasy involved a view of himself, shirtless and adorned with warpaint, standing
with his boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upwards at what
lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon.”
Wallace was profoundly engaged with the problems and
pitfalls of sexual relations but sexuality itself was something that he seldom
touched on. There are, as far as I can recall, no gay characters in his
fiction. The closest he comes to describing one is in the story “Good Ol’ Neon”
in which the narrator, who describes himself quite ‘honestly’ (if that is the
word) as a fraud (and feels more of a fraud for admitting that he feels one),
diagnoses his shrink as a repressed homosexual: “It was pretty clear that there
were some major sexual insecurities and maybe even homosexual ambiguities that
Dr. Gustafson was subconsciously trying to hide from himself and reassure
himself about, and one obvious way he did this was to sort of project his
insecurities onto his patients…” The narrator dislikes this and his
prescription is brutal. He considers telling his shrink in a note that
Gustafson is “a deeply repressed homosexual or androgyne and had no real
business charging patients to let him project his own maladjustments onto them,
and the truth was that he’d be doing himself and everybody else a favour if
he’d just go over to Garfield Park and blow somebody in the bushes and try
honestly to decide if he liked it or not.”
The narrator of “Good Ol’ Neon” is not as smart as Wallace
and, oddly, it is this lack of self-knowledge that saves him from being a total
fraud. How much worse to be Wallace himself! Towards the end of the story, Wallace introduces himself
into it, describing himself in the third person: “considerable time having
passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of
literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower
than he’d had at Aurora West”. In what way indescribable? The suicide that
carried Wallace off at the end was not his first attempt: he had very nearly
killed himself when at College and had been institutionalised and put on
suicide-watch as a result. I don’t believe that the reason for Wallace’s severe
depression in early adulthood is publicly known but, in The End of the Tour, he describes it as a spiritual crisis and goes into
no more details. Can we conjecture that, in some literally inconceivable way,
he’d had a homosexual experience at University and it fucked him up for the
rest of his life? Certainly false rumours circulated about Wallace. One rumour
about him was that he had been a heroin addict. In the film, Wallace repudiates
this rumour in the strongest possible terms, saying that he would never ever
put anything in his arm. “My only addiction has only ever been television.”
I am not seriously suggesting that Wallace had a homosexual
experience at College, although this would be a simple and superficially
plausible explanation for his clinical depression and his obsession with
masturbation. Real life is more complicated than that. In the real world,
heterosexual men simply don’t have homosexual experiences – unless they have
been raped, if not literally than psychologically. Wallace’s spiritual crisis
remains a mystery, at least to me. But such a crisis is not uncommon – arguably
TS Eliot had some kind of spiritual crisis before he wrote The Waste Land and
resolved this crisis by finding God. It seems that something similar
happens to a lot of great artists and it is tempting to view such crises as
sexual ones; it is an idea that I think people often think but never say aloud.
All this raises the question. Would you rather be gifted or happy?
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