"Tell me a story about how things will get better," David Foster Wallace asked his friend Jonathan Franzen last summer. It was a particularly dark summer for Wallace, mired in a depression that ended, on Sept. 12, in suicide.
Franzen spoke Saturday at a simple memorial service at Bridges Hall on the campus of Pomona College, where in 2002 Wallace was named the first Roy E. Disney endowed professor of creative writing and professor of English.
"He was in a terrible and dangerous place as a man and a writer," Franzen told the writer's friends and family, colleagues and students. "I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. He said, 'Tell me another one.' "
Wallace had stopped picking up the phone, Franzen said, his voice cracking, and entered a "well of infinite sadness."
It was a dark, blustery Saturday in Southern California. The 200 or so people assembled for the service included Wallace's wife, Karen, his sister, Amy, and his parents.
There were many beautiful, serious, sorrowful young people. A large bouquet of sunflowers in front of the speaker's podium looked oddly garish. The silence in the room was broken periodically by a muffled snuffling. People leaned against each other.
Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown, spoke next: "Working with David was a thrill and an honor," he said.
Pietsch talked about the joys and challenges of editing Wallace's books, including his acknowledged masterpiece, the novel "Infinite Jest."
Wallace, he said, "preferred notes in tiny fonts with no margin above all other kinds of communication. I think he wanted to use every word in the English language."
Pietsch also mentioned Wallace's discomfort with public attention. "People who see me as a golden boy," he recalled the author saying, "make me feel lonely and alone."
This may be the most difficult part of the Wallace story, a contradiction that is almost impossible to resolve. Wallace was revered by many for his empathy and thoughtfulness, for his thank-you notes to those who worked on his books and his generous, lengthy comments on student papers.
"People who read him expected to be intimidated by him in person," Pietsch said. He paused briefly, waving his hands across the podium, as if to say, "I can do this, just give me a minute."
Then, he continued: "His great act of kindness to me was to allow me to bring his books into the world."
