Magic Hours (25 page)

A nameless energy gathers as one reads deeper into
Travels with Herodotus,
and one begins to realize that, in many ways, Kapuscinski's previous books, however brilliant, were somewhat impersonal. Here, finally, we experience the early tremors Kapuscinski underwent for the privilege to write them. Not all of it is painful; much of it, in fact, is delightful—especially the revelation that Kapuscinski learned English from Hemingway. And one finally sees that in writing about Herodotus Kapuscinski is actually writing about himself. Herodotus tried to get the best information available, Kapuscinski notes, “and, given the epoch, this speaks to a tremendous expenditure of effort and to great personal determination.... And if he knows something, how does he know it? Because he heard, he saw.”

Kapuscinski saw more, and more clearly, if not always perfectly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction, and made many of us want to travel for ourselves, and see for ourselves. Herodotus, Kapuscinski reasonably imagines, interviewed many of his subjects by campfire.
“Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality,” he writes. And so “the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flames' renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination.” How much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone.

 

—2007

David Foster Wallace

 

I
n the autumn of 2005, an email with the unpromising subject header of “Thought you'd like this!!!” landed in my inbox. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for nonexistent computer viruses, and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address—May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: the commencement speaker for Kenyon College's graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.

The novelist Richard Ford spoke at my college graduation; thirteen years later, I can recall precisely nothing of what he said. Which does not mean it was bad. The commencement
address—not quite an essay, more intimate than a speech—is a highly particular literary form. It is also a uniquely disposable one. Imagine you have written the greatest commencement address in history. What do you with it, once it has been delivered? The answer: nothing. I wrote a rather nice one a few years ago for the graduating class of my hometown community college. Would anyone like to read it? I suspected as much. When the graduation caps are thrown into the air, the commencement address's only obvious utility is jettisoned along with them.

Wallace's address managed to avoid this fate not because it was great (though it was). The address was saved, rather, thanks to the enterprising soul who transcribed it from video and posted it on the Internet, where, somehow, it came to the attention of my family friend—a woman who would not have known David Foster Wallace if he fell on her. Thanks to the enthusiasm of people like her, and the magic of the cut-and-paste function, the address became a small sensation and must now rank high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote.

Wallace was often accused, even by his admirers, of having a fatal weakness for what Nabokov once referred to as “the doubtful splendors of virtuosity.” Standing before the graduates of Kenyon College, Wallace opted for a tonal simplicity only occasionally evident in the hedge mazes of his fiction. He spoke about the difficulty of empathy (“Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not the absolute center of”), the importance of being well adjusted (“which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”), and the essential lonesomeness of adult life (“lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation”). Truthful, funny, and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else—the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness,
some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.

I knew Dave Wallace well enough to have responded to the news of his September 2008 suicide with overwhelming grief, though I did not know him nearly well enough to have had any knowledge of his decades of depression. In my shock I sought refuge in the only oasis I could find: his work. While I knew no answers would be found there, I hoped that rereading Wallace would provide some vague, analgesic insight into his (then) unfathomable decision. Many others were doing the same, and a number of commentators pointed to a passage in Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech, where he discusses “the old tired cliché about the mind being ‘an excellent servant and a terrible master.'” Wallace goes on to say, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.”

 

 

“Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address—May 21, 2005” now has a proper title,
This Is Water,
and a colophon belonging to Little, Brown, Wallace's longtime publisher. In it, part of the above passage has been gently removed, and it is not difficult to understand why. Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace's work (and there are many: the patriarch of
Infinite Jest
is a suicide; Wallace's story “Good Old Neon” is narrated by a suicide) now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it. These are craters that cannot be filled. The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.

Over the last six months, at least, this is what I have been telling myself. For all the obvious extraliterary reasons,
This Is Water
is often an extremely painful reading experience, and in this opinion
I cannot imagine I will be alone. When Wallace defines thinking as “learning how to exercise some control over how and
what
you think,” when he describes his own mental “default setting” as one of selfishness and solipsism and despair and then explains that part of being an adult is developing the discipline “to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over,” and when he suggests that the “capital-T Truth” of life “is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head,” his intended audience of college graduates floats away and the haunting, answerless questions crowd suffocatingly in. To whom, you wonder, was he really speaking?

While some may question the decision to publish Wallace's address as a book—and its interior design of one sentence per page is not much of a rebuttal to that question—it would take a small, charred heart to find any impure motives here. Future readers of
This Is Water
will have less trouble reconciling what it says with what its author ultimately did, and they, I think, are the audience this book is meant for.

The terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems.
This Is Water
does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace's defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency—the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.

 

—2009

O
n a bathwater-warm night in Portland, Oregon, several hundred people waited outside Cinema 21 to see a six-year-old film that was widely available on DVD. Nearly everyone here had seen the film at least once, and some had seen it twenty times. It was around 10 p.m.; show time was not for another hour. I walked up and down the line, gravitating toward anyone who seemed particularly displaced or puzzled. One young woman was staring fixedly into space, her grinning boyfriend beside her. When I asked what brought her out, she thumbed toward the boyfriend. “It's so poorly made,” he said, exultantly.

A large shaggy kid in a black leather jacket walked by with a handheld camera—an aspiring journalist, it turned out. He wanted to document tonight's premiere; he hoped that, as soon as tomorrow night, his movie would be up on YouTube, where it would join many other, similarly homegrown opening-night chronicles. “This is
amazing
!” the aspiring journalist said, as
people recounted for him their favorite lines from the film: “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” “I feel like I'm sitting on an atomic bomb waiting for it to go off!” “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”

A man wearing a tuxedo-print T-shirt and in the obvious employ of the theater began to work the line, dispensing rubber-banded bouquets of plastic spoons. Soon, all along the line, the spoons were clicking like castanets in the hands of the impatient crowd.

By 11:15 I was in my seat. The film itself, meanwhile, was in no danger of starting. After a while, the young man in the tuxedo-print T-shirt bounded to the front of the theater and climbed onto the stage. He introduced himself as Ian and told us that he “got on his hands and knees to get this movie here.” He urged us to keep in mind while watching the film that its director, one Tommy Wiseau, submitted it for consideration to the Academy Awards in 2003. Ian reminded us of the spoons he had handed out and specified when we were supposed to throw them at the screen. “Don't blow your wad on spoons all at once,” he said. “You'll have plenty of chances.” Finally, he warned those who had not yet seen tonight's film that the first twenty minutes “are kind of... unusual. This movie doesn't work in the way other movies work. Or in the way reality works. You have to acclimate to it.” With a carnival barker flourish, Ian raised his hands as the curtains behind him parted. The WISEAU FILMS logo appeared onscreen to a volley of spoons. The opening bars of the film's tasteful, insipid piano-and-bassoon soundtrack resulted in the first of several standing ovations. Following that, potted shots of San Francisco's Golden Gate, Alcatraz, the Bay, a trolley car—all filmed at defiantly diverse times of day. The equally unrecognizable names of the cast and crew cycled by to various levels of applause. The last name to appear was that of Tommy Wiseau. The first character to appear was played by Tommy Wiseau. His first line in the film (“Hi,
babe!”) is a tiny miracle of inorganic delivery, but no one that night could hear it: half of the audience was still chanting his name.

 

 

When
The Room
was released in 2003, it was marketed as a drama with the searing intensity of “Tennesee [sic] Williams.” Independently produced movies that lack the garlands of film-festival approval are rarely marketed at all, but
The Room
came backed by a multidisciplinary campaign: television and print ads, a making-of companion book, and a gaudy Los Angeles premiere to which Tommy Wiseau—the film's director, writer, star, producer, executive producer, and distributor—pulled up in a rented limousine. At some of
The Room's
first screenings, half of
The Room
's first audience walked out after twenty minutes; the other half, according to one witness, was paralyzed by laughter. Its two-week take cashed out at a reported $1,900. At that rate, in order to earn a return on Wiseau's $6 million investment in the film,
The Room
would have had to play for another twelve decades.

The artist gambles, the art emerges, both withdraw in disgrace. A shapely, sad, familiar story—and it should have ended there. But among
The Room
's costlier marketing ploys was a billboard, on which, looming over L.A.'s Highland Avenue, could be seen a one-story-tall reproduction of Wiseau's strikingly asymmetrical face, which resembled nothing so much as the mug shot of a man arrested for solicitation after a sixty-hour meth bender. Despite
The Room
's disastrous first run, Wiseau paid to keep the billboard up for one year, then two, three, four. By the time it was taken down in 2008, the billboard had turned into one of those odd, Brown Derby-ish landmarks in which Los Angeles specializes. (Wiseau, who is known to bat away all questions regarding his personal life, has never revealed how much the billboard set him back, but he has said, “Let's put it this way: It cost a lot of money.
You can buy a brand new car. Maybe two.” The average monthly rate for Hollywood-area billboard rental is around $5,000.)

Thanks to the billboard, and Wiseau's efforts to convince one Los Angeles theater to offer monthly viewings of
The Room
, word of the film, and its mysterio creator, slowly got around. By 2006,
The Room
was a cult hit in Los Angeles. Today the film is playing as a midnight movie in two dozen cities around the country; it recently opened in Toronto and London, and screenings are being planned in Scotland and New Zealand.

Wiseau, meanwhile, has been forced into a peculiar marketing position. The serious drama heralded by
The Room
's original campaign was now being called by its director a “quirky new black comedy.” The marketing copy branded on the film's DVD case typifies this doublethink. “Can You Really Trust Anyone?” the first, sober tagline reads. Just below it: “It's a Riot!”