My favorite lunch with David Foster Wallace

A supposedly fun thing I had no part in. Or did I?

“Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”

― Carl Jung

“What do they cite for that?”

“They cite to―”

“Don’t be illiterate.”

―Justice Scalia, to me

Leonard Nimoy: Well, my work is done here.

Barney: Whadda you mean your “work is done”? You didn’t do anything.

Leonard Nimoy: Didn’t I?

The Simpsons, “Marge v. the Monorail,” Season 4, Episode 12

You could say it started with an essay published in Harper’s in April 2001. Which is when I was working for one of the participants. I don’t know when he read it, but he loved it, related to it, saw himself in it.

Then, maybe six months or so later, I met―for the first and only time―the arranger. He came to my law firm to do a legal writing seminar. It was before the books and videos and tours and celebrity. I would eventually teach from those books and give them to students.

But you could also say it started when I bought Infinite Jest in paperback in 1999 at a bookstore in Washington, DC near Dupont Circle. Or when certain academic parents drilled grammar and usage into their precocious kids. Or when one of the participants wound up in a recovery house in Massachusetts. Or something about tennis, which I loved growing up.

The thing about synchronicity, though, is that cause and effect, so beholden to one damn thing happening after another and because of another, is mostly out the window, along with the rational trustworthiness of a chronological account. If this were a brief, I’d tell it all trustworthily chronologically.

This is not a brief.

On February 1, 2007, in Orange County, California, David Foster Wallace and his wife (Karen) had lunch with Justice Scalia and his wife (Maureen). Admiring and knowing a fair amount about both men, I find their meeting and appreciating each other nothing short of extraordinary. But as connected to my own experience with them, it is beyond surreal.

While the wonderfully titled and crafted biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, makes no mention of lexicographer and legal-writing guru Bryan Garner or Justice Scalia, Garner’s memoir about his own relationship with Justice Scalia (Nino and Me) is dedicated to Wallace:

To the memory of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) without whose intervention the events recounted after page 12 of this book could never have occurred

The “intervention” was Wallace’s sitting for an interview with Garner and suggesting that Garner should interview Justice Scalia, a proposition that would eventually lead to their extensive work together on Making Your Case (2008) and Reading Law (2012), along with touring and other legal celebrity stuff.

And in Quack This Way, something of a memoir to Wallace and full publication of the interview that Garner did with Wallace, Garner writes:

Sometimes, when I’m unhappy, I’ll read David’s commencement speech immortalized in the booklet This Is Water. Or I’ll read the interview you are now holding. And it makes me happy―happier to know that there was such a man, such a mind, such a friend. His words uplift me. They give me hope. I’m not alone. Strange, isn’t it, that he didn’t find the hope within himself―the hope he gave to so many others.

I don’t think “strange” covers it.

Why I bought Infinite Jest and why I eventually read it are two different things. Nearly two different people. I bought it because (there’s one of those cause-and-effect assumptions again) it was all featured and recommended and the thing that an intellectual-ish young professional ought to know about and own. That got out of hand, the whole “Lit-Bro” phenomenon, leading to essays like “Reclaiming David Foster Wallace from the Lit-Bros.”

I didn’t read Infinite Jest until 14 years later, with one false start exactly in the middle, and Wallace’s suicide just past that mid-point.

Why did I finally read it? (Id.) At a deep low point in my life, it helped keep me from drinking myself to sleep every night (or back to sleep, as the case may be), and I’ll stop the context there. What better than a difficult, mind-bending, 1,079-page novel, most of which is about people dealing with life-wrecking dependencies (including to the item “Infinite Jest”), with 388 endnotes, some of which (like #25) are essential to having any hope of figuring out key plot points. Infinite Jest came strongly recommended by people I had sought help from and who personally knew exactly what I was feeling; one of the recommenders had read it twice.

I read it in about two weeks (and I am not a fast reader). I went on to read most of what Wallace wrote, along with lots of stuff about him. And somewhere in all that, I stumbled upon the Wallace-Garner-Scalia connection.

Garner thought that Wallace should have lunch with Justice Scalia because Garner knew that Justice Scalia admired something Wallace had written. It wasn’t Infinite Jest. It was Wallace’s April 2001 essay in Harper’s Magazine, which was a review of Garner’s Dictionary of American Usage.  

In Harper’s, the essay was “Tense Present.” In Consider the Lobster, the unedited version―nearly twice as long―is “Authority and American Usage.” If you are someone so troubled by the methodological choices of Webster’s Third that you are up for 90+ pages of footnoted frolics and detours getting to the bottom of those feelings, it might be for you. Or if not, you can just marvel at the feat. But as it turns out, Justice Scalia was such a someone. He even wrote his criticisms of Webster’s Third into a majority opinion. See MCI v. AT&T, 512 U.S. 218, 228 & n.3 (1994).

They were both “SNOOTs,” a term Wallace coined, variously standing for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks (or Nerds) of Our Time.” Apparently, Justice Scalia―devoted only child of a linguist who needled his son to alter the standard judgment language of “it is ordered that the judgment of the district court is reversed” to “be reversed” to account properly for the subjunctive―loved and embraced the term “SNOOT.” In both his essay and through the character of Avril Incandenza in Infinite Jest, Wallace relayed his own experiences with a grammar-and-usage-obsessed parent.

The lunch with Wallace and Scalia was part of events attending Justice Scalia’s visit to Claremont-McKenna. Wallace was a writing professor at Pomona College at the time. They both enjoyed their get-together, or at least said so publicly and privately. And Wallace expressed pleasant surprise that he enjoyed Justice Scalia so much notwithstanding their personal and political dissimilarity.

Indeed. I simply cannot imagine Justice Scalia wearing a bandana or behaving as Wallace frequently did in relationships and life in general. Where Wallace was so searching, loose, and ultimately lost, Justice Scalia was rooted and resolved. But who really knows?

I’ve previously written here of a powerful moment I experienced seeing photos of Justice Scalia across his whole life, from childhood to simple events of fatherhood. I felt similarly reading the essay and seeing the photos in “Good Old Wallace.” Whatever they were at the height of their professional success and celebrity, they were once kids. Kids with idiosyncratic influences and deep obsessions. Kids with intellects far beyond those around them. And those kids became adults needing to integrate all that stuff. I’ve described Justice Scalia as something of a statue to enduring virtues and values. As dissected in “Good Old Wallace,” DFW may have struggled with being a statue of a different kind.  

I’ve wondered with many artists, are they canaries in the cultural coal mine? It seems like the best artists feel more, react more, and need to create more in response. Maybe they pick up signals and frequencies lost on the rest of us. Maybe some don’t deal well with that. They’re ultimately very different, say, from lawyers, though perhaps for some that’s more by degree than kind. And maybe they frequently feel all alone in what they are feeling.

And but so there can’t have been many readers of “Authority and American Usage” who sincerely saw some part of themselves in that bizarre piece of performance art, a self-described wincing confessional, grammatical high-wire act, and philosophical jeremiad. But Justice Scalia was an unlikely one who gleefully did.

Now you may be saying, and it’s fair, I want to know what’s the connection here other than fanboy stuff. And trust me, you do. Garner and Scalia do not even rate a footnote in the biography of Wallace, and I don’t even rate that in any story of Scalia, and certainly not Garner. We’re talking gnat on the tail of the dog here, or speck on the wing of that gnat. But what if I were to tell you this:

What if the day I purchased Infinite Jest in DC were the same day I got called by Justice Scalia to offer me a clerkship? And what if the day he scolded me “Don’t be illiterate” for failing to know that “cites” is a transitive verb and should never have “to” appended were April 26, 2001, the exact same day as Harper’s Magazine hit the newsstands with “Tense Present” by David Foster Wallace? And what if the primary reason Wallace suggested to Garner that Garner should interview Justice Scalia were Wallace’s delight in an opinion by Justice Scalia that I worked on? And what if I saw and spoke with Justice Scalia in Montana within days of Wallace’s death? And what if I finished reading Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King on February 13, 2016, and closed it with tears in my eyes thinking to myself that nothing more would be written by him, and then later that day learned that Justice Scalia had died? And what if there were a half dozen more minor synchs and parallels like that?

What then? What if I told you that I had a dream of writing exactly this essay seventeen years ago and didn’t recall that dream until in the middle of writing it, and then consulted my journal and confirmed it?

Do the synchronous dates and dreams make a difference?

I would never have wanted to have had lunch with David Foster Wallace to talk about grammar or Webster’s Third. I would have told him straight up what Infinite Jest meant to me. And when I read it, I had no clue that Justice Scalia had any connection to Wallace. Imagine my surreal surprise when I learned that.

Does it matter that I didn’t have lunch with David Foster Wallace? Does it matter that I have no knowledge of any other lunch with David Foster Wallace, so picking a “favorite” was from a field of one?  Still, can you comfortably say that I didn’t have any connection to that lunch?

Didn’t I?

I think my work is done here.