[Answers]

IT ALL GETSQUITE TRICKY

By David Foster Wallace. In the past two years, Wal-lace wrote the following letters to students in AnneFadiman’s advanced nonfiction writing classes at YaleUniversity, after the students read an excerpt fromWallace’s essay “Getting Away from Already PrettyMuch Being Away from It All” on attending the Illi-nois State Fair, which is included in his collection ASupposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and ap-peared in the July 1994 issue of Harper’s Magazineas “Ticket to the Fair.” Until his death in September,Wallace was a contributing editor of the magazine.

Question (by Alexander Borinsky): “Haveyou ever not written something for fear thesubject might read it?”

Dear Ms. Fadiman, Mr. Borinsky, et alia:I think I detect a subtext to the question. Here’s

a mortifying fact: When I did the State Fair piece,I thought it was a fairly neutral, even sympathet-ic portrait of the Fair and venue and locale and at-

tendees. Then, when the Harper’s version cameout, I got hate mail, third-party hate mail sent toarea newspapers, etc. The gist of which mail be-ing, Here’s this native who’s gone all East Coastand uptown now coming back and making fun ofhis roots. (Folks were especially upset about the ref-erences to lots of people being fat. It was and is alltrue—go figure.) So after that I got more, shall wesay, sensitive to the reactions of subjects.

There’s a delicate balance here, as I’m sure youguys have observed and discussed. On the onehand, a writer has to understand that his primaryallegiance is to the reader, not to the article’s sub-ject. Excessive concern about subjects’ feelingscan lead to all sorts of dishonesty that the readerwill be able to detect (whether this detection isconscious or not). On the other hand, life is short,and hard, and it seems like good policy to inflictthe absolute minimum pain/humiliation on otherpeople as we schlep through the day. Plus, if thereader gets the idea that gratuitous ridicule or con-tempt is being heaped on a subject, then there’s awhole different, nastier vibe of dishonesty or hid-den agenda that can surround the piece. So it allgets quite tricky.

I don’t do that many nonfiction pieces, so theproblem of subjects’ feelings doesn’t come up that

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much. I think it’s got to be much, much more aproblem for full-time working journalists. I oncedid a piece about an athlete, and the athlete wasindiscreet and told me personal stuff that I knew hewould not (on sober reflection) want to see publi-cized . . . but he’d said it, and if I didn’t include itout of nothing but concern for the subject’s feelingsthen wasn’t I being a hack and screwing over thereader . . . and so on and so forth. After muchdithering and hand-wringing, I sort of restructuredthe piece so that the indiscreet stuff he told mewouldn’t be germane enough to warrant inclusion.

The piece ended up pretty good, and I felt goodthat I’d found a way to avoid embarrassing a de-cent guy without screwing the reader over. But itdoesn’t always work that well, and sometimes Ihaven’t been very strong or smart about finessingthis issue. I’ve had to back out of certain book re-views, for example, because it turned out that Ihated the book, the book was simply bad, and I sim-ply refused to spend a week and 750 words skew-ering a book or explaining point by point why itwas bad . . . mainly because I have myself beenskewered, and know how it feels, and after a cer-tain age I just didn’t have the stomach to do it tosomeone else. There’s a sort of narcissistic empa-thy involved in cases like that; it’s not at all clearto me that I did the “right” thing by refusing to dothose reviews. It’s more like I just couldn’t . . . andthe organ had little problem finding someone elseto do the panning/skewering.

So it’s all ethically gray as hell. Whatever.Hope this makes some kind of sense.

Tally Ho. /dfw/

Dear Mr. Wallace,In writing about the Illinois State Fair, you cri-

tique the animal-like fairgoers, and yet you alsosubtly mock your own voice as narrator. As awriter, how does one find a balance betweenmocking one’s target and mocking oneself?

Many thanks, Daniel Fromson

Dear Mr. Fromson et al.:Well, hmm. You’re about to get a more or less

freewritten reply, which will be my attempt atsimulating a live, sweaty, physically-present-typeanswer. Said answer being mainly: I don’t know.At least I’m not sure whether (a) there is such abalance, and (b) if there is, whether finding it canbe prescribed in any kind of formula. This isn’t tosay that I don’t see your question’s point—at leastI think I do, although I did that piece a long timeago, and I don’t have any copies of it here to lookat. Part of me wants to object to “you critique theanimal-like fairgoers,” although I seem to recall stuffabout clinically fat people engaged in peripateticeating that made them look bovine. But I also re-

call a certain tenderness for the Midwesternersthere (of whom I was, by origin and upbringing,one), and an attempt to explain, for the mainlycosmopolitan readers of Harper’s, some of the ef-fects rurality, physical distance, lack of stimula-tion, etc. have on people. Still, I must also admitthat I got some pissed-off letters indeed from Mid-westerners, along with some aggrieved press men-tions in the Midwest—“Local boy goes off eastand writes smart-ass article for hip New York mag,”etc. Some people sure felt mocked, it would appear.

You’re going to hate this, but the truth is thatthe best source for the kind of “How do you bal-ance . . .” instruction you ask for is probably yourown prof., Ms. Fadiman. For me, at any rate, mostof what I feel I know about the issue comes fromteaching—it’s much easier to see problems andbe coherent about abstract rules in students’ workthan it is in one’s own. So: We’re talking hereabout a certain very specific kind of essay, onethat’s (a) critical, (b) comic, (c) descriptive (asopposed to mainly argumentative or something).Conditions (a) and (b) create the sense of “mock-ery” your question refers to. And I’d say that thisis a dangerous kind of piece to do, because it setsup Narrator Persona challenges, more specificallythe Asshole problem. I’m sure you guys have seenit—it’s death if the biggest sense the reader getsfrom a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very crit-ical person, or from a comic essay that the narra-tor’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance ofbeing just as critical about oneself as one is aboutthe stuff/people one’s being critical of. Seeing thisin print, though, I realize that it looks extremelyobvious and dull. So hmm. Maybe the root chal-lenge here is to form and honor a fairly rigorouscontract with the reader, one that involves hon-esty and unblinkingness (if the latter’s a word). Sothat the reader gets the overall impression thathere’s a narrator who’s primarily engaged in tryingto Tell the Truth . . . and if that truth involves theputziness of other people or events, so be it, but ifit involves the narrator’s own schmuckiness, lim-itations, prejudices, foibles, screw-ups at the event,etc., then these get told about too—because thetruth-as-seen is the whole project here (as opposedto just mockery, or just self-ridicule, or just self-superiority, etc.). I have no idea how to reduce thatto any kind of pragmatic recipe—but I think thatwhatever serious, infrangible contract you makewith yourself and the reader, the reader will pick upon, even if it’s not conscious. The problem is thatit usually takes two or three rambling, incoherentdrafts even to start to have any idea what the rootproject and contract of a given piece ought to be. . . it’s not the sort of thing where you can just im-pose a rhetoric or contract from the outset. Noneof which probably makes much sense . . .

Tally Ho,David Wallace

32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2008

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