Eight people (including colleagues and friends from his time at Amherst, a student that Wallace taught as a visiting professor at Amherst, Amherst professors who knew Wallace as a student, and a colleague from Pomona, where Wallace had taught creative writing since the fall of 2002) spoke about their relationships with Wallace, who committed suicide in September after an acclaimed writing career. The speakers, in sharing their experiences with Wallace, painted a multifaceted portrait of the prodigious writer, teacher, student and friend.
Amherst College Visiting Writer Alexander Chee began by describing Wallace’s commitment to the political life of the country. Most artists, according to Chee, believe they must remove themselves from this aspect of life. But Wallace always insisted that he could participate in both.
Costello, Wallace’s closest friend and sophomore year roommate at the College, took the stage to talk about Wallace’s steadfast conviction that everything in life was deeply contingent. He recalled having once referred to Wallace as a “genius,” a name to which Wallace took great offense. Wallace was deeply afraid of being a fraud, which to him represented the worst possible insult in the English language. In his opinion, being called a “genius” was fraudulent because he wholeheartedly believed that his work was only recognized out of chance.
Costello was followed by Sue Dickman ’89, who, in the fall of 1987, was a student in the only creative writing class that Wallace taught at Amherst. She spoke admiringly of his tough encouragement and the tremendous impact that he had on her writing. “He was the smartest person I have ever met,” she said of Wallace.
The audience then heard from two Amherst professors of English that taught Wallace in the ‘80s: Andrew Parker and Dale Peterson. Parker spoke about Wallace’s view of fiction as a mode of thinking. In his mind, nonfiction was a world of total noise. Parker noted the irony with which Wallace would have seen the news of his own death, as it was printed in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine alongside the faces of the Jonas Brothers and Barack Obama—part of that noise.
Peterson, Wallace’s senior honors advisor in English, spoke about the “thrilling, dizzying experience” of working with the funny, lighthearted, soft-spoken young man who always had a bandana tied around his head.
One of the speakers who just recently became acquainted with Wallace was Dara Regaignon ’93, an English professor at Pomona and Wallace’s former colleague. Regaignon first met Wallace upon her arrival at Pomona for a job interview in 2005. “He introduced himself with, ‘Hi, Dave Wallace. Go Lord Jeffs!’” Regaignon remembered. From then on, she always had a sense that he was somehow rooting for her. Regaignon, along with the other speakers, knew him as Dave. Wallace had insisted that all of his students simply call him “Dave” because, he explained, the “Professor” title made him feel like a fraud.
Corey Washington ’85, another of Wallace’s closest friends at Amherst, described his personality as a student at Amherst. He was quiet and extremely shy, both inconceivably smart and incongruently humble. Wallace refused to go to the library for less than 90 minutes at a time, claiming an hour was not long enough to get work done. When Washington once made him leave the library after only an hour, however, Wallace had written a ten-page paper.
In relationships with his friends, Wallace was dependable, committed, and unusually attentive, always listening and observing intensely, Washington continued. He recalled spending an hour at a bookstore with Wallace years after graduation. As Washington walked up to the register to purchase one of Wallace’s books, Wallace approached him and offered to give him a copy. He had been watching Washington the entire time they had been in the store. “‘I don’t get to see you that often, Corey,’ he told me. That was the kind of person he was,” Washington explained.
At the close of the program, Costello returned to the podium. He spoke about the great company that Wallace provided along with his fascinating mind. But he wanted people to leave knowing that Wallace was never a happy person, constantly filled with chatter in his head. His day-to-day life was painful. Once, when Costello and Wallace were living together in Cambridge after graduation, Costello returned home to the apartment to find Wallace experiencing a severe mental breakdown. As he called for an ambulance, Wallace kept apologizing, saying that if he died, Costello would have to pay more of the rent. “I kept telling him I didn’t care about the money,” Costello explained. “But he knew that. It was a distancing thing for him. He was dying and he still wanted to distance me, his closest friend. Does that make any sense?”