Read Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace for Free Online Page B

wanted to be protected by it. The ancients were part one of Kennick’s three-part introduction to the field he loved. Kennick required a paper every two weeks. The student was supposed to encounter the materialfresh, using only original research and thinking, without consulting secondary sources. “I want you to be writers of prose, not processors of words,” Kennick would explain. Wallace met this rigorous timetable with a routine of his own. He would write a draft, then revise it twice longhand, then revise that revision twice on his Smith-Corona, pecking away with two fingers.
    Kennick restricted papers to five pages, because he thought that compression made for better thinking. Wallace, in thrall to his galloping mind, could not write short. One time Kennick had Wallace count the words in one of his papers and found he had squeezed five hundred onto each page, nearly double the norm. He gave Wallace an A-plus in the class anyway. Wallace for his part basked in Kennick’s affection.
    Wallace liked comedy, and comic writing had come easily to him from childhood. So that semester he and Costello revived the campus humor magazine,
Sabrina
. From an office in the basement in Frost Library they put out several issues a year modeled on the
Harvard Lampoon
. The headquarters also served as an informal social club to gossip and postulate, an extension of their table in Valentine Dining Hall. The atmosphere was, appropriately, sophomoric. One member of the editorial team remembers a long discussion on whether women farted, with Wallace insisting they did not. The magazine itself was likewise often juvenile, but in its pages Wallace could satisfy his passion for parody, mimicry, and farce. In
Sabrina
, he wrote an advice column called “Ask Bill,” in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. “Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving,” the
Sabrina
Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write “The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster” himself:
    Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the Sabrina brothers!
    Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.
    “Crikey!” exclaimed Joe. “It’s a good thing we’re characters in a highly implausible children’s book or we’d be goners!” 5
     
    By spring semester Wallace and Costello were becoming well known on campus because of the magazine. Their table in Valentine began drawing a small but intense group of adherents. Nicknames had been a staple of his friendships in Urbana, and Wallace reveled in them here. He was “the Daver” and also “the Waller.” Costello was “Marcus Aurelius” for his first name, philosophical air, and high forehead; Nat Larson was “the Bumpster,” via the name “Natty Bumppo.” Corey Washington, Wallace’s friend from the debate team, was “Apple” or “the Reactor,” a play on “core reactor.” Eventually they were joined by Washington’s roommate Miller Maley, a wunderkind who had entered the school at twelve, Amherst’s youngest student in decades. Self-conscious about his iffy entry into puberty, Wallace liked having the younger Washington and Maley around. Washington was African American too, a distinct minority at the school, adding to the flavor of a table of refuseniks amid the mostly hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere of Amherst. In their undertrafficked corner of the dining hall, the conversation among the group bounced between social and sexual frustration, intellectual enthusiasm, and nerdy inquiry. Washington