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CAMPOS: A writer's painful secret

By Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 11, 2008 at 6:08 p.m.

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About 10 years ago, I read a remarkable essay about an obscure tennis player named Michael Joyce. Joyce, a Californian who at his professional peak was ranked just inside the world's top 100 players, was attempting to qualify for the main draw of a big tournament in Montreal, and the author of the essay, David Foster Wallace, chronicled the attempt.

Professional sports make up a notoriously ruthless meritocracy, so Wallace was no doubt right to assume that none of his readers would have ever heard of Joyce, even though he was one of the best 100 people in the world at what he did.

Wallace then asked his readers to try a seemingly simple but actually very difficult thought experiment: "You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

A particularly interesting feature of Wallace's essay is that Wallace himself was a pretty good regional amateur tennis player as a teenager, and he came to Montreal under the impression that he could compete with - not beat, of course, but play competitively against - obscure professional players like Joyce.

In the course of the week Wallace discovers that this is in fact a serious delusion, and that, as he puts it, "I could not meaningfully exist on the same court as these obscure, hungry players."

The rest of the essay's exploration of the rather mysterious qualities it takes to become a world-class athlete remains one of the most compelling pieces of sports journalism I've ever read.

I went on to read a lot of Wallace's other work: he's best known for the massive novel Infinite Jest, but he was also an accomplished short story writer, as well as a wide-ranging essayist.

Wallace's omnivorous curiosity and zest for life were evident in everything he wrote; thus like so many of his readers I was shocked a few weeks ago to hear the news that, at age 46, he had hung himself in his home in Pomona, Calif.

Subsequently, it became publicly known that Wallace had struggled for more than 20 years with severe depression. In recent months, the anti-depressant drugs he had been taking had begun to have very bad side effects.

The effects were so bad that his doctors recommended that he try going off the drugs. He did so, but, after a few months in the grip of his now-unmedicated disease, he seems to have found life unendurable.

After hearing of Wallace's death, I re-read his short story, The Depressed Person. Although it had stuck in my mind when I first read it, reading it now in the light of Wallace's own story was a horrifying experience.

The story chronicles the mental state of a woman for whom every conscious moment seems like unbearable agony, and who makes herself and everyone around her miserable in her desperate attempts to escape the prison of her mind. Here is the story's first sentence:

"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor to its essential horror."

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom attends the funeral of an acquaintance who killed himself. It's a particularly painful occasion for Bloom, because his own father committed suicide.

Someone remarks that suicide is a coward's way out. Bloom hears this and recalls the rituals by which the bodies of suicides were dishonored: "They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

Comments

  • November 12, 2008

    11:36 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Jeff writes:

    Thanks for addressing Wallace in a column. He was my favorite writer, and it's safe to say they'll never be another author quite like him - able to mix humor, pathos, entertainment and meaning in a way that made the concoction seem so natural.
    It always irked me that his tragic passing received so little coverage in the mainstream media. Hence, it's nice to see that his life and work didn't go as unnoticed as I thought.