DFW at the HRHRC
Monday brought the news that the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired the papers, and a selection of the library, belonging to the late David Foster Wallace.
David was on the faculty of Pomona College, where I teach, from 2002 until his death in the fall of 2008. Much has been written about David’s presence at the College; the remembrance of my colleague Kathleen Fitzpatrick is for me the most poignant and powerful of these.
I knew David only slightly. We had lunch in February 2008—on James Joyce’s birthday, in fact—when I was on campus interviewing for the job I now have; we talked on the phone, once, about administrivia. Like everyone who met him, I think, I hoped to get to know him better; but I arrived on campus in August 2008, and so what I’d hoped was the beginning of a beautiful friendship never had the chance to develop.
I want to make just one observation on the occasion of David’s library moving to Austin. The press coverage to this point has emphasized the eclectic nature of his book collection; to anyone who has read David’s own books, this can hardly have come as a surprise! But David’s library was far more various than is suggested by the 200 books that are now at the Ransom Center. In making their acquisition, the HRC of course had to think about what cross-section of David’s large library would be of the greatest interests for scholars, both now and in the future: which is to say, they presumably looked at David’s library as scholars. It was however a library assembled along very different lines.
In the floor-to-ceiling oak cases in David’s office (across the hall from mine) one would have found, nestled up against one another, books on ships & shipwrecks; tennis, of course!; math, economics, and accounting; tons of contemporary fiction, both high- and lowbrow (including a $2.98 remaindered hardback of Thomas Cobb’s Crazy Heart, the basis for Jeff Bridge’s Best Actor star-turn this year); computing; personal finance. Two titles, in particular, suggest for me the magpie impulse behind the library: The Practical Guide to Practically Everything and The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.
David Foster Wallace was one of the most voracious, catholic, restlessly curious imaginations of our time. The Harry Ransom Center’s selection from his library suggests a focus on those books that “paid off” in obvious ways in his published work; as an acquisitions principle, that makes a lot of sense. But as any writer knows, much reading never does pay off in any direct way: and those books, too—two copies of North Dallas Forty, two copies of Derrida’s Of Grammatology!—are part of the writer’s library, and the story of a writer’s life.
