1
In my office at Esquire was a hand-me-down frame, bequeathed from fiction editors of the past. It was made of chrome, complicatedly beat up, and held a piece the magazine had run in the eighties called “Who’s Who in the Cosmos 1987.” When I started my job as the magazine’s literary and fiction editor, I found this frame lying on the floor underneath my desk.
The “Who’s Who,” published in the August 1987 summer fiction issue, was part of a special section that month called “The Literary Universe.” It was one of those exercises in classification and pigeonholing that magazines have done since the beginning of time, a power chart of the era’s so-called literary establishment. Cover stars from this issue: John Updike and William Styron. The “Who’s Who” map, which looked kind of like a kid’s outer space place mat, was a three-page gatefold with hundreds of floating, context-free names of various writers, editors, agents, critics, teachers, and publishers grouped in categories such as “Rising Stars,” “Falling Stars,” “Out of Orbit,” “The Parallel Universe,” and “Lost in Space.” You get the drift. Or maybe you don’t. Probably you shouldn’t. With all due respect to the legendary Esquire fiction editor L. Rust Hills, who compiled the thing as a sort of reprise to a literary power chart the magazine published in 1963, I could never make heads or tails of it. I can guarantee that few Esquire readers of the eighties could, either.
One thing was clear: the place to be on the chart was “The Red-Hot Center.” As Rust had written in his introduction, the persons located there were generating “enormous amounts of heat.” The fiction writers placed within that particular red-hot sun (they are all dead now, the sun a graveyard) were Saul Bellow, John Updike, Raymond Carver, Elmore Leonard, and Norman Mailer. Toni Morrison, probably the most important living American novelist, was relegated to a moon in deep space, mentioned only in a roundup of her agency’s clients. The red-hot center did contain the names of three women, but none of them were novelists and only one was a writer—a book critic; the other two were a literary agent and a socialite. And they are all still very much alive, these three, but that’s no real surprise. The women always do seem to persevere in the end.
I never knew what to do with the frame. I loathed the literary star system and everything this chart represented, and there was no way I was ever going to hang it on my wall. But I could never quite bring myself to toss it, either. I tried to give it away, but I never found any takers, not even among the more seasoned Esquire veterans (meaning: Rust Hills, who never seemed to want to take credit for his own creation). So, during the years I had that office, the framed “Who’s Who” existed in a kind of purgatory, lying faceup on the bottom shelf of a bookcase behind my desk, with books and submissions and whatnot stacked on top of it.
When I started the job in 1997, no single media outlet could presume the Literary Universe–wide authority Esquire had attempted to claim for itself a decade before. Was there anything vaguely resembling a red-hot center or even a general literary universe anymore? And if there was, was I now somehow, at age twenty-five, as Esquire’s literary editor, an improbable gatekeeper to it? (Or warden? Den mother, maybe?)
At the bottom of the page was a large catchall category called “On the Horizon,” and included in it was a twenty-five-year-old novelist named David Foster Wallace, who had just published his first book. Eleven years after his Literary Universe cameo, David was in my office, sitting in the squat red velvet swivel chair across from my desk, with the frame in his lap.
“God, I hate this thing,” he said.
David’s hair was cut short underneath his blue bandanna, his complexion was turbulent, and he had, as my grandmother liked to say about any white person who’d been in the sun, good color. I considered him for a moment.
“You’re looking very tan right now, David.”
The brown-gold Wallace eyes gleamed deviously. I would edit four short stories of David’s for Esquire. He was the fiction writer with whom I’d work the most frequently at the magazine.
“Well, I am half quadroon,” he said.
David was using my purple-and-white plastic TRUMP TAJ MAHAL cup—which I’d acquired two years before on an ill-advised trip to Atlantic City and had brought to the office for reasons unknown—as his tobacco cuspidor. Patiently, he waited for me to figure out what a half quadroon was.
“Octoroon,” I said finally.
“Touché,” he replied.
I had been amazed, and not in an entirely good way, how David was able to recollect so many details about the Literary Universe chart—who was situated where; the names, for example, of the writers placed in the “Falling Stars” category, and the distinction between the “Rising Stars” grouping and David’s own “On the Horizon.” (The “Rising Stars” category had Julian Barnes, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich in it and was the far better place to be.) The truth was that I hadn’t known much at all about the notorious history of the Literary Universe, which had been seemingly scrubbed from the Esquire institutional memory, or anything about what a toxic plum cake it had been in literary circles, before David told me about it. According to David, writers and editors had spent the summer of 1987 nattering away about the Literary Universe—everyone joined in the belief that the thing was shallow, cynical, and ridiculous . . . yet everyone knew exactly where, or if, he was placed on it. The most I’d ever heard, or would ever hear, from anyone about the Literary Universe was from David.
“How old were you when it came out?” he asked.
I did a quick calculation. Fifteen. Ninth grade.
“Jesus,” he said.
He’d had a residency at a writers’ colony in upstate New York when the issue was published and began describing how he had taken his august inclusion in the chart as an excuse to behave as badly as possible at the colony, and everywhere else.
“But do you know what’s most depressing of all?” he asked. “How much I actually cared about this thing. All I could think was When do I get to the red-hot center?”
The dark little laugh.
I suppose if there was a red-hot center in the late nineties/early aughts, that center might as well have been David. There was a sense that David, more than any other living writer, was read competitively, his sui generis–ness unbearable to all. It was dangerous, having David around in the world then. Before he could be turned into something else entirely—first, a beloved tragic personage; then, a cultural hero; later, a cautionary tale; finally, a monster—he would need to be safely, tactfully dead. Blood is required of our heroes—and monsters.
“Why would you even care what some magazine says?” I asked.
David looked over at me, eyes bright behind his glasses.
“The good thing about you,” he said, “is that you would never do anything like this.”
“Obviously not,” I sensibly replied.
He started fanning his T-shirt. “Is it exceptionally hot in here or is it just me?” he asked.
The visit to my office had been David’s idea (“I can’t detach from you just yet”), though he was being very weird about it: he didn’t want anyone to see him, so we kept the door closed.