David Foster Wallace is interviewed on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm about the new book of essays, Consider the Lobster.

An okay but not especially forthcoming outing. Wallace talks about the essays as falling in the “service” tradition, that is, here’s a “reasonably bright”* but also “reasonably average” guy who goes to the Maine lobster festival and thinks about all the things you’d think about if you weren’t worn out from the 9 to 5 and didn’t have a couple kids clambering/clamoring at your heels. I’m not convinced that this is the best explanation of how the essays should and actually do work — to begin with, that hypothetical reader, reasonably average and weary but interested in reading DFW as he cogitates on the philosophical and moral implications of dropping a lobster in a pot of boiling water, is problematic — but evidently DFW worked out this “I work in the service industry” thing on the drive over to the Bookworm studio and he’s sticking to it. A nice turn at the end of the interview about why his writing students are wary of sentimentality. Also, a graceful correction of Silverblatt’s description of him as one of our “young writers.”

Wallace has been interviewed on Bookworm a couple times before. My favorite is the 1997 interview about A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The 1999 one for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men retreads a lot of the same ground and is, in keeping with the book it’s in support of, slightly peevish and strained: It’s like a Method Interview. There’s also a third interview, hard to find but worth locating as a bootleg, where DFW does fantastic versions of “Truckin’” and “Sugar Magnolia” with a “Hey Jude” encore. Best part: Silverblatt’s Chong-like effusion of “Cornell … maaaaaaannnnn!!!!”

* DFW is always qualifying his intelligence this way in interviews. It’s like a baseball player trying to be modest but inadvertently revealing that he knows the stats of everyone in the league.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how writers — fiction and nonfiction — choose to write about the people they know. Who gets included? How disguised should they be? What rights — not legal, but moral — do these bystanders have? In other words, what does a writer owe the people around her in terms of privacy?

When David Foster Wallace attended the Maine Lobster Festival last summer he was in the company of “one girlfriend and both his parents” but, as the second footnote of the resulting essay, Consider The Lobster, hastens to add, “N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be talked about in this article.” So all we learn of the “personally connected parties” is that one of Wallace’s parents “was actually born and raised in Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is potato country and a world away from the touristic midcoast.”

An interesting thread over at Sarah’s, spurred by a post by guest-blogger Robert Ferrigno about a manic cab ride through Cali, discussed the various ways in which the people we meet, even glancingly, can end up in our fiction.

Then there was Suellen Grealy’s Guardian piece this weekend (link via Maud Newton). In it, she derides Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with Suellen’s sister, the memoirist Lucy Grealy. It’s a pretty fascinating document; it reminded me of nothing so much as if one of Shakespeare’s angrier characters composed an essay for a London paper giving her side of things (and see there it is again — this turning a real person, Suellen Grealy, into fiction). Suellen is clearly furious (at Patchett, at Lucy, at fate) — and in her recital of events, she gets in several digs that one can only imagine were aimed to hurt Patchett, who she purports was once a friend:

When a review copy of Ann’s book, Taft, arrived by courier at my house in London, Lucy, staying with me, didn’t bother to open it. I wasn’t surprised by the way she tossed it dismissively on to a chair, for she rarely showed interest, at least to me, in other people’s achievements. I felt sorry for Ann then, because I knew how much she had done for my sister.

See, if you’re a writer you know how hurtful that disclosure is meant to be (“She threw my ARC in a chair!? Without reading it!?”). I was interested because, in a reaction to Truth & Beauty posted over at Maud’s, I actually took another tack than the one suggested by Suellen’s portrayal of Patchett’s motives: I thought Truth & Beauty suffered, in part, from the author’s too-gentle handling of the living, writing, “The cameos of people in this book are not as sharp as Patchett is capable of, they are how you would describe your friends if you knew your friends were going to read your book.” And so it was interesting to see one of those friends, Suellen Grealy, step forward and say, “It was still too rough!”

And as much as, as a fellow writer, I defend Patchett’s right to make her art (and wished as I read Truth & Beauty that she’d been willing to take more chances, to act more as an artist and less as a friend) — I also can’t help but see Suellen’s point, to understand, to some degree, her fury:

In the spring of 2003, Ann was working, writing and living in what she described to me as “the Lucy factory”. I thought this was offensive, but didn’t say. She mentioned film rights. I was living in frightening and unfamiliar territory. For whom was this suffocating grief I felt? For my mother? For Lucy? The sadness that Lucy’s many other friends wrote about addressed only a tiny fraction of the tragedy my family had experienced. I envied the precision of their grief. How easy to focus on just one chapter of the intertwined lives of my father, dead at 57 from pancreatitis; my eldest brother, a schizophrenic, dead following a car accident in Nevada; my little sister, dead; my mother, subject to the idle scrutiny of book clubs across America, invited by those reading guides to judge her worth as a parent.

I’d had a framed photograph of Lucy for many years, which I loved. The only word I can think of to describe it is honest. I had loved it while she was alive, for the texture of her skin, for the closeness of her teeth, for a quality of nearness that made me feel if I looked at it long enough, she would blink. Now I looked at it and thought, who is this person? A public person, with a “legacy”, with “work”, by which we felt obliged to do the right thing. But what was the right thing? My husband said he could gauge my mood by whether he found the photograph hanging on the wall or hidden behind the chest of drawers in the spare room.

What right does anyone have to make the private lives of the people around her public?

I have no answers. I bring it up because I think it’s a question with which all writers (and even bloggers) eventually have to wrestle. When I was a kid, I would overhear my mom talking to her friends on the phone, describing something I had said or done — indulgently, I now realize — and it would burn me up. I remember hopping up & down in the kitchen as she talked on the phone, enraged because she was not factual in relaying her stories — she changed how things happened. And it made me indignant & squawkish, like a miniature rooster: “It didn’t happen that way! That’s not what I said! Why are you lying?”

This weekend Mr. Tingle and I visited Thomas Wolfe’s grave at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville. It’s a beautiful cemetery, old and peaceful. Wolfe came from a big family and their graves are all grouped together. His parents, W.O. and Julie, have the biggest monument, his is to the right. Brothers and sisters are scattered all around, including the simple stones of two of Wolfe’s brothers whose deaths are chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. (Go here for a Mountain Xpress article I wrote about Wolfe.)

When it came time to publish Look Homeward, Angel, editor Maxwell Perkins was dismayed to discover that the manuscript he’d been editing was, in effect, autobiography: Wolfe had not even changed the names of the people portrayed. As the story goes, Perkins insisted that Wolfe gives these “characters” new names. It’s funny to think about as you stand looking at the graves of Wolfe’s family. The monument for Wolfe’s sister, Mabel Wolfe Wheaton (who died in 1958), is adorned with a 1925 quote from her famous brother: “She has more human greatness in her than any woman I’ve ever known.” Her husband Ralph Harris Wheaton, who is buried with her, has no quote — he wasn’t in the book. And then there’s the grave of Tom’s brother Fred William Wolfe, who is buried with his wife Mary. Besides his name and his birth and death dates (1894-1980), Fred’s stone simply says: “Luke of ‘Look Homeward, Angel.’”

Yesterday I expressed some curiousity about how David Foster Wallace snuck all the animal cruelty stuff in his essay “Consider the Lobster” for Gourmet, citing one of the piece’s footnotes that alludes to skirmishes with Gourmet’s editorial staff, and juxtaposing that footnote with editor Ruth Reichl’s own extremely politic introduction to the piece.

Now the ever-kickass Maud Newton points to an article by Boston Globe writer Alex Beam that sheds light on those behind-the-scenes, well, scenes:

Editor and writer tangled over a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals video called “Meet Your Meat,” which Wallace was not allowed to name in the article. “That was a line I wouldn’t cross,” says Reichl.

“My impression was that Ruth absolutely loathed PETA, and some of their advertisers do, too,” Wallace says. “It was just an exercise in my weird self-destructiveness that I would submit the article I did. I thought the treatment of the lobsters was far and away the most interesting thing about the festival.”

Last week, I registered some dismay over DFW’s Gourmet essay, “Consider the Lobster” — which I read after an unexpectedly harrowing trip to Chile’s.

I re-read the essay over the weekend and liked it far better the second go-round. Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s structurally messy, with the buoyant front half, where Wallace genially takes in the Maine Lobster Festival, followed by the meditative back half, which is devoted to questions of whether lobsters feel pain, is it right to eat something that feels pain?, when the lobster bangs the inside of a pot full of boiling water, is he just nerve-firing or trying to indicate a wish to get the fuck out of there? etc. It’s like the essay’s all Hawaiian shirt on top and monk robes down below.

But it turns out that when I’m not all alienated from Chile’s, the fact that David Foster Wallace might have written an unsymmetrical essay doesn’t seem so, um, dire.

As Ed points out, the essay’s pretty hysterical in bits. I forget sometimes how much I like it when old DFW gets to observing the people around him. Here he is on a cab ride shared with a wealthy political consultant:

The consultant and cabdriver are responding to informal journalistic probes about how people who live in the midcoast region actually view the MLF, as in is the Festival just a big-dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents look forward to attending, take genuine civic pride in, etc. The cabdriver—who’s in his seventies, one of apparently a whole platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the summer rush, and wears a U.S.-flag lapel pin, and drives in what can only be called a very deliberate way—assures us that locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he himself hasn’t gone in years, and now come to think of it no one he and his wife know has, either. However, the demilocal consultant’s been to recent Festivals a couple times (one gets the impression it was at his wife’s behest), of which his most vivid impression was that “you have to line up for an ungodly long time ot get your lobsters, and meanwhile there are all these ex-flower children coming up and down along the line handing out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them.”

In a footnote, this same cabdriver who drives in the deliberate way is described as having “a distinctive speaking style” that’s “maniacally laconic.”

The long & short of it: Go read the essay. Just don’t eat at Chile’s first. Also, check out the recipe for Espresso and Mascarpone Icebox Cake on page 113.

In his own post about “Consider the Lobster”, The Rake said: “It’s hard to measure exactly, but it should be noted that the examination of the ‘animal-cruelty-and-eating issue’ takes up at least 1/2 of the article. Say what you will, but that seems mildly subversive and makes YPTR oddly happy.”

It does seem subversive, given, well: The existence of pate. In other words, gourmets aren’t a group one imagines as overly concerned with what the lobster banging the pot might be trying to communicate (one possible message: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Surf.” “Surf who?” “Surf in need of turf.” etc.). My cubby at work is next to a gourmet’s. I get a sandwich with some turkey in it and I have dithering moral swoons for an hour. He reaches over like, “Gimmethat,” and smushes the strip of turkey in the middle of his sausage sandwich, right between the duck breast and the salami.

So how did all this “animal-cruelty-and-eating issue” stuff get in Gourmet? There’s a tantalizing clue to behind-the-scenes editorial skirmishes in one of the footnotes (emphasis supplied):

Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. PETA distributes a certain video—the title of which is being omitted as part of the elaborate editorial compromise by which this note appears at all—in which you can see just about everything meat-related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B.2. Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and self-righteous. Personally, though, I have to say that I found this unnamed video both credible and deeply upsetting.))

For herself, Ruth Reichl, Gourmet’s editor in chief, writes in her “Letter From The Editor”:

Consider, for example, David Foster Wallace. We’re big fans of his writing—if you haven’t read his Infinite Jest (or at least part of it), you have a wonderful treat in store—and we spent a long time thinking about an appropriate assignment. After much deliberation (he didn’t want to go to Scotland to write about a big whisky affair, and the idea of sampling Rome’s nightlife did not interest him at all [heh-ed.]), one of us came up with the notion of sending him to Maine to write about the annual lobster festival, in its 56th year.

Nothing on earth could have led me to believe that “Consider the Lobster” (page 50) would be the result. It is hilarious, thought-provoking, very uncomfortable—and something you’re not likely to forget anytime soon.