Bryan Garner - Quack This Way

Introduction

It must have been late 1999 when my secretary, Andrea, excitedly proclaimed that David Foster Wallace had just called the office and spoken to her.

Who? I said.

David Foster Wallace!

Whos he?

She explained that he was a major, major writerthe author o f Infinite Jes t . I knew the book.

Hes writing something about you, she gushed.

Why didnt you put me on the phone with him?

I offered, Andrea said, but he refused. He said he didnt want to speak with you directly. He just wanted some basic information about you. Apparently hes reviewing your usage book.

I went on with my day and put it mostly out of my mind. Apparently I wrote him a note in March 2000a note I no longer have.

Then, a few weeks later, I received a massive manuscript from Bloomington, Illinois. It was Davids manuscript of Tense Present. The cover letter may have been the first of Davids writing Id ever read. It was self-effacing, apologetic, and endearing. He kept insisting that I shouldnt feel obliged to read the whole review, even though hed worked a whole bloody two months on it. He wrote: I usually hate it when people send me their work to read unsolicited, so Im bending way over backward here to assure you that I enclose it with no expectations and nothing but good wishes.

But of course I did read it, and it was enormously impressive.

It took awhile for Tense Present to get published. Originally commissioned b y The New Republi c , it was rejected by the editors there as unwieldy. Then it spent some time (as I was later to learn) a t The New York Review of Book s . In the end, it appeared as the cover article o f Harper s in April 2001. Th e Harper s editors cut the piece in half but showed real creativity in printing it on a bluish paper in the middle of the magazine, as if it were a special section produced separately. They managed to include 52 of the 124 footnotes in his piecewhich ended up, in the full version published i n Consider the Lobste r (2005), more than twice as long. That version is called Authority and American Usage.

The review is a long, laudatory piece. It changed my literary life in ways that a book review rarely can.

Things began happening that had never happened before. For example, in May 2001, a month after the review appeared, I happened to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard Co-Opthe universitys main bookshop. I ducked into the shop because I had 15 minutes to kill before a dinner with a friend. With two linguistic books tucked under my arm, I went to the checkout line and stood behind a man I immediately recognized as Pulitzer prize-winner Anthony Lewis. I had met him the year before at a dinner for the American Law Institute, and I considered whether to reintroduce myself. I decided not to but instead to respect his privacy and let him get on with his afternoon. He seemed mildly fretful about getting through the checkout line, and I figured he might be writing a New York Time s editorial in his head, working against a tight deadline. Finally he got to the front of the line and handed the cashier his one book for purchase.

It was m y Dictionary of Modern American Usag e (as it was then called), with its distinctive red cover. So I approached him after all, slightly interrupting his transaction, and introduced myself. Bryan! Ive just been reading the Wallace review i n Harper s , and I hastened over here to get the book before finishing the review.

We had a good chat.

Now what are the chances of that? Id had a few minutes to spare before meeting with a friend. Id gone into the Harvard Co-Op to take a whirlwind scan of the reference, linguistics, and law sections; and Id rushed to the checkout line at the precise moment when Id be in line behind Anthony Lewis, who was buying my book.

Another remarkable thing about that afternoon: the Co-Op had stocked about 20 copies of my usage book, piling them on the floor in the reference section as well as displaying them prominently on the shelves. Never before had I seen more than two copies of one of my books in a bookstoreapart fro m Blacks Law Dictionar y in law-school bookstores.

This was all new to me.

A few weeks before, I had received a call from a Boston public-radio station asking whether Id participate in a joint interview with David Foster Wallace. He had requested my participation. I agreed, of course. It was a fascinating interview, and it was the first time we spoke to each other. (We still didnt meet, though: we were both calling into the station.) He called me Mr. Garner throughoutas he would for many months after. The interview can still be heard at http://theconnection.wbur.org/2001/03/30/english-language-usage .

Soon we were corresponding intermittently. He wanted to see one of my legal-writing seminars in Chicago. I said Id be delighted, if we could arrange it.

Then, in April 2002, the State Farm Insurance Company in Bloomington, Illinois, asked me to present one of my private seminars to about 100 of its lawyers. I wrote to David to ask whether hed like to have dinner the night before. Yes! came the answer.

He wanted to attend the seminar as well. This, I thought at the time, might be a problem. My client was paying a significant fee for an in-house seminar. They were insurance-company lawyers. Stalwart conservativesif true to the stereotype. Id be asking to have a bandana-wearing novelist and essayist attendsomebody Id not yet seen face to face. Although I already trusted David, I ended up not trusting myself: I might not teach in quite the same way if he were in the audience. I might not do as well for the State Farm lawyers. And I wouldnt want to extract a pledge from him that he couldnt write about the event. After all, his sardonic wit might prompt him to write about my client as hed already written about the Maine Lobster Festival or the adult-film-awards festival.