In the Land of Men Read online

  Dedication

  For Joe

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adrienne Miller

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  At twenty-five, I became the first female literary and fiction editor of Esquire. It was 1997 and Esquire had for decades been one of the country’s most significant magazines; home to the writers who defined “masculinity” (if you will excuse the term) for the twentieth century: Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, and the practitioners of New Journalism.

  My mission was to help the magazine find its new voice. I understood that I was following in the footsteps of two legendary editors, Gordon Lish and Rust Hills, men of extraordinary vision and taste. Of course, I knew that I was, in every way, a baffling choice for the job: I was a woman, I was notably young, and I had had no sparkling editorial career behind me. But I was passionate about writers and writing, I was eager-eyed, and, I believed, I had taste.

  During my tenure, I discovered many new writers, I worked with many giants. But it was with the formally audacious David Foster Wallace story “Adult World,” which, according to David, every other magazine had rejected, that my journey—professional, personal, artistic—really began. David and I met in 1998. I was twenty-six and he was thirty-six. I had been at Esquire only a few months and was doing what I could to refurbish the magazine’s moribund literary section. Infinite Jest had been published two years before and David was on his way to becoming the most influential and imitated American fiction writer since Hemingway.

  I would acquire and edit four of David’s stories for Esquire. I read his manuscripts, we were friends, we dated. After his suicide, my private approach to him, already well honed during his lifetime, became ever more entrenched; my preferred modes: “avoid,” “shut down,” and “avoid” some more. I couldn’t talk about him, I couldn’t read anything about him, and I couldn’t read his work. I certainly couldn’t write about him. God knows I never planned to, and couldn’t have imagined a world in which I ever would.

  What has changed in my thinking? So much has been bothering me in the eleven years since David’s death. It’s nothing new to suggest that as his persona has been processed by the culture industry he so loathed, the living man has faded from sight. Nearly everyone gets him wrong—but that’s beside the point. Whether he’s presented as a hero or a monster, he’s been reduced to a darkly glamorous suicide doll. There are also significant lacunae in the public record of David’s life and in the public record of his evolving thinking about his own work during the period of time we were friends.

  With these thoughts in mind, I started writing about what it was like for me to know him, but also, crucially, about my own personal odyssey: a young woman trying to do good work and trying to get herself taken seriously in a world of men.

  During my career, I would learn about the profoundly compromised men who make the art we venerate, and I would learn about protecting the egos of these men. I would learn about power. That was the world I lived in. Little did we know then that we were in the last days of a dying order. All empires collapse eventually, of course.

  —AM, August 2019

  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.

  I asked him if he wanted me to open the door to let in some air.

  “Eh,” David said. “I’d be too self-conscious to talk to you if the door were open.”

  He discreetly expectorated into my TRUMP TAJ MAHAL cup and went into a quick story about a photo shoot for Us magazine (seriously, Us magazine?) he’d agreed to do with several other young writers in the eighties. By his account, the shoot had not gone well. Indeed, it had gone the opposite of “well.”

  “And do you want to know what good old Dave did before they even took the picture?” he asked. “I ran away. I just ran down the street, crying like an infant.”

  “Were you wasted?” I asked.

  “I wish I had been.”

  Already, nothing David told me about himself came as a surprise—as Quentin Crisp said about why he gave up cleaning his apartment: after a certain point, the dirt can’t get any worse. Have I ever known anyone who’s talked about his past as much as David talked about his?

  “Interesting,” I said.

  David stayed in my office for the rest of the afternoon, describing more about the excesses of his past. (That was David for you—always wading, no, cliff diving, into the blackest edges of himself, and us.) One of the conclusions I had reached about him, and perhaps the only one about which I would remain consistent, despite everything: his artistic triumph in the face of such tremendous psychological and emotional odds was a miracle for which we all must be forever grateful.

  David said, “I hope no one ever writes about any of it.”

  But he knew perfectly well what was coming, and so did I. The bill would come due. The bill always comes due. We are always held accountable in the end.

  “Oh, they will,” I said.

  A heavy pause.

  “Ew,” he said. “I am completely fucked.”

  He knew where our world was headed: Soon there would be no distinction left between the public and the private. Soon it would all be the same thing.

  What is someone “like”? Is he “good”? Is he “bad”? Is she this way, or is she that? What is wrong with him? Who does that? All this thinking we do about other people—all of our talking and complaining, all of our fretting—is an attempt to understand the unexplained inconsistencies and paradoxes in their characters. How do you even begin to negotiate the disjunctions we all have? Almost no one makes any kind of logical, unified sense, and very few people fit together into an integrated whole. All we really have are projections of other people: impressions of character, phantasms of character—vague ideas that may or may not be connected to reality.

  2

  When I was young, I was always watching, always trying to piece together a version of the world from whatever smoke signals arrived to me. I didn’t need people too much. It was, in my first memories, the bicentennial. The national gestalt was sort of a hokey, good-natured patriotism, and any child of four would certainly have been fascinated by the fire hydrants painted to resemble Revolutionary War–era VIPs such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Ben Franklin. Patchwork Holly Hobbie purses—empty, always and forever, for what was there to keep inside, other than perhaps a dandelion?—were all the rage, and let’s not forget unisex plaid shirts with mother-of-pearl-esque snaps and jeans with embroidered back pockets. A child’s hair, whether upon a male or female head, was to be styled in the gender-neutral no-muss-no-fuss bowl-cut manner.

  Marysville, Ohio, is now pretty much a commuter suburb of Columbus, but when I was growing up there, it may as well have been rural Kansas in the thirties. It was a self-contained small town with a main street of Victorian-era buildings, and there was a department store, Weiss Brothers, which, enthrallingly, had a dumbwaiter that carried your money and goods from one floor to another. There were soybean farms and cornfields. There was a Goodyear plant that made conveyor belts and a then new Honda motorcycle plant. It was a town built on lawn pride—the Scotts Miracle-Gro corporate headquarters was also there—and in the summer the yards of our town’s nicer homes, the ones with garden globe ornaments set upon grasses of supersaturated green, were redolent of lawn chemicals.

  Our house was a tidy Cape Cod. A morning glory plant grew along a fence in the backyard, and for family photographs I’d pull a purple flower from the vine, posing with it behind an ear. I made humble bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions, and clover. I liked drawing flowers, small fragile ones. The wallpaper in my bedroom had bright blue blossoms on it, but I was already developing a sensibility and knew that I might have preferred something more delicate, something in wistful Frenchified pastels perhaps (not that I had any concept of Frenchified, much les
s France). But you don’t have much of a determinative role as a child. No one asks your opinion about much, not even parents like mine.

  When I could read, I was enthralled by a collection called A Child’s Book of Poems, rapturously illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, which introduced me to the wonders of Christina Rossetti, Eugene Field, and Edward Lear and the following unattributed limerick that fried my brain and kept it fried:

  There was a young lady named Bright,

  Who traveled much faster than light.

  She started one day

  In the relative way,

  And returned on the previous night.

  Other favorites: T.A. [Transactional Analysis] for Tots (and Other Prinzes), the book that gave us, for better or worse, the terms “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies”; and, of course, the big daddy of the day, Shel Silverstein. I had a lot more books than my parents did, come to think of it, and my mom’s titles—My Mother/My Self, Sybil, Zelda, and Personhood—tended, like T.A. for Tots, to be exemplars of the seventies personality movement, the movement, sad to say, that paved the way for the noxious individualism of the current era. My father subscribed to Foreign Affairs—the battleship-gray type-only cover guaranteeing the solemnity of the enterprise—semiread back issues of which accumulated like so many silvery mushrooms on the bookshelves he, a high-level handyman, had built in our family room.

  I suppose it’s fair to say that my parents could be characterized, at least then, more accurately as doers rather than as readers. It is true that if I spent too much time lollygagging vacantly on the sofa, say, perhaps with a book, although probably not, my mother would suggest, “Why don’t you get up and do something? Move.” In my family, when you said that you hadn’t sat down all day, you said it with pride.

  My parents were in their midtwenties when I was born. This was in no way notable, because the parents of everyone else I knew were the same age as mine, yet my mother and father just always felt younger than everyone else’s, as if they were my peers almost. They drove his and hers Volkswagen bugs (his: green; hers: tan); they owned multiple tanning lamps; they drank gin martinis before and during dinner. They were of a permissive seventies mind-set, and it’s certainly possible that we had too few hang-ups—social ones, I mean (we’re actually very emotionally repressed). When I was five, my father told me that if I had been a boy, my name would have been Matthew. Matthew Miller. Sure. I mean, why not? Sounded good enough. Dependable old Matt Miller.