This week on Page-Turner, D. T. Max is writing about documents and artifacts he drew on in writing “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” his recently published biography of David Foster Wallace. Read his previous posts here.

There are many surprises, delights, and painful moments in the forty or so boxes of David Foster Wallace’s literary material at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, but the heart of the collection are the nine dedicated to “Infinite Jest”—and of those, the stars are boxes fifteen to seventeen, filled with material from the early nineteen-nineties, when the book was being written but before the grinding process of preparing the 1,079-page novel for its 1996 publication had begun. Where else can you find D.F.W.’s small scratchy declaration, “I am sad 6/1/91” in a margin, or “I love Mary Karr”?

Boxes fifteen to seventeen tell an eloquent if incomplete tale of a writer of remarkable focus and endurance. Wallace was in those years an academic gypsy who moved from town to town lugging his precious pads of lined paper with him. This typical page is part of the earliest substantial draft of the book we have. Textual scholar David Hering, of the University of Liverpool, estimates that two-thirds to three-fourths of the finished book is present in these sheets. Noticeably absent are some of the Quebec terrorism material—what Michael Pietsch, David’s editor, called, without much affection, “the interAmerican huggermugger” when he first read it—and much of Don Gately lying in his hospital bed, after having been shot.

It’s likely, as the numbers at the top would suggest, that this is the first page of Section One of the book as it was then ordered, because for a long time the manuscript began with the scene, now pages twenty-seven to thirty-one, in which Hal’s father tries to trick him into opening up by posing as a “professional conversationalist.” That’s the meaning of the first four lines on the page, the last of the scene:

“Son?” “….” Son?” “ ….”

(Of the use of ellipses to indicate non-response, D.F.W. would tell an editor that he stole the idea from the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig.) After the space break begins a version of the scene in which Hal’s grandfather is giving Hal’s father his first tennis lesson, a scene also eventually moved to a place farther along in the book.

The rows of tiny marching characters calls up the image of Wallace with one ankle delicately crossed over the opposite knee, which was his favorite writing posture. His doggedly forward-leaning handwriting seems to urge you to enter the world of his fecundity. The clear-eyed aim with which he seems to be laying out this flashback, this attempt to push the dysfunction at the heart of “Infinite Jest” back one generation, is certainly startling. Allowing for some confusion as to what the date of the action should be (you can see the date “1971” crossed out in the first line and “1961” added just before), the moment seems to emerge fully formed. Every addition adds a nice touch, enhancing tone or balance, adjusting the focus in small ways, though the book would have been fine without them. But then this was very voicey writing, the sort that Wallace had excelled at since college.

But archives conceal just as much as they reveal. You never know what didn’t get into them. The notebooks in which D.F.W. wrote down ideas and possibly drafted scenes are probably gone—he was not a saver. We do know from his letters that many portions of the book were picked up from material begun as early as his graduate-student days in the mid-eighties, or from the dark years of the late eighties. In a letter from around this time to Mary Karr, he notes, “It’s a long thing I want to do, and I’d started it before, so right now I divide my time between writing new stuff, which is a little disjointed … and looking back through two Hammermill [sic] boxes worth of notebooks and notecards and incredibly pretty laser print from my computer….” Those printouts are likely gone forever.

So we don’t really know which parts of the book Wallace found hard or easy to write, nor how many drafts it took (if any) to get to the page you see linked to above. Elsewhere in box fifteen, for instance, is an intriguing version of the professional conversationalist scene, already typed, in which Hal, age fourteen, is called David and the date, 1974, puts the protagonist perilously close to the real Wallace’s age. Could “Infinite Jest” have started as autobiography? It seems possible.

Illustration by Philip Burke.