Failure

This for any writers seeing this blog. I do not know if you are out there, I really have no idea who but a very select few do read me, but I think Stephen Akey's Failure Is Infinite needs to be read and considered in full. Since you might not just on my say-so, here are a few excerpts:

“IT IS NOT enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

The famous aphorism often credited to Gore Vidal has been variously attributed to Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdoch, La Rochefoucauld, and Genghis Khan, but it certainly sounds Vidalian; if he didn’t say it, he should have. Plainly, Vidal was a person who enjoyed great success and, just as plainly, enjoyed the lack of it in others. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little” is another celebrated Vidalian apothegm. If you see the world as a binary opposition between those who succeed and those who fail, then Vidal belonged — spectacularly — to the first group. From that same perspective, I and most of the rest of the world belong just as firmly to the second group. There are reasons to believe that the world is not a binary opposition between success and failure — unless you’re a writer. In that case, it’s rather easier to believe in the myth of your own failure.

Failure is infinite and takes infinite forms. I might say, for instance, that Vidal’s inability to love another human being (on the evidence of his 1995 memoir Palimpsest) constituted a rather larger failing than any literary ambition come to naught. In that memoir, he claimed, not quite plausibly, that the death of an early beloved during World War II extinguished all romantic feeling in him. Love dies, but romance, eros, and experience itself are rarely so cut and dried. Success and failure of every stripe are so jumbled up in our daily lives that it’s often difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. I’m inclined to believe that simply getting through the day without causing excessive damage to oneself or to others constitutes a smashing success. But I’m a writer working in an arena where relatively clear-cut distinctions between success and failure unmistakably obtain. And in that arena, I play the role assigned to my cohort by Vidal: I am one of the many who must fail so that the few (like Vidal) might succeed.

I like to think that my writing achieves a significance beyond that of fulfilling Vidal’s lethal aperçu, that it “succeeds” — to use that terrible word — in engaging readers emotionally and intellectually, in communicating a range of ideas through expressive language, in providing, if nothing else, a modicum of pleasure and wit. And it’s no use posting a snarky comment to the effect that my literary failure is richly deserved; no one and nothing will ever persuade me that I’m not a good writer — which is the necessary minimum for anyone who aspires to write.

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Well, that seems to me about right. What’s mere literary failure in the face of love willfully thrown away? Like much of Beckett’s work, Krapp’s Last Tape dwells on the uncomfortable idea that all of these failures — the erotic, the romantic, the literary, the ethical — bleed together into one seamless “muckball,” as Krapp puts it. And indeed, the literary failure that I’ve been discussing differs very little from its equivalents in other endeavors. What goes for writers also goes for musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, and volleyball players. Nevertheless, there is a separation to be made between failures of careerist ambition and failures of mere personhood — namely, that everyone fails at the latter, whereas only some people risk (and usually attain) failure and futility by going public with their audience-dependent dreams. It’s the failures of personhood that, fittingly, nag the most at poor dying Krapp. His creator had his share of those too, but Beckett also had the not inconsiderable consolation, whatever his personal austerity and modesty, of seeing his work published, performed, and acclaimed. It must have felt pretty nice to be in a position to refuse the Nobel Prize.

What is success? Fame? I admire Rudyard Kipling's short stories regardless of the political criticism put against him. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he is the caricature of an imperialist. So much for success.

Here I am a moral leper, I have little hope for publication. Still, I keep trying to improve my writing. That seems to be the price to pay for the talent - find out how much there is of it.

sch 1/7/23