The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Read online

  The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY CHRISTOPHER ROSE

  INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY ANDREW GALLIX

  First Melville House printing

  — NOVEMBER 2014 —

  MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

  145 PLYMOUTH STREET

  BROOKLYN, NY 11201

  — and —

  8 BLACKSTOCK MEWS

  ISLINGTON

  LONDON N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com

  facebook.com/mhpbooks

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-378-6

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Rose, C. D., author.

  The biographical dictionary of literary failure / C. D. Rose ; introduction by Andrew Gallix.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61219-378-6 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-61219-379-3 (ebook)

  1. Authors—Biography—Dictionaries—Fiction. 2. Failure (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.O78284B56 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014002517

  DESIGNED BY SAM POTTS

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  CASIMIR ADAMOWITZ-KOSTROWICKI to FELIX DODGE

  NO. 1 - CASIMIR ADAMOWITZ-KOSTROWICKI

  NO. 2 - STANHOPE BARNES

  NO. 3 - THE BEASLEY COLLECTIVE

  NO. 4 - ERNST BELLMER

  NO. 5 - THOMAS BODHAM

  NO. 6 - ASTON BROCK

  NO. 7 - MARTIN BURSCOUGH

  NO. 8 - FELIX DODGE

  DANIEL FINNEGAN to ‘THE GOATHERD POET’

  NO. 9 - DANIEL FINNEGAN

  NO. 10 - ELLERY FORTESCUE

  NO. 11 - LAMOTTE FOUQUET

  NO. 12 - J. D. ‘JACK’ FFRENCH

  NO. 13 - WELLON FREUND

  NO. 14 - PASQUALE FRUNZIO

  NO. 15 - ‘THE GOATHERD POET’

  VIRGIL HAACK to MARTA KUPKA

  NO. 16 - VIRGIL HAACK

  NO. 17 - CHARLES HÉBÉ

  NO. 18 - HANS KAFKA

  NO. 19 - YILDIRIM KEMAL

  NO. 20 - JÜRGEN KITTLER

  NO. 21 - MARTA KUPKA

  ELISE LA RUE to ERIC QUAYNE

  NO. 22 - ELISE LA RUE

  NO. 23 - MAXWELL LOEB

  NO. 24 - MAXIM MAKSIMICH

  NO. 25 - EDWARD NASH

  NO. 26 - OTHA ORKKUT

  NO. 27 - KARL PILCROW

  NO. 28 - JOÃO QUARESMA

  NO. 29 - AURELIO QUATTROCHI

  NO. 30 - ERIC QUAYNE

  HUGH RAFFERTY to MOLLY STOCK

  NO. 31 - HUGH RAFFERTY

  NO. 32 - LORD FREDERICK RATHOLE

  NO. 33 - ROBERT ROBERTS

  NO. 34 - BELMONT ROSSITER

  NO. 35 - BENJAMIN RUST

  NO. 36 - CHAD SHEEHAN

  NO. 37 - SIMON SIGMAR

  NO. 38 - ELLEN SPARROW

  NO. 39 - KEVIN STAPLETON

  NO. 40 - MOLLY STOCK

  PETER TRABZHK to BARON FRIEDRICH VON SCHOENVORTS

  NO. 41 - PETER TRABZHK

  NO. 42 - HARTMUT TRAUTMANN

  NO. 43 - BAS VAN DE BONT

  NO. 44 - VERONICA VASS

  NO. 45 - LYSVA VILIKHE

  NO. 46 - HERMANN VON ABWÄRTS

  NO. 47 - BARON FRIEDRICH VON SCHOENVORTS

  NATE WARONKER to SARA ZEELEN-LEVALLOIS

  NO. 48 - NATE WARONKER

  NO. 49 - WENDY WENNING

  NO. 50 - IVAN YEVACHEV

  NO. 51 - WILSON YOUNG

  NO. 52 - SARA ZEELEN-LEVALLOIS

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION

  ONCE upon a time this book was a website celebrating the lives of writers who have ‘achieved some measure of literary failure’. Every week a new biography was posted, anonymously, and after a year all the entries were duly deleted, thus enacting their own subject matter. It struck me as a beautiful echo of Maurice Blanchot’s oft-quoted prophecy that literature is ‘heading toward itself, toward its essence, which is its disappearance.’ I also realised that this online compendium, culled from the slush pile of history by C. D. Rose and his team of researchers, was simply too valuable to be allowed to disappear without trace, however romantic the gesture.

  The impulse to tell the tales of those whose tales will remain untold is akin to that which inspired the creation of the various libraries of unpublished and unwritten books (often modelled on the library in Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion). Hannah Arendt once wondered if the very notion of ‘unappreciated genius’—the poète maudit whose prodigious talent goes unrecognised in his or her lifetime—was not simply ‘the daydream of those who are not geniuses.’ I suspect that there is indeed a touch of Schadenfreude about the pleasure derived from reading these anecdotes of writerly woe. The cumulative effect produces a kind of comique de répétition that takes its cue from Beckett: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ There is a slight sadistic thrill each time you move on to the next sob story, and try to guess how this hapless scribe will manage to fail even better than the previous one. I also suspect that the editor—who had achieved some measure of literary success, but not, alas, the breakthrough he deserved—may have been exorcising some demons of his own.

  Literary biography is a by-product of literature: the writer’s life is read, à rebours, in the light of her works. Had she not written them, we would probably show no interest in the minutiae of her existence. Literature redeems daily life, endowing it with meaning; recasting it, teleologically, as a prolegomenon to the work. By its very nature, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure raises some crucial questions. Literature is all about readers losing themselves in books and writers losing themselves in a language that speaks itself. If, as Roland Barthes argued, the death of the author marks the birth of literature, does the death of literature—its loss, or failure to come into being—mark the rebirth of the author? Is it possible, as Jean-Yves Jouannais believes, to be a writer without writings? ‘The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all,’ states one of Luis Chitarroni’s characters in The No Variations. Not writing, for a writer, may be writing by another means, or rather the logical conclusion of the literary enterprise, for, as Enrique Vila-Matas highlights, ‘in the end, every book pursues non-literature as the essence of what it wants and passionately desires to discover.’

  The fifty-two writers manqués whose names are saved from oblivion in this dictionary certainly did not fail through lack of ambition. Quite the contrary. Most of them devoted their lives to the pursuit of some Gesamtkunstwerk that was supposed to encompass the whole of being, but resulted in nothingness. This quixotic quest for a volume in which everything would be said extends from epic poetry to Joyce’s Ulysses through the Bible, the Summa Theologica, Coleridge’s omnium-gatherum, the great encyclopedias, Proust’s masterpiece, Mallarmé’s (non-)conception of ‘Le Livre,’ and Borges’s ‘total book’—the ‘catalog of catalogs’—rumoured to be lurking on some dusty shelf in the Library of Babel. Take the example of Edward Nash, who was convinced that absolutely everything ‘that needed to be written’ could be expressed, if only he managed to find the perfect way of describing an individual cloud or wave. He spent most of his days staring at the sea and sky, and most of his nights filling notebooks with odd words and phrases. Never once was he able to complete a single sentence, unlike Chad Sheehan, who,
in a flash of inspiration, jotted down the perfect opening to a story. Whenever he attempted to compose the following sentence, however, he ended up with the opening line to another story. This oscillation between totality and fragmentation—already experienced by the Jena romantics, often regarded as the originators of modern literature—is best illustrated by Nate Warronker, who painstakingly planned to write the longest novel in history without ever considering its actual content. Felix Dodge embodies another crucial aspect of literary modernity: the failure to even begin the work, let alone complete it. He spent twenty years limbering up for a magnum opus that would have included ‘everything that was or could be known to humanity’—had he not died just as he was about to put pen to paper.

  In 1975, Ulises Carrión declared: ‘The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages.’ Such books of ‘absolute whiteness’ had featured in Eastern legends for centuries—echoed by the blank map in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ or the blank scroll in Kung Fu Panda—but they only really appeared on bookshelves in the twentieth century. They come in the wake of Bartleby (Melville’s scrivener who stops scrivening), Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry and Hofmannsthal’s aphasia-afflicted Lord Chandos. They are contemporaneous with the Dada suicides, Wittgenstein’s coda to the Tractatus, the white paintings of Malevich or Rauschenberg, Yves Klein’s vacant exhibitions, as well (of course) as John Cage’s mute music piece. Blankness is the sine qua non for inclusion in the BDLF, but it is seldom sought after directly. Manuscripts and books remain blank to us through being censored, lost, drowned, shredded, pulped, burned, used as cigarette paper or wrapped around kebabs, fed to pigs or even ingested by their own authors … Marta Kupka produces a blank memoir, not of her own volition, but due to a potent combination of failing eyesight and dried-up typewriter ribbon. The closest we get to a genuine hankering after blankness comes from the two erasers included in the book: Virgil Haack, who whittles down his work to a single word (à la François Le Lionnais), and Wendy Wenning, who edits her ‘thousand-page epic’ until she is left with a ‘perfectly blank sheet of paper.’ It is suggested that it may be the ‘fear of someone actually reading their work’ that causes authors like Stanhope Barnes, or T. E. Lawrence before him, to lose their manuscripts at Reading station. I think this comment applies to all the entries. These brief biographies are sketches that merely gesture towards the possibility of narrative development; stories that are cut short or fall silent. Stories that would prefer not to.

  We learn that Jürgen Kittler aimed to ‘rebuild language itself,’ just like Stéphane Mallarmé, who set out to ‘purify the words of the tribe.’ The French fin-de-siècle poet was influenced by Hegel, for whom language negates things and beings in their singularity, replacing them with concepts (as Edward Nash learned to his cost). From then on, literature would be officially at war with itself—language being both medium and enemy: ‘A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete’ (Borges). If words give us the world by taking it away, then the solution might be, as Beckett would argue, to ‘drill one hole after another’ into them ‘until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.’ The protagonist of Steven Millhauser’s recent ‘History of a Disturbance’—a latter-day Lord Chandos—vows no longer ‘to smear the world with sentences.’ He even endeavours to ‘erase word-thoughts’ in his quest for ‘a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words.’ After Balzac, the realist novel had taken on an Adamic quality by colonising the singular and contingent: aspects of experience that had no prior linguistic expression. Logoclasts like Beckett sought to put an end to this literary imperialism through a process of unnaming—the deployment of a self-effacing ‘literature of the unword.’ In Molloy, the narrator draws the radical conclusion that ‘all language’ is ‘an excess of language,’ even suggesting that it may be preferable ‘to obliterate texts,’ to ‘fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat,’ rather than ‘blacken margins’ like an eejit. Here, in the BDLF, we are introduced to Aurelio Quattrochi, an enigmatic writer who ‘spent all of 1973 poring over a single word, and most of 1974 erasing it.’

  Erasure may be one way of exploring a prelinguistic, prelapsarian world untainted by human consciousness; another is to make words so obtrusive that they cease to be transparent and blot out everything else. For the likes of Mallarmé and Blanchot, literature takes linguistic negation one step further than Hegel, by negating both the real thing and its surrogate concept. Words no longer refer primarily to ideas, but to other words; they become present like the things they negated in the first place. According to Donald Barthelme, a book is thus ‘an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world.’ Blanchot described writing, in similarly physical terms, as ‘a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.’

  Post-Romantic literature was a blank canvas that often dreamed of remaining blank, anyway. The emergence of modern literature coincided with a growing linguistic crisis. After the seventeenth century—after Milton—language had ceased to encompass most aspects of experience. There was, as George Steiner put it, a gradual retreat from the word. Mathematics became increasingly untranslatable, post-Impressionist art escaped verbalisation; linguistics and philosophy highlighted the arbitrary nature of signifiers, meaning was corrupted by the mass media … Against this backdrop of declining confidence in the powers of language—just as Schiller’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ was becoming ever more apparent, and the writer’s legitimacy, in a ‘destitute time’ (Hölderlin) of absent gods and silent sirens (Kafka), seemed ever more arbitrary—literature came to be considered as an ‘absolute.’ Writers were called upon to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the secularisation of society: they were deified even as their authority was being defied on all fronts. Walter Benjamin famously described the ‘birthplace of the novel’—and hence that of modern literature—as ‘the solitary individual’: an individual free from tradition, but also one whose sole legitimacy derived from him- or herself, rather than religion or society. As soon as this ‘solitary individual’ was elevated to the status of alter deus, the essential belatedness of human creativity became glaringly obvious. In theory, literature could now be anything the author wanted it to be. The snag, as Kierkegaard observed, is that ‘more and more becomes possible’ when ‘nothing becomes actual.’ What Paul Valéry described as the ‘demon of possibility’ is best illustrated by Robert Musil’s unfinished (and probably unfinishable) The Man Without Qualities—a restless work which, like its eponymous character, attempts to keep all options open by spurning any fixed identity.

  Novels were increasingly haunted by the ideal forms of which they were but imperfect instantiations, every book being ‘the death mask of its conception’ (Walter Benjamin), ‘the wreck of a perfect idea’ (Iris Murdoch), the betrayal of all perfection’ (David Foster Wallace). Completing a text became a form of capitulation: ‘This book is my cowardice,’ wrote Fernando Pessoa, who envied the courage of Félicien Marboeuf, the ‘greatest writer never to have written.’ The latter entertained such a lofty conception of literature that any novels he may have perpetrated could only have been pale reflections of their sublime inspiration. (A young Proust gushed that every single page he had failed to write had achieved perfection.) Literature, in other words, was now programmed to fail. Karl Ove Knausgaard defines writing as ‘failing with total dedication.’ Tom McCarthy claims that literature is ‘always premised on its own impossibility.’ Kafka even went as far as to say that the ‘essential impossibility of writing’ is the ‘only thing one can write about.’ Or not. Some took refuge in silence; others in destruction. The Baron of Teive (one of Pessoa’s numerous heteronyms) tops himself after destroying most of his manuscripts due to the impossibility of producing ‘superior art.’ In Dadaist circles, suicide even came to be seen as a form of inverted transcendence, a rejection of the reality pr
inciple and an antidote to literary mystification. ‘You’re just a bunch of poets and I’m on the side of death’ was Jacques Rigaut’s parting shot to the Surrealists. Like him, Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vaché, Boris Poplavsky, Julien Torma, Danilo Kupus and René Crevel all chose to make the ultimate artistic statement.

  Michael Gibbs, who published an anthology of blank books entitled All or Nothing, points out that going to all the trouble of producing such workless works ‘testifies to a faith in the ineffable.’ This very same faith prompts Borges to claim that ‘for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible.’ Marcel Bénabou argues that the books he has failed to write are not ‘pure nothingness’: they exist, virtually, in some Borgesian library of phantom fictions. This is also what George Steiner means when he states, ‘A book unwritten is more than a void.’

  For Blanchot, the impossibility of ever producing a complete work—a materialisation of the Absolute in book form—preserves literature as possibility. He described Joseph Joubert as ‘one of the first entirely modern writers’ because the latter saw literature as the ‘locus of a secret that should be preferred to the glory of making books.’ Cioran attacked Mallarmé for the very same reason: ‘If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealised in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself … We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements.’ Modernity, as Steiner also points out, ‘often prefers the sketch to the finished painting and prizes the draft, chaotic with corrections, to the published text.’ Like Joubert and Mallarmé, Roland Barthes was more interested in ‘sacrificing results to the discovery of their conditions.’ At the outset of his series of lectures entitled The Preparation of the Novel, he announces his intention to proceed ‘as if’ he were going to write a novel: ‘It’s therefore possible that the Novel will remain at the level of—or be exhausted by—its Preparation.’ In his famous foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges had advocated a similar approach: ‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.’ Blaise Cendrars thus toyed with the idea of a bibliography of unwritten works. In his debut, Edouard Levé gave brief descriptions of more than 500 books he had envisaged but never actually written. Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. is a series of footnotes on an ‘invisible’ text. Both Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage and Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London are books about the failure to write a book. Ivan Vladislavic’s The Loss Library is a reflexion upon stories the author had ‘imagined but could not write, or started to write but could not finish.’ Luis Chitarroni’s The No Variations is a series of aborted notes for an aborted novel. Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature is an edition of The Remove of Literature from which Blanchot’s original text has been erased, leaving only the author’s marginalia …