The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Read online

  She wanted to tell her story; its container mattered little. Call it a novel, call it a novella, call it a story: it was all the same to her. Call it a guidebook, why not?

  The story she needed to tell had taken place entirely in her home city, the city she had never left since birth. (And from which, truth be told, she could not have left, given the restrictions on travel which faced its inhabitants at that time.) We who have lived in the wider world may suppose it was simply her limited horizons that led her to think the smokestacks and concrete apartment blocks, the smell from the mineral processing plant or the unique fall of light on the ever-present snow were among the most beautiful things ever witnessed. But who are we to question her perceptions? Especially when she writes so well of them.

  Sadly, in 1961, having decreed the manager of the Guest Hotel International Friendship guilty of ideological impurities, the State Enterprise for Information and Publishing had every copy of A Guide for the Curious Traveller located and pulped, despite never having intuited the trenchant, heartbreaking story contained within it.

  If we could find a copy of the book, we would follow Vilikhe’s every suggestion, even though she describes a city that now has another name, and may well no longer exist.

  HERMANN VON ABWÄRTS

  THERE IS A THEORY, mooted in some literary circles, that love doesn’t exist. This may be putting it too baldly: to put it better, the theory goes that romantic love doesn’t exist. Romantic love as we consider it today was, it is said, nothing but a literary formula, a plot device, a formal trope or stylistic invention created by French troubadour poets in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries.

  Here at the BDLF we naturally find this an intriguing proposition. However (partially due to the state of our research budget and abilities), we have not, sadly, been able to uncover any of these dastardly perpetrators. It would have been fulfilling to find of a certain Guillaume or Hennequin, a Jacquet or an Etienne of somewhere-or-other who had first lusciously described hearts-a-flutter or the sweetness of love’s tears, only to find themselves on the receiving end of the real, true, devastating grief that love can cause.

  For a look at the phenomenon, we are instead obliged to turn to the case of Hermann von Abwärts. Hermann, born in Kassel in 1770, son of a schoolteacher and a midwife, never excelled at school, being poor at sports and unable to fence. From an early age, however, he did show a marked propensity for writing verse, something which his schoolteachers tried their best to beat out of him.

  It didn’t work. Hermann composed pages, quires, then reams and sheaves of love poetry, mostly before he was even eighteen years old, and dedicated to a girl he had not met. Not only not met, but who probably didn’t exist: all the poems are dedicated to a mysterious ‘K’ or ‘R’ or ‘M.’ A census reveals no trace of any Katerina, Rosa or Margaretha whom he could possibly have known. Von Abwärts, it seems, was rehearsing his complex love life before he had even ever actually been in love.

  His habit did not stop. After taking a teaching position in nearby Marburg, von Abwärts fell deeply, passionately in love with the school principal’s wife. After being challenged to a duel by the principal (who had found a none-too-ambiguous poem delivered through his wife’s bedroom window late one night), von Abwärts fled, apparently burning the cache of poems he had written to Herrin Karolina.

  He next shows up in Prague in 1802, hot on the trail of the daughter of a German noblewoman (who believed this amorous young man had been courting her rather than her daughter), after which—more poems burned en route—he turns up in Dresden a couple of years later. It was here he would compose what he believed to be his meisterwerk.

  Having taken up yet another teaching position, he secretly engaged to be married to a young noblewoman of the city. However, on finding out his daughter’s intentions, the Baron von Schroffstein was none too pleased about them and tried to have the upstart rascal von Abwärts (despite the aristocratic pretentions of his surname) run out of town, as modern commentators might put it.

  This time, von Abwärts decided he would run no more, and threw down the manuscript of the (frankly derivative) Sorrows of Young Hermann at his feet, feeling that his murderous pursuers would actually weep and beg pity of him, should they read of the strength of his feelings for Fräulein Katerina.

  Unfortunately, the henchmen the Baron had employed were all illiterate, and used the manuscript to beat him thoroughly around the head before he was knifed and thrown into an unmarked grave, his words beside him.

  BARON FRIEDRICH VON SCHOENVORTS

  THE MORE WIDELY READ amongst us will, no doubt, recognise the name of Baron Friedrich von Schoenvorts as a minor character in one of the lesser-known works of speculative fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This commonly held belief is, however, erroneous.

  The real Baron Friedrich was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a nineteenth-century Prussian Junker and himself a prolific writer of speculative fiction, of which, sadly, nothing survives.

  The Baron began his writing career in his early twenties. Having married into the noble von Schoenvorts family (his own origins remain unclear, though it is thought he may have been the illegitimate child of a wayward von Schoenvorts uncle and a strapping stable lass), he was soon faced with the intolerable boredom of life on a ramshackle east Elbian estate, and gave himself to the literary muse in order to be able to neglect his other (minimal) duties. His early works, amounting to some ten thousand pages, were in the genre which today would be named ‘erotica.’ Unfortunately, the formidable Baroness chanced upon her husband’s manuscripts and made him take them into the garden and burn them in front of the entire host of the estate’s retainers, thus blocking Baron Friedrich’s diligent pen for several years.

  His name reappears around the turn of the century when he bought himself a commission in the Prussian military (possibly to escape the Baroness’s attentions). Though by no means a nautical man, he soon found himself commander of an early U-boat. As he believed the closeted life of a submariner to be the perfect setting in which to write, the Baron installed a typewriter in his small cabin. (The machine in question was thought to be a Sholes and Glidden Remington No. 1, an expensive and extremely heavy import, but was more probably a lighter and more patriotic choice, a Fabig and Barschel Faktotum.)

  Underwater, Baron Friedrich found his element. He locked himself in his cabin for days on end, subsisting on a diet of nothing other than plum brandy and charcoal biscuits, writing as though his life depended on it. His sub-aquatic period gave rise not only to a six-volume history of the von Schoenvorts family (insisting, perhaps improbably, that they were descended from one of the lost ten tribes of Israel), but also to an entire series of works dealing with an undersea colony of Martian invaders plotting the downfall of Western civilisation. Said evil-doers were constantly thwarted in their attempts to use the Crown Jewels as the lens for a death ray, turn the Eiffel Tower into a spacecraft or poison sausages by the dashing Baron Heinrich von Vortschoen.

  It was on an emergency stop near Biarritz (to collect more paper and typewriter ribbons rather than much-needed fuel) that Baron Friedrich first met the enigmatic Lys La Rue,* who would accompany him and his crew on many of their adventures.

  Meanwhile, the First World War had broken out, apparently unbeknownst to the Baron, who saw the constant attacks on his U-boat as nothing other than a distraction at best, an attempt to sabotage his writing career at worst. As a result, the Baron gave command to unhesitatingly blast any craft that approached them as far out of the water as possible.

  It was this rash act that gave rise to his fame as a barbarous yet fearless patroller of the Atlantic, and led to him appearing in certain U.S. newspapers where, it is thought, Burroughs may have seen the name during his time as an apprentice to a pencil sharpener salesman in Idaho.

  Due to his poor navigational skills, Baron Friedrich believed himself to be somewhere under the North Pole ice sheets when his craft was wrecked on the rocky Azores. He believed he
had finally found his magical undersea kingdom, though his crew, by now starving and mutinous, disagreed and summarily shot the Baron through the head. They sent all of his manuscripts to a watery grave when they set light to the remains of the Schoenvort U-boat, and watched it sink below the waves, where, we surmise, it lies to this day.

  * Possibly one of the various pseudonyms of Elise La Rue (See entry no. 22).

  NATE WARONKER

  WE ARE PROVERBIALLY TOLD not to judge a book by its cover, and in the same way we should not judge a book by its girth. Length should never be confused with quality. This obvious fact, however, has not stopped many people from doing so. A cursory glance at any list of the longest novels ever written also includes a notable showing from books many people believe to have been among the greatest ever written. Even short story writers are often not given due credit until they have produced a hefty Collected Works.

  It was in this spirit that Nate Waronker, a young, eager aspirant from Ohio, fresh out of his MFA, decided not to take the usual route of sending out finely honed short stories to slim literary journals, but instead to aim high straight away and write the longest novel ever written.

  This, he was sure, would set him head and shoulders above all his contemporaries who would sit in the library finely honing their prose, sipping mocha lattes from spillfree biodegradable cups while he carved his place in the annals of literary greatness and list sites all over the Internet. Instead of earnestly discussing Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis, Waronker reached for the Guinness Book of Records and did some extensive Googling.

  He had difficulty setting a bar. The only book he’d actually read and which he’d planned to emulate, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, came in a fair lightweight with a mere 484,001 words. (And isn’t that extra ‘one’ intriguing? We wonder if DFW didn’t add it on purpose.) War and Peace was a contender with nearly 600,000 words, Atlas Shrugged (popular with a certain kind of business student on his campus, he had noted) almost equalled it. Waronker was intrigued by Kalki Krishnamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan, which tolled a pleasingly round 900,000 words, but couldn’t find a copy of it in the library and began to doubt its existence. Clarissa—which he was supposed to have read as part of his undergraduate degree but had instead found the Cliff’s Notes to be far more manageable—was up there with 984,700 words, but it was In Search of Lost Time which regularly came in tops, at some 1,200,000 words.

  He had originally planned to read all these great and lengthy works, but having loaded them all onto his Kindle, he didn’t feel the pleasing weight of the great tome he wanted to write, so didn’t bother, instead opting to sit down and begin the million and a half words (he had set his target) of The Longest Novel Ever Written (an arch postmodern wink, or lack of imagination? We leave you to decide).

  Waronker was pretty quick with a keyboard, but soon found he had trouble managing more than three thousand words a day, often not achieving half that number. At this rate, he calculated, even resting only one day a week, it would take him more than two years to complete the book. This seemed like an infinity to a young, eager man. Moreover, he came up against the problem that although he knew how much he wanted to write, he had little idea precisely what he wanted to write.

  Last heard of, Nate Waronker was still sitting in a Starbucks on the campus of his Midwestern liberal arts college, having taken to double espressos in an attempt to keep his word rate up. We wish him well.

  WENDY WENNING

  LEAN, TAUT PROSE. Writing as tight as a bowstring. Refined lexis and stripped-back syntax. These were the things Wendy Wenning liked. Wenning schooled in a creative writing class filled with men who wrote what they knew, knew what they wrote and little else. Stories of upholsterers, French polishers and hardware store clerks with ex-wives and drink problems. No words were wasted in Wenning’s workshop. The tutor praised the amount of white space on the page.

  Later, Wenning fell for a certain type of broadsheet reviewer. Those for whom every word was essential. She began to mistrust anyone who revelled in language, and threw out the thesaurus her grandfather had given her. Didn’t even put it in the recycling bin. She mistrusted puns, avoided alliteration, grew to abhor metaphor. Character development was nothing but cod psychology. In her darker moments, Wenning thought Hemingway too fancy for his own good and found Richard Ford positively baroque. David Foster Wallace made her feel ill. Sometimes she looked amongst the cabbage stalks and coffee grounds in the garbage can, watching her thesaurus rot, not throwing it out but taking grim pleasure in its gradual decay.

  Wenning was not without illustrious precedent. She thought of Ezra Pound’s razor and red-pen work on The Waste Land, or Gordon Lish giving Carver a severe haircut. She wasn’t wrong: while restored, integral or unexpurgated editions may proliferate, there is little doubt that Eliot’s poem or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love would be anywhere near as impressive without such savage editing.

  Wenning had been at work on her great novel of postwar American life for years. But then she discovered she had lost control of An Empty Chair, and realised what she had to do. She had to kill her babies.

  She made some coffee, sat down and began to edit. To refine. To purge. Nouns are our friends, verbs our workhorses, adjectives our enemies. She removed every adjective from her book. Once that task was completed, she turned back to the beginning and started again. Relative clauses went next, then the passive voice. Metaphor, simile, symbol. All felt the knife. None were spared. It was for their own good, she knew. Sometimes she spent an entire day on one sentence or sat up deep into the night trying to find words with fewer syllables. No fat.

  She checked her word count every day. The lower it got, the more determined she grew.

  She began to think Emily Dickinson bloated, Lydia Davis indulgent. Wenning’s style wasn’t reticent or domestic, nor did she ever think herself as working with a small canvas. No miniaturist or minimalist, she believed reducing her words to their very essence would release them, to tell a story as huge as its paper consumption was small.

  As the months passed, she watched her thousand-page epic become a novella, then a short story. Flash fiction came, went. A prose poem. But still too fat. She wouldn’t let anyone see her work until it was perfect.

  Then one morning towards dawn after a long, harsh night of black coffee and charcoal cigarettes, she had it. She leaned back, hit the print button, listened to the machine whir, then looked at her masterwork. A perfectly blank sheet of paper.

  IVAN YEVACHEV

  WHEN IVAN IVANOVICH YEVACHEV finally had a telephone installed, a veil of contentment and pride descended upon him and his mother. He gazed proudly at the black Bakelite apparatus sitting on its own specially appointed table in the kitchen of their small flat on the Arbat and finally felt he had been recognised. Not so much, he thought, for their patriotic fortitude during the difficult period after his father had not returned from the war, but for ‘The Widow’s Legs,’ a short tale published in the journal Mir and recipient of 1929’s Young Socialist Writers’ Prize.

  His consequent decisions to join the Writers’ Union and avoid some of the more avant-garde elements of the Moscow coterie of writers, he felt, only bestowed more honour upon him, although the telephone steadfastly refused to ring. He need not worry, other members of the Union assured him, the Comrade himself had read the story, and had greatly appreciated it.

  Over the next few years, Yevachev wrote several other works. Although the editors of Mir and Zvezda turned them down, he was not discouraged and found space in journals whose circulation almost reached double figures in which to share his writings.

  When he heard that other writers—some members of the Union, others not—had begun to receive not only telephones but also telephone calls, however, he grew frustrated. He sat for hours in his flat, cooking pots of kasha for himself and his mother, glowering at the silent phone. In 1935, he wrote a story about it, ‘The Phone Call,’ copied it out longhand (not having been fortunate e
nough to receive a Moskva typewriter, a fact which may have percolated some amount of envy into the fateful story), and distributed it among some trusted members of the Writers’ Union.

  The phone call eventually came at 2:15 in the morning of August 29th, 1935. Having waited many years for this moment, Yevachev hurried himself out of bed and picked up the receiver with a mixture of hope and anxiety.

  ‘Good evening, Iosif Vissarionovich,’ he said, amazed to hear the words finally coming from his own mouth.

  As far as we know, Ivan Ivanovich Yevachev never wrote again.

  Nor did he ever receive another telephone call. The next night there was merely a large black car pulling itself up outside their apartment in the middle of the night, two men the size and shape of wardrobes knocking quietly on the door.

  His only published story, ‘The Widow’s Legs’, was removed from all extant copies of the journal in which it had appeared, and Yevachev’s name expunged from the roll of prize recipients.

  Wherever Yevachev went in that car or on the train that may or may not have followed it, we like to believe that as he travelled he was thinking of Chekhov on his way out to Sakhalin, or Dostoevsky heading for Omsk, not knowing they would one day return to write their greatest works.