The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Page 3

Bodham’s story is an epic writ small, but no less epic for that. Were he alive today, Thomas Bodham may have chosen to recount his experiences as a blog or a trail of Facebook updates. We wonder, in genuine perplexity, why we feel such an account would have been so much less.

  ASTON BROCK

  WRITING IS ONE of the lowest paid artistic vocations. In the very rare occasions that a writer manages to make a half-decent sum, the press go apoplectic, as if anybody could do such a thing.

  This situation becomes especially pronounced when comparing the most successful writers with the most successful of their colleagues in the visual arts. Even an IMPAC-nominated Booker-winning MacArthur genius cannot hope to command the eye-watering sums raised at auction by Hirst, Richter or Twombly.

  The reasons for this are many and beyond the scope of this humble record, though one significant factor is surely the work of art’s uniqueness: its aura as a singular object.

  It was with this in mind that Aston Brock decided, seeing as his attempts to break into literary renown had yet been unsuccessful, that he would henceforth publish his work in limited editions of one. One copy, only. No more, ever. The author’s signature would grace the title page.

  Thus, reasoned Aston (a fifty-four-year-old economics graduate whose only venture into the world of hedge funds had seen him lose billions on investments in video discs, virtual reality headsets and futures on the Greek drachma, consequently leading banks worldwide to cancel any trace of his existence), his novel Christ versus Warhol would attain the status and price tag of such works of art as Jasper Johns’s Gray Numbers ($40 million), Gerhard Richter’s Three Candles ($8.9 million), Cy Twombly’s Untitled 1970 ($7.6 million) or even Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (a relatively modest $5 million).

  Brock paid a modish graphic design company to do the jacket, had it handsomely quarter-bound in Gray 31 Harmatam fine leather and Atlantic Calm cloth sides with a coloured top, magenta and indigo head and tail bands, Fedrigoni Merida endpapers and housed in a watered slipcase, then used his connections in the art worlds of Paris, New York, Munich and Milan to have it put up for auction at Christie’s.

  It failed to sell, not even for its reserve price. An informal offer of three euro fifty was made, but only on the condition that the buyer could have it in e-book format.

  Brock, perhaps unsurprisingly, declined the offer, and the single copy of Christ versus Warhol currently lies under his bed.

  We do not berate Aston Brock for his presumption; we admire him for his courage. We do not pass judgement on a work that, sadly, we have not been able to read, we only offer up his tale as part of our ongoing perplexity about the status of writing in a world which increasingly prefers to look, and not to read.

  MARTIN BURSCOUGH

  ALL WRITERS’ CAREERS, it is said, end in failure. Pity, then, poet Martin Burscough, whose career began in failure.

  Burscough, who had passed a long and unspectacular life in financial services, was touched by the muse at a relatively late age when, one afternoon, ‘Poetry Please’ quietly leaking from the radio on his kitchen windowsill, he saw a one-footed pigeon limping across his back lawn. This strange conjunction hurt him into poetry (as Auden may have put it), resulting in his first ever poem, ‘The Pigeon.’

  He scribbled the words longhand then dusted off his once-proud Brother AX15 and carefully typed. So pleased by the results, he recalled his favourite bird and wrote ‘The Mallard’ (‘O! Thou green-headed monarch / Of the riverbank …’), then ‘The Sparrow’ and ‘The Seagull.’ Having exhausted the stock of birds he knew, he headed to his local library to consult an Observer’s book, and there saw an advertisement for a meeting of his local writers’ circle.

  A week later he arrived at the meeting only to find the complimentary tea and biscuits already finished (‘Nothing but a few crumbs / Left on an empty plate …’ began the poem he composed to commemorate the occasion). The only person left in the building (not a fellow poet but a librarian) gave Burscough the sad news that due to declining interest, the circle was disbanding. However, she pointed him in the direction of a pile of leaflets, flyers and badly photocopied A4 posters, telling him of the several other poetry events in the area.

  The die was cast. Burscough picked up a handful of indicators and began his travels. He mistimed the bus for his first open mike night but harried the flustered organiser nonetheless, only to end up bottom of the list. ‘Next time …’ she told him. For his second attempt, unforeseen circumstances meant the 6:38 from Bodham was cancelled and again he arrived to find a pack of poets departing for the pub, not inviting him along. The third time it was a points failure; on the fourth, a replacement bus service conspired to make him late.

  He began to venture farther afield, seeking gatherings of versifiers of any stripe, but found a senior citizens’ travel-pass and a mobility scooter unsuited to the demands of the modern professional poet. His routes became more complex and obscure, and from Timperley to Tal-y-Bont, Yate to Yelverton and Ormskirk to Ottery St. Mary, Burscough found Arriva, Greater Anglia, Stagecoach, Plusbus, Onetrains, National Express and Transport for London thwarting him at every turn.

  He went to the Hay-on-Wye festival, only to find a wet field filled with abandoned tents and empty wine bottles, then to something calling itself the ‘smallest poetry festival in the world.’ On arriving, he could not dispute its claim, as he was both the sole poet and the sole audience member.

  So if you are ever in Britain, and you use public transport, keep an eye out for a man with a flask of tea and a soggy banana, clutching a Tesco plastic bag filled with typed manuscripts, anxiously checking his watch and a timetable, and admire him.

  FELIX DODGE

  IT IS OFTEN SAID that a weakness of many first novels is that their over-eager authors cram too much into their pages, fearing they may never write another book again.

  This was not, however, entirely the reason that Felix Dodge’s debut The Hourglass never saw the light of a bookshop or library shelf. Dodge’s great worry, contrastingly, was that he would not be able to cram enough into its pages.

  Felix Dodge was one of those men fortuitous enough to have been born towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a well-to-do upper-middle-class household in London. An earnest young man, he had little interest in books but had, by the age of eighteen, managed to amass enormous collections of stamps, butterflies, fossils, typewriters, postcards of European spa towns, eighteenth-century Venetian erotica, prize pig rosettes, Palaeolithic axe heads and early modern darning implements. His wide-ranging interests and unbounded curiosity led him to study classics at Cambridge (the only suggestion his baffled schoolmasters could find for him), where, in the second year of his studies, he came upon those twin keystones of High Modernism, The Waste Land and a smuggled copy of Ulysses, wrapped in sheets of vinegar paper.

  Their effect was like a lightning strike for the impressionable young Dodge. Such attempts to encompass almost everything that was knowable (however much their authors may have averred this inference) led him to investigate the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a notion that appealed to him greatly, and thus attempt to create his own literary work, one which would include everything that was or could be known to humanity.

  Over the next twenty years, Dodge, aided by a small inheritance, squirreled himself away in the great libraries of Europe and North America, undertook ethnographical adventures in the Near, Middle and Far East, travelled to South America in search of the rare florentibus manu fungus, to Siberia to map little-known rivers and to Africa to collect creation myths from goat-herding tribes no white man had yet encountered.

  His book, he believed, would embrace and obscure the Kalevala, the Mahabarata, the Bible, the Koran, The Divine Comedy and the complete works of Shakespeare, Goethe and all the great Russians. It would make Moby-Dick look like a short story, Finnegans Wake a mere pamphlet. Among many other things, Dodge investigated and wrote extensive notes on Russian steamships, First World War artillery battalions, the Mauve
February anarchists, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the United Kingdom’s lesser-used train routes, rare psychological complaints (bibliophagy and graphomania in particular), translations of obscure German and Russian literature, the nature of the true Ark, seventeenth-century traveller’s tales, Muscovite street slang, early submarines, Bothno-Ugaric languages, the practice of demonology in West Yorkshire, Age of Discovery–era Portuguese statuary and the contents of the great lost library of Alexandria.

  It was only as the Second World War was unleashing its tide of barbarism across Europe that Felix Dodge began to worry. Rightly fearing the destruction of so much knowledge, Felix realised he had lost his narrative thread and, urged by the straitened tenor of the times, knew he had to stop researching and begin writing.

  When he discovered that the mere plan for his novel ran to over a thousand pages, he seemed to hit upon the idea of concentrating everything he knew into one single story. This, he believed, would expound everything he wished to share.

  He put a sheet of paper into his Remington Streamliner and started to type: The Hourglass. Enticing as it is, this undoubtedly profound metaphor he had hit upon, the single image which could hold all his thought, was never untied, because, as he finally began to hit the keys in the calm of his Cambridge rooms, surrounded by the thousands of volumes of research he had built up, before his typewriter could even begin to glean his teeming brain, he was struck by a sudden, fatal aneurysm.

  Was it, we wonder, the weight of all he knew that caused his grey matter to malfunction so spectacularly, and so tragically?

  DANIEL FINNEGAN

  WHILE THE BDLF is reluctant to dip its toes into the murky waters of contemporary publishing, a recent case has been brought to our attention which, we believe, merits observation.

  At first glance, Daniel Finnegan would seem a poor contender for inclusion in these pages. A successful Cambridge graduate, he followed the contemporary career path for an aspirant writer by completing a master’s degree in creative writing at one of the more esteemed institutions for such courses, and (unlike many of his classmates) found himself both talented and fortunate enough to emerge from the programme with an agent and, shortly thereafter, a tidy deal with a major publishing conglomerate.

  Daniel’s novel, A Breakfast of Thistles, a delicately observed and finely wrought double narrative recounting the contrasting and interlocking narratives of a nineteenth-century Irish labourer in London and the (semiautobiographical) tale of a bright young Irishman coming up to Cambridge in the present day, had gained high marks from his supervisors and was initially greeted with enthusiasm by all at his new publishers.

  Daniel felt flush with pride, enthusiasm and a handsome (well, handsome enough for these straitened times) advance.

  His first doubts came when, over lunch, an editor suggested that he change the navvy into a washerwoman working in large aristocratic household. ‘Female migrant narratives are hot at the moment,’ she told him, ‘and we’ve got the Downton factor in there too. It’s win-win.’ Persuaded by her forceful manner, Daniel swallowed his objections and produced a new draft.

  Six months later, he received a call.

  ‘Hi, Dan!’ the voice said.

  ‘It’s Daniel.’

  ‘Okay—good and bad news: it’s not running well with focus groups,’ the assistant editor blandly informed him. ‘So we had a brainstorming session, and came up with this: instead of a sensitive poet-type washerwoman, we’re thinking of a reality TV contestant. It’ll say a lot about, you know, contemporary issues …’

  Again, Daniel felt he had no choice and duly worked up another draft.

  Six months passed, another call. This time it was an intern.

  ‘Hi, Danny!’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Sure. Listen, we’re really impressed by the way you’ve taken on the scathing satire and female subject matter. You owned this stuff! You delivered!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But looking at the whole caboodle, we think it would play better in key secondary markets if the author were a woman.’

  Daniel briefly considered the existence of Daniela Finnegan.

  ‘I could give it a try …’

  ‘L-O-L! But no need to worry about drag rags just yet. We’ve found someone else who’ll do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Oh, cover photo. Title page, that kind of thing. She’s a hottie, too—more Irish-looking than you. Red hair, the lot. She interviews well, too. We felt you were a bit, erm, introspective. And that’s not a criticism! No way! We like introspection, in its place. But, thing is, Dan, we’re visioning this not so much a book as a marketing campaign. Still there, Dan? Look at this way: now we’ll get a crack at the women-only prizes, too!’

  ‘But … what about my book?’

  ‘No worries, mate. We’ve listened to what you’re saying and we’ll take it on board. We’ll make sure you get a mention in the acknowledgements.’

  Mutely, Daniel hung up the phone.

  A year later, via Twitter, Daniel heard the book (A Breakfast of Bolly) had won an award for its marketing strategy.

  Daniel Finnegan still writes quietly introspective works flecked with dazzle and wonder which no one will ever read.

  He has a pocket full of money, but he feels strangely empty.

  ELLERY FORTESCUE

  WRITING AND ILLNESS make common bedfellows. Keats, a doctor, was constantly coughing, Charlotte Brontë claimed to suffer from fits of hypochondria, Joyce and Beckett sat together for hours comparing maladies real and imagined, and don’t even get us started on Marcel Proust.

  We do not know if there is some innate link between the two, or if it is the mere fact that writers tend be great self-examiners (or, as the less charitable may call them, narcissists). Were, however, it found to be true, there would hardly be any surprise in the fact: spending many hours sitting alone in poorly heated rooms, seeing little daylight, building up levels of anxiety about the correct deployment of a semi-colon or whether to risk using an adverb is not going to be good for anyone’s health, without even thinking about the common attendant vices of alcohol, tobacco or worse. (Here the BDLF hastens to recognise that, on a global scale, writing is nowhere near as bad for the health as working in an asbestos factory or cobalt mine.)

  Poet and essayist Ellery Fortescue was possessed by doubts about her health. A sickly child, she had resorted to the world of books early on in life, a habit she kept as she grew older, eventually attempting to contribute to their number with her verses and journals, all dedicated to Susan Sontag and the subject of her many ailments. (Often it was nothing greater than a cold that assailed her, but it was all material.)

  As she grew older, her illnesses became ever more plural. By the age of twenty-eight, she found herself beset by alternating insomnia and narcolepsy, mysterious weight loss followed by baffling weight gain, aches, pains, blotchy skin, hair loss (head), hair growth (other parts of the body), a constantly running nose, bones that seemed to fracture and ligaments that sprained whenever she tried to hit so much as a single key on her IBM Wheelwriter 3500.

  She began to visit doctors, physicians and outright quacks of all persuasions, conventional and complementary, but found them to little effect, until one suggested she try writing therapy.

  ‘Keep a journal,’ said the friendly GP. ‘Write it all down. It might help.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been doing all my life,’ she replied, but by then the doctor was on to his next patient.

  For the next few years, Fortescue listed all her symptoms and feelings about them in an ever-growing pile of notebooks, often wondering what kind of book she could fashion from all this material once it was completed, that is, once she was well again.

  Yet that day never seemed to come; the more she wrote, the more sickly she became.

  It was only when the pile of notebooks had begun to block the door to her bedroom that she realised she could diagnose herself. She knew what her disease was, and
its name: graphomania.

  For Fortescue, writing was not a therapy or a cure, but a symptom.

  She got out of bed and one by one tore her notebooks up and slowly fed them, leaf by leaf, into her paper shredder. She gave the Wheelwriter (long since without a cartridge) to a local charity shop. She banished any kind of writing implement from her flat.

  She has never felt better since.

  LAMOTTE FOUQUET

  WHAT ARE WE READING when we read a translation? Whatever it may be, a translation is far from being the pure, unmediated word of the book’s original author, however much the reader may wish it to be so. Take Nabokov’s translation of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, for example. In a polemical introduction and a series of footnotes no less entertaining than the text itself (the footnotes alone run to some fifteen pages and constantly interrupt the story), Nabokov takes issue with all of the book’s previous translators, informs us of the condition of Jewry in early nineteenth-century Caucasus, tells us about honey production and the several different types of alcoholic beverages available in the region, gives us a short essay on the difference between the white acacia and the American black locust tree, tells a history of the publishing record and reception of the works of Byron in Russia and takes a number of vitriolic sideswipes at Honoré de Balzac as well as keeping a running commentary on the text itself (not unoccasionally telling us when he thinks it is rubbish).

  Without translation, however, it goes without saying that we would all be much poorer. Anglophones would have no Bolaño, Borges, Calvino, Kharms or Gogol. Readers of other languages would have little Joyce. Yet the act of translating is fraught with pitfalls.

  Take, for example, the case of LaMotte Fouquet (1908–1992; not to be confused with Baron Friedrich La Motte Fouqué, the nineteenth-century German Romantic writer). Despite his name, he was actually English, but born into a polyglot household (his mother Swedish, his father Franco-Polish, his brother Armenian), which meant he spoke eight languages fluently by the age of five, if you do not count his reasonable understanding of Sanskrit.