The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Read online

  His father had amassed a fortune in the manufacture of perfumed envelopes, so Fouquet grew up both bookish and entrepreneurial, spending most of his days avoiding school by hiding in the family’s vast library. Here, he discovered many great books, both known and unknown, successful and less so. Even as a teenager he dreamed of bringing such works as The Christ of the Cornfields (a long handwritten manuscript in Russian, which his father had acquired in exchange for a bottle of plum brandy from some Kazak merchants), Here Are the Young Men (a typed draft bought from a house clearance in Reading), Murderer’s Wink (an agreeable if heavily stained piece of pulp he had found hidden under his mother’s bed) or, later, an epic beat poem In the Scarlet Bathtub to a wider readership. He eventually decided that a little-known short story entitled ‘The Widow’s Legs’ (by one Ivan Yevachev, of whom LaMotte could find no information at all*) was the tale upon which to practise his genius.

  Having read and reread the story several dozen times, he sat down with a Russian dictionary (in truth, superfluous) and began to compose his own version of it. The more he got to grips with the text, however, the more he realised why, perhaps, the story had been so neglected. On closer inspection (and translating a text necessitates very close inspection indeed), its style felt clichéd and over-worn, its range of reference and allusion clearly limited to someone who had little knowledge or experience of the world, and its characterisation felt increasingly threadbare. Not dissuaded, however, Fouquet began (much in the manner of the aforementioned Nabokov) to amend. At first he simply embellished Yevachev’s style a little here and there, figuring that since the original was so obscure no one would notice his additions (or improvements, as he thought of them). Then he began to extend the range of the work by the addition of footnotes, including commentaries on what he supposed was the tale’s genesis (he invented a long story about the titular widow, for example, supposing her to have been an early erotic obsession of Yevachev’s). Each choice he made as a translator he rigorously annotated (giving rise to a lengthy disquisition on the frustrating, for a translator at least, lack of articles in the Russian language, as well as another fascinating essay on early Soviet-era Muscovite street slang).

  Six years later, Fouquet had created a work which bore little of the source text, one which was not even a version or—as current fashionable parlance may have it—a ‘reimagining’ of ‘The Widow’s Legs,’ but an entirely new work. He had, perhaps unfortunately, liberally interpreted the title too, coming up with ‘An Older Single Woman’s Lower Limbs.’

  Finding no publisher for his work, he used the last of his inheritance to print up a number of copies himself. None were sold. (In a curious twist of fate, his father unknowingly rebought the entire print run, had them pulped and recycled into perfumed envelopes.)

  * But you, dear reader, can look at entry no. 50.

  J. D. ‘JACK’ FFRENCH

  WHILE STRASBERG AND STANISLAVSKI’S ‘method’ is well known in the theatrical world, J. D. ‘Jack’ Ffrench was, perhaps, the first man who attempted to method write. Eschewing the timid road of second-hand research, Ffrench attempted to create veracity by fully living the stories he composed. His project was intriguing, but perhaps not one best undertaken by a man aiming to be a crime writer.

  J. D. ‘Jack’ Ffrench first appeared in the late 1950s as crime reporter at the North British Daily Advertiser, where he worked on the notorious cases of the White Handbag Murders, the Chip Shop Killer and the Fake Butler Scandal before, ostensibly having been inspired by such intricate and macabre events, heading to London and deciding to write pure fiction. It was perhaps the failure of his first novel Murderer’s Wink (a golden age–style caper involving handbags, chip shop proprietors and dubious household staff) which inspired him to start using the method. It was no longer enough to do the work other writers scrupulously undertake: Ffrench now had to inhabit his narratives entirely, and blur the boundaries between reportage and fiction.

  Due to this, the following account of Ffrench’s career is not based on the BDLF’s usual research sources but draws on the perhaps more reliable public archive of the Metropolitan Police.

  In London in the sixties, Ffrench found his métier. He frequented Esmeralda’s Barn, Murray’s Cabaret and the Astor Club, meeting the Krays (one nark filed a report suggesting he may even have had an affair with Ronnie) and working as an estate agent for Peter Rachman. He shared cocktails with Christine Keeler and slept with Stewart Home’s mother. He knew the forger Eric Quayne.* Not even having his hand nailed to a table by ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser deterred his resolve.

  As for many artists, the seventies seemed to disappear a little for Ffrench, but rumours that pieces of his body are still stored in the cellars of the Blind Beggar would seem to be disproved by CIA files which note the presence of a certain ‘French Jack’ brokering deals between the New York and Sicilian mafias. The Italian poet and performance artist Fausto Squattrinato also claims to have met him during this time, but his evidence is always unreliable.

  At this point, a novel still unforthcoming, it seems reasonable to speculate that Ffrench’s criminal work had become more important to him than writing. The life of an international arms or drugs smuggler is almost certainly more remunerative than that of a writer, though somewhat more risk-bearing.

  It is disappointing that an account of his work with the Cosa Nostra has never emerged, as the southern Italian organised crime organisations have always been flattered by the charms of fiction (though much less so by those of journalism: perhaps it is this that explains its absence, and even Ffrench’s eventual demise).

  His end was inevitable, though his body has never been found. Whether Ffrench is now holding up a turnpike in New Jersey, providing food for fish in some sludgy corner of the Mediterranean or waiting to be dredged from a murky London canal, we will never read the novel he wrote.

  * See entry no. 30.

  WELLON FREUND

  IT IS KNOWN that writers are prone to addiction. For Sheridan LeFanu it was green tea, for Thomas De Quincey opium, and Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day (eventually poisoning himself with raw beans, so desperate was he for his hit). Elizabeth Barrett Browning favoured port and laudanum, while Kerouac typed his way to fame and obliteration on benzedrines. Modern commentators may claim Byron was a sex addict, while Dostoevsky himself acknowledged his addiction to the gaming tables (and how odd it would be to imagine him today, hanging around Betfred while not hooked up to Poker 888).

  For Wellon Freund, not unusually for his generation, it was marijuana.

  Fortunate to be born at the end of the Second World War, thus too old to get drafted to Vietnam, Freund still made it his business to protest as best he could, mostly by rolling carrot-size reefers on the covers of Quicksilver Messenger Service LPs.

  So far, so typical. But what singled Freund out from his weed-addled comrades was that, as the clouds of the 1960s began to thin, Freund found himself possessed no longer to watch Cheech and Chong movies or to make midnight dashes for cookie dough ice cream, but to write.

  Throughout the early 1970s, Freund would skin up and sit down at his IBM Selectric II to bash out tales of those who had tuned in, turned on and drifted off. His works could have made a major contribution to the literature of the period, but sadly most remained unfinished as the Selectric’s ribbon often ran out, and by the time Freund had got hold of a replacement, he found he could no longer remember what it was he was writing. His only success of the period was composing the lyrics for a solo album by the bass player from Iron Butterfly (sadly, never released).

  It was during this period that he claimed to have written the original screenplay for Perkins Cobb’s great cult film My Sweet Dread, though Cobb himself denied this. (‘Wellon Freund?’ replied Cobb when asked about this. ‘Who the hell is he?’)

  At the beginning of the 1980s, using the money he had made from his extra-literary activities, Freund invested in a five-hundred-acre farm in northern Utah, a place where he ho
ped to cultivate both of his passions. However, by now the tide had turned and one morning as Wellon sat behind his new Canon Typestar gazing out onto his crops, he saw a Federal plane swoop low and discharge several thousand litres of high-grade weed killer over his beloved plants.

  At that point, Freund had been halfway through the opening sentence of what he believed would be his magnum opus, but finding himself unable to roll up and puff away, he was never able to complete so much as the first paragraph.

  He spent a year trying to emulate Le Fanu by drinking gallons of green tea before breakfast, but found it had only diuretic rather than hallucinogenic effects. Then he tried Balzac’s addiction, outdoing the father of realism by grinding beans and trying to snort them (which only ended up with him being hospitalised—not for a caffeine overdose, but for an imperfectly ground shard of Arabica which lodged itself in his upper nostril). He moved on to the various modish addictions of the age he found himself in: prescription meds (percosets merely made him fall asleep, Prozac unwilling to do anything at all), sex (an over-rated addiction, he decided, after contracting a particularly unpleasant STD), then moved back to the old standards, gambling and alcohol, but merely lost much of his fortune and poisoned his liver.

  Nothing, it seemed, would ever bring his muse back.

  Now Wellon Freund has cut his hair short, is a registered Republican and no longer believes Skip Spence’s Oar to be the masterpiece he once thought it. Incontinent, broke and needing regular dialysis (when he can remember his appointment time), he has not been near the Typestar for many years.

  PASQUALE FRUNZIO

  THE CITY OF TURIN is known for its chocolate, motorcars and literary suicides. Cesare Pavese overdosed on barbiturates in the Albergo Roma just opposite Porta Nuova railway station, while Primo Levi threw himself from the top of a stairwell in his apartment building on Corso Re Umberto. Swamped by debt and ripped off by his publisher, the swashbuckler Emilio Salgari used a barber’s razor to perform an extravagant seppuku in the hills behind his house on Corso Casale. Friedrich Nietzsche took his time to die, but began the process by throwing his arms around a horse’s neck and weeping extravagantly on Piazza Carlo Alberto, never again composing a legible word.

  It is for this reason, perhaps, that Pasquale Frunzio moved to the city, taking up a dull job with the Italian state insurance company while working on Lo Specchio Segreto, a slim collection of late modernist verse. Pace Kafka, Pessoa and Svevo (all major influences), Frunzio was a quiet, modest man, who bided his time in the Inpdap offices unnoticed and spent his evenings working on his poems, no extravagance greater than a plate of pasta asciutta and a bottle of seltzer water.

  While most writers will have considered the persistence of their reputation postmortem, few will have actively considered death as a career strategy. Not so Pasquale Frunzio. Frustrated by his inability to get any of his work into print, or even to get anyone to read it, he exercised the calculating logic and methodical precision praised by his day job, and decided to kill himself. Only then, Frunzio believed, would his work be noticed.

  Frunzio carefully wrote a letter (one of his finest works, he thought, which would surely eventually form the preface to his opera omnia) and placed it on the table in the living room of his small flat in San Salvario, together with a clearly typed manuscript of Lo Specchio Segreto.

  He then put on his best blue suit and (probably inspired by Sylvia Plath) turned on his gas oven, opened the door and placed his head in it. However, at the moment when the fumes were beginning to take effect, his doorbell rang. Though Frunzio was somewhat drowsy at this point, he was always a man of regular, polite habit, and dragged himself off the kitchen floor to answer. A postman stood at the door bearing a telegram from none other than the esteemed publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, expressing apologies for the accidental return of Lo Specchio Segreto, which he considered a masterpiece and wished to publish post haste. Taken aback by this unexpected reversal, Frunzio sat down at his desk and, wanting to read the telegram more carefully to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood it, turned on the light. A spark from the switch ignited the cloud of gas which had, by now, filled his apartment, resulting in a large explosion and completely immolating Frunzio, his farewell letter and all of his work of which—in a rare lapse—he had made no copy.

  ‘THE GOATHERD POET’

  ANTIQUITY’S A BUGGER. Not only did you have to live a thousand or so years before anyone had even thought of the printing press but if you wanted to avoid the slippery oral tradition you would have had to scratch your work into rock or daub dubious ink onto an animal skin. Then you’d have to put up with centuries of fire, flood, famine, pestilence and war doing their usual tricks, as well as the possibly even greater threat of the vagaries of literary fashion. Sadly, an ancient poet looking to insert him- or herself into eternity was probably knackered before he, or she, even started. We have no idea how many great works have been lost, yet we are aware of a number of bafflingly mediocre ones which have managed to survive and even get canonised. (Have you ever read Beowulf?)

  Pity, then, if you will, a poor man known only as the Goatherd Poet. No name other than this recalls him, he may have not even been a man, he may have been a group of people. The only thing we know for certain about the Goatherd Poet is that sometime between the beginning of the eighth and the end of the eleventh centuries he wrote a poem called The Goatherd.

  We would like to imagine the Goatherd Poet as a rough man of the earth, a proto-Romantic outsider, an early psychogeographer tracing his way across the northern part of his nation, faithful herd at his heel, grappling with the metre of this rough language. Historians, however, doubt this possibility, and it is probably more likely the poet was the second or third son of a Saxon chieftain, less given to the pleasures of the meadhall or the broadsword, trying to make himself useful or get a foothold sideways across the social scale into the Bardic class.

  The poem, sources tell us, was an alliterative epic, some thousand lines long, recording the life of a lonely goatswain as he wanders a bleak landscape, lamenting the obscure loss of his homeland and the bitterness of wyrd fate. It was held by one of the few people who claim to have seen a copy to have been a greater work than The Wanderer, more challenging than The Seafarer, wider in scope and richer in literary and imaginative resource than Pearl.

  A single copy of the poem—allegedly written in the poet’s own hand rather than having been botchedly transcribed by some short-sighted or easily distracted monk–survived in an island abbey off the coast of Northumbria, where it lay undisturbed for centuries, miraculously surviving the sacking of the monasteries and a rampant fire in the late fifteenth century. When the abbey eventually collapsed into the sea in 1760, the mouldering remains of its library were broken up and dispersed across Europe, where they fell into the hands of collectors and antiquarians. After some travels, The Goatherd ended up in the library of a vast country estate in Hampshire, owned by the great-grandfather of Sir Belmont Rossiter.* It was not placed on the library’s shelves, however, but used as material to shore up the walls of the crumbling building, and there it sat, holding up the wainscoting until Sir Belmont had the place rebuilt. On the discovery of this ancient, rotting sheaf, Rossiter became an early champion of the poem. He went on to write an entire history of Goatherd verse, though his nimbler Victorian peers accused him of having invented not only the poem but also the poet, and indeed the entire genre.

  When Rossiter fell into obscurity, so did his work and those authors he had championed. The house collapsed and was used as a hospital during the First World War. It is believed the inmates used the ancient manuscript as paper with which to roll cigarettes. We earnestly hope the great work bought its smokers some pleasure.

  * See entry no. 34.

  VIRGIL HAACK

  THOUGH INITIALLY HELD in disregard by more conservative critics, minimalism has now become an entirely respectable genre in the fields of music and the visual arts. It seems a shame, therefore, that it
has never received its due laurels in the literary arena.

  While the works of writers ranging from Samuel Beckett to Raymond Carver to Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis have variously been described as having something minimalist about them, and while haiku and flash fiction are widely practised forms, few writers have ever really dared to grasp the baton held out by Morton Feldman or Steve Reich, to face the challenge laid down by Donald Judd or Barnett Newman, or to follow the map drawn up by Mies van der Rohe or Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematists.

  One of these brave few was Virgil Haack.

  Haack (described by those who knew him as having a prominent nose set into a long ovoid face between two tiny eyes, as though his own head were already a minimalist work) first appeared in New York in what may have been minimalism’s annus mirabilis, 1964, carrying nothing but a small bag containing a Hermes Rocket (that most minimal of instruments), flitting from white-walled galleries to bleak loft spaces, apocryphally taking part in the debut performance of In C while frantically trying to edit his five-hundred-page beat-influenced novel down to something which more closely matched the tenor of the times.

  After several years’ work, Haack (perhaps unsurprisingly described by those who knew him as ‘a man of few words’) had managed to finish his endeavour and duly sent out the manuscript of Untitled Work (No. 1) to agents and publishers throughout the city. Convinced that less was certainly more, he had written the single word ‘I’ on the first, and only, page of his novel.

  Unfortunately (perhaps due to the inadequacies of the Hermes Rocket), the agents and editors of New York unanimously mistook that lonely, passionate word for the number ‘one’ and believed that Haack had forgotten to enclose the ensuing chapters of his great work.