The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Page 5

  Undeterred, Haack moved into a room in a building occupied by La Monte Young (an admirer of his work) and thus became exposed to the idea of the eternal minimal. (Long drones fed through the house in permanent, gently fluctuating G, C, C# and D chord progressions.) Here he took part in his only known public reading: Angus MacLise battered a dustbin lid and Tony Conrad scraped his violin while Haack intoned a single phoneme. The performance went on for three days, after which Haack collapsed in exhaustion.

  By now obsessed with duration, Haack picked himself up and began work on his next book, a work which consisted of the same word typed over and over and over again. Forty-five years and several hundred typewriter ribbons later, Haack is still typing, and no one knows what that single word is.

  CHARLES HÉBÉ

  LATE ONE WINTER NIGHT in 1904, sitting in his well-appointed study in a spacious apartment just off the Avenue Fouquet, drinking kir (as well as, he would later admit, a little absinthe) and smoking a good pipe, having been inspired by the wild conversation of his friends over a dinner of paddlefish roe, black olive tapenade and aubergine bottarga on crisp pumpernickel, Charles Hébé, previously untouched by literary pretensions, took up his pen and began to write.

  In later years, as he dragged himself from park bench to shoddy boardinghouse in a sequence of ever-drearier towns, Hébé would remember that night as the only moment of greatness in his life, and regret it bitterly.

  Inspired by the whirling talk of his artistic companions and the fervid atmosphere of the city in that period, Hébé had engendered the stuff of literary legend. Out of fauvism, early surrealism, alcohol and opium-induced reveries, nascent psychoanalysis and too much reading of Baudelaire, Laforgue, Nerval and various other symbolists and imagists, Hébé had written the first draft of a novel centred on the monstrous character of Oncle Cauchemère (the only attempted English translation of the work rendered the character’s name as ‘Uncle Sandwoman’), a great swaggering brute of a person, by turns hilarious and terrifying, as real and as intangible as a nightmare.

  He showed the manuscript to his friends, who all acclaimed it wildly, writing deranged songs celebrating the adventures of Oncle Cauchemère, trying to stage a play based on the story (though no actor was found who could take on such a challenging role), and drawing or painting visionary, oneiric pictures of the handsome hulking psychopath, charming women and eating children. Only one of these portraits still exists, sadly, now housed in the storage room of a provincial museum in Alsace.

  Oncle Cauchemère is a unique figure in literary history: although he draws on mythical and fairytale archetype, there is something distinctly and uncannily real about him. (Hébé himself, in a rare comment, claimed the figure was based on a distant relative he half-remembered from his childhood.) He is imbued with a human heft that owes everything to great nineteenth-century French realism. This, according to sources, was what was most terrifying about Cauchemère: he was entirely believable.

  All too believable for Hébé, it seemed. While word of his great work spread throughout the city, no publisher was prepared to touch Hébé’s manuscript, and the character rapidly became the stuff of legend. Hébé began to receive mail addressed to ‘Oncle Cauchemère,’ and had to turn down frequent requests from journalists wishing to interview the man. Despite being a wiry, spindly little man himself, his acquaintances began to nickname Hébé with the name of his creation.

  One night, following an attempt by a gang of drunken aesthetes to break into his apartment demanding to meet Oncle Cauchemère, Hébé sat down for a second time and tried to write: at the top of the page he put down the words La mort d’Oncle Cauchemère. Having invented such a terrible character, he realised, he now had to kill him.

  His attempts, it seems, were not successful.

  Little else was heard from Charles Hébé after that night: his friends received occasional postcards or increasingly deranged letters from small northern towns, Lens, Le Havre, Fécamp, some asserting that Cauchemère, or someone impersonating him, was trying to kill his own author. Legal deeds recount that Hébé sold his elegant apartment but nevertheless fell into poverty, drinking ever more and always trying to finish his second great work, one that would set him free of the first.

  In December 1911, police in Caen had to break into a room in the Pension Jarry, where Hébé had last been seen. The room was empty, save for the torn remnants of a manuscript. The police report mentions teeth marks, as though it had been attemptedly eaten.

  HANS KAFKA

  ‘NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM’ is a slippery idea, and one that may not withstand the fierce glare of sustained critical scrutiny. Yet perhaps there is something about the name ‘Kafka’ (which, somewhat disappointingly, means only ‘jackdaw’ in Czech) that may lead its bearer into dangerous graphomaniac tendencies. Here, we refer not to the famous angst-ridden Germanic writer but to his lesser-known near-cognate, Hans Kafka.

  Tracing through the records as far as we can, we find no family connection between the two authors, though ‘Kafka’ is a far from common name. Is this mere coincidence, a unique combination of time, place and circumstance or something about the thieving corvus monedula which drives its namesakes into the thankless business of writing?

  Hans Kafka was born in 1883 just across the street from the other Kafka family, son to a seamstress and a successful retailer of fancy goods. As a child, he heard of his neighbouring namesakes but was told by his domineering father to have nothing to do with them.

  A quiet, diligent boy, he left school and enrolled in the law faculty at Charles University, but then changed to pursue the study of chemistry (narrowly missing that other writer, who made the same journey in the opposite direction), and on graduating took on work as an analytical chemist, a job he would keep for the rest of his life. He helped to develop an early form of asbestos and used his scarce free time to write a number of challenging short stories.

  He sent these early stories to the journals Hyperion and Arkadia but was turned down with a series of baffling rejection letters. Dear Sir, they began. We are endeavouring to publish your work. Please do not feel the necessity to send us more pieces under a clumsy pseudonym.

  As yet unaware of the fate of his almost homonymous former neighbour, Kafka did not let the rejections dissuade him and began work on his first full-length piece, a grotesque tale of a beetle who is transformed into a man.

  You know how this story will go on: manuscripts lost, burned or denied, failed love affairs, the sustained support of a tiny handful of close friends, the inevitable onset of a lingering, rotting disease. Kafka did not disappoint. However, a crucial difference lay in the fact that the illness from which Kafka suffered throughout his twenties and thirties turned out not to be tuberculosis after all, but nothing more than a nasty cold which, due to his poor diet, damp flat and the inclement weather conditions of the Czech capital, he did not manage to shake off for several years.

  Unlike his near-namesake, Hans Kafka lived and even managed to survive the brutality of the 1940s. By force of sheer miracle, he slipped slowly and quietly into postwar Czech life, his singed manuscripts still packed in a suitcase under the bed of his small apartment on the Sokolovská, watching the reputation of the boy from across the street who almost had the same name as him grow and grow.

  As an old man, as he went out to get his morning becherovka, he saw tourists wandering the streets of his city wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of the dark-eyed, skinny-faced boy he remembered. He put his hand on the cool glass and rolled a cigarette. I’m alive, he thought as he sipped the bitter liqueur and drew on the warm smoke. I am alive.

  YILDIRIM KEMAL

  YILDIRIM KEMAL WORKS in a kebab shop on the Kingsland Road in Dalston. As he slices doner meat, skewers shish kebabs and adds chilli sauce to the takeaway requirements of the glazed or belligerent drunks of his late-night clientele, he takes a strange pride in the fact that none of them know he is a poet.

  The young Kemal won the Greater Istanbu
l Under 18s Poetry competition for a late-Ottoman-style elegy on the death of a gazelle. Though they thought it derivative, the judges nonetheless awarded it first prize, taking the work to be a clever allegory on contemporary Turkish politics (though, in reality, it was inspired by a wildlife documentary Kemal had seen on television).

  Kemal’s mother was proud to have a poet in the family, and encouraged her son to write more. Having drawn as far as he could on the natural world, Kemal changed his focus to urban life, and his style to that of Nazim Hikmet rather than his illustrious predecessors of the Sublime Porte. His mother was not impressed, so Kemal downed his pen, left school and went to work in his uncle’s import-export business. The brief sip of success and the call of the muse were too strong, however, and Kemal spent most of his days working on hard-edged modernist verse rather than on the bills of lading which piled up before him. In a bid to prove to his despairing sister that her son was not useless, and to rid himself of an unproductive employee, Kemal’s uncle forwarded a (not insubstantial) sum of money to a small publisher, who, in turn, produced a run of 2,500 copies of a slim volume of this talented young poet’s verse.

  It sold one copy.

  Kemal’s mother didn’t even buy one, hoping she would get a free book from her son or her brother (who had neglected to mention the question of author copies in the hastily written contract for the deal), neither of whom obliged. Kemal was crushed by this lack of success and, deciding his problem was the limited audience for Turkish-language poetry, decided to move to the UK to improve his English.

  One could ask why Yildirim Kemal has been included at all in the BDLF. One sale of a published book is, after all, far greater success than many other entries have achieved. Moby-Dick sold but a handful of copies on its first appearance, and Wuthering Heights even fewer.

  The sad fact is that the one person who purchased Kemal’s collection did so believing it to be a book of verse penned by the eponymous Hacettepe S.K. centre forward. On discovering his mistake, the purchaser, an Ankaran octogenarian, unbound the book and each day used one of Kemal’s poems to wrap his lunchtime kebab.

  Yet this matters not. Each night, as Kemal stuffs salad into pita and drizzles garlic sauce on grilled chicken, he thinks of the one person out there in Diyarbakir or Batman, in Erzurum or Van, in Fener or Cihangir reading his work, and dreaming.

  JÜRGEN KITTLER

  WHILE THE CONNECTIONS between literature and political activism have been widely examined, those between literature and terrorism are less well known. The Russian anarchist-poets of the Mauve February movement claimed to have thrown ink-pots along with their handmade bombs in the 1890s, but have left little trace in official histories of revolution or literature. The so-called manos pintadas may have formed an armed vanguard group in the 1910 Mexican revolution, but remain so obscure that not even Roberto Bolaño has ever mentioned them. The Italian poet and performance artist Fausto Squattrinato claimed to have taken part in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978, but he is a known liar.

  Truth be told, most poets have felt happier composing sonnets about revolutions rather than ever actually dirtying their hands with them.

  It is precisely this which makes the case of Jürgen Kittler so much more fascinating. Little is certain about this shady figure who flitted through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East under a series of bizarre aliases between the years of 1957 and 1989 (in which year his series of incendiary typewritten communiqués dried up), and there are those, indeed, who go so far as to claim that Jürgen Kittler was only ever an alias for yet another even shadowier figure.

  Kittler first appeared hanging around the fringes of the Letterist International (themselves already a fringe group) before denouncing them as bourgeois collaborationists in his 1957 pamphlet Le monde n’est pas sur le feu. Encore (variously translated as ‘The world is not on fire. Yet’ and ‘The world is not on fire. Again’), and reappeared in the early sixties in locations as diverse as Tangiers, New York, Geneva, London, Cap d’Antibes, Düsseldorf and Manchester (at least according to the postmarks of the various letters, poems, diatribes, novels and outright threats he sent to a number of international publications during this period). He was almost certainly photographed alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Paul Sartre during les événements (and has even been credited with authoring a number of the most dazzling slogans of that golden age of the slogan).

  His mature period commenced shortly after this, when in retreat from what he saw as the grave disappointment, not to say betrayal, of ’68, he wrote what some claim to be his greatest work, a manifesto issued from a hideout somewhere in the Pyrenees. Towards a Revolution of the Word exists, confusingly, in a number of different versions, some called Towards a Revolution of the World. It is uncertain if Kittler meant to play on this close homograph or if the ‘l’ key on his typewriter, a portable Olympia Splendid 66, was merely defective. Whatever, the work insisted that revolution could be brought about not through a total rebuilding of the social order, but only through the rebuilding of language itself.

  His attempts to rebuild language itself resulted in most of his 1970s works, which even according to his most fervent disciples are largely incomprehensible.

  Despite this, the ’70s may well have been his most active period, in which Kittler reappears (as Georges Sansou, Jürgen Mittelos and, confusingly, as Eric Quayne), playing bass for the Krautrock group Lustfaust and Mancunian post-punk outfit King Ink, frequenting the Red Army Faction in Düsseldorf, the Brigate Rosse in Rome and the Angry Brigade in London, stealing cars with Jean Genet in Marseille, playing golf with Carlos the Jackal in Lebanon and posing for a rare Gerhard Richter portrait in Berlin, while all the time circulating samizdat versions of his work.

  None of these were ever published, allegedly due to their devastating revolutionary potential, though this is a difficult claim to justify as anyone who has read any of Kittler’s work from this period is now dead, in a maximum-security prison or has vanished. It has been claimed that copies of his work are being held in government archives in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the United States, but all are subject to a hundred-year embargo, and will not be read by any of us currently living.

  MARTA KUPKA

  FEW OF US ever get what we really want for Christmas. While the most fortunate amongst us may unwrap an old-time Parcheesi board, a book we’d never heard of but which looks fascinating or even a humble dozen home-baked cookies, no one ever gets a guaranteed readership, lifelong respect or happiness. No parcel, no matter how beautifully wrapped in a big red box with a gold ribbon tied around it, will bring your lover back.

  On Christmas Day in 1948, Marta Kupka, having been a bookish child, much given to scribbling stories in thin paper notebooks, was awarded a Royal Quiet Deluxe by her parents, who had found a contact, scraped together enough money and, anxious to encourage their only daughter’s nascent literary talent, managed to acquire the piece of precision American engineering.

  The machine was wrapped in thick brown parcel paper, and so it stayed for the next sixty-four years.

  For Kupka, brought up on powdered eggs and bread filled out with sawdust, the gift (whose nature she had guessed, being an intelligent child) represented an unimaginable luxury. Once unwrapped, she knew it would sit on her small desk, gleaming, filled with promise, and yet also with threat.

  Over the next few years she occasionally imagined rolling a sheet of paper into it, and dutifully typing out sentences from a Pitman course about quick brown foxes and lazy dogs, training her fingers to follow the keys which would reproduce the stories in her mind.

  The sheer weight of the thing, not only physically, but also metaphorically, bore down on her so much that she could not bear to sully its keys with a tale she considered less than perfect. Much as some second-novelists are said to be paralysed in the face of following up a successful debut, Kupka could not even find the perfect first word to begin to glean her teeming brain. And so the gift remained unopened.


  But when she was eighty, on Christmas Day, she uncovered the Royal Quiet Deluxe, long hidden under the piles of letters, postcards and legal documents which had made up her life since then, and finally removed the thick brown paper, keeping the now-faded tag (‘from mammi and papi, with our best wishes’), and was delighted to find the keys, though creaky, still functioning.

  She quickly dusted the typewriter off, sat down, and began to write.

  Sadly, although the intervening years had been kind to the typewriter, they had taken their toll on Kupka’s eyesight, and she failed to notice that the once well-inked ribbon had now dried up completely. She wrote incessantly for three weeks, completing the long tale of her life, failing to see that not a single word of what she wrote actually made it onto the paper.

  ELISE LA RUE

  THE ENIGMATIC AUTHORESS Elise La Rue (and while we generally applaud the move to gender-neutral appellations, La Rue was quite definitely an authoress) first appeared in the 1890s as a soubrette on the (by now far past its best) Paris stage, taking the lead in a series of long-forgotten revues with titles such as L’amour est comment il est perdu, pas comment il a trouvé. Toulouse-Lautrec lamented his inability to paint her: ‘She wasn’t born, she was created,’ he allegedly remarked of her, a comment which may have been true—there is no trace of her birthplace, nationality, parentage or ancestry anywhere. The enigmatic La Rue (she later tried to have the epithet added to her birth certificate, although unfortunately no birth certificate ever existed for her, so this wish proved impossible) variously claimed to be French, German, Polish, Russian and American at various stages in her life. This shifting quality, along with her effect upon men, made her prime material to be a spy during the First World War, a role which she took on with gusto, working in espionage for no less than six of the engaged nations, mostly at the same time.