The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Page 6

  Following this period there are a few lost years in which she seems to have adopted a number of aliases: turning up in the nascent Hollywood as an aspiring starlet variously trying the soubriquets of Theodesia Purr, Vera Palmer and Katie Hedmore; trying her hand at writing Latin-flavoured erotica under the name of Juana Edelmira; holding séances as Margaretha Zella-St. Cyr; and penning an agony aunt column as Phyllis Delphia.

  It was a few years after the conflict that she discovered her muse, and on returning to Europe recalled the favours owing to her by a number of European nations by occupying elegant flats in Mayfair, Manhattan, Trastevere and the third arrondissement, where she instituted a number of literary salons. Most of the great writers of the age paid her court, though few sadly recorded the occasion. It is said that Zelda Fitzgerald and Hadley Hemingway both tried to have her poisoned while Nora Joyce called her a ‘trollop’ (though this didn’t stop her being one of the many suggested models for Molly Bloom).

  She wrote longhand, naked, voluptuously, lying on her divan, usually covered in the fur of a snow leopard which she claimed she had herself skinned from the back of the animal (this story, improbable as it may seem, may be true: records that have recently come to light show she assisted the young Stalin on a hunting trip through the central Asian wilds), accompanied by her favourite cocktail of schnapps and Dubonnet (which she called a ‘Bloody Murder’), beginning mid-morning and knocking off shortly before lunch.

  Having started and abandoned several novels, she always claimed her greatest work was her play ‘The Heart Is an Autumn Wanderer,’ a loosely biographical five-hour epic requiring a cast of some two hundred people. The fact that it was never performed she put down to mysterious conspiracies at work in the theatrical cultures of London, Paris, New York and Berlin. (She ignored the fact that her second play, ‘Nakedness Tonight,’ which featured only two performers and one role, was similarly rejected.)

  Her profligacy was legendary: in his dazzling memoir The Girl with the Avant-Garde Face, Eric Levallois recalls how, having run out of paper, she wrote Imagist poems on five hundred franc notes.

  In later years, she befriended Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and is fondly recalled in some of their diaries and correspondence (Nin called her ‘The Duchess’, Miller ‘a stinking rotting whore’). She wrote long, rambling letters, making copies of each one for herself and for posterity, in perfumed ink, on violet notepaper.

  Following the Second World War, her fortunes changed dramatically. Henry Miller, the Hemingways and the Joyces having long since passed on, she felt the golden age of literary Paris had passed. Nin removed all mention of La Rue from the published version of her diaries. Sartre failed to recognise her. She fell into black depressions, her alcohol consumption rose dramatically. Ever short of money, she tried to call in favours but her once-ardent admirers had now either vanished or claimed to have no memory of this stinking, shrivelled woman. By 1961, she was living on the street, sleeping under the Pont Neuf, her letters, their violet perfume now long departed, keeping her warm through the cold nights. In 1967, she was knifed to death by a fellow vagrant who mistook the sheaves of paper for bank notes.

  MAXWELL LOEB

  IF YOU EVER LOOK at a picture of the Beats, among the poets, junkies and general hangers-on, somewhere behind Ginsberg’s beard or Burroughs’s hat, leaning over Kerouac’s shoulder or looking thoughtfully at Neal Cassady, you will always see one person unlabelled and upon whose identity critics and historians never quite agree. That person is almost certainly Maxwell Loeb.

  Maxwell (who insisted on pronouncing his surname loob, which may not have helped his chances in life) was born in 1928 in an airy Upper West Side apartment block, the son of a couple of psychoanalysts (one Freudian, one Jungian). Having schooled unremarkably, in 1942 he attempted to enlist, only to be laughed out of the building by the recruiting sergeant, an experience which bruised him into becoming a lifelong adherent of the counter-culture, a questioner of authority, a hipster, a hippie.

  Being in New York and in his twenties during the 1950s, Maxwell Loeb was blessed, golden. He action-painted, be-bopped and free-jazzed. He popped bennies, chewed peyote, sank whisky sours and sang hootenanny folk. He gave Jack Kerouac lifts in his parents’ Buick Riviera, stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and modelled for Nat Tate, ran green whenever Herbert Huncke showed up and travelled to Tangiers where he danced in his tighty-whiteys for Allen Ginsberg. He saw the best minds of his generation slumped asleep on toilets and began to believe his first thought his best thought.

  Unfortunately, Maxwell’s first thoughts were usually of hamantaschen, chopped herring salad and the inner elbows of young women (a curious fixation which his parents would have no doubt found fascinating). In the hands of William Carlos Williams or Gary Snyder, this may have been promising material, but Maxwell turned out to have little aptitude for verse (Ginsberg’s dismissal of ‘yellow morning stanzas of gibberish’ in Howl is probably referencing Loeb’s In the Scarlet Bathtub).

  Despite his mentor’s opprobrium, Maxwell continued to write, frequently and copiously, and soon discovered that though his literary talents were not admired, the sheer speed of his typing was. This was no small gift in the feverish environment of the Beats, and soon Maxwell found himself the centre of a small cult dedicated to the worship of the Remington No. 5 and the Hermes 3000. Loeb’s ability to manipulate such machines at speeds of more than 130 words per minute earned him envy and praise in equal measures.

  Maxwell became a master of technique, and bothered little about content or style. He felt Truman Capote’s epithet ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing’ directed at himself rather than at On the Road and took it as a compliment. Long after his comrades had died, moved back in with their mothers, vanished in Kathmandu or moved upstate and got respectable, Loeb continued to type, only the increasing difficulty of finding typewriter ribbons slowing him. One day, we fear, they will cease to exist altogether and only then will Maxwell Loeb finally complete his life’s work.

  MAXIM MAKSIMICH

  ONE APRIL MORNING in 1862, Maxim Maksimich set off early so as not to miss the first steamer of the season, the one that would take him up the rapidly thawing river as far as Tomsk, then Perm, then Chelyabinsk or Ufa, across Siberia and through the Urals to Yekaterinburg and the eventual west. There, he believed, he would board a train for Moscow, where he would find some work teaching, a small room in a boardinghouse and then, in time, a wife, and then, in time, having published a chain of stories in respected literary gazettes, fame.

  It didn’t happen that way.

  After three weeks on board, during which time his ship had made only a tortuous few miles along the unexpectedly ice-bound river, Maksimich tired of the endless diet of kasha, salt fish and Georgian brandy. When the Princess of the Rhine (in later years Maksimich would often wonder how the single-funnelled ship had ended up so far from home) stopped to refuel at an apparently nameless town, he went ashore and found himself in a small hostelry, drank several flagons of the local kvass and woke up in a haystack two days later. He discovered he had been robbed of everything he owned, including the laboriously handwritten manuscript of The Christ of the Cornfields. He ran to the boarding platform only to find the Princess had left some hours before.

  At first, other than ruing the loss of what he believed was his masterpiece, Maksimich worried little, figuring that another steamer would be along soon. He didn’t realise that the Princess of the Rhine (due to its inebriated Bavarian captain) had lost itself hopelessly along a neglected tributary, one no other steamship passed along for that entire year, nor the next, nor the one after that. He tried not to worry and told himself the railway would soon arrive in the small town (which he eventually found did have a name at least, though little more), and that surely within a year or two he would be reaping the benefits of his labours, ensconced in a comfortable Muscovite townhouse, gazing adoringly at his devoted wife, who would sit patiently copying out his manuscripts for him while he engage
d in a rubber of bridge with Lev or Anton or Fyodor.

  He spent the next fifty years in the town, waiting for the locomotives to arrive or a ship to depart, occasionally contemplating taking a carriage through the thick forest, but always thinking better of the idea, slowly composing a series of stories commemorating village life as the turn of the century approached then passed, largely unnoticed.

  He died in 1912, impaled by a falling icicle, a casualty of the thaw for which he had waited so long.

  In 1992, on the eightieth anniversary of his death, some local townsfolk who valued their literary heritage set up a museum in Maxim Maksimich’s honour. His living room and study are preserved exactly as they would have been during his heyday: a quill pen lies on the rough wooden desk alongside a quire of paper, an embroidered blanket is thrown across a sagging sofa, a samovar is filled with water ready to be boiled to prepare the linden tea he adored so much. The museum has limited visiting hours, however, and during the thirty years it has been open, not a single visitor has passed through its doors.

  EDWARD NASH

  WHEN EDWARD NASH was found dead at the age of forty-eight, sitting on the bench at the top of the cliff which overlooked the sea in the small town where he lived, few were surprised.

  A known character in the town, Nash spoke to few but was always to be seen sitting on that bench, apparently doing nothing other than staring at the sea and the sky.

  For many years, a small inheritance and a frugal lifestyle having given him freedom from a deadening job, he had gone each and every day to that same point on the hillside, sometimes at dawn, sometimes at dusk and sometimes from one to the other, and sat there, and looked out.

  Stories were muttered in the town: he was waiting for a ship to come in, he was a spy, a smuggler or a drug-trafficker, a birdwatcher, perhaps an idle eccentric or a man confronting mental health issues in his own unique way. None of these stories were true.

  After closely observing the sea and the clouds for at least six hours each day, Edward Nash would return home and begin to write. His aim, both minute and monumental, was to describe as closely and as perfectly as possible the slow swell of a wave, from the moment it began to form to the point at which it foamed, crested and then broke on the shore or back on itself into the moiling water which was its source. His aim, both vast and insignificant, was to delineate the nature of a cloud, to use words to pinpoint its evanescence and eternity.

  He firmly believed that one perfect sentence drawn from these two essential elements would capture everything that needed to be written: the touch of a lover’s lips, the memory of a child’s laughter or a close friend’s death, the nature and significance of our place in this turbulent, beautiful, destructive, miraculous world. Everything that needed to be written, read and remembered, he thought, could be captured if only he could find the precise words to describe that wave, or that cloud.

  It may be true that Nash was given to some kind of monomania, but what form of writing is not such?

  On emptying the caravan where Nash had lived, the social workers consigned to deal with this friendless, unfamilied man’s effects found a huge cache of notebooks stacked from floor to ceiling, lining the small space in which he had lived. Each notebook was full, but filled with only single words, lines or phrases. Like a wave or a cloud, Edward Nash’s sentence never completed itself.

  The bench remains there to this day, though few people sit there now, finding the spot too windy.

  OTHA ORKKUT

  OTHA ORKKUT (1890–1943) was a poet, translator and historian. She wrote two slim volumes of lyric verse (mostly celebrating the natural beauty of her homeland), and at the time of her death was composing a significantly longer work in the national-epic mode. She also wrote a history of her country, but as we shall see, this was but a short book. This meagre output would perhaps be unremarkable, as would Orkkut herself, were it not for the fact that she was the last surviving speaker of Cimbrian, which was the language in which all her works were composed. Indeed, Otha Orkkut’s oeuvre is the only body of literature in that now sadly deceased language.

  Language death is a disturbingly common phenomenon. Of the seven thousand or so languages currently spoken, only 10 percent will survive by the end of the next century, according to more pessimistic observers. Lipan, Totoro and Bikya are all currently down to a handful of speakers and not expected to see out the next decade. Many factors are at the root of this: the cultural hegemony of English, the expansion of Spanish or Chinese, imperialism, globalisation, the threatened habitats and changing life patterns of indigenous peoples across the world. A museum is needed to preserve what is passing away largely unnoticed.

  If such a museum were to be built, we hope that Otha Orkkut would take her place, representing the great Cimbrian tongue. Cimbrian was a Bothno-Ugaric language, the language of a group of people from the northeasternmost corner of Europe, an unhappy people who only managed to establish their own state very briefly: Orkkut’s father declared the existence of the People’s Republic of Cimbria at midday on September 5th, 1918, only to have the armies of two of the country’s more belligerent neighbours invade by teatime on that same day. (A strong spirit of Cimbrian nationalism survived, however, with a few Cimbrians refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the invaders and continuing to hold their own democratic parliament in the basement of Orkkut’s parents’ house.)

  Orkkut was raised as the last monoglot Cimbrian and wrote verse from an early age. She lived all her life in a small house in Orkko on the Gulf of Bothnia, and never married.

  Cimbrian, it is said, was a unique language in that it contained a tense which was used to describe a person or object which had gone missing or been lost: neither present nor past, still existing in a space or time which no non-Cimbrian can ever properly comprehend.

  A number of critics and translators are currently at work on Orkkut’s books, her manuscripts now inhabiting the realm of that unique Cimbrian tense. It is possible they will not be entirely lost to posterity. But what will be understood of them now that there is no one to recognise the exact feeling evoked by the words kuttsruch or bejamanesch? What nuance will be lost? Who can know precisely what Orkkut felt that last morning when the soldiers came to put her on a train and she packed her small bag, never to return? Who can translate that elusive verb form, existing and not-existing, neither here nor there?

  KARL PILCROW

  CONVINCED THAT THE APOCALYPSE was coming, Karl Pilcrow built himself an ark.

  His ark, unlike that of Biblical renown, was largely constructed from old pieces of two-by-four, a disused chicken coop and an old sofa he’d found in the alley behind his home.

  Pilcrow’s ark, again unlike Noah’s, was not meant to house generations of animals with which to repopulate the earth, but would contain a single thing: The Book of Pilcrow, a long series of aphorisms, insights and great truths he felt he had amassed during his life as a quantity surveyor, and which would give moral and spiritual guidance to the few people he believed would survive the end of the world as we know it.

  The neighbours complained about the unsightly construction growing in their midst, which, somewhat surprisingly given the methods and materials of its construction, soon rose to a great height.

  Council officials were called, and commanded Pilcrow to remove the ark. He refused, but fearing its destruction he decide to launch it onto the ship canal that ran behind his home.

  The day of the launch was a watery one, mid-December, England, the rain falling and staying in the air as it only can there. The ark and its precious typewritten cargo were waterlogged before Pilcrow had even managed to use his Ford Fiesta to drag the thing into the murky green water.

  It sank immediately, of course, and as the weather grew worse and worse, and strange portents appeared in the skies, Karl Pilcrow followed it into the water.

  JOÃO QUARESMA

  THOUGH JOYCE LEANS on his stick and peers down North Earl Street, Pushkin presides over the endless traffic ja
m on Ulitsa Tverskaya and Dante scowls lugubriously over almost every town square in Italy, statues of writers are few. This may not be a bad thing: pity the land that needs its heroes, warns Brecht’s Galileo, and by extraction pity the land that needs its statues. But dead writers? Are they such a threat?

  Whatever the theoretical complexities of such modes of memorialisation, we would like to celebrate the statue of João Quaresma, which stands in the central square of a small town in northern Portugal.

  Heavily influenced by fellow Lusitanian Camões, João Quaresma spent most of his life composing a single epic poem recording the exploits of the hardy bacalhau fishermen of the northern Atlantic. However, as the pages filled (eventually numbering over a thousand) and Quaresma grew older, the sensation that few, if any, would ever read his work became more and more real to him and he began to worry about his stake in immortality. Seeing as his day job was as a monumental mason (some of his finest lines are inscribed on various headstones scattered across the Alto Douro), in his spare time Quaresma set to carving his own statue, sure in the knowledge that after his demise his work would be recognised and his marble self-portrait would be ceremonially placed in one of the great squares of Lisbon or Porto.

  Sadly, upon his death it emerged that Quaresma hadn’t paid a single escudo of tax in his entire working life, and the impoverished local government came down hard on his widow, who had hoped to pay off her late husband’s debts through the sale of his literary endeavours. The authorities, however, were more interested in the large amount of valuable Carrara marble that comprised Quaresma’s self-portrait.