The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Page 7

  At that point in history, the Republican fervour sweeping the country resulted in the assassination of King Carlos I, and the mayor felt it would be a grand patriotic gesture to have a statue of his successor Manuel II erected in the centre of their small town. In this pre-visual age, few had much idea what the king looked like, so Quaresma’s glasses were filed away and an impressive stucco moustache added to his face, and the statue was duly unveiled in October 1910, only days before Manuel (‘the Unfortunate’) fled into exile in England. Seeing as the figure pointed boldly toward the distant sea, it was hastily decided that it instead represented Vasco da Gama or Henry the Navigator. Few cared.

  The moustache has fallen off now, but the statue still stands, smeared with graffiti debating the relative merits of Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto. Alongside Pessoa and his beloved Camões in Lisbon, João Quaresma is one of the few literary statues in Portugal, though today not only does no one know his work, no one knows it is him.

  AURELIO QUATTROCHI

  IN A LARGE ROOM on the fourth floor of an eighteenth-century palazzo just off Via Maqueda in Palermo, Aurelio Quattrocchi sits writing.

  In spring and autumn, a breeze brings in the scent of jasmine and disturbs the loose leaves of paper scattered across the large wooden table at which he sits (he has no desk). A small pile of notebooks sits in a quiet stack at his elbow, only the top one open. In summer, no breeze comes through the open window to stir his papers and the heat wearies him. In winter, the window is closed.

  This may not seem an unusual occurrence: Sicily has a fair literary reputation; there are people sitting writing in rooms all across the world. Nor is it unusual that Aurelio writes by hand using a fountain pen with purple ink. Writers are scaramantic creatures, given to rigorously maintained habits.

  What is unusual is that Quattrochi has sat in this room writing since he was seventeen years old, and he is now seventy-six. What is more unusual is that in all this time Quattrochi has written only five hundred words.

  Speed is an over-rated virtue, especially in literature. Writing takes time; few great works were composed quickly. (Reading, too, takes time: at the BDLF we have little enthusiasm for works eagerly described as ‘pageturners.’ If a writer such as Quattrochi has spent so long putting words onto paper, we should at least pay them the respect of taking their words slowly too, and indulge in the pleasure of well-wrought prose.) Despite this, Quattrochi suffers. He is aware that the slim novel he is working on (Sulla Lentezza, an account of the slowly developing friendship between two ageing men set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century agrarian reform) has consumed his entire life.

  When he began, as a callow teenager, he foresaw literary glory, not knowing how carefully he would work. Only when he turned twenty-one, having finally completed the opening sentence, did he realise the turn his life had taken.

  The seventies were a particularly slow period. He spent all of 1973 poring over a single word, and most of 1974 erasing it. The 1980s, however, saw a comparative rush: Quattrochi completed an entire paragraph in less than a decade.

  If ever asked, which he seldom is, he estimates the work will take until 2042 to finish, a date by which he is aware that he will almost certainly be dead. He has not written a will, but when he does he plans to insist that his manuscript be typed up on the Olivetti Lettera 22 his father had given him as a present when he took his high school diploma.

  Nothing changes in his room; little changes outside the window. Quattrochi has seen a small apartment building rise, the jasmine bush become a tree, and heard the sound of traffic grow louder than it was when he began writing. Nothing more.

  Slowness is a rare virtue in these times, so we wish Aurelio more of it. We will be patient; we are waiting.

  ERIC QUAYNE

  OF ALL THE DECEIT, treachery, fraud and outright lies which play an alarmingly large part in the story of literary failure, those of Eric Quayne must surely rank among the most compelling.

  Trained as an artist in 1950s London (and the world of fine arts is surely the only one to come close to the literary world for its levels of duplicity), Quayne graduated from the Slade at best only an adequate painter, able to produce reasonable likenesses or pleasing landscapes in the style of whichever painter was currently modish, but found his real skill lay in calligraphy.

  Having studied the letters of van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, he trained himself to mimic their signatures perfectly but their work only badly, thus barring himself from the lucrative profession of pictorial forgery. However, aided by the notorious Louis Nodier (then at his most active in the literary marketplaces of London, Paris and New York), Quayne soon found himself able to escape impecunity by adding to the collected correspondence of a number of great artists. Flush with success and cash, Nodier encouraged Quayne to continue, and soon found himself touting manuscripts of everyone from Voltaire to Dickens to august libraries and university archives from Texas to the Sorbonne. In Soho in the 1960s, Quayne seemed to have found his vocation and became a fixture on that bohemian London scene. Despite his fondness for drink, this may well have been his most fruitful period. Indeed, a number of texts now regarded as canonical in the oeuvres of certain writers whom the BDLF shall not name, included in various lists of the hundred books you should read before you die, the reading lists of many chart-topping universities, subjects of earnest Ph.D. theses and BBC costume dramas alike, are actually the work of Eric Quayne.

  In the early seventies, Quayne moved to the south of France and, at this point, over-reached himself by completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, producing another batch of poems by Ern Malley, penning Emily Brontë’s second novel and writing fragments of Joyce’s follow-up to Finnegans Wake. Exposure was inevitable, and in a less tolerant age, Quayne’s claim to be a tricksy, postmodern experimentalist cut him no slack with severe textual mavens such as Hugh Trevor-Roper (who wrote an exposé in the Sunday Times which proved devastating for Quayne).

  Undeterred by Melville’s maxim that ‘it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation,’ Quayne moved to Italy and continued to write under his own name, but no one (not even Nodier, by now serving time in La Santé) took any notice of works such as The Man with the Flowering Hands or The Secret Mirror.

  In 1996, Quayne was found dead lying in a gutter in Rome, his head stove in with a blunt instrument. Police claimed he’d died in a drunken fall, then later decided he’d been done in by an angry lover or unpaid rent boy. Other voices do not concur. Who knows how many Eric Quayne had infuriated or shamed with his dazzling acts of mimicry?

  HUGH RAFFERTY

  WE HAVE DISCUSSED the dangers of addiction before on the BDLF. As Primo Levi points out in The Wrench, addictions are far from being the exclusive province of writers, but writers do tend to be prone to them.

  Hugh Rafferty (b. Dublin, 1870–d. 1905, St. Giles Workhouse, London) would perhaps today have been diagnosed with multiple addiction syndrome, but he never saw it quite like that: he believed he was addicted to nothing but his own genius. The eighth child of society portrait painter James Rafferty and light opera singer Henrietta Mulcahy, Hugh was bundled into a family seething with artistic pretension and large amounts of debt. His father encouraged the boy to take up smoking at the age of four, believing a pipe to be good for his lungs, while for breakfast his mother insisted he drink what she called ‘a little overcoat’: a glass of warm milk with a generous tot of whisky.

  Despite displaying little natural aptitude, his father insisted he train as a painter, but Hugh soon found his real talent was for verse. Heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, his first mature composition was Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, a Browningly long piece in blank verse. Rafferty himself called the piece ‘allegorical,’ yet both contemporary readers (Wilde allegedly kept a copy in his toilet) and critics have not been able to decipher quite what the rambling poem allegorises, and Rafferty himself was always coy about the subject when asked.

  He was probably coy because
he was drunk. The ‘little overcoat’ had only been the start. The young Hugh took pints of porter for lunch and at least three bottles of claret with dinner. And this was before he enrolled at art school.

  Encouraged by the minor success of his poem, and inspired by symbolists, decadents, a generous hint of the gothic and various maudits (not to mention various day trips to Brighton to visit his friend Eric, who rather charmingly called himself ‘Count Stenbock’), Rafferty took to wearing a purple scarf (not particularly decadent, we admit, but he did his best on a limited budget) and soon moved to London in search of a more bohemian life. He frequented Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, but always managed to arrive on evenings when The Rhymers’ Club had gathered elsewhere, and consoled himself by drinking as much as he possibly could while reciting his verses to the bar staff. He claimed to compose them spontaneously, but sadly, the next morning he could remember nothing of what he had said the night before.

  It was around this period when he inevitably discovered absinthe, and despite not particularly liking it (describing it as ‘aniseed ball potcheen’), he decided to dedicate his greatest work (‘The Green Fairy’) to it. Rafferty would begin writing late at night, having already imbibed enough of the spirit to stun a horse, and scribble furiously for hours until he collapsed at his desk or, more likely, on a bar. Sadly, on waking, he would find that he had written nothing but gibberish.

  When the guardians of the St Giles Workhouse (the institute for the destitute where Rafferty inevitably ended up) found hundreds of pages of hastily scribbled verse scattered around his lifeless, wormwood-addled body, they could do little but be baffled, but at least used them to fuel the fire around which they sat drinking port and brandy on the cold evening of the winter day on which Hugh Rafferty’s corpse was dumped in an unmarked grave.

  LORD FREDERICK RATHOLE

  AS WE HAVE HAD CAUSE to point out before, many writers worry about the persistence of their work as much as they worry about its presentation. Sometimes this can even be to the detriment of the work itself. We do not, sadly, have space to discuss the interesting cases of A. Kent Holborn, who spent eight years designing a font which he believed would be the only lexical form dignified enough to contain his work, or that of Maureen Gilhooley, who, despite having a lucrative book deal with a prestigious publishing house, was so insulted by the various cover designs offered her that she refused to go into print altogether.

  Let us turn instead to the case of Lord Frederick Rathole (pronounced, as he always insisted, rath-ole). This was a mania for preservation of a different degree. Before he had actually composed a word, Lord Frederick decided that his literary output should be preserved for posterity in its own library, a library which he personally would build.

  Having rapidly dismissed the services of the finest of architects of his day, Lord Frederick put pen to paper and designed a handsome octagonal building, one side each of which would shelve his works in different genres.

  Building work took time to get underway as Lord Frederick arranged to have only the finest Carrara marble and Murano glass imported, then set about trying to find the best craftsmen in the land to help him complete his vision. Once materials and workforce had been amassed, work eventually began only to find that the site on his extensive estate which Lord Frederick had chosen was actually on top of a peat bog, and would not have held much more than a wooden shack. Undeterred, he decided to have an entire wing of his ancestral home demolished in order to provide space for what he saw as being a worthy successor to the great libraries of Nineveh, Pergamon, Alexandria and Constantinople.

  Unfortunately, work was further delayed as it turned out that Lord Frederick’s blueprints were far from being geometrically accurate, leaving each side of the octagonal building a different length. Lord Frederick dismissed the builders, insisting his vision worked on a higher degree of non-Euclidean geometry.

  Twenty-seven years later, his library was complete.

  Sadly, during this time, Lord Frederick had been so preoccupied with the building work that he had neglected to write anything. He now spent his time wandering the inside of the admittedly impressive though decidedly curious building, dreaming of the day when those empty shelves would house his great writings.

  The library collapsed three years later. Lord Frederick, devastated by the loss, sat down alone one evening, and began to write his only literary legacy. The suicide note ran to a mere three pages, hardly enough to fill a speck of his once-great, empty library.

  ROBERT ROBERTS

  IT IS AN UNFASHIONABLE ASSERTION at the moment, perhaps, but there is a theory that writing does have a proleptic quality. That is, an ability not merely to see or predict the future, but to actually make it happen. This may date back to the ancient, vocative, incantatory origins of the word and its power over things, to shamanic chanting and oracular sayings, but this kind of vatic strain runs through the history of writing: Blake’s visions; Philip K. Dick’s hallucinations; Kafka’s nightmares; Borges’s metaphoric realities; right through to Iain Sinclair’s insistence that Downriver did not predict the fall of Thatcher, it caused it.

  Robert Roberts, perhaps because of the predictive qualities of his very name, the first one anticipating the last, firmly believed this theory. His first poem was composed in his early teens and concerned the death of his pet cat, which had not yet happened. He had imagined the worst thing that could have happened, put it in writing, and when, indeed, McWhiskers passed away a year later, Roberts’s belief that he had brought the event into being was formed.

  Other things followed: he wrote not with the intention of causing events, not of predicting but only taking, as many writers do, what seemed to be the right subject matter to weave into story or meld into verse. Although his school was not hit by a neutron bomb, it was closed down six months after his story ‘Disappearance of the Sixth Grade’ was published in a local fanzine (though due to subsidence rather than nuclear threat). As many teenage boys do, he wrote long poems detailing the agonies of having been abandoned by lovers whom he had not yet met. (This, indeed, would happen to him later in life, and on reading back his old work, he was surprised by the acuity with which he had managed to predict the events and his feelings, though had not quite calculated the amount of pain it caused.)

  Roberts started to believe not that he was ‘a little bit psychic’ as his grandmother had told him, or ‘a little bit psycho’ as his rather cruel classmates taunted him, but that his words had the power to become things.

  That writers tend to think of many things at the same time, and that writing does have a scaramantic quality (many write, knowingly or unknowingly, not to excavate or relive trauma, but to confront and ward off their worst fears and failures, and in so doing, overcome them) is true, however. This, we at the BDLF believe, is why writing is often an invocation to truth, and an important one at that.

  It was not to be so for Robert Roberts, however. Having perhaps overestimated his ability, he wrote a novel, John Johnson, about a teenage psychic who went on to become a novelist who won the Booker, the IMPAC, a MacArthur fellowship, then the Nobel (for peace, not literature). Unfortunately, the book was rubbish, and far from achieving its desired results, it has lain in the slush piles of numerous literary agents and publishing houses for many years now, slowly going mouldy, an outcome its author had not foreseen.

  BELMONT ROSSITER

  SOME WRITERS KNOWN to the BDLF occasionally look at the work of E. L. James or Dan Brown and sigh. Not—it should be said—out of dismay at imperfectly rendered prose, poor characterisation and turgid storylines, but out of disgust at the sheer number of digits their sales figures entail. Such writers may even cast their glances at the prestige enjoyed by elder literary statesmen (and they do tend to be men), and seethe internally when thinking of the advances received and cocktail parties attended by Messrs Rushdie, Amis or McEwan.

  To assuage their anger and despair, they need think only of Sir Belmont Rossiter.

  Belmont Edward Georg
e Rossiter was born into the minor aristocracy in 1828, heir to a smart townhouse in Mayfair, a thriving estate in Hampshire and a not inconsiderable fortune. He published his first work (a book of verse entitled A Garland of Poesy) when he was only seventeen, fresh from Eton and about to go up to Cambridge, and the following year’s subsequent volume, Weeds and Wild Flowers, won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English Verse. At Trinity, he shifted his attention from poetry to the then-burgeoning novel form, and over the course of his next seventy years published no fewer than fifty-three novels, five collections of tales, several histories, a memoir and four further volumes of poetry.

  His success, even at a time when literary men could become national figures, was dazzling. His very first novel, Henderby of Henderby Hall, sold out of its initial print run of five hundred copies within a matter of days and was soon being reprinted by every unscrupulous publisher throughout the British Isles.

  Rossiter could not be stopped. Each book was more successful than the last. Cheveley, the Man of Honour was the highest selling novel of spring 1850, and its successor, Captain Claridge’s Great Mistake, outsold that fivefold. Literary London was aflutter and working men’s associations across the country were set up, helping sheep-shearers and costermongers to read only so they could devour the latest in Rossiter’s oeuvre. No genre was safe from his attention: The House and the Brain was his foray into horror writing, The Royalist’s Revenge was a historical novel, The Coming Race science fiction and A Lady of Leicestershire a tear-stained romance. The colonial settings of the adventure stories Kenelm Chillingly and Ernest Maltravers were among his most wildly successful tales, and were both made into early films (their nitrate film long since turned to ash).