The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Read online

  We could list his many other works, but frankly, they are too boring to bother with.

  Known as Writing Rossiter to the chronically unimaginative press, he was called Bel by his friends, though he had very few. He challenged Dickens to a duel and allegedly tried to poison Wilkie Collins. Worried by the rising reputation of the Brontë sisters, he once tried to use his rapidly growing fortune to buy up every edition of their work and have them pulped. He told George Eliot she looked like a horse.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, his personal failings, Rossiter was offered an army commission and a seat in parliament (both Tories and Whigs were keen to engage his support and services), but turned everything down, preferring to sit in his country retreat and dedicate himself to writing. On his death at the age of eighty-seven from a rare venereal complaint, his fortune was estimated to be enough to buy Hampshire.

  But try to find anything of Belmont Rossiter now. Look on the open shelves of your local library, then try the reserve ones. Scan the catalogue of the British Library. Ask an expert on Victorian literature. Trawl through secondhand or antiquarian bookstores in Hay-on-Wye, London, New York, Amsterdam or Paris. Pore over their catalogues. Consult dealers in rare first editions. Try Amazon or AbeBooks, or Google itself. Go on, try.

  BENJAMIN RUST

  BORN IN 1906 in Headingley, an unexotic suburb of Leeds, to a family that was neither suffocatingly middle class nor intriguingly lower class, Benjamin Rust was a solitary child, much given to bronchial infections and poking around in libraries. Having distant parents, no siblings, and playmates who regarded him as a ‘bit odd’ from an early age, Benjamin grew up with his imagination as his best friend.

  His imagination (which he named Azeroth, after a minor demon he had read of) led him to places which, today, may not seem strange for a teenage boy. (Indeed, were Benjamin alive today he would probably be a successful MMORPG player.) By the time he was thirteen, he had already read the Lesser Key of Solomon, The Book of Thoth and the Smaragdine Table, as well as a number of other esoteric texts, and this resulted in the disappearance of a number of neighbourhood cats.

  As he grew older, Rust joined various orders of the Golden Dawn, lesser Masonic chapters and diverse branches of Theosophists (surprisingly numerous, in Leeds), and decided to document his experiments. Influenced by Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, Count Eric Stenbock and Algernon Blackwood, he thought that lightly fictionalising his experiments and experiences would bring him greater success and attention.

  Indeed, much like J. D. ‘Jack’ Ffrench,* Rust decided it was not enough to use his few adolescent adventures and a thorough reading of Aleister Crowley as materials for his fiction, and though Azeroth (his imagination, remember) was a fertile creature, Rust decided the thing he needed to do was to summon up a demon for himself, see what happened when he set it loose in suburban Leeds, write down the results and ‘hey presto,’ one might say (though Rust himself would almost certainly have said something altogether more cabbalistic and complex).

  Finding a goat proved rather troublesome, though he did his best, and eventually got one to sit within the pentangle he had carefully chalk-marked on his bedroom floor. He then went through a number of procedures described in the many arcane demonologies and grimoires he had consulted, and, after the neighbours last saw him hauling a rustled sheep through his front door, Benjamin Rust was never seen again.

  His parents found nothing but a scorch mark on the rag rug, though later considered this may have been left by a piece of cheap coal. It was, however, noticeable that all his writings had also disappeared.

  We at the BDLF do not believe that Benjamin Rust was dragged down into a circle of hell by a low-ranking demon—but writers be warned: when we mess with the written word, we know not what we may bring into being.

  * See entry no. 12.

  CHAD SHEEHAN

  BEWARE of first lines.

  A great incipit to a poem or story, we are often told, is essential to its eventual success, that striking image or statement an essential hook with which to gather the reader in and keep him or her engaged for the rest of the journey through the work. The opening of a story is a promise which the rest of the tale has to deliver.

  Chad Sheehan was first struck by a great opening sentence when he was eighteen years old. Possessed by the perfection of the line that had come unbidden into his head, he went out and bought himself a spiral-bound notebook, carefully inscribed the handful of words and left the rest of the notebook empty, awaiting the moment when a second line would surely follow, tailed by a third then a fourth and so on and so on until the work reached its completion, fulfilling the promise that opening line had made.

  This never happened. No sooner had Sheehan written out his great opening line when another one came to him: the perfect beginning to an entirely different story. Sheehan rushed out, bought another notebook, wrote this new first line at the top of the opening page, and then found himself unable to continue. By now he had been possessed by an utterly different idea and its attendant perfect introduction.

  The process continued, sometimes rapidly, sometimes more slowly, until Sheehan possessed 1,917 notebooks, all carefully filed in his small apartment, each one awaiting completion.

  A new idea has not come to Sheehan for several years now, and despite his insistence on being included here in the BDLF, we were initially hesitant, as lack of fulfilment is not yet an achievement of failure. Though we were tempted to reproduce some of Chad Sheehan’s great opening lines (many of which are indeed highly impressive), we shall not, and let them rest where they are, a sentinel of warning to those who fear the blank page.

  SIMON SIGMAR

  THERE IS MUCH to be said for the idea that the literature of the twentieth century is that of memory. From Beckett struggling to forget, to Nabokov urging it to speak, to Borges’s Funes tormented by everything he can remember, to Sebald haunted by everything.

  Pity, then, Simon Sigmar. Born in Dresden in 1922, Simon was an aspirant poet whose verses were never published due, as he thought, to their decadent qualities and the onset of the Second World War. But this was not his tragedy. Simon avoided being conscripted but found himself interned for being a suspected Communist, then managed somehow to survive the horrors of imprisonment only to be liberated by the Red Army and returned home after a six-week walk to discover his city flattened and burned, his parents missing, presumed dead, and his only surviving sister shocked mute with horror, and pregnant.

  Sigmar, then, was a man with much to bear witness to, yet unfortunately found himself living in a city controlled by such repressive apparatus that anything he tried to publish, or even to write, was resolutely suppressed. He soon found himself under close observation, being carefully monitored due to his dangerous tendencies.

  Eventually, he tried to escape by concealing himself in a large plastic bag and hiding in the boot of a car travelling west. He made the crossing and survived the journey, but part of his brain did not: on being revived, he was found during the eighteen-hour ordeal to have suffered from some kind of aneurysm, which left him unable to remember anything that had happened longer than ten minutes previously.

  He had brought some of his notebooks with him, but now when he read them they made no sense to him. He had the impression that it was a terrible story that had happened to someone else and was relieved that such trauma had not happened to him. A blessing, of sorts.

  Despite his loss of long-term memory, Sigmar reported feeling haunted by some kind of sense of loss. He would often spend hours walking around his room looking for something he could not find, though was unable to say what it was that he was searching for.

  In some part of his still active mind he knew he had to write, to tell the story of what he could not remember. He had piles of notebooks in which he would begin to write, but by the time he had composed more than a few sentences, he had no idea what or why he was writing or how the last word he had written related to the ones he had begun with. Some sha
dow of his earlier life would occasionally loom into his mind, but by the time he had found paper and a pen, Sigmar no longer had any memory of the incident he had struggled to recall.

  Not even Oliver Sacks, who visited Sigmar in the late 1970s, could help.

  If the literature of the twentieth century was all about memory, what role could there have been for Simon Sigmar? He knew everything, and remembered nothing.

  ELLEN SPARROW

  ONCE CONSIDERED NOTHING but the deranged scribblings of lunatics, the category of ‘outsider art’ is one that is now formally recognised by the art establishment, however controversial that definition remains. The question that we at the BDLF beg to ask, however, is what would ‘outsider literature’ look like?

  To help us answer the question, we can turn to the story of Ellen Sparrow. Born in London, out of wedlock, in 1882, she was placed in an orphanage until a distant aunt appeared when Ellen was nine. (Her aunt, having little or no knowledge of Ellen’s father, gave her the surname ‘Sparrow,’ having seen such a poor creature freeze to death, dropping like a stone from the window ledge of the dormitory young Ellen shared with a dozen other girls.)

  Her aunt, it turned out, had a notable interest in spiritualism and theosophy, and young Ellen soon became a fixture at her regular séances. It may have been here, some commentators have suggested, that Sparrow’s later peculiarities were engendered.

  When Sparrow was thirteen, finding herself alone for the first time in her aunt’s East End terrace, she was visited by a spirit which called itself Escribor. And Escribor told her to write.

  So Ellen Sparrow, a good child, did as she was bid, and began to write down everything Escribor dictated to her. There being little paper in the house, Sparrow attempted to accomplish her spirit’s ardent commands by writing on anything she could find. Old newspapers, bills, receipts of sale and fish wrappers were soon covered in her spiderish writing (she later claimed Escribor had learned her her letters, too). Things came to a head when Sparrow was sixteen, and finding herself with no materials to write on despite her spirit’s ever more insistent bidding, she scrawled thousands of words across the walls of her aunt’s house, her tiny handwriting only beginning to glean the tale the spirit had told her.

  Her aunt took a dim view of this, and had the walls instantly repapered thus losing an early example of Sparrow’s work. (The words may still be there somewhere, concealed under layers of wallpaper in some now-fashionable Dalston or Shoreditch two-up two-down, assuming it survived the Blitz.)

  All writers, in one way or another, write to please a spirit, benign or malignant. But none seemed as insistent as Ellen Sparrow’s Escribor.

  Aunt Madge died a year after the wallpaper incident, and the bereft Sparrow was sent to Hanwell asylum, where she would stay until 1952. It was during this time that she composed most of her work.

  There, she found the rolls of Izal toilet paper perfectly suited to her needs, inscribing them with pencil marks (a pen, with its sharp point, was deemed too dangerous) in handwriting that was too tiny to be deciphered by the naked eye. The pioneering psychiatrist Max Glatt attempted to decipher some of them with the aid of a magnifying glass, but even he eventually gave up due to glaucoma. (Sparrow herself, on the one occasion she was asked, claimed that she was not able to read what she had written.) Over the fifty or more years she spent in Hanwell, it is estimated that she covered some ten thousand rolls of paper with her work.

  Other inmates remember her writing at great speed, muttering or singing to herself as she did so. Then it would stop, sometimes for months. Sparrow underwent deep depression during these periods, and voluntarily underwent sessions of deeply traumatic ECT. Her doctors hoped it would cure her; Ellen hoped it would bring Escribor back.

  She died in 1954, shortly after having been discharged from the asylum, and finding herself living homeless and destitute. The only thing which accompanied her lifeless body was—inevitably—more writing (on rolls of higher-quality paper, at least, taken from the toilets in Victoria station. Unfortunately, these final manuscripts were so soaked by the driving London rain as to fall apart at the first touch. Nothing survives of them).

  Had she drawn pictures, Ellen Sparrow would now be remembered in the same breath as Henry Darger or Madge Gill. Sadly, Sparrow had chosen words.

  KEVIN STAPLETON

  EVEN TAKING INTO ACCOUNT the vagaries of literary fashion, it seems a shame that travel writing is no longer what it was. A field which includes Ibn Battuta and Richard Hakluyt, a Victorian pseud like Richard Burton or a great female voice such as Freya Stark, and reached huge commercial popularity in the 1980s with the no-less slippery Bruce Chatwin, surely deserves more than half a shelf in your local Waterstones or Barnes and Noble.

  It may be this age of easy travel and the Internet which has brought about the genre’s demise, but try using Dickens’s, Twain’s or Stevenson’s accounts as a guidebook and discover how infinitely richer the experience is than that of trying to use a Google Maps app to find a half-decent restaurant.

  Kevin Stapleton, born in Stockport in 1963, was a boy brought up on tales of travellers and wonder. Or, at least, he would have been, had he been fortunate enough to have had good parents and one of those teachers from the movies. Instead, Kevin had only some back issues of Look and Learn, a worn copy of a Children’s Illustrated Atlas of the World and a selection of Willard Price’s Adventure series.

  It was enough. Stapleton grew up with a vivid imagination but few practical talents and, on leaving school at the age of sixteen in the late 1970s, found himself shunted into a YOP scheme and its inevitable successor, the dole.

  That great malady of writers, utter penury, limited his opportunities. Stapleton spent his first cheque on a typewriter (a Silver Reed SR 180), thus leaving himself unable to afford even an off-peak day return to Birmingham.

  This did not deter Stapleton, and he spent the next few years in his bedsit writing tales of great journeys to Ceylon, Siam and Persia, unaware that those countries had ceased to exist. He sent his work to publishers, who were initially interested, but on finding Stapleton was a twenty-year-old dolehead from Manchester and not some grizzled ex-colonial telling tales from the verandah, they began to return his thick brown envelopes unopened.

  (And here we are forced to ask another question: if Stapleton had called his books ‘novels’, or posited them as postmodern questionings of the genre’s assumptions, how successful would they have been? Stapleton was, in a certain way, a victim of that curious and deadly twenty-first-century affectation, a desire for authenticity.)

  Hope still clung to him, however, and when after six years Stapleton realised he suffered not only from poverty but also from an acute case of agoraphobia, he was not deterred.

  Even though his greatest journeys now consisted of travelling no farther than the shared bathroom in his hallway, or even, on a good day, as far as the Londis minimarket for half a pint of skimmed milk and a loaf of sliced white, he continued to write. His greatest work, My Day, concerned the voyage from his bedroom to the toilet, then to the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of tea and some beans on toast, recounting his meetings with the people he found along his route, and was replete with anthropological insight and utter poignancy.

  Last we heard, Stapleton had moved into sheltered accommodation near Stretford. One day, Kevin, we shall all read your work, and marvel.

  MOLLY STOCK

  THE QUESTION OF WHAT OR HOW to write is one which has vexed all writers, though perhaps no less so than the equally serious question of where to write. For those fortunate enough, there may be the room of one’s own, be it a tiny bedsit or a quiet book-lined study with a view over heritage woodland. Others claim the literary café or even corporate coffee shop is the place, with the buzz of caffeine, the element of flaneurism, the free heating. The sofa works fine for some, the kitchen table for others. The options are many: a beach hut, or a cabin in the mountains? A bland Travelodge room, or a five-star hideaway retrea
t? Alone, or in a room full of people? On the bus going to work? Using a notebook while out walking? In a public library, replete with the background hum of yelling children, mobile phones and half-heard conversations?

  Each writer, and each story to be written, requires their own space.

  Not unlike many writers, Molly Stock took some time finding her perfect place to write.

  After she graduated from Royal Holloway in 1952, her story ‘Winter Trees’ was published in the student journal Early Days and widely read among certain circles. She was talked of as a promising lady writer of the time. Ongoing correspondence with Cyril Connolly encouraged her, but also pointed out that while she was undoubtedly talented, her work still lacked form, substance, assurance, that something which transforms the adequate into the brilliant. This lack, Stock decided, was due not to a deficit of talent, but to not having the perfect writing environment.

  She took her notebooks, manuscripts and portable typewriter (a lovely mint-green Hermes Baby) around Lyons Cornerhouses, Soho pubs, Kensington Park and a distant aunt’s house in North Yorkshire. But the words did not come.

  Then, having trouble rousing herself one cold January morning, Molly Stock found it. She realised she didn’t need to bother searching. Here was her perfect writing environment: her bed.

  Bed, bed, bed. Bed, lovely bed. Soft and warm and comforting, as big as a house, covers to pull over her head or pillows to prop herself up on. The lovely cool bit hidden at the bottom where she could stretch her legs and wiggle her toes. The cradling divot in the centre, the same shape as herself.

  At first she tried placing her typewriter on the bed, but even the delicate Hermes Baby with the support of a tea tray weighed too much, upsetting her perfect equilibrium. So she went back to paper and pen, and other than the occasional dressing gown–wrapped mission to kitchen or toilet, she sat in bed and began to write.