Failing Into Place

Earl Fowler

It’s a hoary cliché, I know, but after 70 spins around the sun I have one foot in the grave and still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. You tell me.

I know it’s a cliché because, speaking of overused chestnuts, so many of the people I know are sitting across from me over the same checkered tablecloth, our candles flickering in the necks of wicker-clad bottles of long-vanished Chianti. Liver, anyone? Fava beans?

Like most people, I’m afraid of dying without ever making much of a mark on life. Without ever scrawling a personal “Kilroy was here” onto a wall somewhere, notwithstanding my success at walking around to this day as a live doodle with a bald head and a prominent nose peeking over said wall, fingers desperately clutching the ledge.

But hang onto that fork, Duke. There’s pie. For I’m even more loath to become one of those old poops proud of simply having tarried too long at the fair while only the good died young.

You know. The sort of old ginks writer Phillip Lopate eviscerates in the eponymous essay in his marvellous 1989 collection Against Joie de Vivre:

“Ah, what a twinkle in the eye the old man has! He’ll outlive us all.” So we speak of old people who bore us, when we wish to honor them. We often see projected onto old people this worship of the life force. It is not the fault of the old if they then turn around and try to exploit our misguided amazement at their longevity as though it were a personal tour de force. The elderly, when they are honest with themselves, realize they have done nothing particularly to be proud of in lasting to a ripe old age, and then carrying themselves through a thousand more days. Yet you still hear an old woman or man telling a bus driver with a chuckle, “Would you believe that I am eighty-four years old!” As though they should be patted on the back for still knowing how to talk, or as though they had pulled a practical joke on the other riders by staying so spry and mobile. Such insecure, wheedling behavior always embarrasses me. I will look away rather than meet the speaker’s eyes and be forced to lie with a smile, “Yes, you are remarkable,” which seems condescending on my part and humiliating to us both.

Lopate will turn 82 in November, so perhaps he now greets bus drivers with a chuckle and a boast about not wearing Depends. My grandfather lived to be 95 and, in his final years, like a five-year-old claiming to be six, would add a year to his age to really wow his listeners. I loved my grandpa and wouldn’t mind becoming a raffish nonagenarian with a twinkle in the eye myself, but I never want to be that guy.

When one is young, heedlessly bellying up to the illusion bar, the glorious future hangs in the distance like one of those gleaming, castellated cities seemingly floating over a coastline as you approach a port from the sea.

This is, of course, a trick of the light. We’re all intoxicated by visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads before age  — with the cloying sweetness of Clorets on its breath to mask the gin — sets us down on the hard, cold pew of reality. Upon arrival at the shore, the castellated illusions are revealed to be nothing more than snail tracks tunnelled through the mud in quavering curves.

For what is it we really see through our floaters and cataracts at 70 or 80 or 90 from the burning deck of our lives, peering out over a darkling plain where ignorant armies (as ever) clash by night? To repurpose an exquisite sentence from Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son: “There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.”

Thus the memories of the elderly failure — the curtains drawn, the pillows plumped, the streets strewn with sawdust.

If you’ll indulge one further hallucinatory image from an old but not particularly crusty newspaperman: Checker cabs wend their way over the sandy dunes and jagged potholes of memory in the telex rooms of our minds, where restive machines noisily rattle off AP and CP dispatches bearing yesterday’s news, echoing faintly off the soft-panelled ceilings of daily bridge columns, movie ads and Andy Capp threatening to beat his wife.

I miss the movie ads.

But oh dear. I’ve gone off-piste again. (Insert awkward throat-clearing and foot-shuffling here.)

Setting aside the attendant harrowing confessions and unresolved contradictions, it remains nonetheless true that entering what Tennessee Williams referred to as one’s “crocodile years” — without having succeeded in much of anything — does confer the occasional compensatory riff of gnarled insight.

In his eloquent paean to fellow writer Richard Wright, titled “Alas, Poor Richard,” James Baldwin writes about the horror he felt when his own semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, 1953’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, proved not to be the literary sensation he was hoping for. Wright knew better and tried to offer him solace, but Baldwin reacted as the young tend to do when embarrassed and ashamed:

It simply had not occurred to me in those days that anyone could approve of me if I had tried for something and failed. The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did — which was to hide.

Having routinely encountered failure on the tar-blistered, pigeon-splattered roundabout of existence — or to use a more graphic idiom, having established once and for all that we couldn’t pour piss out of a boot to save our lives — we members of the family Crocodylidae have three French words to offer groping and tentative youth about the built-in lessons and complaisances that palliate most forms of disappointment : Bien au contraire.

What was that pithy observation by Robert Musil, author of a brilliant but unfinished (I rest my case) modernist novel, A Man Without Qualities? Oh, there it is: “For as you well know: while a single disappointment may elicit tears, a repeated disappointment will evoke a smile.”

As do those silver-framed photos on the mantelpiece hinting at what we once were on our tenth birthday or the convocation ceremony or the second wedding.

Now it has to be said, of course, that some self-proclaimed failures are fooling themselves.

Franz Kafka doubted the value of his writing throughout his life and instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts upon his death. Fortunately, Brod ignored his wishes, but Kafka died believing he was a literary dud.

Van Gogh sold a single painting during his lifetime and was one and done by 37, feeling defeated and unrecognized. Chopin was riddled with self-doubt and obsessed with revising his compositions. Considered too long, too complex or emotionally excessive, Mahler’s music won wide acclaim only decades after he’d joined the choir inaudible. Emily Dickinson toiled in obscurity and received almost no recognition until well after she couldn’t recognize anything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up,” his morbid account of hitting bottom, is the saddest account I know of a first-rate artist berating himself for having drunk away and pimped his talents to Hollywood schlockmeisters:

I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. … So there was not an “I” any more — not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect — save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew now that he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do —

Fitzgerald, just 44 when carried away by a fatal heart attack in 1940, would never see The Great Gatsby be proclaimed a literary masterpiece and a contender as the Great American Novel.

Still, as tragic as this is, I can’t help (as a hardbitten former journalist) injecting a note of cynicism. Whenever I come across self-loathing like this by a self-destructive artist who vastly underestimates the worth of his or her work, a little voice goes off in my head repeating a reflection by J.D. Salinger’s narrator Buddy Glass in the novella Seymour: An Introduction: “Besides, a confessional passage has never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride.”

As much as I enjoyed Gary Shteyngart’s hilarious 2014 memoir, Little Failure, a title based on the term his disappointed mother fused from English and her native Russian to berate him when he decided to become a writer — Failurchka — the book is suffused with the kind of second-order pride at being a successful sad sack and a schlemiel (albeit a bestselling one) that Salinger was getting at.

In truth, you’re not a bona fide, honest-to-goodness, real McCoy of a failure unless a) you see yourself as one, and b) the facts back you up. Shteyngart allows in a “reader’s guide” at the end of his memoir that despite their initial dismay at his career choice, “my parents reconciled themselves to my career, and now they are proud of me.”

Thus a Big Success. A failure to fail. And this directly leads us — won’t you please join me in making a silky moue — to a lonely figure tilling the frontiers of a wilderness of failure, a man with a name that wouldn’t have been out of place on the pages of Mad magazine and whose outlook on the world routionely thrilled fellow schleps and adepts to the marrow (or did, at least, until he took that fatal overdose of barbiturates in his one-room apartment on East 10th Street in New York as autumn loomed in 1989).

I refer, of course, to the legendary Seymour Krim, the Rodney Dangerfield of belletrism. As cultural critic James Wolcott once observed:

His willingness to face failure first thing in the morning is what gives Krim’s writing its tremendous tender sense of fraternity. … It may be lonely at the top, but it’s crowded at the bottom.

To me, one of the standout showpieces in Phillip Lopate’s 1997 anthology The Art of the Personal Essay — which is filled with one resplendent piece of thinking after another, starting with Seneca the Younger (writing about noise) and ending with Richard Rodriguez (the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 1980s) — is Krim’s radiant essay titled “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” also included in the 1991 posthumous compilation of his essays, What’s This Cat’s Story?

The thing is, Krim didn’t think much of essay writing. He wanted to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald (or least a Kerouac or a Ginsberg, whom he idolized while worshipping at the altar of the first-person New Journalism sensibilities of such writers as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and others of that ilk).

Here’s how “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” opens:

We are all victims of the imagination in this country. The American Dream may sometimes seem like a dirty joke these days, but it was internalized long ago by our fevered little minds and it remains to haunt us as we fumble with the unglamorous pennies of life during the illusionless middle years. At 51, believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don't know truly “what I want to be.” I've published several serious books. I rate an inch in Who’s Who in America. I teach at a so-called respected university. But in that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13, although even I know that the chances of acting them out diminish with each heartbeat. One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.

Let’s stop him right there. One of the vices contributing to a sense of failing in life, of never catching one’s star, is having a profuse upstairs delicatessen for a brain that can’t seem to settle on whether to order chorizo or mortadella or ham off the bone. Feeling that one could have been more than a name on the door is also a virtue if you want to remain open to the possibilities that present themselves when one is young. But the returns diminish with age. Krim continues:

At 50 my father was built-in as a concrete foundation and at 55 he was crushed out of existence by the superstructure of his life. I have no superstructure except possibly in my head. I literally live alone with my fierce dreams, and my possessions are few. My father knew where he stood or thought he did, having originally come from an iron-cross Europe, but I only know that I stand on today with a silent prayer that tomorrow will bring to me my revelation and miraculize me.

Failure: Waiting on a miracle that never arrives. Waiting for a vision, a revelation, a clear indication of how to convert the Land of Opportunity into more than a cornball slogan. How to turn the American Dream into a Whitmanesque song of yourself. And then never finding it.

That’s because I come from America, which has to be the classic, ultimate, then-they-broke-the-mold incubator of not knowing who you are until you find out. I have never really found out and I expect what remains of my life to be one long search party for the final me. I don’t kid myself that I’m alone in this, hardly, and I don’t really think that the great day will ever come when I hold a finished me in my fist and say here you are, congratulations. …

We know all along that time is squeezing us into a corner while we mentally rocket to each new star that flares across out sky, and yet we can’t help ourselves. We forget that our contemporaries are building up wealth of one kind or another, reputations, consistency, credit in the world, and that it counts for more as age settles down around all of us, the very age we have denied or ignored. In a way, those of us who have lived higher in the mind than on the sidewalk making and revising our salad of possibilities have stayed younger than we should have. We have even been sealed off from our own image as it’s seen by others.

Yet each one of us sooner or later gets the elbow that reminds us that the “real world” we have postponed making a deal with, in fact played with like Chaplin kicking the globe around in The Great Dictator, has been evaluating us with a different set of standards than the ones we have been applying to ourselves. If we have been snotty towards ordinary success, proud and mysterious as we followed the inner light, even making thoughtless cracks about those who settle for little, then the day comes when our own inability to put it all together is seen by another who wants to cut us down to size and our lives suddenly explode in our faces.

Oh, and (this is for you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears), bury the rag away deep in your face. Now is the time for your tears:

But if you are a proud, searching “failure” in this society. and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of us, then it is smart and honorable to know what you attempted and why you are now vulnerable to the body blows of those who saw you robed in the glow of your vision and now only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day. …

Like most of us in the failure business, I am, we are, patriots so outrageously old-fashioned that we incorporated the spirit of the country in our very heads, took literally its every invitation to the greatest kind of self-fulfillment ever known. There’s something beautiful about being an American sucker, even if you pay for it with tears and worse. We were millionaires of the spirit for at least 20 adult years before we felt the lowering of the boom, and in the last analysis of the spirit, the attitude within, a quality of soul, that this country has to offer to history much more than its tangible steel and the bright blood too often accompanying it. …

With those words, Krim signs off to become just another wraith among the ancient tribesmen who populate the red-ochre cave drawings of our dreams. (Insert the hum of distant drumming here.)

If I were in a certain kind of mood, I could avail myself of a vast store of salutary apothegms about the positive side of failure with which to bring this little disquisition to an, ahem, successful conclusion.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” — Robert F. Kennedy (though in all fairness, he might have changed his view on this after watching his son drive the American health care system over some roadkill and into the ditch).

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison

An so on and so forth. But unlike Edison, most of Krim’s “millionaires of the spirit” will never stumble upon that 10,001st way that turns the key to the Magic Kingdom. I’ve already mentioned how Krim’s life came to an abrupt end in that dingy apartment where he had been suffering for months from various ailments, including a depressing, debilitating heart attack.

On the one hand clapping, I share Krim’s appreciation for the Beat ethos enunciated by Jack Kerouac in On the Road, Krim’s bible:

… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

And I can’t argue with the penned inscription by Clarence Odbody in the first-edition copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer given to George Bailey, “the richest man in town,” at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: “Dear George: Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

But one also has to acknowledge the deep suffering of our brothers and sisters who burn, burn, burn but never find their way out of the Hundred Acre Wood with their exploding yellow roman candles. Who “want America to know this kid was here,” Krim’s lifelong ambition, but wind up sinking beneath our wisdom like a stone (cf. Christ, Jesus and Cohen, Leonard), as predatory gulls circle above while passing their inevitable verdicts on such lives: meretricious, fatuous, fiascoes.

But let’s speak some more of those stones. As poet Annie Dillard writes in her lovely, sinuous essay “Seeing”:

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and total surprise.

The gift of finding your footing in life comes to some but not to all ... however much one lunges at that tuft of grass while slipping over the edge.

“I have never really learned how to live,” Krim added in a plaintive footnote to his brothers and sisters in the failure business. “I improvise — and fuck up anyway.”

The pearl may not be sought. And far too many of us wind up instead like Beckett’s Molloy, without hope, sucking on a pebble as the waiters yawn and hover beside our tables at closing time.