Post #46: Failure and the Writing Life

9 July 2023

“Failure, failure, failure—failure behind me, failure ahead of me—that was by far the deepest conviction I carried away.”

— George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys”

Success is delightful, but failure is more interesting and instructive. Our triumphs are the very spice of life, but they also invite envy and resentment, whereas our shared miseries unite us perhaps more than anything else. Listen to The Donald holding forth on his greatness and you may imagine yourself in one of the darker circles of Dante’s hell; but would not a sincere heart-to-heart about his defeats and disappointments be very enticing indeed? And so with everyone, even one’s worst enemy, the very demons haunting the world. How enlightening it would be to get the Prince of Darkness for a frank interview about his setbacks!

It probably has something to do with how relatively few ways there are to be happy (so very precariously even at the best of times) and how countless the ways in which things can miscarry for us so very easily. A single unguarded second in traffic and it’s all over. Tolstoy famously introduced Anna Karenina with the observation that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy one is distinctive in its miseries. Happiness is a gift and a miracle, but it writes white, says the writer; there is just not much to be said about it. But the sea of misery and failure, now there are depths that can never be plumbed!

Dukkha is the universal element in life, as the noble truths remind us; our moments of escape from the dominion of dissatisfaction are momentary and rare, mere blips that never go all the way, unless we break free of the constraints of sentience altogether. No wonder our sufferings give us more in common, or at least more reliably, than our successes and delights in life ever could! Not that I slight those lighter, brighter moments: I am as eager for them as anyone, but that may be why I’ve learned to be a little more realistic about them and moderate my great expectations, as I’ve said several times.

The question, of course, is how to keep up one’s spirits (or some semblance thereof) in the course of so many drubbings, drenchings, and cloudy days. One source of inspiration might be found in the Zen tradition of shoshaku jushaku, attributed to Dogen and briefly discussed in a passage of Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill 1995, p. 39) where life on the Path—possibly even that of a Zen master—is depicted as a long series of making one mistake after another, distinguished from more ordinary failure mainly by the single-mindedness and unwavering determination with which the “successful” practitioner keeps up his effortless efforts. One should never be too sure of understanding Zen. (The definition of success as going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is often spuriously attributed to either Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln. Both would have approved the sentiment, presumably, but there is no evidence that either ever used the phrase.*)

The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope—no stranger, he, to failure—is a great inspiration in this respect, not only because of how he recalls his early years as one more or less uninterrupted trail of tears, but also because of how unavailing were his beginnings as a writer, despite the considerable success that came to him eventually. Who could write with Trollope’s inimitable equanimity of the utter failure of his first book, though accepted for publication? Thus in chapter 4 of his Autobiography:

My first book was to be printed at the publisher’s expense, and he was to give me half the profits. Half the profits! Many a young author expects much from such an undertaking. I can with truth declare that I expected nothing. And I got nothing. Nor did I expect fame, or even acknowledgment. I was sure that the book would fail, and it did fail most absolutely. I never heard of a person reading it in those days. If there was any notice taken of it by any critic of the day, I did not see it. I never asked any questions about it, or wrote a single letter on the subject to the publisher.

But did it take the wind out of the good man’s sails? By no means:

I do not remember that I felt in any way disappointed or hurt. I am quite sure that no word of complaint passed my lips. But I went on writing. With my next two books I changed my publisher, but did not change my fortune. I made the same agreement as before as to half profits, and with precisely the same results. The book was not only not read, but was never heard of. Again I held my tongue, and not only said nothing but felt nothing. Any success would, I think, have carried me off my legs, but I was altogether prepared for failure. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the writing of these books, I did not imagine, when the time came for publishing them, that anyone would condescend to read them.

To keep himself writing, quite independently of his mood or any ephemeral inspiration, he made a note in a little black diary, every day and without fail, of the number of pages he had produced. This is the very method I invented for myself thirty years ago—tracking daily hours of study instead of pages—when I had a dozen weeks left to get myself into passable shape for my undergraduate exams at Oxford, the most grueling thing I’ve ever had to do. (I knew nothing of Trollope’s method until yesterday, but I will gladly share the credit.) I used the same contrivance again to finish my dissertation, and I‘ve been applying it to my hours on the mat for over fifteen years now, as mentioned before.

The life of Trollope marks one of those rare, consoling instances where sheer writerly perseverance really does end up triumphing. Though it took a decade of unremitting and unremunerated literary labors in Trollope’s case and half a dozen published novels before they began to sell, they ended up flying off the shelves, to his great delight. Nonetheless, the keen memory of his earlier misfortunes never left him:

For the first twenty-six years of my life—years of suffering, disgrace, and inward remorse—I was wretched, sometimes almost unto death, and often cursed the hour in which I was born. Then all these evils went away from me and no one has had a happier life than mine. But all is not over yet. And mindful of that, remembering how great is the agony of adversity, how crushing the despondency of degradation, how susceptible I am myself to the misery coming from contempt—remembering also how quickly good things may go and evil things come—I am often tempted to hope, almost to pray, that the end may be near.

Such redemptive stories about those who make good are all very well, heartening and bracing and surely not without meaning; but they are also misleading, standing to the experience of most serious writers as the wisdom of fairy tales does to that of everyday life. Trollope understood only too well how huge is “the pile of futile literature, the building of which has broken so many hearts,” and he knew too how little is really gained, by way of worldly success, when a manuscript has been completed, or even when it has been accepted for publication: “I knew how many a tyro who could fill a manuscript lacked the power to put his matter before the public; and I knew, too, that when the matter was printed, how little had then been done towards the winning of the battle! I had already learned that many a book—many a good book—’is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’”

PS: There are many touching and endearing things about J.K. Rowling that get in the way of the usual envy and resentment—the difficulties of her beginnings as a writer, the manner in which Harry Potter got picked up by a publisher after the usual rejections, the nature of her oeuvre—but what I approve and admire most about her is how she used her moment of triumph, the commencement address at Harvard, to invoke the benefits of failure. Shame on the lot who have tried to tarnish her as some kind of nefarious reactionary.

* See Richard M. Langworth’s Churchill by Himself: The Definite Collection of Quotations (Perseus 2008), which lists the dubious quotation among prominent “red herrings,” or false attributions (p. 580).