My Heroes Have Always Been Failures

Let me begin by defining my terms -- when we talk about famous failures in literature, we're not really talking about failures, are we? After all, the true failures are the ones nobody knows about, lapsed into permanent obscurity, forgotten by the ages. No, the failures that I'm talking about are the men and women (all right, mostly men) who died thinking of themselves as botched experiments in humanity, the recognition of whose success is almost always after they've become worm food.

Those kind of failures.

Yes, Fitzgerald got me started thinking about this whole phenomenon. But the more I weighed it, the more I realized that, like the man himself, I'm fascinated with the idea of the reach that exceeds the grasp, and many of the writers whose work I read most compulsively can squeeze into this template rather cozily, or at least with the help of a little social lubricant. Poe, yes, and Hemingway, who beat his brains out depression and a bottle, Faulkner and poor, amazing Richard Yates, whose Boston apartment I tracked down a few years ago, just up the street from the bar where he continued to assassinate his liver. What is it with these guys? And more importantly, what is it with me -- am I actually romanticizing such a self-destructive lifestyle?

In fairness to myself -- hey, even I need an advocate -- it's not the lifestyle itself that proves so magnetic over time. At least, not just the lifestyle. Those names in my own index of American literary psychiatric collapse -- the crack ups, in other words -- share a compelling inability to bend to the fashion of their time...they wrote what they had to write, regardless of whether or not the critics adored it, or the public bought it, and in the end that rootless feeling of operating in a void, of following their gut regardless of how unpopular it made them, probably drove them into the bowels of emotional bankruptcy, substance abuse and other bad habits.

In the end, it's not the writer, but the work. And thank God, the work endures.