The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

by C. D. Rose

  Writing about fictitious or lost works is a means of holding literature in abeyance, of preserving its potentiality. In a way, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure is and is not. Yes, you are holding a copy in your hands, and yes, it contains fifty-two reasons why this is a small miracle; yet it is still a book to come.

  CASIMIR ADAMOWITZ-KOSTROWICKI

  THINK, IF YOU WILL, of Kafka asking Max Brod and Dora Diamant to burn all his papers when he eventually succumbed to the TB that had been slowly killing him for years. Think of Virgil, weak with fever and unable to put the finishing marks on his Aeneid, arriving in the harbour at Brindisi and asking that his work be destroyed rather than left unfinished. Think of Lavinia Dickinson, who did not burn her sister’s poems. And now think of Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki.

  You cannot, of course, because unlike Franz Kafka, Publius Vergilius Maro and Emily Dickinson, Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki had a friend faithless enough to obey his dying wishes.

  We cannot think of Adamowitz-Kostrowicki because we know nothing of him, but imagine if Kafka’s best friend and his lover had done what was bid of them, if Virgil’s scribes hadn’t had the emperor Augustus telling them what not to do and if Lavinia had not been so wily in interpreting her sister’s will and burned the poems as well as the letters, which she did destroy.

  This, too, is almost impossible, as you are being asked to imagine what is not, rather than what could have been. Imagine a void; imagine blankness. Imagine a literary world—or, indeed, any world—which has not in some sense been shaped by Kafka’s dark fables, Virgil’s Roman epic and Dickinson’s poetic invention. We cannot know, of course, but it is possible that Adamowitz-Kostrowicki’s work would have had a comparable influence on the way we interpret the world around us.

  Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki was born to a Polish father and American mother in Paris in 1880, initially trained to be a chemist but was soon distracted by the emergent technologies of film, photography and sound recording. These pursuits led him to frequent more bohemian circles and attempt to record and portray some of the people he admired most: Picasso and Apollinaire, Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the young T. S. Eliot.

  Inspired by their example, Adamowitz-Kostrowicki began to write and showed his work to many of his subjects, who all responded with enthusiasm. However, he refused to allow anything to be published, claiming his greatest work was yet to be completed. In 1914, he volunteered, joined a French artillery battalion and left a suitcase containing all of his writings with his closest friend, Eric Levallois. Adamowitz-Kostrowicki firmly instructed his friend that were he not to return, Levallois should destroy the entire contents of the case, including his magnum opus—the first great modern novel—L’homme avec les mains fleuries. This, it is said, was a work which would have overshadowed La Recherche, made The Man Without Qualities look as dull as its title, dwarf Ulysses in its range and scope, render To the Lighthouse small and parochial.

  By 1918, Levallois had not heard a word from his friend and, desolate, built a small bonfire on the street outside his Montmartre home. Passers-by thought he was celebrating the end of the war.

  (Unknown to Levallois, Adamowitz-Kostrowicki had not perished at the front but had been badly shellshocked and did indeed return to Paris that very week, and may have even been trying to visit his friend, but a horse, spooked by fireworks set off as part of the festivities, bolted and trampled him to death.)

  So think again of Kafka and Virgil and Dickinson, and think of how we cannot know what has been lost, not only from an unfortunate like Adamowitz-Kostrowicki, but from those dozens or hundreds or thousands whose work has been lost to fire or flood, to early death, to loss, to theft or to the censor’s pyre. What has been lost that could have bettered us all?

  STANHOPE BARNES

  COMPARED TO THAT OF Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki,* the case of Stanhope Barnes may seem significantly more prosaic. For Barnes there was no deathbed insistence, no last testament, no relative or friend placed in an agonising moral quandary. His work did not, as far as we know, go through the teeth of a cruelly ironic shredding machine or meet any bitter flames. No, Stanhope Barnes merely made the mistake—in an age long before flash drives, memory sticks, Dropbox or the iCloud—of leaving the only manuscript of his work on a train.

  At first, this seems like a poor example of failure. This man, you may think, was no great artist manqué frustrated by cruel fate, but a mere fool. We at the BDLF, however, beg to differ. Stanhope Barnes was far from being a fool, and what was left on that threadbare second-class seat at Reading station may have been the equivalent of The Trial or The Aeneid or ‘Because I could not stop for death.’

  Born into a working-class family in Nottinghamshire in 1897, Barnes was part of a generation shaped by their experiences on the battlefields of the Somme, experiences which he would fashion into Here Are the Young Men, the novel lost on the train as he was taking it to London to discuss its publication with T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. The book was a modernist epic which would have changed the perception of First World War writers as doomed poets, and place them squarely in the modern forge. Here Are the Young Men was a deeply felt work about the horrors of the war on a par with In Parenthesis or Mrs Dalloway. Its loss is incalculable.

  And though the circumstances surrounding this loss may seem foolish, how much more closely does this touch our own experience? Few of us have ever had to make a life-or-death decision, but many of us—whether on buses or trains or in bars or restaurants—will have lost valued objects through hurry, stress or sheer neglect. (Freud, of course, would claim this means we wish to return to the scene of the loss, that we are re-enacting some primal grievance, and though we are baffled as to why Barnes may have wished to return to Reading, we cannot help but note that T. E. Lawrence also famously left the first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the same place. Is there, we wonder, some association with that dull junction’s homonym, that it is a writer’s fear of someone actually reading their work that causes these slips?)

  We are left only to wonder: what happened to that manuscript? There are stories: that it was discovered by an avid reader who loved it so much he locked it in a vault or hid it in an attic to be discovered by an as yet unarrived posterity; that it was found by a kindly stranger who spoke no English but took it to home to Paraguay and had it translated into Spanish, where, by dint of an extremely poor translation it became known as ¿Dónde están los jóvenes?, a hugely successful account of a youth football team touring war-torn Europe and succumbing to random sniper fire (even forming the basis for a 1970s telenovela); that it met the requirements of another poor traveller stranded in the Thames Valley in urgent need of toilet paper. But these stories are only hearsay, and have yet to be proved.

  In his novel The Angel of History, Bruno Arpaia suggests that Walter Benjamin’s last lost work was entrusted to an anti-Franco fighter who used it to light a fire and consequently save himself from freezing to death on a Pyrenean mountainside when fleeing from persecution. We can only hope Stanhope Barnes’s work may, in its last moments, have saved a life.

  * See entry no. 1.

  THE BEASLEY COLLECTIVE

  FEW GREAT LITERARY WORKS have ever been composed by more than one hand. While some early poems (including the Odyssey and the Mahabharata) may well have been the product of several authors over long periods of time, the modern age has nothing comparable. The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was quite obviously the work of Wordsworth, however he and Coleridge may have pretended. Auden and Isherwood collaborated briefly, but without fireworks. The Groep 52 experimented in the Netherlands, while in Italy Luther Blissett and various Wu Mings have pointed the way but inevitably fell into solipsistic fragmentation. A number of genre writers are more or less committees, but have produced little that will last.

  What is it about the group or collective that so proscribes literary greatness? There may be many answers to this question, but the most signific
ant is probably the brute fact that writing remains an intensely solitary activity.

  Some, however, persuaded either by recognition of their own lack or more often, it seems, by ideological reasons, have tried to buck this trend. One such group would be the Beasley Collective.

  Formed in Hulme, Manchester, in 1979 (and not, in fact, named after the John Cooper Clarke poem, but after the location of the communal squat where they all resided), the Collective wanted to take the ideological drive of the post-punk era and marry it to the sheer thrill of being in a band, but seeing as none of them could play instruments (not, it has to be said, a barrier that stopped many in that fertile time) decided to work in the literary sphere. They could all read and write, after all. Such a strategy would, they believed ‘attack imperialist high culture from the inside.’

  While most were anarchists, others were Maoists, Trotskyites, anarcho-syndicalists, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, Kropotkinites and radical Lacanians. Jürgen Kittler* was briefly, it is said, a member, probably during his stint as bass player with the semi-legendary band King Ink.

  The Collective liberated an IBM Selectric from the insurance agency where one of them worked by day, and established a rigorous compositional method. They would sit in a circle on the floor of their sparsely furnished house and in turn type one word each, slowly stringing together the sentences of literary works which, they hoped, would blow apart the postwar neoliberal consensus.

  Their first work was, of course, a manifesto.

  There is no literary form more thrilling than the manifesto. To emblazon ideas across the artistic firmament or make a grand declaration in the belief that what one is doing will change human society without, yet, actually having to bother doing anything that will make such proclamations true is an exciting endeavour.

  Only one copy of the Beasley Collective Manifesto was ever produced: the Xerox machine at the insurance agency was due for servicing.

  Undeterred, the Collective carried on composing, though their rigorous method meant that works were slow in coming. Each word typed was given over to strict ideological analysis and heated debate. It took them six months to produce their first short story, but then it was decided that the short story was a commercial form and not applicable to their radical standards. Further discussion saw the novel deemed ‘bourgeois’ and poetry ‘elitist.’

  Most bands split up due to musical differences (usually a shorthand for the simple fact they can’t stand each other anymore), most writers keep on going, producing ever-inferior work or giving up when they have nothing left to say. The Beasley Collective was, at least, unique in this perspective: their work ceased in 1982 due to ‘ideological incompatibility.’ For this, at least, they deserve to be remembered here.

  * See entry no. 20.

  ERNST BELLMER

  ‘EVERYONE HAS A BOOK inside them,’ it is often said, and while this may or may not be true, for Ernst Bellmer the commonplace had an unusual validity.

  Born in Vienna in 1875, Bellmer grew up the autodidact son of an innkeeper, voraciously reading anything that was left lying around in his father’s hostelry. Feuilletons and three-decker novels, penny dreadfuls and pages of the yellow press, chapbooks, almanacs, encyclopedias and broadsides: all were devoured by his gaze. By the age of eighteen, he had ingested enough to begin producing. Over the course of the next few years, Bellmer wrote at least fifty tales (mostly closely observed vignettes of lower-middle-class Viennese life) as well as an epic bildungsroman, Der mann mit den blühenden händen, concerning the life of a lower-middle-class Viennese innkeeper’s son and his desperate struggle to become an artist.

  But Bellmer was vexed, and it was not the sad failure to find a publisher for his many writings that vexed him. Bellmer suffered, but not from that familiar graphomane pull, that need to translate every thought, feeling or event of his life into words, that overwhelming desire to record and memorise everything by folding it into a more or less probable narrative. No, Bellmer had a less familiar problem: he was a bibliophage. For Bellmer, the aesthetic act was not complete unless his words, once committed to paper, were then eaten.

  Bibliophagy is a rare complaint, its very existence doubted by many clinical practitioners and often used as a metaphor rather than in its strict pathological sense. Yet to Bellmer, who suffered not only from this strange psychological compulsion but also from the crippling indigestion it engendered, it was very real.

  One of his father’s regular clients made him an appointment with Wilhelm Fliess, but the doctor found Bellmer’s condition insufficiently interesting (or, perhaps, insufficiently lucrative) and passed it on to his friend and colleague Sigmund Freud (who included a study of the case, entitled ‘The Book Eater,’ in an early version of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, only to have it removed by his editors who doubted its veracity). Freud in turn passed Bellmer on to Friedrich Loeb (grandfather of Maxwell*), with whom he sustained a long-lasting though ultimately unsuccessful analysis. He died at the age of seventy-five from ink poisoning.

  It seems sad that Bellmer’s undoubtedly fascinating excavations of the underbelly of fin-de-siècle Viennese life will never be read, and more intrepid researchers may well have dived into the Austrian capital’s sewers to find what remains of his manuscripts, but there we shall not go, leaving Bellmer’s work to decay (as surely as all books one day shall).

  * See entry no. 23.

  THOMAS BODHAM

  MEN LIKE THOMAS BODHAM are rare these days. Born into an impoverished family in the eponymous Norfolk village in 1720, Thomas knew he was destined to be a traveller when at the age of two the family’s only book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, fell from a high shelf onto his head. He was too young to remember the incident, but the story was often told when Thomas asked about the large indentation it had left on his prominent forehead. With the aid of the kindly pastor’s Sunday school lessons, Thomas taught himself to read, practising his skills on the family’s only resource until his father swapped the book for a pig during the particularly harsh winter of 1732. The pig died soon after, and Thomas was allowed only its foot to eat.

  The book had fed his thirst for adventure, as books are wont to do, and like many young men from his village Bodham took to sea as soon as he was able, seeing the flat fields around him as scant fertiliser for his questing mind. Moreover, he had never forgiven his father for his act of philistinism, nor less for the meagre trotter. As an act of small revenge, he took the family’s only remaining treasure, a pair of silver buckles (bequeathed to the Bodhams, so family lore had it, by King Charles himself) on his travels, believing they would keep him fortunate and safe.

  Some years later, marooned in Goa by a treacherous Portuguese merchant, Thomas found himself no longer able to stand the permanent seasickness he had endured since he had first set foot on a ship in Great Yarmouth, nor the mariner’s continuous diet of salt cod and pickled cabbage. While he still longed for the adventure that had so far failed to present itself to him, he realized he missed those flat, open fields and wishing he could eat a jellied pork by-product. He therefore decided to find his Wicket Gate, House Beautiful and Delectable Mountains by making his way from the western shores of the great subcontinent all the way back to Norfolk on foot.

  It was as he set forth that he decided to record the tales of the adventures he would have, encouraged to write like so many by a fear of forgetting and a desire to prove that his fantastic voyages had genuinely taken place. And so, armed with a quire of parchment, squid ink and any writing implement he could lay his hands on, he began to compose his great tale, The Lyffe and Travells of Thos. Bodham, Esq.

  Space prevents us from recounting his amazing adventures, and in truth we can only be certain of their end. We must rely on hearsay and historical footnotes for his accounts of Jerusalem, Damascus, Istanbul, Byzhzh and remote cities in Russia, of tribesmen and goatherds, pashas and palaces, for the only thing we know for sure is that having crossed the Bosphorus and reaching the gates of Vienna, Bodham w
as approached by a merchant who claimed that a published version of his great work would surely make him a fortune. Bodham, by now penniless and gaunt, was taken in by the man’s tale and handed over his great manuscript (now amounting to more than a thousand pages). No sooner had he done so when the merchant slid a thin blade between Bodham’s skinny ribs, killing the weakened traveller instantly.

  The merchant, having no genuine interest in what he believed to be a poorly written ragbag of fibs and outrages, fed the manuscript to his pigs, removed the shiny silver buckles from the traveller’s worn shoes and then disposed of the body in the same way he had disposed of the pages of fascination and wonder that had made Bodham’s life.