The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

by C. D. Rose

  She kept the curtains half drawn, occasionally angling her head to peek out at the gusty or snowy weather beyond, and felt herself safe in bed, writing.

  The leaves of paper mounted as thickly as her cotton sheets, woollen blankets and goosedown quilts. Page after page piled up around her, tumbling onto the cold floor.

  Eventually trips to the loo or for more tea and crumpets became ever more taxing, and ever fewer. She snoozed, she slept, she snored. The bed was so warm, so soft, after all. Writing was hard; sleeping was easy.

  Friends occasionally popped by to visit, and though she assured them she was fine, she soon went from promising lady writer to deluded eccentric.

  After she stopped seeing visitors, claiming she was too sleepy or too cosy to open the door to them, Molly Stock’s biographical trail sadly disappears. She was last heard of in a boardinghouse in Islington in 1963. We hope she finished her stories, and we wish her sweet dreams.

  The strongest writers, of course, could probably write anywhere, in any conditions. Claiming the environment is not right, that the time of day is wrong or that there is too much or too little noise may only be one of the many obfuscatory delaying tactics writers habitually delude themselves with.

  But Stock’s lesson remains: writers, beware of not only what you write, but also where you write.

  PETER TRABZHK

  EVERY CITY SHOULD HAVE its own writer. Dublin has Joyce, Prague has Kafka, Buenos Aires belongs to Borges, London to Dickens and New York to, well, take your pick. Some cities, however, sadly remain writerless. Manchester, for example, has tried to lay claim to Anthony Burgess, but with little success or, indeed, motive. Being born in the place is not nearly enough.

  There are many cities across the world that remain sadly orphaned.

  Take, for instance, the city of Bzyzhzh. A little-known place, neatly but perhaps somewhat uncomfortably nestled on the border between Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany, the city (it calls itself a city, despite numbering few more than fifty thousand inhabitants) had quietly tried to mind its own business despite a turbulent thousand-year history encompassing countless invasions, several name changes and appurtenance to a number of different countries.

  While we pity the city without a writer, we also pity the writer without a city. Such a man was Peter Trabzhk. Trabzhk had been born into a rootless existence, son of an Italian mother and a German father, failed farmers and itinerant agricultural workers in Argentina. Having spent much of his young life travelling that vast country, earning his crust working as a book-keeper, when he was twenty-seven he decided he had earned enough to take a trip back to his motherland, to discover the roots he didn’t know he had.

  He never found his roots, due to a long story involving an antiquated map and a non-existent command of any of the languages he encountered on his travels. Indeed, quite how he wound up in Bzyzhzh remains obscure. It is possible, we surmise, that he was attracted to the place simply because its complex spelling reminded him of his own orthographically intricate surname.

  Regardless, in 1972 he arrived there—unknowingly tailed by spies from four different countries—liked it, and even though he had never written a word before in his life decided to become a writer and write the story of Bzyzhzh.

  A complete history would obviously have taken far longer than a young writer wants to wait, so he began judiciously with a series of short poems inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s tedious Spoon River Anthology, a copy of which he had picked up while travelling through Italy, where it remains inexplicably popular. The local newspaper was interested and printed a few of them in its ‘Poets’ Corner,’ but there was little wider interest.

  He reached out and, this time inspired by Dubliners (a Czech copy of which was orally translated for him by a man he met in a bar), wrote a collection of short stories all set in Bzyzhzh, featuring characters he had met during his stay in the city. He was promptly sued for defamation, and all manuscripts were destroyed.

  Undaunted, he carried on, and somehow managed to spend several more years in the city, during which time he worked assiduously on what he believed would be his greatest work, a nine-hundred-page epic spanning the whole history of the city. Still feeling uncomfortable with the several languages which jostled for space in Bzyzhzh, Trabzhk’s great mistake was perhaps to write the book in his native Spanish, a word of which no one even in the polyglot city actually spoke. Had anyone apart from its author ever been able to read La ciudad de los tres ríos, Bzyzhzh may today be on the literary tourist trail. Perhaps, however, it never wanted to be.

  HARTMUT TRAUTMANN

  HARTMUT TRAUTMANN had long had a passion for the English language. Of the thousands of languages in the world, he felt that only English had such unique variety of inflection, a vast lexis and infinite subtleties of register, all combined with a vigorous directness and utmost grammatical flexibility. What is truly amazing is that Trautmann was able to perceive all this without actually being able to speak a word of the language.

  Quite how his particular passion was engendered is unclear. He had been born in East Germany in 1948, so opportunities for learning the language were distinctly limited. Though other linguistic possibilities were presented to him throughout his youth, he found Spanish (promoted in regular visits from Cuban comrades) too in thrall to its Latinate father, Czech and Polish were like having mouthfuls of broken glass, Serbo-Croat didn’t know if it was one thing or another and Hungarian was frankly incomprehensible. Russian he refused to countenance. It has been suggested that his love for English was brought about through his enthusiastic devouring of translations of pulp American Wild West novels (Louis L’Amour was strangely popular in the DDR) and a long study of Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare (like many, he believed the two men to be one and indivisible).

  He saved money from his job as an electrical engineer and, after ten years on the waiting list, was finally able to purchase a Robotron 202, upon which he set to writing his great novel (in German, hoping to translate it at a later date into English). After several years of work on Das geheimnis spiegel, however, Trautmann realised that translation was an inadequate method of expressing himself in English. No, to use the language authentically, he believed, to be able to bathe in its rich resources, to be able to appreciate and manipulate every tiny nuance and shade of meaning, he had to learn to speak the language, to train himself to think in it, and from there to compose directly in the tongue he loved so much.

  It was not until 1988 that Trautmann, having carefully used his network of professional contacts to avoid the over-inquisitive eyes of Stasi censors, finally managed to get hold of a German-English dictionary. However, due to the nature of the said professional contacts, the dictionary consisted exclusively of terms particular to the field of East German electrical engineering. Undaunted, Trautmann set out on his task, and beginning with ampere and moving through Gaussian shift to orthogonal frequency multiplexing to upverting oscillator and finally to zener diode and zero voltage switching, he learned English, memorising each and every single term by heart.

  It took him seven years to do this, by which time his country no longer existed and English had flooded every advertising hoarding, television channel, instruction booklet and pickle jar label he set his eyes or hands on.

  In 1995, having found an antiquarian with replacement parts for the Robotron 202, Trautmann once again sat down to write but found he was unable to string the words he had learnt into any form of meaningful sentence. Always resolute, he continued, eventually making sense of his tale of a frustrated electrical engineer trying to come to grips with a foreign language.

  Unfortunately, none of the publishers to whom Trautmann submitted his thousand-page manuscript could make sense of it, and it now remains yellowing, forgotten, in the upstairs room of a tenement block in Friedrichshain, waiting to be rediscovered.

  BAS VAN DE BONT

  WHILE, POST-DUCHAMP, conceptual art has arguably become the major language of visual arts over
the last fifty years, conceptual literature remains much more of a minority interest.

  And by ‘conceptual literature’ here, we do not mean experimental writing, however much we may admire those who cut holes in the pages of their books, wilfully abandon punctuation or engage in wild flights of typographical fancy.

  No, here we are talking about the work of someone like Bas van de Bont.

  Van de Bont was born in Amsterdam in 1932, and following the war he dropped out of medical school to join Groep 52, a Dutch avant-garde collective of artists, poets and pranksters. Though less well-known than some of their European counterparts, the Groep 52 were nevertheless influential in establishing notions of the absurd and surreal among their often staid countrymen.

  Tired by what he saw as the still-too-restrictive representational practises of stage, screen or page, van de Bont became a founding member of the Situationist International but found himself excluded from that august organisation as early as 1960 for having ‘a realist turn’ (to quote Guy Debord’s oblique communiqué), though more likely it was his growing friendship with the increasingly unstable Jürgen Kittler that led to his expulsion.

  During the sixties, he removed himself to an isolated part of Zeeland, and inspired both by Borges and Ray Bradbury set himself to memorising whole swathes of the canon of Dutch literature. This included the early twelfth-century Central Franconian Rhyming Bible, the entire oeuvre of Joost van den Vondel, whose tragedy Gijsbreght van Aemstel van de Bont saw as having unique relevance to postwar Dutch cultural stasis, and Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken’s pioneering 1782 novel, Sara Burgerhart. He read with a view of re-creating the whole sweep of his country’s glorious, terrible, complex history in a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk the exact proportions and form of which are un-known. (His hut in Zeeland, containing all his notes, was swept away by floods in 1968.)

  But it is his work of the early ’70s that interests us most. Or, rather, its absence.

  In 1972, van de Bont wrote a long letter to his then lover, the French mystic philosopher Catherine Levallois, telling of his newfound passion for the work of Robert Smithson, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Joseph Kosuth, the Art & Language group and the Fluxus movement.

  The letter delivered, he found a small rowing boat and set off to traverse the entire wrinkled, wriggly, shifting coast of his homeland, armed with only a pair of oars and a typewriter (a portable Adler Tippa S) in what he described as being ‘not so much an act as a gesture of writing.’

  He was never seen again.

  ‘I like art that exists in people’s minds more so than it does in reality,’ Jeremy Deller has said, and how right he is. How much are we secretly in love with Emily Brontë’s second novel, Joyce’s ‘epic of the sea’ follow-up to Finnegans Wake, Jodorowsky’s Dune, Beethoven’s Tenth or that Miles Davis–Jimi Hendrix collaboration? How much, while still knowing they’d all probably be disappointments in reality?

  At the BDLF, we like to think that Bas van de Bont is still out there, somewhere amidst the fogs and floods, rowing and typing. Yet it matters little: what he did not complete is surely as important as what he did.

  VERONICA VASS

  WRITERS ARE OFTEN secretive creatures, either by instinct or by nurture. The days spent squirreled away in eye-strainingly dark rooms or cloistered libraries, shaping ideas, observations, experiences and rare imaginings into words they can’t possibly hope to orally parallel will inevitably form a person given to the pleasures of hiding. At the BDLF, we do not hold with those ostentatious flâneurs who sit in cafés or coffee shops, flaunting their MacBooks or Moleskines. Little good will come of it. At the BDLF, we have more respect for those who endeavour in silence.

  A writer such as Veronica Vass, for example, though we grant that her case is a little extreme. Born in Geneva in 1921 to a Russian émigré mother and a Swiss-Polish father, Vass was one of those women who were presented with a rare window of opportunity by the terrible event of the Second World War. Presciently fearing further convulsions in Europe (though unpresciently fearing Switzerland was to be involved), her family moved to England in 1928. Vass, however, stayed in Brussels, where she was privately educated before coming to Somerville College in 1938. Her formidable intelligence and skill with languages (she spoke five by the age of fifteen, and would eventually add another seven to her repertoire) marked her out as a natural recruit for the secret cryptographic work being carried out at Bletchley Park. (Papers made available recently, however, reveal that her appointment there was not without problems: her mixed European heritage, Jewish father and ironically the very talent with languages that distinguished her also rendered her suspicious in some appointers’ eyes. Indeed, it was never entirely clear if Veronica was working as a double, triple or even quadruple agent.)

  At Bletchley Park, despite being hidden away in a wooden hut and told not to speak to anyone about anything other than tea dances and buns, Vass met Angus Wilson, Alan Turing and perhaps most significantly the young Christine Brooke-Rose.

  Although Vass had already written a novel while at Oxford (the interior monologue Handflower, perhaps too heavily influenced by Djuna Barnes to be seriously regarded), it was in the intensely secretive atmosphere of the cryptographic operations centre that her genius for covert work asserted itself.

  Over the course of the war years, she wrote five novels, all of them in a code so complex, so treacherous, so arcane that Turing himself couldn’t get past the first few words.

  Much of the best writing is penetrable only to a certain degree. Who honestly managed to get anywhere with Finnegans Wake without several works of reference propped open alongside? Some French-inclined readers would assert that all writing is a kind of code, but none quite as bafflingly impenetrable as the one Veronica Vass used to write her work.

  The habit of secrecy inculcated at Bletchley Park ran so deep that many who worked there never spoke about their work even years after the war had ended. So it was with Vass. Not only had she composed her great works in a language for which no Rosetta Stone existed, but then she did not even tell anyone she had written them.

  They were discovered by her son following her death in 1979: five typed manuscripts, the ink fading, resolutely refusing to disclose their secrets.

  LYSVA VILIKHE

  OF ALL THE MANY VARIETIES of failure we have examined so far, the simple, almost banal one of category error has not yet appeared. Yet the simple mistaking of one thing for another, a taxonomic confusion, a lack of understanding about where one thing starts and another ends is one of the most basic and potentially most brutal kinds of failure.

  We may, for example, take the case of Lysva Vilikhe, whose book, A Guide for the Curious Traveller, could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, only for people to take it for a poor quality travel guide to a remote and uninteresting city.

  A Guide for the Curious Traveller was printed by the State Enterprise for Information and Publishing on poor quality paper, hardly good enough for cigarettes, and bound with cheap glue between badly printed covers in 1959.

  Read in one way, the book unsurprisingly gives a number of itineraries for the titular curious traveller to follow around the city, pointing out the monuments, parks, hotels, restaurants and other places of interest in a city remote even for the rest of the citizens of the country in which it is located.

  Read differently, however, the book tells not the story of the unnamed city, but rather stories from it: the strange disappearance of the author’s father, her mother’s sad, slow decline, her adoption by her twin aunts. Then, as she grows older, her own peregrinations around the city in search of its meanings come to the fore, the book almost becoming a crime thriller as the narrator picks out clues to the possible solutions of the many mysteries her life has presented her, finding traces of explanations written into the stones of the streets, the pavements and the buildings themselves.

  It is left to the reader to intuit the story of Vilikhe’s eventual meeting with a foreign
stranger in her city, her brief but passionate romance with him and its sad ending in a station hotel. When implored by her lover to leave with him, she is momentarily tempted to go before turning away, drawn by the possibility of her missing father’s return or (reading darkly between the lines) blackmailed by the city’s secret services into staying.

  If we look at the section Parks, for example, we find a description of Yevachev Park, which is described (fairly banally) as having a ‘wondrous, romantic view over the river,’ and then (more intriguingly) as being ‘a perfect place for a secret romantic assignation,’ while the description of Kharms Park as a place ‘of mystery, where the funfair attraction may lead you to lose the one you love’ hints at a darker purpose.

  If we look at the section on Hotels, we find the Hotel Raspberry Bush being ‘the best place for an intimate weekend’, while the Guest Hotel International Friendship is described as having only one good thing about it: its proximity to the station, and from where, Vilikhe tells us, ‘If you are staying here, you will at least know that you are leaving in the morning.’ (‘If you have to stay there,’ she advises us, ‘at least stay in Room 22’—the room where her last recorded presence is noted, according to the recently rediscovered State archives.)

  Medical Services warns the traveller of the poor quality health provisions, while hinting at her mother’s decline and loss. Bars and Restaurants tells us where to get some good food, but warns us of falling into bad company among drunks and dissidents.

  Why, we are tempted to ask, did Vilikhe tell her story in this fashion, rather than as the otherwise powerful and haunting novel or memoir it could have been? We have no simple answer. Most probably, Vilikhe was attempting to avoid the censors, and therefore told her story in the form of a guidebook rather than in that of the intrinsically suspicious novel. Moreover, she could write directly in English (a language she had picked up in the home of her twin aunts, educated women, included under ‘Interpreting and translation services’), nominally appealing to the wider audience the elders of her city wanted to attract in that brief moment of international thaw. She probably knew no one in her region would read English, least of all the bureaucrats and censors, and even if they did, few would bother with a lowly guidebook for the infrequent visitors to her distant city.