JULY 8, in case you happened to miss it, was Fitz-Greene Halleck Day, a chance to remember the most intensely forgotten writer in American history. “No name in the American poetical world is more firmly established than that of Fitz-Greene Halleck,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1843. And yet, despite a Central Park statue that still stands in his honor, Fitz-Greene Halleck may now be the most famous man ever to achieve total obscurity.
Failure is big right now — a subject of commencement speeches and business conferences like FailCon, at which triumphant entrepreneurs detail all their ideas that went bust. But businessmen are only amateurs at failure, just getting used to the notion. Writers are the real professionals.
Three hundred thousand books are published in the United States every year. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures. The majority of writers are failures. And then there are the would-be writers, those who have failed to be writers in the first place, a category which, if you believe what people tell you at parties, constitutes the bulk of the species.
For every Shakespeare who retired to the country and to permanent fame, there are a thousand who took hard breaks and vanished: George Chapman, the first translator of Homer, begging in the streets because his patrons kept dying on him; Thomas Dekker, whose hair went white in debtors’ prison; and my favorite, the playwright John Webster, whose birth and death dates in the Dictionary of Literary Biography have question marks, symbolic hooks into oblivion.
Failure doesn’t afflict only the lesser talents. John Keats, who died at 25 with a collection of bad reviews to his name, asked for his gravestone to read: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. He died convinced of his obscurity.
Herman Melville endured a stranger torture. His early, lousy novels were huge successes, and then the better his books became, the less anyone was interested in reading them. His travel story “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life” sold 16,320 copies in his lifetime. “Moby-Dick,” 3,715. Melville worked 19 gloomy years at the New York Customs House, self-publishing occasional poetry in batches of 25 copies. He ended up as a ziner, with “Billy Budd” unpublished in his drawer.
“We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses.” So wrote Hannah Arendt in a 1967 essay on literary reputation. Thomas Gray had already countered the idea: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Everyday experience is on Gray’s side rather than Arendt’s — finding underappreciated talent is half the pleasure of being a reader. “Lost classic” is practically a genre unto itself. The New York Review of Books series alone has found more than 300 of them so far, and its editors won’t be running out of gorgeous obscurity anytime soon.
The mass of forgotten glory is exactly what gives literature its subterranean richness. For readers, there’s always more than you’ve seen. There’s always more beauty underneath.
I first read Fitz-Greene Halleck in Ezra Pound’s poetry anthology, “Confucius to Cummings.” (From which he excluded Pope. Is there a circle of success into which even Alexander Pope doesn’t fall?) Pound, whose name was synonymous with literary success for decades, suffered the most complete failure of any writer of his generation. Captured as a fascist sympathizer at the end of the Second World War, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for 13 years. He summed up his career to Allen Ginsberg this way: “I found out after 70 years I was not a lunatic but a moron.”
Writers don’t fail like ordinary people. They fail in their bones. They fail even when they triumph. Bernard Malamud took the 1959 National Book Award for his short story collection “The Magic Barrel”; he left the check on the dais, and when he arrived at the dinner in his honor, the organizers had forgotten to set a place for him.
“Fail better,” Samuel Beckett commanded, a phrase that has been taken on by business executives as some kind of ersatz wisdom. They have missed the point completely. Beckett didn’t mean failure-on-the-way-to-delayed-success, which is what the FailCon crowd thinks he meant. To fail better, to fail gracefully and with composure, is so essential because there’s no such thing as success. It’s failure all the way down.
At the center of this web of catastrophes and losses and despairs and mistakes sits a single, obvious culprit: the act of writing itself. In the best work, the intentions of the author fall away, leaving an open field for readers to play in, and they create meanings that may have nothing to do with the author’s. Jonathan Swift famously intended “Gulliver’s Travels” as an indictment of all humanity but ended up leaving a story for children. The joy of language is also a torment. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to,” Flaubert wrote, “while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
When I hear the phrase “writing community,” usually uttered by those without enough talent to hate other writers for theirs, my first instinct is to reach for the napalm. But failure really does bind us. Flaubert longing to melt the stars and the kid receiving her first rejection letter are the same. All of our little streams pour out into the ocean of total uncaring. If there are to be any claims to greatness, they are to be found only in the scope of the failure and persistence in the face of it. That persistence may be the one truly writerly virtue, a salvation indistinguishable from stupidity. To keep going, despite everything. To keep bellying up to the cosmic irrelevance. To keep failing.
Does it matter that Fitz-Greene Halleck’s poetry is fantastic — deft and witty and roiling with suppressed longings? It only slightly matters. And that’s enough.