“Was ever a writer so besotted by failure as F. Scott Fitzgerald?” So Geoff Dyer opens an essay on The Beautiful and Damned, and the answer is “no.” The young Fitzgerald pushed desperately for literary success, Dyer believes, to create his great subject: failure on a “colossal scale.” Ironically, the despair, regret, and alcoholism that in the end ruled his life inspired the Lost Generation’s leader. This “ideal of ruination,” to use Dyer’s phrase, has consistently heartened more-recent American writers as well, such as Richard Yates of Revolutionary Road.
Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History
By Gavin Jones (Cambridge University Press)
The American transformation of literary failure into success predates Fitzgerald by decades. Whether it took the form of personal melancholy, poor sales, bad reviews, tragic storylines, bungled plots, or stylistic awkwardness, faltering strangely enlivened several major 19th-century and early-20th-century writers. We quickly glimpse the power of collapse, for instance, in Poe’s tales of vertiginous descent, Henry James’s obfuscating sentences, and the catastrophes of Henry Adams.
In Failure and the American Writer, Gavin Jones thoughtfully explores the generative failures in those writers as well as in Melville, Thoreau, Crane, Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett. For Jones, faltering in those authors goes beyond the social and the economic; it is “a process of thinking, knowing, feeling, being … essential to an understanding of what makes us human.”
The Education of Henry Adams exemplifies Jones’s thesis. Americans in the 19th century, Adams proposes, wearily realized that history could never adequately explain events, because time is not linear but cataclysmic. Whether the upheaval was economic (the Panic of 1837), social (the violence of the Civil War), or technological (the Industrial Revolution), the years lurching toward the 20th century crumbled faith in the human mind and its primary tool: language.
Adams—who suffered personal setbacks (such as the suicide of his wife, Clover, in 1885)—was acutely cognizant of those shocks to all systems, and made it his mission to represent botched lives in pages that themselves blunder. This is Jones’s great insight: To illuminate the failures at the core of existence, Adams and other like-minded American writers deliberately wrote deficient books, reflecting the collapses in their lives in texts that fail in form and content alike. But the shortcomings of those volumes, Jones urges, are precisely what make them aesthetically prosperous.
Adams’s Education, for instance, is “defined by contradictions and gaps.” A most glaring rift opens between the narrator, Adams, and the protagonist, Henry. But there are other chasms, such as Adams’s skipping over the 20 years in which he was married to Clover and then grieved her suicide. The work also fails to conceptualize the little data it presents, producing only “inconsequential” theories. Those seemingly intentional faults, though, achieve illuminating mimesis by staging—through craft—the discontinuities and cataclysms of existence.
Where Adams textually embodies time’s arbitrariness, Poe, writing some 70 years earlier, verbally enacts the vertigo of financial and social collapse, especially in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities likewise depicts the American writer’s “struggle to find a foothold in an unappreciative antebellum marketplace,” according to Jones. Melville wonders: If materially successful styles conform to the lowest common denominator of psychological security, then can an expression more suited to life’s complexities be profitable? No, and Melville’s novel, a turgid bursting of prosperous conventions as well as a total commercial and critical bust, sounds the paradox of the situation: A successful book is a literary failure, while a botched tome (of a certain kind) can flourish. But Melville’s understanding of failure goes beyond Poe’s secular one; for the author of Pierre, failure is an “essential condition of human fallibility.” Thoreau’s failure in Walden is less existential, more epistemological: His extremely local anecdotes cannot convey the transcendental knowledge he wants.
The more realist Crane explores the ironic relationships between societal conventions and self-formation. Twain relinquishes control over his plots to manifest his personal inconsistencies. More comfortable with deficiency, Jewett views the failure to elevate particulars to narratives as a condition of admirable humility. Finally, Henry James’s “disproportion” between exorbitant verbiage and quotidian events represents the nature of consciousness, “suspended nervously in endless debate and doubt.”
Jones’s illumination of a neglected, historically expansive American trend puts him in the august company of a Sacvan Bercovitch or a Lawrence Buell. But Jones’s take on failure also newly connects British Romanticism and American when we remember that Coleridge and Fitzgerald’s beloved Keats understood that melancholia attunes us most to beauty, and the fragment intimates the ungraspable whole.
Jones reaches forward, too. The theoretical ruptures agitating late-20th-century humanities departments—the deconstructions of identity, presence, gender, and whatnot—seem far from iconoclastic or apocalyptic. In fact, the ruminations of Derrida et al. come off as unimaginative, even jejune. The chasm between language and life, desire and fulfillment, need not disgorge despair or manic laughter. It can inspire humanistic vision: the void as plenitude of possibility; shared loss as empathy’s invitation.
Jones’s analyses also extend beyond literary criticism to recent psychology. Researchers exploring “depressive realism” have shown that depression, saturated in failure, can foster increased sensitivity to hard facts, empathy toward those who suffer, original thought and action, capacity to endure.
The line between brilliance and breakdown is thin. As Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” A lesser intelligence, cracking up, is like “a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.”
On the edge between the fertile faults and Usher-like rifts lives the most powerful muse, who can transform a book on the failure to compose a book (in Dyer’s case, on D.H. Lawrence) into an account most fruitful.
Correction (11/7/2014, 1:27 p.m.): This article was published with the wrong title of the F.Scott Fitzgerald novel mentioned in the opening paragraph. It is The Beautiful and Damned not The Beautiful and the Damned. The article has been updated to reflect that.
