By Carmelo Militano
On Writing and Failure or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer
by Stephen Marche
Biblioasis (2023)
A quick skim of Stephen Marche ‘s Wikipedia bio leads to the obvious conclusion that he is an accomplished writer: three novels, a short story collection three non-fiction works and a former columnist for Harper’s Magazine. As well, he has published essays in many august contemporary papers and magazines: The Walrus, The Atlantic, Guardian, The New Yorker and The New York Times and contributes to CBC Radio.
On Writing and Failure is his eighth book or booklet, a long essay exploring how the real life of writers is mostly defeat and failure and success is, at best, a fleeting moment in the long up-hill battle of learning to write well, publish, and find an audience. There is to be sure a touch of The Myth of Sisyphus to the progress of many a writer.
Marche reads like he is talking to you across the table over a beer and wisely guiding you through the shoals of the writing life. There is an evocative and metaphorical parable about his early childhood curiosity about writing and how his curiosity evolved into an exploration of the vast and multipurposed rooms at the Grand Hotel aka the writing life.
Reading Marche’s essay also brings to mind a quip Martin Amis gave as an aside to a Yale writing class. The life of a writer resembles the progress of the early Christian saints. The writer, like the saint, is tested, suffers countless trails and tribulations but eventually is reconciled to God or is martyred and is worshipped for his life after his death.
In Marche’s view, success is a crapshoot ( like winning a literary prize) and whether or not a writer is ever reconciled to his Muse, failure is the invariable meat and drink of most writers when they are still alive.
“Writers are the real professionals ( at failure).Three hundred thousand books are published every year in the United States alone. 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.”
Marche kicks off his essay by addressing the ‘ kid writer’ by flashing an early warning sign about the perils of a writing career. There is a bit of hard-boiled gums-shoe tone here (and the rest of the essay) mixed with a jocular chatty prose style.
Marche basically says look ‘ the first job of a writer is to write. The second is to persevere.’ Failure, real or imagined,-self-doubt the plague all writers must learn to deal with along with the pain and glory of solitude- stalks the self-wounded writer like a wolf.
It’s tough. Every step towards writing a book or poetry collection, the later as a species, has its own special heart-ache, is a minefield. First, you have to actually write the damn book, which can be its own roller-coast ride complete with screams, thrills, and unbelievable twists and turns. Next is finding a publisher and in the meantime watch the rejection slips rise to the level of the window sill above your desk, and finally once you publish there is getting an audience. Notice in this whole process there is no mention of money. In fact, according to Marche, earning “a hundred million dollars… does not protect you from the sense that you’ve been misunderstood.’’ Really? Call me shallow, but even a few hundred thousand dollars, so I could afford a classy four month vacation on the Amalfi Coast, would take the sting off being misunderstood.
Rejection may never end according to Marche — after all, as Hemmingway was fond of pointing out, you are only as good as your last book, but surely critical and financial success must psychologically make the starting of your next book different than if you are trying to finish your first novel at night after teaching high-school English all day. Granted, that too, is not breaking rocks in the hot sun and then sitting down to write.
In any event, all writers are “ chancers” at acquiring success and this is followed by the real possibility of becoming obscure even if you are successful followed by the impossible conditions or mutable environment contemporary writers are forced to consider. The centre in the publishing, reading and writing culture, no longer holds. The golden era of publishing and writing post-1945 until the late 70’s- has vanished and has been replaced by an industry in constant transition. Marche gives the role of social media as an example and its impact on making or breaking you as an artist/writer. The marketplace is one big vagary these days. But, on the other hand it has always been tough to be a writer. Marche acknowledges this to be true citing the examples of Samuel Johnson and Joyce and their financial struggles, the rejections endured by Melville, Orwell, J.K. Rowling and the unbearable hardships of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova under the brutal Stalinist regime. In short to paraphrase Conrad, Art is long, money usually short, and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is constant.
And yet, Marche does consider at least in the cases of Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Solzhenitsyn ( interesting enough, all three are Russian writers) that suffering of one kind or another helps or maybe is a midwife to exceptional writing.
“It may be that the best work forms itself in degradation and fear.”
Marche dips into the idea that great art often emerges from great suffering (mental, or physical, or poverty, or all three), a mid-nineteenth romantic trope of the bohemian artist. It is from the Romantic movement (and its creators)in fact were we get the image of the pure (think Keats or Baudelaire) artist suffering for his art.
The solution Marche offers to overcoming the obstacles, peaks and valleys (more valleys than peaks I might add) of the writing life is perseverance. “No whining.”
Or as my old writing teacher, the post-modern Canadian writer, Robert Krotesch was fond of saying, “you write against reason.”
The quality of your writing often will have nothing to do with the success or failure of your writing career yet it is the only thing that really matters. In Marche’s view “writing well and failing and submitting and preserving “is the only thing in the end that truly matters.
There is, it seems, a large streak of masochism in the psychology of the writing life.
Marche views Socrates, Confucius, and Christ as failures who after their death became successful. They may have failed in life in one way or another:
Socrates’s philosophy did not prevent him from drinking the hemlock, Confucius died penniless, and Christ, well we all know how that turned out.
Nevertheless, “their failures were their triumphs.”
But, why are these three guys, who are more philosophers rather than writers, in the traditional sense of the word as someone who tells stories or puts them down on paper, cited as examples of beautiful failures in their pursuit of the writer’s life?
From my experience, there may not be much ‘success’ in a writer’s life in the sense most writers do not make mega-dollars, fame is a bit like a snowflake in May, and your family is not always pleased or proud of you as a writer. But, if you are paying attention you do learn heaps about yourself as you wander around in the Grand Hotel at the end of Marche’s essay. It is a hotel with many different rooms and in various conditions, and peopled by many different versions, old and new, of your elusive self. It probably helps if you keep a notebook. Still, I cannot help but wonder if you are not incomplete as a writer if you do not have an audience, however small; how self-knowledge itself can be a bitter herb, a subtle taste of failure in the pursuit of literary victory and hard won personal perceptions.
Carmelo Militano is the author of three books of poetry and five books of prose. He lives and works in Winnipeg, MB. He considers himself a successful failure. Visit him at www.carmelomilitano.com.