Failure & Success

Don Quixote, Giannis Atentekuompo, Stephen Marche, severed heads sprouting spider-legs, and massive failures that turn out to be huge successes.

January, 1605

It’s been a rough couple of decades for poor old Miguel de Cervantes. After being exiled from his home in Madrid, conscripted into the military, losing the use of his left arm during a battle, getting kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, he’s now working as a tax collector to support his family. Despite his grand ambitions to be a writer, he hasn’t published anything of significance in the past twenty years. He’s 58 years-old. The odds are stacked against him.

But things are finally starting to look up! He’s written something that people want to read. A revolutionary piece of literature. A smash hit. A blockbuster. Hundreds of years later it will be called “the first modern novel.” The full title of his masterpiece is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, but you probably know it simply as Don Quixote.

Yes, Miguel de Cervantes has finally overcome a lifetime of failure to find success.

Or has he?

---

May 25, 2023

You’re receiving this issue of TOLSTOYAN two days late. I have failed to finish my essay about failure on time.

---

On Writing and Failure

Writers are uniquely familiar with failure. We live in close proximity to it. We are perpetually engaged with it, even in the midst of our small successes. Failure, to a writer, is what email is to other professions: you’re always processing it, sorting it, responding to it, catching up on it, stressing out about the sheer and unconquerable volume of it—and you’re always waking up to more of it.

(And we also have to deal with email.)

Failure is the premise of Stephen Marche’s new essay/pocketbook On Writing and Failure, which is a historical account, field study, and personal reflection on the defeatism unique to literary life.

Failure is the body of a writer's life. Success is only ever an attire. A paradox defines this business: The public only sees writers in their victories but their real lives are mostly in defeat.

How does one measure success and failure in the world of writing? Getting published is a pretty standard benchmark. But what if you publish something (success!) and no one buys it (failure)? What if everyone buys it (success!) and the critics hate it (failure)? Should the criterion be simpler? Should simply finishing a piece of writing (which is truly the greatest obstacle to overcome—see, for example, this newsletter arriving two days late) be the primary indicator of success? But when a thing has been crafted specifically for an audience — when the whole point of writing the words is for the words to be read by someone (anyone) — does it fulfill its purpose if it remains unread?

The dominant narrative, at the moment, is that failure leads to success. The internet loves this arc: low then high; first perseverance, then making it; all struggle redeemed; the more struggle the more redemption. It's pure bullshit, but not for the reason most people think. I've been lucky enough to know some of the most successful writers of my generation, men and women who have earned hundreds of millions of dollars, who have won all the prizes, who have received all the accolades, who have achieved fame insofar as writerly fame exists. The triumphs don't seem to make much difference. A hundred million dollars is worth having, to be sure, but it doesn't protect you from the sense that you've been mis-understood, that the world doesn't recognize who you are. It doesn't. I know if you're a kid writer you must think I'm either lying or they're crazy. All I can tell you is that I'm not lying.

---

If you can’t already tell—

—from his obsession with failing, Stephen Marche is Canadian.

He’s only four years older than I am, but I’ve always thought of him as being a generation ahead of me. He published his first novel, Raymond & Hannah, at the age of 29, and was therefore, by definition, a Successful Young Novelist—which, back in 2005, was precisely what I aspired to be.  

I read Raymond & Hannah in a single evening in the winter of 2005. I remember this vividly because my very first short story had just been published in a somewhat notable literary journal (success!) and I’d driven to Toronto to attend the launch party (yes, they used to throw parties when new issues of a somewhat notable literary journal came out). I stayed at a hotel, and, feeling very writerly, very successful, I sat at the hotel bar with a cocktail and read Marche’s debut novel from cover to cover. To me, at the time, he was a rival. I was reading his book to see if he was any good — specifically, to see if he was better than me — which would, of course, determine whether I resented or admired him. I can’t recall what I thought at the time, but I have, over the years, followed and admired Marche’s work, so I suppose that’s an answer: he is better than me. If not better, then certainly more successful.

But he has also failed more than I have. To fail, after all, you must attempt. Like The Great One says, “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.” Marche has taken far more shots than I have, and is therefore, by any objective writerly metric, far more successful. And this, actually, is the whole point of his lovely little book:

All creative careers demand persistence because all creative careers require luck. Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune. […] Painters and sculptors and designers and dancers and musicians all create under the same capriciousness of fortune. Even so, the life of a writer demands a peculiar persistence. Writers make meaning. They trade, equally, in illusion and disillusion.

---

Iconic Duds

Melville, Austen, Joyce, Keats, Dickinson, Kafka, Bronte—history is filled with writers who died broke or unknown (or, tragically, both). By the criteria of failure and success that most writers adhere to — and by which much of the modern world operates — these seminal artists were, in their lifetimes, complete and total losers.

Given knowledge of their posthumous acclaim, do you think any of them would have traded a bit of it for a couple good reviews? A little bump in sales? A few hundred bucks?

What good is success, after all, if you can’t enjoy it?

---

By the end of 1605—

—Don Quixote was already a bestseller (even though most copies of the first edition were lost in a shipwreck). People loved it. It was a parody of the chivalric romances that were popular at the time (typically written in a high baroque style) and Cervantes’ colloquial prose — using common language and everyday speech — was groundbreaking. He was, in some sense, democratizing literature, inventing a new genre.

But despite the novel's incredible popularity, Cervantes wasn’t able to build any momentum for his literary career. He hadn’t been paid much up front, and his publisher (smartly, from the historical perspective) favoured exposure over profits. In the following years, Cervantes became embroiled in numerous legal battles over unauthorized sequels and imitations of his work (there were few laws to protect intellectual property in the seventeenth century). He had to go back to work as a tax collector, and would later spend some time in prison for “irregularities” in his reporting. He remained as he had always been: relentlessly broke.

The author of the world’s most popular novel, which was now being read all across Europe and the New World, was right back where he’d started.

His great success was a total failure.

---

No Failure in Sports?

In art, success and failure are subjective. To simply create something — an album, a painting, a book — can be seen as an accomplishment, an achievement of the goal, a success. But there is a parallel world where failure and success is binary: sports.

In sports, the outcome is quantitative: one player or team gets more points than their opponent and therefore wins (success!). But Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Atentekuompo doesn’t think so. After his team was bounced from the NBA playoffs, he had to suffer through one of the most ignominious rituals of pro sports — the post-game press conference — where his answer to a dumb question about whether or not the Bucks’ season was a failure went viral:

Do you get a promotion every year? On your job? No, right? So, every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? Every year you work, you work toward something. Toward a goal, right? Which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, to be able to provide the house for them, or take care of your parents. You work toward a goal. It's not a failure. It's steps to success. So, why did you ask me that question? It's a wrong question. There's no failure in sports. You know, there are good days, bad days, some days you are able to be successful. Some days you're not. Some days it's your turn, some days it's not your turn. And that's what sports is about.”

People loved this speech. Mostly, I think, because it was so different than the rote, win-at-all-costs platitudes offered by most athletes during post-game press conferences (compare this to another elite athlete’s very different response to being ousted from the playoffs).

The idea that winning and losing isn’t the only barometer of a team’s success isn’t necessarily radical, but it sure sounds that way coming from one of the best basketball players in the world. He is making the argument that sometimes an apparent failure can turn out, in the long run, to be a success.

---

Failures That Are Actually Successes

It has been a general rule throughout my life that, upon meeting someone new, I will ask what they think about John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. If they like it, there’s a good chance we’ll end up becoming best friends.

It is generally accepted, in the year 2023, that The Thing is a masterpiece—John Carpenter’s best film, and, alongside Ridley Scott’s Alien and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the great science-fiction movies ever made. The people who like The Thing (aka. people with good taste) don’t just like it—they love it. They wear the T-shirts, they quote the best lines (“You gotta be fucking kidding me…”) and anyone in their orbit who admits to having never seen it is immediately kidnapped, strapped to a chair Clockwork Orange-style, and forced to watch it.

But when The Thing first came out, people hated it.

Hate, in fact, might be too kind a word. It was despised. It was abhorred. It was proof that the Western World was undergoing an irreversible and cataclysmic decay.

Here’s Vincent Canby in The New York Times:

“John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other. Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80's - a virtually storyless feature composed of lots of laboratory concocted special effects, with the actors used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disemboweled and decapitated….it is too phony to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.”

And here’s Alan Spencer in Starlog magazine:

“John Carpenter’s The Thing smells, and smells pretty bad. It has no pace, sloppy continuity, zero humor, bland characters on top of being totally devoid of either warmth or humanity…It’s my contention that John Carpenter was never meant to direct a science-fiction horror movie. Here’s some things he’d be better suited to direct: traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings.”

Even Roger Ebert got in some shots:

“There’s no need to see this version unless you are interested in what the Thing might look like while starting from anonymous greasy organs extruding giant crab legs and transmuting itself into a dog. Amazingly, I’ll bet that thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers are interested in seeing just that.”

Ebert was right, as it turns out. Millions of moviegoers were interested in seeing that. Over the subsequent four decades, The Thing went from being repudiated to revered.

How did this happen?

Time passed. Tastes changed. The Thing was famously released just a week after what would turn out to be the year’s top-grossing movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which was much more attuned to the prevailing mood of Western culture. Audiences in 1982 wanted to feel wonder, not dread. They wanted comfort, not disquiet. They believed (just as we do today) that they were living through a particularly difficult period in history — economically, politically, environmentally — and they wanted to be soothed. What they very much didn’t want was to see a severed head sprout spider legs, or watch a guy’s chest cavity turn into giant monster-mouth and bite off another guy’s arms.

But, as the 90s approached, bleakness and apathy became cool, and so did The Thing. Kids like me watched it incessantly on VHS, and the whole idea of being stranded on an Antarctic research base in the dead of winter seemed exciting, not depressing (I’ve always thought that Ennio Morricone’s stripped-bare pulsing synth score sounded a lot like the electronic dance music that we partied to in junior high). Over time, the most crippling failure of John Carpenter’s career turned out to be one of its greatest successes. It just took a few decades for the tide to turn. 

---

A question for you, Reader—

What have been the successes and failures of this newsletter so far? Nine issues, now, and I still haven’t figured out what it’s supposed to be about—maybe you can help me. What do you like the most about it? What kind of stuff do you look forward to reading? What entertains you? Which parts do you find most valuable? If you tell me, I’ll do more of it. I’m nothing if not a pleaser.

---

A Little Promotion

This month, I’m going to be giving away a few copies of Stephen Marche’s aforementioned and inexplicably inspiring new book, On Writing and Failure. Contrary to what you might think, it’s very encouraging—particularly for aspiring writers, if only to help them realize that feeling like a complete and utter failure is all part of the process.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• Every NEW SUBSCRIBER will be entered for a chance to win.

• If you’re an EXISTING SUBSCRIBER you can share this link on your social media for a chance to win (tag a friend in the post, and if they subscribe, you’ll be entered twice!).

• If you’re a SUBSTACK WRITER you can add TOLSTOYAN to your recommendations for a chance to win.

Deadline is June 1st. I’ll inform the winners then, and announce them in the next issue of this newsletter.

---

Back to 1615

Ten years after Don Quixote had set the literary world ablaze — ten years of legal wrangling, begging, borrowing, working odd jobs — Miguel de Cervantes was ready for his big comeback. He secured a bit of cash from a new patron, the Count of Lemos (who ditched him shortly thereafter to become a Viceroy in Naples), and it was just enough to get him across the finish line. After finally managing to shit-can the most popular of the unauthorized sequels, Cervantes released Part II of Don Quixote.

Like most sequels, it didn’t have the same impact as its predecessor. At least not in terms of sales. But it is now considered to be a leap forward in terms of stylistic intricacy and psychological intimacy; the experimentation he’d begun in Part I came fully to life in Part II. It would solidify Cervantes’ immortality as the first great novelist.

But he didn’t have much time to revel in his success. Less than a year later, he was dead. Diabetes, probably (though they didn’t have a name for it at the time).

For the majority of his time on earth, Miguel de Cervantes was a failure. He couldn’t catch a break. He blundered, and suffered, and screwed up—over and over again. But this may have been the secret to his eventual triumph. In Daniel Hahn’s review of The Man Who Invented Fiction, he explains:

As a writer, Cervantes treats his struggling characters with kindness and understanding rather than mockery, because they have been animated by his own sometimes traumatic life experiences. He often draws most fully those suffering misfortune, and he does so with sympathy and concern for their inner lives, the conflicts in their intents and desires. This was a new way of telling a story.

Cervantes’ failure to be successful was, in the end, his greatest success.  

---

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this particular issue of TOLSTOYAN, you can share it with a friend by clicking the button below.

I’d love to hear about all of your failures. You can get in touch by responding directly to this email, or by clicking the button below to leave a comment.