The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C.D. Rose
My rating: 4/5 cats
i didn’t clock that this was fiction until i was … further in than i want to admit. the introduction blinded me – full as it is of pomp and academic jargon; quoting from a checklist of names designed to make all the white men in tweed coats cerebrally moist, and i was completely on board, believing i was going to read a series of entries about authors who had been screwed by circumstance but would have been great if not for that war, that late bus, that faulty typewriter.
re-reading the intro after this realization, one can see the little cheeky bits, but way back in spring or whenever i read this, i was fooled. don’t be fooled.
it’s a great book even if it is completely fabricated. because while i love books full of obscure literary tidbits, this one reads like nonfiction and involves stories that could have happened. it’s real tragedy of life stuff, where people fail to become part of the literary elite not (always) because of their own shortcomings, but due to the tricksy little vagaries of life:
manuscripts left on trains, fed to pigs, burned, bibliophagy, the unreliability of public transportation, procrastination, overpreparation, overediting, being strongarmed and poorly guided by editors, graphomania – publishing a book is nearly as prone to an unsatisfying outcome as rearing a child, and these stories are truly tragic. they’re like literary missed connections, but sadder.
take the case of marta kupka, who was given the expensive gift of a typewriter as a child, but considered it too majestic to sully with just any old story, so she waited until she was eighty years old to finally commit her story to paper:
Sadly, although the intervening years had been kind to the typewriter, they had taken their toll on Kupka’s eyesight and she failed to notice that the well-inked ribbon had now dried up completely. She wrote incessantly for three weeks, completing the long tale of her life, failing to see that not a single word of what she wrote actually made it onto the paper.
weep.
and casimir adamowitz-kostrowicki, whose story opens this collection with a bang:
Think, if you will, of Kafka asking Max Brod and Dora Diamant to burn all his papers when he eventually succumbed to the TB that had been slowly killing him for years. Think of Virgil, weak with fever and unable to put the finishing marks on his Aeneid, arriving in the harbour at Brindisi and asking that his work be destroyed rather than left unfinished. Think of Lavinia Dickinson, who did not burn her sister’s poems. And now think of Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki.
You cannot, of course, because unlike Franz Kafka, Publius Vergilius Maro and Emily Dickinson, Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki had a friend faithless enough to obey his dying wishes.
as someone who still mourns the lost memoirs of byron (which was the opposite of this situation – he wanted them published, but instead his friends had a book burning party after his death), this story was very effective.
it was 1914, and casimir had gone off to war, leaving his manuscript with his best friend, telling him to destroy it if he did not make it back. the literary elite who had read the manuscript were convinced it was “the first great modern novel,” and would have overshadowed La Recherche, made The Man Without Qualities look as dull as its title, dwarf Ulysses in its range and scope, render To the Lighthouse small and parochial
but a promise is a promise and
By 1918, Levallois had not heard a word from his friend and, desolate, built a small bonfire on the street outside his Montmartre home. Passers-by thought he was celebrating the end of the war.
(Unknown to Levallois, Adamowitz-Kostrowicki had not perished at the front but had been badly shellshocked and did indeed return to Paris that very week, and may have even been trying to visit his friend but a horse, spooked by fireworks set off as part of the festivities, bolted and trampled him to death.)
and thus was a masterpiece lost forever.
that parenthetical part killed me, back when i thought this was nonfiction. now it just makes me chuckle. ruefully.
it’s a fun little book, and there’s enough “real” material in there – references made to similar-and-true situations where great works were lost or never written, to make it feel real, and if you are a booky person, you will probably dig it.
it’s not a great book for gulping, though. i would take it a chapter a day, or it might all run together.
