While success may have many fathers and failure is an orphan, in the case of C.D. Rose’s The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, these orphans at least have a warm roof over their heads. Rose’s quest to “tell the tales of those whose tales will remain untold,” in the form of 52 portraits of failed literary careers seems initially to disprove the “failure is an orphan” expression—until, as in the best of fictional orphanages, some of the residents rapidly begin to look considerably less like foundlings and considerably more like offspring.
Andrew Gallix asks, in his introduction, “If, as Roland Barthes argued, the death of the author marks the birth of literature, does the death of literature—its loss, or failure to come into being—mark the birth of the author?” In this case, it likely does, in an index of literary failure of every possible variety. A near-blind author pours out a masterpiece onto a dry typewriter reel. An author strains in vain over a lifetime for a perfect first word, beaten to it narrowly by death. Another author suffers the comparatively prosaic misfortune of leaving the manuscript of his masterpiece at Reading Station. Reading this necrology of unseen fiction, one enjoys the creeping awareness that the greatest failure of anyone in the Biographical Dictionary was existing in the first place. This does tend to put their faults in perspective.
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