Directory of Lost Causes

Well, I've just arrived in London and am marvelling again at how expensive everything is, and wondering how I ever managed to live here as an unsuccessful writer. The answer, of course, is that I didn't. I moved to Wales.

Anyway, my feet are sore. I've just come back from Waitrose with (hopefully) a week's worth of food. I'm vaguely looking forward to my birthday celebrations on Friday.

Before I went to Waitrose to buy tins of chopped tomato, pasta, and so on, I noticed a new review of my German collection, Dunkle Gestade (Aufgesang), online. I did the computer translation thing on it, and, well, it was pretty bad. Now, as I understand it, 'aufgesang' means something like 'volume one', but it's looking very much now like there's not going to be a volume two, after all. Every single review I have seen of my German collection has been bad. I believe sales have also been poor. Critics and public in Germany seem to be of one mind here: My stories are shit.



It's at times like this that I find that I'm forced to confront the unpleasant possibility that I might simply be a deluded no-hoper. I've often thought that there can be no worse fate than to be a 'bad poet'. Forever to be teased by the Muse, only to see her lavish her affections on everyone but yourself, to be, in fact, the Muse's cuckold, and a laughingstock. The very core of such an existence is embarrassment. Nobody wants to be this person, but somebody, some poor wretch, for the sake of cosmic completeness or some such thing, must be. And that person is me.

Faced with such overwhelming evidence that I am a complete failure, what do I do? I can't simply go on flying in the face of opinion, can I?

Hmmm. I suppose the logical thing to do would be to give up writing and find something to which I am more suited. Unfortunately, there is nothing to which I am more suited. I am a failure at the thing to which I am most suited. That's a bit of a bummer. There's nothing else I actually want to do, either. I mean, really, I'm so woefully lacking in motivation in every other area of my life apart from writing that... Well, I don't want to even tell you about it. Basically those other areas (and I'm not even going to mention them) have atrophied more or less into non-existence.

At times like this I want to believe in a god, just so I can tell him what a cunt he is.

Am I going to give up writing? Well, unfortunately, that seems unlikely. You know, I don't want to come across as indomitable, as some kind of unconquerable spirit, or anything. It's not really like that. It's more like - very much more like - someone who knows very well he will never be desirable simply carrying on in a resigned manner with his trainspotting. What else can I do? Quite simply, what else can I do?

Now, I'm sure that there are lots of glass-half-full people, who, if they read this, will want to point out that a few bad reviews does not a failure make. Well, maybe not. In which case we must ask, what is success? Am I happy with my stories? I don't know if I am, really. The point of stories for me is largely communication. I seem to be failing in my communication. But that's not quite it, either, is it? It's like painting a picture. You know if you haven't got that branch on that tree quite right, if the expression on that face isn't quite alive. My work is riddled with bad branches and dead faces. That, I think, is what really hurts. One can hope one is being too perfectionist, but one's hopes, then, rely on the feedback of reviewers and so forth. Apparently I haven't been perfectionist enough.



I was rather hoping that, since my success in the English-speaking world has been, shall we say, modest, that I would be like Edgar Allan Poe, whose reputation first took off in Europe. That must be the problem, I thought. They just don't understand me in the Anglosphere. But actually, my reception in Germany has been much worse than in Britain and America. So, that blows that theory.

I'm thinking now of Dazai Osamu, and feeling very close to him. I'm thinking of the odd-shaped tales in which he mentioned, here and there, how 'at that time' his stories never sold, or that he's been writing 'nothing but dasaku'. 'Dasaku' is a Japanese word meaning something like 'turkey' or, well, basically indicating artistic works that fail in their purpose. He says somewhere that he never understood the criticism that he was a talented writer who was unfortunately lacking in moral fibre, and that he felt it was the other way round. He was a very moral person with no talent, and knew no other way to write than simply to forge ahead blindly with the full force of his being. Yes, I understand these words very well.

Morrissey, I believe, once said that he was intensely interested in failure, adding impishly, "Only in other people, of course." And that's a telling qualification to his comment. Morrissey fascinates because he has made a success of failure. I am not like Morrissey. Rather, I am like one of the characters about whom he sings. Like, for instance, the 'hero' of Little Man, What Now?. "Did that swift eclipse torture you? A star at eighteen and then suddenly gone, down to a few lines on the back page of a faded annual." Except, of course, I have the consolation that I have never been a star, so 'eclipse', in my case, is inappropriate. No, more appropriate to me is the song Southpaw, but, once again, I don't even want to go into that. Basically, where Morrissey has made a success out of failure, I have only made a failure out of failure.

I am interested in failure, though. So interested that I seem to have to live it out quite thoroughly. In fact, only the other day, I was thinking of writing a blog post about why I am fascinated by Stuart Goddard, otherwise known as Adam Ant, of Adam and the Ants fame. Stuart Goddard was and probably still is, a fantasist, like myself. He threw himself with wonderful, deranged flamboyance into his silly, flimsy fantasy world, and for a while, the public supported him in his derangement. And then the trampoline was cruelly snatched from under him. Or so it seems.



"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!"

Yes, failure interests me, and I'm fairly philosophical about it. Even if I am a 'bad poet', I am also a bit of a contrary bastard, I suppose, and will simply go on writing bad poetry, literally or metaphorically, until I die. That will be my statement. That will my contribution to the world. I don't know if it's a choice or whether I just can't help it. It feels somehow like both at the same time - a choice that I can't help making. On his tombstone, Kafu wanted the epitaph 'Kafu the Scribbler'. Seidensticker, his translator and biographer, considered that Kafu had never written any single work worth translating. I love Kafu. Perhaps I will have something similar on my tombstone. "Quentin S. Crisp. 1972 - 2010. He wrote a load of really stupid stories."

Anyway, we'll all be turned into robots in two years, and live happily ever after, so it won't matter.

Just in case this sounds like unmitigated self-pity, I'll add something else from one of Dazai's stories here. I forget the title, but it was a story in the form of letters being written between two writers. The older writer (I believe) scolds the younger that he has a "masterpiece complex", that he is impatient to write a masterpiece so that he can get it over with and stop writing. But there is no end to writing. You simply have to pick yourself up, and pick your pen up, and carry on. And carry on. And because there's no ending, it's perpetually as if all you have done so far has come to nothing, and you are only just starting. And that's the way it has to be.

The title of this blog entry comes from a song by Momus called, I Was a Maoist Intellectual in the Music Industry:

I became a hotel doorman, I stood there on the doormat
Clutching my forgotten discs in their forgotten format
Trying to hand them out to all the stars who sauntered in
The ones who hadn't been like me, who hadn't lived in vain
I gave up ideology the day I lost my looks
I never found a publisher for my little red books
When I died the energy released by my frustration
Was nearly enough for re-incarnation

But if I could live my life again the last thing that I'd be
Is a Maoist intellectual in the music industry
No, if I could live my life again I think I'd like to be
The man whose job is to stop the men who think like me
Yeah! If l could live my life again that'd be the thing to be
The man who plots the stumbling blocks
In the lives of the likes of me!

Excellent stuff. I particularly like the use of the word 'nearly' in "nearly enough for re-incarnation". The narrator even fails to get re-incarnated through his frustration. I'm sure that's what will happen to me, too.

Oh, if anyone in Germany has read Dunkle Gestade and actually liked it, I would be quite interested to know.