Or Maybe It Just Wasn't Good

Hatchet jobs, gradations of failure and asking unaskable questions

The other day, I tried to fob off the critical and commercial failure of my book What Smiled at Him on a marketing misstep (see “The Grip of Genre”). The other obvious possibility was that I’d written a book that wasn’t so very great. And that possibility got no mention.

But was it bad?

Whether or not something is actually bad is studiously avoided by the people who make those calls for a living. I’ve received thousands of rejections - and that’s one consistent theme. There are dozens of ways to say that an unwanted thing isn’t necessarily bad. They vary from “I loved it, but I didn’t fall in love with it enough in this market environment” to “it’s a subjective business.” I could spend an essay reading between the lines of the many permutations, but where would that leave us?

The people who write rejection letters may be genuinely frustrated with their inability to discern what’s actually good from what’s actually bad. Or they may simply want to discourage a reply. In the end, there’s no great way to give bad news. Failure stings. It has your name and your address. Failure, if you look for it, is everywhere in the arts.

10 degrees of failure

Here are the inescapable gradations of artistic failure. It starts from the most complete, though perhaps least painful, failure. It ends with the failure that looks the most like success, but may hurt the most.

1. It never occurred to you: This is most painful when it occurs to someone else, and their version is good.

2. You never got around to it: A vague regret, a recurrent ache, a repeated plan told to friends and acquaintances that makes you a bore.

3. You never finished it.

4. It didn’t come out like you thought it would. It’s disappointing. Whether or not your judgment is right is anyone’s guess.

5. You never showed it to anyone.

6. It never got made: That could mean no agent, no publisher, no gallery, no theater or no movie studio ever bought in and brought it to the broader world. Or you never had the money, time or conviction to do it yourself.

7. It was made, but no one noticed.

8. People noticed and cared, but it never made money.

9. It made money, but no one thought about it afterwards.

10. It set the world on fire, but even that didn’t matter: Think of Paul Cezanne refusing the Paris Salon after decades trying to get in, or Mark Rothko killing himself after months haunting a retrospective of his works at MOMA.

Hatchet jobs

Once in a while, a critic will have a real go at a writer or artist. This used to matter more in cinema. But movies are slow-moving prey these days. Most movies feel more like assets these days, with the risk-management of them overpowering the narrative or artistic aspects as to make criticism wildly beside the point. A lot of contemporary music seems to exempt itself from criticism for this same reason.

But in art in literature, the question of is this good? still resonates powerfully enough that you can only ask it at some personal and professional risk.

That’s what makes hatchet jobs thrilling. Someone climbing out on a limb, stirring up vitriol they know they can’t escape - the world they’re operating in is way too small. Here they are taking a sizable risk to say no, this is not good.

Wow. You can almost hear the upholstery creak as people scooch in to hear what they’ll say next.

Amadeus, 1984

I first saw this movie when I was seven, at Showcase Cinemas in downtown Worcester. We’d park by a big gray stone church. I remember the dirty bandage on F. Murray Abraham’s throat. A lot of the movie is about who gets what favors in the Viennese court two hundred years earlier, so as a second grader, it wasn’t exactly up my alley. But I’ve returned to it more than once in the thirty-nine years since then.

The movie is as distant in time from this essay as it was from the end of World War Two. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about Antonio Salieri - an aged contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - thinking about the old days. Back then, Salieri won all the music prizes and high-paying court-composer gigs. At the time he was maybe the only guy who knew or cared that Mozart was a capital-g genius, and he went out of his way to thwart the Mozart.

Maybe the movie is good and maybe it isn’t. It swept the Oscars. And the reason why I say it might not have been that good is that it also did something that’s different than being good, but possibly even more moving and effective than being good: It told certain people what they wanted to hear.

What did they want to hear? The world regularly ignores works of capital-g genius. It impoverishes and degrades the genius. Everywhere, hacks win accolades and rake in the dough. But capital-g genius always wins in the long run.

Why do people want to hear it? Because people, especially the kind of people in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, fail every single day in ways just like the capital-g genius.

Salieri is every hack with an enviable career. The movie is his confession. It even has him try to slit his own throat in self-disgust. It’s incredibly gratifying. Maybe too much so. And I don’t know if it’s honest.

Feeding Homer

Why do you like something? Motivation is part of it, necessarily. How much is hard to suss out. It’s one more reason why it’s hard to really answer whether or not something is good.

Take Homer, and the Iliad - a hard book to talk about. In terms of how we live, it’s about as foreign as a whale song. But it also crowds up close as a middle-school friend at a local bar the night before Thanksgiving. The mix of deep recognition and utter incomprehension is why every new translation seems to bring fresh news.

Before they were written down, Homer’s works persisted through something like 450 years in purely oral form. And that shit is expensive. You can leave a book on a shelf at very little expense. But to keep people telling the same story for like 25 or 30 generations of guys - breakfast lunch and dinner - costs real coin. The expense cuts both ways. That’s more than two dozen generations of bright guys who decided to throw in their lot with an old story.

Now this may seem like a worthy investment by the state, if you look at it from the perspective of a culture with endowments and grants and tenure. But there weren’t any MacArthur Grants or Kennedy Center Honors. The Iliad was making the rounds during the Greek Dark Ages, when something so bad happened to society that we don’t even know what it was, so bad that its written language was lost for more than two thousand years.

Homer wasn’t a preservation project run from the top down by a confident civilization. It was something kept together from the ground up, kind of like the punk scene of ramen noodles and couches to crash on, but for 500 years, with a civilization slowly rebuilding itself on the back of guys who could sing the 15,000-line equivalent of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird really well.

That doesn’t happen unless people truly want it. But who wanted the Iliad? Just read the thing - no one comes off well. War doesn’t come off well. The biggest hero is a petulant prima donna. The king is trying to chase down his wayward wife. It ain’t propaganda. It’s the personal squabbles, betrayals and failures of a bunch of soldiers who died in a past so distant that it’s more a bedtime story than a history, and who died for more or less nothing. So who wanted to generously pay a whole class of guys to recite it?

Soldiers. It told soldiers what they knew and what needed to hear. It acknowledged that dear and noble friends die for the grandeur of the undeserving few. It nodded to the embarrassing origins of the conflict and the ultimate futility of the campaign. But it also celebrated valor. And by its repeated telling, it insisted and proved that valor would continue to be celebrated.

There are very few true connoisseurs. Every reader or listener of ancient world who dug into their pockets or purses to fish out a denarius was motivated in much the same self-serving way that way you or I are motivated.

The ancient soldiers who knew they’d likely die the next day - and the kings that a minuscule fraction of those soldiers became - paid. They paid to hear a story that, in its telling and in its hearing, effectively obliterated what they couldn’t bear to think.

The guys who told this story, collectively known now as Homer, did well in Greece, which was almost always at war back then. But some people smelled a rat. Plato, for one, said that in any decent state the poets who told these stories would be run out of town.

Those soldiers, though, paid for a song that felt true enough and sounded beautiful enough, but which primarily made it possible to do the hard things they’d have to do. Passed down, the use fades, and the song starts to stand in for reality. To the next clever fellow, it seems like a nice backstory for your startup on the banks of a river in Italy. And on it goes. Be generous. Call it a tradition.

Why don’t you just do that?

I’ve written ten novels. The degree to which they’ve failed is an open question most days. But some days, a verdict comes uncomfortably close.

One afternoon stands out. In the middle of a months-long stretch of unemployment I was interviewing for a job for which I seemed to be a very precise match, doing a kind of joyless industry copywriting that I’d done before.

It was in one of those old, lightless office piles in the financial district at the foot of Broadway. I was interviewing with someone who had a sincere-seeming enthusiasm for joyless copywriting in that particular industry. She was having a bad day, a bad life or just didn’t like the cut of my jib.

Going over my resume, she saw the bit at the bottom that mentioned I’d written a handful of well-reviewed novels. She read that out loud and said - I see you write books. Why don’t you just do that?

Because they weren’t good

Because the books were not good. Because I did the best I could with all the resources I had in the realm of my greatest interest and talent. And it flat-out wasn’t good enough to provide a meager living - maybe that flashed through my mind. But that can’t be the answer, though I have the sense that’s the answer she wanted.

I mumbled some crap about publishers consolidating. I bought a pint of whiskey for the subway ride home.

Better than nothing

So why make anything? Why, especially if only one of a dozen varieties of failure awaits? The answer can’t be merely personal.

I’ll posit something cosmic: When you consider how much collectively vanishes - revelations, loves, buildings, hopes and people - every single hour on this planet, then so-called creativity reveals itself as something less like a hobby and more like a survival instinct.

Selected bibliography

Danny Jock, who did the image for this piece, and who is taking commissions