THE HIGHER FAILURE The man who has tendencies towards an inner quest... will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything. E.M.Cioran quoted by Geoff Dyer in F.Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night from Working the Room, Essays & Reviews 1999-2010, Canongate, Kindle end. p.151, 160). Writing in another essay, Dyer quotes Fitzgeralds comment on Anthony Patches attempt to move to paid employment from his literary and intellectual endeavours to the effect that to succeed in the world of finance... the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind, and, Dyer adds by comparison, the idea of failure seems all-embracing, something that will consume and test [Anthonys] entire being. But Dyer is quick to puncture the idea that there is any necessary glamour to this form of decadent romanticism, for failure necessarily imposes its own limits. From being a person of mental adventure, of curiosity, Antony becomes an individual of bias and prejudice. It is to the credit of Fitzgerald, the artist - who as a man was prone to shoddy prejudices of his own - that the absolute nadir of Anthonys life, the pitch of degradation, comes when, having been refused a loan, he calls the movie producer, Joseph Bloeckman a Goddam Jew. Even an incident like this demonstrates the capacity of failure to generate some kind of hideous enlightenment. Had everything gone smoothly for Anthony he might never have so nakedly confronted the potential baseness of his own character. In less extreme circumstances failure generates an aura of romance and mystery... Fitzgerald was never shy of using the word tragedy, but it seems to me that his writing - with the gleaming exception of The Great Gatsby - is constantly groping towards an intuition that has historic rather than simply personal resonance: namely that, despite the vaulting claim announced by Dreisers An American Tragedy (1926), in twentieth century America failure had superseded tragedy. Whether this in itself is a failure or a tragedy constitutes the crux of his creative efforts. Geoff Dyer in F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and the Damned from Working the Room, Essays & reviews 1999-2010 ed.cit., loc.cit, pp.148-149).
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 06:50:51 +0000
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