Leonard Michaels
KISHKAS
A nation of immigrants, we adore worldly success because
it proves we exist despite attenuated roots or none. But more in–
teresting than success is its dark brother, failure, and the strange
fascination with failure that haunts American literature from the
apocalyptic grandeur of
Moby Dick
through the pathos of
Sister Carrie
and
Seize the Day,
or the gruelling agonies of
Death ofa Salesman,
or the
poignant ironies of
The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Lolita,
and in–
numerable short stories and poems . Imagine then millions of failed
pages on failure , laboriously wrought, deeply sincere, discoloring in
drawers and boxes about the land. Something very like this–
unheard, unseen , immanent - is made vast and looming in "The
Yachts ," a frightening poem by William Carlos Williams, where he
discovers a spectral thrill in the heart of failure. Williams sees the
nervous and exhilarating beauty of racing yachts, and abruptly suf–
fers an access of vision:
. . . a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair
.. . the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind ,
the whole sea ... an entanglement of watery bodies .
beaten , desolate , reaching up from the dead .
they cry out, failing , failing!
My entanglement with watery bodies occurred mainly in
Hollywood, but it began in New York, in 1979, when an editor at
Cosmopolitan
invited me to write for the magazine . I submitted a
story called "The Men's Club." It was refused . Ultimately,
Esquire
published the story, and, sometime later, I made it into the first
chapter of a novel which was received with praise and sneering, in
1981 , and went into several foreign languages even as the desolate
hand reached for me .
Some reviewers said the novel is an allegory; others thought it
satirizes the women's movement; one reviewer called me a "miso–
gynist"; another said "feminist." It was as if I'd been talking to some–
one on the platform of a train station when a locomotive -
The
Zeitgeist Cannonball-
rumbled by and sucked my sense after it. I felt
emptied; dispossessed.
