What is failure?

A few years ago I was meeting with an editor about a project I was doing for him. He mentioned that his girl friend always got on his case whenever he said that in his judgment he was a failure. Here was a man, now officially retired, who had had a long career editing a prestigious weekly, a journalistic career before that that had earned him a Pulitzer nomination, someone I regarded highly. How could he consider himself a failure?

And yet I understood because I've often felt the same way myself. Rationally I look back at my career and am proud of my accomplishments. But frequently I feel like a failure. I feel like a failure because I have such marginal literary visibility, such a small audience for my work. Just like the editor's girl friend, my wife gets angry whenever I mope around about this.

So who is right? Since these actually aren't mutually exclusive opinions, I think all of us are right. We think we are failures, when we do, because our aim was so high. Our reach was beyond our grasp, as Tennyson would say. We didn't meet our high expectations of ourselves. All this said, we still accomplished a hell of a lot.

There also is an element of aging in this equation. It's a youth culture, no doubt about it. There are "hot shot" writers in town now who were still in diapers, if even born, when I was in the regional limelight. I have two fat scrapbooks of memorabilia and press from the 70s and 80s, my decades of relative "fame." But so what? In fact, the opposite of failure is not fame.

The opposite of failure is satisfaction. This is how I get out of those periods when I mope around feeling sorry for myself: I remind myself how goddamn lucky I've been and still am. I've been able to do most of my "real work" my way. I've written outside-in as well, commercially, but just enough to keep going, to keep writing inside-out, the real writing. And I have a large archive to show for it, most of which not only satisfies me but awes me. I have past work that I look at with disbelief that I actually wrote it, that I was this good. This is a judgment along personal aesthetics, which is far from mainstream aesthetics.

At the bottom of this blog is a quotation from J. D. Salinger that is worth repeating in this context: a writer's job is to aim for perfection on his own terms, no one else's. This is what I've done in my long writing career. Did I ever reach perfection? Of course not. But I came damn close more than once.

It's also appropriate to repeat what Camus said about Sisyphus: the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart.