The Real F-Bomb

Failure, as a topic, is "just not for us."

This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals to us 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, The Trouble with Being Born, tr. Richard Howard

I never learned anything from a match that I won.

—Bobby Jones

Nine years after ruining my chances for becoming a college professor by being kicked out of a very selective PhD program, I found a job at a national magazine that specialized in introducing a general audience to new, generally left-of-center ideas in politics, social thought, environmentalism, and human relationships.

The magazine prided itself on taking on challenging, even paradoxical, ideas in an approachable style and with design elements that were brighter and more lively than those in most left-leaning publications of the day, which tended to go for an appalled, end-of-the-Weimar-Republic look. Unlike those publications, too, it treated concepts from the worlds of “personal growth” and “human potential” seriously, rather than dismissing them as mere late-capitalist pabulum.

We editors produced sections on, for example, how slowing down the pace of one’s personal life could contribute to social change; why we ought to inject some joy and delight in nature into the dour, shaming-and-blaming world of environmentalism; and where and how conservatives (the old kind who developed arguments and held to values) were right about community and tradition.

As for me, I was curious about what my failures represented. I had flopped miserably at becoming the one thing I had wanted to become since the age of thirteen—an academic—due to a set of comorbidities including alcoholism, fear, laziness, aimless rebelliousness, and arrogance. With a lot of help, I had sobered up and was living a new life, not exactly the one I would have chosen, but one that felt hopeful and sane.

In some ways, I had willed my failure because of my misgivings about the academic route that I had laid out for myself. Isolated, ashamed to admit to anyone that a life of teaching entitled undergrads and neurotic grad students, attending endless faculty meetings, and writing books destined mainly for dissertation bibliographies might not really be for me— and, of course, sloppy drunk every day—I began to skip classes, I failed to turn in papers, and then I simply let the inevitable happen.

Of course, the main drivers of my failure were personal weaknesses and egotism, but it seemed to me that the path my failure took might actually have been expressing something about me and my relationship with the world that was true.

Failure—I thought it could make an interesting section in a magazine that was skeptical about the values of a competitive, success-obsessed capitalist culture and willing to entertain the idea that the personal was actually personal as well as political. What was failure, really, in light of the fact that every life ends in the grave or the urn? Given that everyone fails at something while alive, too, why are Americans so afraid of it?

I even had a headline: “The Real F-Bomb.”

I could feel, and almost see, the idea deflate and sink the moment I suggested it in one of our editorial meetings. There was a polite nod or two, some silence, and then we moved on.

I had, by this point, worked on the staffs of four different magazines, so I recognized the moment for what it was: a group frisson of embarrassment for me and for my suggestion, which, as they say in the magazine world, was “just not for us.” We can take up fear, the moment seemed to say; we can take up liberal guilt; we can take up love and death and the many contradictions of political and social life. We can take up specific failures, like the end of the New Deal ethos or the Democrats’ loss of the working class—but the F-bomb itself, in its rawness and generality and its hint of personal, individual loss, is just too dark and hopeless. We’ll pass—thanks, Jon.

But I want to continue to gnaw on this particular bone here, looking at failure in the light of my own mistakes, stumbles, and character defects, big and small. The idea is to enjoy the comedy and even the beauty in my various downward and backward trajectories as well as to acknowledge the pain, confusion, and disappointment that my egotism and weakness brought on me and those I love.

I’ll talk about my alcoholism, but I don’t intend to emphasize its miseries or the joys of recovery—there are many eloquent places to go for those truths. I’d prefer to focus on what Cioran alludes to above: the gifts that failure can give us if we let it—and, of course, if we survive it and find a place of reasonable comfort from which to contemplate it. Among those gifts: self-knowledge and the almost inevitable comic dimension of self-knowledge. I hope to find ways in these pages to smile at the descent of the F-bomb and help you smile at it too.