Essayist Richard Rodriguez talked movingly about the notion of success and failure last night in his discussion with Stanford’s Steven Zipperstein about the latter’s Isaac Rosenfeld biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.
In the conversational presentation between the two writers and friends at the San Francisco JCC, Rodriguez questioned Rosenfeld’s reputation as a failure. In words thankfully captured for later radio broadcast, he held up Rosenfeld’s 1946 novel, Passage from Home, and said Rosenfeld wrote a book that is dear to me, published excellent essays and short stories, and spent his days writing what he wanted to write. Is that a failure?
Seymour Krim themes overlap like power cables at a rock concert.
Krim wrote so passionately about failure I feel I ought to send his estate a royalty check when I mention the word. He owned it.
But then Krim went and ruined his reputation as a failure. He screwed up at failing. Krim made himself ineligible to wear the failure tag when he wrote his devastatingly sad, frank, and intelligent essay about it. “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” is a knockout.
So, as Rodriguez might have asked, can anyone who explores his own sense of failure with profound understanding be a failure?
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