Michael J Farrell writes: As I was edging up to middle age, a variety of circumstances landed me at the University of Southern California learning how to write a novel. Scores of students, many recovering from the ecstatic sixties, had descended on Stephen Longstreet’s class. This man seemed to know every word ever written in America. He had also spent exciting years in Paris, and spiced his erudition with anecdotes about boxing with Hemingway. I called my novel Fields and a Slanting Sun. I was diligent, and first to submit a finished work. And I was never late for class – except on the day Longstreet returned my manuscript and pronounced it ‘very, very good’.
This verdict was relayed to me by a student named Andy, who placed particular emphasis on the second very. Andy was savvy despite a narcotics issue, so I agreed with him about the second very. Professors, we figured, didn’t waste words like that without good reason. Longstreet, who was one of the first to bring Samuel Beckett’s trilogy to the attention of the West Coast, had said in class that he devoted two days of his life to reading my novel. In literary terms I was on the pig’s back.
I mention all this because that was fifty-one years ago, in 1973. During which time I have not been able to find a publisher for Fields.
I can guess what you are thinking: the novel must be a stinker. And you may be right. Despite fifty years of re-working, the synopsis still begins as follows: ‘Within an almost imperceptible few years – around 1970 in this telling – ancient Ireland gave way to modern Ireland. This was at the same time exhilarating and traumatic. In a western village down the road from the Shannon, the talk is of a nuclear power station that will fuel the nation’s future. Across the parish, meanwhile, farmers cutting turf discover a prehistoric bog body rank with old mythologies …’
In a matter of days, I was represented by William Morris, at the time the Rolls Royce of literary agencies. Senior agent Rhoda Weyr sent Fields to all the best publishers for an excruciating two years or so. They (and most of the agents and editors of the past fifty years, if they commented at all, generally agreed) invariably said they liked the writing but the story was not right for their purposes. This, unfortunately, makes sense (as if sense had anything to do with it). What a long shot it is, statistically, to find a subject that matches the proclivities of the individual agent or editor longing, just like me, to discover the on-the-money story.
The sensible thing would have been to read the writing on the wall, but this I failed to do. Every few years I resurrect Fields again. Every decade or so, other agents have tried their luck, and mine. It has been rejected hundreds of times, just guessing. The last time was some months ago.
Some perspective, though, might help explain all those rejections. In only a handful of cases did anyone read the novel. They asked to see a synopsis, a few chapters. Not that they read the few chapters, either, not most of the time. I speak with authority here. I sat in an editorial chair, albeit a nonfiction one, for twenty years, and in similar chairs before that. In most cases I could quickly see if the writer and I had a future together, and all too frequently we didn’t.
I should also explain that life in general has been more than fair to me. And if I may say so, vice versa. When I was young, wanting to save the world, I lurched in the footsteps of Melchizedek, offered sacrifice at a time when nearly everyone believed this was important and even sublime. I did lots of other exotic whatnots such as two years teaching philosophy in Latin. For six years I presided over a monastery in Ulster’s murder triangle. During the lean sixties I published a literary magazine, to which the illuminati contributed heartily, in part because, unlike today, there were few literary outlets. ‘Unbelievably impressive,’ one review of Everyman went, while whoever squired ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in 1968 paraphrased Piers Plowman: ‘A fresh field full of fair fruit found I here.’
None of this came close to saving the world, so I went to America. Where I was equally unsuitable for real life. For four months, for example, I tried selling furniture, though I couldn’t distinguish oak from mahogany. I then became a journalist for an elite niche newspaper with a distinguished worldwide readership. My own outlook, however, was suffering upheaval. While religion was our gist, humour became my undoing. Eventually my betters deemed me and therefore the paper too opinionated. The obvious cure for opinionation was fiction. And here we are.
While Fields and a Slanting Sun mouldered among my souvenirs, I did what incurable writers do: I started another novel. Why was I bothering? This is useless to ask because impossible to answer. People write fiction in pursuit of worthy causes from money to glory. My excuse was more akin to that of TE Lawrence: ‘I had one craving all my life: for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form.’
I wrote another novel or three. Rhoda Weyr still had my back and gave those an airing. I don’t remember the titles, and intrepid Rhoda is dead these many years. I must have had some standards, though, because finally there were only six I was prepared to vouch for. They are still waiting on my computer. Each, if not totally bad, is no doubt imperfect, but who’s to say when a story is ripe for the world? In addition to Fields, they range from traditional to post-Beckett contemporary, as follows:
I’ll Live Till I Die. About a middle-aged man, supposedly myself, who discovers he has cancer and only a year to live. But he has a gift, a creative imagination slightly out of kilter, with which he had once thought to save the world. Now perhaps his very weirdness can save his life? All he needs is to write happy endings and they will happen. Until, that is, he loses confidence in his gift. Naturally, it’s not as simple as that.
All That Delirium. I returned from exile in time to be disappointed by Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, and wrote a satire.
Will the Asteroid. Law of averages says an asteroid will arrive here soon, but the novel is really about a writers’ group and the power of words to change reality, a thread that runs through much of my writing.
Leroy. If God is dead, what are atheists now to do?
Bingabong. Dystopia obviously has a future. Things have gone badly for earth (all our fault). Now there are only two humans left and one is dead, leaving a woman with the last word.
I did other stuff besides. I wrote short stories: two collections and more; also nonfiction. Even nowadays, when to dig I am not able and to beg I have no need, I squint daily at the computer, my head full of irrepressible ideas. In recent months I wrote an op-ed about the search for UFOs. Three famous newspapers turned this down. I also wrote about whether and how far to trust science. A whole team of adjudicators combined to reject this.
I must also confess that, back the road, fortune hiccupped and published a novel called Papabile. Even here my ill-luck held. Between submitting the work and the day it was published, the publisher (an American outcropping of a big German conglomerate) decided to discontinue its fiction line. Yet a few copies are out there.
The challenge (at last) is to unravel an all-too-common quandary: how, given the life I’ve lived, given the chances I had, I have been, on earth’s ordinary terms, unable to cause more creative commotion. If Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare and Luke and John could do it, if hordes of mediocre novelists could, why not I? This dilemma will strike normal people as trivial and/or vain. On the other hand, it was my one and only life. It must mean something.
That many artists buckle under the weight of unfulfilled aspirations is a common cliché. Thoroughly chastened, I took to calling myself a failure. I was scolded for doing this. But how else placate those unloved novels? Perhaps it is all semantics and failure and success are only words. A writer named Stephen Marche recently lamented in The New York Times: the better you write, the more you will fail. ‘Of course,’ he goes on, ‘Socrates and Confucius and Jesus were all failures.’ He cites the sixth-century Boethius: ‘Bad fortune is more use to a man than good fortune.’ This is the fellow who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. Poor fellow died a terrible death. You never know until you’re dead. Marche, author of this paean to failure, recently had his latest book published. The sub-title: ‘On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer.’
I have decided to drop failure from my CV. But where does that leave me? Perhaps an occasional essay, if I can find someone or something to praise or blame. I don’t intend to write another novel. The last thing harassed editors need is another submission of three chapters and a synopsis: not the way books now fit into the great scheme of things. For a decade I have tried in vain to give away these novels to an archive or anywhere they could with dignity await some post-Elon Musk moment in the sun.
Writes Marche: ‘Failure is spreading because of technological and social changes that are beyond anyone’s control. The writing of our time is in constant, unrelenting transition.’ To cope with this, yours truly has tried to fabricate various alternatives. In one short story, ‘The Written Word’, a writer with the same dilemma as myself decides to go over the heads of editors and agents and write directly for the universe. ‘It was liberating. No more catering to passing trends. The world was interested – how could it not be? The world had time. The cosmos needed feedback. The cosmos, designed for give and take, is constantly running down unless we give something back. This is especially true of meaning. Everyone knows there is a dearth of meaning in the world …’
So here’s what I would like to do. If this essay ever gets read, and if any readers are interested, I will send such persons my fifty-one-year-old, unpublished Fields and a Slanting Sun. All I need is the reader’s email address, and a promise you will tell me what you think of it, as short as a word (good, bad, indifferent) or as long as you like. You will find me at [email protected].
October 5th 2024
