A Glorious Disaster

Writing about what you want to versus what you need to is a conflict that bedevils many writers, yours truly included. What happens when you get the pig headed urge to write about something you're passionate about, even if you have little or no chance of making it a commercial hit? A glorious disaster.

Credit where it's due. This column by E.J.Dionne Jr. mentioned a book of the same name about Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign by J. William Middendorf II. Got me thinking about a few movies and albums which were awash with artistic genius, but commercial flops at the time, and then went on to become bestsellers when history proved them right. So I decided to dig into similar debacles in the literary world.

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The Legacy By Sybille Bedford

This piece about Sybille Bedford in the New Yorker says "..She may have had too much fun, because she also spent many years not writing. Most of the long magazine pieces were bunched together in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. The novels came out haltingly. For that reason, and also because her interests were so widely dispersed, she is something of a loose piece in the literary canon..."

What it does not say is that her most acclaimed novel, The Legacy, was at first declared "dull" by her own publisher. It's been reprinted and has gone on to become a massive bestseller.

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Ulysses by James Joyce
A trendsetter and path-breaking novel, it made waves as much for the literary content as for the controversy surrounding the obscenity in the book. The book, first published in Paris in 1922, and unavailable in English until 1934, has had a huge amount of influence on romantic writing and writers since it's publication.

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Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Melville put in an intense amount of labor over the book, writing all day long, from 1850 to 1851. But the literary genius in the pages was a wasted effort and the book was a commercial flop. Only in the 1920's was the book rediscovered and took it's rightful place as one of the greatest novels ever written.

There is a common thread running across all three of the above mentioned authors, as well as notable personalities such as Orson Welles and Brigitte Fontaine, who went through a similar agony, of producing underappreciated masterpieces. All of them bucked conventional wisdom and led lives which, while entertaining to read about, no doubt caused a lot of pain and anguish to concerned parties. It's almost like all of them stood up and gave a middle finger to society at large, in the form of the masterpiece, and said, "Take that!" And That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a glorious disaster.