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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Advantages of Failure

The Advantages of Failure

Failure is what most of the human race dread most: failure in work, failure in love, failure in military achievement, moral failure.

One could say that in our own highly competitive technological age, there is nothing more damning one could say about another person, than – ‘Poor page 111 fellow, he’s an utter failure! I suppose it can’t be helped.’ Some of us lie awake at night gnawed by a strong fear that our plans will come to ruin; or, worst of all, that our very salvation may be in danger.

There is a strong tradition within the Church to regard failure with total disapproval. Satan is a failure; he failed to pass the test that God set for the angels. Judas was a failure; the first failed priest. And our own possible eternal destination will depend, it seems, on our success or failure in the tests and tasks that God appoints for us.

In this context of a universal horror of failure, it may look thoroughly paradoxical for me to suggest that there may be certain spiritual advantages to be plucked out of failure. But I have good reason for doing it.

*

Nearly every day of my life I am likely to meet somebody who says to me, either directly or by implication: ‘Well, aren’t you lucky? It must be nice to be a success. So many plays produced; so many books of verse published – I hope you can keep a steady head in the middle of all this. . . .’ My problem in coping with success is not so great as the anxious acquaintance may suppose. I have only to read a poem by Dylan Thomas, or a play by Brendan Behan, to know the narrow unchanging limits of my own intellect and imagination.

It is not just that those writers think and write differently (I can never believe they are dead); it is that every phrase and image in their works shows me, with a certain real sadness, that they are large men and I am a small man, that they have true boldness where I have irascible weakness.

Would I then give my right hand to have written that poem of Thomas’s called ‘A Winter’s Tale’ or that little radio play of Behan’s called The Big House? Certainly. But it would still be a useless exchange. No man can buy another’s intellectual universe. He can share in it; and that is a sufficient privilege. Yet even when all stupid envy has vanished, the sense of failure remains – that one has never dug deep enough, never walked far enough – that those steps cut by others far up on the ice wall lie in a region where one’s own feet will never tread.

*

But there is more than that. The desire for literary success is not ignoble if – as in the case of all true writers – it is not the esteem of a captive audience that they want but the inward knowledge that the work itself is good. Nevertheless, the works of the intellect are mere sawdust compared to the works of the will; and I have only to look in other areas of my life to lose in a moment the delusion that I am a success.

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Failure to be an effective husband; to be an effective father; to be an honest friend – those subtle failures in love, in work, in marriage – and under them all, bottomless and terrifying, the failure to be a true lover of God which could lead indeed to an irreversible calamity, if God were not capable of rectifying for me all that I have left undone – these liabilities rapidly dwarf that small fragment of intellectual success which I sometimes cling to like an old filthy handkerchief.

Nor do I suppose that I am unique in this. When we recite the Confiteor, we may not remember any major atrocity we have committed in the last ten days; but the Confiteor does describe our permanent human condition of failure – and while it may be depressing to recognise it, certainly it is highly dangerous to forget it.

*

There was a man I knew who became a bankrupt. His public assertion of financial bankruptcy, however humiliating it may have been for him, and however galling for his creditors, was, I think, the beginning of his recovery from the disease of active alcoholism. A recognition of failure at one level highlighted certain deeper failures. He was able to acknowledge his incompetence to control his own life; and this in turn led him to seek the help of others and put his will and life in the hands of God.

Not exactly, I think, that failure was turned into success; but rather that the admission of failure led him to a deeper and calmer relationship with his fellows and with God. If the shell had remained intact – if he had somehow contrived to keep his business going – he might have been the loser, because he would have kept the doors of his soul shut to the Divine help.

There are a thousand girls I have met from time to time – and not all of them girls, by any means – who have come up against a blank wall in their pursuit of happiness through sexual love.

Perhaps they discovered that their chosen man was a boor and a knave; perhaps he grew tired of them, because their real personality was widely different from the image he had conceived of it; perhaps it was just a muddle from start to finish. But I have known some of them who benefited from the experience of failure in love.

Instead of deciding that the human race – or, at least, the male members of it – were unreliable specimens of an unrewarding cosmos, they dug a bit deeper, and came up with the answer that human beings have obvious limits, that it is best to love them without placing on their shoulders the burden of an absolute trust, that they themselves – being human – shared the same limits, and that the hunger for a Being on whom one could depend absolutely had better be turned towards a different Object.

They did not necessarily opt out of the intricate game of human relationship; but they acquired a sense of perspective and even perhaps a sense page 113 of humility. I am not offering religion in packages as a cure-all for affairs of the heart. But I am suggesting that failure in love may be the beginning of a better understanding of the nature of love.

*

Perhaps all human relationships must have in them an element of failure. One remembers T.S. Eliot’s comment that he had only not failed because he was keeping on trying; and though the references may have been to literary labours, it has a broader connotation.

The very depth and solidity of the vocation of marriage guarantees that there will be keenly felt areas of failure in even the finest marriages which might not be so obviously present in a brief liaison.

A husband must give God to his wife; and a wife must give God to her husband – that is the meaning of the Sacrament, and it commonly entails an almost continuous sense of failure. It is no good for either of them to lower their sights, and decide that kindness and duty are enough – in their own souls they are judged by the absolute harmony of the relation of Adam and Eve before the Fall, and by the pure relation between Christ and His Church which their union obscurely signifies.

In that eternal context who could fail to fail? The rational comforts of modern society cannot adequately bandage a wound of love – or, at least, of the desire for love – which has been inflicted by God Himself.

What spouse is ever fundamentally contented to be less than a perfect friend and lover? What spouse does not secretly desire the other to be this? Yet what spouse has ever in fact been such? Men and women may run away from the pain of failure into liaisons, into lifelong resentful fantasy, into separation or even divorce. But they are haunted by their failures.

It would be better to make a daily inward admission of failure and keep on trying to achieve what an average psychiatrist would call an impossible ego-ideal, yet which the Church defines not just as a desirable goal but as the essential meaning of marriage.

*

At the same time, we see around us many honest failures – I do not mean the faint-hearted who have run away at the first real discomfort in marriage, but those who have kept on trying to the limit, and perhaps beyond it, and then failed to hold their marriages together. No military commander would hold that a soldier was at fault who had fought in the front lines and been disabled there.

Similarly those who fail honestly in marriage deserve our full respect and even approval. They have failed to achieve an outward success in their page 114 vocation; but they have not in fact abandoned it. Though single, they are still husbands and wives. And the Church guards their mysterious vocation of failure most jealously when she states that remarriage for them would be no marriage at all. By obedience to the Church they continue their married vocation, in the eyes of God, if not perhaps in the eyes of the world.

*

In our difficult and transitional society I doubt if any failure is felt more commonly and more keenly than the failure of parents to transmit their ideals and values to their children. And I think many parents are unnecessarily hag-ridden by a sense of guilt on this account. God gave them the job of rearing their children; yet the children are independent beings possessing free will, and He gave no guarantee that free will would be well exercised.

When parents take on their shoulders the total responsibility for the faults of their children, it may be an unconscious arrogance; they may be putting themselves in the place of God, and accusing themselves of a failure to be omniscient and omnipotent. Their failures may be no more than a sign of the necessary barriers that exist between different lives.

The mistakes of their children are bound to cause pain to parents; but it may be part of their vocation to accept this pain as a means of sanctification, rather than insisting that the cosmos is out of gear.

Sometimes parental failure is a wholly necessary stage in the process by which the child learns to stand on his or her own feet. In such cases, if the parents had actually been successful, they would have crippled their children spiritually and so frustrated the will of God.

I am always inclined to think that the attitudes of parents are of more help to children than any obvious commands and cajolings. A child may learn to love from a loving parent; but it will throw away the book of rules that it was given in the nursery the moment that it feels it has reached an independent status.

*

To hate all failure implies that success has in itself an absolute spiritual value; and this is by no means the case. What might Napoleon or Hitler have been if they had been thoroughly unsuccessful men? Perhaps they would have turned out as a mediocre policeman and a somewhat neurotic carpenter who came eventually to tackle their true problems at a much deeper level because they were not diverted by wordly success and hypnotised by a mirror image of themselves.

I have seen the slow poison of success in my own trade of writing, where quite often an open-minded and rather emotional young man is turned into page 115 a hierophant and aesthete by the public acceptance of his works. He finds it too hard to recognise that what his neighbours believe – namely that he is a mysterious and priestly figure – is in fact a delusion.

And so he may fall into the trap of elevating the intellectual universe above the universe of the will, and suppose that his talents give him a special moral licence. Perhaps here I am speaking most of all of myself; but to recognise the danger is at least a beginning of wisdom.

*

The deepest pain of failure comes undoubtedly in the moral sphere; and in this area we have the minor consolation that this kind of pain is shared by the whole human race. Yet where there is objective failure, and nevertheless a constant subjective struggle to keep on moving in the face of one’s own obvious defects, the person concerned may resemble a tortoise moving slowly under its shell – the shell is the objective evil that surrounds the life of such a person; the vulnerable body of the animal is the soul which has not, in fact, given a full consent to that evil.

I believe that many people whom we regard as moral failures – and who regard themselves in the same light – may be more fortunate than their orderly and virtuous neighbours who have never felt any reason for conscious doubt that they are the right people on the right road.

In a curious way a full and deep recognition of moral failure seems to draw down God’s help and mercy as a forest draws down the rain. To say ‘I will not’ is forbidden to us; but those who look at the slagheap of their lives, without the ghost of a shovel in their hands, and sincerely say ‘I cannot’, may find – not indeed that the hideous heap miraculously disappears – but that the cloak of the Divine mercy is speedily thrown over them.

Success or failure is hardly the issue to a person who meets God in the wilderness. 1970 (599)