"Enrique Martín" by Roberto Bolaño & the nobility of failure
Bad poets generally suffer like laboratory animals, especially during their protracted youth
I met Enrique Martín a few months after arriving in Barcelona. He was born in 1953 like me and he was a poet. He wrote in Castilian and Catalan with results that were fundamentally similar, though formally different. His Castilian poetry was well meaning, affected, and quite often clumsy, without the slightest glimmer of originality. His model (in Castilian) was Miguel Hernández, a good poet whom, for some reason, bad poets seem to adore (my explanation, though it’s probably simplistic, is that Hernández writes about pain, impelled by pain, and bad poets generally suffer like laboratory animals, especially during their protracted youth).
[…]
Enrique wanted to be a poet, and he threw himself into this endeavor with all his energy and willpower. He was tenacious in a blind, uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero’s bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it gave him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.
~ “Enrique Martin,” by Roberto Bolaño
Is it noble or foolish to be a failed artist? This is comes up a lot in Roberto Bolaño’s work. I don’t think you can avoid the conclusion that his answer is “both.” The nobility of the failed artist is that they continue trying long after the world has communicated that they will never succeed. The foolishness of the failed artist is . . . that they continue trying long after the world has communicated that they will never succeed.
Bolaño’s work is to a certain extent autobiographical. He was born in Chile but wandered Mexico, Paris, and Spain; he wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry; he died in 2003 at the age of 50. He knew what it was like to fail; until the very end of his life, he hardly knew what it was like to succeed. By then the poor condition of his health probably made it hard to enjoy what success he had attained.
The titular character in the short story “Enrique Martín” is one of Bolaño’s many lowlife poets. The story poses a simple question: Will Enrique ever grow from a bad poet into a good one? Will he ever find success?
You can read the story online for free here and I suggest doing so before proceeding if you don’t want to have the answer spoiled… Link
The answer is “no.” Enrique never succeeds. But he never stops trying, either. After his poetry magazine fails, and his other blustering attempts to make it into the literary world fail, he becomes something of a conspiracy theorist, writing articles about UFO sightings . . . so the narrator assumes, when Enrique drops off a package of secretive papers, that they must contain maps, codes, and miscellaneous ravings . . . only years later, after Enrique has committed suicide, does the narrator open the package and discover the contents:
There were fifty A4 sheets, neatly bound. There were no maps or coded messages on any of them, just poems, mainly in the style of Miguel Hernández, but there were also some imitations of León Felipe, Blas de Otero, and Gabriel Celaya. That night I couldn’t get to sleep. My turn to flee had come.
Derivative to the end . . . but a poet nonetheless.
There’s a curious effect of writing about writers who resolutely press on in the face of overwhelming evidence that they suck: It makes the writing feel defiant. You don’t like this? Bolaño seems to say. Well too bad, because I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for me.
…in other news, read Brandon Taylor on Raymond Carver: Link . . . I liked this post a lot.