The Music of Failure: Variations on an Idea By Bill Holm Illustrations by Stuart Mead Designed by Connie Gilbert Another idea from Walt Whitman that no one wants to hear. At fifteen, I could define failure fast: to die in Minneota, Minnesota. Substitute any small town in Pennsylvania, or Nebraska, or Bulgaria, and the definition held. To be an American meant to move, rise out of a mean life, make yourself new. Hadn’t my own grandfathers transcended Iceland, learned at least some English, and died with a quarter section free and clear? No, I would die a famous author, a distinguished and respected professor at an old university, surrounded by beautiful women, witty talk, fine whiskey, Mozart. There were times, at fifteen, when I would have settled for central heat and less Jello, but I kept my mental eye on the "big picture.’’ Later, teaching Walt Whitman in school, I noticed that my students did not respond with fervor to the lines, Wit/i music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only. I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those war-vessels sunk in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And to the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! I left Minneota at the beginning of America’s only lost war. While I traveled, got educated, married, divorced, and worldly, the national process of losing went on: a president or two shot, an economy collapsed, a man whom every mother in America warned every child against accepting rides or candy from, was in the flesh overwhelmingly elected president, and then drummed into luxurious disgrace for doing the very things those mothers warned against. The water underneath America turned out to be poisoned. Cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago were invisible under air that necessitated warning notices in the newspaper. A rumor flourished that the Arabs bought the entire Crazy Mountains in Montana. Oil gurgled onto gulls’ backs north of San Francisco. The war finally ended in disgrace, the Secretary of State mired as deep in lies as Iago. America, the realized dream of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, seemed to have sunk into playing out a Shakespearean tragedy, or perhaps a black comedy. Yet as history brought us failure, it brought us no wisdom. The country wanted as little as my students to hear those lines from Leaves of Grass. It was not “good to fall,” not good to be “sunk in the sea,” not good to be among the “numberless unknown heroes.” We elected, in fact, a famous actor to whom failure was incomprehensible as history itself, a man who responded to visible failure around him by ignoring it and cracking hollow jokes. In the meantime, I aged from twenty to forty, found myself for all practical purposes a failure, and settled almost contentedly back into the 4 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1988
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