by C. D. Rose
At the BDLF, we are hesitant to call this ‘failure,’ for in many ways it is an act of great heroism. Following some editorial debate, we have decided to include him, if only to remind ourselves that he is not alone.
WILSON YOUNG
TRAVEL IS A RAW MATERIAL of the mind that every writer should have.
Some, indeed, would have it up there in the well-worn pantheon alongside show-don’t-tell, murder-your-babies, application-of-bum-to-seat and so on: travel. Travel brings the useful knowledge, however scant, of a second or third language. It brings the awareness, be it intimate or sketchy, of how people in cultures and climes very different to one’s own may negotiate the everyday. In the worst cases, it can at least provide an exotic backdrop to an otherwise dull story. Most important, however, travel can give the experience and feeling of being an outsider, of not being one of the crowd, of being someone other. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve, and to acknowledge.
It was this that Wilson Young was obscurely seeking when, having graduated from an English midlands redbrick university at the dog-end of the sorry 1980s and having little direction other than not wanting to become a jobseeker, he decided to travel. To be fair, he did have a vague idea of becoming a writer, but naïvely (like many, let it be said) he thought this was a process that would somehow happen rather than one that had to be actively brought about. Travel, he was sure, would help his flowering into literary greatness.
Having little idea where he actually wanted to go, he took a pin, closed his eyes and stuck it into the tatty world map his flatmate used to cover the holes in the wall. Unfortunately, the pin stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the nearest landmass to it the tiny island of Nauru, one of the remotest spots on the face of the earth. Wilson’s perilous finances did not allow him to undertake such an adventurous journey at that point, so he began more modestly, and went to Paris: a good enough place for a writer to start, surely?
It was less than a week before he was fed up with overpriced arrogance and bad food, so Young headed to the Gare de Lyon and jumped on a train whose destination he did not know.
It was the beginning of a journey that would take more than twenty years, and have no end.
Knowledge is nothing but a map of ignorance, and this Young found out the practical way: the more he travelled, the less he realised he knew. The farther he went, the farther he realised there was still to go.
His ambitions to write changed from vague ideas to stuffed notebooks. He felt he had to tell the entire fascinating and complex history of the town of Bzyzhzh and the tiny, brief country of Cimbria. He had to recount the whole Crimean war, but then realised all this was not necessary: it had been done before, elsewhere, better. He scratched everything, but saved just those few, telling details, the nuance or feeling that would make a work of fiction come alive.
Young filled his notebooks with long, tender, mouthwatering descriptions of the menemen eaten in Istanbul, the manoushi in Beirut and the grilled milza in Palermo, but then realised he was writing a guidebook for gastronomes, not a work of fiction. He recast everything, thinking how his characters may have relished the same food.
He wrote dialogues in the languages he had learned, feeling very pleased with himself but then realising they would probably be incomprehensible to most readers, or at least need a good deal of clumsy exegesis. He scrapped them, or used one telling word to suggest a conversation in a different tongue.
Yet despite all this judicious self-editing, the quantity of material Young amassed during his travels was enormous: Ukrainian folktales roughly translated by a drunk in a bar in Lvov, a story of a Portuguese settler in Madras recounted by a taxi driver in an idli restaurant in Chennai, ghost stories from a fattucchiera on a rancid backstreet in Naples, descriptions of the huge storks he had seen wheeling across the sky in Rabat, the colour of the twilight sea in Kovalam or the bright morning one in Lampedusa. He saw a woman building a house of stones in Palestine, he saw a boy with a pet wolf in Siberia, he saw a girl in the windswept east of England save the life of a baby chick as it struggled across the road then couldn’t get up a steep grass verge, and she took it, and held it, and placed it in safety.
All this, he felt, needed to be recorded, and needed to be told. And yet: the travelling, he knew, could never stop. There was still that thought that one day he might get to Nauru.
So he carried on moving and he carried on writing, a writer at last, even though he could form none of his millions of notes into any shape because he had not yet finished travelling. Only when the journey had ended could he write the first word of the story.
He’s still out there somewhere. If you come across him, tell him to keep going.
SARA ZEELEN-LEVALLOIS
ALL WRITING has loss at its heart; all books are records of disappearances.
Throughout this book we have traced many of them, some profound, others less so. While we have occasionally had cause to mock the pompous, we have also tried to remember the true, the talented and the lost.
We will end with the story of Sara Zeelen-Levallois: a writer so dangerously and frustratingly obscure she has challenged even the standards of the BDLF.
Her name has only ever been heard in whispers, eavesdropped from conversations between people scarcely less obscure than herself. It is possible that she was the daughter or granddaughter of Eric Levallois (Casimir Adamowitz-Kostrowicki’s friend and faithful confidante*), or the sister of Bas van de Bont’s one-time lover,† but no one knows with any certainty where she was born, grew up, studied, or even less what ever happened to her.
None of her works have survived, or have ever been seen. They exist purely in the domain of hearsay and rumour.
She may never have existed at all, or perhaps she is still alive, out there somewhere, writing.
Those who claim to know her, or know of her, have talked of poems whose syntax and diction twist language into new shapes, forming tiny bright daggers sharp enough to pierce the heart. Others have spoken of a novel so compendious and yet so precise it would change our thinking about the form, the last true revolutionary work, a thing that would turn lives inside out after only its first page. Some have claimed she wrote short stories, brief tales that twist and turn, things that would checkmate Chekhov, carve Carver into pieces. Stories that need but a few brief pages to reconfigure your soul.
The ephemeral, evanescent, scarcely believable career of Sara Zeelen-Levallois shows us, if nothing else, one important, terrible thing: words will change nothing. Write how we may, the arrogant and corrupt will still run the world, people will starve needlessly, your lover will still leave you.
And yet.
The power of writing is one of the greatest things we have, whether it is read or not. Let her story represent all those who have borne witness and desired their memory to last. Let it be for those who have wanted to leave a mark, a trace, of whatever kind, however slight, on this earth. Let it be for all those who have wanted to say I was there, I saw. Let it be for all those who were enchanted and wanted to enchant, for all those who have tried to hold a thought, an image, a memory in a handful of words. Let it be for all those whose lives and work have come to nothing. Let it be for all the lives we could live, of all the people we will never know, the people we never will be, of everything we have had and couldn’t keep. This is what the world is, and this is what she wrote of.
At the very beginning of this Dictionary, we asked you to think of ‘those dozens or hundreds or thousands whose work has been lost to fire or flood, to early death, to loss, to theft or to the censor’s pyre.’ We asked you to think on ‘what has been lost that could have bettered us all.’ At the end, we ask you again.
Memorials, it has been said, are good only for those still living: it is useless to remember the dead or the lost because they cannot remember us. But in remembering them, we give them and their words life. So let us remember.
* See entry no. 1, also author of The Girl with the Avant-Garde Fac
e.
† See entry no. 43.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MANY have asked how the BDLF came about. This is a good question, and merits a good answer. It is, however, a complex story, and sadly lack of space and certain legal niceties prevent us from divulging the whole history of the genesis of the BDLF.
Suffice to say that the editor, long preoccupied with the question of literary failure, began to find tantalising traces of untold stories and hidden histories in his long searches of dusty secondhand bookstores, junk shops and flea markets. His constant questioning led to contacts being made and a small group of similar obsessives formed. The story continues with the discovery of abandoned manuscripts in house clearances, trawls through the rotting slush piles of minor literary agents, overheard literary gossip and tales from the failing memories of librarians, book dealers, academics and fellow writers across the world.
The editor would like to thank the dedicated team of biographers and researchers who made this ambitious project possible.
G. B. Shorter (poet, philosopher and barman), Tat Usher (goat expert and delver into basements), Emilie Reinhold (our Franco-Scandinavian agent), the late Eric Levallois (well-connected author of The Girl with the Avant-Garde Face), Bethany Settle (library sleuth), Sarah Mount (book addict), the ever-unreliable Fausto Squattrinato, Jonathan ‘Johnnycakes’ Kemp (forager into the dark underbelly of the Great Wen), Madame Holette (rock ’n’ roll rambler through the British hinterlands), and K, wherever she is now.
C.D.R.
C. D. Rose was born in the north of England and studied in several of that country’s elite universities, including the University of East Anglia, where he went to do an M.A. in creative writing, and Edge Hill University, where he is at work on a Ph.D. His research into great lost literary works drew him on to live and work in several different countries, including Italy, France, Russia and the United States, where he enjoyed a number of encounters with curious authorial personalities. His research interests have not abated, and now, though based in England, he continues to travel in an unending quest for that one elusive, perfect tale.
Andrew Gallix is the editor in chief of 3:AM Magazine. He writes fiction and criticism, and teaches at the Sorbonne. He divides his time between Scylla and Charybdis.
