Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

14. For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business

177 14 For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business Phillip Lopate included “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (1994), and it stands up to the competition offered by George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and H. L. Mencken. “Failure Business ” is a moving analysis of Krim’s—and America’s—obsession with success and failure. Less obviously, it is also a farewell to a Jewish-American type. Alfred Kazin wrote how he was intoxicated by America, how he fell under the spell of the country that “would soon be the greatest power instrument in history” (1979, 21). Mailer was drunk on America when he declared he would settle for nothing less than making “a revolution in the consciousness of our time” (1959, 17). The poet Delmore Schwartz had equally outrageous ambitions. “The heroic appealed to his grandiose imagination” and he dreamed of becoming a “great athlete , statesman, actor, drama critic, and intellectual” (Atlas 1977, 17). Allen Ginsberg , to his credit, mocked this penchant for outrageous demands by comically asking in his poem “America,” “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” (1983, 31). In “Failure Business,” Krim understands the syndrome. “America was my carnival at an earlier age than most and I wanted to be everything in it that turned me on, like a youth bouncing around crazed on a boardwalk. I mean literally everything.” This ambition produced unstable personalities that more often led to failure than success. The love and enthusiasm that Krim and his contemporaries brought to being Americans exacted a high price, but one that Krim feels was worth paying. 178 . Missing a Beat He dreamed that he was actually the hero of a legend, going back to his sophomore year at Columbia and taking the football team on to glory at the Rose Bowl, following with an A in Chemistry, running the fastest mile ever run in Madison Square Garden, being scouted by the Yankees for their baseball team, becoming a great actor playing King Lear, impressing Madison Avenue by writing “a book so golden and so purchased with magic that everybody smacks their brows,” and ending up knocking out Joe Louis and becoming the world’s heavyweight champion. —Kerouac by Ann Charters W e are all victims of the imagination in this country. The American Dream may sometimes seem like a dirty joke these days, but it was internalized long ago by our fevered little minds and it remains to haunt us as we fumble with the unglamorous pennies of life during the illusionless middle years. At 51, believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.” I’ve published several serious books. I rate an inch in Who’s Who in America. I teach at a so-called respected university. But in that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13, although even I know that the chances of acting them out diminish with each heartbeat. One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind. At 50 my father was as built-in as a concrete foundation and at 55 he was crushed out of existence by the superstructure of his life. I have no superstructure except possibly in my head. I literally live alone with my fierce dreams, and my possessions are few. My father knew where he stood or thought he did, having originally come from an iron-cross Europe, but I only know that I stand on today with a silent prayer that tomorrow will bring to me my revelation and miraculize me. That’s because I come from America, which has to be the classic, ultimate , then-they-broke-the-mold incubator of not knowing who you are until you find out. I have never really found out and I expect what remains of my life to be one long search party for the final me. I don’t kid myself that I’m alone in this, hardly, and I don’t really think that the great day will ever come when I hold a finished me in my fist and say here you are, For...