But Bradatan swiftly dismisses those who try to “rebrand” failure as “a steppingstone to success.” They have plucked Samuel Beckett’s line to “fail better” out of its dark context, shearing it off from what follows: “Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.” Against the emollient platitudes of self-help, Bradatan encourages actual, painful humility — what Iris Murdoch called a “selfless respect for reality.”
This, then, is an extreme book — but not an extremist one. It isn’t a manifesto or even a treatise; those revolve around argument, of which Bradatan offers surprisingly little, or little that is stable enough to pin down. “In Praise of Failure” is mainly structured around storytelling, as Bradatan recounts the lives of people who not only faced down failure but actively invited it.
There is Mahatma Gandhi, the anticolonial leader and radical pacifist, abstaining from clothing, from food, from sex; failure, for him, was a forge: “I can only learn when I stumble and fall and feel the pain.” There is Simone Weil, the brilliant and sickly French philosopher, taking on physically demanding factory jobs, joining the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War (despite being so nearsighted that she couldn’t shoot straight) and eventually dying at 34 from tuberculosis and self-starvation. The Romanian-born philosopher E.M. Cioran wholeheartedly supported fascism before wholeheartedly identifying as an idler, a self-described “parasite.” The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima was determined to be a “noble failure” by becoming a militant arch-nationalist and staging his own “beautiful death.”
The work of these thinkers could be invigorating, but they themselves were often unpleasant and downright cruel. Bradatan does not try to redeem them. To the contrary, he draws our attention to everything about them that was disappointing, disgusting and deplorable. “As Hitler was wreaking havoc in Europe, Gandhi proved to be remarkably supportive,” he writes, describing how Gandhi urged the Jews “to pray — for Hitler.” (“If even one Jew acted thus,” Gandhi said, “he would save his self-respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry.”) Mishima’s suicide, a meticulously planned seppuku, turned out to be a spectacular mess. “He wanted to will himself into humility,” Bradatan writes, “an act which in itself betrays significant pride, and he thought he could get away with that.”
This turns out to be a running theme — how a strain of perfectionism can doom a pursuit of failure to, well, failure. None of Bradatan’s characters cared much for the kind of democracy in which imperfection would be embraced and contained by institutions. Even Gandhi, in Bradatan’s telling, talked about democracy in spiritual terms: “What he envisioned was not new political institutions, but a transformed humanity.”
