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Book Examines The Whole Concept Of Failure

John Scalzi Mcclatchy News Service

Consider, if you will, the story of Elisha Gray.

A product of the Gilded Age if there ever was one, Gray was an American inventor of no little accomplishment: He held several patents, including one for an improvement on the telegraph. But Gray’s highest achievement came in 1874, when he invented a device for “transmitting vocal sounds or conversations telegraphically” - in short, Gray had invented the telephone. Gray filed a patent for the device on Feb. 14, 1876.

Two hours after Alexander Graham Bell.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Today, when you ask someone who invented the telephone, they answer “Alexander Graham Bell” if they answer at all. The monolithic phone company was “Ma Bell,” and its demonopolized offspring “Baby Bells.” For the want of 120 minutes, Gray and his invention (which, for the record, was more like our modern telephone than Bell’s) have been consigned to oblivion. They are, in the fullest sense of the word, failures.

And this is why Neil Steinberg loves Elisha Gray so.

Steinberg, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, is the author of “Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, RunnersUp, Never-Weres and Total Flops” (Doubleday, 251 pages; $17.50).

Breathtakingly original, meticulously researched and exceptionally funny, “Complete and Utter Failure” goes where no one has bothered to go before: to the dustbin of history, to view what Steinberg describes as “the siren beauty of ruin” and bring its desultory lessons back to the world.

What was the appeal of writing a book on failure? Part of the appeal, Steinberg said, is the universality of failure.

“I’ll tell you a story. When I first sat down to write the book, the first image that came to my mind was this cigar I have sitting at my desk,” he said. “I got the cigar as part of a humidor when I turned 18. My friend gave it to me. And I smoked the cigars during the summer of my 18th year, and when I got to the last cigar, I held it up and I showed it to my girlfriend, and I said, rather grandly, ‘See this cigar? I’m not going to smoke this now, I’m going to wait until my ship comes in, and I’m going to smoke it then.’

“And I’ve never smoked it. Because I realized your ship never comes in. Maybe you win the lottery and you’re set. But even then, life doesn’t stop. The idea of success, of winning, is in a sense a false pretense. We all die at the end. Every story ends badly in that sense. By looking at failure, it makes it more of a process thing.”

It also helps that failure is a largely unexplored field. There have been other books on failure, of course. But most books on failure tend to cover specific topics, from failed products (“Barbarians at the Gate” and its Premier cigarette, which also gets a once-over in Steinberg’s book) to failed civilizations (Edward Gibbons’ “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”).

“Complete and Utter Failure,” on the other hand, examines failure as a concept: not just how people, products or ideas fail, but what it means that they do.

As Aristotle once said, “There are many ways to fail.” Some failures, such as Elisha Gray’s, are failures of timing. Product failures, which are given their own chapter, often are the result of poor insight into the psyche of the consumer.

Steinberg provides several examples of these, ranging from vegetable-flavored Jell-O (General Foods thought wiggly, jiggly, cool and tomatoey might go over; it didn’t) to the Failure of Failures, the Ford Edsel.

But perhaps the most interesting types of failure are the ones people bring on themselves. One of the book’s most compelling chapters, tellingly titled “Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys,” follows the course of the National Spelling Bee, which in Steinberg’s estimation is little more than an exercise in which 9 million small, impressionable children annually fail at progressively more damaging levels; the title of the chapter is Steinberg’s description of what the pressure does to the children participating.

Steinberg writes: “Not only does just one child out of 9,000,000 win, but the 8,999,999 losers lose in a public and humiliating fashion. It would be hard to think up of a way to make failure in the bee more demeaning, particularly at the later stages, short of having a quartet of circus clowns drive deficient spellers from the stage with seltzer bottles and flappy paddles.”

“The people who go on in the spelling bee, unless they’re the single person who’s going to win the bee, they’re just set up for a more profound, more cataclysmic kind of failure,” Steinberg said. “If you’re going to lose the bee, and 99.9999 percent are going to, you do much better to be the kid who blows it on the first day. It’s nothing to him. It’s much better to be him than that guy who came in second at the national bee, I think.”

The question is what, if anything, is to be learned by studying failure. One of the important things might be the realization that the world isn’t just winners and losers, success and failure; life is a gray area in which winning and losing are not two sides of the coin but are intermixed in a capricious and sometimes random fashion throughout its length.

“Everyone creates chances for failure by doing anything. Not only can failure not be traumatic, you have to make it not traumatic. If it’s something that’s worth doing, you have to risk,” Steinberg said.