Failure isn't always so bad

We were out in America this summer, traveling the highways and back roads of the East Coast and near-South and, what do you know, the country still seems in one piece.

Times are tough, no doubt. Unemployment has clobbered workers in cities and small towns, and, absolutely, people are worried about what might happen next. But as the friendly woman at a fruit stand in North Carolina said, the peach crop was decent and people still had to eat.

Her mellow assessment didn't match the outlook on television talk shows we watched in our motel rooms. Analysts focused mostly on failure -- failure on the part of the president to create jobs, of Congress to agree on just about anything, of the global economy to set itself straight and start cooking again.

But I began wondering if failure sometimes gets a bad rap. Is messing up such a terrible thing if attended by honest effort and high hopes? Isn't success more often reached by chutes and ladders than leaps and bounds? On this trip, forget the GPS.

As an older guy, maybe I'm just trying to cut myself some slack and soothe private misgivings. I worked at an out-of-town newspaper once -- big place with a national reputation -- and, after a year, announced to the editor that I had found a job in New York and would be quitting in a couple of weeks.

The editor was a decent fellow who probably didn't mean to sound like an early version of Simon Cowell when he said: "Well, good luck at the next place. We thought you were going to be great, but it didn't turn out that way."

I remember feeling like I did as a boy when Jimmy Cherico landed one on my chin during a backyard Brooklyn boxing match. On the long road trip to New York with my wife and kids, I kept replaying the boss' words. He thought I was going to be great (who knew?) and I'd let him down.

The moment sits, floodlit and roped-off, in my little house of horrors. Not that I'm the only one to bomb an evaluation. Years ago, I interviewed Woody Allen for a story about his latest movie, and we got to talking about pain, suffering, defeat and the absurdity of the human condition -- all the stuff Allen loves so much.

To make a point, Allen told me that when he was a standup comic he'd sometimes play to an audience that loved his routine -- except for one guy in the back who stared ahead, stone-faced, as though Allen were delivering punch lines in Arabic. Famously neurotic, Allen would nod to himself and think: "He's right."

It turned out that, like most of us, even the incomparable Woody Allen was afflicted with fear of failure. And just as well. If it weren't for the unsmiling soul in the last row who gave Woody the silent treatment, would we have had "Annie Hall," "Sleeper" or "Play It Again, Sam"? You never know.

All this struck me as profound when, after a drive through the Tennessee Valley, we visited the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C. We toured the boardinghouse operated by Wolfe's mother, Julia, and heard about the author's precocious youth and publication of his famous first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel."

Before it went to print, the book got a serious scrubbing by fabled Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, who, tough customer, also insisted on revisions from people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There's always someone around telling you to do better. Count on it.

Along the line, the tour guide noted that Wolfe badly wanted to be a playwright but had a serious problem: His dramas were DOA -- overblown and uninspiring. He became a novelist instead, and American literature gained a master.

Flops can turn to triumph -- not all the time, but often enough. I survived the glum review of my long-ago editor and stayed in the news business -- at Newsday and elsewhere -- for nearly 40 years. Most of us have sturdy enough spirits to carry on.

There is no way to know, of course, but I think Thomas Wolfe would agree.

His last novel -- published in 1940, two years after Wolfe died of tuberculosis at 37 -- was "You Can't Go Home Again." The melancholy title has come to mean there are no second chances, but, really, does anyone buy that?

Of course, you can go home again. You can always give it another shot -- try again to be "great" even if the chances seem slim. "The present we know is only a movie of the past," Wolfe once said. Sounds to me like a man who believed in double features.