I first came on a paperback reprint of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise when I was already in my despairing middle thirties. Though I had been writing steadily and obsessively since the age of twenty-two, I was still mainly unpublished: a handful of poems, a couple of short stories, a single essay, and all in quirky little magazines printed, it seemed, in invisible ink. Connolly’s stringent dissertation on the anatomy of failure had a morbid attraction for me: it was like looking up one’s disease in the Merck Manual—I knew the symptoms, and it was a wound I was interested in. One day I urgently pressed my copy of Connolly on another failed writer a whole decade younger than myself; we were both teaching freshman composition at the time. He promised to read it; instead he hurried off into analysis and gay pride. I never saw the book again. My ex-colleague has, so far, never published. Enemies of Promise went out of print.

After that, I remembered it chiefly as a dictionary of low spirits, even as a secret autobiography. Over the years one of its interior titles—“The Charlock’s Shade”—stayed with me, a mysterious phrase giving off old mournful fumes: the marsh gas writers inhale when they are not getting published, when they begin to accept themselves as having been passed by, when envy’s pinch is constant and certain, when the lurch of humiliation learns to precede the predictable rebuff. Writers who publish early and regularly are not only