Who is a success? Who is a failure?

The Scottish judge and literary critic Francis Jeffrey believed we live in a world where “Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions and lost by one.” Napoleon produced an awesome record as a military strategist — until he overreached himself in the Russian winter of 1812. Joe Paterno won 409 football games at Penn State and endowed a library there, but he also harbored a serial child molester on his staff for years. Martin Heidegger was a brilliant philosopher but also a Nazi apologist.

So, yes, Steve Lavin’s point is surely inarguable: If you can ply your craft for a lifetime without losing your talent, your principles, or your marbles, you deserve honor and admiration.

But consistency isn’t the only definition of success. Winston Churchill was largely perceived as a 65-year-old failure when Parliament summoned him to save Western civilization in 1940. Much the same could be said for Ulysses S. Grant in 1861. Georg Solti was a second-rate conductor and the Chicago Symphony a second-rate orchestra prior to 1969, but together over the next 22 years they became, in the words of the New Yorker, “The finest conductor and the greatest orchestra active in America.” Were these men ultimately failures or successes?

Hitchcock and Altman

Even a single noteworthy deed or two or three can redeem an otherwise pedestrian career. Henry Roth and J.D. Salinger each wrote a single immortal novel and then vanished into seclusion. Georges Picquart was an anti-Semitic officer who heroically sacrificed his military career to expose the French army’s framing of the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

Alfred Hitchcock made 60 mostly forgettable or ludicrously contrived movies over a 57-year career, but we remember him mainly for a mere handful of gems (I would choose Rebecca, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo, and Frenzy). One of my favorite movie directors, Robert Altman, gave the world such complex tapestries as MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Thieves Like Us, and Gosford Park but also many other films that are downright painful to sit through.

Consistency wasn’t Altman’s hallmark, or Hitchcock’s; instead they swung for the fences and struck out a lot. But then, so did Babe Ruth.

Brando’s flops

Marlon Brando is revered today as the 20th century’s ultimate realistic actor, yet that reputation rests on a handful of roles — as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, Paul in Last Tango in Paris, and Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Only in these does Brando truly inhabit his character (and it’s usually the same character: an alienated outcast much like Brando himself). In most of his 41 films, Brando’s just another costumed Hollywood celebrity phoning in his performance as, say, Zapata, Napoleon, Fletcher Christian, Sir William Walker, Jor-El, or Colonel Walter Kurtz. Was Brando’s career a disappointment for its unfulfilled potential? Or was it successful because Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy remain forever etched in our minds?

Christoph Eschenbach made more than 80 recordings as a piano soloist before blazing an impressive trail as a conductor in Hamburg, Houston, Chicago, and Paris; but as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director from 2003 he inexplicably failed to click with his musicians and audiences and so was gone within five years. A success? A failure?

Cleveland Amory’s law

John Stiegman, my college football coach, was hired by Penn in 1960 largely on the strength of his reputation as a man who had experienced only one losing season in his entire career as a player and coach; at Penn he produced five straight losing seasons and a record of 12 wins and 33 losses. Had Stiegman stayed at Rutgers, he might have finished his career with his winning reputation intact. But was he a better man for taking the risk of starting over?

We are talking here about the seasonal nature of human performance as well as conventional wisdom’s simplistic notions of success and failure. The truth is more complicated, as the social critic Cleveland Amory acknowledged: “The successful man is right three times out of five, the unsuccessful man two times out of five.” In other words, there isn’t much difference between success and failure, and everyone encounters both sooner or later. Even Mike Krzyzewski, after all, has lost more than 300 basketball games. And if you’ve never known failure, you need to get out of your comfort zone.

On the occasion of his 250th victory, the fiercely competitive Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril had this to say: "I don't give a hoot about the first one, nor the 100th, nor will I care about the last one. They are so meaningless anyway. A victory is to be enjoyed for a while and then forgotten, and a defeat should be reflected upon for a while and then forgotten as well.”

The ultimate test of success or failure, to my mind, boils down to this question: When you reach the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks what you’ve done to merit admission, how will you respond?

In this context, the response of Bobby Knight — who won 902 college basketball games over a 43-year career but was fired by Indiana University in 2000 for his inability to control his anger — is less than reassuring. "When my time on Earth is gone, and my activities here are passed,” Knight told a reporter in 1994, “I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass." Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall at his interview with St. Peter?