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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things




When Amaryllis was alone after the motor with Mrs. Ardayre in it had
departed, an uncontrollable fit of restlessness came over her. The visit
had stirred up all her emotions again; she could not grieve any more
about the tragedy of John; her whole being was vibrating with thoughts
of Denzil and desire for his presence--she could see his face and feel
the joy of his kisses.

At that moment she would have flung everything in life away to rush
into his arms!




CHAPTER XVIII


Denzil was wounded at Neuve Chapelle on March 10th, 1915, though not
seriously--a flesh wound in the side. He had done most gallantly and was
to get a D.S.O. He had been in hospital for two weeks and was almost well
when Amaryllis came up to Brook Street, on the first of April. She had
read his name in the list of wounded, and had telegraphed to his mother
in great anxiety, but had been reassured, and now she throbbed with
longing to see him.

To know that soon he would be going back again to the Front, was almost
more than she could bear. She was feeling wonderfully well herself. Her
splendid constitution and her youth made natural things cause her little
distress. She was neither nervous nor fretful, nor oppressed with fancies
and moods. And she looked very beautiful with her added dignity of mien
and perfectly chosen clothes.

Mrs. Ardayre came at once to see her the morning after her arrival, and
suggested that Denzil should come when out driving that afternoon.
Amaryllis tried to accept this suggestion calmly, and not show her joy,
and Mrs. Ardayre left, promising to bring her son about four.

Denzil had said to his Mother when he knew that Amaryllis was coming
to London:

"Mum, I want to see Amaryllis--please arrange it for me. And Mum, don't
ask me anything about it; just leave me there when we drive and come and
fetch me when I must go in again."

Mrs. Ardayre was a very modern person, but she could not help exclaiming
in a half voice while she sat by her son's bed:

"You know she is going to have a baby in a month, dear boy, perhaps she
won't care to see you now."

A flush rose to Denzil's forehead: "Yes, I do know," he said a little
hurriedly, "but we are not conventional in these days. I wish to see her;
please, darling Mother, do what I ask."

And then he had turned the conversation.

So his mother had obediently arranged matters, and at about four in the
afternoon left him at the Brook Street door.

Early as it was, Amaryllis had made the tea, and expected to see both
Denzil and his mother. The room was full of hyacinths and daffodils, and
she herself looked like a spring flower, as she sat on the sofa among the
green silk cushions, wrapped in a pale parma violet tea-gown.

The butler announced "Captain Ardayre," and Denzil came in slowly, and
murmured "How do you do?"

But as soon as the door was closed upon him, he started forward,
forgetting his stiff side.

He covered her hands with kisses, he could not contain his joy; and
then he drew back and looked at her with worship and reverence in his
blue eyes.

The most mysterious, quivering emotions were coursing through him, mixed
with triumph, as he took in the picture she made. This delicate,
beautiful creature! And to see her--so!

Amaryllis lowered her head in a sweet confusion; her feelings were no
less aroused. She was thrilling with passionate welcome and delicious
shyness. Nature was indeed ruling them both, and with a glad "Darling
Angel!" Denzil sat down beside her and clasped her in his arms. Then for
a few seconds delirious pleasure was all that they knew.

"Let me look at you again, Sweetheart," he ordered presently, with a tone
of command and possession in his very deep voice, which caused Amaryllis
delight. It made her feel that she really belonged to him.

"To me you have never been so beautiful--and every scrap of you is mine."

"Absolutely yours."

"I had to come--I cannot help whether it is right or wrong. I must go
back to the Front as soon as I am fit, and I could not have borne to go
without seeing you, darling one."

They had a hundred things to say to each other about themselves--and
about the baby, and the next hour was very sacred and wonderful.
Denzil was a superlatively perfect lover and knew the immense value of
tender words.

He intoxicated Amaryllis' imagination with the moving things he said.

Alas! how many worthy men miss themselves, and make their loved ones
miss the best part of life's joys by their mulish silence and refusal
to gratify this desire of all women to be _told_ that they are loved,
to have the fact expressed in passionate speech! No deeds make up for
this omission.

Denzil had none of these limitations; he said everything which could
cajole and excite the imagination. He murmured a hundred affecting
tendernesses in her ears. He caressed her--he commanded and mastered her,
and then assured her that he was her slave. He was arrogant and
humble--arrogant when he claimed her love, humble in his worship. He
spoke of the child and what it meant to him that it should be his and
hers. He caused her to feel that he was strong and protective and that
she was to be cherished and adored. He made pictures of how it would be
if he could spend a whole day and night with her presently in June, when
she would be quite well, and of how thrilled with interest he would be to
see the baby, and that, of course, it _must_ be exactly like himself! And
Amaryllis' eyes, all soft and swimming with emotion answered him.

Naturally, since she loved him so passionately, it would be his image!
Had not his own mother accounted for his pronounced Ardayre stamp by her
having been so in love with his father--so, of course, this would
re-occur! It was all dear to think about!

They spent another hour of divine intoxication, and then the clock
struck six.

It sounded like a knell.

Amaryllis gave a little cry.

"Denzil, it is altogether unnatural that you should have to go. To
think that you must leave me, and may not even welcome your son! To
think that by the law we are sinning, because I am sitting here clasped
in your arms! To think that I may not have the joy of showing you the
exquisite little clothes, and the pink silk cot--all the things which
have given me such pleasure to arrange.... It is all too cruel! You
know that eighteenth century engraving in the series of Moreau le
Jeune, of the married lovers playing with the darling, teeny cap
together! Well, I have it beside my bed, and every day I look at it and
pretend it is you and me!"

"Darling--Darling!"--and Denzil fiercely kissed her, he was so
deeply moved.

"It is all holy and beautiful, the coming to earth of a soul. It only
makes me long to be good and noble and worthy of this wonderful thing.
But for us--we who love truly and purely, it has all been turned into
something forbidden and wrong."

"Heart of me--I must have some news of you. I cannot starve there in the
trenches, knowing that all the letters that should be mine are going to
John. My mother is really trustworthy, will you let her be with you as
often as you can, that she may be able to tell me how you are, precious
one? When the seventh of May comes I shall go perfectly mad with suspense
and anxiety. I will arrange that my mother sends me at once a telegram."

"Denzil!" and Amaryllis clung to him.

"It is an impossible situation," and he gave a great sigh. "I shall tell
John that I have seen you--I cannot help it, the times are too precarious
to have acted otherwise. And afterwards, when the war is over, we must
face the matter and decide what is best to be done."

"_I_ cannot live without you, Denzil, and that I know."

They said good-bye at last silently, after many kisses and tears, and
Denzil came out into the darkening street to his mother in the motor,
with white, set face.

"I am a little troubled, dearest boy," she whispered, as they went along.
"I feel that there is something underneath all this and that Amaryllis
means some great thing in your life--the whole aspect of everything fills
me with discomfort. It is unlike your usual, sensitive refinement,
Denzil, to have gone to see her--now--"

"I understand exactly what you mean, Mother. I should say the same thing
myself in your place. I can't explain anything, only I beg of you to
trust me. Amaryllis is an angel of purity and sweetness; perhaps some day
you will understand."

She took his hand into her muff and held it:

"You know I have no conventions, dearest, and my creed is to believe what
you say, but I cannot account for the situation because of your only
having met Amaryllis so lately for the first time. I could understand it
perfectly if you had been her lover, and the child was your child, but
she has not been married a whole year yet to John!"

Denzil answered nothing--he pressed his mother's hand.

She returned the pressure:

"We will talk no more about it."

"And you will go on being kind?"

"Of course."

Before they reached the hospital door in Park Lane Mrs. Ardayre had been
instructed to send an immediate telegram the moment the baby was born,
and to comfort and take care of Amaryllis, and tell her son every little
detail as to her welfare and about the child.

"I will try not to form any opinion, Denzil; and some day perhaps things
will be made plain, for it would break my heart to believe that you are a
dishonourable man."

"You need not worry, Mum dearest. Indeed, I am not that. It is just a
tragic story, but I cannot say more. Only take care of Amaryllis, and
send me news as often as you can."

* * * * *

The telegram to say that Amaryllis had a little son came to John Ardayre
on the night before he went into the trenches again at the second battle
of Ypres on May 9th, 1915. He had been waiting in feverish impatience
and expectancy all the day, and, in fact, for three days for news.

His whole inner life since that New Year's night had been strangely
serene, in spite of its frightful outward turmoil and stress. He had
taken the tumult of Neuve Chapelle calmly, and had come through it and
all the beginning of the Ypres battle without a scratch. He had felt that
he was looking upon it all from some detached standpoint, and that it in
no way personally concerned him.

He had seen Denzil do the splendid thing and he had felt a distinct
distress when he had seen him fall wounded.

Denzil was just back now and in the trenches again with the rest of the
dismounted cavalry. They might meet in the attack at dawn.

When John read the telegram from his aunt, Lady de la Paule, his emotion
was so great that he staggered a little, and a friend standing by in the
billet took out his flask and gave him some brandy, thinking that he must
have received bad news.

Then it seemed as though he went mad!

The repression of his life appeared to fall from him, he became as a new
man. All his comrades were astonished at him, and a Scotch Corporal was
heard to remark that it was "na canny--the Captain was fey."

The Ardayres were saved! The family would carry on!

Fondest love welled up in his heart for Amaryllis. If he only came
through he would devote his life to showing her his gratitude and
showering everything upon her that her heart could desire--and
perhaps--perhaps the joy of the baby would make up for the absence of
Denzil. This thought stayed with him and comforted him.

Lady de la Paule had wired:

"A splendid little son born 11:45 A.M. seventh May--Amaryllis
well--all love."

And an hour or two before this Denzil had also received the news from his
Mother. He, too, had grown exalted and thanked God.

So the day that the Germans were to fail at Ypres, and destiny was to
accomplish itself for these two men--dawned.

* * * * *

Of what use to write of that terrible fight and of the gas and the horror
and the mud? John Ardayre seemed to bear a charmed life as he led his men
"over the top." For an hour wild with exaltation and gladness, he rallied
them and cheered them on. The scene of blood and carnage has been too
often repeated on other fateful days, and as often well described, when
acts of glorious heroism occurred again and again. John had rushed
forward to succour a wounded trooper when a shell crashed near them, and
he fell to the ground. And then he know what the great thing was the New
Year had promised him. For death was going to straighten out
matters--John was going beyond. Well, he had never been rebellious, and
he knew now that light had come. But the sky above seemed to be darkening
curiously, and the terrible noise to be growing dim, when he was
conscious that a man was crawling towards him, dragging a leg, and then
his eyes opened wildly for an instant, and he saw that it was Denzil all
covered with blood.

"Are we both going West, Denzil?" he demanded faintly. "At least I am--"
then he gasped a little, while a stream of scarlet flowed from his
shattered side.

"I've asked you in a letter to marry Amaryllis immediately--if you get
home. I hope your number is not up, too, because she will be all alone.
Take care of her, Denzil, and take care of the child...." His voice grew
lower and lower, and the last words came in spasms: "There is an Ardayre
son, you know--so it's all right. The family is saved from Ferdinand and
I am very glad to die."

Denzil tried to get out his flask, but before he could reach John's lips
with it he saw that it would be of no avail--for Death had claimed the
head of the Family. And above his mangled body John's face wore a look of
calm serenity, and his firm lips smiled.

Then things became all vague for Denzil and he remembered nothing more.




CHAPTER XIX


It was more than two months before Denzil was well enough to be brought
from Boulogne, and then he had a relapse and for the whole of July was
dangerously ill. At one moment there seemed to be no hope of saving his
leg, and his mother ate her heart out with anxiety.

And Amaryllis, back at Ardayre with the little Benedict, wept many tears.

John's death had deeply grieved her. She realised his steadfast kindness
and affection for her. He had written her a letter just before the battle
had begun--a short epistle telling her calmly that the chances would be
perhaps even for any man to come out of it alive--and assuring her of his
greatest devotion.

"I know that Denzil went to see you, my dear little girl. He has told me
about it. And I know that you love each other. There is only one chance
for us in the future--and that lies with the child. It may be that when
it comes to you it may fill your life and satisfy you. This is my
prayer--otherwise we must see what can be arranged about things; because
I cannot allow you to be unhappy. You were an innocent factor in all
this, and it would be unjust that you should be hurt."

How good and generous John had always been.

And his letter to his lawyers! To make things smooth for her--and for
Denzil--how marvellously kind!

Her mourning for John was real and deep, as it would have been for a
brother. But during the month of intense anxiety about Denzil everything
else was numbed, even her interest in her son.

By the end of August he was out of danger, although little hope was
entertained that he would ever walk easily. But this was a minor
thing--and gradually it began to be some consolation to the two women who
loved him to know that he was safely wounded and would probably not be
fit for active service again for a very long time.

They wrote letters to one another, but they decided not to meet.
Six months must elapse at least, they both felt--even in spite of
John's commands.

Another shell must have fallen not far off, for his body was never
found--only his field glasses, broken and battered. And there would have
been no actual information about his death had not Denzil seen him die.

* * * * *

Harietta Boleski and Stanislass and Ferdinand Ardayre had remained in
Paris, with visits to Fontainebleau.

When John had been killed, Harietta had been extremely perturbed.

"Now Stepan will be able to marry that odious bit of bread and butter,
and he is sure to do it after the year!" This thought rankled with her
and embittered everything. Nothing pleased her. She grew more than ever
rebellious at the dullness she had to live in. War was an imposition
which ought not to be tolerated and she often told Hans so. At last she
grew to take quite an interest in her spying for lack of more agreeable
things to do.

And so the months went by and November came, and a madness of jealousy
was gradually augmenting in Harietta for Amaryllis Ardayre.

Verisschenzko had gone to Russia in September, and she was convinced
that he loved Amaryllis and that the child was his child. She could not
conceive of a spiritual devotion, and something had altered all Stepan's
ways. From the moment he returned to Paris until he had left she had
tried and been unable to invoke any response in him, and she had felt
like a foiled tigress when another has eaten her prey.

As the impossibility of moving him forced itself upon her unwilling
understanding, so the wildest passion for him grew, and when he left in
September she was quite ill for a week with chagrin; then she became
moody and more than ever capricious, and made Stanislass' life a hell,
while Ferdinand Ardayre had little less misery to endure.

An incident late in November caused her jealousy to burst into flame.

She heard that Verisschenzko had returned from Russia and she went to his
rooms to see him. The Russian servant who was accustomed to receive her
was there waiting for his master who had not yet arrived. Without a word
she passed the old man when he opened the door, and made her way into the
sitting room, and then into the bedroom beyond. She did not believe that
Stepan was not there and wanted to make sure. It was empty but a light
burned before an Ikon, the doors of which were closed.

Curiosity made Harietta go close and examine it. She knew the room so
well and had never seen it there before. The table beneath it was
arranged like an altar, and the Ikon was let in to the carved boiserie of
the wall. It must have been since he had parted with her that this
ridiculous thing had been done! She had not entered his _appartement_
since June. She felt angry that the shrine should be closed and that she
could not look upon it, for it must certainly be something which
Verisschenzko prized.

She bent nearer and shook the little doors; they resisted her, and her
temper rose. Then some force seemed to propel her to commit sacrilege.
She shook and shook and tore at the golden clasp, her irritation giving
strength and cunning to her hands; and at last the small bolt came undone
and the doors flew open--and an exquisitely painted modern picture of the
Virgin disclosed itself, holding the Christ child in her arms. But for
all the saintliness in the eyes of Mary, the face was an exact portrait
of Amaryllis Ardayre!

A frenzy of rage seized Harietta. Her rival reigned now indeed! This was
positive proof to her, not of spiritual meaning--not of the mystic,
abstract aloofness of worship which lay deep in Stepan's nature and had
caused him to have Amaryllis transfigured into the symbol of purity, a
daily reminder that she must always be for him the lady of his soul--such
things had no meaning for Harietta. The Ikon was merely a material proof
that Verisschenzko loved Amaryllis--and, of course, as soon as the year
of mourning should be over he would make her his wife.

She trembled with passionate resentment. Nothing had ever moved her so
forcibly. She took out her pearl hatpin and stabbed out the eyes of the
Virgin, almost shaking with passion, and scratched and obliterated the
face of the Christ child. This done, she extinguished the little lamp and
slammed to the doors.

She laughed savagely as she went back into the sittingroom.

"The Virgin indeed!--and _his_ child!--well, I've taught him!" and she
flung past the Russian servant with a look which was a curse, so that the
old man crossed himself and quickly barred the entrance door, when she
stamped off down the stairs.

Arrived in her gilded salon at the Universal, she would like to have
wrung some one's neck. She had never been so full of rage in her life.
She did find a little satisfaction in a kick at Fou-Chow, who fled
whining to his faithful Marie who had come in to carry away her mistress'
sable cloak.

The maid's face became thunderous. A look of sullen hate gleamed in her
dark eyes.

"She will kick thee, my angel, just once too often," she murmured to the
wee creature when she had carried him from the room. "And then we shall
see, thy Marie knows that which may punish her some day soon!"

Harietta, quite indifferent to these matters, telephoned immediately to
Ferdinand Ardayre.

He must come to her instantly without a moment's delay! And she
stamped her foot.

A plan which might give her some satisfaction to execute had evolved
itself in her brain.

He was in his room in another part of the building, and hastened to obey
her command. She was livid with anger and seemed to have grown old.

She went over and kissed him voluptuously and then she began:

"Ferdie," and she whispered hoarsely, "now you have got to do something
for me. You are not going to let the child of Verisschenzko be master of
Ardayre! We are going to gain time and perhaps some day be able to do
away with it. Now I have got a plan which will lighten your heart."

She knew that she could count upon him, for since the birth of the
little Benedict and the death of John, Ferdinand had stormed with threats
of vengeance, while knowing his impotency.

His life with Harietta had grown a torment and a hell--but with every
fresh unkindness and pang of jealousy she caused him, his low passion for
her increased. He knew that she loved Verisschenzko, whom he hated with
all his might--and if she now proposed to hurt both his enemies, he would
assist her joyfully.

"Tell it me," he begged.

So she drew him to the sofa and picked up a block and pencil.

"Do you possess any of the writing of your dead brother, John, or if you
don't, can you get some from anywhere?"

Ferdinand's face blazed with excitement. What was she going to suggest?

"I always keep one letter--in which he ordered me never to address him
and told me I was not of his blood but was a mongrel Turk."

"That is splendid--where is it? Have you got it here?"

"Yes, in my despatch box. I'll go and fetch it now."

"Very well. I will get rid of Stanislass for the evening and we can have
some hours alone--and you will see if I don't help you to worry them
hideously, Ferdie, even if that is all we can do!"

And when he had left her presence, she paced the room excitedly.

"It will prevent Stepan's marrying her at all events for; a long time."

The thought that she had lost Verisschenzko completely unbalanced her.
It was the first time in her life that she had had to relinquish a man.
She hated to have to realise how highly he must hold Amaryllis. He seemed
the only thing she wanted now in life, and she knew that he was quite
beyond her, and that indeed he had never been hers; the one human being
whom she had attracted and yet never been able to intoxicate and draw
against his will. She went over all their past meetings. With what
supreme insolence he had invariably treated her--even in moments when he
permitted himself to feel passion! And how she adored him! She would have
crawled to him now on the ground. She had not known she could feel so
much. Every animal, sensual desire made her throb with rage. She would
have torn the flesh from Amaryllis' face had she been there, and thrust
her hatpin into her real eyes.

But the spoke should be put in the wheel of Verisschenzko's marrying her!
And perhaps some other revenge would come. Hans?--Hans should be made to
carry the scheme through--Hans and Ferdinand. She dug her nails into the
palms of her hands. No wild animal in its cage could have felt more rage.

Then when Ferdinand returned with John's letter, she controlled herself
and sat down at the table beside him and supervised his attempts at
copying the writing, while she unfolded the details of her scheme.

"You know John's body was never found," she informed him presently. "I
heard all the details from a man who was there--they only picked up his
glasses and his boot. He could very well have been taken prisoner by the
Germans and be in hospital there, too ill to have written for all this
time. Now think how he ought to word his first letter to his precious
bread and butter wife!"

"There must only be the fewest words, because I don't know what
terms they were on. I think a postcard, if we get one, would be the
best thing."

"Of course?--I have some one who can see to that--it will be worth
waiting the week for--we'll procure several, and meanwhile you must
practise his hand."

At the end of half an hour a very creditable forgery had been secured,
and the two jealous beings felt satisfied with their work for the time.

Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

We all want to be happy, we want our children to be happy, and there are countless books advising us how to achieve happiness. But is this really what we should be aiming for?

"A fly bothers me, I kill it: you kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer."

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

^'He was not to be described as a happy person," Diana Trilling wrote in a memoir about her husband, the critic Lionel Trilling. "Indeed, he thought poorly of happiness and of people who claimed to be happy or desired happiness above other gratifications in life . . . seriousness was the desirable condition of man." It is easy to make all sorts of assumptions about why an unhappy person would not value happiness; and indeed why seriousness might be seen as an alternative to happiness; or just to say that it was seriousness that made Trilling happy. One of the ways in which happiness is made to seem like an inclusive ideal – the ways it charms us – is by our asserting that by definition the things that matter most to us must make us happy, that that is how we know they are good. It's as though one word could do the work of the moral imagination.

Or can we just say that if happiness is one's aspiration, then learning about the history of the slave trade, say, or watching the news, or indeed ageing are all to be avoided. And yet learning about the terrible things people can do to each other, and the history of the terrible things people have done to each other, is important – we can't imagine a life without it – and gives some people a great deal of pleasure; pleasure, as psychoanalysts might say, of various kinds. Anyone who has or knows children, or remembers being a child, will know how happy it can make them tormenting their siblings. And so if we value happiness we can't help but wonder what morality it entails, what kind of morality it might involve us in.

It is not surprising, in other words, that happiness has always had rather a mixed reception. No one in their right minds we might think, especially now, would be promoting unhappiness; and yet the promotion, the preferring of happiness – the assumption of a right to happiness – brings with it a lot of things we might not like. And the desire for happiness may reveal things about ourselves that we like even less. "A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy," the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote.

What are we going to have to do, what are we going to have to become, what are we going to have to renounce or ignore if we want to be happy? Or if we are to propose happiness, or its pursuit, as some kind of right? We tend to make rights of things we assume to be in short supply, things perpetually under threat. Wherever there is scarcity now human rights are asserted; and the assertion of rights is reactive to a sense of scarcity deemed to be needless. Or, to put it slightly differently, calling something a right can be a way of rhetorically enforcing an important wish, a way of making a wish sound important.

I want to begin with three fairly obvious propositions that are also misgivings about the right to happiness or its pursuit. And I'd like to suggest that the right to frustration may be more useful and interesting – more enlivening – than the right to happiness. That's to say I want to waylay the common, all-too-plausible idea that the solution to frustration is satisfaction, or that happiness is the answer to unhappiness, or that if we get rid of the bad things, the good things will start happening. Happiness and the right to pursue it are sometimes wildly unrealistic as ideals; and, because wildly unrealistic, unconsciously self-destructive.

Because happiness is not always the kind of thing that can be pursued, we should view it, more often than not, as a lucky side effect but not a calculable or calculated end. Making it such an end all too easily brings out the worst in us. If this is a version, to rewrite John Lennon's famous line, of "happiness is what happens to you when you are doing something else", it also suggests that scarcity is integral to a sense of reality; that we should be thinking of what Philip Larkin in "Born Yesterday" called "a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness" rather than the engineering of it.

Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting; because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness – as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards – may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us.

My three fairly obvious propositions are: first, in Freud's formulation from Civilisation and its Discontents, "happiness is something essentially subjective" (subjective I take it, in the sense of being not only personal but idiosyncratic). We can be surprised by what makes us happy, and it will not necessarily be something that makes other people happy. This has significant consequences not least in the area of our lives that is sometimes conducive to happiness, sexuality. And this makes happiness as a social or communal pursuit complicated. We have only to imagine what it would be for someone to propose that we had a right to sexual satisfaction to imagine both how we might contrive this and what terrible things might be done in its name.

Second, bad things can make us happy – and by bad things I mean things consensually agreed to be unacceptable. It clearly makes some people happy to live in a world without Jews, or homosexuals, or immigrants, and so on. There are also what we might call genuinely bad things, like seriously harming people and other animals, that gives some people the pleasure they most crave. I remember a very unhappy boy of 10 telling me in a psychotherapy session that he was only happy when he was cutting the feet off rats that he had caught. He said it made him feel "really awake", that it was like "turning on the light in your favourite room in the world". Cruelty and humiliation make some people happy, perhaps lots of people happy some of the time; and this issue is not dealt with merely by saying that they are not really happy or that they are in some way perverse or sick. We tend to pathologise the forms of happiness we cannot bear. If we are to have a right to happiness or to its pursuit – two different things – we must then acknowledge the full range of things that make people happy. This means taking them at their word. Cruelty can make people happy. And we might then want to think about what problem, or rather problems, happiness is deemed to be the solution to. It is not, for example, incidental to our predicament that so many of our pleasures are, or are felt to be, forbidden (this is what Freud's account of the Oedipus complex is a way of thinking about). So put briefly – as every child and therefore every adult knows – being bad can make you happy. Happiness is subjective, it takes many forms, and one of its forms is immorality.

Last but not least – though the least exciting – is the third point: some people like being unhappy. Indeed for some people their lives can be construed as the pursuit of unhappiness. It is astounding the lengths to which some people will go to be unhappy, to contrive their own misery, as though happiness itself were a phobic object and held terrors. And we don't talk of the right to be unhappy, when we should. Unhappiness can, after all, among many other things, be the registration of injustice or loss. At its best, a culture committed to the pursuit of happiness might be committed, say, to the diminishing of injustice; but at its worst, the culture of happiness may proscribe a whole range of feelings and perceptions.

It is sometimes said that psychoanalysis is one of the last places in the culture where people are allowed to be unhappy. And clearly psychoanalysis protects, if it does not actually foster, a person's right to be unhappy. The subjectivity of happiness, what it is that the individual really loves and gets pleasure from, the immorality of pleasures and the lure of transgression, happiness as a perversion, the fear of pleasure and the masochistic solution – all this is the material of psychoanalysis, and not only of psychoanalysis.

Yet, historically, psychoanalysis is the inheritor of a set of political propositions it would seem to be at odds with; or at least at a very odd angle to. If Freud and happiness doesn't sound like a very promising subject, Freud and rights seems even less so (there's only one reference to the rights of man in Freud's work). Rights, like class, have never really been the thing for psychoanalysis; omissions, one would think, of some significance. Don't have much confidence in the so-called rights of man, Freud seems to say in his New Introductory Lectures; they are no match for the ferocity of inner morality – the super-ego, or "conscience". The whole business of rights only turns up when the individual, the melancholic individual, is briefly released from his internal regime ("For after a certain number of months the whole moral fuss is over, the criticism of the superego is silent, the ego is rehabilitated and again enjoys all the rights of man till the next attack.") Morality, at least in these patients, is periodic, as are the rights of man, the gift, as it were of a higher power.

"Our normal sense of guilt," Freud writes, "is the expression of the tension between the ego and the super-ego". This translates as: our happiness depends on the distance between who we are and who we should be according to the dictates of our internalised morality. We are mostly unhappy because we are rarely as we should be. When the internal authorities are so implacable and sadistic — over-severe, abusive, humiliating, as Freud writes — what are the possibilities for happiness?

The right to happiness, or to its pursuit, would mean the right to a generous super-ego, the right to a super-ego that was on the side of one's pleasure: one that promoted the view that feeling alive was more important than being right or good. It is one of Freud's more horrifying ironies that the pursuit of pleasure incites, calls up, the super-ego. And, of course, when and if pleasure is forbidden its pursuit requires punishment. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Virtue has to be its own reward. To pursue pleasure is to be pursued by punishment. There is no one more moralistic, more coercive, than a hedonist.

As the right to happiness or its pursuit is my subject, and I am by training a child psychotherapist, all this is by way of a lengthy preamble to putting together the famous sentence from Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence with something from the paediatrician and psychoanalyst DW Winnicott's story about child development. I want to ask what, if anything, the right to happiness or its pursuit has to do with the child's development; whether Jefferson's founding declaration has anything to do with the declaration of independence that is the child's personal development.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Some of us might not believe in the Creator part now, and some of us might find more and more difficult the idea that people are born equal when the conditions in which they are born are manifestly so unequal; and most of us would want to assume that by "men" Jefferson meant "people". And yet, as many people have noted, the pursuit of happiness – something not mentioned in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, nor in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – seems peculiarly salient; it is the only one of the things listed that is a pursuit.

What exactly might it mean to have an "unalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness", given that it is fairly obvious that the pursuit of happiness is so morally equivocal – could be, among other things, a threat to the society that promoted it? At first sight it seems to be a pretty good idea; if we are convinced of anything now we are convinced that we are pleasure-seeking creatures, who want to minimise the pain and frustration of our lives. Or at least a "we" could be consolidated around these beliefs. We are the creatures who, possibly unlike any other animal, pursue happiness. But the pursuit of happiness, like the pursuit of liberty – the utopian political projects of the 20th century – has legitimated some of the worst crimes of contemporary history across the political spectrum.

In Jefferson's Declaration, the art critic Dave Hickey has noted, "Happiness is not assured, but its pursuit is protected . . . the government will act to ensure our safety, and it will stand back as we act on our own behalf in the 'pursuit of happiness'. When that pursuit putatively threatens our safety the government invariably steps in. Safety trumps happiness, the government always wins." It is not too much of a stretch here to see, in this account, the government as the parents, and the citizens as adolescent children; the governmental parents protect the pursuit of happiness, but prioritise safety. The developing child pursues his own happiness under the rules and conditions provided by the adults. Children cannot bring themselves up, and children cannot bring up children (in Lord of the Flies the question recurs: "are there any adults?").

If it is said, or written, that we have a right to be happy or to pursue happiness, it is assumed that happiness is something we are capable of, something that is available, if certain obstacles are removed. If liberty is there when tyranny is taken away, happiness is there when whatever makes us unhappy is removed. From a pragmatic point of view the art of a good life involves removing the obstacles to happiness; the picture, if we visualise it, is of something looked for, something looked forward to, and of there being something in the way. And this something in the way could be called an unavailable mother, a prohibitive father, competing sibling, not having enough brains or beauty, or charm, or money, or education, or luck. We would get closer to our happiness were these things acquired; and a reality sense would be something to do with acknowledging which of these things cannot be acquired. It is all about, in short, our relation to obstacles; our distinguishing the intractable from the changeable, what we have to acknowledge from what we can influence; whether our desire is forbidden or not – whether we want a cream cake or another man's wife. It is, in pragmatic terms, about knowing what is possible. And everybody, it seems, is shadowed by an imaginary other person, a lucky counterpart, who gets all the happiness going; Lacan writes of "the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality". This other person presumably enjoys his happiness, his super-abundant vitality with no conflict, with no thought of safety, with no consideration of the rules and conditions required by the good of the rest.

A right to the pursuit of happiness must be a right to remove the obstacles to happiness. This, at least, is the logic of the case. The man called the happiness tsar, Lord Layard, says we now know what makes children happy (the book he co-authored last year is called A Good Childhood). What, then, are the obstacles to the child's happiness, and why can't we set about trying to remove them? And some of them we can remove. But what if the so-called obstacles to happiness are, or sometimes are, among the things that matter most to us? If, say, we love both luxury and justice? What if two mutually exclusive things make us happy, and one has to be abrogated? And what if some obstacles are immovable, untransformable into anything other than obstacles?

There is something about the sexual drive, Freud suggested, that makes it intrinsically unsatisfiable. There are not infinite resources of food, of energy, of medicine. It is, for example, true, as every mother knows, that the mother cannot give the child everything that he wants, and that if she could it wouldn't be what he wanted. That everyone feels left out of something. It is misleading to think that one's parents have been the obstacle to one's happiness, even if they have radically thwarted it. Indeed we might end up thinking that a right to irresolvable conflict might be the most realistic right we could come up with. That the attempt to resolve at least some conflicts was a distraction from finding better ways of living them; that the right to pursue happiness has seduced us into pursuing happiness when we could have been doing something better.

If the alternative to happiness is not, in the binary way, unhappiness; and if happiness has become so insidious, so hypnotic a single end for a good life, why have we wanted this strange narrowing of our intent? What have we lost, or forgotten, or ignored, or paid insufficient attention to, or protected ourselves from by wanting happiness? Happiness, it would seem, is the most plausible of our aims in life. But what psychoanalysis can chip in with here is that we are at our most defensive when we are at our most plausible.

One of the other things we most want is to be able to feel frustrated; to register what we feel deprived of. Frustration issues in many things only one of which is happiness; and happiness can be, at its worst, a pre-emptive strike against frustration, a refuge from it rather than any kind of productive, unpredictable transformation of it. If we want to talk of a right to pursue happiness there needs to be a prior right, as it were, to feel frustration; to be able to bear and to bear with a sense of what is lacking in one's life. And not simply because frustration makes satisfaction possible in the way that hunger can make a meal delicious. But because frustration and satisfaction do not only or always have a logical, a causal, a pragmatic relationship with one another. Or to put it rather more obviously, what we are lacking when we are unhappy is not always happiness, any more than what an alcoholic is lacking is a drink. And proposing a right to the pursuit of happiness may seduce us, by a kind of word-magic, into thinking that happiness is just the thing.

It is of interest that when Winnicott writes about deprivation in children he too talks about rights. "Let us consider the meaning of the anti-social act," he writes in a paper called "The Deprived Child": "for instance, stealing. When a child steals what is sought . . . is not the object stolen; what is sought is the person, the mother from whom the child has the right to steal because she is the mother. In fact every infant at the start can truly claim the right to steal from the mother because the infant invented the mother, thought her up, created her out of an innate capacity to love."

For Winnicott, the child makes the mother he needs and gradually, through disillusionment and hatred, disentangles her, to some extent, from the mother she happens to be. But it is "the mother from whom the child has the right to steal because she is the mother" that I want to consider. Because the thing stolen is not quite or even nearly the thing wanted – which is not a thing, but a mother – it can never satisfy. What we have is a picture of the right to pursue happiness getting stuck, something I think it is prone to do; as though there is something about the pursuit of happiness that sponsors and endorses addiction. In this sense, consumer capitalism is a system tailor-made for deprived children.

The theft requires communicable translation; it requires, as it were, someone to be able to say, or otherwise communicate what it is that is really being pursued. In Winnicott's declaration the child has a right to the pursuit of a mother to get what he needs for his development. He is entitled to a mother; she belongs to him in the sense that his own development belongs to him. A good-enough mother or parents might give you the wherewithal for your pursuit of happiness; they might have backed your desire, helped you to believe in and not only be fearful of your pleasures. But it is more complicated than this. Lives are not the kind of things that can be guaranteed by mothers. And this is where the idea of a right to pursue one's own happiness becomes more interesting.

Do children want to be happy? And if they don't want to be happy what else might they want to be? This would seem to be of some importance because they are growing up in a world in which their parents mostly want them to be happy, or at least don't like them being unhappy, admittedly for a variety of different reasons. And by a world I mean the particular cultures for whom happiness has become the preferred object, or the preferred fetish. Children are supposed to be anti-depressants for their parents.

Happiness is something parents often demand of their children; we, as we say, want our children to be happy; we were once children who's parents wanted us to be happy. And that means the whole spectrum, from not being a worry to them, not making their lives more difficult, being curative of their woes, to the pleasure our parents could take in our pleasure and our wellbeing. We are more dependent on our children than they are on us; and we are dependent, in brief, on their happiness. What makes the child happy is not going to be unlinked to what makes the parents happy. Clearly if a parent lives as if their child has a right to happiness, or a right to its pursuit, and that they are the guardians of this right, they are going to have a difficult, an even more difficult, task on their hands. Lovers often feel that they should be making each other happy when they are in fact making themselves a problem to each other.

So by way of conclusion I want to suggest that a right to the pursuit of happiness is asserted when a capacity for absorption has been sabotaged, when there is a loss of confidence in people's passions. Happiness becomes important when the possibility for absorption is under threat. That the child does not want to be happy – or perhaps, more exactly, the child doesn't want only to be happy – the child wants first to be safe, and then to be absorbed. There are, for example, only two reasons for children to go to school – apart, that is, from acquiring the werewithal to earn a living: to make friends, and to see if they can find something of absorbing interest to themselves.

There is an interesting moment in Lord of the Flies when Henry, one of the "littluns", wanders away from the main group of children. "He went down to the beach and busied himself at the water's edge." William Golding writes: "There were creatures that lived in this last fling of the sea, tiny transparencies that came questing in with the water over the hot, dry sand. With impalpable organs of sense they examined this new field. Perhaps food had appeared where the last incursion there had been none . . . This was fascinating to Henry. He poked about with a bit of stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a vagrant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers . . . He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things."

The adult narrator can see Henry as in some way identified with these rudimentary scavengers; and the narrator intimates that without adults the children feel how much is out of control or under-controlled. And then there is the remarkable sentence: "He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things." He feels himself exercising control, but he is not, and his absorption is beyond, in excess of, mere happiness. Something else is wanted more than happiness by Henry, and it seems to be the exercise of control over living things, one of which is himself. It would be easy, and partly true, to say that what Henry is absorbed by here, what is beyond mere happiness, is power, control over living things. But Golding is clear about two things; it is an illusion of power – Golding refers to Henry having "the illusion of mastery" – and it is also the absorption itself that is beyond mere happiness. "He became absorbed beyond mere happiness." It is an illusion that absorbs him beyond happiness; in other words, he is playing. Absorption is not in and of itself a moral good; in the novel the tyrannical, sadistic Jack absorbs the attention of a lot of the children who do his bidding. But in proposing, in the context of the novel, that there is a beyond to mere happiness, something else or further that is wanted; and that indeed happiness may be a poor substitute for something else, that happiness may be something that can get in the way of whatever is beyond it; by proposing this Golding is saying something about what can override the pursuit of happiness, and what may be lost in its pursuit. For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. The child is fobbed off with happiness when what she really wants is to get her appetite back. The right to the pursuit of happiness can be a cover story for the wish to hide.

Author, author: Sue Townsend aka Adrian Mole

Gabriel Josipovici's essay is a welcome counterblast in conservative times, says Tom McCarthy

That modernism represents one of the great seismic shifts in the history of western literature wouldn't be disputed by any literary professors who know their onions. What they find it harder to agree on is when that shift begins and what exactly it consists of – in short, what modernism, properly speaking, is. Gabriel Josipovici, former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford and currently a star turn in the graduate school of humanities at Sussex, eschews both the definitions usually proffered by cultural historians of a Marxist bent (that it was a reaction to industrialisation or to a crisis among the bourgeoisie) and the humanist ones given by liberals (that it was an era of unbridled self-expression), not to mention the dismissive ones put out by conservatives (that it was all a bit of silliness we've thankfully got over now). In their stead he ventures, at the outset of this book-length essay, a more essential formula: that modernism should be understood as "a coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities".

Herein lie both the strength and weakness of the argument that follows. The disadvantage of such a general characterisation is that these terms apply as much to Shakespeare as to Joyce: think of the self-reflectiveness of so much of the former's work, from Hamlet's disruptive (and disrupted) play-within-a-play to the sonnets' constant awareness of form and its limits. They apply even to Ovid: what do the "Pygmalion" or "Orpheus" sequences of Metamorphoses enact if not allegories of art's fragile status and responsibilities? The advantage is that Josipovici knows this, and uses the knowledge as a cue to drag the cursor way back, tracing the tendency that comes to a head in the "high" modernist period (the early 20th century) through the Romantics to the reformation and beyond.

Thus Cervantes's Don Quixote is, both lucidly and utterly correctly, identified as a far more "modern" work than many more recent offerings – modern in the fraught relationship it maintains with its own narrative modes, the way it orchestrates a sense of disenchantment or erosion of the sacred, and, most of all, the way its main "adventure" becomes one of reading and writing. Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashion – as a template for an anti-humanist worldview: what matters is not the individual but the house, or oikos, from which he emerges and of which he forms no more than an iteration. It's an insight that helps us to understand (although Josipovici doesn't mention him) why that arch-modernist William Faulkner delves, in Attic style, through generations of the Compson family, trawling their dwindling estate for residues of buried history. From that other Greek unit of measure, the polis or city-state, Josipovici derives a modern aesthetic of interconnectedness, of man as a diminished agent operating within systems that exceed him.

Interconnectedness is a feature of this book, providing not only one of its central themes but also its discursive method. A typical paragraph will zap us from Dürer to Mann to Flaubert to Dostoevsky in order to make a point about Kierkegaard. It can disorient at times, but the associative or digressive approach is the right one for the task. What I'm not so sure about is the overall "pitch". Josipovici is a formidable scholar whose The World and the Book I remember being a landmark text when I was studying literature. But there he was writing in academic mode, with a certain critical framework and its attendant permissions taken for granted; here, he's shifted into a more populist mode, and it doesn't always play to his advantage. Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most. Rather than celebrate the subversive energies of Luigi Nono's opera Prometeo, for example, he tries to sell it to the Glyndebourne crowd by claiming that it leaves us "with a sense of sorrow and of wonder and, at an even deeper level, a sense of having bathed in the waters of life". The sentiment is just that: sentimental. While the impetus behind it is profound, it ends up sounding trite.

Josipovici has never been a fellow traveller of any school or fashion. His points of contact here, as in his other work, are original, at times idiosyncratic. To use Kierkegaard rather than the more obvious Nietzsche to explain the vertiginous, abyss-gazing disposition of most modernist works is refreshing. To choose Wordsworth as a historical model for what a truly modernist-inspired contemporary literature might be seems odd, to say the least; wouldn't Laurence Sterne or Gerard Manley Hopkins make much better heroes? And to trot out the old canard that equates Flaubert with naturalist realism is just wrong. The Flaubert who wrote Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two Quixotic figures re-enact gestures from book illustrations in vain bids for imagined authenticity, before the narrative gives over to a "dictionary of received ideas" whose authorship is never clear? The Flaubert who wrote The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which phantasms shake and rivet a disintegrating consciousness that yearns "to become matter"? Come on.

What can't be faulted is the plaintive logic running through this book. In cultural terms, we live in deeply conservative times. Editors at several major publishing houses have to run novels' synopses past reader focus groups before being allowed to publish them; "literary" festivals feature newsreaders and other media personalities. We shouldn't imagine, though, that things were that different in the golden age of modernism. Ulysses was printed, in 1922, on a small, private press in Paris, in a run of 1,000; Kafka's Metamorphosis, on its small-press publication in 1915, sold 11 copies – of which 10 were bought by Kafka. Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915? Of course not. That alone should give Josipovici comfort.

Tom McCarthy's C (Cape) is on the Booker longlist.

David Grossman and the new publishing season

'I read Tony Blair A Journey all night and into the early hours. At 5.10am I had a revelation. Mr Blair surrounded himself with Alpha Males'

Wednesday 1st September

Dear Diary,

Woken early by an employee of Parcel Force. He was a Chinese bloke and asked if I was "Mr Occupier!" I said I was Mr Adrian Albert Mole. He was holding a squarish, heavy-looking parcel. I hoped it was the wooden Japanese neck-pillow I had ordered from Innovations many months ago.

After a chilly doorstep wrangle (the wind was blowing through the fly of my pyjamas, directly on to my prostate), I managed to persuade him to hand the package over and went inside. When I opened it at the kitchen table I was shocked to find Tony Blair's face staring up at me with the words, Tony Blair A Journey. Inside was a House of Commons acknowledgments slip from Pandora:

Aidy darling,

Had a brief disastrous affair with a bookshop manager – he left his wife and turned up at my apartment with his ghastly suitcases and a hyperactive boy-child called Plato. He has promised me free books for life. I know you are obsessed with TB so enjoy this advance copy.

After a struggle to control my jealous rage I started to read.

As I ploughed through the acknowledgments I could not help but reflect that, had I had 26 people to help me with my own books I might have had at least one published by now.

My own semi-autobiographical novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland has been with Hutchinson for two and a half years.

At 11am my mother came in from next door to "borrow" yet more teabags (she already owes me 17). On seeing Mr Blair's cover photograph she began to sniffle: "He was so full of promise," she said, "And look at him now, he's a broken bulrush in the River Nile of life."

I went to the lavatory and was in there for some time. When I returned my mother was engrossed in the book and my father had let himself into the house and was rummaging through my fridge (God! I should never have installed those wheelchair ramps which allow him easy access to my house).

I went into my bedroom to get dressed and came back to find my father eating the cold custard from last night's dinner. My mother looked up from A Journey and said: "He writes that he came very near to having a drinking problem."

My father said: "A pisshead yeah? What was he on?"

My mother said: "A gin and tonic and two glasses of wine over dinner."

My father sneered. "A gin and tonic and two glasses of wine? He's a bleedin' amateur." He put the empty custard jug back in the fridge and lit a cigarette.

He said: "Now, if he was crawling in the gutter in Downing Street, screaming at the moon and trying to fight a policeman on the door of Number 10, then yes, I'd agree he did have a drink problem."

He tapped cigarette ash into the ashtray that had been welded on to the arm of his wheelchair.

Thursday 2nd September

Dear Diary,

I read A Journey all night and into the early hours. At 5.10am I had a revelation. Mr Blair surrounded himself with Alpha Males: Alastair Campbell, Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett, Philip Gould, Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson, yet he was not an Alpha Male himself. He was a receptacle and a conduit of their wishes and opinions. Mr Blair had as much self-belief as a chameleon.

I remembered that when he returned to London after a long period in the United States he had an American accent, much like that of his fellow Christian and friend, Sir Cliff Richard.

I am not a trained psychologist but I am wise beyond my 40 years and think that I have discovered why Mr Blair was so keen to become a war leader and to swagger alongside George Bush. He thought it would give him another pair of testicles and would promote him to Alpha Maleness.

At 1.30pm I took A Journey round to my parents' house and said: "I've finished it."

"What?" said my mother, "You've read all 718 pages? It's impossible."

I reminded her that I was a speed reader and had read War and Peace in two days.

"What's your method?" she said suspiciously.

"I skip over the adverbs and adjectives," I said.

I left them fighting over who was to read A Journey first and went to my desk to write a stern letter to Hutchinson, demanding that my own book, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, be published tout suite:

Dear Hutchinson,

My friend and confidante Dr Pandora Braithwaite BA, MA, D phil, advanced me a copy of Tony Blair A Journey (incidentally I notice with sorrow that Dr Braithwaite's name does not appear in the index, though she has spoken to me at length many times about the long and intimate conversations she had with Mr Blair into the early hours). I congratulate you on your sales of the above book, which brings me to the subject of Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland. Apart from an acknowledgment slip some time in 2007 which said: 'Your manuscript arrived at our office today. However, it may be sometime before we can get back to you', I have heard nothing from you and warn you that unless you promise me a publication date, I will take the manuscript back and offer it to Penguin.

Yours,

Adrian A Mole

PS Mr Blair uses too many emotive adjectives and he could do with taking a red pen to his adverbs also.