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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things




"Yes, there is some scent from it. One perceives it at first and then it
goes off. Oh, Stepan, please do not torture me. Can you be quite sure?"

"I am absolutely certain that whether it is in John's writing or not,
Ferdinand, or some one who uses his unique scent, has touched that card.
Now we must investigate everything."

He walked up and down the room in agitation for a few moments; talking
rapidly to himself--half in Russian--Amaryllis caught bits.
"Ferdinand--how to his advantage? None. What then? Harietta?
Harietta--but why for her?"

Then he sat down and stared into the fire, his yellow-green eyes blazing
with intelligence, his clear brain balancing up things. But now he did
not speak his thoughts aloud.

"She is jealous. I remember--she imagined that it is my child. She
believes I may marry Amaryllis. It is as plain as day!"

He jumped up and excitedly held out his hands.

"Let us fetch Denzil," he cried joyously. "I can explain everything."

Amaryllis left the room swiftly and called when she got outside his door:

"Denzil--do come."

He joined them in a second or two--there as he was, in a blue silk
dressing gown, as he had just been going to dress for dinner.

He looked from one face to the other anxiously and Stepan
immediately spoke.

"I think that the card is a forgery, Denzil. I believe it to have been
written by Ferdinand Ardayre--at the instigation of Harietta Boleski.
She would have means to obtain the postcard, and have it sent through
Holland too."

"But why--why should she?" Amaryllis exclaimed in wonderment. "What
possible reason could she have for wishing to be so cruel to us. We were
always very nice to her, as you know."

Verisschenzko laughed cynically.

"She was jealous of you all the same. But Denzil, I track it by the
scent. I know Ferdinand uses that scent," he held out the card. "Smell."

Denzil sniffed as Amaryllis had done.

"It is so faint I should not have remarked it unless you had told me--but
I daresay if it was a scent one had smelt before, one would be struck by
it! But how are you going to prove it, Stepan? We shall have to have
convincing proof--because I am the only witness of poor John's death, and
it could easily be said that I am too deeply interested to be reliable.
For God's sake, old friend, think of some way of making a certainty."

"I have a way which I can enforce as soon as I reach Paris. Meanwhile say
nothing to any one and put the thought of it out of your heads. The
evidence of your own eyes convinced you that John is dead; you found it
difficult to accept that he was alive even when seeing what appeared to
be his own writing, but if I assure you that this is forged you can be at
peace. Is it not so?"

Amaryllis' lips were trembling; the shock and then this counter
shock were unhinging her. She was horrified at herself that she
should not catch at every straw to prove John was alive, instead of
feeling some sense of relief when Verisschenzko protested that the
postcard was a forgery.

Poor John! Good, and kind, and unselfish. It was all too agitating. But
was just life such a very great thing? She knew that had she the choice
she would rather be dead than separated now from Denzil. And if John were
really to be alive--what misery he would be obliged to suffer, knowing
the situation.

"Quite apart from what to me is a convincing proof, the scent,"
Verisschenzko went on, "the card must be a forgery because of John's
seeming oblivion of the possibility that you two might have already
carried out his wishes. All this would have been very unlike him. But if
it is, as I think, Ferdinand's and Harietta Boleski's work, they would
not be likely to know that John had desired that Denzil should marry you,
Amaryllis, and so would have thought a short card with longings to see
you would be a natural thing to write. Indeed you can be at rest. And now
I will go and dress for dinner, and we will forget disturbing thoughts."

Amaryllis and Denzil will always remember Stepan's wonderful tact and
goodness to them that evening; he kept everything calm and thrilled them
all with his stories and his conversation and his own wonderfully
magnetic personality. And after dinner he played to them in the green
drawing room and, as Mrs. Ardayre said, seemed to bring peace and healing
to all their troubled souls.

But when he was alone with Denzil late, after the two women had retired
to bed, he sunk into a deep chair in the smoking room and suddenly burst
into a peal of cynical laughter.

"What the devil's up?" demanded Denzil, astonished.

"I am thinking of Harietta's exquisite mistake. She believes the baby is
mine! She is mad with a goat's jealousy; she supposes it is I who will
marry Amaryllis--hence her plot! Does it not show how the good are
protected and the evil fall into their own traps!"

"Of course! She was in love with you!"

"In love! Mon Dieu! you call that love! I mastered her body and was
unobtainable. She was never able to draw me more than a person could to
whom I should pay two hundred francs. She knew that perfectly--it enraged
her always. The threads are now completely in my hands. Conceive of it,
Denzil! The man at the Ardayre ball was her first husband for whom she
always retained some kind of animal affection--because he used to beat
her. They married her to Stanislass just to obtain the secrets of Poland,
and any other thing which she could pick' up. Her marvellous stupidity
and incredible want of all moral restraint has made her the most
brilliant spy. No principles to hamper her--nothing. She has only tripped
up through jealousy now. When she felt that she had lost me she grew to
desire me with the only part of her nature with which she desires
anything, her flesh--then she became unbalanced, and in September before
I left, gave the clue into my hands. I shall not bore you with all the
details, but I have them both--she and Ferdinand Ardayre. The first
husband has gone back to Germany from Sweden, but we shall secure him,
too, presently. Meanwhile I shall hand Harietta to the French
authorities--her last exploits are against France. She has enabled the
Germans to shoot six or seven brave fellows, besides giving information
of the most important kind wormed from foolish elderly adorers and above
all from Stanislass himself."

"She will be shot, I suppose."

"Probably. But first she shall confess about the postcard from the
prison camp. I shall go to Paris immediately, Denzil; there must be
no delay."

"You will not feel the slightest twinge because she was your mistress, if
she is shot, Stepan? I ask because the combination of possible emotions
is interesting and unusual."

"Not for an instant--" and suddenly Verisschenzko's yellow-green eyes
flashed fire and his face grew transfigured with fierce hate. "You do not
know the affection I had for Stanislass from my boyhood--he was my
leader, my ideal. No paltry aims--a great pioneer of freedom on the
sanest lines. He might have altered the history of our two countries--he
was the light we need, and this foul, loathsome creature has destroyed
not only his soul and his body, but the protector and defender of a
conception of freedom which might have been realised. I would strangle
her with my own hands."

"Stanislass must have been a weakling, Stepan, to have let her destroy
him. He could never have ruled. It strikes me that this is the proof of
another of your theories. It must be some debt of his previous life that
he is paying to this woman. He was given his chance to use strength
against her and failed."

The hate died out of Verisschenzko's face--and the look of calm
reasoning returned.

"Yes, you are right, Denzil. You are wiser than I. So I shall not give
her up, for punishment of her crimes. I shall only give her up because of
justice--she must not be at large. You see, even in my case,--I who pride
myself on being balanced, can have my true point of view obsessed by
hate. It is an ignoble passion, my son!"

"You will catch Ferdinand too?"

"Undoubtedly--he is just a rotten little snipe, but he does mischief as
Harietta's tool--and through his business in Holland."

"He loathes the English--that is his reason, but Madame Boleski has no
incentive like that."

"Harietta has no country--she would be willing to betray any one of them
to gratify any personal desire. If she had been a patriot exclusively
working for Germany, one could have respected her, but she has often
betrayed their secrets to me--for jewels--and other things she required
at the moment. No mercy can be shown at all."

"In these days there is no use in having sentiment just because a spy is
a woman--but I am glad it is not my duty to deliver her up."

Verisschenzko smiled.

"I cannot help my nature, Denzil,--or rather the attributes of the nation
into which in this life I am born. I shall hand Harietta over to justice
without a regret."

Then they parted for the night with much of the disturbance and the
complex emotions removed from Denzil's heart.




CHAPTER XXII


When Verisschenzko reached Paris and discovered the desecration of the
Ikon, an icy rage came over him. He knew, even before questioning his old
servant, that it could only be the work of Harietta. Jealousy alone would
be the cause of such a wanton act. It revealed to him the certainty of
his theory that she had imagined the little Benedict to be his child. No
further proof that the postcard was a forgery was really needed, but he
would see her once more and obtain extra confirmation.

His yellow-green eyes gleamed in a curious way as he stood looking at the
mutilated picture.

That her ridiculous and accursed hatpin should have dared to touch the
eyes of his soul's lady, and scratch out the face of the child!

But he must not let this emotion of personal anger affect what he
intended in any case to do from motives of justice. In the morning he
would give all his proofs of her guilt to the French authorities, and let
the law take its course--but to-night he would make her come there to his
apartment and hear from him an indictment of her crimes.

He sat down in the comfortable chair in his own sitting room and
began to think.

His face was ominous; all the fierce passions of his nation and of his
nature held him for a while.

His dog, an intelligent terrier whom he loved, sat there before the fire
and watched him, wagging his stump of a tail now and then nervously, but
not daring to approach. Then, after half an hour had gone by, he rose and
went to the telephone. He called up the Universal and asked to be put
through to the apartment of Madame Boleski, and soon heard Harietta's
voice. It was a little anxious--and yet insolent too.

"Yes? Is that you Stepan! Darling Brute! What do you want?"

"You--cannot you come and dine with me to-night--alone?"

His voice was honey sweet, with a spontaneous, frank ring in it, only his
face still looked as a fiend's.

"You have just arrived? How divine!"

"This instant, so I rushed at once to the telephone. I long for
you--come--now."

He allowed passion to quiver in the last notes--he must be sure that she
would be drawn.

"He cannot have opened the doors of the Ikon," Harietta thought. "I will
go--to see him again will be worth it anyway!"

"All right!--in half an hour!"

"_Soit_,"--and he put the receiver down.

Then he went again to the Ikon and examined the doors; by slamming them
very hard and readjusting one small golden nail, he could give the
fastening the appearance of its having been jammed and impossible to
open. He ordered a wonderful dinner and some Chateau Ykem of 1900.
Harietta, he remembered, liked it better than Champagne. Its sweetness
and its strength appealed to her taste. The room was warm and
delightful with its blazing wood fire. He looked round before he went
to dress, and then he laughed softly, and again Fin nervously wagged
his stump of a tail.

Harietta arrived punctually. She had made herself extremely beautiful.
Her overmastering desire to see Verisschenzko had allowed her usually
keen sense of self-preservation partially to sleep. But even so,
underneath there was some undefined sense of uneasiness.

Stepan met her in the hall, and greeted her in his usual abrupt way
without ceremony.

"You will leave your cloak in my room," he suggested, wishing to give her
the chance to look at the Ikon's jammed doors and so put her at her ease.

The moment she found herself alone, she went swiftly to the shrine. She
examined it closely--no the bolt had not been mended. She pulled at the
doors but she could not open them, and she remembered with relief that
she had slammed them hard. That would account for things. He certainly
could not yet know of her action. The evening would be one of pleasure
after all! And there was never any use in speculating about to-morrows!

Verisschenzko was waiting for her in the sitting-room, and they went
straight in to dinner. A little table was drawn up to the fire; all
appeared deliciously intimate, and Harietta's spirits rose.

To her Verisschenzko appeared the most attractive creature on earth.
Indeed, he had a wonderful magnetism which had intoxicated many women
before her day. He was looking at her now with eyes unclouded by glamour.
He saw that she was painted and obvious, and without real charm. She
could no longer even affect his senses. He saw nothing but the reality,
the animal, blatant reality, and in his memory there remained the pierced
out orbs of the Virgin and the scratched face of the Christ child.

Everything fierce and cunning in his nature was in action--he was
glorying in the torture he meant to inflict, the torture of jealousy and
unsatisfied suspicion.

He talked subtly, deliberately stirring her curiosity and arousing her
apprehension. He had not mentioned Amaryllis, and yet he had conveyed to
her, as though it were an unconscious admission, that he had been in
England with her, and that she reigned in his soul. Then he used every
one of his arts of fascination so that all Harietta's desires were
inflamed once more, and by the time she had eaten of the rich Russian
dishes and drank of the Chateau Ykem she was experiencing the strongest
emotion she had ever known in her life, while a sense of impotence to
move him augmented her other feelings.

Her eyes swam with passion, as she leaned over the table whispering words
of the most violent love in his ears.

Verisschenzko remained absolutely unstirred.

"How silly you were to send that postcard to Lady Ardayre," he remarked
contemplatively in the middle of one of her burning sentences. "It was
not worthy of your usual methods--a child could see that it was a
forgery. If you had not done that I might have made you very happy
to-night--for the last time--my little goat!"

"Stepan--what card? But you are going to make me happy anyway, darling
Brute; that is what I have come for, and you know it!"

Her eyes were not so successfully innocent as usual when she lied. She
was uneasy at his stolidity, some fear stayed with her that perhaps he
meant not to gratify her desires just to be provoking. He had teased her
more than once before.

Verisschenzko went on, lighting his cigarette calmly:

"It was a silly plot--Ferdinand Ardayre wrote it and you dictated it; I
perceived the whole thing at once. You did it because you were jealous of
Lady Ardayre--you believe that I love her--"

"I do not know anything about a card, but I _am_ jealous about that
hateful bit of bread and butter," and her eyes flashed. "It is so unlike
you to worry over such a creature--I'm what you like!"

He laughed softly. "A man has many sides--you appeal to his lowest.
Fortunately it is not in command of him all the time--but let me tell you
more about the forgery. You over-reached yourselves--you made John ignore
something which would have been his first thought, thus the fraud was
exposed at once."

Her jealousy blazed up, so that she forgot herself and prudence.

"You mean about the child--your child--"

The ominous gleam came into Verisschenzko's eyes.

"My child--you spoke of it once before and I warned you--I never
speak idly."

She got up from the table and came and flung her arms round his neck.

"Stepan, I love you--I love you! I would like to kill Amaryllis and the
child--I want you--why are you so changed?"

He only laughed scornfully again, while he disengaged her arms.

"Do you know how I found out? By the perfume--the same as you told me
must be that of Stanislass' mistress--on the handkerchief marked 'F.A.'
The whole thing was dramatically childish. You thought to prove her
husband was still alive, would stop my marriage with Amaryllis Ardayre!"

"Then you are going to marry her!"

Harietta's hazel eyes flashed fire, her face had grown distorted with
passion and her cheeks burned beyond the rouge.

She appeared a most revolting sight to Stepan. He watched her with cold,
critical eyes. As she put out her hands he noticed how the thumbs turned
right back. How had he ever been able to touch her in the past! He
shivered with disgust and degradation at the thought.

She saw his movement of repulsion, and completely lost her head.

She flung herself into his arms and almost strangled him in her furious
embrace, while she threw all restraint to the winds and poured out a
torrent of passion, intermingled with curses for one who had dared to try
and rob her of this adored mate.

It was a wonderful and very sickening exhibition, Verisschenzko thought.
He remained as a statue of ice. Then when she had exhausted herself a
little, he spoke with withering calm.

"Control yourself, Harietta; such emotion will leave ugly lines, and you
cannot afford to spoil the one good you possess. I have not the least
desire for you--I find that you look plain and only bore me. But now
listen to me for a little--I have something to say!" His voice changed
from the cynical callousness to a deep note of gravity: "You need not
even tell me in words that you sent the forgery--you have given me ample
proof. That subject is finished--but I will make you listen to the
recital of some of your vile deeds." The note grew sterner and his eyes
held her cowed. "Ah! what instruments of the devil are such women as
you--possessing the greatest of all power over men you have used it only
for ill--wherever you have passed there is a trail of degradation and
slime. Think of Stanislass! A man of fine purpose and lofty ideals. What
is he now? A poor lifeless semblance of a man with neither brain nor
will. You have used him--not even to gratify your own low lust, but to
betray countries--and one of them your husband's country, which ought to
have been your own."

She sank to her knees at his side; he went on mercilessly. He spoke of
many names which she knew, and then he came to Ferdinand Ardayre.

"They tell me he is drinking and sodden with morphine, and raves wildly
of you. Think of them all--where are they now? Dead many of them--and you
have survived and prospered like a vampire, sucking their blood. Do you
ever think of a human being but your own degraded self? You would
sacrifice your nearest and dearest for a moment's personal gain. You are
not caught and strangled because the outside good natures come easily to
you. It makes things smooth to smile and commit little acts of showy
kindness which cost you nothing. You live and breathe and have your being
like a great maggot fattening on a putrid corpse. I blush to think that I
have ever used your body for my own ends, loathing you all the time. I
have watched you cynically when I should have wrung your neck."

She sobbed hoarsely and held out her hands.

"For all these things you might still have gone free, Harietta--and fate
would punish you in time, but you have committed that great crime for
which there can be no mercy. You have acted the part of a spy. A wretched
spy, not for patriotism but for your own ends--you have not been faithful
to either side. Have you not often given me the secrets of your late
husband Hans? Do you care one atom which country wins? Not you. The
whole sordid business has had only one aim--some personal gratification."

He paused--and she began to speak, now choking with rage, but he motioned
her to be silent.

"Do you think so lightly of the great issues which are shaking the world
that you imagine that you can do these things with impunity? I tell you
that soon you must pay the price. I am not the only one who knows of
your ways."

She got up from the floor now and tossed her head. Important things had
never been to her realities--her fear left her. What agitated her now was
that Stepan, whom she adored, should speak to her in such a tone. She
threw herself into his arms once more, passionately proclaiming her love.

He thrust her from him in shrinking disgust, and the cruel vein in his
character was aroused.

"Love!--do not dare to desecrate the name of love. You do not know what
it means. I do--and this shall always remain with you as a remembrance. I
love Amaryllis Ardayre. She is my ideal of a woman--tender and restrained
and true--I shall always lay my life at her feet. I love her with a love
such beings as you cannot dream of, knowing only the senses and playing
only to them. That will be your knowledge always, that I worship and
reverence this woman, and hold you in supreme contempt."

Harietta writhed and whined on the sofa where she had fallen.

"Go," he went on icily. "I have no further use for you, and my car is
waiting below. You may as well avail yourself of it and return to your
hotel. In the morning the last proof of the interest I have taken in you
may be given, but to-night you can sleep."

Harietta cried aloud--she was frightened at last. What did he mean? But
even fear was swallowed up in the frantic thought that he had done with
her, that he would never any more hold her in his arms. Her world lay in
ruins, he seemed the one and only good. She grovelled on the floor and
kissed his feet.

"Master, Master! Keep me near you--I will be your slave--"

But Verisschenzko pushed her gently aside with his foot and going to a
table near took up a cigarette. He lighted it serenely, glancing
indifferently at the dishevelled heap of a woman still crouching on
the floor.

"Enough of this dramatic nonsense," and he blew a ring of smoke. "I
advise you to go quietly to bed--you may not sleep so softly on
future nights."

Fear overcame her again--what could he mean? She got up and held on to
the table, searching his face with burning eyes.

"Why should I not sleep so softly always?" and her voice was thick.

He laughed hoarsely.

"Who knows? Life is a gamble in these days. You must ask your interesting
German friend."

She became ghastly white--that there was real danger was beginning
to dawn upon her. The rouge stood out like that on the painted face
of a clown.

Verisschenzko remained completely unmoved. He pressed the bell, and his
Russian servant, warned beforehand, brought him in his fur coat and hat,
and assisted him to put them on.

"I will take Madame to get her cloak," he announced calmly. "Wait here
to show us out."

There was nothing for Harietta to do but follow him, as he went towards
the bedroom door. She was stunned.

He walked over to the Ikon, and slipping a paper knife under them opened
wide the doors; then he turned to her, and the very life melted within
her when she saw his face.

"This is your work," and he pointed to the mutilations, "and for that and
many other things, Harietta, you shall at last pay the price. Now come, I
will take you back to your lover, and your husband--both will be waiting
and longing for your return. Come!"

She dropped on the floor and refused to move so that he was obliged to
call in the servant, and together they lifted her, the one holding her
up, while the other wrapped her in her cloak. Then, each supporting her,
they made their way down the stairs, and placed her in the waiting motor,
Verisschenzko taking the seat at her side--and so they drove to the
Universal. She should sleep to-night in peace and have time to think over
the events of the evening. But to-morrow he must no longer delay about
giving information to the authorities.

She cowered in the motor until they had almost reached the door, when she
flung her arms round his neck and kissed him wildly again, sobbing with
rage and terror:

"You shall not marry Amaryllis; I will kill you both first."

He smiled in the darkness, and she felt that he was mocking her, and
suddenly turned and bit his arm, her teeth meeting in the cloth of his
fur-lined coat.

He shook her off as he would have done a rat:

"Never quite apropos, Harietta! Always a little late! But here we have
arrived, and you will not care for your admirers, the concierge, and the
lift men, to see you in such a state. Put your veil over your face and go
quietly to your rooms. I will wish you a very good-night--and farewell!"

He got out and stood with mock respect uncovered to assist her, and she
was obliged to follow him. The hall porter and the numerous personnel of
the hotel were looking on.

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.