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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things




He bowed once more and appeared to kiss her hand:

"Good-bye, Harietta! Sleep well."

Then he re-entered the car and was whirled away.

She staggered for a second and then moved forward to the lift. But as she
went in, two tall men who had been waiting stepped forward and joined
her, and all three were carried aloft, and as she walked to her salon she
saw that they were following her.

"There will be no more kicks for thee, my Angel!" the maid, peeping
from a door, whispered exultingly to Fou-Chow! "Thy Marie has saved
thee at last!"

* * * * *

When Verisschenzko again reached his own sitting room he paced up and
down for half an hour. He was horribly agitated, and angry with himself
for being so.

Denzil had been right; when it came to the point, it was a ghastly thing
to have to do, to give a woman up to death--even though her crimes amply
justified such action.

And what was death?

To such a one as Harietta what would death mean?

A sinking into oblivion for a period, and then a rebirth in some sphere
of suffering where the first lessons of the meanings of things might be
learned? That would seem to be the probable working of the law--so that
she might eventually obtain a soul.

He must not speculate further about her though, he must keep his nerve.

And his own life--what would it now become? Would the spirit of freedom,
stirring in his beloved country, arrive at any good? Or would the red
current of revolution, once let loose, swamp all reason and flow in
rivers of blood?

He would be powerless to help if he let weakness overmaster him now.

The immediate picture looked black and hopeless to his far-seeing eyes.

But his place must be in Petrograd now, until the end. His activities,
which had obliged him to be away from Russia, were finished, and new ones
had begun which he must direct, there in the heart of things.

"The world is aching for freedom, God," his stormy thoughts ran, "but we
cannot hope to receive it until we have paid the price of the aeons of
greed and self-seeking which have held us, the ignorance, the low
material gain. We must now reap that sowing. The divine Christ--one
man--was enough as a sacrifice in that old period of the world's day--but
now there must be a holocaust of the bravest and best for our
purification."

He threw himself into his chair and gazed into the glowing embers. What
pictures were forming themselves there? Nations arising glorified by a
new religion of common sense, education universally enjoyed, the great
forces studied, and Nature's fundamental principles reckoned with and
understood.

To hunt his food.

To recreate his species.

_And to kill his enemy._

A bright blade sheathed but ready, a clear judgment trained and used,
ideals nobly striven for, and Wisdom the High Priest of God.

These were the visions he saw in the fire, and he started to his feet and
stretched out his arms.

"Strength, God! Strength!" that was his prayer.

"That we may go--
Armoured and militant,
New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
To those great altitudes whereat the weak
Live not, but only the strong
Have leave to strive, and suffer, and achieve."

Then he sat down and wrote to Denzil.

"I have all the needed proofs, my friend. Marry my soul's lady in peace
and make her happy. There come some phases in a man's life which require
all his will to face. I hope I am no weakling. I return to Russia
immediately. Events there will enable me to blot out some disturbing
memories.

"The end is not yet. Indeed, I feel that my real life is only just
beginning.

"Ferdinand Ardayre is deeply incriminated with Harietta; it is only a
question of a little time and he will be taken too. Then, Denzil, you, in
the natural course of events, would have been the Head of the Family. You
will need all your philosophy never to feel any jar in the situation with
your son as the years go on. You will have to look at it squarely, dear
old friend, and know that it is impossible to have interfered with
destiny and to have gone scott free. Then you will be able to accept
title affair with common sense and prize what you have obtained, without
spoiling it with futile regrets. You have paid most of your score with
wounds and suffering, and now can expect what happiness the agony of the
world can let a man enjoy.

"My blessings to you both and to the Ardayre son.

"And now adieu for a long time."

He had hardly written the last line when the telephone rang, and the
frantic voice of Stanislass, his ancient friend, called to him!

Harietta had been taken away to St. Lazare--her maid had denounced her.
What could be done?

A great wave of relief swept over Stepan. So he was not to be the
instrument of justice after all!

How profoundly he thanked God!

But the irony of the thing shook him.

Harietta would pay with her life for having maltreated a dog!

Truly the workings of fate were marvellous.




CHAPTER XXIII


The days in prison for Harietta, before and after her trial, were days of
frenzied terror, alternating with incredulity. She would not believe that
she was to die.

Stanislass and Ferdinand, and even Verisschenzko, would save her!

She loathed the hard bed at St. Lazare, and the discomfort, and the
ugliness, and the Sister of Charity!

She spent hours tramping her cell like a wild beast in a cage. She would
roar with inarticulate fury, and cry aloud to her husband, and her
lovers, one after another, and then she would cower in a corner, shaking
with fear.

The greatest pain of all was the thought that Stepan and Amaryllis would
marry and be happy. Once or twice foam gathered at the corners of her
lips when she thought of this.

If she could have reached Marie, that would have given her some
satisfaction--to tear out her eyes! For Ferdinand Ardayre had told her
how Marie had given her up, working quietly until she had all necessary
proofs, and then denouncing her.

When Stanislass had returned from the Club, whither she had despatched
him for the evening, so that she might be free to dine with
Verisschenzko, he found that she had already been taken away.

The shock, when he discovered that nothing could be done, had nearly
killed him--he now lay dangerously ill in a Maison de Sante, happily
unconscious of events.

For Ferdinand Ardayre the blow had fallen with crushing force. The one
strong thing in his weak nature was his passion for Harietta--and to be
robbed of her in such a way!

He battled impotently against fate, unable even to try to use any means
in his possession to get the death sentence commuted, because he was too
deeply implicated himself to make any stir.

He saw her in the prison after the trial, with the bars between and the
warders near. And the awful change in Tier paralysed him with grief. On
the morrow she was to die--the usual death of a spy.

Her hair was wild and her face without rouge was haggard and wan.

She implored him to save her.

The frightful pain of knowing that he could do nothing made Ferdinand
desperate, and then suddenly he became inspired with an idea.

He could at all events remove some of the agony of terror from her, and
enable her to go to her death without a hideous scene. He remembered "La
Tosca"--the same method might serve again!

He managed to whisper to her in broken sentences that she would certainly
be saved. The plan was all prepared, he assured her. The rifles would
contain blank cartridges, and she must pretend to fall--and afterwards he
would come, having bribed every one and made the path smooth.

He lied so fervently that Harietta was convinced, her material brain
catching at any straw. She must dress herself and look her best, he told
her, so as to make an impression upon all the men concerned; and then,
when he had to leave her, he arranged with the prison doctor that she
might receive a strong _piqure_ of morphine, so that she would be
serene. She spent the night dreaming quite happily and at four o'clock
was awakened and began to dress.

The drug had calmed all her terrors and her dramatic instinct held
full sway.

She arranged her toilet with the utmost care, using all her arts to
beautify herself. In her ears were Stanislass' ruby earrings and she wore
Stepan's ring and brooch.

Death to her was an impossibility--she had never seen any one die.

It was a wonderfully fine part she would have to play, with Ferdinand
there really going to save her! That was all! She must even be sweet at
last to the poor sister, whom she had snarled at hitherto.

If she could only have seen Stepan once more! Stanislass and his broken
life and fond devotion never gave her a thought or troubled her at all.
After she was free, she would find some means to pay out Hans! She hated
him. If it had not been for Hans and his tiresome old higher command
with their stupid intrigues, she would still be free. That she had
betrayed countries--that she was guilty in any way never presented
itself to her mind.

All Verisschenzko's passionate indictment had fallen upon unheeding ears.
The morphine now left her only sufficiently conscious for fundamental
instincts to act.

She felt that she was a beautiful woman going to be the chief figure in a
wonderfully dramatic scene. Nothing solemn had touched her. Her brain was
light and now only filled with cunning and _coqueterie_; she meant to
charm her guards and executioners to the last man! And ready at length,
she walked nonchalantly out of the prison and into the waiting car which
was to carry her to Vincennes.

Now the end of all this is best told in the words of a young French
soldier who was an eye witness and wrote the whole thing down. To pen the
hideous horror I find too difficult a task.

"Sunday--11 in the evening.

"We had only returned at that moment from our day's leave, when the
Lieutenant came to us to announce that we should be of the _piquet_
to-morrow morning for the execution of Madame Boleski, the spy.

"He said this to us in his monotonous voice as though he had been saying
'To-morrow--_Revue d'Armes_'--but for us, after a whole day passed far
from barracks, it was a rather brusque return to military realities!

"At once it became necessary that we look through our accountrements for
the show. No small affair! and for more than an hour there was brushing
and polishing of straps and buckles. It was nearly two o'clock in the
morning before we could turn in.

"Many of us could not sleep--we are all between eighteen and nineteen
years old, and the idea to see a woman killed agitated us. But little by
little the whole band dozed."

"Monday morning.

"At four o'clock--reveille. We dress in haste in the dark. Ten minutes
later we all find ourselves in the courtyard.

"'_A droit alignement couvres sur deux_.'

"The Lieutenant made the call."

* * * * *

"The detachment moves off in the night, marching in slow cadence--that
step which so peculiarly gives the impression of restrained force and
condensed power.

"We leave the fort and gain the artillery butts--true landscape of the
front! Trenches, stripped trees, abandoned wagons!

"And in the middle of all that--our silhouettes of carbines,
casques and sacs.

"Absolute silence.

"We stop--we advance--and suddenly in the dawn which has begun, we arrive
at our destination--the execution ground.

"'_Cannoniers--halte! Couvres sur deux. A droite alignement_.'"

"A rattle of arms. And there in front of us, at hardly fifteen yards, we
catch sight of the post.

"Up till now we had scarcely felt anything--just startled impressions,
almost of curiosity, but now I begin to experience the first strong
sensation.

"The post! Symbol of all this sinister ceremony. A short post--not higher
than one's shoulder! There it stands in front of the shooting butts. And
to think that nearly every Monday--"

* * * * *

"Now the troops from the Square, which is in reality rectangular, the
shooting butt constituting one of its sides. Then in the grim dawn we
wait quietly for what is to come. One after another, we see several
automobiles approach, and each time we ask ourselves, 'Is not this the
condemned?'

"No--they are journalists--officers--_avocats_--and presently a hearse,
out of which is lifted the coffin.

"The undertakers' men, who presently will proceed to the business of
placing the body there, laugh and talk together as they sit and smoke.
They are old _habitues!_"

"One was cold standing still! It begins to be quite light. The condemned
one may arrive at any moment, because the execution has been fixed for
exactly at the rising of the sun.

"The men of the platoon load their rifles. The number of them is
twelve--four sergeants, four corporals, four soldiers.

"And then there are the _Chasseurs a pied_."

"All of a sudden, two more cars appear, escorted by a company of
dragoons.

"This time it is She.

"They stop--out of the first one, officers descend. The Commissaire of
the Government who has, condemned Madame Boleski to death and who had
gone a little more than an hour ago to awake her in her cell. The
Captain, reporter, and two other Captains. The door of the second auto
opens, two gendarmes get out--a Sister of St. Lazare (what a terrible
_metier_ for her!)--and then Harietta Boleski!

"And at once, accompanied by the nun and followed by the gendarmes, she
penetrates into the square of men.

"Until now we have been enduring a period of waiting, we have been asking
ourselves if it will have an effect upon us--but now we have no more
doubt. The effect has begun!

"'Present arms!'

"All together we render honour to the dead woman--for one considers a
person condemned as already dead. And the bugles begin to play the
March--_Do sol do do Sol do do, Mi mi mi_--

"They play slowly--very softly and in the minor key.

"Harietta Boleski walks quickly, the sister can hardly keep by her side.
She is tall, beautiful, very elegant. A large hat with floating lace veil
thrown back and splendid earrings. A dark dress--pretty shoes.

"She looks at the troops and the _piquet d'execution_ a little
disdainfully, and then she smiles gaily--it is almost a titter. The
sister taps her gently on the shoulder, as if to recall her to a sense of
order, but she makes one careless gesture and walks up to the post.

"The bugles are sounding plaintively, slowly and more slowly all the
time.

"She pauses in front of us--and with us it is now, 'Does this make us
feel something?' We must hold ourselves not to grow faint.

"To see this woman go by with the trumpets sounding ever. To say to
ourselves that in sixty seconds she will be no more. There will be no
life in that beautiful body. Ah! that is an emotion, believe me!

"Never has the great problem been brought more forcibly before my spirit.

"It is during the second when she passes before me that I receive
the most profound impression, more even than at the actual moment of
the firing."

* * * * *

"Harietta Boleski is beside the post. The bugles stop their mournful
sound. They tie her to it, but not tightly, only so that her fall may not
be too hard. A gendarme presents her with a bandeau for her eyes, which
she pushes aside with scorn.

"And when an officer reads the sentence, Harietta Boleski smiles."

* * * * *

"At twelve yards the platoon is lined up. The sentence has been read.

"Madame Boleski embraces the Sister of Charity, who is very overcome.
She even whispers a few words to comfort her. They stand back from the
post. The adjutant who commands the platoon raises his sword--the rifles
come in into position--two seconds--and the sword falls!"

* * * * *

"A salute!"

* * * * *

"Harietta Boleski is no more.

"The fair body drops to earth and immediately an Adjutant of
Dragoons goes swiftly to the post, revolver pointed, and gives the
_coup de grace_.

"_'Arme sur l'epaule--Droit. A droit. En avant. Marche!'_

"And we file past the corpse while the trumpets recommence to sound.

"Harietta Boleski is lying down. She seems to be only reposing, so
beautiful she looks.

"The ball had entered her heart (we knew this later) so that her death
has been instantaneous.

"All the troops have defiled before her now.

"We regain our quarters.

"But as we file into the courtyard the sun gilds the highest window of
the fortress. The day has begun."

* * * * *

Thus perished Harietta Boleski in the thirty-seventh year of her age--in
the midst of the zest of life. The times are to strenuous for sentiment.

So perish all spies!


THE END

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.