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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things




John began to speak presently with a note of deep seriousness in his
voice. He talked of the war and of his Yeomanry's going out, and of
Denzil's regiment also. It was quite on the cards that they might both be
killed--then he spoke of Ferdinand, and the old story of the shame, and
he told Denzil of his boyhood and its great trials, and of his
determination to redeem the family home and of the great luck which had
befallen him in the city after the South African War--and how that the
thought of worthily handing on the inheritance in the direct male line
had become the dominating desire of his life.

At first his manner had been very restrained, but gradually the intense
feeling which was vibrating in him made itself known, and Denzil grew
to realise how profound was his love for Ardayre and how great his
family pride.

But underneath all this some absolute agony must be wringing his soul.

Denzil became increasingly interested.

At last John seemed to have come to a very difficult part of his
narration; he got up from his chair and walked rapidly up and down the
room, then forced himself to sit down again and resume his original calm.

"I am going to trust you, Denzil, with something which matters far more
than my life." John looked Denzil straight in the eyes. "And I will
confide in you because you are next in the direct line. Listen very
carefully, please, it concerns your honour in the family as well as mine.
It would be too infamous to let Ardayre go to the bastard, Ferdinand, the
snake-charmer's son, if, as is quite possible, I shall be killed in the
coming time."

Denzil felt some strange excitement permeating him. What did these words
portend? Beads of perspiration appeared on John's forehead, and his voice
sunk so low that his cousin bent forward to be certain of hearing him.

Then John spoke in broken sentences, for the first time in his life
letting another share the thoughts which tortured him, but the time was
not for reticence. Denzil must understand everything so that he would
consent to a certain plan. At length, all that was in John's heart had
been made plain, and exhausted with the effort of his innermost being's
unburdenment, he sank back in his chair, deadly pale. The quiet, waiting
attitude in Denzil had given way to keenness, and more than once as he
listened to the moving narration he had emitted words of sympathy and
concern, but when the actual plan which John had evolved was unfolded to
him, and the part he was to play explained, he rose from his chair and
stood leaning on the high mantelpiece, an expression of excitement and
illumination on his strong, good-looking face.

"Do not say anything for a little," John said. "Think over everything
quietly. I am not asking you to do anything dishonourable--and however
much I had hated his mother I would not ask this of you if Ferdinand were
my father's son. You are the next real heir--Ferdinand could not be; my
father had never met the woman until a month before he married her, and
the baby arrived five months afterwards, at its full time. There was no
question of incubators or difficulties and special precautions to rear
him, nor was there any suggestion that he was a seven months' child. It
was only after years that I found out when my father first saw the woman,
but even before this proof there were many and convincing evidences that
Ferdinand was no Ardayre."

"One has only to look at the beast!" cried Denzil. "If the mother was a
Bulgarian, he's a mongrel Turk, there is not a trace of English blood in
his body!"

"Then surely you agree with me that it would be an infamy if he should
take the place of the head of the family, should I not survive?"

Denzil clenched his hands.

"There is no moral question attached, remember," John went on anxiously
before he could reply. "There is only the question of the law, which has
been tricked and defamed by my father, for the meanest ends of revenge
towards me--and now we--you and I--have the right to save the family and
its honour and circumvent the perfidy and weakness of that one man.
Oh!--can't you understand what this means to me, since for this trust of
Ardayre that I feel I must faithfully carry on, I am willing to--Oh!--my
God, I can't say it. Denzil, answer me--tell me that you look at it in
the same way as I do! You are of the family. It is your blood which
Ferdinand would depose--the disgrace would be yours then, since if
Ferdinand reigned I would have gone."

The two men were standing opposite one another, and both their faces were
pale and stern, but Denzil's blue eyes were blazing with some wonderful
new emotion, as they looked at John.

"Very well," he said, and held out his hand. "I appreciate the tremendous
faith you have placed in me, and on my word of honour as an Ardayre, I
will not abuse it, nor take advantage of it afterwards. My regiment will
go out at once, I suppose, the chances are as likely that I shall be
killed as you--"

They shook hands silently.

"We must lose no time."

Then John poured out two glasses of brandy, and the toast they drank was
unspoken. But suddenly Denzil remembered as a strange coincidence that he
was drinking it for the third time.

* * * * *

Amaryllis arrived from Ardayre the next afternoon, after John's medical
board had been squared into pronouncing him fit for active service--and
he met his wife at the station and was particularly solicitous of her
well-being. He seemed to be unusually glad to see her, and put his arm
round her in the motor driving to Brook Street. What would she like to
do? They could not, of course, go to the theatre, but if she would rather
they could go out to a restaurant to dine--there were going to be all
kinds of difficulties about food. Amaryllis, who responded immediately to
the smallest advance on his part, glowed now with fond sweetness. She had
been so miserable without him; so crushed and upset by the thought of
war, and his possible participation in it. All the long night, alone at
Ardayre, she had tried to realise what it all would mean. It was too
stupendous, she could not grasp it as yet, it was just a blank horror.
And now to be in the motor and close to him, and everything ordinary and
as usual seemed to drive the hideous fact further and further away. She
would not face it for to-night, she would try to be happy and banish the
remembrance. No one knew what was happening, nor if the Expeditionary
Force had or had not crossed to France. John asked her again what she
would like to do.

She did not want to go out at all, she told him; if the kitchenmaid and
Murcheson could find them something to eat she would much rather dine
alone with him, like a regular old Darby and Joan pair--and afterwards
she would play nice things to him, and John agreed.

When she came down ready for dinner, she was radiant; she had put on a
new and ravishing tea-gown and her grey eyes were shining with a winsome
challenge, and her beautiful skin was brilliant with health and
freshness. A man could not have desired a more delectable creature to
call his own.

John thought so and at dinner expanded and told her so. He was not a
practised lover; women had played a very small part in his life--always
too filled with work and the one dominating idea to make room for them.
He had none of the tender graciousness ready at his command which
Denzil would very well have known how to show. But he loved Amaryllis,
and this was the first time he had permitted the expression of his
emotion to appear.

She became ever more fascinating, and at length unconscious passion grew
in her glance. John said some rather clumsy but loving things, and when
they went back to the library he slipped his arm round her, and drew her
to his side.

"I love to be near you, John," she whispered; "I like your being so tall
and so distinguished-looking. I like your clothes--they are so well
made--" and then she wrinkled her pretty nose--"and I adore the smell of
the stuff you put on your hair! Oh! I don't know--I just want to be in
your arms!"

John kissed her. "I must give you a bottle of that lotion--it is supposed
to do wonders for the hair. It was originally made by an old housekeeper
of my mother's family in the still room, and I have always kept the
receipt--there are cloves in it and some other aromatic herbs."

"Yes, that is what I smell, like a clove carnation--it is divine. I
wonder why scents have such an effect upon one--don't you? Perhaps I am a
very sensuous creature--they can make me feel wicked or good--some
scents make me deliciously intoxicated--that one of yours does--when I
get near you--I want you to hold me and kiss me--John."

Every fibre of John Ardayre's being quivered with pain. The cruel,
ironical bitterness of things.

"I've never smelt this same scent on any one else," she went on, rubbing
her soft cheek up and down against his shoulder in the most alluring way.
"I should know it anywhere for it means just my dear--John!"

He turned away on the pretence of getting a cigarette; he knew that his
eyes had filled with tears.

Then Murcheson came into the room with the coffee, and this made a
break--and he immediately asked her to play to him, and settled
himself in one of the big chairs. He was too much on the rack to
continue any more love-making then; "what might have been" caused too
poignant anguish.

He watched her delicate profile outlined against the curtain of green
silk. It was so pure and young--and her long throat was white as milk. If
this time next year she should have a child--a son--and he, not killed,
but sitting there perhaps watching her holding it. How would he feel
then? Would the certainty of having an Ardayre carry on heal the wild
rebellion in his soul?

"Ah, God!" he prayed, "take away all feeling--reward this sacrifice--let
the family go on."

"You don't think you will have really to go to the war, do you, John?"
Amaryllis asked after she left the piano. "It will be all over, won't it,
before the New Year, and in any case the Yeomanry are only for home
defence, aren't they?" and she took a low seat and rested her head
against his arm.

John stroked her hair.

"I am afraid it will not be over for a long time, Amaryllis. Yes, I
think we shall go out and pretty soon. You would not wish to stop
me, child?"

Amaryllis looked straight in front of her.

"What is this thing in us, John, which makes us feel that--yes, we
would give our nearest and dearest, even if they must be killed? When
the big thing comes even into the lives which have been perhaps all
frivolous like mine--it seems to make a great light. There is an
exaltation, and a pity, and a glory, and a grief, but no holding back.
Is that patriotism, John?"

"That is one name for it, darling."

"But it is really beyond that in this war, because we are not going to
fight for England, but for right. I think that feeling that we must give
is some oblation of the soul which has freed itself from the chains of
the body at last. For so many years we have all been asleep."

"This is a rude awakening."

They were silent for a little while, each busy with unusual thoughts.

There was a sense of nearness between them--of understanding, new and
dangerously sweet.

Amaryllis felt it deliciously, sensuously, and took joy in that she was
touching him.

John thrust it away.

"I must get through to-night," he thought, "but I cannot if this hideous
pain of knowledge of what I must renounce conquers me--I must be strong."

He went on stroking her hair; it made her thrill and she turned and bit
one of his fingers playfully with a wicked little laugh.

"I wish I knew what I am feeling, John," she whispered, and her eyes were
aflame, "I wish I knew--"

"I must teach you!" and with sudden fierceness he bent down and
kissed her lips.

Then he told her to go to bed.

"You must be tired, Amaryllis, after your journey. Go like a good child."

She pouted. She was all vibrating with some totally new and overmastering
emotion. She wanted to stay and be made love to. She wanted--she knew not
what, only everything in her was thrilling with passionate warmth.

"Must I? It is only ten."

"I have a frightful lot of business things to write tonight, Amaryllis.
Go now and sleep, and I will come and wake you about twelve!" He looked
lover-like. She sighed.

"Ah! if you would only come now!"

He kissed her almost roughly again and led her to the door. And he stood
watching her with burning eyes as she went up the stairs.

Then he came back and rang the bell.

"I shall be very late, Murcheson--do not sit up, I will turn out the
lights. Good-night."

"Very good, Sir John."

And the valet left the room.

But John Ardayre did not write any business letters; he sank back into
his great leather chair--his lips were trembling, and presently sobs
shook him, and he leaned forward and buried his face in his hands.

Just before twelve had struck, he went out into the hall, and turned off
the light at the main. The whole house would now be in absolute darkness
but for an electric torch he carried. He listened--there was not a sound.

Then he crept quietly up to his dressing room and returned with a bottle
of the clove-scented hair lotion.

"What a mercy she spoke of it," his thoughts ran. "How sensitive women
are--I should never have remembered such a thing."

Yes--now there was a sound.

* * * * *

Midnight had struck--and Amaryllis, sleeping peacefully, had been
dreaming of John.

"Oh! dearest," she whispered drowsily, as but half awakened, she felt
herself being drawn into a pair of strong arms--"Oh!--you know I love
that scent of cloves--Oh!--I love you, John!"




CHAPTER IX


When Amaryllis awoke in the morning her head rested on John's breast, and
his arm encircled her. She raised herself on her elbow and looked at him.
He was still asleep--and his face was infinitely sad. She bent over and
kissed him with shy tenderness, but he did not move, he only sighed
heavily as he lay there.

Why should he look so sad, when they were so happy?

She thought of loving things he had said to her at dinner--and then the
afterwards!--and she thrilled with emotion. Life seemed a glorious thing
and--But John was sad, of course, because he must go away. The
recollection of this fact came upon her suddenly like a blast of cold
air. They must part. War hung there with its hideous shadow, and John
must be conscious of it even in his dreams, that was why he sighed.

The irony of things--now--when--Oh! how cruel that he must go.

Then John awoke with a shudder, and saw her there leaning over him with a
new soft love light in her eyes, and he realised that the anguish of his
calvary had only just begun.

She was perfectly exquisite at breakfast, a fresh and tender graciousness
radiated in her every glance; she was subtle and captivating, teasing him
that he had been so silent in the night. "Why wouldn't you talk to me,
John? But it was all divine, I did not mind." Then she became full of
winsome ways and caresses, which she had hitherto been too timid to
express; and every fond word she spoke stabbed John's heart.

Could she not come and stay somewhere near so as to be with him while he
was in training? It was unbearable to remain alone.

But he told her that this would be impossible and that she must go back
to Ardayre.

"I will get leave, if there is a chance, dear little girl."

"Oh! John, you must indeed."

After he had gone out to the War Office, she sang as she undid a bundle
of late roses he had sent her from Soloman's, on his way.

She must herself put them in water; no servant should have this pleasing
task. Was it the thought of the imminence of separation which had altered
John into so dear a lover? She went over his words there in the library.
She relived the joy of his sudden fierce kiss, when he had said that he
must teach her as to what her emotions meant.

Ah! how good to learn, how all glorious was life and love!

"Sweetheart," the word rang in her ears. He had never called her that
before! Indeed, John rarely ever used any term of endearment, and never
got beyond "Dear" or "Darling" before. But now it was an exquisite
remembrance! Just the murmured word "Sweetheart!" whispered softly again
and again in the night.

John came back to lunch, but two of the de la Paule family dropped in
also, and the talk was all of war, and the difficulty of getting money at
the banks, and how food would go on, and what the whole thing would mean.

But over Amaryllis some spell had fallen--nothing seemed a reality, she
could not attend to ordinary things, she felt that she but moved and
spoke as one still in a dream.

The world, and life, and death, and love, were all a blended mystery
which was but beginning to unravel for her and drew her nearer to John.

The days went on apace.

John in camp thanked God for the strenuous work of his training that it
kept him so occupied that he had barely time to think of Amaryllis or the
tragedy of things. When he had left her on the following afternoon, the
seventh of August, she had returned to Ardayre alone and began the
knitting and shirt-making and amateurish hospital committees which all
well-meaning English women vaguely grasped at before the stern
necessities brought them organised work to do. Amaryllis wrote constantly
to John--all through August--and many of the letters contained loving
allusions which made him wince with pain.

Then the awful news came of Mons, then the Marne--and the Aisne--awful
and glorious, and a hush and mourning fell over the land, and Amaryllis,
like every one else, lost interest in all personal things for a time.

A young cousin had been killed and many of her season's partners and
friends, and now she knew that the North Somerset Yeomanry would shortly
go out and fight as they had volunteered at once. She was very
miserable. But when September grew, in spite of all this general sorrow,
a new horizon presented itself, lit up as if by approaching dawn, for a
hope had gradually developed--a hope which would mean the rejoicing of
John's heart.

And the day when first this possibility of future fulfilment was
pronounced a certainty was one of almost exalted beatitude, and when
Doctor Geddis drove away down the Northern Avenue, Amaryllis seized a
coat from the folded pile of John's in the hall, and walked out into the
park hatless, the wind blowing the curly tendrils of her soft brown hair,
a radiance not of earth in her eyes. The late September sun was sinking
and gilding the windows of the noble house, and she turned and looked
back at it when she was far across the lake.

And the whole of her spirit rose in thankfulness to God, while her soul
sang a glad magnificat.

She, too, might hand on this great and splendid inheritance! She, too,
would be the mother of Ardayres!

And now to write to John!

That was a fresh pleasure! What would he say? What would he feel? Dear
John! His letters had been calm and matter of fact, but that was his way.
She did not mind it now. He loved her, and what did words matter with
this glorious knowledge in her heart?

To have a baby! Her very own--and John's!

How wonderful! How utterly divine--!

Her little feet hardly touched the moss beneath them, she wanted to
skip and sing.

Next May! Next May! A Spring flower--a little life to care for when
war, of course, would have ended and all the world again could be happy
and young!

And then she returned by the tiny ancient church. She had the key of it,
a golden one which John had given her on their first coming down. It hung
on her bracelet with her own private key.

The sun was pouring through the western window, carpeting the altar steps
in translucent cloth of gold.

Amaryllis stole up the short aisle, and paused when she came between the
two tall canopied tombs of recumbent sixteenth century knights, which
made so dignified a screen for the little side aisles--and then she moved
on and knelt in the shaft of the sunlight there at the carved rails.

And no one ever raised to God a purer or more fervent prayer.

She stayed until the sun sunk below the window, and then she rose and
went back to the house, and up to her cedar room. And now she must
write to John!

She began--once--twice--but tore up each sheet. Her news was a supreme
happiness, but so difficult to transmit!

At last she finished three sides of her own rather large sized
note-paper, but as she read over what she had written, she was not quite
content; it did not express all that she desired John to know.

But how could a mere letter convey the wordless gladness in her heart?

She wanted to tell him how she would worship their baby, and how she
would pray that they should be given a son--and how she would remember
all his love words spoken that last time they were together, and weave
the joy of them round the little form, so that it should grow strong and
beautiful and radiant, and come to earth welcomed and blessed!

Something of all this finally did get written, and she concluded thus:

"John, is it not all wonderful and blissful and mysterious, this coming
proof of our love? And when I lie awake I say over and over again the
sweet name you called me, and which I want to sign! I am not just
Amaryllis any longer, but your very own 'Sweetheart'!"

John received this letter by the afternoon post in camp. He sat down
alone in his tent and read and re-read each line. Then he stiffened and
remained icily still.

He could not have analysed his emotions. They were so intermixed with
thankfulness and pain--and underneath there was a fierce, primitive
jealousy burning.

"Sweetheart!" he said aloud, as though the word were anathema! "And must
I call her that 'Sweetheart'! Oh! God, it is too hard!" and he clenched
his hands.

By the same post came a letter from Denzil, of whose movements he had
asked to be kept informed, saying that the 110th Hussars were going out
at once, so that they would probably soon meet in France.

Then John wrote to Amaryllis. The very force of his feelings seemed to
freeze his power of expression, and when he had finished he knew that it
was but a cold, lifeless thing he had produced, quite inadequate as an
answer to her tender, exalted words.

"My poor little girl," he sighed as he read it. "I know this will
disappoint her. What a hideous, sickening mockery everything is."

He forced himself to add a postscript, a practice very foreign
to his usual methodical rule. "Never forget that I love you,
Amaryllis--Sweetheart!" he said.

And then he went to his Colonel and asked for two days' leave, and when
it was granted for the following Saturday and Monday he wired to his wife
asking her to meet him in Brook Street.

"I must see her--I cannot bear it," he cried to himself.

And late at night he wrote to Denzil--it was just that he should do this.

"My wife is going to have a baby--if only it should be a son, then it
will not so much matter if both of us are killed, at least the family
will be saved, and be able to carry oh."

He tried to make the letter cordial. Denzil had behaved with the most
perfect delicacy throughout, he must admit, and although they had met
once and exchanged several letters, not the faintest allusion to the
subject of their talk in the library at Brook Street had ever been
made by him.

Denzil had indeed acted and written as though such knowledge between
them did not exist. He--Denzil--in these last seven weeks had been
extremely occupied, and while his forces were concentrated upon the
exhilarating preparations for war, it would happen in rare moments
before sleep claimed him at night that he would let his thoughts conjure
a waking dream, infinitely, mystically sweet. And every pulse would
thrill with ecstasy, and then his will would banish it, and he would
think of other subjects.

He could not face the marvel of his emotions at this period, nor dwell
upon the romantically exciting aspect of some things.

He was up in London upon equipment business on the very Saturday that
John got leave, and he was due to dine at the Carlton with Verisschenzko
who had that day arrived on vital matters bent.

As they came into the hall, a man stopped to talk to the Russian, and
Denzil's eyes wandered over the unnumerous and depressed looking company
collected waiting for their parties to arrive. War had even in those
early Autumn days set its grim seal upon this festive spot. People looked
rather ashamed of being seen and no one smiled. He nodded to one or two
friends, and then his glance fell upon a beautiful, slim, brown-haired
girl, sitting quietly waiting in an armchair by the restaurant steps.

She wore a plain black frock, but in her belt one huge crimson clove
carnation was unostentatiously tucked.

"What a lovely creature!" his thoughts ran, and Verisschenzko
turning from his acquaintance that moment, he said to him as they
started to advance:

"Stepan, if you want to see something typically English and perfectly
exquisite, look at that girl in the armchair opposite where the band used
to be. I wonder who she is?"

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.