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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things

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"What luck!" cried Verisschenzko. "That is your cousin, Amaryllis
Ardayre--come along!"

And in a second Denzil found himself being introduced to her, and being
greeted by her with interested cordiality, as befitted their cousinly
relationship.

But Verisschenzko, whose eyes missed nothing, remarked that under his
sunburn, Denzil had grown suddenly very pale. Amaryllis was enchanted to
see her friend, the Russian. John had gone to the telephone, it
appeared--and yes, they were dining alone--and, of course, she was sure
John would love to amalgamate parties, it was so nice of Verisschenzko to
think of it! There was John now.

The blood rushed back to Denzil's heart, and the colour to his face--he
had only murmured a few conventional words. Mercifully John would decide
the matter--it was not his doing that he and Amaryllis had met.

John caught sight of the three as he came along the balcony from the
telephone, so that he had time to take in the situation; he saw that the
meeting was quite _imprevu_, and he had, of course, no choice but to
accept Verisschenzko's suggestion with a show of grace. At that very
moment, before they could enter the restaurant, and re-arrange their
tables, Harietta Boleski and her husband swept upon them--they were
staying in the hotel. Harietta was enraptured.

What a delightful surprise meeting them! Were they all just together,
would they not dine with her?

She purred to John, while her eyes took in with satisfaction Denzil's
extraordinary good looks--and there was Stepan, too! Nothing could be
more agreeable than to scintillate for them both.

John hailed their advent with relief: it would relax the intolerable
strain which both he and Denzil would be bound to have to experience. So
looking at the rest of the party, he indicated that he thought they would
accept. It suited Verisschenzko also for his own reasons. And any
suggestion to enlarge the intimate number of four would have been
received by Denzil with graciousness.

He had not imagined that he would feel such profound emotion on seeing
Amaryllis, the intensity of it caused him displeasure. It was altogether
such a remarkable situation. He knew that it would have been of thrilling
interest to him had it not been for the presence of John. His knowledge
of what John must be suffering, and the knowledge that John was aware of
what he also must be feeling, turned the whole circumstance into
discomfort.

As soon as he recalled himself to Madame Boleski they all went into the
restaurant to the Boleski table, just inside the door, by the window on
the right. Harietta put John on one side of her and Denzil at the other,
and beyond were Verisschenzko and her husband, with Amaryllis between,
who thus sat nearly opposite Denzil, with her back to the room.

Harietta, when she desired to be, was always an inspiriting hostess,
making things go. She intended to do her best to-night. The turn affairs
had taken, England being at war, was quite too tiresome. It had spoilt
all her country house visits and nullified much of the pleasure and
profit she was intending to reap from her now secured position in this
promised land.

Stanislass, too, had been difficult, he had threatened to go back to
Poland immediately, which he explained was his obvious duty to do--but
she had fortunately been able to crush that idea completely with tears
and scenes. Then he suggested Paris, but information from Hans gave her
occasion to think this might not be a comfortable or indeed quite a safe
spot, and in all cases if the Frenchmen were fighting for dear life they
would not have leisure to entertain her, therefore, dull and gloomy as
England had become, she preferred to remain.

Hans, too, had given her orders. For the present London must be her home,
and the lease of the Mount Lennard house in Grosvenor Square having
expired, they had moved to the Carlton Hotel.

The misery of war, the holocaust of all that was noblest, left her
absolutely cold. It was certainly a pity that those darling young
guardsmen she had danced with should have had to be killed, but there was
never any use in crying over spilt milk--better look out for new ones
coming on. She was quite indifferent as to which country won. It was
still a great bother collecting information for her former husband, but
he threatened terrible reprisals if she refused to go on, and as in her
secret heart she thought that there was no doubt as to who would be
victor, she felt it might be wiser to remain on good terms with the power
she believed would win!

Ferdinand Ardayre had been very helpful all the summer--he had moved from
the Constantinople branch of his business to one in Holland and had just
returned to England now; he was, in fact, coming to see her later on when
she should have packed Stanislass safely off to the St. James' Club.

Harietta had no imagination to be inflamed by terrible descriptions of
things. She saw no actual horrors, therefore war to her was only a
nuisance--nothing ghastly or to be feared. But it was a disgusting
nuisance and caused her fatigue. She had continually to remember to
simulate proper sympathy, and concern and to subdue her vivacity, and
show enthusiasm for any agreeable war work which could divert her dull
days. If she had not been more than doubtful of her reception in America,
even as a Polish magnate's wife, she would have gone over there to escape
as far as possible from the whole situation, and she had been bored to
death now for several days. People were too occupied and too grieved to
go out of their way now to make much of her, and she had been left alone
to brood. Thus the advent of Verisschenzko, who thrilled her always, and
a possible new admirer in Denzil, seemed a heaven-sent occurrence.
Amaryllis and John were undesired but unavoidable appendages who had to
be swallowed.

Denzil's type particularly attracted her. There was an insouciance about
him, a _debonnair sans gene_ which increased the charm of his good looks;
he had everything of attraction about him which John Ardayre lacked.

Amaryllis, against her will, before the end of the dinner, was conscious
of the fact also, though Denzil studiously avoided any conversation with
her beyond what the exigencies of politeness required. He devoted himself
entirely to Harietta, to her delight, and Verisschenzko and Amaryllis
talked while John was left to Stanislass. But the very fact of Denzil's
likeness to John made Amaryllis look at him, and she resented his
attraction and the interest he aroused in her.

His voice was perhaps even deeper than John's, and how extraordinarily
well his bronze hair was planted on his forehead; and how perfectly
groomed and brushed and soldierly he looked!

He seemingly had taken the measure of Madame Boleski, too, and was
apparently enjoying with a cultivated subtlety the drawing of her out. He
was no novice it seemed, and there was a whimsical light in his eyes and
once or twice they had inadvertently met hers with understanding when
Verisschenzko had made some especially cryptic remark. She knew that she
would very much have liked to talk to him.

Verisschenzko was observing Amaryllis carefully. There was a new
expression in her eyes which puzzled him. Her features seemed to be drawn
with finer lines and pale violet shadows lay beneath her grey eyes. Was
it the gloom of the war which oppressed her? It could not be altogether
that, because her regard was serene and even happy.

"Did I not know that nothing could be more unlikely, I should say she was
going to have a child. What is the mystery?" He found himself very much
interested. Especially he was anxious to watch what impression Denzil
made upon her. He saw, as the dinner went on, that Amaryllis was aware
that he was an attractive creature.

"There is the beginning of a chapter of necessary and
expedient--romance--here," he decided. "If only Denzil is not killed."
But what did his growing so pale on learning that she was his cousin
mean...? that was not a natural circumstance--some deep undercurrents
were stirred. And in what way was all this going to affect the lady
of his soul?

They could not have any intimate conversation at dinner; they spoke of
ordinary things and the war and the horror of it. Russia was moving
forward, but Verisschenzko did not appear to be very optimistic in spite
of this. There were things in his country, he told Amaryllis, which might
handicap the fighting.

Stanislass Boleski looked extremely depressed. He had a hang-dog,
strained mien and Verisschenzko's contemptuously friendly attitude
towards him wounded him deeply. Once he had shone as a leader and chief
in Stepan's life, and now after the stormy scene in the smoking-room at
Ardayre, that he could greet him casually and not turn from him in anger,
showed, alas! to where he had sunk in Verisschenzko's estimation--a thing
of nought--not even worth his disapproval. The dinner to him was a
painful trial.

John also was far from content. He had been longing to see Amaryllis, and
yet the sight of her and her fond and insinuating words and caresses had
caused him exquisite suffering. His emotions were so varied and complex.
His prayer had been answered, but apart from his natural loathing for all
subterfuge, every new tenderness towards himself which Amaryllis
displayed aroused some indefinable jealousy. She had been so glad to see
him and he had been conscious himself that he had been even unusually
stolid and self-contained towards her. He knew that she grew disappointed
and that probably the exalted sentiment which her letter had indicated
that she was feeling had been chilled before she could put it into words.

All this distressed him, and yet he could not break through the reserve
of his nature.

And now to crown unfortunate things, there was Denzil brought by fate and
no one's manoeuvring into Amaryllis' company! Of all things he had hoped
that they need not meet before he and his cousin should go to the Front.
And it was all brought about by his own action in insisting that they had
better dine at a restaurant, as the kitchenmaid, who always remained at
Brook Street, had gone to see a wounded brother.

Amaryllis had sighed a little as she had consented, with the faint
protest that they could have eaten something cold.

But on their drive to the Carlton she had become fondly affectionate
again, nestling close to him, and then she had pulled out the carnation
from her belt and held it for him to smell.

"I picked it in the greenhouse this morning, the last of them; I have had
them all around me while there were any, because they remind me of you,
dearest--and of everything divine."

John felt that he should always now hate that clove stuff for the hair
and could no longer bear to use it.

He was perfectly aware that Denzil on his hostess' other hand was
looking everything that a woman could desire, and that his easy
casualness of manner would be likely to charm. He saw that Amaryllis,
too, observed him with unconscious interest, and a feeling akin to
despair filled his heart.

Life for him had always been difficult, and he was accustomed to blows,
but this one was particularly hard to bear, because he really loved
Amaryllis and desired happiness with her which he knew could never really
be attained.

Only Harietta of the whole party was quite content. She intended to annex
Stepan when they should be drinking coffee in the hall. She looked upon
Denzil's conquest now as almost an accomplished fact, and so felt that
she might let him talk to Amaryllis, since the Russian was her real
object. His ugly rugged face and odd Calmuck eyes always attracted her.

"Why aren't you staying in the hotel, darling Brute?'" she whispered to
him as they left the restaurant. "If you had been--"

"I am," said Verisschenzko, and leaving her for a moment he went and
telephoned to his not unintelligent Russian servant at the Ritz to
arrange about the transference of his rooms.

"She requires the most careful watching--I must waste no time."

And then he returned to the party in the hall.




CHAPTER X


Denzil Ardayre took up his letters which had been forwarded to him from
the depot where he was stationed. He and Verisschenzko were passing
through the hall of his mother's house, for a talk and a smoke in his
sitting-room, after leaving the Carlton.

The house was in St. James' Place, a small, old building, the ground
floor of which was given over to Denzil whenever he was in London. His
mother was absent at Bath, where she spent a long autumn cure.

John's letter lay on the top, and Verisschenzko caught the look of
interest which came into Denzil's face.

"Don't mind me, my dear chap," he remarked, "read your letters." And they
went on into the sitting-room.

"I want just to look at this one--it is from John Ardayre whom we met
to-night," and Denzil opened it casually--"I wonder what he is writing to
me about, he did not say anything at dinner."

He read the short communication and exclaimed: "Good God!" and then
checked himself. He was obviously stirred, and Verisschenzko watched him
narrowly. Anything to do with John must concern Amaryllis, and therefore
was of profound interest to himself.

"No bad news, I hope?" he said.

Denzil was gazing into the fire, and there was a look of wonderment and
even rapture upon his face.

"Oh! No--rather splendid--" He felt quite the strangest emotion he had
ever experienced in his life. His usual serene self-confidence and easy
flow of words deserted him, and Verisschenzko, watching him, began to
link certain things in his mind.

"Tell me, what did you think of your cousin, Lady Ardayre?" he asked
casually, as though the subject was irrelevant.

"Amaryllis?" and Denzil almost started from a reverie. "Oh, yes, of
course, she is a lovely creature, is not she, Stepan?"

Verisschenzko narrowed his eyes.

"I have told you that I adore her--but with the spirit--if it were
not so, she would appeal very strongly to the flesh--Yes?--Did you
not feel it?"

"I did."

"Well?"

"Well--"

"She is longing to understand life, she is groping; why do you not set
about her education, Denzil?"

"That is the husband's business."

"Not in this case. I consider it is yours; you are the right mate
for her. John Ardayre is a good fellow, but he stands for nothing in
the affair. Why did you waste your time upon Harietta, when time is
so short?"

"I was given no choice."

"But afterwards, in the hall?"

It was quite evident to Verisschenzko that the mention of Amaryllis was
causing his friend some unexplainable emotion.

"You did not even exert yourself, then. Why, Denzil?"

Denzil lit a cigarette.

"I thought her awfully attractive--it is the first time I have ever seen
her--as you know."

"And that was a reason for remaining silent and as stiff as a poker in
manner! You English are a strange race!"

Denzil smiled--if Stepan only knew everything, what would he say!

"You were made for each other. If I were you, I would not lose a
second's time!"

"My dear old boy, you seem quite to forget that the girl has a husband
of her own!"

"Not at all, it is for that reason--just because of that husband. I shall
say no more, you are quite intelligent enough to understand."

"You think it is all right then for a woman to have a lover?" Denzil
smiled as he curled rings of smoke. "It is curious how the most
honourable among us has not much conscience concerning such things."

Verisschenzko knocked off his cigarette ash and spoke contemplatively:

"The world would be an insupportable place for women, if he had! But
whatever the moral aspect of the matter is in general, circumstances
arise which alter the point, and that is where the absurd ticketing
system hampers suitable action. A thing is ticketed 'dishonourable.'
Pah! it is sometimes, and it is not at others--there is no hard and
fast rule."

Denzil stretched himself--he was always interested in Verisschenzko's
reasonings and prepared to listen with enjoyment:

"The general idea is that a man should not make love to another man's
wife. Man professes this as a creed, and the law enforces it and punishes
him if he is found out doing so. And if he acted up to this creed as he
does about stealing goods and behaving like a gentleman over business
matters, all might be well, but unfortunately that seldom occurs, because
there is that strong; instinct which is the base of all things working in
him, and which does not work in regard to any other point of
honour--i.e., the unconscious desire to re-create his, species, so that
this one particular branch of moral responsibility cannot be measured,
judged, or criticised from the same standpoint as any other. No laws can.
alter human nature, or really control a man's actions when a natural
force is prompting him unless stern self-analysis discovers the truth to
the man, and so permits his spirit to regain dominion. The best chance
would be to resist the first feeling of attraction which a woman
belonging to another man aroused before it had actually obtained a hold
upon his senses--but the percentage of men who do this must be very
small. Some resist--or try to resist the actual possession of the woman
from moral motives, but many more from motives of expediency and fear of
consequences. Then to salve conscience the mass of men ride a high moral
stalking horse, and write and speak condemnation of every back-sliding,
while their own behaviour coincides with the behaviour they are
criticising. The hypocrisy of the thing sickens me; no one ever looks any
question straight in the face, denuded of its man-made sophistries. And
few realise that a woman is a creature to be fought for--it is
prehistoric instinct, and if she can't be obtained in fair fight then you
secure her by strategy. And if a man cannot keep her once he has secured
her, it is up to him. If I had a wife, I should take good care that she
_desired_ no other man--but if I bored her, or was a cold and bad lover,
I should not expect the other men not to try and take her from
me--because I should know this was a natural instinct with them--like
taking food. It would probably be no temptation to most of us to steal
gold lying about in a room, even if we were poor, but a hideous
temptation to refrain from eating a tempting dish if we were starving
with hunger and it was before us--and if a woman did succumb to some new
passion I should blame myself, not her."

Denzil agreed.

"Jealousy is a natural instinct, though," he said, "and although there
would be not much profit in trying to hold a woman who no longer cared,
one could not help being mad about it."

"Of course not--that is the sense of personal possession which is
affronted. Vanity is deeply wounded, and so the power to analyse cause
and result sleeps. But this attitude which men take up of neglecting a
woman and then expecting her to be faithful still is quite ridiculous,
and without logic; they are as usual fogged by convention and can't see
straight."

Verisschenzko's rough voice was keen--compelling.

Denzil smiled.

"Another of your windmills to fight!"

"I am always fighting convention and shams. Get down to the meaning of a
thing, and if its true significance coincides with the convention which
surrounds it, then let that hold, but if convention is a super-imposed
growth, then amputate it and study the thing without it."

"I suppose a man marries a woman nine times out of ten because he cannot
obtain her in any other way; then when he has become indifferent by
possession, he still thinks that she should remain devoted to him. You
are right, Stepan, it is very illogical."

"Club the creature, or keep her in a cage if you want fidelity through
fear, but don't expect it if you allow her to remain at large and
neglected, and don't be such an ass as to imagine that your friends won't
act just as you yourself would act were she some one's else wife. If a
woman has that quality in her which arouses sex, married or single, I
never have observed that men refrained from making love to her."

"All this means that you consider I am quite at liberty to make love to
Amaryllis Ardayre!"

"Quite."

Denzil threw his cigarette end into the fire:

"Well, for once you are wrong, Stepan, in your usually perfect
deductions," he got up from his chair. "There is a reason in this
case which makes the thing an absolute impossibility; under no
possible circumstance while John is alive could I make the smallest
advance towards Amaryllis! There is another point of honour involved
in the affair."

Verisschenzko felt that here was some mystery which he had yet to
elucidate, the links in the chain were visible up to a point, but he then
became baffled by the incontestable fact that Denzil had seen Amaryllis
that evening for the first time!

"If this is so, then it is a very great pity," he announced, after a
moment or two's thought. "Were the times normal, we might leave all to
Fate and trust to luck, but if you are killed and John is killed, it
will be a thousand pities for Ferdinand to be the head of the family.
A creature like that will not enlist, he will be safe while you risk
your lives."

Denzil went over to the window, apparently to get out a fresh box of
cigars which were in a cabinet near.

"John writes to-night that there is the chance of an heir after all--so
perhaps we need not worry," he said, his voice a little hoarse with
feeling. "I was so awfully glad to hear this--we all loathe the thought
of Ferdinand."

Verisschenzko actually was startled, and also he was strangely moved.

"When I saw my lady Amaryllis to-night that idea came to me, only as I
believed it was quite an impossibility--I dismissed it--It is a war
miracle then?" and he smiled enquiringly.

"Apparently."

The cigar box was selected and Denzil had once more resumed his seat in a
big chair before either of them spoke again.

"I perfectly understand that there is some mystery here, Denzil--and that
you cannot tell me--and equally I cannot ask you any questions, but it
may be that in the days that are coming I could be of assistance to you.
I have some very curious information which I am holding concerning
Ferdinand Ardayre in his activities. You can always count on me--"
Verisschenzko rose from his chair, stirred deeply with the thoughts which
were coursing through his brain.

"Denzil--I love that woman--I am absolutely determined that I shall not
do so in any way but in spirit--I long for her to be happy--protected.
She has an exquisite soul--I would have given her to you with
contentment. You are her counterpart upon this plane--"

Denzil remained silent, he had never seen Stepan so agitated. The
situation was altogether very unusual. Then he asked:

"Do you think Ferdinand will make some protest then?"

"It is possible."

"But there is absolutely nothing to be said, the fact of there being a
child refutes all the old rumours."

"In law--"

"In every way," a flush had mounted to Denzil's forehead.

"You know Lemon Bridges?" Verisschenzko suggested.

"Yes--why do you ask?"

"He is a remarkably clever surgeon. It is said that he is also a
gentleman; if this news surprises him he will not express his feelings
probably."

Stepan was observing his friend with the minutest scrutiny now, while he
spoke lazily once more as though upon a casual topic bent, and he saw
that a lightning flash of anxiety passed through Denzil's eyes.

"I do not see how any one can have a word to say about the matter," and
he lit his cigar deliberately. "John is awfully pleased--"

"And so am I--and so are you, and so will be the lady Amaryllis. Thus we
can only wish for general happiness, and not anticipate difficulties
which may never occur. When is the event to happen?"

"The beginning of next May," Denzil announced, without hesitation, and
then the flush deepened, for he suddenly remembered that John had not
mentioned any date in his letter!

The subject was growing embarrassing, and he asked, so as to change it:

"What is your friend, Madame Boleski, doing now, Stepan?"

"She is receiving news from Germany which I shall endeavour to have her
transmit to me, and I have some suspicion that she is transmitting any
information which she can pick up here to Germany, but I cannot yet be
sure. When I am, then I shall have no mercy. She would betray any country
for an hour's personal pleasure or gain. I have not yet discovered who
the man was at the Ardayre ball--I told you about it, did I not? Just
then more important matters pressed and I could not follow up the clue."

"She is certainly physically attractive, and all the things she says are
so obvious and easy, she is quite a rest at a dinner, but Lord! think of
spending one's life with a woman like that!" and Denzil smiled.

"There are very few women whom it would be possible to contemplate in
calmness spending one's life with, because one's own needs change, and
the woman's also. The tie is a galling bond unless it can be looked at
with common sense by both--but I think men are quite as illogical as
women over it, and of such an incredible vanity! It is because we have
mixed so much sentiment into such a simple nature-act that all the
bothers arise, and men are unjust over every thing to do with women.
All men think, for instance, that a woman must not deceive her lover
and, at the same time that she is appearing to be his faithful
mistress, take another for her pleasure and diversion in secret. A man
would look upon this and rightly as a dishonourable betrayal because it
would wound his vanity and lower his personal prestige. But the
illogical part is that he would not hesitate to do the same thing
himself, and would never see the matter in the light of a betrayal,
because the Creator has happily equipped him with a rhinoceros hide
which enables him never to feel stings of self-contempt when viewing
his own actions towards the other sex."

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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.


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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.


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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.


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