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The Price of Things by Elinor Glyn

E >> Elinor Glyn >> The Price of Things

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Denzil laughed aloud.

"You are hard on us, Stepan, but I dare say you are right."

"It is just custom and convention which make us think ourselves such
gods. Had woman had the same chance always, who knows what she might not
have become by now! Everything is ticketed, it is called by a name and
put down under such and such a heading--women are 'weak' and 'illogical'
and 'unreliable' and men are 'brave' and 'sound' and 'to be
trusted'--tosh! in quantities of cases--and if so, why so? Women are
wonderful beings in many ways--of a courage! The way they bear things so
gladly for men--think of their suffering when they have children. You
don't know about it probably, men take all this as a matter of
course--but I saw my sister die--after hours of it--"

Denzil moved his arm rather suddenly and upset the glass of lemon squash
on a little table near.

Verisschenzko observed this, but went on without a break:

"It is agony for them under the best conditions, and sometimes they
become divine over it. Amaryllis will be divine--I hope John will take
care of her--"

A look of concern came into Denzil's face, and Verisschenzko watched him.
Could any one be more attractive as a splendid mate for Amaryllis, he
thought. He crushed down all feeling of human jealousy. His intuition
would probably reveal all the mystery to him presently, and meanwhile if
he could forward any scheme which would be for the good of Amaryllis and
the security of the family, he would do so.

"I must leave you now, old man," he said, looking at his watch. "I have a
rendezvous with Harietta. I shall have to play the part of an ardent
lover and cannot yet wring her neck."

When Denzil was alone, he stood gazing into the fire.

"That John should take care of her?"--but John was going out to
fight--and so was he--and they might both be killed--What then?

"Stepan knows, I am certain," he thought, "and he is true as steel; he
must stand by her if we don't come back."

And then his thoughts flew to the vision of her sitting opposite him at
the table, with her sweet eyes turned to his now and then, the faint
violet shadows beneath them and the transparent exquisiteness of her skin
telling their own story by the added, fragile beauty. Oh! what
unutterable joy to hold her in his arms and whisper passionate love words
in her little ears, to live again the dream of her dainty head lying
prone there on his breast. Every pulse in his being throbbed to bursting,
seeming almost to suffocate him.

"Amaryllis--Sweetheart!" he whispered aloud, and then started at his
own voice.

He paced up and down the room, clenching his hands. The family might go
on, but the two members of it must endure the pain of renunciation.

Which was the harder to bear, he wondered--his part of hopeless memory
and regret, or John's of forced denial and abstinence?

In all the world, no situation could be more strange or more cruel.

He had felt deeply about it before he had seen Amaryllis. He thought of
the myth of Eros and Psyche. His emotions had been much as Psyche's
before she lit the lamp. And now the lamp had been lighted--his eyes had
seen what his arms had clasped, the reality was more lovely than his
dream, and passion was kindled a hundredfold. It swept him off his feet.

He forgot war and the horror of the time, he forgot everything except
that he longed for Amaryllis.

"She is mine, absolutely mine," he said wildly. "Not John's."

And then he remembered his promise, given before any personal equation
had entered into the affair.

Never to take advantage of the situation--afterwards!

And what would the child be like? A true Ardayre, of course--they would
say that it had harked back, perhaps, to that Elizabethan Denzil whom
his father had told him was his exact portrait in the picture gallery
at Ardayre.

He could have laughed at the sardonic humour of everything if he had not
been too overcome with passionate desire to retain any critical sense.

Then he sat down and forced himself to realise what it meant--parenthood.
Not much to a man, as a rule. He had looked upon those occult stirrings
of the spirit of which he had read as romantic nonsense. It was a natural
thing and all right if a man had a place for him to wish to have a
son--but otherwise, sentimentality over such things was such rot!

And yet now he found himself thrilling with sentiment. He would like to
talk to Amaryllis all about it, and listen to her thoughts, too. And then
he remembered the many discussions with Verisschenzko upon the theory of
re-birth and of the soul's return again and again until its lessons are
learned on this plane of existence, and he wondered what soul would
animate the physical form of this little being who would be his and hers.

And suddenly in his mental vision the walls of the room seemed to fade,
and he was only conscious of a vastness of space, and knew that for this
brief moment he was looking into eternity and realising for the first
time the wonder of things.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Verisschenzko had returned to the Carlton and was softly
walking down the passage towards the Boleskis' rooms. The ante-room door
was at the corner, and as he was about ten yards from it a man came out
and strode rapidly towards the lift down the corridor at right angles,
but the bright light fell upon his face for an instant, and Verisschenzko
saw that it was Ferdinand Ardayre.

He waited where he was until he heard the lift doors shut, and even then
he paced up and down for a time before he entered the sitting-room. There
must be no suspicion that he had encountered the late visitor.

"Darling Brute, here you are!" Harietta cried delightedly, rising from
her sofa and throwing herself into his arms. "I've packed Stanislass off
to the St. James' to play piquet. I have been all alone waiting for you
for the last hour--I began to fear you would not come."

Verisschenzko looked at her, with his cynical, humorous smile, whose
meaning never reached her. He took in the transparent garments which
hardly covered her, and then he bent and picked up a man's handkerchief
which lay on a table near.

"_Tiens_! Harietta!" he remarked lazily. "Since when has Stanislass taken
to using this very Eastern perfume?" and he sniffed with disgust.

The wide look of startled innocence grew in Madame Boleski's hazel eyes.

"I believe Stanislass must have got a mistress, Stepan. I have
noticed lately these scents on his things--as you know, he never used
any before!"

"The handkerchief is marked with 'F.A.' I suppose the _blanchisseuse_
mixes them in hotels. Let us burn the memento of a husband's straying
fancies then; the taste in perfumes of his inamorata is anything but
refined," and Verisschenzko tossed the bit of cambric into the fire which
sparkled in the grate.

"I've lots of news to tell you, Darling Brute--but I shan't--yet! Have
you come to England to see that bit of bread and butter--or--?"

But Verisschenzko, with a fierce savagery which she adored, crushed her
in his arms.




CHAPTER XI


On the Tuesday morning after the Carlton dinner, fate fell upon Denzil
and Amaryllis in the way the jade does at times, swooping down upon
them suddenly and then like a whirlwind altering the very current of
their destiny. It came about quite naturally, too, and not by one of
those wildly improbable situations which often prove truth to be
stranger than fiction.

Amaryllis was settled in an empty compartment of the Weymouth express at
Paddington. She had said good-bye to John the evening before, and he had
returned to camp. She was going back to Ardayre, and feeling very
miserable. Everything had been a disillusion. John's reserve seemed to
have augmented, and she had been unable to break it down, and all the
new emotions which she was trembling with and longing to express, had
grown chilled.

Presumably John must be pleased at the possibility of having a son since
it was his heart's desire; but it almost seemed as though the subject
embarrassed him! And all the beautiful things which she had meant to say
to him about it remained unspoken.

He was stolidly matter-of-fact.

What could it all mean?

At last she had become deeply hurt and had cried with a tremour in her
voice the morning before he left her:

"Oh! John, how different you have become; it can't be the same you who
once called me 'Sweetheart' and held me so closely in your arms! Have I
done anything to displease you, dearest? Aren't you glad that I am going
to have a baby?"

He had kissed her and assured her gravely that he was glad--overjoyed.
And his eyes had been full of pain, and he had added that he was stupid
and dull, but that she must not mind--it was only his way.

"Alas!" she had answered and nothing more.

She dwelt upon these things as she sat in the train gazing out of the
window on the blank side.

Yes. Joy was turning into dead sea fruit. How moving her thoughts had
been when coming up to meet him!

The marvel of love creating life had exalted her and she had longed to
pour her tender visionings into the ears of--her lover! For John had been
thus enshrined in her fond imagination!

The whole idea of having a child to her was a sacred wonder with little
of earth in it, and she had woven exquisite sentiment round it and had
dreamed fair dreams of how she would whisper her thoughts to John as she
lay clasped to his heart; and John, too, would be thrilled with
exaltation, for was not the glorious mystery his as well--not hers alone?

Now everything looked grey.

Tears rose in her eyes. Then she took herself to task; it was perhaps
only her foolish romance leading her astray once more. The thought
might mean nothing to a man beyond the pride of having a son to carry
on his name. If the baby should be a little girl John might not care
for it at all!

The tears brimmed over and fell upon a big crimson carnation in her coat,
a bunch of which John had ordered to be sent her, and which were now
safely reposing in a card-board box in the rack above her head.

Fortunately she had the carriage to herself. No one had attempted to get
in, and they would soon be off. To be away from London would be a relief.

Then her thoughts flew to Verisschenzko; he had told her that
circumstances in his country might require his frequent presence in
England for the next few months.

She would see him again. What would he tell her to do now? Conquer
emotion and look at things with common sense.

The picture of the dinner at the Carlton then came back to her, and the
face of Denzil across the table, so like, and yet so unlike John!

If Denzil had a wife would he be cold to her? Was it in the nature of
all Ardayres?

At the very instant the train began to move the carriage was invaded by a
man in khaki who bounded in and almost fell by her knees, and with a
cheery 'Just done it, Sir!' the guard flung in a dressing-bag and slammed
the door, and she realised with conscious interest that the intruder was
Denzil Ardayre!

"How do you do? By Jove. I am awfully sorry," and he held out his hand.
"I nearly lost the train and I am afraid I have bundled in without asking
leave. I am going down to Bath to say good-bye to my mother. I say, do
forgive me if I startled you," and he looked full of concern.

Amaryllis laughed; she was nervous and overstrung.

"Your entrance was certainly sudden and in this non-stop to Westbury we
shall have to put up with each other till then--shall you mind?"

"Awfully--Must I say that the truth would be that I am enchanted!"

Fortune had flung him these two hours. He had not planned them, his
conscience was clear, and he could not help delight rushing through him.
Two hours with her--alone!

There are some blue eyes which seem to have a spark of the devil lurking
in them always, even when they are serious. Denzil's were such eyes.
Women found it difficult to resist his charm, and indeed had never tried
very hard. Life and its living, knowledge to acquire, work to do, beasts
to hunt, had not left him too much time to be spoiled by them
fortunately, and he had passed through several adventures safely and had
never felt anything but the most transient emotion, until now looking at
Amaryllis sitting opposite him he knew that he was in love with this
dream which had materialised.

Amaryllis studied him while they talked of ordinary things and the war
news and when he would go out. She felt some strong attraction drawing
her to him. Her sense of depression left her. She found herself noticing
how the sun which had broken through a cloud turned his immaculately
brushed hair into bronze. She did a little modelling to amuse herself,
and so appreciated balance and line.

Everything in Denzil was in the right place, she decided, and above all
he looked so peculiarly alive. He seemed, indeed, to be the reality of
what her imagination had built up round the personality of John in the
weeks of their separation. Denzil believed that he was talking quite
casually, but his glance was ardent, and atmosphere becomes charged when
emotions are strong no matter how insignificant words may be. Amaryllis
_felt_ that he was deeply interested in her.

"You know my friend Verisschenzko well, it seems," she said presently.
"Is not he a fascinating creature? I always feel stimulated when I am
with him, and as if I must accomplish great things."

"Stepan is a wonder--we were at Oxford together--he can do anything he
desires. He is a musician and an artist and is chock full of common
sense, and there's not a touch of rot. He would have taken honours if he
had not been sent down."

Amaryllis wanted to know about this, and listened amazedly to the story
of the mad freak which had so scandalised the Dons.

She had recovered from her nervousness, she was natural and delightful,
and although the peculiar situation was filling Denzil with excitement
and emotion, he was too much a man of the world to experience any _gene_.
So they talked for a while with friendliness upon interesting things.
Then a pause came and Amaryllis looked out of the window, and Denzil had
time to grow aware that he must hold himself with a tighter hand, a sense
almost of intoxication had begun to steal over him.

Suddenly Amaryllis grew very pale and her eyelids flickered a little; for
the first time in her life she felt faint.

He bent forward in anxiety as she leaned her head against the
cushioned division.

"Oh! what is it, you poor little darling! what can I do for you?" he
exclaimed, unconscious that he had used a word of endearment; but even
though things had grown vague for her Amaryllis caught the tenderly
pronounced 'darling' and, physically ill as she felt, her spirit thrilled
with some agreeable surprise. He came nearer and pushing up the padded
divisions between the seats, he lifted her as though she had been a baby
and laid her flat down. He got out his flask from his dressing bag and
poured some brandy between her pale lips, then he rubbed her hands,
murmuring he knew not what of commiseration. She looked so fragile and
helpless and the probable reason of her indisposition was of such
infinite solicitude to himself.

"To think that she is feeling like that because--Ah!--and I may not even
kiss her and comfort her, or tell her I adore her and understand." So his
thoughts ran.

Presently Amaryllis sat up and opened her eyes. She had not actually
fainted, but for a few moments everything had grown dim and she was not
certain of what had happened, or if she had dreamed that Denzil had
spoken a love word, or whether it was true--she smiled feebly.

"I did feel so queer," she explained. "How silly of me! I have never felt
faint before--it is stupid"--and then she blushed deeply, remembering
what certainly must be the cause.

"I am going to open the window wide," he said, appreciating the blush,
and let it down. "You ought not to sit with your back to the engine like
that, let us change sides."

He took command and drew her to her feet, and placed her gently in his
vacant seat; then he sat down opposite her and looked at her with
anxious eyes.

"I sit that way as a rule because of avoiding the dust, but, of course,
it was that. I am not generally such a goose though--it is the nastiest
feeling that I have ever known."

"You poor dear little girl," his deep voice said. "You must shut your
eyes and not talk now."

She obeyed, and he watched her intently as she lay back with her eyes
closed, the long lashes resting upon her pale cheeks. She looked childish
and a little pathetic, and every fibre of his being quivered with desire
to protect her. He had never felt so profoundly in his life--and the
whole thing was so complicated. He tried to force himself to remember
that he was not travelling with _his_ wife whom he could take care of and
cherish because she was going to have _his_ child, but that he was
travelling with John's wife whom he hardly knew and must take no more
interest in than any Ardayre would in the wife of the head of the family!

He could have laughed at the extraordinary irony of the thing, if it had
not been so moving.

Verisschenzko, had he been there and known the circumstances, would have
taken joy in analysing what nature was saying to them both!

Amaryllis was only conscious that Denzil seemed the reality of her dream
of John, and that she liked his nearness--and Denzil only knew that he
loved her extremely and must banish emotion and remember his given word.
So he pulled himself together when she sat up presently and began
talking again, and gradually the atmosphere of throbbing excitement
between them calmed. They spoke of each other's tastes and likings and
found many to be the same. Then they spoke of books, and each discovered
that the other was sufficiently well read to be able to discuss varied
favourite authors.

An understanding and sympathy had grown up between them before they
reached Westbury, and yet Denzil was really trying to keep his word in
the spirit as well as the letter.

Amaryllis felt no constraint--she was more friendly than she would have
been with any other man she knew so slightly. Were they not cousins, and
was it not perfectly natural!

They talked of Oxford and of the effect it had upon young men, and again
they spoke of Stepan and of the dream he and Denzil shared.

"You will go into Parliament, I suppose, when you come back from the
war?" she remarked at last. "If you have dreams they should become
realities...."

"That is what I intend to do. The war may last a long time though--but it
ought to teach one something, and England will be a vastly different
place after it, and perhaps the younger men who have fought may have a
greater chance."

"You have pet theories, of course."

"I suppose so--I believe that the first great step will be to give the
people better homes--the housing question is what I am going to devote my
energy to. I am sure it is the root of nearly every evil. Every man and
woman who works should have the right to a good home. I have two supreme
interests--that is one, and the other is elimination of the wastrels and
the unfit. I am quite ruthless, perhaps, you will think. But there is
such a sickening lot of mawkish sentiment mixed up with nearly every
scheme to benefit workers. I agree with Stepan who always preaches: Get
down to the commonsense point of view about a thing. Prune the convention
and religion and sentimentality first and then you can judge."

Amaryllis thought for a moment; her eyes became wide and dreamy, and her
charmingly set head was a little thrown back. Denzil took in the line of
her white throat and the curve of her chin--it was not weak. Why was it
that women with the possibilities of this one always seemed to be some
other man's property! He had never come across such charm in girls. Or
was it that marriage developed charm?

They neither of them spoke for a minute or two, each busy with
speculation.

"I want to do something," Amaryllis said at last, "not, only just make
shirts and socks," and then the pink flushed her cheeks again suddenly as
she remembered that she would not be fit for more strenuous work for
quite a long time--and then the war would be over, of course.

Denzil thought the same thing without the last qualification. He was
under no delusions as to the speedy end of strife.

He could not help visioning the wonderful interest the hope of a son
would be to him if she really were his wife--how filled with supreme
sympathy and tenderness would be the months coming on. How they would
talk together about their wishes and the mystery and the glory of the
evolution of life. And here she had blushed at some thought concerning
it, and no words must pass between them about this sacred thing. He
longed to ask her many questions--and then a pang of jealousy shook him.
She would confide to John, not to him, all the emotions aroused by the
thought of the child--then. He wondered what she would do in the winter
all alone. Had she relations she was fond of? He wished that she knew his
Mother, who was the kindest sweetest lady in the world. He said aloud:

"I would like you to meet my Mother. She is going to be at Bath for a
month. She is almost an invalid with rheumatism in her ankle where she
broke it five years ago. I believe you would get on."

"I should love to--it is not an impossible distance from us. I will go
over to see her, if you will tell her about me--so that she won't think
some stranger is descending upon her some day!"

"She will be so pleased," and he thought that he would be happier knowing
that they were friends.

"Does she mean a great deal to you? Some mothers do," and she
sighed--her own was less than emptiness--they had never been near, and
now her stepfather and the step-family claimed all the affection her
mother could feel.

"She is a great dear--one of my best friends," and his eyes beamed. "We
have always been pals--because I have no brothers and sisters I suppose
she spoilt me!"

"I daresay you were quite a nice little boy!" Amaryllis smiled--"and it
must be divine to have a son--I expect it would be easy to spoil one."

Denzil clasped his hands rather tightly--she looked so adorable as she
said that, her eyes soft with inward knowledge of her great hope. How
impossible it all was that they must remain strangers--casual cousins and
nothing more.

"It must be an awful responsibility to have children," he said, watching
her. "Don't you think so?"

The pink flared up again as she answered a rather solemn "Yes."

Then she went on, a little hurriedly:

"One would try to study their characters and lead them to the highest
good, as gardeners watch over and train plants until they come to
perfection. But what funny, serious things we are talking about," and she
gave a little, nervous laugh--"Like two old grandfather philosophers."

"It is rather a treat to talk seriously; one so seldom has the chance to
meet any one who understands."

"To understand!" and she sighed. "Alas--How quite perfect life would
be--" and then she stopped abruptly. If she continued her words might
contain a reflection upon John.

Denzil bent forward eagerly--what had she been going to say?

She saw his blue attractive eyes gazing at her so ardently and some
delicious thrill passed through her. But Denzil recovered himself, and
leaned back in his seat--while he abruptly changed the conversation by
remarking casually:

"I have never seen Ardayre. I would love to look at our common ancestors.
My father used to say there was an Elizabethan Denzil who was rather like
me. I suppose we are all stamped with the same brand."

"I know him!" Amaryllis cried delightedly. "He is up at the end of the
gallery in puffed white satin and a ruff. Of course, you must come and
see him; he has exactly the same eyes."

"The whole family are alive I believe--we were a tenacious lot!"

"If you and John both get leave at Christmas you must come with him and
spend it at Ardayre--I shall have made your Mother's acquaintance by
then, and we must persuade her too."

He gave some friendly answer--while he felt that John might not endorse
this invitation. If the places were reversed, how would he himself act?
Difficult as the situation was for him, it was infinitely harder for
John. Then the train stopped at Westbury.




CHAPTER XII


Denzil had got out to get some papers which he had been to hurried to
secure at Paddington tipping the guard on the way, so that an old
gentleman who showed signs of desiring to enter was warded off to another
compartment. Thus when the train re-started, they were again left alone.

Amaryllis had partially recovered and was looking nearly her usual self,
but for the violet shadows beneath her eyes. She glanced at the papers
which he handed to her, and Denzil retired behind the Times. He wanted
to think; he must not let himself slip out of hand. He must resolutely
stamp out all the emotion that she was causing him; he despised weakness
of any sort.

He thought of Verisschenzko's words about laws being powerless to control
a man's actions, when a natural force is prompting him, unless he uses
self-analysis, and so by gaining knowledge permits the spirit to conquer.
He recollected that he had transgressed often without a backward thought
in past days with other women, but now his honour was engaged even apart
from his firm belief in Stepan's favourite saying, that a man must never
sully the wrong thing. Then the argument they had often had about
indulgences came to him, and the truth of the only possibility of their
enjoyment being while they remained servants, not masters.

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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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