It is perhaps the most famous first line of all — the one that begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
It’s a great opening gambit. Sucks you right in to the travails of the Oblonsky household, where the paterfamilias has been banished to his study because of his latest dalliance. The line has only one drawback: It isn’t true.
To begin with, I am not sure if there are happy or unhappy families. Happiness, it seems to me, is something one ascribes to individuals, not groups, even groups bound by ties of blood. To find an individual who is truly happy is rare enough. An entire family that is would seem a prodigy.
No, most families, composed as they are of persons, have — like the persons who compose them — good days and bad, and many other days in between. What Willa Cather says in her essay on Katherine Mansfield about “the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday ‘happy family'” seems more to the point than Tolstoy’s glib pronouncement. “[E]very individual in that household (even the children),” Cather writes, “is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavor … the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be oneself at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at breaking point.”
The question that needs to be asked, of course, is, “What do we mean by happy?” The word itself doesn’t tell us much. It descends from a Middle English word, hap, meaning luck. Luck can be either good or bad, but when we call someone lucky we have in mind the good kind. So happy can be taken to mean blessed with good fortune.
Only that isn’t usually what we mean when we say someone is happy. After all, there are people with every advantage who, if not downright miserable, we would never describe as happy, and others whose circumstances are far from ideal, perhaps even straitened, but who seem quite happy indeed.
In The Art of Happiness, John Cowper Powys proposes a definition of happiness that strikes me as about right: “that particular glow of well-being that arises when something deep in us is being satisfied and fulfilled.” That, however, is not something likely to be ascribed to an entire family.
Despite what Tolstoy says, the discontents that make for an unhappy family are depressingly the same: Dad cheats on Mom, who in turn drinks too much, while No.1 son is failing at school, and his little sister is hanging with a bad crowd, etc., etc. (In the suburban narrative that dominates America’s so-called literary fiction, of course, there simply are no happy families: However fortunate they may be in terms of health, wealth, looks, whatever, their lives are empty of everything but some nameless anxiety, which of course ends up driving Dad to cheat on Mom, who then turns to drink — you get the picture.)
Nevertheless, though it may not be that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the particulars of misery almost always make for high drama and low comedy, and those particulars are common enough, Lord knows, to make their depiction recognizable to all. Such is not the case with happiness. A successful portrayal of genuine goodness or felicity is as difficult as it is rare. Worse, while rogues and misfortune are no impediment to a willing suspension of disbelief, when it comes to goodness and felicity, we recoil in skepticism.
We may speak fondly of “the pursuit of happiness,” but the fact is, we’re not quite sure what it is we’re pursuing, or how exactly to pursue it. Powys, in fact, thinks there is a kind of happiness-taboo at work:
There does seem to be a wide-spread notion … that although in reality all these great “purposes” of life, God, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Work, are precious to us because they alone, in the long run, bring us happiness, we can only obtain this happiness, or create this happiness, by treating these things as ends in themselves and by letting the happiness they bring, their by-product, come and go as it will.
So the point of his book — long out of print but easily available from used-book sellers online — is that we defy this taboo and set about doing whatever we have to in order to be as happy as we can within the limits of our circumstances. A good first step is to confront our discontents more directly than we are apt to.
Many years ago I found myself in a relationship that presented regular opportunities for outbursts of rage. I routinely availed myself of those opportunities until, one day, I just happened to notice that there wasn’t anything pleasant about rage. Quite the contrary. It was awful. So I paused to consider why I was letting myself feel so bad and quickly realized that my anger had its source in a toxic combination of injury and impotence: I felt hurt and there really wasn’t anything I could do about it. The rage was simply fuming over what I would do if there were anything I could do.
The moment I realized how much my rage was an exercise in futility, it stopped, and I was left just feeling hurt and sorry for myself. I next decided that the only honest thing to do was go with it and feel hurt. And you know what? You can’t keep that up too long. You just stop feeling it, the way you get used to a strong odor.
Ever since, I have rarely been moved to anger. I have also found this works for other strong emotions. Feeling depressed? Then go with it, be as depressed as you can. You may just find you can’t keep it up over the long haul. (Obviously, I am not talking about the clinical variety of depression — I am much too shallow a person to be subject to that.)
Anyway, this causes me to wonder if perhaps some enterprising young novelist might want to try his hand at depicting a character who doesn’t succumb to that legendary suburban disenchantment, but strives to overcome it and, by God, succeeds! Would anybody publish such a book? And what would the reviewers say?
That’s What He Said appears every Tuesday.
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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