In March 1894 Jules Renard wrote in his journal that “in order to be truly successful it is necessary, first, that one get there oneself, next, that others do not.” In May, he refined this thought a bit: “It is not enough to be happy: it is also necessary that others not be.”
Both quotes bring to mind one attributed to Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
It is easy to imagine Vidal coming upon Renard’s journal, adapting the Frenchman’s thought, and palming it off as his own. It is certainly easy to see why the mean-spirited Vidal would have taken to the sentiment.
But I sense a slight difference between Renard’s and Vidal’s outlooks. I think Renard was being merely grimly realistic about himself, whereas there is a kind of gleefulness in Vidal’s take. Renard may have felt that way, but I doubt if he was proud of it.
The problem with such a view, of course, is that it makes your success dependent upon what happens to others. Specifically, it renders your satisfaction proportional to their disappointment.
The only success worth having is success on your own terms. Though I am fond of quoting Spike Milligan’s quip that “all I ask is the chance to prove that great wealth won’t corrupt me,” great wealth has not in fact exerted enough of a lure for me to do anything in its pursuit. As for fame, that has never held any appeal for me.
My own terms for success will no doubt strike most people as either becomingly modest or uncommonly frivolous: I ended up doing exactly what I decided I wanted to do in high school. Back then, Philadelphia had a newspaper called The Bulletin. The Sunday edition had a modest book section — a couple of pages inside the Entertainment section. But a feature on the book pages was a column called “A Writer’s Diary” written by a Canadian author called Robertson Davies. (Davies was not yet as well-known a novelist as he would become. I was in high school in the ’50s and Fifth Business, probably his most famous novel, didn’t come out until 1970.)
His column was wonderful, written in a style as fluent as the best conversation, filled with all sorts of fascinating information, studded with opinions that always seemed truly meet and just. I read it — I do not exaggerate — religiously. And I thought to myself, “Now that is the job I would like to have — reading books and writing about them in the Sunday paper.”
It is, of course, what I ended up doing. I wrote my first professional review just a few months after I finished college. By 1976 I was writing freelance reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1980 I became an Inquirer staffer, then, in 2000, its book editor. I even got that weekly column in the Sunday paper (and now I have a Tuesday one here).
In other words, I did not set out to achieve much, but I did manage to achieve it. Henry Miller says somewhere that a good bit of happiness consists in nothing more than finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time. Since most of us have to spend the lion’s share of our time earning a living, finding a way to make ends meet doing something you like certainly gets you a leg up on the pursuit of happiness.
It also spares you any need to take pleasure in others’ disappointment.
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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