Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

In my Heyday (which was the Twenties), most of my contemporaries took the Declaration of Independence seriously--especially that phrase in it which declares that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. Among all too many of today's intellectuals this is no longer a respectable opinion. According to them every thinking man must be, and every decent man should be, thoroughly miserable--the decent man because the world is unjust, the thinking man because the whole universe is, and must remain, "absurd."

Until recently no one ever accused me of being a Pollyanna. In fact, my early book The Modern Temper (1929) was widely denounced as perversely pessimistic. Yet I have lived to hear it described on a TV panel as "quaint" and "almost sweet" by college freshmen who boasted that Sartre and Beckett had plunged them into a far deeper pit whose horrors (so it seemed from their voices) they were proud to revel in with masochistic determination.

Meanwhile I have grown progressively cheerful. Perhaps that is only what my younger contemporaries prefer to think it, namely, the result of a hardening of the cerebral arteries; but I prefer to call it a healthy reaction against the perversely extravagant lucubrations of the existentialists and the beatniks. Like Dr. Johnson's old school friend, I find that no matter how hard I try to be a philosopher, cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

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Perhaps there is more concrete misery than usual in the world today and I'll go along with the "decent man" far enough to agree that it should concern us. But I fail to understand what good it does anybody to say, like the character in one of Koestler's novels, "In an age of transition no one has the right to be happy." And I am even less persuaded by the existentialists who try to convince me by dubious abstract arguments and bold dogmatic assertions that I must think myself into some sort of abstract despair.

In the currently most admired novels and plays there is a terrible monotony. Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre and Genet repeat with little variety of method and no novelty of doctrine the same things: The universe is meaningless, without rhyme or reason; or as their endlessly repeated shibboleth has it, "absurd." Good and evil are empty words. One thing is as valuable as another. Though man is, in some inexplicable way, free and thus exempt from the necessity that governs everything else, he can demonstrate this freedom by being either a saint or a monster. Most people chose the latter alternative and it is logically no less admirable than the other. Hence the truest picture of life consists almost exclusively of unhappy, but usually cruel and debauched people, behaving irrationally in an irrational universe.

When I first met some of these specimens of the most serious and characteristic works of our time and first learned how greatly they were admired, I supposed that I must be misunderstanding what they were really intending to convey. Since I have read the explications furnished by their many sympathetic critics, I realize that I understood only too well. By one analyst I am assured that even Camus, "the most traditional, the gentlest and the wisest" of the lot, really did wish us to understand that a motiveless atrocity serves admirably to demonstrate human freedom and that Genet, "the wildest and loveliest," invents a new morality in which "dishonesty is better than honesty; cowardice is better than bravery; betrayal is better than loyalty; homosexuality is better than heterosexuality, and so on." Simone de Beauvoir declared that the Marquis de Sade was "the freest man who ever lived" and presumably she must find intriguing such of his reasonings as that which exalts incest on the ground that it promotes family affection! Since De Sade spent a considerable portion of his life in jail and Genet would be serving a life sentence as a habitual criminal had it not been for (concluded on page 250) Life, Liberty (continued from page 167) the intercession of literary admirers, to call De Sade the freest man who ever lived must be to take very literally the doctrine that "stone walls do not a prison make."

Whatever else may be said of either the novel or play "of the absurd," it is evident that both its creators and their characters are devoted to the pursuit of unhappiness--which may be an inalienable right but is certainly not the one the rest of us are compelled to exercise.

The poète maudit has, of course, often been with us. Oddly enough, we had at least one--Edgar Allan Poe--who appeared most improbably in mid-19th Century America. France has had the most of them and they run the gamut from Baudelaire to Rimbaud and Apollinaire on to the nadir of De Sade. But have they ever before been taken seriously as exponents of the only truth which a generation of intellectuals found it possible to recognize?

That the works of the current crop have a certain shock value is obvious both as propounders of paradox and (especially in the case of Genet) as purveyors of effective if perverse eroticism. Some of their admirers tacitly minimize the latter. The men they most admire are described as great writers who just happen to be often exercising their gifts in the treatment of gaudily erotic themes. But at the risk of being dismissed as hopelessly Philistine, I am bound to register my opinion that they would have a much smaller audience if they were not pornographic.

Even their shock effect soon loses its effectiveness because they repeat the same shock over and over again and are condemned by their very dogmas to monotony. An endless variety of meanings can be, and has been, read into the universe and human life. But meaninglessness is always the same. Once you have said that life is absurd, it is absurd in a simpler sense to say it again and again. You have reached the end of the line. There is nowhere to go from there--except perhaps to a further exposition of that unhappiness to which a belief that nothing is better than anything else inevitably leads.

The beatnik and the existentialist may seem far apart, but the professed convictions of each lead easily to the same messy, unrewarding conduct. Their lives are likely to be as much a failure from the standpoint of the hedonist as from that of the most conventional morality. They don't even "have fun." And that, by a prevalent system of values, is the ultimate failure.

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All this, so they tell me, is inevitable. Nihilism is the only possible modern philosophy. For the first time in history we know the facts and have the courage to face them. The literature of the absurd is the only literature the future will tolerate and despair the only mood intelligent men can ever know. The race of human beings has wandered for many thousands of years from delusion to delusion, but it has come to rest at last. There is no God and we are His prophets.

I doubt it. Existentialism is merely a creed no more solidly founded than Calvinism--which it resembles in the gratuitous assumption that human nature is vile and the majority of men damned before they were born to torture either in this world or the next. The premise that the universe is meaningless is merely a premise, not a demonstrated fact. The contention that man is capable of freedom and value judgments although he is the product of natural forces which know nothing of either is singularly improbable. Either of the alternate assumptions makes more sense. If he is indeed unique in nature, then something transcendental made him so. If he is something which nature herself has produced, then nature must be in some way responsible for capacities he inherits from the universe itself.

Neither literature nor any of the other arts merely reflect the times. They create as well as record convictions and moods. If a sizable audience now believes that life is absurd, existence a continual misery, and human beings almost without exception vile, it believes it in large part, not because of its own experience, but because poets of talent have convinced it of the alleged fact. I risk the bold prediction that sooner or later--and rather soon, I think--it will awake from its nightmare, and the "theater of the absurd" will be as outmoded as the proletarian "art-is-a-weapon" drama of the Thirties which many critics of the time described as the only drama of the future. One of the advantages--perhaps there are not many--of having lived a long time is the fact that it inevitably makes one something of a square. We know by experience what those who know the past only through history can never believe, namely, that those "eternal truths" which have been newly discovered turn out to be mere fashions after all.

Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the only "drama of the absurd" to achieve a great success on other than off-Broadway, Edward Albee's hideous masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one in which surrealism is abandoned in favor of what comes pretty close to old-fashioned naturalism. It is understandable, even bitterly funny, no matter what your intellectual convictions may be. Unlike most of Beckett, Ionesco and Genet, it makes sense whether you are an existentialist or not. And you don't even have to believe that it is typical. Only that some human beings, not all, are like the doomed quartet which constitutes its dramatis personae. That is at least a step back toward sanity.