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Sorts of Unhappiness

[The following excerpt from Graham Greene’s autobiography, A Sort of Life, is meant to call into question Hermann Hesse’s optimistic assertion that happiness is a talent. I don’t mean to deny that there are people who have a talent for enjoying life, or to deny that most people could learn to be happier if they really determined what was required, and then paid the price—for even happiness has a price. What I doubt is whether all those people who have certain kinds of unhappiness built into their lives by virtue of a temperament they can’t change, and/or circumstances that are very difficult to escape, can significantly increase their capacity for happiness through their own efforts. How, for instance, could Greene have made himself happier given the situation he finds himself in? He couldn’t simply decide not to be a writer, which Georges Simenon called a “vocation of unhappiness.” George Orwell, a great writer himself, expands on the nature of this vocation: ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon, who one can neither resist nor understand.’ Undoubtedly there are happy writers. But it should be obvious that being a happy writer is not as easy as being a happy truck driver—assuming you have a strong desire to drive trucks. The common assumption nowadays that the individual is responsible for his own happiness may in fact be as unenlightened a notion as the old idea that physical disability was caused by sin: ‘Whereupon his disciples asked him, Master, was this man guilty of sin, or was it his parents, that he should have been born blind?’ (John 9: 2) It is pleasant to think that happiness is something that we can create for ourselves through effort and ingenuity. But since most human experience teaches the opposite, perhaps it is wiser to try to work within the limitations that life imposes. As a consolation it may be liberating to accept that one can never be as happy as one had hoped. In the passage below, the ‘job’ Greene took (and shortly thereafter left) was an office job in an oil company, Sackville Street refers to where the employment agencies were located, and ‘the Carlist refugees in Leicester Square’ refers to the plot of one of Greene’s early failed attempts at novel writing.]

There was the problem of money. I had dropped my allowance when I took my job and I couldn’t live at home, for the house was closed and my family at the seaside. It was Sackville Street or nothing. To the young men of my generation, down from the university without work, recourse to Sackville Street was like recourse to the pawnshop in earlier days. Among the “gentlemen’s tailors” stood an office with the Dickensian name of Gabbitas & Thring... The office of Gabbitas & Thring (chief rival of the equally Dickensian Truman & Knightley) might have been that of an old family solicitor, with strange secrets concealed in the metal file boxes. It was not the cream of educational aspirants which trickled through Sackville Street. I doubt if many young men ever reached Eton or Harrow with the aid of the “partners,” for a man with a first-class degree did not require their help. They were the last hope of those needing a little temporary aid. You pawned yourself instead of your watch.

I had a horror of becoming involved in teaching. It was a profession into which you could so easily slip, as my father had done, by accident. He had intended to be a barrister, had “eaten his dinners” and taken on the job of temporary master only to tide him over a lean period. Had he been afraid of feeling the trap close, as I was now? I wanted nothing permanent, I explained in near panic to the partner. Was there not, perhaps, some private tutoring job which was available just for the summer? He opened his file with an air of disappointment: there were certainly good opportunities, he suggested, in the coming school term, for an exhibitioner of Balliol with an honours degree. As for private tutoring I was too late in applying, such men were needed immediately the schools broke up (he whisked over page after page), there was really nothing he could offer for someone of my qualifications . . . . I would hardly be interested in this (he had detached a page with the tips of his fingers), a widowed lady living at Ashover, a village in Derbyshire, who required someone to look after her son of eight during the holidays. I would not be asked to live in the house: I would have a room in a private hotel with all my meals, but there was no salary attached. When I accepted, he looked at me with disappointment and suspicion—there must be something disgracefully wrong with my background.

The position suited me, for I had the evenings free when I could work at my novel. The country was beautiful with the gray Pennines standing all around, a few wandering sheep on desolate deserted hills, loose stone walls and occasional cottages with an Irish air of dilapidation. The widow was undemanding. She didn’t want her son to be overworked. A little mathematics perhaps in the morning (I had forgotten all I ever knew), a quarter of an hour of Latin (equally forgotten), some games after lunch . . . . I had what I thought the bright idea of teaching him a little carpentry, though I had never practiced it myself. There was a large shady garden which reminded me of my uncle’s at Harston with lots of outhouses in which I discovered wooden crates, nails, hammers. I suggested we should build a toy theatre. My pupil agreed readily enough: he was a boy without initiative: he was quite ready to stand around holding the nails. Unfortunately the toy theatre failed to take even a rudimentary shape, so that after two days’ work I decided that what we had been making without knowing it was a rabbit hutch. He was quite satisfied, even though there was no rabbit; he was as undemanding as his mother.

Back in the private hotel, which was called Ambervale, I plodded on till dinnertime, among the Carlist refugees in Leicester Square, but the oppression of boredom soon began to descend. Once on my free day I walked over the hills to Chesterfield and found a dentist. I described to him the symptoms, which I knew well, of an abscess. He tapped a perfectly good tooth with his little mirror and I reacted in the correct way. “Better have it out,” he advised.

“Yes,” I said, “but with ether.”

A few minutes’ unconsciousness was like a holiday from the world. I had lost a good tooth, but the boredom was for the time being dispersed.

The only other distraction lay in the old ladies—a gay crowd who insisted on playing paper games they didn’t properly understand after dinner under the direction of an elderly gentleman: “Famous general beginning with the letter B,” the sort of thing to which family life had accustomed me. They were regarded with cynical impatience by the only other young people, a pale slang-ridden schoolboy and a girl with bobbed hair who wanted a hotel flirtation. She went with me to the pub where the landlord showed us into a private room, where we sat gingerly on the edge of a table and kissed dryly, then took refuge in a half of bitter and gin and lime. She offered me a mongrel wire-haired terrier as a souvenir, which was to be sent by rail from Leicester to Berkhamsted and was to prove the bane of my life. Later the dog played an off-stage part in a play of mine, The Potting Shed, and Mr. Kenneth Tynan, for reasons which remain mysterious to me, believed that he represented God. At lunch I would share a table with the flapper and her fat mother because the manageress thought it would be nice for the young people to get together. The mother was too shy to talk and whinnied like a frightened horse whenever I spoke to her.

The afternoons were the worst, for then there was not even the pretense of lessons. When I was tired of hide-and-seek for two I invented a game of pirates which involved a lot of physical activity on the walls of the vegetable garden. Luckily my pupil fell off the wall and cut his leg. This, in the eyes of his mother, made mathematics impossible, so now I could read to him all day while he lay stretched in a deck chair. And so my second job came slowly and undemandingly to an end. My family returned from the seaside, the mongrel dog, called Paddy, arrived by train in a highly nervous condition from Leicester, and I was back at square one in Berkhamsted.

[Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was an influential Canadian literary critic who taught English in Victoria College at the University of Toronto. He first came to prominence with his 1947 book on the prophetic poetry of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, a book that Harold Bloom said, ‘ravished my heart away.’ Unfortunately for the highly intellectual Frye, he was born into a Methodist family of rather fundamentalist outlook. Even worse, the family’s economic position steadily deteriorated from Frye’s childhood on, due mainly to bad luck. This circumstance made him dependent on scholarships and the charity of those who could recognize his gifts. Though not keen on ordination to the ministry, Frye saw it as probably his only chance to make a career in academia, intellectual work being, as he knew only too well, the only work he was capable of enjoying and qualified to do. Methodist students on track to ordination, however, were required to prepare for the ministry by spending a summer doing pastoral work. Accordingly, the shy, music loving, Blake-obsessed, somewhat sickly twenty-two year old Frye was uprooted from his natural habitat, Victoria College, and sent out to Saskatchewan to be a circuit riding preacher. For the next five months he ministered to the prairie hamlets of Stone, Stone Pile and Carnagh. The following selections from John Ayre’s excellent biography of Frye aim to make clear just how miserable he was, and, indeed, how unhappy doing work one is eminently unsuited to do can make anyone.]

Even to a westerner, this can be a curious and frightening land. The parish consists entirely of a dry uplands plateau called The Bench which seems forced right up against the sky. This is an illusion created by the long rolling hills which close off any distant horizon, creating disorientation, even claustrophobia. Frye early felt a baffled terror in the “fitful tossing country” with farms so large that “you look over the horizon and all you can see is your own farm.” Neither the shallow bush-choked ravines, called coulees, or the dry patches of cottonwood shrub relieved its essential brown, sun-baked banality. . . Frye discovered that he would be boarded around at different homes each week so that the parish could claim Frye’s board money. What this meant was a constant break in routine, trying to study Blake in loud open kitchens with blaring radios and unfamiliar people. . . . Frye’s innate shyness, total ignorance of farming and inability to make small talk made encounters difficult and futile. His own dislike for physical labour meant that he shied away from helping farmers out. . . . Although Frye quickly developed a deep “coffee” tan, his image was more Don Quixote than cowboy. He kept his hair sufficiently long that the leading lady of the congregation, Mrs. Bonfoy, muttered to Mrs. Meyers that it had to go. On horseback, he wore regular trousers, ignoring the usual apparel of jeans or chaps. His experiences with the horses themselves were symptomatic of his general unease. His first horse, Katie, was a nag as old as Frye himself. She was as uncooperative as a donkey. Her physique was like that of an Alpine mountain range. She was so slow and old, forward progress seemed negligible. Her up and down disjointedness threw Frye’s inner organs into disarray. There was the suggestion that Frye could be quickly upgraded to a better horse but he begged off. Two months later, he did graduate to Bessie, a younger mare who didn’t have to be chased around the barnyard like Katie for saddling. Frye early marvelled at the uncomplicated speed with which she crossed distances, but feared her naughtiness in trying to buck him off. . . . Frye felt foolish and self-conscious. In later years, he joked that across the flat areas of the parish, he felt he couldn’t even relieve himself because he was convinced that the ladies of the parish—one especially—continually kept the preacher boy under view with binoculars. . . . In frequent letters to his fiancé, Frye detailed every social and physical agony he encountered. He knew that he would commit suicide “without the slightest hesitation” if he had to stay on the prairies all his life. He tried to put Toronto out of his mind because it unbalanced him to think of the disparity of life styles: “God Himself seems to fade away on these grim prairies: not that He is far away—I never feel that; but He seems curiously impersonal. That, of course, is largely because I left Blake at Stone, the nearest piano a mile away and you in Ottawa.” Two months later, he morbidly predicted that perhaps “by 1940 some student will come out and collect my remains.” He managed to cheer himself up one evening by reading Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet in a girl’s poetry anthology which conveyed everything about his present state. Besides Blake, he immersed himself in the only universally available literature: “I am getting a sound and accurate knowledge of the Bible; the Bible is magnificent, but in spite of what everyone says, it is a book for admiration rather than intimacy, like the natural world”. . . . If Frye was emotionally and physically discomfited, he was at first benignly insensitive to his parishioners. Although he faced a congregation which was usually poorly educated, culturally isolated and beleaguered by drought and plague, he preached to them like Emmanuel College graduates. While he quickly discerned a need “to work from the inside, in their own language and sets of ideas,” he couldn’t bear the corollary, reinforcing his parishioners’ moral superstitions which passed for religion. “For instance, if old Mrs. McCrae knew that a young lady [his fiancé] of whom I was most inordinately proud and fully intended to marry danced, smoked, swore and had no moral objections to playing cards she would be scandalized, and in being her minister I sometimes cannot help feeling that I am tacitly assenting, through lack of courage, to a monstrous and absurd scale of values”. . . . “The Methodist prejudices I encounter [are] the most superstitious of fetishes, and merely a way of avoiding the real problems of religion. That is the most obvious of rural deficiencies—making piety consist of taboos... but I think the religious problem is bound up with the cultural deadness. What these poor people use for literature, art and music is to me the source of the whole evil that makes them regard religion as a social convention rather than an experience. I admire and respect the people in themselves... But they work too hard, and get too little out of their work” . . . . It was precisely when his letters to her were becoming less frenetic that his college friend John Bates sought him out and found him still wild with unhappiness. Bates had learned of his problems in a round robin letter and, feeling depressed himself, he set out in a Model T from his own mission area in Robsart about fifty miles away. To Bates it seemed as if Frye had disappeared into a surrealist wasteland. When Bates asked parishioners where he was, they pointed vaguely down the road and said he should look for a grey, sway-backed mare. Finally, Bates came across a farm where the farmer, Walter Hickman, was putting a horse into the barn. Bates pulled up and when he walked to the side door of the house, he saw Frye through the torn screening furiously swatting at flies in the kitchen. When he saw Bates, Frye’s face lit up in a way that Bates had never seen before or since. Frye freely confessed that he’d almost believed that “Victoria College and all that that means to me had become a dream.”

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