`Our Hearts Expect Happiness'

The first short stories written during my lifetime I can remember reading were John Updike’s, the early pieces from The Same Door (1959) and Pigeon Feathers (1962). Not coincidentally they remain my favorites from his half-century and more of work, and I’ve always preferred his short fiction to the novels. In the foreword he wrote for The Early Stories: 1953-1975, published in 2003, Updike characterizes his Depression-born generation and says:

“But when has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just that – a pursuit. Death and its adjutants tax each transaction. What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted. Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear – these are the worthy, inevitable subjects. Yet our hearts expect happiness, an underlying norm, `the fountain-light of all our day’ in Wordsworth’s words.”

This seems morally and aesthetically wise. Can you think of a significant -- or even insignificant -- work of fiction dedicated to happiness? Neither can I. A kneejerk explanation is that happiness is not essentially an interesting state of being. It's best defined negatively, by what it is not. It tends to be monochromatic, with fewer nuances than the Technicolor palette of unhappiness and sorrow. And happiness is evanescent. It seems appreciable only in contrast to what surrounds it -- depression, numbness, anger, discontent, anomie, churlishness. It dissolves when I become aware of it, as though self-consciousness were a corrosive. We experience a happy minute, an hour, never a month. It seems to be an occasional byproduct of right living, of living in balance. And to seek happiness assures its elusiveness. Like grief, its arrival is unexpected.

Updike was 25 when he wrote "The Happiest I've Been," later collected in The Same Door. The Updike-like narrator is 20. Describing a New Year's Eve party among friends from high school, in a small Pennsylvania town in 1952, he says: "I had the impression then that people only drank to stop being unhappy, and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy."

Of all Updike's stories this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It's the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. As John Nordholm drives west across Pennsylvania, in the company of his friend Neil Hovey, whom he has already told us he will never see again after they arrive in Chicago. Read the story's conclusion with its title in mind:

"There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility -- you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element -- and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state -- as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."