'This Function Is to Make Me Happy'

“It is best to open with a simple declaration. I belong to a quaint depleted sect of serious readers who believe that literature exists to make men happy.”

That so joyous a declaration was issued in 1968, annus horribilis, makes it even more revolutionary. Few of us started to read books hoping to achieve unhappiness, though you wouldn’t always know that from the dreary roll call of critics, scholars and schoolmarms.

 

From Boris Dralyuk I learned that the ebullient polymath Oscar Mandel died on May 20 just short of his one-hundredth birthday. The passage above is taken from his essay “The Excesses of Seriousness in Literature,” published in the Spring 1968 issue of The Antioch Review. I can testify that reading Mandel’s varied output makes me happy. Such happiness started in 1985 when New Directions published The Book of Elaborations, an essay collection blurbed on the cover by Guy Davenport, who was the original reason I bought the book. When I reviewed Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters in 2007 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I discovered this in a 1984 letter from Davenport to the founding publisher of New Directions:

 

“O nobody knows Oscar Mandel. He writes scholarship as well as anybody (except that he writes it humanly, with jokes and brassy opinions); he writes poems that remind me of yours (poetry as a civilized skill rather than a wind from the infinite and the absolute); and he writes some of the best prose in the Republic.”

 

Later I read Mandel’s The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation, published in 1996 by Davaco, a Dutch publisher. It’s another book no one else seems to have read. Mandel and I exchanged emails in 2022 and he sent me a copy of Otherwise Poems (Prospect Park Books, 2015), signing it “with high greetings.” His poems blur distinctions between light verse and dark. Here is a poem from that collection, “Holy Books”:

 

“Christ is bad and Moses worse;

Montaigne fills my mental purse.

 

(Re the Number 3 Strong Cheese –

Bullets and bombs! I’ll hold my peace).”

 

And this, “Forgive Me”:

 

“Forgive me, you so pitifully dead,

when at the trombone’s bleat I dance,

as I forgive, reluctant! In advance,

the whoopers on my grave and huggers in my bed.” 

 

Mandel tells us his Antioch Review essay is intended to address “the quarrel for pre-eminence in literature among truth, morality, and pleasure.” Like Mandel, I object to none of these virtues, which remain perfectly compatible, assuming pleasure-giving is part of the package. He writes:

 

“I should like something of the spirit of Daphnis and Chloe and Aucassin and Nicolette to return to literature. I do not object to having a novel or a play expand my conscious- ness; I do not even mind its converting me into a better man; both of these events may contribute to the pleasure I take in reading, and when they do they are welcome. But I accept them only in their pleasure-giving capacity. For I keep the true function of literature exposed under a perpetual light. This function is to make me happy. The only difference between good and bad literature is that the first administers happiness to me, and the second does not.”