Hansjörg Schertenleib - A Happy Man

Tolstoy wrote that every happy family is alike, and that unhappy families are different in their unhappiness. Anna Karenina goes on to explore several unhappy families in great detail, and remains one of the permanent masterpieces of Western literature.

The implication that all happy families are alike extends, of course, to individuals, and from there only on conclusion may be drawn – to be happy is to be boring. Literature has struggled to represent happiness, confusing it with simplicity and innocence at times, and at others, well, can anyone read a saccharine-sweet dialogue between two people recently in love (and, we assume, happy) and not cringe? “I felt great!” is not the foundation upon which to build a novel. “I feel bad, and here's why...” however, seems to be fertile ground.

Hansjörg Schertenleib's A Happy Man is an attempt to tackle this problem. We are introduced to our hero, This Studer, while he is on a train, traveling to Amsterdam with his wife. He is a jazz trumpeter, which he thinks is a bit of a pretentious way to describe one's occupation, but that's what it is and besides, he's really quite good at it, and loves to play. At fifty he still loves his wife, and yearns for her both sexually and romantically. His teenager daughter is a problem, but he recognises her behaviour as the rebellion of youth and nothing more. His best friend is just that. As Schertenleib writes,

Otherwise, there's nothing special about him. Shall we try to describe him anyway? He's one of those people whose appearance is hard to recall precisely, even though his face is actually not an ordinary one. Or is it? At most, you remember the protuberance on the bridge of his nose, his bristly sideburns, or the fact that he's tall and powerfully built and leans slightly forward when he walks, like a ski-jumper about to launch himself from the takeoff platform. Certainly the most noticeable thing about him is his smile.

But he notes on the same page that not everybody takes to This the way that This takes to life:

A person who's always in a good mood is a challenge; someone's who always smiling, a provocation. What could be worse than another person's happiness?

The novella is split into two sections. In the first, This is on his way to Amsterdam with his wife, and during the second she has returned home while he stays in the city and plays a few gigs. There isn't any real conflict to speak of – oh, sure, the narrator mentions a few times that his wife occasionally finds his constant happiness a bit off-putting, but that's as far as it goes – which admittedly does have the effect of reducing the plot to This walking around spending time with his friends and playing music. To return to the lack of conflict, the following is about as intense as it gets:

On certain days, however, his optimism is more than she can take. She's often reproached him for it: he should just let her feel the weariness and the darkness, she whom the wind directs and doubts assail. Her secret wish at such times is that he, too, would have his bad days.

The narrator, who is decidedly not This, is sometimes an intrusion but most often functions as a device for comparing the contented life of This with the regular life of ordinary people (ie people who aren't always happy). The narrator is a commentator, generally rather good, and serves to place This within his world. He (we shall presume Schertenleib is the narrator for ease of grammar) has a certain fondness for This, it is clear, and this is perhaps best expressed in the fact that This is real – he is conceivable. He's not happiness personified, and he isn't a stand-in for some metaphysical system of the author's to show us readers how to be happy. No, he's a person, he just happens to be, well:

”I'm not happy, just content,” said This. “Everybody in this world has doubts, everybody carps and bellyaches, but the contended man is king. He lives in peace, unlike the happy man. He doesn't have to prove anything, not to himself or anybody else. He doesn't feel called upon to convince anyone of anything, has nothing to fear. He's content because he knows he's gotten past his fears.”

If the first part of the novel introduces This, the second examines how he came to be. Schertenleib expertly balances three distinct storylines in the second section. The first we know; it concerns Amsterdam, This' best friend, and jazz. The second is darker, dredging through This' childhood memories of a savage dog he was afraid to approach. The third shows how This came to jazz, detailing his grandfather's methodical and loving introduction to the jazz greats. Schertenleib's sections are brief, a page or two at most, and as they cut from one to the other we gain a deeper perspective on This as an adult. But let's be clear: his memories of the vicious dog are not there to provide a balance to This' later happiness. He did not react to a bad experience by becoming hyper-content. That would be lazy, and Schertenleib is far too good a writer for that. No, what the dog, and the grandfather, provide are aspects of an identity that grew naturally and organically, as all identities should.

The culmination of a novel where not much happens and, by virtue of its lead, not much can happen, is surprisingly rather good, and allows the narrator free reign to comment upon the human condition with an intellectual sensitivity perhaps unexpected from the first fifty or so pages. Schertenleib cleverly builds his character as a character, a person, and not a trope, and then he utilises him for philosophical digressions and asides. This is really quite effective, and the last four or five pages have real and lasting impact.

A Happy Man is short, and deals with its subject in a manner that feels complete. This doesn't have enough to him to support an entire novel, but the framework around him that has been created by Schertenleib doesn't require it. The novella is part of “The Contemporary Art of the Novella” series by Melville House and shows exactly why the novella remains an important contribution to contemporary letters. Novellas have never really gained the appreciation in English that they have in, say, French, or German, or many other European languages, which is a shame, because they allow for a full and comprehensive examination of a concept without sacrificing integrity by padding things out or cutting too much away.