Happier is as Happier Does
Reviewed By Bob Hodges
It’s a best-selling, self-help book. It comes with a lot of authority. The writer is a popular teacher at Harvard, no less. His classes are full. Thousands of people look to him for inspiration for how to make their lives happier. This book has something for everyone. However, despite all the bells, whistles and background that come with Tal Ben-Sharer’s Happier, as a gay male, I found myself going along with his advice but not quite feeling included.
His basic look at humanity has us divided into four groups. The devotees of the “rat race” are trained in school to succeed with good grades, spending their entire lives finding meaning in success and only in success. Pleasure seems a waste of time on the rat racers. Certainly, gay men and lesbians often try to justify themselves through success — it can make up for the shame of homosexuality.
Group two is the precise opposite. These are the hedonists, people who seek pleasure and only pleasure. This, too, can include us. If our sexuality makes our lives damaged and worthless, then why not live for kicks? You can turn those forbidden good times into life’s goals. Our movement for the past few decades has done a lot to undo this point of view, but, looking at some gay publications, the stress on luxury and pleasure still makes us look like aspiring hedonists. Oscar Wilde once spoke about the supreme importance of the pursuit of pleasure. Of course, both the rat racers and the hedonists are never satisfied; their versions of happiness are short lived and the pursuit of success or pleasure only drives them onward.
The third group he calls the “nihilists.” These people have given up, finding all activity meaningless. They sound more in need of psychotherapy. The advice and exercises in this book do not seem like enough to pull them out of their despair.
Ben-Sharer writes that “Happiness Archetype” is the goal. He advises writing down your goals, your satisfying times, and spending time on self-improvement. One could hardly disagree with any of his advice, but it’s as though something is left out. Personal relationships are barely mentioned, although he does not restrict romance to heterosexuals and is careful with gender pronouns (“partners”).
What he omits are the special problems of LGBT people or of any minority that suffers from prejudice, and the “happiness revolution” he calls for in his book only leaves readers wondering what that actually is.
Cheever, a Life
by Blake Bailey
Alfred A Knopf, $35
When John Cheever died at age 70 in 1982, he was the most prestigious American writer of fiction. Blake Bailey’s biography is a fascinating read based on Cheever’s vast diary and searching interviews with many who knew him. Cheever’s bisexuality was a deeply kept secret, only suspected after his novel about prison life, Falconer, included a love affair between two incarcerated men.
Cheever had been bothered by his homosexuality most of his life. Homosexuals, he wrote in his journal, seem “unserious, humorless and revolting.” He was married with three children and even had a rather self-conscious affair with the actress Hope Lange. He had number of clandestine affairs, often with students he was advising about writing. One even spent a lot of time in the family home. His “bisexuality” became public only after his death in his daughter Susan’s book “Home Before Dark.”
His fiction retains its appeal. A humorous version of New England eccentricity makes up “The Wapshot Chronicle” and continues in “The Wapshot Scandal. Cheever’s most famous story, “The Swimmer” speaks to gay readers. I think it resonates with us because of the pool party, always popular with gay men and sometimes painful as bodies in various states of attractiveness are on display and the vivid reminders of the passing of time are all too obvious.
- ROBERT HODGES