Lessons in joy

Bother the gloomy

Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim

By Gabrielle Carey

Review by Jenny Bird

Only Happiness Here is a hybrid work of non-fiction, both biography and memoir, and a layered reflection on the nature of happiness. Gabrielle Carey’s fascination with the life and works of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim is both literary and personal. Carey, an academic, declares that rather than write a conventional biography, she wants to share her ‘love of Elizabeth and her works with readers outside of the scholarly world.’ She describes her relationship with Elizabeth as ‘like a very special friend that I was aching to introduce to everyone I knew.’ Carey is ‘incensed’ that Australian-born Elizabeth ‘had been so completely forgotten’ and determines to return her to her rightful place in literary history. But Carey’s interest in Elizabeth von Arnim lies deeper than just a biographer’s sense of injustice for an overlooked and forgotten subject. Already committed to writing a book about Elizabeth, Carey’s family was struck by tragedy, and, with life and work on hold, Carey found that she had forgotten what happiness was. Worse than that, she felt that she had ‘completely lost faith in the very idea of happiness, let alone the pursuit of it.’ Carey writes, ‘When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy.’ Carey’s questions became these: ‘What did Elizabeth understand about happiness that no other writer I’ve ever come across did? And is it something I too might be able to learn?’ She takes a year off to study Elizabeth, a year that she describes as ‘one of the happiest in my life.’ In Only Happiness Here Carey toggles between Elizabeth’s personal diaries, her books, and three previously published biographies to fulfil her promise of sharing her special friend with us. I too fell in love with Elizabeth and laughed out loud at her wickedly satirical writing about marriage and the gendered roles of domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century:

She hadn’t been married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was, the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn’t to begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage with very little of it and work steadily upwards…’ And this observation from an agriculturalist husband:

His affection for his wife was quite satisfactory: it was calm, it was deep, it interfered with nothing.

She held the honourable position he had always, even at his most enamoured moment, known she would ultimately fill, the position next best in his life after the fertilizers. You can be forgiven for never having heard of Elizabeth von Arnim. Born in Sydney in 1866, her family moved to London in 1870. She lived ‘a manically restless life’ in Europe, England and the USA, never returning to Australia. She was a friend of E.M. Foster, a lover of H.G. Wells, the wife of Count Henning August von ArnimSchlagenthin and later the wife of Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank. She was the mother of five children and the cousin of Katherine Mansfield. Throughout a life of chaotic and often destructive domestic, financial and romantic dramas, she was a determined, consistent and prolific writer. Most of her twenty-one books are thinly disguised semi-autobiographies. When Elizabeth died in 1941 the Melbourne Advocate said this about her writing: ‘Wit, glamour, joyousness, truth (sometimes ugly), incisive satire, laughter, beauty, common sense…’ Amidst the chaos and periods of deep depression,

Elizabeth managed to carve out periods of rapturous happiness. According to Carey, Elizabeth ‘had little sympathy for misery gutses’ and the inscription above the front door of her Swiss chalet ‘Only Happiness Here’ is a declaration of sorts. ‘Bother the gloomy’ says Elizabeth. Carey structures the book around a set of nine ‘Principles of Happiness According to Elizabeth von Arnim’ – what she learns from Elizabeth about happiness, and what she would like to share with us in case we might like to follow. For example, Elizabeth found sublime joy in nature, her gardens, and in sunlight. The spiritual rapture she describes from being in nature reminded me of the transcendentalists and Henry David Thoreau:

I lived in a world of dandelions and delights… the acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, slivery-pink peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful and grateful, that I cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away in a dream of pink and purple peace. Only Happiness Here gifted me the unexpected sheer delight of meeting Elizabeth and her writing. But it also set going a deep reflection on my own relationship to happiness. Sometimes I found myself not quite trusting Elizabeth’s take on happiness. She had, when you add it all up, a tough life despite her privilege. Yet she kept bouncing back to happiness. Occasionally I wondered if Elizabeth needed a psychologist. It seemed that her highs were very high and her lows very low. Of course, my suspicions had as much to do with my own relationship to happiness as they did with Elizabeth. Yet how could I be doubtful of a woman who wrote in her diary just before her death, ‘I think I’ve so got into the habit of being happy inside and quite secretly…’ While reading Only Happiness Here I coincidentally came across an interview with actor Charlotte Rampling in The Guardian in which she talks about the impact of the death by suicide of her twenty-threeyear-old sister. She said ‘I couldn’t be what I had been before. I couldn’t be happy any more. Your whole life changes.’ I understood exactly what she meant. But Elizabeth had a contrary approach to pain and grief: ‘One has only got to shut out the parts of the present one doesn’t like to see this all clear and feel so happy.’ At the very beginning and at the very end of the book Carey mounts two broader arguments about happiness. One is that ‘modernism didn’t believe in happiness,’ and the other, ‘let’s face it, most literature is miserable.’ Carey wonders about Elizabeth:

She was demoted to those of the unsophisticated cheerful. It has become more respectable to be depressed, an attitude that signals virtue, and almost socially irresponsible to be happy – a state that is associated with vacuousness… amid our infatuation with darkness, being cheerful has become not only unsophisticated but morally suspect. As you can see, there is a lot to ponder in Only Happiness Here, but let us allow Elizabeth the last word: ‘What are you to do if your conscience is clear and your liver in good order and the sun is shining?’

University of Queensland Press / 248pp / RRP $32.99