In Search of a Happy Ending

IN SEARCH OF A HAPPY ENDING 0'er land and sea love follows with fond prayers Its dear ones in their troubles, grief and cares; There is no spot On which it does not drop this tender dew, Except the grave, and there it bids adieu, And prayeth not! -STODDARD," In Memoriam" T HE foregoing lines seem to sum up rather well the conclusion with which the novels which we read in our maturity supplant the endings of the fairy tales we read in childhood. Once our stories ended: "And so they lived happily ever after." Now we are older and more enlightened and the better stories, though marked with passing bliss, prefer to reach their term in stark despair and utter dashing of hopes. If the happy couple do not find shipwreck before, the sacrificial novelist leads all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave-but to the grave. And there he " bids adieu and prayeth not." Our Prince elopes with Cinderella-only to divorce her some time later. They had hoped for too much; the gods do not smile on such dreams. Cinderella moons away on her alimony and the Prince drags his bruised and battered heart sadly through an unfeeling w-orld. Grant them the prospect of happiness without alloy, then just as Cinderella and her Prince are about to drive off in the pumpkin carriage to some castle of dreams, a mad goblin will appear on the scene and stab our Prince to the heart, leaving him to expire in the arms of the heart-broken Cinderella. This situation occurs in Maurice Baring's Friday's Business/ wherein the hero, having at last discovered his beloved, is more or less casually murdered in a Balkan revolution which promptly melts away a few moments 1 Maurice Baring, Friday's Business (London: 1932). 41 PIERRE H. CONWAY later. The tragic future of the beloved is left to the reader's imagination. As he closes such a book, he can hear the spirit of the author saying: "Sorry, old man, I'd like to give you a happy ending, but life is just not like that, and as a truthful observer of life, I can't lie to you and delude you." As far as life goes, we must admit the author has done a good job of reporting. The champions of fairy tales may denounce modern authors as downright pessimistic and perverse, but most of us feel more inclined to applaud them for their effort at truthfulness, even if it must hurt. If they do not settle the problem, at least they do not evade it but follow their human models to their logical, even if tragic, conclusion.2 The problem is age-old. Love, that perfect union of hearts which has the tendency to be complete and eternal, is constantly menaced by the whims of fate and fortune, and is ultimately sundered by its inexorable enemy, death. In story-telling it is quite possible to overcome ill fortune by the stroke of the pen and to evade death si;mply by saying " they lived happily ever after" in keeping with Pascal's maxim: "Men, unable to remedy death, sorrow and ignorance, determine, in order to make themselves happy, not to think on these things." 3 In life, not so. Hence stories which aim to be a mirror of life, and not mere products of the imagination and momentary " opium for the people " feel obliged to 2 Such cannot be said of all modern novels. Some, no less successful, shake ofi the logical implications leading to a tragic conclusion. Thus, in Marriage Is A Private Affair by Judith Kelly, whereas logically and psychologically husband and wife are cutting themselves adrift from one another by an abortion, this tragedy, by an insidious and post-childhood use of the fairy tale technique, is neatly transformed into the prospect of a glowing future of fast-knit happiness for the guilty pair. Novels incorporating such unjustifiable metamorphosis of evil into good and such gratuitous re-routing of human nature evade the problem encountered by novels in which the characters strive earnestly and rationally for happiness, yet seem relentlessly baulked by fate...