THE SECRETS OF HAPPINESS
by Richard Schoch
Profile, £15.99; 288pp

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS
by Daniel Gilbert
Harper, £14.99; 352pp

H+: A NEW RELIGION?
by Edward de Bono
Vermilion, £6.99; 96pp

THE OTHER DAY I WAS SEATED next to a very distinguished New York literary agent. I commented on the plethora of happiness books; he intimated that if I thought that was true in the UK, I should see the American catalogues. “But why do you think it is? Why now?” I asked. He shrugged, “Because a lot of people are very unhappy.” Later he was telling me about his new granddaughter, how she looks just like her mother, and so on. This laconic man couldn’t know how his face shone. I said: “OK, so we can define happiness as holding a baby who restores to you the daughter who’s the apple of your eye — at the same age?” “You got it,” he replied.

The beautiful, brief simplicity of that would not earn an advance for any writer, psychologist, philosopher or self-help guru, or a percentage for their agents, or sales for publishers. Since the happiness industry requires new insights, or at least a recycling of what the sages said, the poetry sections in our bookshops shrink while shelves of self-help titles tell you how to live, create, cultivate your emotional intelligence, live the life you feel you deserve and so on. Bright sparks such as Daisy Goodwin turn poetry itself into a self-help form, suggesting wisely that these particular poems can “get you through the day”. Better that than a soma pill.

“Are you getting enough of what makes you happy?” asked the band Hot Chocolate — and the desperate chorus, “What’s the matter with me?” is echoed millionfold by wistful souls who view happiness through somebody else’s window. Each day, it seems, a new study shows we are unhappier than ever, and that more and more people reach for the Prozac, wondering what went wrong with their lives. Now one of Britain’s elite schools is embarking on a pioneering educational experiment. Wellington College is to make space in the crowded timetable for lessons in positive psychology and the “science of wellbeing”. It intends to teach its clever and privileged youngsters — all destined, one can assume, for top jobs — how to become happy and fulfilled through the judicious application of positive psychology.

There are plenty of textbooks. Last year Paul Martin’s Making Happy People examined “the nature of happiness and its origins in childhood”, while Richard Layard’s Happiness was subtitled Lessons From a New Science and made a plea for the pursuit of contentment at the same time as identifying some universal causes of happiness and the opposite. Both are essential reading. Now four new books appear and in the publishers’ lists I note forthcoming The Happiness Hypothesis, by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and What Makes Women Happy — a characteristically bold and witty take on the subject by Fay Weldon. Near the end of The Pursuit of Happiness, Darrin McMahon recalls a trip to a Paris bookstore: “Entire walls of contemporary psychology and New Age religion beckoned in the direction of everlasting content.”

Layard and Martin dealt rather briskly with history and barely touched on literature, where unhappiness is dissected again and again. In this batch, the cultural historians Darrin McMahon (American) and Richard Schoch (a professor at Queen Mary, University of London) redress the balance, both turning to the wisdom of the past to discover how the pursuit of happiness has been viewed, and wherein it might lie today. From Plato to Prozac, as it were. McMahon provides a vast exhilarating sweep; Schoch offers more of a distillation, providing an inspirational accompaniment to everyday life — more of a helpful text (in the best possible way) than academic study.

For centuries thinkers have asked how happiness may be defined. Is it the same for all people, or do they seek different things in the name of happiness? There seems no question that humankind wants happiness; whether felicitas needs to be earned is another matter. “Man wishes to be happy,” Pascal wrote, “and cannot wish not to be so.” In an attempt to answer the question of what man desires, Locke answered: “Happiness, and that alone.” Kant pointed out that “the notion of happiness is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he can never convey accurately and distinctly what it is that he really wishes and wills”. So it is that a man with every worldly good may lock himself away from his wife and family in his house of terrible luxury — and take his own life.

A woman may define happiness as the right to buy more handbags and shoes than could contain the Third World debt, then look in the mirror and wonder why her frown lines are deepening. Success, affluence and retail therapy may offer the brief buzz of apparent happiness but there is a vast gulf between the moment of feeling happy and being happy — or living happily — for a lifetime.

McMahon shows how the Ancient Greeks considered happiness a gift of the gods, whereas now we view it as a right. He investigates how this fundamental shift in thinking took place, by examining 2,000 years of culture, politics and thought and triumphantly fulfilling his challenge to himself: “How to write a history of something so elusive, intangible — of this ‘thing’ that is not a thing, this hope, this yearning, this dream.” His method made this reader shout aloud with joy — and happiness was contained for me within nothing less than the canon. For, outlining his sources in art and architecture, music and theology, literature and myth, McMahon goes on: “By and large, I rely on what were once called, without irony or inverted commas, the great books of Western civilisation. In teaching these books . . . it has been my experience that debate regarding their continued relevance disappears the moment one bothers to read them.”

Richard Schoch’s book — subtitled Three Thousand years of Searching for the Good Life — is roughly half the length of McMahon’s and takes us outside the Western canon. He argues that we can enrich our lives by understanding the philosophical and religious traditions of happiness, including those of other cultures: “We have lost contact with the old and rich traditions of happiness, and we have lost the ability to understand their essentially moral nature.” This is to overstate a good case, for there are plenty of people who do interpret happiness as more than “an entitlement”. Nevertheless, he is right in his exasperated assertion that the majority does define happiness in terms of “mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain and suffering”.

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