'This Function Is to Make Me Happy'

“It is best to open with a simple declaration. I belong to a quaint depleted sect of serious readers who believe that literature exists to make men happy.” That so joyous a declaration was issued in 1968, annus horribilis, makes it even more revolutionary. Few of us started to read books hoping to achieve unhappiness, though you wouldn’t always know that from the dreary roll call of critics, scholars and schoolmarms. From Boris Dralyuk I learned that the ebullient polymath Oscar Mandel died on May 20 just short of his one-hundredth birthday. The passage above is taken from his essay “The Excesses of Seriousness in Literature,” published in the Spring 1968 issue of The Antioch Review. I can testify that reading Mandel’s varied output makes me happy. Such happiness started in 1985 when New Directions published The Book of Elaborations, an essay collection blurbed on the cover by Guy Davenport, who was the original reason I bought the book. When I reviewed Guy Davenport and James…