What’s so great about happiness? I can’t think of anyone I admire who was happy. I’m reading “Vile Bodies,” the wonderful Evelyn Waugh novel that introduces the character of Mr. Chatterbox, the gossip columnist who makes things up. (Can you imagine?) While writing this gossamer, light-hearted book, Waugh was as unhappy as a man could be. In the middle of composing “Bodies,” his wife Evelyn, or “she-Evelyn” as he called her, left him for another man. “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live,” Waugh wrote to his friend Harold Acton. And yet he wrote a wonderful book. As always — paging Herr Kafka! — … Continue reading Alex Beam