The Good Life: Should This Man Be Smiling?

His mother was a depressive, he says, and his father, a New York State civil servant, suffered a series of debilitating strokes beginning when Marty was 13. Seligman went to an elite Albany prep school where, as a ­middle-class Jew, he felt out of place. Psychology first attracted him as a teen when he realized that girls paid attention to you if you listened wisely to their problems.

As a philosophy student in college, he took as his hero Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, by all outward evidence, was one of the least cheerful men who ever lived. Seligman collects photos of the philosopher and has only seen one of him smiling. And yet when Wittgenstein died alone in an apartment in Cambridge, England, his last words to his landlady were, “Tell them it’s been wonderful.” Seligman loves that story because it shows the depth in the human character, shows that contentment and fulfillment — and, yes, some form of happiness — can be achieved and you need not grin like a moron. (There’s still a lively debate in the world of psychology over whether happy people aren’t just a little dumb.)

“Psychology reflexively condemned the unsmiling, curmudgeonly half of humankind to the hell of unhappiness,” Seligman says. “I think that’s just wrongheaded.”

Yet the other anecdote he has told repeatedly of late is the story of how his young daughter Nikki convinced him to stop being a grouch one day when he was trying to work in his rose garden and was frustrated by her childish play. Seligman’s last book before he moved toward positive psychology was The Optimistic Child. His wife, who put her nascent psychology career on hold to homeschool their five kids (he has two more from his first marriage), has just finished her first book on how to apply Positive Psych techniques to children.

Seligman finishes his banana tart, and the waiter pours us the last of the wine. “I’ve pretty much given up wine for roses,” he says. “When I was 50, I started to notice, as I will tomorrow, that I’m more fatigued. So I’ve given up wine and women and all those things.”

I begin to think that talking with Marty Seligman is like visiting with a character from a Saul Bellow novel, one of those hyper-smart professors who have devoted their lives to seriousness, to thinking the important thoughts, but can’t resist mixing it up in the low-down world of money and power. Over the course of two long talks, he has shifted easily from analysis of scientific method to wistful thoughts on women to a little highbrow name-dropping to book critiques of authors ranging from Charles Murray to Stephen King.

He tells tales of the fabulously rich folk who have become interested in Positive Psychology (“I can’t tell you the names”) and the guys — bartenders, schoolteachers, newspaper reporters — with whom he played poker once a week for 25 years. Whether he’s happy or not, Marty Seligman seems to take the Positive Psychology medicine, to live a full life.