Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (2 page)

But then I asked myself whether this was really true. So before I sat down to write I went off to the library to do a quick check. And, lo and behold, I could not have been more wrong. The library catalog listed whole books on the subject, scores of books, many of them quite recent. But when I took a step further and actually had a look at these books, I recovered my self-respect somewhat. I had been right, or half-right, after all: what the books had to say about friendship was of little interest, most of it. Friendship, it would seem, remains a bit of a riddle: we know it is important, but as to why people become friends and remain friends we can only guess.

(What do I mean when I say that what is written is of little interest? Compare friendship with love. There are hundreds of interesting things to say about love. For instance: Men fall in love with women who remind them of their mothers, or rather, who both remind them and don’t remind them of their mothers, who are and are not their mothers at the same time. True? Maybe, maybe not. Interesting? Definitely. Now turn to friendship. Whom do men choose as friends? Other men of roughly the same age, with similar interests, say the books. True? Maybe. Interesting? Definitely not.)

Let me list the few observations on friendship, culled from my visits to the library, that I found of actual interest.

Item. One cannot be friends with an inanimate object, says Aristotle (
Ethics
, chapter 8). Of course not! Who ever said one could? But interesting nevertheless: all of a sudden one sees where modern linguistic philosophy got its inspiration. Two thousand four hundred years ago Aristotle was demonstrating that what looked like philosophical postulates could be no more than rules of grammar. In the sentence “I am friends with X,” he says, X has to be an animate noun.

Item. One can have friends without wanting to see them, says Charles Lamb. True; and interesting too—another way in which amical feelings are unlike erotic attachments.

Item. Friends, or at least male friends in the West, don’t talk about how they feel toward each other. Compare the garrulity of lovers. Thus far, not very interesting. Yet when the friend dies, what outpourings of grief: “Alas, too late!” (Montaigne on La Boétie, Milton on Edward King). (Question: Is love garrulous because desire is by nature ambivalent—Shakespeare,
Sonnets
—while friendship is taciturn because it is straightforward, without ambivalence?)

Finally, a remark by Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s
Parade’s End
: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her. Implication: that turning a woman into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters; but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air.

If it is indeed so hard to say anything of interest about friendship, then a further insight becomes possible: that, unlike love or politics, which are never what they seem to be, friendship is what it seems to be. Friendship is transparent.

The most interesting reflections on friendship come from the ancient world. Why so? Because in ancient times people did not regard the philosophical stance as an inherently skeptical one, therefore did not take it as given that friendship must be other than it seems to be, or conversely conclude that if friendship is what it seems to be, then it cannot be a fit subject for philosophy.

All good wishes,

John

Brooklyn

July 29, 2008

Dear John,

This is a question I have given much thought to over the years. I can’t say I have developed any coherent position about friendship, but in response to your letter (which unleashed a whirlwind of thoughts and memories in me), perhaps this is the moment to try.

To begin with, I will confine myself to male friendship, friendship between men, friendship between boys.

1) Yes, there are friendships that are transparent and unambivalent (to use your terms), but in my experience not many of them. This might have something to do with another one of the terms you use: taciturn. You are correct to say that male friends (at least in the West) tend not to “talk about how they feel toward each other.” I would take this one step further and add: men tend not to talk about how they feel, period. And if you don’t know how your friend feels, or what he feels, or why he feels, can you honestly say that you know your friend? And yet friendships endure, often for many decades, in this ambiguous zone of not-knowing.

At least three of my novels deal directly with male friendship, are in a sense stories
about
male friendship—
The Locked Room
,
Leviathan
, and
Oracle Night
—and in each case, this no-man’s land of not-knowing that stands between friends becomes the stage on which the dramas are played out.

An example from life. For the past twenty-five years, one of my closest friends—perhaps the closest male friend of my adulthood—is one of the least garrulous people I have ever known. He is older than I am (by eleven years), but there is much we have in common: both writers, both idiotically obsessed with sports, both with long marriages to remarkable women, and, most important and most difficult to define, a certain unarticulated but shared feeling about how one is supposed to live—an ethics of manhood. And yet, much as I care for this person, willing as I would be to rip the shirt off my back for him in time of trouble, our conversations are almost without exception bland and insipid, utterly banal. We communicate by emitting short grunts, reverting to a kind of shorthand language that would be incomprehensible to a stranger. As for our work (the driving force of both our lives), we rarely even mention it.

To demonstrate how closely this man plays his cards to his vest, one small anecdote. A number of years ago, a new novel of his was about to appear in galleys. I told him how much I was looking forward to reading it (sometimes we send each other finished manuscripts, sometimes we wait for the galleys), and he said that I should be receiving a copy quite soon. The galleys arrived in the mail the following week, I opened the package, flipped through the book, and discovered that it was dedicated to me. I was touched, of course, deeply moved in fact—but the point is that my friend never said a word about it. Not the smallest hint, not the tiniest anticipatory wink, nothing.

What am I trying to say? That I know this man and don’t know him. That he is my friend, my dearest friend, in spite of this not-knowing. If he went out and robbed a bank tomorrow, I would be shocked. On the other hand, if I learned that he was cheating on his wife, that he had a young mistress stashed away in an apartment somewhere, I would be disappointed, but I wouldn’t be shocked. Anything is possible, and men do keep secrets, even from their closest friends. In the event of my friend’s marital infidelity, I would feel disappointed (because he had let down his wife, someone I am very fond of), but I would also feel hurt (because he hadn’t confided in me, which would mean our friendship wasn’t as close as I thought it was).

(A sudden brain wave. The best and most lasting friendships are based on admiration. This is the bedrock feeling that connects two people over the long term. You admire someone for what he does, for what he is, for how he negotiates his path through the world. Your admiration enhances him in your eyes, ennobles him, elevates him to a status you believe is above your own. And if that person admires you as well—and therefore enhances you, ennobles you, elevates you to a status he believes is above his own—then you are in a position of absolute equality. You are both giving more than you receive, both receiving more than you give, and in the reciprocity of this exchange, friendship blooms. From Joubert’s
Notebooks
(1809): “He must not only cultivate his friends, but cultivate his friendships within himself. They must be kept, cared for, watered.” And again Joubert: “We always lose the friendship of those who lose our esteem.”)

2) Boys. Childhood is the most intense period of our lives because most of what we do then we are doing for the first time. I have little to offer here but a memory, but that memory seems to underscore the infinite value we place on friendship when we are young, even very young. I was five years old. Billy, my first friend, entered my life in ways that elude me now. I remember him as an odd and jovial character with strong opinions and a highly developed talent for mischief (something I lacked to an appalling degree). He had a severe speech impediment, and when he talked his words were so garbled, so clogged with the saliva buildup in his mouth, that no one could understand what he said—except little Paul, who acted as his interpreter. Much of our time together was spent roaming around our New Jersey suburban neighborhood looking for small dead animals—mostly birds, but an occasional frog or chipmunk—and burying the corpses in the flower bed along the side of my house. Solemn rituals, handmade wooden crosses, no laughing allowed. Billy detested girls, refusing to fill in the pages of our coloring books that showed representations of female figures, and because his favorite color was green, he was convinced that the blood running through his teddy bear’s veins was green.
Ecce
Billy. Then, when we were six and a half or seven, he and his family moved to another town. Heartbreak, followed by weeks if not months of longing for my absent friend. At last, my mother relented and gave me permission to make the expensive telephone call to Billy’s new house. The content of our conversation has been blotted from my mind, but I remember my feelings as vividly as I remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I felt what I would later feel as an adolescent when talking on the phone to the girl I had fallen in love with.

You make a distinction in your letter between friendship and love. When we are very small, before our erotic lives begin, there is no distinction. Friendship and love are one.

3) Friendship and love are not one. Men and women. The difference between marriage and friendship. A last quotation from Joubert (1801): “Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose as your friend if she were a man.”

A rather absurd formulation, I suppose (how can a woman be a man?), but one gets the point, and in essence it is not far from your remark about
Parade’s End
by Ford Madox Ford and the funny, whimsical assertion that “one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her.”

Marriage is above all a conversation, and if husband and wife do not figure out a way to become friends, the marriage has little chance of surviving. Friendship is a component of marriage, but marriage is an ever-evolving free-for-all, a continual work in progress, a constant demand to reach down into one’s depths and reinvent oneself in relation to the other, whereas friendship pure and simple (that is, friendship outside marriage), tends to be more static, more polite, more superficial. We crave friendships because we are social beings, born from other beings and destined to live among other beings until the day we die, and yet think of the quarrels that sometimes erupt in even the best marriages, the passionate disagreements, the hot-headed insults, the slammed doors and broken crockery, and one quickly understands that such behavior would not be countenanced within the decorous rooms of friendship. Friendship is good manners, kindness, steadiness of affect. Friends who shout at each other rarely remain friends. Husbands and wives who shout at each other usually stay married—often happily married.

Can men and women be friends? I think so. As long as there is no physical attraction on either side. Once sex enters the equation, all bets are off.

4) To be continued. But other aspects of friendship need to be discussed as well: a) Friendships that wither and die; b) Friendships between people who do not necessarily share common interests (work friendships, school friendships, war friendships); c) The concentric circles of friendship: the core intimates, the less intimate but much liked ones, the ones who live far away, the pleasant acquaintances, and so on; d) All the other points in your letter I haven’t addressed.

With warmest thoughts from hot New York,

Paul

September 12, 2008

Dear Paul,

A response to your letter of July 29—sorry to have taken so long.

Dorothy has been away in Europe (Sweden, the UK) attending academic conferences. The latter part of the trip has been a bit of a nightmare—she developed bronchitis and had to cancel travel plans within the UK, then yesterday had a fall which is making it hard for her to move around. She is due back in Australia next week.

The good news is that she will be accompanying me to Estoril [Portugal]. We are both looking forward to that, and to seeing you and Siri again.

All good wishes,

John

September 11, 2008

Dear Paul,

“The best and most lasting friendships are based on admiration,” you write.

I would be cautious about accepting this as a general law—it seems to me less true for women than for men—but I do agree with the sentiment behind it. Plato writes of our desire to be held in honor by our peers as a spur to excellence. In an age still dominated by Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, there is a tendency to reduce the desire to be held in honor to something less idealistic—a will to power, for instance, or a drive to spread one’s genes. But identifying the desire to be held in esteem as one of the primary forces in the soul yields valuable insights, it seems to me. For instance, it suggests why athletic sports—activities with no parallel in the rest of creation—are so important to human beings, men in particular. Men run faster or kick the ball farther not in the hope that pretty girls with good genes will want to mate with them but in the hope that their peers, other men with whom they feel bonded in mutual admiration, will admire them. Much the same holds, mutatis mutandis, in other fields of endeavor.