Hello, Goodbye

In a new book on friendship, a noted Chicago author concludes that it should be treated as an art—one worthy of regular maintenance through thoughtful cultivation

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Illustration: Kim Rosen

When I first set out to write about friendship, I began with a vague sense that the standard idealization of friends was somehow false to the truth of friendship, at least as, day by day, we all live it. I also sensed my own slight discomfort at sometimes being put off by the mild but often insistent demands of friends, though I enjoyed being with my friends and think myself a friendly person. I recognized that I was promiscuous in my friendships, and would sometimes feel trapped in a friendship I hadn't really wanted. For reasons that were less than clear to me, what was supposed to have been one of life's pure pleasures had become complicated and sometimes confused.

Friendship, I came to realize, ought not to be considered so free and easy a thing as it generally is, but needs to be treated as an art. Like any other art, it requires perspective, craft, a careful and experienced touch. It calls for regular maintenance through thoughtful cultivation. To know oneself is the first and best step in the training for friendship, and from there one hopes to go on to know one's friends. In friendship the golden rule-treat others as you would yourself be treated-doesn't always apply. Some friends, after all, wish to be treated quite differently than one wishes to be treated oneself. But treating friendship as an art, and not as a series of social accidents or spontaneous happenings, is essential.

The very word "friendship," like "stewardship," "editorship," "governorship," and several other words with a -ship suffix, implies not passivity but an active hand; it suggests taking control, charting a course, planning a future. Most of us, I suspect, do not look upon friendship in this way. Until beginning to write about friendship, I certainly didn't. Instead I took my friends as they came. Some have been a continuing delight to me, some have seemed burdensome, some I regret ever having started up with and, given the opportunity, would prefer to trade away for players to be named later.

"The name of friend seems to me even holier [than that of relative]," wrote Quintilian, the first-century Roman advocate. "For the one comes from the intellect, comes from a decision; the other chance bestows, circumstance of birth and things that are not elected by our will." Quintilian is correct when he says that one's friends are a matter of conscious decision. True, sometimes one's choices are limited by circumstances. But if many of one's friends seem given, like cards dealt out, perhaps one does best to think of the game of friendship as five-card draw, in which one can toss away some cards and ask for others. One doesn't have to stick with the hand one was dealt.

Only of late have I begun to be more selective, in effect to attempt to edit my friendships. I not long ago learned that the mother of my physician had died. He is a man I like; we have long called each other by first names. It occurred to me to send him a note of condolence, but then I thought better of it. Such a note might draw us closer together. But is more closeness needed? Our middle-distance friendship seems fine as it is. I'm certain he doesn't want more closeness from me. I decided not to send the note.

The columnist George Will occasionally calls me when he is in Chicago, where he has a son and grandchildren living. Sometimes we go to lunch or dinner together; he recently took me to a Cubs game, treating me to a front-row seat. Soon after, I happened to read an interesting article on the relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley in GQ, which I'm fairly certain he doesn't read. I cut it out of the magazine intending to send it to him, then decided not to do so. Why put him under the obligation of having to read it, write to me about it, perhaps call to tell me an odd fact or two (he has a vast quantity of such facts) about Eckersley? I like the occasional nature of my friendship with George, who is a man much on the go, and see no reason to take it any further or deepen it in any way. It's quite all right as it is.

I have developed a taste for highly qualified, nicely defined friendships-the equivalent, I suppose, of prenuptial agreements but applied to friends. I have a friend who lives in Arizona and who, on his annual visit to Chicago, meets me for a single lunch. I see another friend perhaps four or five times a year, always for coffee. I once suggested that we get together with our wives, but there were complications on his side in doing so. I have not suggested it again. Things are OK as they are, I have decided, and I shall not again suggest meeting with wives.

A man who lived in the same apartment building I do went to my high school four years before I did. We had had many acquaintances in common. A year or so ago, he died of a heart attack while out exercising on his bicycle. Ours was largely an elevator and lobby friendship. I was always pleased to see him, and I like to think he felt the same about me. We were never without things to tell each other: news of old schoolmates, fresh jokes, chitchat about sports. I don't believe that we ever had a conversation lasting beyond 20 minutes. I could have invited him to lunch, where with more time our friendship might have become richer, but I never did. Nor did he ever invite me to lunch; a wise man, perhaps he instinctively understood the art of friendship. The first rule of the art of friendship, I have come to believe, is that not all friendships need to be deepened.

Another rule I have devised is never to allow friendship to be reduced to a sharing of afflictions; friendship oughtn't to consist mainly, or even secondarily, of sharing weaknesses or troubles. One mustn't unload, as we say nowadays, on one's friends one's terrors, disappointments, and (until now hidden) resentments at the world's putative injustices. The art of friendship entails deliberate repression. A friend, a cliché definition has it, is someone whom, when you are in crisis, you can call at 4 a.m. I'd say that's true, but with the qualification that one is permitted only one such call.

Yet another rule of the art of friendship is to look beyond the mere opinions of potential friends in the attempt to discover that deeper thing, their point of view. Everyone has opinions, lots of them, but not everyone has a point of view, which is much more than the collectivity of a person's opinions. A point of view is one's particular angle on the world, one's ways of viewing life that imply a well-considered position on a range of much larger questions than that of the reform of Social Security or the future of NATO.

I am myself guilty of breaking a serious rule of the art of friendship, the Aristotelian stricture against polyphilia, or having too many friends: "for it would seem," Aristotle wrote, "actually impossible to be a great friend to many people." In a talk I once gave on friendship, I mentioned that I had 75 or so friends. A sensible woman in the audience said that that seemed an unusually, almost unbelievably, high number. I now think that the number 75 was probably on the modest side, at least if one thinks of friends as people with whom one has had past and expects to have continuing relations, with all the conviviality and obligations entailed in a friendship. Doubtless it is now too late, but if I could, I shouldn't mind cutting down my roster of friends. On the other hand, if I had had a severely limited number of friends, I might not have been able to write on this subject.

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Part of the art of friendship, I have also decided, includes reassessing the pleasures of acquaintanceship, which may be underrated. I once thought I would have a chapter in this book called "Let Old Acquaintance Be Forgot," but I've come to think there is much to be said on behalf of acquaintances, not least the absence of obligation that they bring.

Friendship requires participation. Not all fields of endeavor permit the time that full participation in friendship needs. The choice of being an artist, which is to say an observer, greatly reduces the appetite for frequent engagements with friends. From Thoreau to James Joyce, from Tolstoy to Samuel Beckett, from Melville to Saul Bellow, literary artists, while not without friends, have never been notable for devoting much energy to the enterprise of friendship. (Nor, from Napoleon to Bismarck to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, have great political figures done much better.) "Friends are a costly luxury," wrote Ibsen. "When a man invests his capital of energy in a profession or mission, he will lack the means to have friends."

Her biographer Richard Sewall wrote of Emily Dickinson that "she never achieved a single, wholly satisfying relationship with anybody she had to be near, or with, for any length of time." Henry James was kind and generous to many people, but his first obli-gation was to his art. One of his biographers writes about Isaac Bashevis Singer that he "was a consummate master of casual acquaintance," which is another way of saying that he knew how to keep people at a proper distance. Céleste Albaret, Marcel Proust's housekeeper, in her memoir of her employer, writes "that he must have let, or even made, a lot of people think he felt affection and friendship for them, whereas in fact-it was the thing that always struck me-he could do without all of them with the greatest ease."

One finds such coolness over and over in artists. In a song called "Being Alive," the finale to his show Company, Stephen Sondheim writes of a close friend that he may be someone you need too much and you know too well, someone who'll put you through hell. For all their astonishing gifts, Michelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso seem not to have had much of a gift for friendship. The last great modernist artist, the choreographer George Balanchine, who had five wives, seems to have had fewer friends. Loyal and generous though he was to the people in his great dance company, "he was a person you could not get close to," as one of his male dancers remarked. Balanchine himself said, "I can't cope with human relationships, difficult relationships." His art, the reason surely is, came first.

Dorothy Rowe, an Australian writer and psychotherapist, in a book titled Friends and Enemies, asked a number of people who participated in various workshops she ran to end a sentence that began, "After it's all said and done, what matters most in life is . . . ." The four things that were most often listed were "a sense of having achieved something"; "a sense of having made a contribution to the world"; "being able to accept yourself and so be at peace with yourself"; and "loving relationships." She notes: "What was listed most often was loving relationships. What most people feared was dying unloved and alone."

My guess is that most artists would have written one of the first two responses, and the more passionate they were about their art, the less that the last one was likely to have entered into their thinking. In the division of people between those who live for their work and those who work chiefly in order to live, artists fall preponderantly on the live-to-work side. Alexis de Tocqueville, despondent at the end of his active political career, writes: "For without the resource of a great book to write, I truly do not know what would become of me." People who are more devoted to the pleasures of daily life are likely to be more intensely interested in the cultivation of friendship.