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
(page 2 of 2)
One of the toughest rules of the art of friendship is to take friends as they are. It hasn't always been easy for me to do so. I have a strong critical sense, with a passion for analysis, and an abiding interest in the motives, known and secret, of others, not least those of my friends. I feel a need to understand the vanities and weaknesses of friends along with their virtues and strengths. I want to know what movie is playing in their minds in which they think they have a starring role. I believe I am willing to take friends as I find them, but only after taking the most precise measure of them possible, so I have a strong sense of who, exactly, they are.
The art of friendship involves knowing what you want, need, expect, and are willing to give to other people in a friendship. In late middle age, what I most want from friends is amusingly engaging talk. From some people, I have come to expect talk that cuts deeper than it does from others. Although such talk can be quite enough, I also hope that sometimes my friends will cause me to discover things about myself and the world that, without their intervention, I would never have discovered on my own. In recompense, I hope I can sometimes do something similar for them through such insights and observations and amusements as I might have to bestow.
Friends have conferred favors on me. One friend regularly bails me out of small computer problems, sometimes at the cost of nearly a full day of work; another often calls bits of journalism and scholarship to my attention that I might not otherwise have known about; yet another, a woman who goes to house sales, keeps an eye out for things that she thinks might charm me: a pair of unused dove-gray spats is one re-cent delightful gift of hers in this line.
I also obtain from friends an unacknowledged reinforcement of my belief in my own worth. I am more than a little pleased, for example, to think that I have become friendly with most of the men and women I admire who work in the realms of art and intellect. This suggests that they may also have some tincture of admiration for me and what I do, which of course delights me.
***
Mine has been a lucky enough life for me not to need to call upon friends for loans of money, or the gift of bone marrow or a kidney, or much in the way of emotional support. I have a friend who recently wrote to me in the most heartfelt way about the death of a friend of his who had been immensely helpful to him when his, my friend's, wife was undergoing something close to a nervous breakdown and he had no one in his own family to talk with about his troubles; and he had done something similar when his friend's own wife died. "No matter how stupid or crass or idiotic they may occasionally be, friends are friends," he wrote to me shortly after this man died. They are, he said, "the people you connect with."
As for what I expect from friends, I mainly expect consideration, which includes a set of reasonably correct assumptions about the sort of man I am. A friend ought to know something about how another friend's mind works, how his tastes run, what he finds amusing, and what intolerable.
In the line of expectations, friends ought to be able to ask friends favors. The extent of the favors, however, is what is in question.
I am up for doing any favors I can for friends. I am ready to use such connections as I have to help friends, or the children or cousins of friends, find editorial jobs and literary agents, or offer advice on their careers.
I stand prepared to drive friends wherever they need to go. I have loaned some friends small sums, never more than $1,000.
Favors in friendship need to be carefully calibrated. Aristotle said that no friend should ever ask one to do anything that is (morally) wrong. But at a level below the moral, things get more complicated. In a Seinfeld episode, Jerry meets the Mets' first baseman Keith Hernandez, who soon thereafter asks Jerry if he would help him move his furniture into a new apartment. A subtle, convoluted, and amusing discussion follows among Jerry's friends about the appropriateness of the request, given that the two men have known each other so brief a time; the point is that the favor, given the short acquaintanceship between the two men, seems out of line.
Sometimes a favor will be offered that one hadn't expected and is so delighted by that one looks upon the person bestowing it in an entirely different way. One evening, as we were setting out for a concert, our car didn't start. A neighbor with whom I had previously done nothing more than ex- change polite greetings, noting my problem, without hesitation offered me the use of his car for the evening. I was much im-pressed by the offer, which I gratefully took him up on. The generosity of the gesture moved him for me out of the mere neighbor category. We were talking the other day about the agreeable way that the people in our building keep a proper distance from one another. I acknowledged that this was so, adding only that he and I were in serious danger of becoming friends. He smiled.
A generous impulse ought never to be stifled, or so I have always felt. But if friendship is to be practiced artfully, even generosity may sometimes have to be measured. Overkill may occur; how, one wonders, will one ever be able to square things, put them back on a fair basis, so that a favor doesn't come to take the form of an obligation? Sometimes you can do a friend a real favor by not doing him too great a favor.
Perhaps the first rule in the art of friendship is never to idealize a friend. A friend is not a dog, a Lassie, a Benjy, a Rin Tin Tin, a permanently affectionate, unconditionally loving creature who offers uncritical adoration and who is always going to come through for you. Owing to such general idealization, altogether too much pressure is placed on friendship, with the result that one comes to expect perfection, which isn't likely to be available even in the best of friends. Friends, in fact, figure to be unsteady, contradictory, not perpetually obliging-rather, if I may say so, like you and, it pains me much more to say, like me.
If one had to draw a brief character of myself, it might well be that I am a gregarious melancholic, a highly sociable misanthrope, a laughing skeptic. On different days, or on the same day, I am distinctly more or less hospitable to the delights and obligations of friendship, welcoming it warmly one day, doing very nicely without it, thank you very much, the next. Life without friends is unimaginable, but life with them perpetually around is no picnic on the grass, either.
The idealization of friendship may be owing to the fact that the most intense time for friendship, for men and women, is during adolescence. This is also a period when time itself seems inexhaustible, and life's pressures are well off in the distance. Friendship can be explored, friends cultivated, unambiguously enjoyed, luxuriated in. My own adolescence, I see now, was devoted wholly to friendship. Each morning I thought of myself as going off not to school, in which my interest wasn't even minimal, but to the prospect of exchanges with a wide circle of friends, close, middle-distance, and happily negligible friends. Every day was spent at play in the fields of friends, bopping from circle to circle of pals in gym, at the school store where we all gathered at lunch and after school, and usually continuing through the evening, with time out only for dinner at home, laughing and splashing my way through the day in the warm waters of friendship. I am supposed, I believe, to regret this extended frivolousness. It was a thorough waste of time, during which I could have learned ancient Greek or taken up the oboe; it was completely irresponsible; it was paradise.
Not that friendship is one of those childish things that must be put away once one attains adulthood, or that one must henceforth view it, as the First Epistle to the Corinthians says, through a glass, darkly. But life contrives many ways of pushing friendship off center stage the older one grows. From its high point in adolescence, it tends to descend from centrality next to marriage, family, passion for work, and sometimes, too, with a heightened consciousness of the rush of time passing.
Enough has changed over the past 50 or so years to alter the nature of friendship substantially. Begin with the changed status of women. As we have seen in the classical writers, wives in the good/bad old days were generally not considered candidates for friendship with their husbands. Until the advent of labor-saving devices such as washers and dryers, only aristocratic or wealthy women had much time for friendships of their own, even with other women. The emergence of women in the workplace, with the greater affluence and freedom it has sometimes brought them, has changed much about friendship, not least the old strict division into exclusively male and female friends.
The phenomenon of women out working in the world has obviously changed the way the family works, and with it the older formation of friendships. The family is now a less tightly controlled ship than it was when one person (the wife and mother) was at the wheel. Men are now called upon to help out, and are fools if they don't agree to do so. With both parents often working, the feeling of frenzy, even when there is increased income to buffer it, is fairly standard. Add to all this the frequency of divorce, which can lend the leaden note of guilt to that of frenzy.
This feeling of frenzy has a good deal to do with the heavily increased amount of attention that children now receive. Most homes with young kids today are child-centered to an extent that would astonish parents of my mother and father's generation, who brought up their children in the 1940s and '50s. Neither of my parents felt that their first duty was to their children. They went off on vacations to Montreal or New York and left my younger brother and me in the care of professional babysitters or a childless aunt and uncle. My mother didn't begin driving until her late 40s, and my father was always off at work during the day, including Saturday, so I was never picked up or taken anywhere by my parents; I bicycled or took public transportation wherever I went. True, the world seemed a safer place then-less crime, no drugs-and kids could be left on their own more readily. But I never felt in the least neglected or maltreated by being so much on my own; on the contrary, I relished the freedom. Few parents today would themselves feel free enough to extend such freedom to their own children. Such is their worry about bringing up their children properly that they are willing (‘feel compelled' is more like it) to expend a vast outlay of time on a full-court press of attention for their kids-time taken from, among other things, the cultivating of friendships.
Given the changed status of women, the demands of career and especially those of family in the contemporary scheme of living, friendship has been demoted to a leisure time activity and consequently has come to seem an altered, even a radically changed, institution.
At moments in the course of writing this I had the staggering thought that I seemed to be coming out against friendship-turning out one of those drab volumes carrying a title like The Death of Friendship. That is not at all what I had in mind when I began, and it is not what I have ended up with. What I wanted was to take some of the air out of the idealization of friendship, so that a friend, like a teacher or a clergyman, need not always feel that he or she is falling short of an impossible ideal.
Friendship is often an amusement, sometimes an education, at least a reprieve from loneliness, at best a human connection of the highest and grandest kind. Contradiction is implicit in the very nature of modern friendship. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the sign of an intelligent person is the ability to keep two contradictory ideas in his or her head at the same time and still function. With friendship, the two contradictory ideas are these: first, friends can be an immense complication, a huge burden, and a royal pain in the arse; and, second, without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost.
Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »
