'Here and Now' is a collection of three years of correspondence between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee. This epistolary dialogue touches on topics ranging from sport, fatherhood, literature, film, philosophy, politics, the financial crisis of art, death, marriage, friendship and love.
29 July 2008
Dear John,
This is a question I have pondered quite a bit over the years. I can't say I have developed any coherent position on friendship, but in response to your letter (which stirred up a whirlwind of thoughts and memories), perhaps now is the time to try to do so.
For starters, I'll limit myself to male friendship, friendship between men, friendship between boys.
1) Yes, there are friendships that are transparent and non-ambivalent (to use your terms), but, in my experience, not many of them. This may have something to do with another term you used: silence. You are correct when you say that male friends (at least in the West) tend not to “talk about how they feel about each other.” I would take that a step further and add: men tend not to talk about how they feel, period. And if you don’t know how your friends feel, or how he feels, or why he feels, can you honestly say you know your friend? And yet friendships last, often for decades, in this ambiguous zone of nothingness.
At least three of my novels deal directly with male friendship, in a sense they are stories circle male friendship – Locked Room, Leviathan, Night of the Oracle – and in each case, this no-man's land of unfamiliarity found among friends becomes the stage where dreams are played out.
A real-life example. Over the past twenty-five years, one of my closest friends—perhaps the closest male friend my age since adulthood—has been one of the most reserved people I’ve ever known. He’s older than me (by eleven years), but we have a lot in common: both writers, both idiotically into sports, both with long marriages to remarkable women, and, most important and hardest to define, a shared but unarticulated sense of how a man should live—an ethic of manhood.
However, no matter how much this person means to me, for whom I would strip the skin off my back if he were in trouble, our conversations are almost invariably calm and straightforward, mostly banal. We communicate by emitting short grunts, turning it into a kind of shorthand that would be incomprehensible to a stranger. As for our work (the driving force of our lives), we rarely mention it.
To demonstrate how secretive this man is about his plans, here's a little anecdote. A few years ago, a new novel of his was due to be released. I told him I was looking forward to reading it (sometimes we send each other finished manuscripts, sometimes we wait for the final drafts) and he told me I would get a copy very soon.
The boxes 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 touched in fact – but the thing is, my friend hadn’t said a word to me about it. Not even the slightest mention, not even the slightest hint, nothing.
What am I trying to say? That I know this man and I don't know him.
This is my friend, my dearest friend, despite this lack of recognition. If he were to go out tomorrow and rob a bank, I would be shocked. On the other hand, if I were to read that he is cheating on his wife, that he has a new lover kept secret in an apartment somewhere, I would be disappointed, but I would not be shocked. Anything is possible, and men keep secrets, even from close friends. In the event of my friend's infidelity, I would feel disappointed (because he would be treating his wife, someone I care deeply about), but I would also feel hurt (because he would not have shown trust in me, which meant that our friendship was not as close as I had thought it was).
(A sudden brainwave. The best and longest lasting friendships are based on admiration. This is the basic feeling that binds two people together for a long time. You admire someone for what they do, for who they are, for how they navigate their way through the world. Your admiration elevates them in your eyes, ennobles them, elevates them to a status that you believe is above yours. And if that person admires you in return—thereby elevating you, ennobling you, elevating you to a status that they believe is above theirs—then you are in a position of absolute equality. You both give more than you receive, you both receive more than you give, and in the reciprocity of this exchange, friendship flourishes. From Joubert's Notebooks (1809): “He must not only cultivate his friends, but also cultivate friendship within himself. They must be kept, he must care for them, he must water them.” And again Joubert: “He loses the friendship of those who lose our esteem.”
2) Boys. Childhood is the most intense period of our lives, for most of the things we do at that time are things we do for the first time. I have little to say about it, except for one memory, but that memory seems to underscore the infinite value we place on friendship when we are young, very young indeed. I was five years old. Billy, my first friend, came into my life in a way that I cannot now grasp. I remember him as a strange and cheerful character, with strong opinions and a highly developed talent for mischief (something I lacked to a terrible degree). He had a severe speech impediment, and when he spoke his words were so garbled, so full of saliva from his mouth, that no one could understand what he was saying—except little Paul, who acted as his interpreter. We spent most of our time together around our suburban New Jersey neighborhoods, searching for small dead animals—mostly birds, but also the occasional frog or chipmunk—and burying the bodies in flower beds along my sidewalk. Solemn rituals, homemade wooden crosses, no laughing allowed. Billy resented the girls, refusing to fill the pages of our books with colored portraits of female figures, and because his favorite color was green he was convinced that the blood that ran 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 city. Heartbroken, I mourned my missing friend for weeks if not months. Finally, my mother relented and gave me permission to make the expensive phone call to Billy’s house. The content of our conversation has slipped 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 a teenager talking on the phone with a girl I had a crush on.
You make a distinction in your letter between friendship and love. When we are very young, before our erotic lives begin, there is no difference.
Friendship and love are one.
3) Friendship and love are not the same. Man and woman. The difference between marriage and friendship. A final quote from Jubert (1801): “Do not choose for a wife any woman whom you would not choose for a friend if she were a man.”
A pretty absurd formulation, I think (how can a woman be a man?), but we get the point and it's basically not that far from your remark about Parade's End of Fort Madox Ford and the ridiculous and 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 a man and a woman do not find a way to be friends, the marriage has little chance of surviving. Friendship is a component of marriage, but marriage is a free for all in constant development, a constant work in progress, a constant demand to reach into our depths and reinvent ourselves in relation to others, whereas pure and simple friendship (that is, friendship outside of marriage) tends to be more static, more polite, more superficial. We crave friendships with all our hearts, because we are social beings, born of other beings and destined to live among other beings until the day we die. However, think of the quarrels that sometimes break out in even the best marriages, the passionate disagreements, the heated insults, the slamming of doors and the breaking of crockery, and we quickly realize that such behavior would not be acceptable in the decorated rooms of friendship. Friendship is the good manners, the pleasantness, the constancy of love. Friends who shout at each other rarely remain friends. Husbands and wives who shout at each other usually remain married—often happily married.
Can men and women be friends? I think so. As long as there's no physical attraction on one side. Once sex enters the equation, all the dice are in play.
4) Continued. But some other aspects of friendship need to be discussed as well: a) Friendships that fade and die; b) Friendships between people who do not necessarily share common interests (work friendships, school friendships, war friendships); c) Concentric circles of friendship: closest relatives, less close but most liked, those who live far away, pleasant acquaintances, and so on; d) All the other issues in your letter that I did not address.
With warmest thoughts from hot New York
Paul
/Adapted from Paul Auster and JM Coetzee, 'Here and Now', Viking Press, 2013
/Translation Gazeta Express
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