This all suggests friends must not be judged. We should not attempt to change them, although in not attempting we may end up doing this, perhaps in ways we would not want. All relationships, including non-judgemental ones, change people, but friendship is essentially acceptance of the other person as they are. In the age of networking, coercive relationships are often passed off as friendships, but they are not. These are properly called hierarchies, which have always existed, but people did not always pretend that they don’t exist.
Proverbs and writers on friendship often stress the importance of frank advice between friends. This is an idealised friendship, and refers to a particular kind of friendship. We all have friends who would take our advice as an insult, and that advice should be withheld as it would be either wasted or, much worse, counterproductive. Besides, we should question whether we, with all the mistakes we’ve made in our lives, are qualified to provide unwanted advice. The Gaelic proverb claiming that friendship is the mirror of the soul should be covered with a small mound of salt.
This leads to another important differential in friendship: its longevity. Friendships made in our early twenties tend to be lasting. By that age, we have become more or less what we still are. The ageing process and experience change the tone and vehemence of our thoughts, but we retain the essence of our invented selves. In our teens, as Kundera once suggested, we are trying on various personas like masks in an attempt to find which one fits. Friends from this period can become very different as you grow older, but still a residual affection can remain. But friendships from our twenties can be broken off by circumstance and taken up again with little interference from the missing years. These are often relationships in which advice can be dispensed in both directions without offence on either side. It can be sought out. Are these then the most important friendships? Only in a way. When we revisit these ancient friendships, we find our friends in the midst of other short-term friendships that are often more intense. Some of the most important and instructive friendships in our lives are short ones. They come out of a contingency, and have no purpose beyond it.
I am not talking here of what I call professional friendships, which are based on mutual respect and perhaps admiration for the other’s work, but are also characterised by a degree of distance and formality. In a culture that denigrates formality or at least language that reflects a more formal relationship, this is often hidden, but hiding it is not a good idea. That formality is admirable where it is appropriate, and we should not pretend we’re all close friends when we’re not. In any case, a professional friendship is only on the very boundary of friendship. What I am talking of here is a contingent friendship based on an original encounter between dissimilarities, which is intensely revelatory in the initial period.
This in turn leads to another important differential in friendship: its capacity. It is often said that friendship is the most important ingredient for marriage, but this is a cliche that holds only a small part of the truth – to the extent that it is highly misleading. The validity of this assertion mainly rests on its implication that it takes more than sexual attraction and compatibility to make a marriage (or long-term sexual relationship, whether heterosexual or homosexual). No one would argue with that, but marriage (or sexual partnership) in the West requires a great deal – some might say too much. How many of our friendships would last, if we spent the same amount of time with our friends that we do with our spouses. Good marriages overcome the problem of overfamiliarity. I was talking to the wife of a friend whose conversation and wit I admire. She told me that her marriage lasted because she found him so amusing. I immediately leapt to confirm this truth. She looked at me as if I were a fool and said, “But I don’t find him funny when he’s trying to be – only when he’s taking himself seriously.” This revealed many things: that she might have been wittier than he was, but also that she knew all his jokes and the mechanisms he used to create new ones. Perhaps he too had to invent her persona in order to love her, and I remember that he was an extremely uxorious man.
Montaigne excluded women from friendship, and never bothered to consider the nature of friendship amongst women, and he excluded closeness from marriage because “women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.” Fortunately we have progressed, but not that much, at least amongst heterosexuals, for whom friendship still remains predominantly homosexual (i.e. between people of the same sex). You would expect then that for homosexuals friendship would be heterosexual, which to some extent it is, but homosexuals also have many friendships with people of either sex. In this sense, homosexuals are showing us the way friendship should develop in the supposedly open society of the twenty-first century.
The great burden we now put on sexual partnership in the West and increasingly beyond it may not stand up well, if we apply the utilitarian dictum, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. The problems these relationships encounter today are exacerbated by the modern consumerist culture, which turns everything into a product or commodity – even a human relationship – which must be judged for its usefulness to the individual rather than the couple or family, and also bombards the consumer with an endless series of adverts that, amongst other things, conjure up the unobtainable image of the perfect family of consumers busy at their consumerist duties. In spite of this, there are many successful marriages and sexual partnerships, and today many, perhaps most of us, would expect great loyalty to be reserved for this more meaningful relationship and not friendship in general, as Montaigne argued. For the French essayist, friendship should seek perfection and for him one particular friendship was all-consuming; the death of that friend was a blow from which he could never recover. It was, as he describes it, homosexual love but not sexual. What we call Platonic love: “There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him – as he would have missed me; for just as he infinitely surpassed me in ability and virtue so did he do so in the offices of friendship.” On the other hand, he says, “in my bed, beauty comes before virtue”. If, as he claims, he did in fact separate sex and passionate love, which is not really friendship as we understand it, then perhaps this separation has the advantage of compartmentalising relationships and demanding less of each one. But his description of friendship is not consistent: the friendship as a monogamous Platonic love surviving even death coexists alongside “common friendships” – a more recognisable kind of friendship which includes a clique of close friends vying for priority. He agonises over the resulting conflicts without resolving the problem: “If two friends asked you to help them at the same time, which of them would you dash to? If they asked for conflicting favours, who would have the priority? If one entrusted to your silence something which it was useful for the other to know, how would you get out of that?”. Here we have the clubbishness and hierarchy of traditional male friendships. Today, each friendship should be its own thing, and not in competition with other friendships, which may have very different functions. Nor should friendship override an individual’s personal morality, although personal morality also needs a degree of flexibility – but not to the point of corruption. Montaigue’s three unanswered questions lie at the heart of the kind of freemasonry that degrades society.
Sexual love in a partnership or marriage is to some extent an exercise in self-deception, while friendship is an exercise in knowing another as deeply as is possible and, of course, never succeeding. Friendship should be as promiscuous as possible, as it is better to learn from a great variety of people and viewpoints. That is why friendship does not have great capacity. Many a long friendship has come to grief due to a prolonged holiday in each other’s company. That every human relationship is unique is a truism, but a friendship has no ideal form, nor does it require a purpose. It is enough for two people to wish to be regularly in each other’s company, either by thems
elves or with others, for no other reason than that companionship and not for some other purpose, such as financial self-interest or ambition.
On Writing about Ourselves
In her collection of blogs, On Writing, A.L. Kennedy refers to the practice of basing fictional characters on real people as “body-snatching”. The roman-à-clef gets a hammering. Some of the great romans-à-clef come to mind, including Tolstoy’s Resurrection which I examine in an earlier essay. Kennedy is right to point out that there are terrible dangers in this kind of writing, and to write about someone with the intention of harming their reputation would be reprehensible (unless they’re a politician and the satire is political rather than personal). Sometimes you read a flawed novel or short story in which you get the impression that the writing is an elaborate private message delivered publicly to a particular individual, and the writer cannot wait to post off a copy to the victim.
But “body-snatching” has produced many good novels, and to some extent all characters must arise from the author’s experience of life and other people, even when a character is invented. Moreover, the distinction between an invented character and a real one is not clear. Many a character might start life in the author’s brain as someone drawn from life or even a mixture of two real people, and then take off in a slightly different direction once the novel evolves. A character may be invented and then come under the influence of a real person, because the author perceives the appropriateness of this to their changing ideas of how the book should be written. Never say never in literature, and in many other things. Much of the current advice on writing is to avoid risk, but art is primarily about risk.
My own experience of writing is that real people tend to make caricatures, and are only useful for very minor parts. This is counterintuitive, but given our inability to really understand other people’s motives, it should not surprise us too much. I have also noticed that readers want to attribute autobiographical influences where none existed. I wrote a dialogue at the end of my first novel, The Golden Menagerie, in which the three main participants were originally called “c.v.”, “l.v.” and “s.v.”, which stood for cynical voice, liberal voice and socialist voice. Only after the dialogue was complete did I attribute names and describe them in a manner that appeared to suit the different viewpoints they embodied. This did not stop people from identifying these characters with real people. I had originally written this book in the south of England and the story ended up in the west of Ireland. As it happened, my life copied my book and I ended up living on the periphery, in a village near Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, and so I decided to relocate the final dialogue to a place that I knew rather than one imagined and never visited. From the moment I used Stornoway, readers who knew I lived there felt that the story must have been at least in part based on actual events, which in the case of some more minor characters was partially true.
Another book that comes to mind is Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which is a wonderfully extreme example and therefore instructive not only about “bodysnatching” but also the whole business of writers writing about themselves both in fiction and non-fiction, because the book became famous principally because of its closeness to real events in the author’s life and also worked well as a novel in itself. The body Waugh snatched and abused most readily was his own, and the book is an act of courage and almost self-harm. He subjects himself to unremitting ridicule. The saving grace of Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh’s alter ego, is that he deals with the prolonged bout of temporary madness on his own and comes through, something of which Waugh was justifiably proud.
In brief, Pinfold/Waugh is suffering from insomnia and rheumatic pain for which he is taking a cocktail of different drugs and alcohol, in particular bromide and chloral. In hope of respite from the two oppressive symptoms of aching joints and sleeplessness, he departs on a sea journey for Ceylon during which he starts to hear voices. The drugs may have been the cause of a derangement that resembled in many ways paranoid schizophrenia. The current Penguin edition contains a useful introduction and some fascinating appendices. 1 When asked “how far Pinfold is an account of your own brief illness?”, Waugh replied, “Almost exact. In fact, it had to be cut down a lot. It would be infinitely tedious to have recorded everything. It’s the account of three weeks hallucinations going on absolutely continuously.” Later in the same interview, he makes an intriguing observation, “… it was not in the least like losing one’s reason, it was simply one’s reason working hard on the wrong premises.” You don’t have to be mad to fall into that deluded state. Life is a deluded state in the midst of lies, misunderstandings, wrong interpretations, betrayals and an unrelenting flood of propaganda. Delusions that originate in ourselves and delusions imposed from outside, but poor Mr. Pinfold had something more – a serious clinical condition.
Waugh goes into great detail on Pinfold’s cocktails of drugs and alcohol. Too much so, as though to justify Waugh’s own experience of madness, which would be understandable. Here he is most certainly copying from life. But self-justification, generally the greatest pitfall of autobiographical elements, is not the pervading tone of this book, quite the opposite. It is the author’s unrelenting and cruel examination of his own character and temporary madness.
When Pinfold, before his departure, says, “Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?” the reader feels, but cannot know, that this was an expression Waugh often used in his own house – something familiar to his children that they would greet with exasperation, smiles and filial indulgence. I imagine a cantankerous man driven by a powerful sense of duty “to do the right thing”, and nearly always failing. Is this desire to think about the author, rather than the protagonist, the other characters or even the narrator, a distraction that impedes the flow of the novel? It feels at times as though Pinfold and Waugh are jostling for centre stage, and the reason is that Waugh made little attempt to cover up the link between his own experience and Pinfold’s fictional one, although he may equally have exaggerated it. Our imaginings of the real Waugh are not reliable.
When I read of the drunken and drugged-up Pinfold, who “prayerless … got himself to bed”, I immediately infer that Waugh would consider his nightly prayer a significant duty. In spite of his very public conversion to Catholicism, this may not have been the case. Even if the inference is correct, it doesn’t tell us what kind of prayer: is it that idiotic prayer to a patriarchal god for happiness, help in an examination or some other bounty missing from the pious person’s life, or is it a meditation away from all selfish considerations – an attempt in frivolous times to regain a sense of the seriousness of life? I would think that on political and religious issues Waugh was very distant from me, but this book suggests that I share one important thing with him: contempt for the pettiness of life – the guarded ego, selfimportance, the hollow courtesies, servility, deceit. We all disdain these things, and indulge in them too, more often in some periods of our lives than others. In fact Pinfold, disastrous and inept as he is – a malign Charlie Chaplin – is ultimately as likeable as he is disagreeable, because he is most contemptuous of pettiness when he discovers it in himself, and throughout the high point of his derangement a nebulous self-awareness endures, although it also succumbs to his persecution mania or his “pm” as Waugh and his wife referred to it in their correspondence, suggesting that the condition was not entirely new.
Thus Waugh provides us with an intriguing novel which we would read differently if he hadn’t publicised the source of its content. But this too may not be wholly reliable. While in his conversations with his wife he put the whole blame for his condition on drugs and alcohol, outside the family he was less protective of his reputation. On meeting a friend in London who commiserated on his illness, Waugh reportedly “burst into laughter” and replied, “I know that Laura [his wife] has been putting it about that I’ve been ill. But it’s not true. I’ve been off my head.” We possibly have here someone who is so determined to be ruthless i
n his self-assessment in public that he may be distorting the truth.
The Pinfold story is not just about the book and its account of his illness, there is also the possibility that the illness itself arose from his relationship with the media, and concerns the way authors relate to their public, a subject which is more relevant today than it was then. Waugh appears to have been upset by a couple of interviews by a BBC journalist who then became the object of his paranoid delusions. The family and in particular Auberon Waugh supported the argument that Stephen Black’s interview drove Evelyn Waugh mad, but when I read the relevant excerpts in the Penguin edition I can find nothing in the first interview, which was at his home and supposedly the offending one, that could justify Waugh’s ire or even his offence, although the second one does throw more light on the disagreement. In the first interview there are those techniques, probably part of BBC training, whose purpose is to inform the audience of things the interviewer already knew:
Black: You are a Roman Catholic, Mr Waugh?
Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 13
