From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
No Hugging, Please
Friendship doesn't have to mean "sharing."
Several years ago, my brother visited New York for a long weekend. As we strolled around the city, he described his life in California: heading off to mud baths with his friend Jenny; acting in a play with his friend Rob; cheering on the Sacramento Kings with his friend Craig. Not a single person emerged in the course of his conversation, it seemed, without the phrase "my friend" firmly attached. By the end of the visit, I had that feeling of name-vertigo that routinely occurs during big family gatherings and Russian novels. And we hadn't even started in on mere acquaintances.
What a relief, then, to realize upon reading Joseph Epstein's brisk and delightful "Friendship: An Exposé" that my brother is not a friend-slattern: He simply suffers from a problem of categorization. "Some years ago," Mr. Epstein notes, "I wrote an essay in which I compared my own friendships with the seating plan in a stadium, my closest friends seated in the box seats, less close friends in the grandstand, and business associates and acquaintances in the bleachers."
In short, "my friend" can mean all sorts of things--not all of them, as Mr. Epstein reminds us, appropriate for a Hallmark card. Friendships can be tiring, tedious or only fitfully rewarding--they can also break. And even when they have a sustaining power, as they do, there are limits. Of even his close friends, Mr. Epstein writes: "We do not bitch, whine or cry in one another's presence." Long ago he discovered that he preferred to suffer his disappointments and setbacks alone: "I think carrying on without (to invoke a new-fashioned word) 'sharing' my troubles is (to invoke a very old-fashioned word) 'manly,' possibly even dignified and graceful."
It says something about how friendship has changed in the past two decades that such a declaration provokes the question: Well, then, what is friendship really about? Chapter by chapter, anecdote by anecdote, Mr. Epstein attempts to answer this profound question.
Like his earlier book-length essays--"Snobbery" and "Envy"--"Friendship" proceeds at a leisurely pace, strolling through aspects of the topic at hand. One chapter acknowledges that there are people, like Mr. Epstein's father, who do not appear to need friends. Another delves into the importance of conversation; another into the category of "best friends." Mr. Epstein describes with affection a colleague who has since passed. Although he had a dry wit, "he could be rigid in his formality, unbending in his standards. He never appeared outside his home without a tie and jacket, and my guess is that he judged harshly those men who did."
As a long-time essayist--best known for his "Aristides" columns in the American Scholar--Mr. Epstein often followed Montaigne's example, evoking the first person but never belaboring it. So he might begin with a personal anecdote but end up using it like a musician who hums a note to get a harmony going. After that, he'd be off singing a tune whose notes could come from any number of reference points, from old radio routines to the diaries of Edmund Wilson.
But friendship is a topic that is hard to capture third-hand; one of the best ways of describing it is to talk of one's own friends. Thus "Friendship" might be the closest that Mr. Epstein will come to writing a memoir. He mentions a divorce, the death of a son. Though he does not go into detail about such events, his habit of reticence lends a certain formal regard to his portraits of his friends--say, a mathematician he has come to know or the late witty editor he once sought out at parties. He admired them enough not to place upon them the heaviest of his own burdens.
Mr. Epstein also enshrines his relationships in engaging prose. "Friendship" is spangled with winning turns of phrase. "We play each other like old cellos," he writes of some old friends. Instead of simply saying that Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing about friendship gets purple, Mr. Epstein declares: "Here is Emerson again, with the helium machine turned all the way up." Of a certain kind of social tyranny, he writes: "Some friends need solace without being remotely in trouble. Like the strict schoolteachers of an older day, these friends require perfect attendance."
As always with Mr. Epstein, there is dish, too. He recalls the imbalance in a three-year friendship he had with Saul Bellow. It broke down when Mr. Epstein began gravitating toward the late social-scientist Edward Shils, who, Bellow felt, didn't give the Great Novelist the proper amount of respect. In the middle of "Friendship," Mr. Epstein sets down a frighteningly detailed account of his social activities over a week--a kind of friend-diary--in which he describes every email, phone call, errand, coffee-date and meal he shared and how it made him feel. Not all of the details are flattering.
Although he claims to be an only mildly gregarious man, this schedule reveals Mr. Epstein's dirty little secret--he does indeed have a stadium-size range of friendly associations. It also speaks to the necessity of friendship, even among the highly cultivated. "I seem, in the realm of friendship, to be the equivalent, in the realm of sex, of that too fast high school girl who finds herself in the back of a Chevy, staring up at her saddle shoes and asking herself how she got here, again." He needn't worry about his honor, though. If anything, "Friendship" reveals that--as in love-making?--enthusiasm counts for everything.
Mr. Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. You can buy "Friendship: An Exposé" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
