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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Friendship:
An Expose by Joseph Epstein |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Affinity Many readers
will be grateful that Joseph Epstein has entered a reflective time of life
and is willing to share his experiences and wisdom with others. On the pages
of Friendship:
An Expose, Epstein riffs on as many dimensions of friendship as he can
think of, and tells stories of his own experiences with friendship over a
lifetime of making and losing friends. After reading this book, many readers
will pick up the phone and call a friend. Here’s an excerpt, from the
beginning of Chapter 5, “Friends-Who Needs ‘Em?,”
pp. 46-53: “For without friends,” writes Aristotle, in the Ethics, “no one would choose to live.”
Aristotle goes on from here to run the categories of those who need friends:
The prosperous and successful need them to exercise their beneficence, and
also to guard and help preserve their wealth. In poverty and misfortune,
Aristotle claims, friends are the only refuge. Friends help keep the young
from error, and help the older by ministering to their needs and shoring up
their weaknesses as life winds down; and friends lead those in the prime of
life to contemplate noble deeds that will win approbation. These are all rather
utilitarian reasons for friendship. Aristotle was of course born well before
the age of self-regarding psychology, and so was less likely to dive down to
the darker waters of hidden motives behind friendship. Do we look to friends,
for example, for self-affirmation — that
is, to affirm our own best evaluation of ourselves — or, in the cant phrase of the day, to
pump up our self-esteem? Is friendship, when stripped down to its essentials,
just another playing field for that insatiably greedy and sleepless monster,
the human ego? A comic line of our time runs, “It’s always about you, isn’t
it?” Does friendship qualify here, too? Is it, finally, always about “me” or
“you” — about, in other
words, little more than making me or you feel good? One would like to say,
without hesitation, absolutely not to all these questions. But consider. In
its broadest lineaments, the argument that friendship is chiefly about
self-affirmation holds that none of us exists outside a social context. Our
sense of our own value, in this reading, is almost wholly dependent on what
others think of us. Obviously, most of us are pleased to count as friends people of whose high opinion of us we can be
certain. (No one but a certified masochist could bear a friendship with
someone who is always putting down or otherwise deflating him.) If we have
noble or generous or impressive achievements in our past, it’s pleasing to
think that the people with whom we are friendly know about these things.
Pleasing, too, even late in life, to be in a group where many people know
that one was once a good athlete, physically beautiful, a great student, a
solid parent, a fine provider, a splendid person all around. Among friends,
one doesn’t have to establish afresh one’s bona fides about one’s real
quality. Do we take our conception
of ourselves from outside ourselves, the question is, or are we strong
enough to know our true value without seeing it reflected in the eyes of
friends? Some writers, artists, and composers have known they were good,
superior even, without any signs of their quality being registered in criticism,
the marketplace, or the estimation of people who love them: Henri Matisse, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce,
Arnold Schoenberg come to mind. Of their own quality they were without doubt;
and, among a small number of such people — many of them avant-garde geniuses — they required no other valuation than
self-knowledge, which informed their unwavering high opinion of themselves.
(Exceptions to this exist in the arts, of course: Virginia Woolf, judging from her diaries, seemed to have been in a
state of near-permanent insecurity about the quality of her art and of
endless worry about what the people who mattered to her thought about it.)
But are there many people outside the arts who have the same confidence? My father seems to have
been such a person. He was a good, gentle, generous, fair man, yet in all the
time I knew him, a man without anything resembling friends. When I was a boy,
if the phone rang in our apartment, my father would joke that if it was for
him — the joke here is
that it never was — to
tell the party calling that he had left the country. My father had friends as
a boy and as a young man, but once he married and found the work that he was
able to devote himself to, friendships seemed to hold no real allure for him.
Such social life as he had was with the husbands of
my mother’s friends, and he never went beyond a middling sociability with
any of them. In place of friends, he had family; in place of a social life,
he had his business. The people who came closest to being his friends were
those he knew through work, but he rarely saw them in the eve-fling or on
weekends. My father’s fairly high
valuation of himself was owing to his having made a small but genuine success
at his business. Born a Canadian, he moved to My father had a firm sense
of himself as a serious and productive and independent person. He was filled
with opinions about human nature and the way the world worked; though he
didn’t force them on anyone, neither could he quite hold them back. (He had
developed the art of the falsely modest introductory clause: “I could be
wrong about this, of course. . .“ “This is just off the top of my head,
but I’m inclined to think. . .“) As a self-made man, he felt he had
some authority to speak about the world; and as far as I was concerned, he
did have the authority, if not always anywhere near enough to support his
heady theories about demography and war, the various hidden purports of
Mother Nature, and the like. His success at his business
may have conferred on him all the self-regard he needed. Having friends in
important places, having someone besides his wife to confide in, having
people with whom he could be utterly relaxed and himself, none of these
things seemed to matter to him. He wanted to be thought an agreeable person,
but I don’t think he cared all that much if someone found him otherwise. He
was what he was — which is to say,
he was always himself. Inner-directed, in David Riesman’s once famous scheme
of psychological types, is what my father was, and to a high degree. While my mother was my
father’s best friend, I’m far from certain that he was her best friend, though her love for him was constant and without
qualification. Owing to his temperament and his total absorption in his work,
he could not hope to come close to supplying her with her social
requirements. My mother was a very sociable woman. She always had circles of
friends, belonged to card-playing groups, and went to lots of luncheons and
charity events of the kind that women of her generation called “affairs.” Nor
had she the least snobbery. Her only qualification for a friend, so far as I
can determine, was that she have a good heart, which my mother herself had.
Thus she became friends with the woman, an immigrant who survived Hitler’s
death camps, who began as her seamstress, and sometimes she would spend
mornings with this woman, listening to her stories about life in As a married man, I
resemble my father in having, as my best friend, my wife. But I also have a
knack—a flaw perhaps is better — for
a too easy intimacy, described earlier, that leads some people to believe
that I want to be closer to them than I actually do. People mistake
friendliness in me for friendship, two quite distinct things. Because of
this. I suspect that the number of people in the world who might call me a
good friend is larger than the number of people I would claim as good
friends. When I ask myself what my
friends do for me, I find myself retreating into vapidities. With friends I
feel the comfort of a common outlook — amused,
ironic, not altogether unhappy to be slightly out of
it as we grow older together. More than anything else I find comfort in my
close friends: an easiness that allows me to be myself. Not, I hasten to
add, that I have several alternative selves available to me to be. I pride
myself on having arrived at an age when pretense seems silly, if not comical.
(My general style, once perhaps carefully cultivated, but now quite real, is
that of being a man reasonably at ease in the world.) Yet with these few
friends, I can, so to say, be even more myself: risk wild allusiveness, drop
diplomacy, heighten candor. Knowing how their sense of humor works, I can
play on my own with a spontaneity and freedom that I can’t generally call
into play with lesser friends. These close friends and I do not agree on
everything — only on important,
only on the main, things. I hope I don’t need
reinforcement from friends for such ideas as I have, such opinions as I hold, such core beliefs as I expect to die with. Agreement
in these and other matters can of course cushion friendship, removing the
potholes and bumpy places all friendships of any duration encounter. I have
met many people whose opinions were vastly different from my own, and
discovered that this deprived them neither of charm nor, when I permitted
myself to gaze beyond their mere opinions, of my affection. On the other side, I’ve met
people many of whose opinions are nearly congruent with my own whom I find
entirely objectionable and wouldn’t want to be with for the time it takes to
drink a cup of coffee. When I lived in Over the years I have had friends
connected with specific activities: tennis friends, racquetball friends,
poker friends. But when the games were over, so too, until the next session
of games, were the friendships. As I have grown older, many of my friendships
have come to have distinct limits. I have a friend, from our days in the army
together, with whom I went to one Chicago Cubs game a year, until he moved to
When I am with certain friends,
I am, variously, content, amused, happy, sometimes all these things at once.
But I do not mentally crave the pleasures of friendship as once I did. Too
often I feel, more than straightforward affection, a corroding sense of
obligation; and as the sociologist Ray Pahl puts
it, “if we feel obliged to be a friend, then it is no true friendship.”
Nietzsche said that to live alone, a man must be a god or a beast. I know I
am not the first, and hope I’m not turning into the second. Is it that much
of my former need for friends is now supplied by my wife, a person many of
whose interests and much of whose point of view are so close to my own? Is it
that, having grown older, I have come to enjoy solitude more? In an introduction to
Jocelyn Brooke’s Orchid Trilogy, Anthony Powell writes of his friendship
with Brooke: “I was never a close friend of Jocelyn Brooke’s, but we
corresponded quite often, and he was one of the people to whom one wrote
letters with great ease. He speaks more than once of his own liking for that
sort of relationship, a kind that did not make him feel hemmed in. There are
several incidents in his books when the narrator refuses an invitation from
someone with whom he is getting on pretty well so that it was no great
surprise when, a few months after Brooke had stayed with us for a weekend, he
politely excused himself from another visit on grounds of work. The reason
may have been valid enough, writing time is always hard to conserve, but one
suspected his sense of feeling ‘different,’ unwillingness to cope with
face-to-face cordialities of a kind that might at the same time be agreeable
in letters.” I am not so odd as Jocelyn Brooke, but
I have come to a time in life when I can understand his oblique motives. I sometimes feel my life too
crowded with friends, of various kinds. Some contemporaries among my friends
have reached the stage of ceasing to listen, but only wait to speak, which
they often do about things I have heard them say more than twice before. With
them meetings are no longer as pleasant as I remember them having been: the
laughter is less, the flow of talk not as spirited, the glow of good feeling
afterward occasionally nonexistent. Friendship, in other words,
can come to seem a burden. I want friends, yes, but I want them at my
convenience: the right ones at the right time. This is a condition of course
that can be met only by what were once known as call girls, and friends,
quite rightly, won’t — and
shouldn’t — stand for it.
Still . . . Why are people drawn to me?
Embarrassing question though it is to confront, I would say it is due in part
to the general aura, the high-octane fumes, of friendliness I often give
off, to the promise my personality seems to hold out for charm and
chumminess: I am teller of jokes, a doubtless too frequent reteller of well-polished anecdotes, someone who attempts
to use language in an amusing way. But I also think that I come off — I say “come off,” which is, please
note, different from “am” — as
someone who is comfortable in his own skin, not vulnerable or needy, a man
who is sailing through life well in control, owing to his strong sense of
autonomy. Whether this is actually so is perhaps not a question for me to
answer. What if, reading the above
paragraphs, my friends — many
of whom are happily without knowledge of one another’s existence — were to hold a meeting in which they
established an easily arrived at consensus to abandon me? What would my life
be like without friends? Undoubtedly poorer — much poorer. My relationship with my
wife, however dear to me, cannot supply all my social needs. Although she is
a highly cultured woman, some of my intellectual pursuits are outside her
realm of interest. She knows only a minimum about my professional dealings
with magazine and book editors, literary agents and publishers. I am more
vulgar than she, with a number of small but real
passions — for sports,
unhealthy food, off-color jokes (not too off-color; roughly turquoise, I’d
say) — that I am just as
glad she doesn’t share. Although she is the only person in the world with
whom I can speak freely — not
always easily, but freely — about
things of the heart, she cannot be all things for me, and I know I cannot be
all things for her. I retain friends for various of these (I wish there were a better word than the
one I am about to use) needs. With some friends of my own age I can talk
about how goofy the world has become — and
how different from the world in which we grew up. With others I can talk in a
detailed way about mildly abstract things: politics, the current state of the
university, the quality of literary and intellectual life. With still others
I can talk about brutish things: sports, the comedy of sex, and use such
charming words as mother-grabber and nice boobs. The excerpt
illustrates the offbeat style Epstein uses throughout Friendship.
Readers will both laugh and think as the pages turn. Steve Hopkins,
July 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Friendship.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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