ESSAYS: DENNIS O'DRISCOLLreviews The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable FriendshipsEdited by Robert B Silvers and Barbara Epstein New York Review Books, pp 298, £14.99
IF THE OPPOSITE of love is indifference, the opposite of friendship is betrayal. Friendship is the realm of trust rather than passion: censorship is lifted, confidentiality assured and full disclosure facilitated. Within the wonky, hand-drawn circle of friendship, conversational restraints are much looser than they would be among mere acquaintances; you are largely (though not wholly) free to say whatever is on your mind – to spit it out, tease it out, without falling out. While erotic love finds its ultimate expression beyond words, friendship finds its most satisfying outlet in words: exchanges of news, opinions, tribulations, shared enthusiasms. Drinks, meals, concerts and travels may form part of the picture, too, but they are mere props; it is the words that count.
You can paint friendships (as Howard Hodgkin does) or make music of them (Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations); however, a word-free friendship would be as improbable as a conversation-free dinner party. Inevitably, therefore, when rifts occur, they, too, relate to words: even the most open friendship will place some outer limit on the freedom of expression allowed and can be rocked by wounding remarks, misfired jokes, confidences divulged to a third party; in friendship, one may kiss but not tell.
How, then, can the 27 contributors to The Company They Kept, a compendium of essays reprinted from the New York Review of Books, purport to tell of "unforgettable friendships" without simultaneously betraying them? The book's subjects being safely dead and, in every sense, out of hearing, each posthumously summoned friend might well have been portrayed ungenerously (warts to the fore) without fear of recrimination or revenge.
Blemishes are by no means airbrushed – the usual ogres – drunkenness, fecklessness, moodiness, infidelity, egotism – rear their unlovely noggins, but the artistry of the essayists, who include Elizabeth Hardwick on Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald on Delmore Schwartz, Anna Akhmatova on Amedeo Modigliani and Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke, rises to the kind of portraiture where a deep vein of empathy drains the bile and shows even their most fallible and flawed subjects to have had qualities worthy of homage, and gifts that transcended their failings.
The poignancy of human endeavour is conveyed graphically here. Writers may endure crushing poverty and hardship in the cause of sculpting sentences and burnishing metaphors, only to be little read or quickly forgotten. The reputation of Djuna Barnes, who is artfully captured by Darryl Pinckney in her "brutally cramped" one-room flat, hangs on, thanks to her novel Nightwood, by a single cultish thread.
For the left-wing novelist Josephine Herbst the thread may actually have snapped; when Alfred Kazin first met her in 1950 she was already “out of print, out of a job, out of cash, out of fashion”. Writing of FW Dupee, Mary McCarthy recounts the “pain he suffered” to perfect his apparently effortless critical essays. But to what end? Artistic labour had better be its own reward, because even the Muses’ gifted votaries are rarely granted a timeshare in immortality.
In one of the most substantial contributions to the book, Robert Lowell (himself the focus of a laboured and lumbering essay by Derek Walcott) makes a dazzlingly eloquent case for Randall Jarrell’s “heartbreaking” poetry. But is anyone listening? Jarrell seems destined to be remembered mostly for his criticism; and Lowell’s own standing – once as stately and secure as that of Lehman Brothers – has freefallen like the Dow.
The reputations of the book’s two scientists, Francis Crick (recalled in Oliver Sacks’s ever-engaging prose) and Albert Einstein (staidly surveyed by Robert Oppenheimer), are more assured, because their verifiable discoveries are independent of taste or fashion.
Some of the most absorbing essays (Saul Bellow on John Cheever, Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan) are so brief that, having been introduced to their subjects, one wants to prolong this privileged access like a spell. And while few people without surplus dollars and saintly patience would have lingered for long in the erratic company of Hart Crane, Edward Dahlberg’s expansive account of their friendship is mesmerising. Dahlberg wears his learning heavily – negotiating his allusion-dense prose is like wading through diamond-studded lava – yet his style is everywhere lit with idiosyncratic genius.
A few essays in this book are profiles (Enrique Krauze on Octavio Paz) rather than recollections; others come closer in character to obituaries (Michael Ignatieff on Bruce Chatwin) or literary criticism (McCarthy on Dupee) than to memoirs. Joseph Brodsky's reminiscence of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin can hardly qualify as a record of friendship. Yet – always at his best in discipleship mode, writing of his masters and mentors – Brodsky treats this encounter, in the "huge, mahogany-cum-leather shell" of the Athenaeum Club's library in London, as the culmination of his readerly relationship with Berlin (whose face was "a cross . . . between a wood grouse and a spaniel"). That relationship had begun in the greyer, grimmer setting of cold-war Leningrad when Brodsky discovered The Hedgehog and the Foxand Four Essays on Liberty(with its cover removed "out of caution, given the book's subject").
Perhaps, unlike swallows and summers, one encounter makes a friendship where writers are concerned. Or, as Derek Walcott contends, “Style sits easily on good poets, even in conversation. In intimacy, their perceptions go by so rapidly that a few drinks with them are worth a book on poetics.” And one meeting may be more than enough in certain instances. Petty jealousy and groundless paranoia can quickly undermine literary friendships; Saul Bellow’s essay defines writers as “difficult people who are not always pleased by the talents of their contemporaries”.
Susan Sontag, although revering Paul Goodman’s writings, could not abide the man himself, “the reason being . . . that I felt he didn’t like me”. Walcott was shocked to be told by Lowell: “You use people.” So explosive was Gertrude Stein that her name might be rhyming slang for landmine. Theodore Roethke could not bear to be bested at anything, whether poetry or tennis: “You could not expect to be congratulated by him: he was more likely to smash his racket across his knees.”
The principled commitment of writers to truth-telling, so integral to their art, can itself be destructive of friendships. Randall Jarrell “could be very tender and gracious, but often he seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable”. If urged to show caution, Mary McCarthy (whose memoirs recount “more than scrupulosity demands”) would “look puzzled and answer: But it’s the truth”.
Lillian Hellman, arch-enemy of the lie-detesting, lie-detecting McCarthy (“Every word writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’ ”), is encountered in Prudence Crowther’s endearing account of a youthful friendship with the elderly SJ Perelman. One of Perelman’s circle of wits quipped that Hellman and Perelman enjoyed “a very ambivalent relationship”: “He detested her and she detested him.”
Despite such flashpoints, affection and admiration prevail among the contributions, tinged sometimes with well-earned exasperation. Beautifully produced, and rich in revealing vignettes, this gathering of friends would make a perfect gift for a literary friend, especially one who agrees with EM Cioran that the two most interesting things in the world are gossip and metaphysics. Among the book’s sweeter moments – literally so, in this case – is an anecdote about SJ Perelman (“a fanatic for dessert”). After some of the topping on his blueberry pie became “plastered on his cuffs” at dinner, the humorist announced that he wanted to find another restaurant “so he could finish off the rest of his suit”.
Dennis O'Driscoll is a poet and critic. His latest publication, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney(Faber), received the Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award
