A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Joseph Epstein has a very interesting and somewhat heartbreaking commentary on Norman Podhoretz's book Ex-Friends. Epstein discusses Podhoretz's dilemma in part of his essay:

Over the four decades that I have known Norman Podhoretz, he has taken positions based on his beliefs that have cost him and his family much unjustified contumely, and at times, I have no doubt, true anguish; at a minimum they cost him a central place in what was once snobbishly considered the American intellectual establishment. He has also commanded great loyalty, which speaks to a true gift for friendship. But he knows only one way to take ideas--dead seriously. He is a polemicist, to the bone and beyond, and his has been a life lived in and through argument. Very near the pure type of the intellectual, he cannot avoid taking positions, and cannot say other than what he thinks; candor is in his nature, and he has in him much more charm than diplomacy.

In the introductory chapter of Ex-Friends, Podhoretz writes that friends can disagree about a lot, "but only provided the things they disagree about are not all that important to them." He is in interesting company here. In 1914, with World War I about to begin, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to Bertrand Russell:

I can see perfectly well that your value judgments are just as good as mine and deep-seated in you as mine in me, and I have no right to catechize you. But . . . for that very reason there cannot be any real relation of friendship between us.

Of course, in the hothouse world of the New York intellectuals, few if any would be ready to concede that an adversary's "value judgments are just as good as mine," let alone forgo the right to catechize. So when Norman Podhoretz turned away from his radical-Left politics of the late 1950's and early 60's, arguing in print that America was on balance a good place in which one was fortunate to be living, the walls crashed down around him. He was looked upon by his former friends, he writes, "as a dangerous heretic, which I certainly was from their point of view"--just as, he adds, "I considered them a threat to everything I held dear, which they certainly were--and still are." Those friends who did not think him stupidly or evilly wrong considered him insane. "No wonder," he concludes, "that there is hardly a one of my old friends left among the living with whom I am today so much as on speaking terms, except to exchange the most minor civilities if we happen unavoidably to meet (and often not even that)."

The destruction of friendships over political ideology is quite regrettable. I have happily been able to avoid this for the most part in my life because I never thought that politics should be the defining factor in deciding what makes a friendship. I suppose as well that the fact that I grew up around people whose politics differed from mine allowed me to both appreciate an alternative point of view. Of course, I was also forced to be pragmatic about the degree to which I ranked political similarities as important in the making of friends; given the milieu in which I grew up, had I considered politics an exceedingly defining characteristic of my friendships, I would not have had many friends, after all.

The value of Epstein's essay, however, is that he manages to discuss a panoply of situations in which friendships are broken, situations that teach the reader something important and valuable. Consider the following:

With intellectuals as with anybody else, jealousy is one of the ways that friendship can sadly resemble love. It is not uncommon for two close friends to resent a third person who may seem to be coming between them--or for that third party to resent a close friendship that appears to shut him out, and to seek means of retribution. The novelist Paul Theroux, for example, blamed the breakup of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul on the latter's marriage to a woman regarded by Theroux as aggressive and interfering. Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) was the vengeful and vitriolic result--a risible and finally unsuccessful attempt to reduce Naipaul by mocking his pretensions and highlighting his cold-bloodedness.

Theroux may possibly fall into another category--that of the person who, having no real talent for friendship himself, looks to others as ostensible friends in order to be let down by them. "He was inordinately vain and and cantankerous," wrote Max Beerbohm about the painter James Whistler. "Enemies, as he had wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to have valued friendship . . . as just the needful foundation for future enmity. Quarreling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life blithely."

I happen to know someone whose talent for making enemies is perhaps unparalleled and who defined (and for all I know, still defines) his life by the enemies that he made, all the while stewing in what he believes to be righteous indignation. Righteous indignation can, of course, be a good thing but like many good things, it loses its power and efficacy if carried too far and the carrier can turn into a laughingstock if he develops a singular talent for repelling friends and for reveling in the enmities that he has created, as the individual I have in mind most certainly has done.

At the same time, Epstein appears to be all too willing to rationalize and excuse what should strike all decent people as exceedingly bad behavior. Consider the following long passage:

Beerbohm discovered a species of friendship made to be broken in the phenomenon that he named sympat. He took the word from a Brazilian he had met abroad who, after a few encounters, exclaimed, "Never, my friend, did I yet meet one to whom I had such a sympat as you!" Beerbohm used the neologism to refer especially to relationships made while traveling or on holiday, conjuring up, in an essay under that title, the initial pleasure one feels in unfamiliar surroundings upon finding someone with whom one has things in common and with whom one senses a more immediate closeness than might be the case upon meeting the same person at home. "Sympat," Beerbohm writes acutely, "is but the prelude to antipat." Not that he would have us avoid such friendships when abroad; the trick is to avoid them back home.

With Beerbohm's essay in mind, I recall a time when I might have played a role resembling that of the welcome sympat turned dreary antipat. This had to do with the novelist Ralph Ellison, who had written an essay for a magazine I then edited. The essay was both beautiful and wise, and when I thanked him for it, he responded by inviting me to lunch when next I was in New York.

We met one wintry day at the Century Club, for a lunch that lasted no fewer than four hours. Everything about the afternoon seemed magical. The flow of talk was unbroken: gossip, friends we had in common, the present state of the literary world. There were jokes, much laughter, and great good feeling on both sides. It was daylight when I walked into the Century Club and dark when I emerged. In Ralph Ellison I had met a man I long admired and found him not in the least disappointing. I felt I had made a new friend.

Returning to Chicago, I wrote Ellison a note of thanks for the meal and the splendid conversation, ad-ding my hope that he would let me know if he planned to be in Chicago so that I could stand him to a similar lunch. He did not answer. A month or so later I wrote again, this time inviting him to write another essay for my magazine. No answer. A few months passed, and I wrote to pass along a bit of news that I thought might interest him. Again nothing. Ellison and I never had another communication of any kind.

Was it me? Apparently not. Soon after Ellison died in 1994, I received a letter from a reader asking if I had known him. This man and his wife had been on a cruise and met the Ellisons, with whom, he thought, they hit it off beautifully. Upon their return, he wrote to Ellison not once but several times, receiving no reply. Did I, he wondered, have any explanation for this strange behavior?

I now think the explanation may lie in Max Beerbohm's notion of the sympat, and, what is more, I understand and sympathize with Ellison. A naturally gregarious man, he was someone whom many people, I among them, would have been pleased to think of as a friend. He was also a man who, having published a fine novel, Invisible Man, in 1954, had not written another in all the decades since--a man, in other words, haunted by work undone. He did not need more friends filling up his days with correspondence, lunches, and the other time-consuming niceties that would follow from his natural sociability. No sympats for Ralph, evidently; he eliminated them before they had a chance to turn antipat.

This excuse-making is incomprehensible. To be sure, I have some personal knowledge of the sympat/antipat dichotomy. In Farsi, we might say that someone is a hamzaboon, which literally translated, means that the person "shares the same tongue" as we do. This indicates sympat tendencies but with more permanency. And as one who is used to more permanency in friendships and who expects the permanency and reciprocity that a good friendship ought to have, I cannot fathom what causes Epstein to try to explain away what can only be described as reprehensible--and I measure my words carefully when I write this--behavior on the part of Ellison in failing to reciprocate Epstein's efforts at kindness and friendship. Ellison threw away what could have been marvelous comradeship and did it with both hands. And for what? Because he "did not need more friends filling up his days with correspondence, lunches, and the other time-consuming niceties that would follow from his natural sociability"? Why the poor little darling! Millions would kill for the problem of having an overabundance of friends, and yet, Ellison does not even appear to appreciate the good fortune he found himself in as someone who could attract friendships with the greatest of ease. And it should be noted that those who expect other friends to make most or all of the efforts to keep up friendly contacts should be entirely unsurprised if they engender the same bad feelings that Ellisonian "friends" do.

Instead of such excuse-making, such attempts to rationalize the wholly indefensible, Epstein would have done well to condemn Ellison's behavior. But let us give credit where it is due. Epstein certainly did well in withdrawing his own efforts at friendship. When a certain friend fails to return your correspondence, when he/she fails to reach out to you as you have to him/her, and whether the reasons are mysterious or obvious, one must reciprocate by withdrawing one's own one-sided efforts at keeping up what is, at best, an asymmetrical relationship. This may be done with the hope that the failing friend will realize and recognize what is missing in his/her life and seek to reconnect and it should be done without a "go-to-Hell" missive being sent out to the failing friend. In these circumstances, it is best to keep the lines of rapprochement open by avoiding the public airing of hurt and anger that must accompany the seeming loss of a friendship. At the same time, one mustn't be seen to beg for a friendship manqué. After making reasonable efforts to try to get a friendship out of what appears to be torpor and decline, one must demonstrate worth, self-respect and an ability to rise above a relationship that is fruitless or one in which a person feels unwanted. After all, the efforts and energy one expends on an unresponsive friend might be better used to cultivate the friendships of those who don't trifle with your affections and esteem and who do not take your warmth and respect for granted. If the missing friend shows up and seeks to re-establish contacts and relations, then all is good (especially because that friend will not have been scared away by an angry and emotional blast from the hurt and wounded party). If not, then it wasn't much of a friendship, was it?

Such things are difficult to write about and even more difficult to face--again, I measure my words carefully in writing all of this. But it would seem to make a lot more sense in the long run to abide by this advice than it would to engage in Epsteinian excuse-making for Ellisonian characters. Perhaps Joseph Epstein is a more large-hearted individual than some. Perhaps his generosity of spirit is woven in the songsheet of the angels and will receive a kind of Eternal Reward.

Then again, perhaps Epstein had it right when he began his article with this:

"It is painful to consider," wrote Samuel Johnson about friendship, "that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain."

and when he ended with this:

Every broken friendship can be thought of as a failure or a defeat. Yet, one must ask in each case, was the friendship itself therefore without meaning? Nietzsche, who himself had a famous broken friendship with Wagner--he began by idolizing the composer and ended by despising him--devotes a strangely fortifying paragraph to the subject in The Gay Science. Trying to make lemonade out of the rotted lemons of broken friendship, he suggests that perhaps, in "a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit, such friendships might be renewed and better made." One would like to think this may be so, but the odds in favor of it are only slightly better than those in favor of the return of vaudeville.

These latter two passage are acrid and painful to read, and no doubt, to write. They also smack of realism. Epstein would have done well to apply them to the case of Ellison and everywhere else, potential friends manqués might do well to consider the passages as cautionary tales whose inherent sadness should be avoided if at all possible, and who should banish the degree of neglect and inattention that brings about that sadness in all too many a broken friendship.