Our mutual friends
Alan Watkins
English is still ruled more by authority than by reason. We continue to write tinder the despotism of the Fowlers. Our mutual friend is a phrase in point. Many people have been scared off it. Self-consciously they write (or worse say) our common friend in circumstances where, as I shall demonstrate, the accurate word for what they intend to convey is mutual. Their Object — it is hardly surprising after the battering they have received for most of this century — is not so much to write clearly as to avoid the appearance of ignorance, foolishness or philistinism. They resemble the man who, bemused by the Ross-Mitford Injunctions of the 1950s, took, poor fellow, t,o talking about his 'car wireless' and his Shaving looking-glass'. Even J. A. r•ilarnmerton, editor Of the Educational ° ,00k Co edition of Dickens, felt compelled, n introducing Our Mutual Friend, to apologise in a somewhat surly fashion for lhe assumed solecism. He wrote:
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The misuse of the word 'mutual is a barren topic, and may be left to the pedants. Strictly, the word is wrongly used; the correct epithet should be 'common', foforWhich, Macaulay assures us in his emphatic Way, 'mutual', as here applied,is a :low vulgarism'. But as Dickens had such writers as Burke and Scott, and the usage of quite decent society, to justify him in the use of the Phrase, distinctly pleasanter to the ear than our common friend', and much less °Pen to misinterpretation, it is nothing but the cheapest of pedantry to quibble over the title of this book." We must try to do better than this. Let us therefore see what the authorities have to sayG. H. Vallins, usually both the most sensitive and the most sensible of guides, is content broadly to follow Fowler and does not add greatly to the argument. Fowler 'S Modern English Usage (Gowers edn, 1965) Is dismissive though tolerant. 'Perhaps,' he ‘rvrites, our mutual friend 'should now be segarded as qualifying for admission to the INDEFENSIBLES: To see the doctrine laid down in all its cocksureness we must, as ever, turn to the Fowlers' The King's s .English
Every one(1930 edn). They write:
knows by now that our nt. unto1 friend is a solecism. Mutual implies an action or relation between two or more Persons br things, A doing or standing to B as B does or stands to A. Let A and B be the Persons indicated by our, C the friend. No such reciprocal relation is here implied between A and B (who for all we know may be enemies) but only a separate, though similar relation between each of them and C. l'herejs no such thing as a mutual friend in the singular; but the phrase mutual friends
may without nonsense be used to describe either (sic) A and C, B and C, or (sic), if A and B happen also to be friends, A and B and C "Our mutual friend is nonsense; mutual friends, though not nonsense, is bad English, because it is tautological. It takes two to make a friendship, as to make a quarrel; and therefore all friends are mutual friends, and friends alone means as much as mutual friends."
EviVently the Fowlers are condemning mutual friends as 'bad English', as distinct from 'nonsense', irrespective of whether two people or more than two are concerned. Yet there is a distinction. Let us begin with two people and consider the use of mutual in relation to, first, respect; second, love; and, third, friendship.
I may respect Geoffrey Wheatcroft. He, for his part, may well consider me a thirdrate fellow, lucky to appear in the Spectator at all. On the other hand, Wheatcroft may have a colossal regard for me, in which case I say: 'Wheatcroft and I respect each other mutually.' (The Fowlers have a fetish about each other's being otiose where mutual or mutually is used. But the phrase cannot be removed from the Wheatcroft sentence without doing violence to English: you cannot respect mutually, but you can respect each other mutually. An alternative formulation would be: 'Wheatcroft and I have (or enjoy) a mutual respect"; though even here the addition of for each other would make the sentence more idiomatic.) However, the point is that there is no necessary reason for respect to be mutual. It often is not.
Nor is there any reason for love to be mutual. We are all familiar with the situation where John loves Janet but Janet does not love John (though she respects him simply tremendously, thinks he's an awfully nice chap, and so forth).
Why should friendship be different from love or respect? After all, I may regard Wheatcroft as a friend. He may regard me asno more than a good acquaintance. In this circumstance Wheatcroft and I are not friends. Owing to his attitude, the state of friendship does not exist between us. For the moment let us accept (though with reservations) the Fowlers' claim that mutuality is implied in friendship between two people.
Let us, moreover, take it that Wheatcroft and I are now friends (his attitude has changed). And let us at this point bring Richard West into the story. I am a friend to both Wheatcroft and West. West is a friend to both Wheatcroft and me. Wheatcroft is a friend to both West and me. The relationship is triangular. The mutuality resides in this relationship. West, Wheatcroft and I are mutual friends. If I am talking to Wheatcroft, I am entitled to refer to 'our mutual friend, West'. This after all, is what he is. It is not as if I were talking to a stranger who happened alsb to be a friend of West. In conversation with this stranger I might refer to 'our common friend, West', though I should probably say 'our friend, West'. If, however, in talking to Wheatcroft I referred to 'our common friend,Wese the usage would be not only inaccurate but illmannered: not so much because it implied that West was a low type as because it 'implied that, though West was a friend of each of us, Wheatcroft and I were not truly friends at all. In the real world friendships tend to overlap and expand. Mutuality therefore tends to be the tule rather than the exception.
Admittedly, the larger the group of friends, the more difficult it is to attain true mutuality. With three friends we need establish only three relationships. With four the number rises to six. (There is a mathematical formula for this, with which I will not detain the reader.) Thus, if we introduce, say, Brown to our group, Wheatcroft may be a friend to Brown; Brown to me; I to West; West to Wheatcroft; and Wheatcroft to me. The in tonality is ruined by the sad fact that West and Brown cannot stand each other. But in the real world, again, we tend to think of groups of friends, clusters, rather than of two-person relationships inside groups. The justification for retaining our mutual friend is that, as I have shown, it means something different from 'our common friend. We should never lightly discard words or phrases which conduce to greater precision.
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