FRIENDSHIP AND THE ENGISH
Simon Blow on belonging to a
people who are lonely, but are unable to be alone
WHAT is the purpose of friendship? I often hear someone say, 'I wouldn't have expected that of a friend,' or, 'He's let me down; I shall never speak to him again.' Relations are different. With them, there is no choice, and any bouts of non-speak- ing are more painful. But how do we select friends, and what do we do when we realise that the friendship is a mis- take? Friendships that last a lifetime are rare; past friends accumulate as fast as past lovers. Yet friendship ought to be a lesser crisis; friendship is a love affair without the time bomb of sex. But friend- ship, a microcosm of life, is as volatile as we who live. We are perpetual victims of the unpredictability of our characters. I think frequently of my first friend and this is because he was entirely imagi- nary. His name was Gubbleydix, and wherever I went, he came with me. He had no age; he was not fixed in time, he was immortal. He acted as a refuge from my father's family. With Gubbleydix, I could hide from a threatening adult world. I could escape with him from a ter- rifying, bullying uncle who threatened to throw me into beds of stinging nettles or beat me with his horsewhip, and from an oversized grandmother who would crush me against her vast bosom at one moment, but would then thrust me away with withering, unkind words. I sought refuge from rejection by real, frightening beings in the company of an imaginary friend. How ironic, then, that after the terror of those years, I should still have craved the company of living friends.
The fear that these relations instilled Into me, school repressed. My upper lip stiffened. I quickly learnt that an emo- tional wreck would not make friends. So I developed a sporting bravado — winning my colours at soccer and making the rug- ger XV. But when a romantic friendship offered itself, I softened into sentiment. It was emotional more than consciously sex- ual, but it was tactile. It gave me an escape from the stiff upper lip. At night my friend and I slept with our heads together, placing them on the wooden chair which separated our beds and on which our clothes were folded. The friendship was intense, and shortlived, because after school our ways parted. But that friendship has never left my mind. It took place in dreamland — two school- boy wanderers who, like Alain-Fournier, were alive only in their invented domain. That domain was never entirely lost, since my friend was to die in a drowning acci- dent before the full onslaught of adult- hood.
A disturbed childhood — including not only divorce but the cruel loss of a family home — made me at first seek out friends who were secure. I sought solace — and camouflage -- among those who seemed never to have suffered. For a time, I surrounded myself with hunting and point-to-point types who had jolly, straightforward faces and jolly, straightfor- ward parents. There were many dinner parties during the Cold War when the prospect of nuclear annihilation was briefly considered and quickly dismissed, so that the conversation could move on to a vital topic: who was going to win the Grand National? I stayed and hunted with these friends; I said that they would be my friends for life and I meant it. I identified with my foxhunting hero, Siegfried Sas- soon, who believed that there was only one answer to the pain of human exis- tence, to join a happy, contented, self-cre- ated universe — a grown-up version of Gubbleydix. I have never shed these sim- ple, hunting friends, but now I see them less often, for there are shortcomings in their happy world; unremitting heartiness palls. I sought their company to stifle angst; after a week with them, I craved angst. I realised that I was an addict of the melancholy which I was trying to shun. I knew that it would mean pain, but I could not help exposing myself to the vulnerabil- ity of absolute friendship.
Even so, I still believed that friendship had to do with people being pleasant and loyal to each other; that the bonhomie of the hunting-field was compatible with pro- found, introspective relationships. Howev- er, a few sightings of Soho — which I took then to be the thinking man's Mecca, cancelled this out. I watched Muriel Belcher being catty and spiteful to mem- bers of her Colony Room. The members in turn were spiteful to one another. I had quite the wrong idea of friendship — my Alain-Fournier dream had not died and I was out of step with Soho tough- ness. Malice was not part of my make-up, and in Soho I failed. But I am grateful to Soho for tearing away my innocence and showing me that friendship is nothing to do with being friendly and well-disposed. I came to appreciate that lago stalked every pavement. Soho taught me the dif- ference between friendship and senti- ment.
I began to learn to avoid the mistake of thinking that everyone who befriended me had my best interests at heart. I then learned that sexual desire can also mas- querade as friendly support. I once spent time at the Provençal château of the Cubist expert, millionaire and maverick Douglas Cooper. He is famous in art his- tory not only as the owner of many Picas- so paintings, but as the man who hit Sir John Rothenstein at a Tate Gallery func- tion. The pretext for my being asked there was that I was to help him to assem- ble his writings, but I soon found out that he had further intentions — every evening there was yet another pass. I was to be able to write at the château whenev- er I wished. But when his desires went unrequited, his château ceased to be available. I felt that it was a failure on Douglas's part not to have been more magnanimous. Or was it a failure of mine not to see that magnanimity is not com- patible with lust?
I became wary. I ditched all the biblical tosh about laying down one's life for a friend and embraced the dry common sense of La Rochefoucauld: 'Natural goodness, which boasts such awareness, is usually snuffed out by self-interest.' That was better. The deception of friends no longer bothered me. They merely led me to analyse the sturdy prevalence of the seven deadly sins. The result is that I have now come to trust in chance encounters, where a person may be a friend for a week, a month, or even a year and then disappear back into the inchoateness of things. I have often learnt more in a few days from these friendships than my conventional friends have taught me in ten years. To one unwed, these chance encounters come easily. They help me to understand the sadness of our con- dition; they also help me to endure it. Nor would I want to exchange it for the 24-hour tedium of married life. To me, that is abnormality.
Because of shyness, the English con- fuse company and friendship. Shyness makes the English a lonely people unable to be alone. The raucous hordes that crowd the pubs on a Friday evening have nothing to do with friendship; they are but the collective shutting out of loneliness. They are gatherings of sheep, not of leop- ards. The same is true of those who trail to gentlemen's clubs only to be trapped by bores. I would always avoid someone described as 'immensely clubbable' friendships of that sort are as convincing as the joie de vivre on the members' faces.
It is sad that the English are so unrea- sonably frightened of being seen alone. How many restaurants are there in Lon- don where one may eat breezily with a book? Even the waiters and managers look at one as if one was diseased. Yet there are few enjoyments greater than eat- ing quietly on one's own. The art of being alone needs far more practice here, for the forming of friendships is about the selecting of humours and levels, which comes about at hazard, cannot be planned, and happens rarely. For friend- ships to flourish, we need a return to the free spirit, not easy in a nation institution- alised against freedom by class, education and politics. This is why I return frequent- ly to the years of my lost domain — my conversations with Gubbleydix. I found friendship long ago — two free spirits, perfectly at ease in the land of the immor- tals.
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