The Friendship Files #1

Plus: ‘Reading Out Loud With Friends’ at #THINAIR2020

In his essay titled “Of Friendship,” first published in 1612, Francis Bacon writes “that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.”

He also writes, later in the same piece, “You may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.”

I love that Bacon grouped a “closed” heart among his list of otherwise chiefly physical ailments, and prescribed friendship as the remedy.

While I was working on my memoir, The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship, I delved into writings on friendship, correspondences between friends, and depictions of friendship in story and verse. Once you pay attention for them, you find them everywhere: in Roddy Doyle’s buddies setting up a chip van; in the formidable, quietly troubled women who people Alice Munro’s sometimes remarkably racy stories; in Thomas King’s side-splitting yarns.

I’ve analyzed up-and-down and all-around bonds I’ve revisited so often as to nearly forget they’re fictional, such as that between Lizzie and Jane in Pride and Prejudice, as lovingly drawn by their creator, Jane Austen: they’re sisters, but their friendship ummistakably supercedes that relationship in import, for neither finds anything resembling a friend in their other three siblings: it is to each other that Jane and Lizzie turn to share confidences, burdens, and private jokes. Contrast their friendship with the more tempered yet still firm alliance between Lizzie and Charlotte (whose approach to life ultimately differs so sharply) and the more treacherous variety—as in, not at all real friendship—that briefly rears between Jane and Mr. Bingley’s sister. The latter is the sort of “friend” who gives the whole enterprise of female friendship its long-standing reputation as a condition rife with backstabbing, bitterness, and emotional hazard.

Lately there’s been much increased attention on the friendship of women. It’s oft-noted, and rightly so, in relation to the MeToo movement: the crucial support of women by women. It’s apparent in the global sensation created by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet (starting with My Brilliant Friend), and in more polemic accounts of female friendship, such as American journalist Kayleen Shcaefer’s part-memoir, part-social history, Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship.

Amid all this fuss, I, too, it seems, have written a book about a friendship between two young women. Early on in The Last Goldfish, I get a bit cheeky, in a roundabout way, with the philosophers whose writings on friendship, all historically male-focused—even to the point of declaring women incapable of real friendship—have sometimes irked me:

“We made a habit of believing in things: it felt rebellious to resist the cynicism all around us. We put truck in fate. In unseen forces. In myth and its latent powers. Yet I find no model for the great friendship of my youth in the old stories and legends. We weren’t heroes or warriors. There was, in our tale, no passionate display of battlefield grief. No sacrifice of honour, family, money, freedom, or opportunity. No courageous offer to exchange one life for another, a profession of devotion so pure it might procure the mercy of a god.”

My reason for writing this book was not because I wished to elevate or rehabilitate female friendship, nor because I wish to cast aspersions on the nature of friendship between men or between people of any gender identification. I believe, just as my friend Louisa and I did all those years ago, in the power and wonder of friendship, period, between all comers, of any persuasion, background or age.

Indeed, I believe just what Cicero declared, as translated by contemporary philosopher A.C. Grayling in Friendship, his marvellous 2013 study, from ancient times to the present, of our evolving understanding of this alluring, beguiling, and most necessary predicament:

“If you should take the bond of friendship out of the world, no house or city could stand, nor would the soil even be tilled.”

The Friendship Files, a new series on my blog, Henrietta & Me, will delve into depictions of friendship in stories, essays, poems and other writings. We’ll revel in connections between others, both fictional and real, and consider what they reveal, what questions they raise, what friendship-related pitfalls or danger zones they call up, and what they tell us about our human instinct for finding, and holding fast to, our most intimate allies.

Meanwhile, in these lonesome covid times, in need of company, of solace, of play—and because the good folks at Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival allowed it!—I asked a handful of friends to read to me—and to you. The video ‘Reading Out Loud With Friends’ is a collage of the poems and snippets of stories, essays and memoirs they chose to share. Their selections range from L. M. Montgomery to Arthur Conan Doyle, with a wonderfully eclectic mix in between. All offer glimpses of friendship in action—in plot, in memory, in reflection, even in one book’s very making.

Readers include National Post film critic Chris Knight; high school teacher Kristin McLaren, a Canadian ex-pat in Maine; Fredericton writer Sherry Coffey; journalist and managing partner of vacay.ca, Rod Charles; CTV’s “The Social” co-host (and now Toronto-Centre Liberal MP candidate!) Marci Ien; radio producer, media artist, writer and all-around community-enlivening force of nature Janna Graham of Yellowknife; the eminent and elegant poet and editor John Barton of Victoria, where he serves currently as poet laureate (and who is also, at heart, of Calgary, Ottawa, and other Canadian locales); the warm, exuberant and brilliant poet, memoirist, teacher and editor, Yvonne Blomer of Victoria, that city’s previous poet laureate.