“If you're ever in a mill and get sawed in half, I won't laugh."

Cole Porter, "Friendship" (1939)

"Friendship Among Writers"

by Jack Foley

A writer friend asks me to write about friendship among writers. I discover from his essay that, in a moment of fury, he once punched out a writer friend of his, decking him. My friend has always--struck--me as one of the gentlest people I know.

Is friendship among writers any different from friendship among insurance salesmen? friendship among army buddies? friendship among women? What did Wordsworth and Coleridge do to cement their bond? Coleridge remarked that William and Dorothy Wordsworth and himself were "three persons and one soul." A.S. Byatt writes of Coleridge, "He had romantic hopes of both men and women--all men were potentially ideal friends, all women potentially devoted lovers--and at the same time he was obsessed by the fear of living perpetually unloved and solitary." Coleridge was also "haunted by money troubles" and, evidently thinking of himself, was the first to use the term "psychosomatic." Byatt goes on to remark about the Wordsworths, "It is surprising how many of their circle went mad." Wordsworth addressed the Prelude to Coleridge as "The Friend": "Thou, O Friend! Who in thy ample mind / Hast station'd me for reverence and love." The friendship between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound seems a kind of equivalent to the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. At the death of Eliot in 1965, Ezra Pound said, movingly--I'm quoting from memory-- "His was the true Dantean voice. I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago, 'Read him.'" William Hazlitt called Coleridge

          the first poet I had known, and he certainly answered to that inspired name. I had heard a great deal of his powers of conversation, and was not disappointed. In fact, I never met with anything at all like them, either before or since... That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the park, and seting ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and musical voice...and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring.... ("My First Acquaintance with Poets")

Coleridge himself wrote in "Christabel" of friendship gone wrong:

Alas! They had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain...

They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away I ween
The marks of that which once hath been.

What did Jack Kerouac receive from Neal Cassady? Kerouac remarked about the end of On the Road, "They're still great friends, but their friendship has to enter a new phase." The publication of the novel and its subsequent soaring publicity put an enormous strain on their friendship--especially since Cassady was never able to achieve the literary heights his friend attained. "Say that my glory was," wrote William Butler Yeats, "I had such friends" ("The Municipal Gallery Re-visited"). Yeats also wrote, "I thought him [MacGregor Mathers] half a lunatic, half knave, / And told him so, but friendship never ends" ("All Souls Night"). Is there a difference between a writer friend who writes about you and a writer friend who doesn't? Would Boswell's relationship to Samuel Johnson have been different had he chosen never to write a book? Shakespeare wrote, "But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored and sorrows end" (Sonnet XXX) and

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(Sonnet XXIX)

And the young James Joyce wrote,

There is no word nor any sign
Can make amend--
He is a stranger to me now
Who was my friend.

William Blake observed,

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
("A Poison Tree")

Almost all of my friends are artists. Of these many are writers, and of the writers many are poets. I don't think the emotional make-up of the poet is necessarily all that different from the emotional make-up of the plumber. Indeed, the plumber may be more sensitive than the poet. This fact is not obvious because the emotional lives of plumbers are rarely documented in print-- or, for that matter, films, videos. Among my poet friends are Ivan Argelles, Jake Berry, Neeli Cherkovski, Michael McClure, Dana Gioia, Robert Sward, among many others. I have known many people for a while and then not known them any longer, but Argelles and company are among my longest-lasting relationships. I would certainly count my wife Adelle as a friend as well, and our relationship dates back more than forty years. (Adelle has been writing poetry since 1989.) Our son Sean, currently completing his Ph.D. in History, has published in various places-- so, though not a poet, he is certainly another writer friend. Some of my writer friends have died. Scarcely a day passes when I am not reminded of Larry Eigner or James Broughton in some way. As a child, my interest in art isolated me, made me sense myself as "different"; as an adult, my interest in art is precisely what binds me to others: it is the primary stuff that lies at the base of my social life. I know poets, musicians, painters, dancers, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers.

But behind this question of writers and friendship there may be another question. In his essay, "Writers' Friendship, Writers' Enmity," Robert Sward quotes one of his--friends: "I long for writing buddies as much as anyone else, but I have difficulty trusting and supporting and remaining loyal to people who are, after all, no less obsessed, neurotic and self-involved than I am." Another writer says, "I wouldn't necessarily choose Aggression as a muse for writing, but I confess I've sometimes been inspired to write, and publish, poems that...came about, in part, because I happened to envy or felt competitive with a fellow writer. And I'm speaking here about writes I feel close to, people I admire, writers I regarded then, and still regard, as friends." Behind such statements is perhaps the sense that writers are special, that they are more "obsessed, neurotic and self-involved"--and perhaps also more loving--than other people. How can such people be "friends" with anyone?

In a sense, we make the concrete details of our lives out of our psychic contents, out of our needs, desires, wishes. Gertrude Stein begins her portrait of the sculptor Lipschitz with a kind of palindrome--a shape which suggests the balances of a sculptor's work: "Like and like likely and likely likely and likely like and like." The portrait ends, "I like you very much." Stein's pun suggests that it is likeness that draws us to people. Yet likeness can become a threat: we don't wish to be mistaken for someone else. In a fascinating book, The Glory of Hera (1968), Philip E. Slater writes of what he terms "the oral-narcissistic dilemma." Slater's book is a study of "pre- Oedipal" relationships, relationships between mother and child. At the center of such relationships is a "conflict between the desire to merge and the desire to be free and separate":

          [The oral-narcissistic dilemma] originates in a failure to negotiate successfully the transition from the infantile state of total narcissism and total dependence to one involving an awareness of the separate existence of others. As this awareness grows, one's sense of narcissistic integrity and one's dependency needs are simultaneously violated...Total fusion and stratospheric isolation become equally essential and equally terrifying.