"Friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship"--so wrote Cole
Porter for the musical DuBarry Was A Lady--a song and a sentiment
we all can harmonize with. We all have friends, and if some writers
have been more than a bit cynical--Emerson thought that friendship
resembled the immortality of the soul "in that it is too good to be
true," and Schopenhauer compared friendship to a sea serpent, "no
one knows whether they are fabulous or really exist somewhere"--for
the most part the world's literature and our own experience are
filled with fine examples.
In The Oxford Book of Friendship, one of England's best known
poets, D.J. Enright, and David Rawlinson have brought together some
of the world's best thoughts on friendship, found in excerpts from
Shakespeare and the Bible, novels and poems, autobiographies,
letters, and diaries, even personal ads from The New York Review of
Books ("Handsome NYC poet emeritus, 59, seeks beautiful, bright,
non-smoking woman. Dutch treat, naturally"). Here is friendship in
all shapes and sizes: from the Bible and classical literature
(David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and
Pythias), among literary figures (Goethe and Schiller, Lamb and
Coleridge, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), even among animals
(the friendship of Mole and Badger for Toad in The Wind in the
Willows). There are interracial friendships (Queequeg and Ishmael,
Huck Finn and Jim), friendships formed in concentration camps,
young friends (Steerforth and David Copperfield), even the
friendship we have for our pets. Thomas Mann, in "A Man and his
Dog," writes of his dog Bashan--"Extraordinary creature So close a
friend, and yet so remote"--and Alexander Pope, in his last known
couplet, mourns the death of his pet Bounce. The ups and downs of
friendship are also covered (Beethoven once wrote his friend Johann
Hummel, "You are a false dog, and may the hangman do away with all
false dogs," and the very next day wrote, "Come to me this
afternoon.... Kisses from your Beethoven, also called dumpling").
And the editors conclude with a delightful potpourri of short
sayings, such as the proverb, "it is easier to visit friends than
to live with them," and Emerson's sage advice, "the only way to
have a friend is to be one."
C.S. Lewis observed that friends rarely talk about their
friendship. In The Oxford Book of Friendship, Enright and Rawlinson
have found thousands of sources to do the talking for us, to
question what we've taken for granted, and bring out in the open
what we've always left unsaid.
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