Literary Friendships

 

I must apologise for the break in transmission – I’m not entirely sure why the past few days have felt so busy, but having family to stay has been one reason why I’ve not managed to post. The other seems to be just a general lack of focus caused by the dying of the light. Each twenty-four hour segment seems to be three-quarters night to a quarter daylight and in consequence I’ve felt sleepy and inefficient. I also have a lot of friends I’d like to catch up with and I’m slowly making contact; one is recently returned from Australia, another has just had a baby, a third is teaching my students while I’m on leave, another has begun a new university job. ‘A Friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature,’ wrote dear old Emerson, who liked the concept of friends a lot, without being able to make or keep many of them. It’s true that he had extremely high standards for friendship, whilst what probably glues a lot of friends together is a high degree of tolerance for the other’s peculiarities and flaws. Making friends is relatively straightforward when you find someone with whom you have a great deal in common, whom you like and admire instinctively and who can lift your mood when you’re together. But to keep friends you need to forgive long periods of silence, careless remarks, organisational mistakes and differences of opinion.

 

Take, for instance, two literary friendships that veered off in wildly differing directions. George Sand was one of the best friend-makers in the nineteenth century. She was friends with a vast number of the European literati, artists and musicians of her age, and she was really good at keeping friends too. One important friendship that came later in her life was with the French writer Gustave Flaubert, which was surprising as on matters political, sexual and literary they held fundamentally opposing views. But they worked their way around this with gentleness and understanding. Flaubert sent sections of his novel L’Education Sentimentale to Sand for her to read, a move that risked being inflammatory in one sense as the novel derided the Christian anti-capitalists of the 1840s for mixing politics, Romanticism and religion, that’s to say, it mocked precisely the group and the perspective that Sand loyally supported. Sand replied with a generous defence of idealism. The vanquished, she suggested, deserve our forgiveness rather than our scorn, and whatever mistakes they had made, they had learnt their lessons and were ready to progress. ‘I rely on you,’ she told Flaubert, ‘to practise magnanimity. With one word more or less you can use the lash without leaving a wound when the hand on the whip is strong and gentle. You are too good-natured to be cruel.’ Flaubert was determined to maintain the political vision of his novel, but he also wanted to appease his friend. He wrote back to Sand, declaring ‘when my third part is finished I will read it to you and if there is anything in my work that you think spiteful I shall remove it.’ He did just as he promised: it took eight hours, with an hour off for dinner. Who was the more heroic in that encounter, I wonder?

 

Now compare that to the bitter political quarrel that split up the friendship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Ostensibly the argument began over a bad review of Camus’s new book, L’Homme revolté (The Rebel), which appeared in Sartre’s literary magazine, Les Temps modernes. Camus was furious and hurt and denounced Sartre in an open letter to the journal for having made a personal attack on him, which he claimed was intended to gain Sartre political points with his Left wing friends (although Sartre himself did not write the review). It’s probably not a good idea to rile a man in his own journal, and the matter might have been better settled over a drink or three, but instead the argument became all the more vindictive as both man’s public reputation now seemed to be at stake.

 

The row was over a difference of political opinion that was bound up with the experience of the Second World War. At that time in France (1951) those who had participated in the Resistance instantly received moral credit, and so both Sartre and Camus, who had fought against the Nazis in their different ways, were figures of respect and glamour to the French nation. France was a broken and disoriented country after the invasion, struggling to come to terms with the extent of collaboration that had gone in on the war – necessary for survival at the time, most probably, but viewed in a very poor light after the Germans had left. The big questions, as France faced further crisis in Algeria, were all about finding a politics that would be ethically sound, sincerely committed and radically different. Sartre supported Communism because, although he believed it could be an oppressive party, they were the best of a bad lot and did support the oppressed. Camus believed that all political parties were oppressive, and the best one could do was a highly personal, individual form of revolt. Sartre felt Camus had sold out on the collective rebellion that had been the Resistance movement. Camus thought Sartre had sold out. Sartre said: ‘The only way of helping the enslaved out there is to take sides with those who are here.’ Camus said: ‘Stupidity has a knack of getting its own way.’

 

As with all political quarrels, there is no sense in trying to find out who was right in all of this: the question they were debating (and which is far more complex and subtle than my brutal account allows), does collective political action always end up doing more harm than good, is not one that has any ready answers. The point was that underneath a perfectly valid debate on the contemporary political scene (in which both men, incidentally were rather naïve and idealistic) a more vindictive battle was buried. Camus felt let down by Sartre, and Sartre, once attacked in public, could not let it go. Neither was able to tolerate the other’s position for in both cases it looked like an unbearable slur on their own. How many friendships have ended over similarly entrenched positions in irresolvable disputes? Because neither party has been wise enough (cf. George Sand ) to remind the other of their reserves of good nature, flexibility, sympathy, open-mindedness?

 

And so my book blogging friends, may all your friendships be long, happy and mutually supportive ones, in which you are able to acknowledge the differences in each other and admire them, rather than feel threatened by them. Particularly when it comes to politics, which causes enough trouble as it is, without adding broken friendships to its tally of catastrophe. As a final coda, I will take the opportunity to remind you all of your wonderful levels of tolerance as I catch up on my blog reading. It may take a little while, but I’ll get there in the end!