LitLetter 222: Journey, continued...to The Depths of Friendship
Poetry, drama and screenplay of spycraft, all on friendship
Prologue
Friendship may be an even more debated word than love, such are its complexity and shades of meaning. These perspectives can, like a desert plant, age, wither, regenerate, lie fallow, bloom over a very long period of time. Think of your longest friendship – it may not be, probably is not, that with your partner – and consider its tendrils over decades, how these tendrils almost change form completely depending on their role at that time. Were you mutual supporters perhaps? Were you both parents of small children? Colleagues? Same church? Or was one more of a supporter than the other? Was there a sense of inequitable need? Did the friendship survive? Immediately we are confronted with a need for balance between friends, a quid pro quo without which the relationship might - will? – wither over time. Or not. As the one seeks to mitigate a situation for the other. This role for the one is entirely a function of his or her personality, background back to point zero, seeing mitigation perhaps – who knows? - as the very purpose of friendship.
Poems
Here's Wiliam Blake with a fairly straightforward take on friendship.
A Poison Tree by William Blake
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.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veil’d the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
This is quite a hateful poem, having in fact more to do with hatred than friendship. Yet it makes a fine point in the first two lines – I was angry with my friend, I discussed it, and it ended. With my enemy I did not discuss it and it grew; in time, my enemy it slew. Boom! and we are in it. If we do not talk with our friend about some grievance, no matter how slight, the expectations are strong that that lack of seeking an answer by asking a question – using words, in other words – will escalate somehow virus-like into a more complex situation of unasked, yet still interpreted, guesses and interpretations. This insidious process will continue forever, till both die, and even then their offspring may wonder, and still not ask. For it is out of our use, or non-use, or abuse, of words that arises our most fundamental understanding of the world, as well as the inescapable misunderstandings that bedevil the grand sensemaking experiment we call life.
As you think back over a long line, sometimes barely remembered, of friendships, you are bound to reflect on why some of them withered, some trod water, and some blossomed to the mutual joy of both parties. You will almost certainly discover a lack of courage, or bad timing, or plain forgetfulness, to make a certain statement at a certain moment to be the cause of the fracture. You may also notice that friendships can occur at any time in one’s life, indeed, should occur.
This dialogue between reality and illusion (or imagination) is where philosophy, for instance, stations itself. This dialogue has been explored by most of the great writers of the world, and especially in some partnerships that transcend friendship, for instance, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Don Quixote. Indeed it is to James Boswell that we owe this epithet:
‘There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends’
No surprise then that most of our laughter is in the company of friends.
Really strong friendships survive turbulence. We forgive and forget, we acknowledge greater sentiments in our friend (than he is currently expressing). We make allowances in the full and certain knowledge that a moment may/will occur when we will need to have allowances made for us. It’s a two-way street. We cut some slack in the certain expectation that we will be cut some slack in return.
Robert Frost captures this sensitivity well in this poem.
A Time to Talk by Robert Frost
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Frost signifies his understanding that it is words that connect us, and the best use of these words is face to face. His behaviour here is quite old-fashioned for the quick, manic speed of today’s communications. Only in exceptional circumstances do people seem to know when another person wishes to, needs to, speak. And can then lay aside their ego and listen.
My favourite thread of Shakespearean wisdom on friendship is one I call to mind nearly every day of my life:
To Thine Own Self Be True by William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).
Polonius (to his son, Laertes, on the latter’s departure for France)
There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear ’t that th’ opposèd may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.
This small extract is a jewel among other gems of bright lustre in an unimaginably comprehensive speech, laden with good words for life. More idiomatically:
Be friendly, but not too so, certainly do not be vulgar. (Vulgar is from the Latin word vulgus, meaning crowd.) Your friends whom you have, know and trust, and whose adoption as friends is proven, hold them to your heart and soul with hoops of steel. (This cannot be clearer.) Therefore beware of too ready an engagement with every Tom, Dick and Harry.
The older I get, the more I ‘grapple unto my soul’ the friendships I have whose adoption is tried. This grappling has become one of the key pillars of my life. I am blest by those friends, and maybe they receive blessings also.
A Spy Among Friends
Then suddenly, as often seems to happen by chance, something blazes across the near horizon drawing attention to thoughts in an apparently coincidental manner. Yet there are no coincidences, are there?
The blaze in my case now is the watching on streamed TV of a new six part series titled A Spy Among Friends. A fictionalised account of the Kim Philby affair, based on the book by Ben McIntyre, it explores the rationale for Philby et al. (Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross) to have betrayed their country – Great Britain – and by association, Britain’s allies in Europe, North America, indeed the world. This group of Cambridge undergraduates became known over decades as the Magnificent Five, the ablest group of foreign agents in KGB history.
The dramatic uncovering of Philby’s guilt is well-scripted, and kudos must go to Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce for their superb acting as Nicholas Elliot and Kim Philby, respectively. Yet, on consideration, the drama is at its highest as the friendship between Elliot and Philby unravels. This is a friendship whose adoption has been tried – for more than thirty years before Philby’s treason became known. And to make matters worse, Elliot and Philby were close colleagues in Special Intelligence Services (SIS) during and after WW2. SIS is synonymous with MI6, the foreign intelligence service of the British civil service.
The dialogue is subtle, reflecting the subtlety of the relationship between friends, and also the subtlety of spy craft. To emphasise this point, much of the story is embedded in flashbacks of memory, action, and dialogue. As the episodes unwind, the hurt of the mild-mannered Elliot at his betrayal by Philby – the friendship and the treason against country – manifests itself, but never in an ordinary manner. The primary scene is 1963 in London, shown grimy, distressed, hopeless. The ‘old chaps’ of SIS are the epitome of stiff upper-lippedness, none more so than Elliot himself. The crimes of Philby and the other four were truly heinous. Philby had been recruited by the KGB in 1934. The transfer of secret intelligence to the forces of the USSR directly caused the death of more than 100 000 people, maybe more. The drama allows only one such incident to be portrayed – but, my word, it is appallingly bloody and malignant.
None of the five men came to trial. Philby himself ended up in Moscow where he died twenty five years later. I leave it to you to gauge the nature and force of Elliot’s redress for his betrayed friendship. In an understated manner – of course – it seems to me to have been very powerful.
Final Word
Final word to poet David Whyte whose work I have discussed formerly in these articles. In a recently published book titled Consolations: the Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Ordinary Words, he discusses friendship, one of these ordinary words.
‘Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness…An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.
‘…the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them…for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone’.
David’s prose is as poetic as his poetry! The privilege of asking and being asked to witness reminds me of the weddings of our children, and the warmth of friends invited precisely because of their history of witness of our children.
Journey, continued…to the Depths of Friendship.