What is the highest and best form of human relationship, apart from the bond between a mother and her infant? Without doubt it is friendship. To the champions of romantic love this might seem a calumny, but in fact romantic love is only the first step to what can become, if everything works out, the finest kind of friendship, for it is not an end in itself but a beginning to richer and deeper possibilities.
Think of it: if we can become friends with our lovers and spouses even as they remain our lovers and spouses, if we can become friends with our children and our parents even as they remain our children and parents, and likewise with our workmates and neighbours even as they remain these things too, then our relationships with them will have reached their summit. This is because of what friendship is: it is the vital connection that consists of trust, giving, support, enjoyment, sharing and caring, and is central to what makes life worth living.
The five key elements to friendship are mutuality, loyalty, readiness to help, readiness to challenge when necessary, and ‘being there’ as we say nowadays. Each can be illustrated from great examples of friendship in literature, legend and history.
Mutuality means the sharing of interests, concerns, pleasures and cares. In the tradition of philosophical debate about friendship, most writers have followed Aristotle in defining a friend as ‘another self’, but this is not quite right: respecting the other’s difference, being complementary to one another, being a separate self, is important; it means each giving to the other what the other desires and needs in the bond of friendship. This is exemplified in the great friendship between Voltaire and the brilliant scientist Émilie du Châtelet, who began as lovers but soon became friends who supported each others’ work and provided a creative foil helping each other to develop their ideas.
Readiness to help, to stand alongside one’s friend, is illustrated in the story told by the poet Virgil of the love and friendship between Nisus and Euryalus, two soldiers in the army of Aeneas when he led his people to Italy after the fall of Troy. The pair were on a secret mission through enemy lines when Euryalus was caught, and although Nisus had already got through and was poised to carry the vital message to Aeneas, he saw his young friend in terrible danger, and plunged back into the fray to die at his side.
One of the oldest stories of loyalty is that of Ruth and Naomi in the Bible. When Naomi lost her husband and her sons she decided to return to her homeland, and told her daughters-in-law to do likewise since she had no more sons for them to marry. But Ruth would not leave her, and chose to convert to Naomi’s religion so that she could remain with her. The two were inseparable thereafter, even when Naomi found Ruth a husband.
We have to challenge our friends, or be challenged by them, when either side needs admonishment, advice or warning. The point is best put by Oscar Wilde, who defined a friend as ‘someone who stabs you in the front’ – unlike an enemy who does it from behind. If we fail in the duty of giving our friends timely advice and admonishment when really necessary, we are not good enough as friends. But beware the ‘toxic friend’ who, under the disguise of being helpfully challenging, is really undermining.
Another way of describing the state of ‘being there’ for friends is keeping in touch and up to date with our friends’ lives, remaining accessible, maintaining the flow of contact that nourishes the relationship and keeps it ready and apt in the ways just described. Here a good example is the torrent of letters that passed between members of the Bloomsbury Group – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and others – often half a dozen letters a day or more, which might seem excessive now but is easily replicable in this age of text messaging, Twitter and emails. A tweet can tell friends that we are thinking of them; when we know that we are in our friends’ thoughts we are encouraged and warmed by it, especially at pressure-point times: going for a job interview, a medical procedure, a funeral, moving house, taking an exam.
Friends need as much if not more tending as a garden of flowers. Because friendship lies at the centre of good and flourishing lives, every one of us needs to be good at this special kind of gardening. The examples of Ruth and Nisus, Émilie du Châtelet and the Bloomsbury writers, show us how to do it.
But the question of definition remains: what is a friend? Since Aristotle there has been much debate in moral philosophy about this important question, but also – unusually for philosophy – much agreement. Friends, the philosophers say, are those who feel mutual affection and regard, who enjoy each other’s company, have similar interests and tastes, help each other, share confidences, admonish each other when occasion calls for it, and always go the extra mile. To illustrate these qualities they cite famous literary and legendary examples of friendship: here are five examples to illustrate why.
Achilles and Patroclus are the famous friends of Homer’s Iliad. There is the usual difficulty in classical cases of knowing whether they were gay lovers in addition to (or alternatively to?) being friends; most of history has regarded them as being such, though Homer tells us that when they went to bed in the same tent, it was each to his own couch, and each couch contained a beautiful young woman. You have to be good friends to choose this sleeping arrangement. The closeness of the bond between them is however most evident in the excoriating grief felt by Achilles when Patroclus was killed while personating him on the battlefield. In portraying them as intimately bound to each other, necessary to each, companions to each other in the deepest literal sense of the term, Homer offers a picture of friendship that sets the tone for much that followed in literature.
Jonathan and David are like Achilles and Patroclus in being men at arms, comrades both in circumstances of danger and in the world of affairs. David married Jonathan’s sister, but this does not preclude the two men having been lovers also, as suggested by the fact that their mutual love is described as ‘surpassing the love of women’, and by the fact that the moment Jonathan first saw David he fell in love with him. So much did Jonathan love David that he not only opposed his father, King Saul, in order to protect David from Saul’s jealous wrath, but went so far as to betray him in doing so, by telling David of his father’s intentions and keeping David’s whereabouts from his father’s knowledge.
Ruth and Naomi offer one of the very few examples of friendship between women that literature and legend offer. The main reason is of course that women occupy the shadows of history, concealed from view in the harem or the inner courtyards, anonymously behind the men who figure in the stories that come down to us. No doubt the very nature of closeted and inward life forced on women made for richer, closer and more intimate friendships than men had – so it is an irony that the greatest arena of friendship might be hidden from us by the act of discrimination. But at least with Ruth and Naomi we see the loyalty and deep affection that make friendship a treasure, all the more so given that the choice that kept the two women together was a peculiarly difficult one for both.
Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet might not seem an obvious choice for an example of friendship, and once again because there is sexual love in the picture; but after the honeymoon of the earlier phase of their relationship, these two highly intelligent and productive souls were friends above all else. Émilie translated Newton and made contributions to physics; here was a meeting of brains as well as personalities. Émilie protected Voltaire from the dangers he threatened to get himself into by his too acidulous pen; she fiddled the lottery to keep them financially afloat; in turn his wit and sharp mind interested and inspired her, and although they were too volatile a pair to remain together for ever, while they lasted they were a mutually enlivening combination in just the way that best friendships should be.
Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, both writers, the former the biographer of the latter also, were fast friends in their early adult lives, until the premature death of Winifred at the age of thirty-seven. They had met at Oxford and taken against each other at first, but when their friendship began in earnest they encouraged and solaced each other, growing together as writers in a world – the world of the two World Wars – still greatly inimical to women’s chances. They both produced best-selling classics as a result of the support they gave each other, doing what friends so wonderfully do: giving each other permission to succeed, to aspire and to achieve. In writing of Holtby after her death, Brittain remarked that whereas a biography of a man could leave out his family life without having a material effect on the account, no biography of a woman could do that, because women are too closely defined by their relationships to husbands and children – or their absence. Rescuing Holtby from that occlusion was one of Brittain’s greatest acts of friendship to her.