Martha Wiseman

Word Count 1321

“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” – William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Here you are. In my photographs. In my life. Throughout the better part of my life. Better because of you.

In a school assembly. In an acting class. In a dance studio. Each of you has made an entrance. I love our origin stories.

An intensity of understanding sprang up, spontaneously, between us, at our first meeting. Both the intensity and the understanding have grown, and grown subtler. My life is unthinkable without you.

These friendships are sacred. A long history, 30, 50 years, a history that bolsters us. Flickers within us.

My husband says, almost proudly, that he has no friends. I understand to the extent that I know him so well, but I cannot really imagine his position and his attitude. I need my friends; I need to see them, talk to them; I want more friends close by. Some would say I should be satisfied with the close and longstanding friendships that I have, even though these friends live far away. And lest I call myself greedy, I remind myself how deeply grateful for them I am. I have relied on their presence in my life, and I want to hear their voices regularly. I miss them. And I do have a handful of friends who live close by, but except for one, they’re not the sort I can call on the spur of the moment: Want a cup of coffee? Want to take a walk? Want to do something? Not much luck.

To my husband, I point out somewhat futilely, as I have many times, that he does have a few friends. (I also tell him that he falls into the cliché of men not having close friendships. He agrees, though we both know that most other male clichés don’t fit him.) True, some—most?—were originally my friends, who welcomed him into what I call my family. Assuredly, however, he does not seek out friends; he feels no need to do so, and he does not consider himself in the least diminished by his relative isolation.

Montaigne deeply mourned his beloved friend, Étienne de la Boétie, describing their relationship as a “fusion of our wills,” “one soul in two bodies.” His own experience leads him to maintain that we can have only one true friendship in our lives; we have no psychological or emotional room for more than one: “For this perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible: each one gives himself so wholly to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere.”

Perhaps I’ve never experienced such an ardent friendship, one that supersedes all other relationships. But I assert—pace Montaigne—that I have deeply meaningful bonds with a handful of friends, to each of whom I can give myself fully.

I’ve turned to Montaigne because I’ve been wanting to write about friendship, but I’ve not known exactly what I wanted to say, what I wanted to explore. I’ve known only how central my friendships are to my life.

I said to a friend, a fellow writer, “I’ve been trying to write about friendship, but—”

“But what?”

I shrugged. “Dunno. It’s so hard.”

“Right,” she said. “I’ve thought about it, too. But— Well, why is it so hard?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

“We should write about friendship together. I mean, write together about friendship.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, yes. Let’s.”

We were speaking as friends. We were reaching across only a very narrow strip of difference. Sometimes, with other people, we’ve had to reach across a very wide gulf. I said something to that effect.

“But you keep reaching,” she said.

“Not always,” I said.

I once tried to list every friend I’ve ever had from childhood on. A little unwieldy when I’ve lived seventy-plus years. I’ve gone over all the friends I’ve lost, all the would-be friends I never gained. The losses are various: through attrition, with no actual break—one of us moves, changes careers, reassesses perspectives; someone cuts me off—I didn’t read R.’s manuscript soon enough, I refused to do a favor that I thought was overreaching, I proved too needy to L., S found our friendship too strained and severed it (much, it turns out, to my relief); I ended a relationship that seemed destructive or one-sided. In a few cases, the loss, never fully acknowledged, has pained me; I keep trying to reach out. I have gotten in touch with friends from the past and tried to revitalize the relationships; in a few cases, I’ve been successful, and both of us are happy to be in each other’s lives again, even if we live at some distance from each other.

M came to tea. Long talk with E. B here for the weekend. Dined with J and H. Met R at the club. To X with.…. I am reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and I am once again struck by her more or less consistent involvement with friends, whom, of course, she renders with a sharp critical eye—but she goes on meeting them, having them to tea or dinner or a weekend stay, visiting them. Yes, of course, Bloomsbury: I know it can be seen as overexamined or idealized, but no matter the hype, there was indeed a circle of friends and acquaintances and family members, closely or loosely knit, depending, and they knew they belonged to this circle, and they all saw one another, and they talked, it seems, endlessly. I am envious. I, too, want a web of good friends who can meet in pairs or in various groupings, who can know they are woven together, day by day.

Then I think back to my early adulthood—up to my early forties—in New York, and I confess it looks as if I was living a properly bohemian, artistic, almost communal life. I was surrounded primarily by artists—musicians, painters, dancers, theater people, though only a handful of writers. I tended to befriend really tortured writers, and those relationships, as much as I expected from them, soured. I’m in touch with very few of these people now. Some ties do not bind.

But I did, in those far-away years, have a loose group of friends who all knew one another, and we gathered on various occasions—birthdays, Thanksgiving, New Year’s. I was always especially pleased when I could host a dinner, have my dear friends around my table, feed them, raise glasses together. I still miss the ease with which we could make this happen, and on a straitened budget, too.

Some of the couples my first husband and I shared holidays with are now separated; both these husbands and wives have passed out of my life, including my former husband. The rest of the group is scattered, no longer down the street or a bus or subway ride away.

When I left New York for Vermont and was lonely and scared, a new friend (no longer new; nearly three decades have gone by since) saved me. We saved each other. Again, our connection was immediate and certain. We saw each other most every day for several years.

When I began teaching at a small liberal arts college in Upstate New York, I imagined with great hopefulness and some naivete that my colleagues would become my group of friends, that we would get together outside school and talk books and pedagogy and, well, more books. This was, of course, a fantasy.

I look through my boxes of photographs again: the friends, their children, us together. I remember each scene. I go over, as we often do together, the beginnings of our braided lives. Interwoven, we have moved through time. Even when months or years have somehow kept us apart, such lapses have long since healed, folded themselves into our mutual stories.

These are my friends.

*

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The Georgia Review has published four essays of hers, the latest in Fall 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and White Eagle Coffee Store Press brought out a long story, Double Vision (2004), as a chapbook. Her “Dreams of Foreign Cities,” a prize-winner in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Contest, was published in Fish Anthology 2021, and essays are out or forthcoming from Ponder Review, Under the Sun, and The Bookends Review. She has also published an essay on Proust, book reviews, and translations from French, and she has collaborated on dance-theater pieces at the University of Michigan.