The Oxford Book of Friendship!

Our book today is 1991's Oxford Book of Friendship edited by D. J. Enright and David Rawlinson, a book that clocks in at only about 360 pages and yet is chock-full of great stuff on that most elusive and yet universal feature of human life and certainly human literature: friendship.

To put it mildly, I've made something of a study of the subject in my own life. I was lucky enough to spend most of my childhood with the best friends imaginable, but the luck was double-edged, because those friends were dogs, and it took me a long time to realize that the reason I wasn't finding friendships among humans that were anywhere near as strong as those I found everywhere with dogs was tragically simple: dogs are better at friendship than humans are, in just the same way that, say, humans are better at language than dogs are. "I want to know as I am known," scripture cries out, and of course that's been the driving personal dynamic of humans since they first achieved their current level of murderous sentience. The enormous conceptualizing capacity of the human brain comes with a huge price: the isolation of being the smartest, creepiest, most deceitful species on the planet, or in the planet's history.

Which makes mankind's search for simple friendship all the more moving, I guess - it certainly makes that search an all the more natural candidate for artistic treatment, and for the well-placed quip. Enright & Rawlinson's great book (yet another in a long line of great Oxford Books) is broken into many different aspects of friendship - "Among Men," "Among Women," "Youth and Age," "Animals," etc. - and each section is full of quotes and excerpts from a very pleasingly wide variety of authors. Here's a sampling:

It should be a part of our private ritual to devote a quarter of an hour every day to the enumeration of the good qualities of our friends. When we are not active, we fall back idly upon defects, even of those whom we most love.  (some jasper named Mark Rutherford)

Oscar Wilde said of me 'An excellent man: he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.' And that's quite true: they don't like me; but they are my friends, and some of them love me. If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper - and despise it. I had rather you remembered one thing I said for three days than liked me (only) for 300,000,000,000,000,000 years. (George Bernard Shaw, to Ellen Terry)

A man who has few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate - a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes - he may be left, in a month, destitute of all. (Robert Louis Stevenson, in Virginibus Puerisque)

George wondered if this was what being old meant: everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool. The very old needed interpreters just as the very young did. When the old lost their companions, their friends, they also lost their interpreters: they lost love, but they also lost the full power of speech. (Julian Barnes, writing out his ass as usual)

Love is like the wild rose-briar,

Friendship is like the holly-tree -

The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms

But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,

Its summer blossoms scent the air;

Yet wait till winter comes again

And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now

And deck thee with the holly's sheen,

That when December blights thy brow

He still may leave thy garland green.

(Emily Bronte's "Love and Friendship," from 1839)

And we could hardly close on the subject of friendship without this last poem, even though Enright and Rawlinson choose not to include it in their anthology:

When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe
And storied urns record who rest below:
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been:
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth--
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth:
While Man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive Heaven.
Oh Man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on--it honours none you wish to mourn:
To mark a Friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one,--and here he lies.

That's of course Lord Byron, writing an epitaph for a beloved dog. He's being hyperbolic (I mentioned it was Byron, yes?), but not much more so than, say, Kipling or Burns would be. And it's hard to think systematically about the phenomenon of friendship without thinking of dogs - at least for me. The rest of you need not worry, though: you'll find this wonderful anthology for the most part very comfortingly human-oriented.

Nine Lives 6: Richard Wagner

Our book today is The Perfect Wagnerite by George Bernard Shaw. He wrote it quickly – he wrote everything quickly – in 1898 in order to express his enthusiasm for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring), and as usual, Shaw’s method of expression enthusiasm was to teach, to quip, and to provoke.

This presents us with a conundrum, which is also something Shaw would have loved. In my opinion, he’s one of the greatest critics who ever lived: smart, shrewd, funny, strong, flexible, and wonderfully pragmatic. His plays, despite the performances and festivals they garner, are often still underestimated for their power, but in his criticism – that surging, almost unreadably vast ocean of prose – there is a happy, almost unalloyed greatness that can scarcely be approached by any other author, much less equaled.

And thereby the conundrum: what do you as a reader do when one of the greatest critics of the last 400 years writes an enthusiastic, deeply intelligent, passionately argumentative book on a great big pile of garbage? Do you avoid it, because garbage smells bad and is unsightly, or do you read it, because truly great criticism is not to be missed in this life?

These are the questions any sensitive reader must bring to The Perfect Wagnerite, because in the brief course of that highly entertaining book, as Shaw describes the stage actions and plot lines of Der Ring’s four interminable parts, Das Rheingold, DieWalkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdamerung, he’s also sure to convey his enthusiasm for the whole work, but the whole work is garbage-and so, the conundrum.

Shaw spent many an unoffending afternoon and evening squirming in his chair as this adolescent nightmare of a stage monstrosity unfolded before him. He lived through two separate Wagner vogues in Great Britain and saw some truly innovative and, one supposes, impressive attempts on the part of stage managers, working in wood and cloth, to reproduce even in small part the long list of lunatic demands Wagner put in his stage instructions. Listen, for instance, to Shaw’s narration of the notorious conclusion to Die Gotterdammerung and then try to imagine how on Earth a London stage of 1870 could pull it off:

Finally she [Brynhild, obviously] flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried’s finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant heavens the gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.

Lovely stuff. We can get the vicar’s wife to darn up some lovely orange flames. And while we’re at it, we’ll get the Royal Corps of Engineers to divert the Thames once a night, and matinees on Sundays.

Of course it’s not just that The Ring Cycle is garbage, nor is it really that virtually everything Wagner wrote is garbage (although one must search into the foothills of the 21st century to find a equally frightening Coldplay-esque divergence between a miniscule speck of talent and a mighty engine of popularity) – it’s that Wagner himself was garbage. Willfully ignorant, proudly rude, a seducer of other men’s wives, an arrogant traducer of other men’s prides, a debt-dodger, a liar, a cheat, a tone-deaf melodist, a fatuously self-deluded folklorist, an idiotically ham-handed dramatist, and a disgustingly outspoken racist and anti-Semite. We’re taught endlessly – and we’re taught true – that we must divorce the worth of the artist from the worth of the art (else who would ‘scape whipping?), but damn, Wagner makes it hard. It would be different (well, a bit different) if this vile scrap of human trash had produced truly wonderful music; we wouldn’t forgive, necessarily, but we’d be more inclined to overlook. But the music is of a piece with the man: loud, overbearing, coarse, and empty-headed.

And yet, Der Ring at least provoked this nifty little book by Shaw (almost all other books on Wagner, according him ‘great artist’ status but not, alas, being written by Shaw, are necessarily also garbage), and despite Wagner’s presence all throughout, it very often produces a smile – almost always when some fine point accidentally taps into the boiling sub-strata of Shaw’s ever-present all-purpose outrage. When that happens, rants occur, and they’re always fun:

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger generation of our educated classes as it as forty years ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the Church’s teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale’s throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror to all, except persons of exceptional force of character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still groveling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against “blasphemy.”

You finish The Perfect Wagnerite with a thorough understanding of the Ring Cycle, which is quite an accomplishment on Shaw’s part and which is the smallest reason to recommend reading this great little book. Of course, if you finish the book with any desire to actually see the Ring Cycle, there’s something seriously wrong with you.