Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the late Carmen Callil – seeks to redress that.
It was, as Cooke reports in her introduction, more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Every other popular novel these days may be about female friendship (‘The result,’ Cooke semi-grumbles, ‘both of feminism and, I think, of capitalism’), but before Jane Austen, ‘fully realised and articulated friendships between women in literature’ were as rare as full stops in Henry James. The important relationship for women in fiction was marriage. 1991’s Oxford Book of Friendship – edited by two men – relegated friendship between women to a single brief chapter, and only 49 of its more than 300 authors were female.
‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense?’
Cooke bravely risks the charge of what’s sometimes called gender essentialism in saying that female friendships – which is what this book, as its publisher might indicate, is interested in – are different from the male sort: more complex, more confiding, more agonised. ‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense? It seems that the answer to both questions is yes.’ Blokes talk about ‘music, football, books’. Women talk about… other stuff too, apparently. Chaps can find out what that other stuff is by reading this book.
The result of Cooke’s considerable labours in the archive is a spry and very dip-in-and-outable anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms from high culture and low. Here are passages of fiction and poetry and memoir, speeches and obituaries, letters, agony aunt columns and even comics (The Four Marys from Bunty!). The oldest entry is from the Bible. The most recent pieces include Cooke’s send-off for Callil and a very touching speech given at Hilary Mantel’s funeral by her oldest pal Anne Preston.
Every anthology needs some sort of structuring principle. This one, writes Cooke, ‘has the shape of a human life’. It’s chronological, but not in the publication dates of its texts so much as in their themes. It takes us from the bassinet to the funeral parlour chapter by chapter: ‘Definitions’, ‘Childhood’, ‘First Encounters, Confessions, Closeness, Contrasting Characters’, ‘Solidarity’, ‘Loneliness and Longing’, ‘Frenemies and Falling Out’, ‘Shifting Sands’, ‘Old Friends’ and ‘Goodbyes’. Each of these sections jumbles voices from different ages – so in ‘Old Friends’ Chaucer and Samuel Richardson share space with Toni Morrison and Carol Shields.
Predictably enough, the ‘Frenemies’ section is a corker. One highlight is a just wonderful worm-turning character assassination of the ghastly Susan Sontag by her former disciple Terry Castle; another is a run of extracts from Katherine Mansfield’s letters bitching poisonously about her lifelong friend Ida Baker. Imagine Ida’s delight when the letters were published after Mansfield’s death.
But there’s as much to be moved by here as to cackle over. A piercing lesser-known poem of Stevie Smith opens the bit on loneliness, and the last section – the send-offs – is just as touching as you’d expect. Here’s an incomparably tender and exact description of Hannah Arendt by Mary McCarthy. The book ends, quite properly, with the death of Helen Burns from Jane Eyre: ‘Resurgam.’
And as Cooke’s anthology reminds us – in an age when we’re all gushing over our ‘besties’ on Instagram (Elena Ferrante has firm views on affixing hierarchical adjectives to the word friend) – sometimes less is more. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were boon companions for two whole years, I was delighted to learn, before they stopped calling each other ‘Miss Bishop’ and ‘Miss Moore’.
Comments