A study in the artistry of friendship

Every individual deserves a biography, though no declaration of human rights has yet claimed that. On the contrary, they say the opposite: that you have the right to keep your life a secret, in the name of privacy. But are you sure you are worth only a few lines on a tombstone? Do you not have a duty to tell your autobiography, so that others avoid making the same mistakes as you? Have you really had no experience that can illuminate the problems others face?

The lives of Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola would be interesting even if they were not famous. Instead of focusing on their art, Wayne Andersen revisits their story from the perspective of what they can tell us about choices that concern us all intimately. Their relationship is a powerful stimulus to thoughts about what friendship means and what it could be in the future.

They grew up in the same town and were close friends until their mid-40s. Suddenly their correspondence stopped, and they broke off all contact. We are not sure why. The simplest explanation is that their relationship ended precisely in the year that Zola published his novel “The Masterpiece,” whose hero was more or less modeled on Cezanne and whose plot echoed experiences the two men had shared. It is conceivable that Cezanne felt betrayed.

Though there are no statistics to show that the betrayal of friends is becoming more common, Kiss and Tell seems to be a growing industry. The management theory of downsizing has even given fashionable respectability to the stab in the back by colleagues who are supposed to be friends. Does this mean that loyalty to friends is becoming outdated?

An alternative explanation of the break between the two artists is suggested by what Cezanne is reported to have said 10 years after their estrangement: that it had nothing to do with the book. “I no longer felt at ease with him, with his oriental carpets, his servants and his desk of sculpted wood. It was enough to make me feel that I was paying a visit to a minister. Zola had become a filthy bourgeois.” That would make the collapse of their friendship a precursor of millions of sad modern stories in which one partner in a couple has a successful career while the other fails. Zola’s novels made him rich and famous well before Cezanne found buyers for his paintings or could even decide what he should be trying to do as an artist. Is it inevitable that inequality should be a barrier to friendship?

It is also arguable that the two men were basically quite different, that their early association was simply a youthful accident, that they came together because they were both misfits. “I am nearly as lonely as you,” wrote Zola. Though they shared childish fantasies about a glorious future together, their dream vanished as they discovered that adult experiences brought out different reactions in them. Zola was exhilarated by the noise of crowds and heat of human conflict, for example, and Cezanne increasingly preferred the stillness of nature.

Today, the majority of long-term friendships are still established in youth, and adulthood often fosters a narrowing of sympathies. Despite the fact that marriage is increasingly thought of as involving friendship too, divorcees do not normally end up good friends. Professionally, people seem more intent on developing networks than intimacy. So we have the paradox that, because so many traditional ties are disintegrating, friendship is valued more highly than ever before, but the skills needed to establish and maintain it are still rudimentary.

Friendship has taken many wrong turns over the centuries. As people came to see themselves as unique rather than as definable by the stereotypical qualities of their occupation or status or sex, their first reaction was to conceal their differences, as though these were faults. Dale Carnegie’s bible on how to make friends was about the art of concealment, preaching that people will like you only if you stop being different. In ancient Rome, friendship did not even have to pretend to involve affection and was more often an instrument in the search for success, a calculating alliance. Shakespeare said, “most friendship is feigning.” The idea that friends should be soul mates has also led to an impasse. There has been no invention to make it easy to find a soul mate whose tastes and attitudes you share completely. The romantics produced what seemed to be a brilliant solution for this problem in which many still believe. They argued that two people can love each other so well that a fusion of their souls is the result. But this cannot satisfy people who do not want a clone to echo their thoughts, who are conscious that they are growing and changing at different rates from their partners and who value the creative stimulation that the friendship of someone different can provide. The romantics claimed that their ideal of total union could be achieved and maintained through sex, which was supposed to solve the difficulty of different tastes. Friendship was thus relegated to a lower status than love.

Andersen’s excellent and engrossing book is original in that it translates the two men’s correspondence at length and successfully challenges the conventional psychoanalytical interpretations of their relationship (which made Cezanne a woman hater). It will doubtless receive a lot of attention from experts in the visual arts, but for many readers it may be more interesting as a case study in the art of friendship.

The story of Cezanne and Zola is not just an anecdote in the history of art or literature. The two men were engaged in a battle in which nearly all of us are still involved. They tried to assert their individuality against society’s demands for conformity. Zola is a significant figure in that rebellion because he was one of the earliest champions of the legitimacy of eccentricity. The fact that society did not like you, he claimed, was just too bad for it; you had the right to be what you were and to be proud of it. He wrote his novels, he said, to “completely reveal myself.” To every artist he offered the guiding rule that one must “be faithful to one’s nature.” But if you make it your motto to assert your difference, is the inevitable result that you will grow ever more apart from others? Is individualism a recipe for loneliness?

I do not believe that “the lonely crowd” is the final outcome of history. The growth of new forms of friendship may well be one of the original achievements of the new century. Though we claim to be ruled by traditional family values, the Western family has come to be very different from what it was. It is no longer an economic unit providing parents with the free labor of their children but an emotional, leisure and educational institution, demanding financial sacrifices from parents, who are struggling to learn to be friends with their children instead of despots. When there are places where half of children are born out of wedlock (Britain is getting close to that, Wales has just reached it and in the United States it stands at nearly a third), and when the remarriage of divorcees leads to an increasing number of people unrelated by blood living in the same household, friendship becomes one of the supreme arts. New forms have to be invented for new circumstances.

But little attention has been focused on the possibility of changing the character of friendship, as opposed to marriage. When male and female worlds were more separate, male friendships -- in 19th century America, for example -- could be much more openly emotional than they are now. When fashion demanded that men should fall romantically in love in order to get married, they compensated for what could be perceived as a weakness by flaunting their toughness, which could be bogus. Intimacy, which once meant no more than shared domesticity before it involved sexual contact, is now taking on a new dimension in the form of intimacy of the mind. Friendship has changed in the past and can change in the future.

From the beginning of time, preoccupied with regulating reproduction and property, governments and churches have battled to improve marriage, but there are no institutions dedicated to friendship as such; one of its charms, of course, is that it is free of outside control. But that does not mean that people do not need help in the art of friendship. Family values are no longer enough to ensure the well being of societies. Friendship values have become as important.

Such values are likely to become even more important because friendship is opening up new horizons. It is a path to a more profound equality than mere equality before the law. It invites self-revelation and so contributes to the transparency and honesty that are increasingly being demanded of business and government as well as in private life. Not least, it liberates us from many forms of fear and prejudice, enabling us to expand our curiosity and our appreciation of the unfamiliar. So it is not surprising that the family is trying to become a friendship.

However, the more we expect of friendship, the more we need to reinvent it in order to sustain it. Because friendship in the past was so often linked with corruption or favoritism, the last few generations have built impersonal bureaucracies to hold it in check, but we now need to imagine different solutions. Because we have developed so many anxieties about our relations with others, we have used psychology and literature to take refuge in introspection, which can be the opposite of friendship: It is time to find new ways of focusing on other people. The ingenuity of technology has led us to invest vast sums to speed up communication, but that has not increased our wisdom: We need to think beyond the transfer of information to the development of greater sensitivity and receptivity between enigmatic individuals.

So a new kind of conversation has become necessary, one that is not small talk, argument, etiquette or gossip but a tool for the meeting of minds and for the creation of equality and mutual respect. That will not happen without conscious effort. Conversation is something that needs to be studied, experimented with and constantly adapted to every new encounter. It is not just a technique. Our ancestors studied rhetoric; we need to go several stages beyond that.

Those who insist that human nature being what it is -- nothing much can be done about betrayal, jealousy and incompatibility in friendship -- do not have history on their side. Humans have changed. It is not just painters and writers who are artists. Every individual can endeavor to make his or her life into a work of art.