Recalling her grandmother, Nell Dunn writes: ‘Ever since I first remember seeing my maternal grandmother I knew I was like her: that narrow face, those worried eyes. When I was about seven, she asked me who was the most important person in the world to be friends with. She eventually told me the answer was, “Yourself”. I loved being with her and with my mother and my sister.’ Outings with Granny are visits into an eccentric world of others. On one foray into a grand house, Dunn meets a woman who is always horizontal, because lying down ‘preserves a woman’s beauty’. Stories from earlier generations trickle down, describing strange, superannuated customs, other social codes, war and exile.
Though I found my own ageing mother a handful and bridled at her sense that she always knew best–that she carried on being mother even when the generational power balance had been reversed and she was the one who needed looking after–she was much loved by my children. I suspect they were more than a little pleased that their own mother wasn’t an ultimate authority on everything. They listened to their gran’s endless stories, loved the food she so carefully prepared for them and carried on visiting her even when dementia had got the best of her mind. Her tales gave them a lived sense of history stretching deep into that foreign country that the past is. Eventually, and in part through her, they learned a little about human vulnerability and the duty of care.
One of the reasons children can create such a deep bond with grandparents is that grandparents love them with such attentive profuseness. Having passed through that time of life which is so bound up with the travails of ambition and the daily strife of getting and spending, they have the space to focus on these new beings absolutely, but with no urgent need to shape their lives. In that sense, they’re more childlike themselves. A grandmother Nell Dunn interviewed attests:
What Cato [her grandson] gives me is the sheer pleasure of living. He reminds me that there isn’t so much to it all, that actually a good breakfast, a nice walk, a new word, good weather, a new hat–everything–is just outrageously delightful, and that it’s as simple as that, and all those things that take enormous effort are not necessarily where our satisfaction comes from. The greatest surprise for me is that after seeking satisfaction in so many places it can be so easy, so before my nose…
Grandfathers, and indeed those ageing fathers who are of grandparental age, share this sense. They have a new-found ability to play and get down on the floor with their grandchildren, as if there were nothing more important in the world, though that leisure, that freedom, that time, never existed when their own children were young. And grandparental spoiling, often free of those unwitting demands that can turn gifts into bribes when they come from parents, provides a reparative space for children.
Changing Families
Up until the Great War, traditional families were large, not only in numbers of siblings, but in their extensions. The arc of experience that children underwent was far wider than today, even though our virtual world supplies far more information about other lives. Not only grandparents, but mothers, like Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s, might die while children were young. The death of siblings, too, was a regular occurrence. Ghosts were a felt presence in the family. Pain and mourning attended young life. Sometimes stepmothers appeared and produced a new brood of siblings, which brought a repeated panoply of rivalry and tensions in tow. The small child was quickly tossed into a miniature society, only partially protected by the walls of home.
Virginia Woolf’s writings bring to life the storms and loves that inhabited this particular kind of extended family. Her parents had both been previously widowed. Laura, the daughter of her father Leslie Stephen’s first marriage, was mentally unstable and, despite best parental efforts, was institutionalized when Virginia was nine, leaving behind her a trail of shame and grief, as well as a little relief. Virginia’s beautiful mother Julia, so hauntingly evoked in To the Lighthouse, had three children by her first marriage, George, Stella and Gerald Duckworth. When Virginia was thirteen her mother died, followed two years later by her stepsister Stella, who had helped to look after the young ones: Virginia herself, her older sister and brother, Vanessa and Thoby, and the youngest, Adrian. Around this time, and perhaps emotionally not unconnected to it, Gerald began to molest his two stepsisters. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Virginia recalled the horror of it. ‘I can remember the feel of his hands going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But he did not stop.’ In the same memoir she also recalls her father’s rages, sinister, blind, animal, savage, though this alternates with memories of him as kindly, comforting and grandfatherly.
The range of a child’s experience within the family was both painfully and blissfully broad, and bonds were formed which lasted a lifetime. Virginia and Vanessa, with all their ups and downs, remained intimate. Their parents and siblings in their various recreations people Virginia’s fictions: the family had become what Wilde called ‘that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape’. Indeed, one could say that the Bloomsbury circle itself was a lateral extension for the Stephens, as it was for the Stracheys, of their originary, already large family circles.
We think of our own families, today, as nuclear. Parents and adult children often live at great distances from each other. Our single child or two have a special and heightened importance. We work hard in the name of love to shield them not only from harm, but from those very conflicts and disappointments which, arguably, shape richness of character. We try to keep conjugal rows hidden or alternatively, if divorce or separation takes place, we’re quick to split off good from bad, demarcating everything on one side as good and loading all the bad on to the other. Whereas, in fact, both inevitably inhabit each. The difficulty of lone parenting is simply that it takes place alone: there are no others of whatever sex or age for children to build up other allegiances with, other models of trust, other forms of argument and resolution. There can be too little sense that conflict necessarily inhabits the world inside as well as the outer world, that there are always limits to satisfaction, that frustration exists and that we can live with it and still love.
The extensions that our long lives, divorce and separation rates have introduced into our contemporary families can, for siblings, parallel those of older, traditional societies when dead parents were replaced and new broods came along. In Britain today, according to Relate, ‘a third of people find themselves in a step-family at some point in their lives’. A twenty-five-year-old can easily enough have a stepbrother ten years younger, and two stepsisters from a different mother who arrive when he himself is old enough to be starting his own family. Harbouring residual anger at former partners, we may guard our children jealously and think of these extensions as part of a negative experience. Certainly, there are difficulties: ex-partners quarrel, shadow the life of the new family, cause tugs of affection, split loyalties, guilts. The very sense that one needs to fall in love with all of a new partner’s familial baggage, or on a child’s part that one somehow needs to love a parent’s new partner, adds to the burden.
Yet from the child’s point of view, these additional family members can also offer new attractions and benefits. An alternative mother or father, if wise enough not to make too many competitive demands of love or acceptance, can grow into a kind of aunt or uncle and provide the child with a different possibility of what an adult can be, perhaps even an extra ear to listen to problems. A range of step-siblings, alongside the inevitable rivalries and jealousies, can also provide new interest and give love other shapes, grow the range of affections and ways of caring.
None of it is necessarily easy. Little in our ways of loving is. Yet, for all their bad press in the annals of literature, families are the seedbeds of our social world and any hopes we have of it. It is in the family that we learn how to love and to hate and everything in between. It is here that we first experience grief and loss
. It is here, too, that we learn to trust, and how to temper at least some of our rampant desires. Here, that we derive at least some of the hopes that keep our world together. When, in adolescence, as Adam Phillips writes, we become excessive, too much for ourselves, and ‘definitely too much for other people, so much so that we have to leave them’, we usually–even if we also find an institution, a leader or a god–also eventually discover someone else with whom we form a family.
Love in families may often be hate. Its path is pitted with misunderstandings and pain, that experience which leads to deformations of the heart. It may not offer up the immediate pleasures that passion and commodified sex advertise (though so rarely deliver through time). But it enmeshes the originary couple, their parents, their children and all the many possible extensions in ways that draw upon all sides of ourselves. Reliance, kindness, fortitude, stoicism, loyalty, generosity–all the ordinary virtues–are forged here, alongside the nether passions. And our kindred, in this atomized world, may be the only ones to follow us from cradle to grave. When they are gone, we mourn them, our love once more as idealizing as it was in childhood.
At the root of the word ‘kindness’ is the word ‘kin’. The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary for ‘kindness’ is ‘kinship; near relationship; natural affection arising from this’. This sense of the word is obsolete, which is perhaps not altogether unrelated to our historically developed ambivalence about families–those familiars not of our own choosing. In our culture of individualism we’re prone to feel queasy about the attributes of kindness, most particularly in our families, and prefer to sing of the love of strangers. But for these strangers to become friends, we have first to prime our tenderness, our fondness, our affections, our recognition of our own and others’ vulnerability–our ‘kindness’–in that primer that is family life, which is also the memory store of the selves we become.
PART SIX
Love and Friendship
My friends are my ‘estate’. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
Emily Dickinson
Friendship catapults us out of the sphere of kin and binds us into a world of others. It does so without engaging carnal passions and thus in its ideal form–if not always in the vicissitudes of the real–has a greater hope of durability. It is also one of the fundamental building-blocks of society.
The Greek word for friendship, philia, means ‘love’. Philia forms part of the word ‘philosophy’, the love of wisdom or knowledge, and the love that informs friendship and philosophy have long walked arm in arm. Playing with the words, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida commented in an interview that this philia entails an ‘affirmative desire towards the Other–to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other’. This ‘yes’ to the Other–in all his or her difference and without the cannibalizing instinct which sexual desire can often bring in its train–will engage one in questioning. So the very process that underpins philosophy was also in ancient Greece a dialogue between friends who admired each other’s qualities. Friendship has a high calling. It is one based on an appreciation of attributes, and in that it is markedly different from the elemental thunderbolt of passion.
Through Western history philosophers have continued to stress friendship’s value. Arguably, until the twentieth century it trumped passionate love and even marriage as a desirable relation. In the ancient world, C.S. Lewis noted, ‘friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves’. Edmund Burke went so far as to talk of a human instinct for sociability as fundamental as the instinct for self-preservation. Today, sociologists urge that companionship is an essential way of making good the loss of happiness regularly reported in market democracies, which have long overemphasized the dominance of the self-interested individual. The love of friends can be more enduring and satisfying than our tumultuous passions. Affectionate friends shore up the self in times of upheaval, and provide the companionship we humans can rarely do without.
So friendship remains one of the key aspects of a good life, all the more important in highly mobile times when families can be quickly dispersed. The worldwide popularity of the American sitcom Friends is part witness to the significance that friendship has once more taken on. The programme, which ran for ten years (1994–2004), appeared in adapted form in various countries and is repeated over and over in its original version everywhere. Friends became a formative model for a generation. As its creators stated in their original treatment for the series, ‘When you’re single and in the city, your friends are your family.’ Yet in our globally interconnected times, when each of us may number thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook or MySpace and ‘tweet’ intimate details to virtual hordes, what can friendship mean?
Adolescence has always been a time of fluctuating group cohorts, when the turbulent, isolated young mass their identities under various political or cultural banners, often to change them as quickly as they first embraced them. It is the young who maintain their virtual networks most assiduously. But quantity, in friendship as in other domains, may displace quality. Having vast numbers of ‘friends’ can express a very real need of friendship, masking a core loneliness and an inability to engage fully with another. ‘A sign of health in the mind,’ Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970, ‘is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.’ Even if the imagination is in some respects already a virtual sphere, exposure in words and images to a loose network is not the same as engagement with an individual who, at times, may be less than compliant. ‘Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,’ argued the great American transcendentalist, Frank Waldo Emerson.
Friendship in the contemporary world is further complicated by the fact that the dividing lines that used to separate the private from the public–what you revealed to intimates and what you told the world–have grown increasingly blurred. ‘Outing’ the secrets of the rich and famous was once a matter for the tabloids. Now every man and woman aspires to self-initiated celebrity status on a global stage. The young, in particular, insouciantly ‘share’ confidences with thousands. Gossip on the village green has become a matter of self-publicity to a network of disembodied contacts. The bounds of the self, already conceived as shifting and unstable, grow dauntingly porous in consequence, and may soon give us a differently constituted individual. After Freud, the ego was unseated as master in its own house; today what is inside that house, and what out, defies definition. This confusion about the nature of the intimate self challenges the very nature of friendship. Narcissistically bloated on our virtual contacts, we forget or never learn how to ‘enter imaginatively and accurately’ into the world of another and allow her or him to do the same for us. Quantity, here, may be a sign of impoverishment.
There is more. Our competitive, individualist world of selfish genes and narcissistic self-promotion heralds the erotic as a principal key to the good life–even though sex can be less pleasurable than its triumphalist exposure. With this emphasis on carnal bliss as the primary happiness to pursue, alongside wealth and ever more acquisitions, we’re in danger of emptying out what has long been that most fundamental of human delights and the facilitator of the trust that binds society: loving friendship. Thomas Jefferson, the very man who enshrined the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence, also noted: ‘The happiest moments [my heart] knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.’If the pursuit of happiness has made a great many unhappy, it may be that what we have pinpointed as happiness and the good life is simply mistaken.
The Most Fully Human of All Loves
In French, as in other Romance languages, the words for love and friendship–amour and amitié–share a common root in the word for soul–âme. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its primary definition for the wor
d ‘love’ not the feelings we associate with passion, but those which characterize friendship: ‘A feeling of deep affection or fondness for someone, typically arising from a recognition of attractive qualities, from natural affinity, or from sympathy, and manifesting itself in concern for the other’s welfare and pleasure in his or her presence’.
Indeed, loving friendship, a meeting of souls, was long thought a far more significant bond than the kind of love that involved carnal relations. An attachment of soul or mind trumped one based on self-gratifying sexual desire in whatever configuration. After Darwin and Freud, we’ve grown suspicious of such ties: all love tends to appear as rampant reproductive urge or camouflaged desire and its distortion. Yet neither Darwin nor Freud would have welcomed a human world where love was reduced to mere reproductive drive or blind instinct. After all, as Adam Phillips has written, ‘We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.’
Given the importance of loving friends, it’s worth pausing over some of the classical and humanist ideals of friendship and exploring how they have shifted through time.
In his Rhetoric (367–322 BC) Aristotle, that most capacious of early philosophers, defines the activity involved in philia, or friendship, as wishing for the friend ‘what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about’. Mutual well-doing, here, is a fundamental good.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 40