On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan review: 'a gossipy, generous, kindly book'
This series of essays on friendship points to the possibility of a future memoir, writes Stuart Kelly
Perhaps, sometime in the future, Andrew O’Hagan will write a memoir or – more seriously – an autobiography. He has always been a presence in his own non-fiction books, from The Missing, through his harrowing examination of the foot-and-mouth horrors in The End of British Farming, to the strained and fudged account of Julian Assange in the “unauthorised” autobiography. O’Hagan has been the eye, but not the I. So this work, ostensibly a series of essays on friendship, maybe a work of old fashioned belles-lettres (Hazlitt is given a tip of the chapeau here), might be the dry run for a longer future work. Nevertheless, it is a gossipy, generous, kindly book; a kind of pacing around memories and moments that meant much.
One thing that is evident about On Friendship is that friendship is not actually one thing. Cicero wrote in his Laelius de Amicitia that a friend was “a second self”, and if so, O’Hagan has the capacity to be many selves. The book’s epigraph is from JM Barrie, and it segues neatly into the first essay on the idea and reality of childhood friendships. It moves thence to an account of the poet Seamus Heaney and the critic Karl Millar, where O’Hagan is bystander, the chield amang ye taking notes, and awed at their capacity for friendship. This essay has an odd divagation about the late Edwin Morgan, the first Scots Makar, and his snappiness: it is, I attest, true. I remember him – in the cinema in Galashiels of all places – being exceptionally acid about some of his contemporaries.
The third essay is about friendship and death, and O’Hagan’s limpid brilliance shines brightest here. Death “sanctifies”; it is “a disaster but also a permanence”, a point after which “there will be no more to add”. Having lost a brother, I can say it is strange and sad and true: he is perfected while I am still stumbling on. Parts of the essay reflect on O’Hagan’s Mayflies, and there is a knowing little wink: “Time for another name drop”. He really is unabashed about this, and do you know what – why not? But the part that scythed me was a moment about the contacts on your phone. When is it acceptable to delete a contact? I keep the phone which my brother is on. It is like a very tiny tombstone.
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The fourth essay is an arch jaunt around Edna O’Brien, which manages to steer a route between obvious deep affection and mild exasperation. It is a little gem of camp. Who cannot admire a person who says “I think we can finally say, Andrew, that the great enemy is Prosecco”. The “finally” is perfection. O’Hagan moves on to the idea of friending and unfriending in the digital age – I was almost surprised he didn’t use the classic Wilde line – also Eddie Cantor and Friedrich Nietzsche in spirit – “He has no enemies in the world and all his friends hate him”. A chapter on friendship in the workplace is enlivened by a sense of nostalgia – tea trolley! – but also a genuine regret for the days before “working from home”. It also features James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, and I clicked a little that O’Hagan is a Boswell of our days: well-connected, a bit roguish, a man about town, a lost boy.
The chapter on friendship with animals might be though a makeweight or bagatelle in the book, but is earns its place because O’Hagan discusses his novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe. Of his novels, I still rate it higher than the Hugo-esque Caledonian Road or the anguished The Illuminations, just because it has a sense of gleefulness. The conclusion is about non-existent friends, the characters a novelist creates. This might have been expanded. I did wonder which of is creations he cared for – reading his backlist I would say that I far prefer Father David from Be Near Me than Campbell Flynn in Caledonian Road. But as O’Hagan writes, we sometimes like our friends despite themselves. In that respect, his differentiation between love and friendship is key. Love is overwhelming, and friendship is sustaining.
O’Hagan’s prose is cut-glass beautiful: my copy of On Friendship is underscored everywhere. (“Some boys don’t really grow up, they enlarge upon their youth”, “Animals understood that if blood is thicker than water, friendship is thicker than blood”, “Maybe every creature on earth yearns to be part of a double act, imaginary or otherwise”). He is one of the most honed authors currently writing.
But the strangest thing is that this book, full of kindness and care and humour, is profoundly melancholy. It is commemorative, almost like a carefully crafted funeral oration. O’Hagan’s essays are poised towards the dead rather than the living. He does make true the idea, from Cicero, that friendship doubles our joys and halves our griefs. But while falling out of love is commonplace in literature, falling out of friendship is not, and O’Hagan skirts around betrayal and resentment and sorrow. The book is all the better for that: a sequel please.
On Friendship, by Andrew O’Hagan, Faber & Faber, £12.99
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