A Critical Friendship: Donald Justice and Richard Stern, 1946-1961

Foreword: A Literary Friendship

FOREWORD | A Literary Friendship William Logan Literary friendships are based on a terrible longing, the longing to be understood . Every close friendship is a love affair—or, between writers, really four love affairs: between the writers themselves, between each writer and the work of the other, and at last between the two bodies of work. Such bonds may be formed through communion of interest, mutual admiration, desire for flattery, hope of reward, or the need for an acutely critical eye—just the odd combination of vices and virtues any friendship requires for what psychologists call “fit.” Devotion may also prove a powerful goad to ambition, if the writer doesn’t feel worthy of the friendship. Such a desire was perhaps in part responsible for the depth and reach of Moby-Dick, which Melville dedicated to Hawthorne. If writers want an audience in general, they want readers in specific; and for most writers a single sympathetic and passionate reader will do—if he’s a fellow writer. Such closeness of spirit gives the writer someone to write to, x FOREWORD as well as for. It might be argued that writers write for themselves, but those who have enjoyed intense friendship know that to have a perfect audience of one—the one who does not live in the mirror—is very different. There ought also to be some mésalliance between friends, some telling disparity in age or social class, wealth or reputation, some longing on both sides toward an opposite. George Sand and Gustave Flaubert found in their incompatible politics and the gap in their ages precisely what became the strengths of friendship. (I’m aware of only three sets of identical twins with literary careers. It would be instructive to know if they possess the bond described here. I would hazard that they do not, and perhaps cannot.) Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau, Twain and Howells, Wharton and James, Eliot and Pound, Sartre and Camus, Bishop and Lowell, Larkin and Amis—literature is littered with literary friendships , often more interesting for their asymmetries and disproportions. Emily Dickinson pined for a fellow spirit and came closest to finding one in the somewhat unsuitable Thomas Higginson. Lewis Carroll discovered such a spirit, for a time, in Alice. Perhaps this friendship is one of the strangest —it does not belong simply to that category of worship and bullying that forms the relation between artist and muse. (A muse must be aloof and unreachable—and she is not obliged to give anything back.) Before the breach between Carroll and Alice’s family, which prefigured what would have been almost inevitable once she was grown, Alice was more than a muse to him. It was the intensity and intelligence of her pleasure that drove the young deacon to his peculiar fraught ingenuity. None of the other little girls who became his friends had that effect—and afterward there were no books as brilliant as the two written for Alice. Like love affairs, such liaisons dangereuses are quickly contracted and all too easily broken. Literary friendship is rarer than romantic love and comes with its own peculiar liabilities. (It hardly need be said that romance and literary friendship almost never coexist.) Such friendships rarely occur more than once in a life, and when there has been a fatal rupture the loss is often felt permanently . Friendships founder on rivalry, jealousy, mutual incomprehension, petty slights, trivial misunderstandings—such bonds are even more fragile than love’s. Fitzgerald was devastated when Hemingway betrayed him—he FOREWORD xi needed the younger man’s approval, the one thing Hemingway could never give. The young and overbearing Melville never understood how he had scared off the shy, prissy Hawthorne. Scholars who want to eroticize literary friendship apparently have no friends—or have been reading too much Freud. Donald Justice and Richard Stern were unusually fortunate in enjoying a lifelong friendship ending only with Justice’s death in 2004. They met in 1944 in the library of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), where Justice came upon a young man reading an anthology of modern poetry. “Good stuff,” he remarked. There the acquaintance began, though Stern, then only sixteen, admits that he had only recently acquired a taste for poetry. Such chance encounters give friendship the sense of inevitability usually reserved for romance. (Byron wrote that “Friendship is...