AN INSINCERE FRIEND
From Clarice Lispector's collection, I picked a short story—called A Sincere Friendship— that makes us wonder about the qualities that make for a satisfying friendship.
Ever since I started reading books in translation with a conscious effort at uncovering great works, the name Clarice Lispector kept returning to me. Lispector was not only a remarkably talented arrival in the literary scene in 1943 when, as a 23-year-old, her debut work Near to the Wild Heart took Brazil by storm. She was also glamorous, a woman in whom beauty and brains coexisted, it seems, in a sort of languid harmony. One look at this photograph from an article in the New York Times and I was reminded of a Bond girl from Goldfinger.
Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, A Sincere Friendship begins with a commentary on the nature of a friendship between two students that began in the last year of high school. From that point on, these two friends hang out together all the time.
We reached the point of friendship at which we could no longer keep a thought to ourselves: one would soon call the other, making plans to meet right away. After the conversation, we felt as happy as if we had given ourselves to each other as presents.
This is how most friendships begin and in my closest friendships I’ve tended to share a tremendous amount about my life without caring too much, in the early stages, about whether it was reciprocated. In the story, the two young men find themselves sharing a lot about their lives when they’re in school but as they grow older and go about navigating their future, their friendship beings to fray at the edges.
Right around that time came the first signs of disturbance between us. Sometimes one would call the other, we’d meet, and have nothing to say. We were very young, and didn’t know how to sit quietly. At first, when we started running out of topics we tried talking about people. But we were well aware that we were already adulterating the nucleus of our friendship.
The friendship suddenly begins to assume a performative nature. The narrator observes that one can’t force a friendship where there isn’t one. A Sincere Friendship takes us into specific moments of friction when the friends began realizing that they really did not have too many things in common, after all.
This was just four pages in all, a short story that focuses on several moments in a human connection but it left me pondering not only how the most beautiful connections begin but also what it takes to sustain them.
Friendships often begin in a haphazard, unexpected moment of connection when two people realize how they have so much in common. Keeping the flame burning over the long haul, however, takes work and a lot of give and take. At what level is the friendship truly being reciprocated? How deep is the trust? Is there a sense of entitlement that one friend exerts over the other? All these questions arise in Lispector’s story.
Very little seems to happen, yet A Sincere Friendship suspends us in a moment of inequality, one that clearly dogs the friendship. It’s clear that the narrator begins feeling empty and inconsequential after their meetings. As their friendship continues, the narrator begins to feel that his friend has an attitude about his (the narrator’s) own circumstances. We also get a sense that the narrator has gone out of his way to ingratiate himself into his friend’s life.
I had another strange and fleeting thought. The sincerity the narrator tried to express had begun to feel insincere to the friend and, certainly, to the reader, too.
But a sincere friendship called for the purest sincerity. Seeking this, I began to feel empty. Our outings were getting even more disappointing. My sincere poverty was gradually being revealed. He too, I knew, had reached the impasse of himself.
I suppose there is one quality to this friendship that bothered me from the get-go. There was so much intellectualizing of the relationship that it never felt, simple, organic and natural. At least one of them in the relationship was trying a little too hard.