There was a study published recently by a charity with a lovely name — the Great Friendship Project — which was distinctly unlovely in the light it shone on the reality of the world we live in. For it told how perhaps the greatest of all pleasures, friendship, is for many at risk of dying out.
A fifth of under-35s said they had no real friends, or only one; triple the number of a decade earlier. It came after another body, the Campaign to End Loneliness, found those aged 16 to 29 were more likely than any older age group to say they feel “often or always” lonely.
Nor is it just here. The Survey Center on American Life found those in the US reported having fewer close friendships than they once had, talked to friends less often, and relied less on friends for personal support. Nearly half of Americans had three friends or fewer — 12 per cent depressingly reported having “no close friends” at all.
All of which makes the latest book by the novelist Andrew O’Hagan particularly timely. Called On Friendship, it’s a celebratory anthology made up of eight chapters, each recalling a particular time or person.
He starts by seeking to define how friendship differs from other bonds. It is different from the relationships you don’t select, as with family; or the love affairs that end in marriage. Yet it is that difference which means too often the importance of friendships can be overlooked. “Romantic love gets all the headlines,” he writes, “but just as often it is strong friendship that properly describes the shape of your life.”
A constellation of stars
In the subsequent chapters, he examines childhood friends, new friends and even bad friends. He tells of his childhood friendships in Scotland when, in a world still free of technology, he roams muddy football pitches and waits at bus stops, flushed with the exhilaration of finding a partner looking, as he is, for fun.
His life is littered with a cast of famous figures ranging from Julian Assange to Mark Rylance
Another chapter talks of his friendship with Seamus Heaney and their aim to travel across the four nations of the British Isles. There is his friendship with Edna O’Brien. Others are more transitory — he admits that many had been found around the work photocopier.
It is a personal book about one man’s life and like everyone’s life, it is unique. Here the uniqueness belongs to a celebrated novelist whose life is littered with a cast of famous figures ranging from Julian Assange to Mark Rylance. That should grate, but the book is saved by the writer’s clear and genuine fondness for his subjects.
“He courted me,” he remembers O’Brien saying of Richard Burton. “I never went to bed with him. He loved a story of mine, The Love Object, and he used to read it aloud to Elizabeth when they were having sex. He told me that. I said I’d rather not know, if you don’t mind.” Who wouldn’t want to spend time with friends like that? At its heart this is a book not only about the pleasures of friendship but also its responsibilities. “Until I was 40 I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that friendship might also mean helping old friends out of this world,” he says.
Friends for life
My favourite of the characters is the friend who taught him that lesson, Keith. The pair tore up the town together in their teenage years. “Write about me,” Keith says to O’Hagan as he nears his end. “We had a brilliant time, didn’t we?”
And ultimately, that’s what friendship is about — enjoying time spent together, paying your dues when needed, and then holding the memories tight.
O’Hagan’s friends are lucky they had someone who could allow them to live on so vividly in this gentle but charming book. And he was clearly lucky to have had so many join him in the journey of his life.
Oliver Poole is executive editor of The London Standard
On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan is out on October 9 (Faber & Faber, £12.99)
