talking about friendship and also about how sometimes one thought leads to another.
The other day I was thinking how Nelson and Wellington once met in person. I read about this a while back and it always struck me as cool.
Wellington and Nelson wouldn’t normally have come face to face. Nelson was engaged on the high seas. Wellington, on land. They were both only intermittently in England.
But one day in 1805 both men happened to be in the waiting room of the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Wellington (well . . . he was still Wellesley but let’s keep it simple,) had just returned from India and was reporting to Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State for War. Admiral Nelson was waiting in the same room for his own appointment with Castlereagh.
Wellesley recognized Nelson immediately. There were not, after all, so very many one-armed admirals in the Royal Navy. Nelson, at 42, was the acclaimed victor of the Battle of Copenhagen and the Battle of the Nile. A famous man at the height of his career.
He was also seven weeks from his death in the Battle of Trafalgar.
Wellesley was ten years younger. He’d served with distinction in India, but the most impressive part of his military career was still ahead of him. It would be another eight years before he took command of the Peninsular Campaign and began the string of victories that would culminate at Waterloo.
I delight to imagine them seated there, (that’s a quote from Yeats, btw,) the sailor and the soldier, the older and the younger, two military geniuses at ease, chatting about the political situation in Europe.
I wonder if they would have become friends if they’d had the chance to get to know each other.
I had a writing friend staying with me over the weekend so it was natural for me to go from these two military men talking shop to idea of writerly friendship.
Oh my, but there were lots of writer friends in the era — Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Boswell and Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Maybe the friendships didn’t last a lifetime; maybe the discussions could get a bit fraught; but there’s no question the relationships influenced the work and life of these folks.
Sometimes the writer friends were women.
Here we got Shelley, also being cool.
The relationship between Byron, Shelley, and Mary Goodwin was kinda interesting. The way it went down: they met cute. Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, had been Byron’s mistress and she was pregnant with his child. But the affair was over and Byron left England before his daughter was born.
In the spirit of — what? — fair play? Mischief? Neatness? Claire arranged for Mary and Percy Shelley, (who was Mary’s lover,) to meet Byron in Switzerland. This is like the original Soap Opera.
The three instantly hit it off. They rented a pair of houses near the shore of Lake Geneva and boated, hiked, went sightseeing in the Alps, and spent long evenings talking by the fire, finding common creative ground underfoot all over the place.
Shelley, in his turn, encouraged Byron to begin an epic poem on a contemporary subject. That was the seed of Byron’s Don Juan.
The stay in Switzerland, famously, led Mary to write Frankenstein. The story goes that on a rainy night the three friends were sitting at the fire reading German ghost stories aloud. Byron challenged everyone to write a ghost story and Mary dreamed up Frankenstein. It’s said her own story frightened her into nightmares.
But then, what are writerly friends for?
Can writers be friends by letter?
George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They never met, but they shared a genuinely close friendship by letter. Maybe it was easier for Stowe to befriend Eliot at a distance, where Eliot’s scandalous lifestyle placed no strains on the relationship.
Eliot was equally candid. “She alluded to her own frequent bouts of depression and — surprisingly for a modern audience aware of her legacy — to her lapses in confidence about her literary abilities. Stowe’s words, she said, had assured her that her own work had been “worth doing”.
I guess I compare this epistolary friendship to what today’s authors may find emailing one another or chatting on Facebook and Twitter. I think there can be help and advice, long-distance literary influence, shared stories of uncertainty and triumph. An exchange of warmth, understanding, and encouragement even between folks who never meet.
Bring it on, says I.
I find I have no words left to talk of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell or Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott or the Brownings. I can’t begin to touch on the many modern writer friendships.
But let me ask — Do you make friends through your art or avocation, your hobby or profession? Long distance, or face to face over the table at the local café? Is a professional friendship based on shared work special?