On Friendship by Andrew O'Hagan

Author:Andrew O'Hagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Edna’s sense of outrage was a kind of energy. At the Duchess Theatre, we once attended a production of Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s morbidly funny little masterpiece, and she made us climb ninety steps to look in on the actors. One of them, Mark Rylance, was perfectly nice though in a bit of a hurry, and the other immediately buttonholed Edna and suggested she write to Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, to complain about his review of the play. ‘As if I don’t have enough to worry about,’ Edna said as we thudded back down the stairs. ‘And not as much as a thimble of wine either!’ Day in and day out for years, Edna would come on the phone speaking of ‘my present harassed condition’. She seemed to enjoy the fact of two writers bobbing separately and together towards their goals, but her instinct for friendship showed her when to go deeper. ‘We have to draw blood,’ she would say as we sat down in her kitchen, her face a mask of worry as she sat below Jane Bown’s famous photograph of Samuel Beckett. ‘He would get lonely sometimes and call me late at night,’ she said of him. ‘Oh, Andrew. Beware of the man who calls you late at night, that’s all I can say.’

On the best occasions, she treated friendship as if it were a sacrament. It could be professional and quasi-Catholic at the same time, a thing of elevated affinities and deep responsibilities, of grace and torment. I was probably a bit too practical for some of that, and insufficiently ecclesiastical in general, but I enjoyed Edna’s seriousness about our commitment. She thought I was her envoy, which was fine, though I never wanted to be a receptacle for her intolerances, especially when it came to her other friends. She shared a lot and not all of it was accurate, but it was part of her defence, her writer’s defence, to recruit ‘unspoiled’ friends who might help her to enlarge the truth. It felt like a task of the imagination, something both intimate and dangerous, with no guarantee of success. Real writers are born with a huge inclination towards the fabular, and in some of us, including Edna, the path to wonder-making might be strewn with the little hostages to fiction that art demands. Edna was a reporter on the human spirit and I loved being with her. Age shouldn’t matter in any account of friendship or love, and I’ve always had elderly friends, ever since I was a boy. Edna needed a lot, but she gave a lot in return. She put lifeblood into the system, and that, for me, is what a friendship demands above all. But more than anything she made me laugh. I was always impersonating her way of speaking, the full-blown Celtic twilight of it all, the sonorous heartache and the sense of doom. On long nights either in restaurants or on the phone, she spoke to me many times about her end and the arrangements for her funeral.

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