Two children, one of whom wants to go back home
A few years back, someone thrust Elena Ferrante at me, because that was the book that everyone was thrusting on their friends at the time. The first one, titled My Brilliant Friend, looked so promising. A story about two girls growing up in the back streets of Naples, like in the song, though not quite begging in rags.
The story starts with a mystery and a disappeared woman. I spent four books raging through one of the most depressing chronicles of a friendship I’d ever read, to see if the mystery would be resolved, knowing all the while that novels don’t need to give you answers. They didn’t.
There was one powerful moment in the first book, that kept me reading beyond curiosity. It was about one of those aborted attempts at running away that is essential to all novels about childhood. One of the girls wants to keep walking, the other wants to go back. Eventually, both go back, but there’s a strong recognition of the fact that wanting to go back is a true betrayal.
Of course, who in their right minds would want to keep walking into the world, without resources to combat it? How would two little girls survive? The decision is partly made in helplessness, more than homesickness. But there’s a truth to this moment – that to keep walking would be to start another story. That past the fear, the hunger, the getting wet in the run, there’s the opportunity of an open road presenting itself, an absolute escape. There’s a haunting knowledge that the future beyond has very big sharp teeth.
I had seen this scene before, in a film called The Winter Guest. Two little boys talk about all the things they want to run away from. They discover a kitten while they’re at it. As the world turns white around them, there’s that moment of choosing to walk. One starts disappearing into a foggy moonscape, and the other is afraid. The boy who left keeps walking, the kitten tucked away into his coat. As the other one changes his mind and starts calling out, he continues, silently, and whispers to his kitten he had his chance. Had his bloody chance.
I’ve never forgotten this scene, though I saw it as a child. A stark moment of absolute recognition of betrayal, of making a choice, of losing a friend, and a little bird that sang too late, too late.
The completely unnecessary and irrelevant debate about who Elena Ferrante is, and whether anyone should know
Like the mysteries of missing babies and disappeared women in Ferrante’s story, a tangential mystery surfaced about who the writer was, and a lot of words were spent on whether or not finding out would be a form of harassment. The real mystery, hidden underneath, was not even whether or not anyone cared. It was why these books were touted as a chronicle of female friendship, even a seminal work on female friendship.
Elena and Lila have a terrible relationship. They do offer each other material support, at times, but their relationship is built on anything but love. Call it vicarious living, mutual distrust, projection, envy, a creepy fascination with each others’ lives that’s rooted in self-hatred, a horrifying ghost-presence and haunting. Lifelong obsession, yes. Friendship, not.
This feeling that I was looking at something far uglier than I had imagined crept up on me around when Elena started obsessing about Lila’s shoemaking. Lila’s shoes were apparently wonderful, unique, dazzling, mysteriously alluring. For some reason, I couldn’t believe this. Instead, I decided that Elena was mad. The girl really hadn’t shown any interest in art, design, or even shoes before. How did this miraculous genius take place, in such a short time? From there on, the books became very hard to read. In resolution, Elena decides to tell their story. At something like or past middle age, she looks back on the past and this is all she discovers. Mutual betrayals, obsessions, bitternesses, and a pile of nonsense called Nino.
Looking back on a past and retelling a story
I read a novel called Hellfire, a giant tome by Mia Gallagher, long before Ferrante. Lucy Dolan sits in an abandoned house on a hill and lights a fire and looks back into her past. She meanders through a life of abuse, drug abuse, more abuse, poverty and misery. She looks most deeply into her obsessions, her nemeses. The primary ones were Nayler – manipulator, torturer, dealer, and her mother. She tries to find that moment of betrayal. As she shines her lonely torchlight on the story, however, she finds something else. She finds herself trapped in a bizarre web of love and protection. She had experienced a facade of hatred to protect a passionate affection. Lila and Elena had a facade of support that hid incomprehensible fascination with wanting to eat each other’s lives and personalities and Nino.
Hellfire was the first novel that convinced me of the power of recollection. Of hillsides and solitary fires and a form of witchery that was simply about shining a lonely torchlight on a dusty corner. I did this many times after, sat on many figurative hillsides, and I still feel that it’s a magical act. I don’t know how it turned out so disappointingly banal for Elena.
Speaking of hillsides and witches
When I want to recover from Ferrante, I always think about Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. One of the first witch novels, Wyrd Sisters, ends with each of them walking along a hillside, a witch alone, he says. Because, essentially, a coven of witches is a coven of one, he says. All the while, though, not in opposition to this oneness at all, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg share a friendship that keeps me going through a lifetime of oneness. They have an essential difference that carries the ghost of an echo of Lila and Elena. Elena reads, Lila lives, we’re told. Lila gets to be more colourful (and pretty, by Ferrante’s standards, whatever they are). Elena gets to be an academic and a writer.
Granny Weatherwax is the more powerful witch. She’s the maiden that stayed, eventually, in her old age, harnessing a unicorn on one silver strand of hair. Nanny Ogg is the more powerful social manipulator. She has an army of sons and a bullied host of daughters-in-law and a bevy of grandchildren and a string of outlived husbands. In Ferrante’s world of friendships, this would lead to hidden resentments that informed their personalities, projections that became obsessive constructions, and, of course, a Nino.
Instead, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg live in absolute certainty of their own and each other’s powers. Their difference expresses itself largely in what Pratchett calls ‘bickering’ – beautiful word that describes not dislike, not conflict, not deep-rooted resentment exposed, not argument, but simply a way of interacting. A way of hanging out, a way of spending time together. A way of resolving actual conflict. At the heart of this friendship is love. I’m not in any doubt about that.
What actually lies at the heart of a friendship?
The word heart itself reminds me of Ponyo, a film about children so tiny that they couldn’t even betray each other. Ponyo starts the film as a red-haired goldfish. Her transformation into a little girl caused a tsunami. It started with her getting trapped in a glass bottle, from which she was pulled out and transferred into a bucket by a boy called Sosuke. And this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. When I watched this film, I had a sudden sense of the frailty of friendship, a thing which grows, but as it gets bigger it looks more delicate, like some organic structure made of glass tubes, transparent, eminently breakable.
Ponyo declared her love, straight out of the bucket, fiercely committed. After a brief and temporary separation, she charged back to Sosuke, running barefoot over the tops of waves. This and a small accident starts the tsunami that freezes life in the little town she is rushing to. All the while, she looked so terrifyingly confident of her welcome, and all the while I was terrified, wondering whether she would be rejected. And how she ran across the tops of the waves, causing this great churning in the water, making this almost-tsunami, and always looking forward, so sure of her goal, so confident of her welcome.
Ponyo’s unconscious bravery was well-rewarded. She was welcomed. Soon after, I had another heart-clutching moment when the two of them wandered off alone to find Sosuke’s mother. They took a toy boat and traveled over glass-like still waters, beneath the surface of which great prehistoric fish roamed. Ponyo had brought not just the sea, but everything it could be, everything it had been. I didn’t worry about whether or not they would be eaten by a giant fish. I worried about whether or not Sosuke would turn on her, blame her for the disappearance of his mother. I worried that one of them would leave the other behind.
Because Ponyo, being who she was, would naturally make the seas rise, creating a looming wall of water, bringing tidal waves crashing to the shore, when she decided to become human, when she went looking for Sosuke. Which gives special meaning to the words, will you love her for who she is?
And yet, they continued this walk on glass, this walk on the tightrope, with so much love and dignity and honour. Not all tests of friendship have been passed through with so much grace.
It reminded me of this line from The Waking:
God bless the ground! I shall walk softly there
If anything should lie at the heart of a friendship, it should be this. Blessed ground.
The confusing consistency and bizarre popularity of betrayal
The real mystery of Ferrante was this for me: Why these books were touted as a chronicle of female friendship, or friendship at all. The answer came to me a few years after I read them – that betrayal is so common, so absolute, that we don’t remember what came before it anymore. From that first moment when we were the one to go back, or the one abandoned on the threshold of an adventure and a thing with big teeth. On to a lifetime of little betrayals and big ones. The commonality of betrayal is absolute – no one is safe from it.
The commonality of betrayal is so absolute that we start to confuse friendship itself with betrayal. We assume that a consistency of betrayals over a period of time from one person = friendship. We assume that a long-term bitterness, a happening and a doing of harm, a series of resentments – these are the things that friends are made on. Like betrayal made Bovaries of us all. Like imagining that the smell of pigment and thinner, the unwashed brushes and the stains on your clothes are the act of painting itself. Close, intimately close, but not the same.
Maybe all betrayals start from difference, from a recognition of otherness and a fear of oneness. Maybe that’s why witches make better friends than Bovaries or Elenas or Lilas. Being a witch in Pratchett’s world starts with being an absolute entity, with or without a coven, with or without a friend. From there on, there’s no space to project or resent, not in a big way, not in a consuming way. There’s only space to connect.
Going back to the start
When I was about four or five years old, I decided to make myself a friend. I went about it in the most direct way possible. I saw a girl behind a gate across the street, went over and said, will you be my friend? She said yes. It felt a little like a mad barefoot run across heaving waves. We were friends for maybe two or three years, with a few interruptions, interventions, fights and minor betrayals along the way. After she moved, we didn’t see or speak to each other again.
I think now that this mad streak of boldness that overcomes a lifetime of shyness, this very direct attempt at making a friendship, would be the thing to repeat, over and over. A series of attempts that eventually take over the failure-count, the betrayal-count, the misery count and accounts. That friendship itself is the thing to seek out and the thing to keep seeking.
I don’t wonder about the truth of Ferrante’s anti-friendship novels. I don’t think it even matters. There’s a school of thought that says that misery = realism = reality. There’s a school of witches, goldfish and five-year-olds that says otherwise.
