FAILURE
I'm reading the bound galleys of a book called Failure, a memoir pitched around its title theme. In one chapter, the writer, Josh Giddins, remembers being at Exeter and falling under the sway of a smart and sardonic classmate, sees it now as another of the ways in which he didn't come up to scratch. This wasn't my first strong recognition. Just pages before he was featuring himself as an aspiring intellectual, a pipe-smoking poseur whose most vivid literary attachment was to the character of Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, the very same fixation I'd recently written about. He was even writing about the same line in the novel, Birkin's saying to Ursula Brangwen, “I don't believe that.” She has just asserted that love between a man and woman is absolute, admits no others. Birkin we know is thinking about his great friend Gerald Crich, which I mention because friendship is such a part of this other thing, this 'falling under the sway' business. For me it was my friend of late high school and then college years, David Berthune, who christened himself 'Reddog' in 1969 after we went to Woodstock together, and who has never been anything but Reddog since to me. What struck me this morning was the fact that I've gone for years now without giving my old friend, the whole life of our friendship, more than a passing nod. For so long he was the very center of things, the constant reference point in my inner life, a figure of--I knew it even then--disproportionate influence. It's been decades now since we've seen each other, and though I know he lives in New York, I'm never really tempted to look him up when I visit the city. This is not just because we would have little besides the past in common--I'm sure we're very different--but also because I like to think I'm psychologically done with him. I don't really want to be reminded of the times, of myself in those times, when I wasn't.