The Silent Friendships of Men

By Roger Rosenblatt

What I enjoyed most about my conversations with John Campbell was that they hardly existed. We spoke--at the post office, at the village store, whenever he pulled over to the curb on his bike--two, three times a month. But we said very little. In the still, blank autumn afternoons like these, our silence abetted the season. One of us would open with some typically male, moderately hearty greeting; the other would follow with an observation about essentially nothing, like the lowering sky; the other would grunt or nod; John would pedal away, and that would be that.

When he died some weeks ago, of leukemia at age 77, I didn't say much either--just bowed my head. I went over to see his wife Jane, and again said little. I asked John's daughter Frances if I might have a picture of him, so that I could recall his tight, sweet-tempered face. She gave me the choice of the dashing John as a fighter pilot in World War II, the one with the goggles dangling from his neck, or the older John I knew, who sold real estate. I took the more recent shot.

"I saw Private Ryan," Francie told me. "Funny to think that when the Army Air Force came to the rescue of Tom Hanks and his infantrymen, that was Dad. He never spoke about the war."

That made sense to me. The silence of men in general is over-talked about and overcriticized. To be sure, men never open up as much as women want them to, but there is a wordless understanding in which we function fairly well--especially in friendships. There are a dozen guys whom I count as friends and who do the same with me, yet months pass without our speaking, and even when we do, we don't.

Old story: two women approach Calvin Coolidge. One says to the close-mouthed President, "Mr. Coolidge, I just bet my friend that I could get you to say three words." Says Coolidge: "You lose."

I believe, in fact, that most women would prefer a man to be glumly uncommunicative than to spill his guts at the drop of a hat. That (one recalls with a shudder) was the goal of the so-called men's movement of Robert Bly et al. in the 1980s and early '90s, which exhorted men to express their feelings. If anyone doubts the perils of men expressing feelings, he should watch The McLaughlin Group or Cable Monica.

This drum-beating, male-retreating, back-to-the-woods nonsense is still going on, by the way. Last February a hundred men retreated to a pine forest in Louisiana owned by Benedictine monks to acquire the ability to grieve. One reported that he had learned "to work my grief muscle." Thanks for sharing.

The push for men to express their feelings presumes that we have feelings, and we do have a few, but they remain submerged, and the airing of them often violates their authenticity. We are, as a gender, as dull as we seem. Contrary to the claptrap of the men's movement, men gain power through not talking. "The strength of the genie," said poet Richard Wilbur, "comes from being in a bottle." I'm no biologist, but my guess is that the male human animal was programmed for silence. One can make us talk counter to our genetic makeup, but it is like training kangaroos to box. It's mildly entertaining but pointless.

Older story: Wordsworth goes to visit Coleridge at his cottage, walks in, sits down and does not utter a word for three hours. Neither does Coleridge. Wordsworth then rises and, as he leaves, thanks his friend for a perfect evening.

There's a deep, basically serene well of silence in most men, which, for better and worse, is where we live. I do not mean to start claptrapping myself, but I often think that all our acts of aggression and wanna-fight posturing arise from that well as forms of overcompensation or panic. Unlike women, men are not social creatures, not born administrators. It's nicely P.C. to think of God as female, but no woman would have thrown Lucifer out of heaven; she would have offered him a desk job. Had Lucifer been a woman, she would have dropped all that "myself am hell" business and taken it.

I would go so far as to argue that men were programmed to be isolated from one another and that aloneness is our natural state. Silence in male friendships is our way of being alone with each other. Once men have established a friendship, that itself is the word. The affection is obvious, at least to us. A main component of our silence is an appreciation of the obvious.

I may have spoken with my friend Campbell a total of a hundred times, yet I cannot recollect a single idea exchanged or the substance of a subject addressed. He knew that I wished him well, and I knew that he wished me the same. The day he died--before I learned that he had died--I called to him on his bike, mistaking a man of similar build and helmet for my friend. Later, when told of his death, I thought of that other man (I don't know why), and I pictured him pedaling away with a bright wave of the hand. See ya, John.