As recently as last March, as good a columnist as Joseph Epstein is, he was again asking "Can Men and Women Be Friends?" (Chicago Tribune Magazine, March 2, 1997). The question reminds me of an old joke about a conversation between two people at an interdenominational gathering. One person asks the other, "Do you believe in infant baptism?" The second person responds, "Believe in it? Why, I've actually seen it done!"

Our eroticized culture may take a jaded view of the prospects for friendship between the generic Woman and the generic Man, but even the most worldly among us may be silenced when faced with the indisputable excellence of one such actual friendship. Our questions can then turn from "Is this possible?" to "How can I participate in that?"

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (Greywolf Press, 1986) contains the remarkable correspondence, over an 18-month period, of two talented writers, Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright. Silko, a Laguna Pueblo Indian who has since won great acclaim as a novelist, essayist, and poet, was 30 years old when their friendship began, living in Arizona and trying to carry on her career while teaching part-time in university writing programs. James Wright, 20 years her senior, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of English at Hunter College in New York. As Anne Wright, who edited the book, says in her introduction, "Leslie Silko and James Wright met only twice. The delicacy and strength of their friendship was to grow through letters." Their first brief meeting was at a writers conference in 1975; their last meeting was in a hospital room where James Wright lay dying of cancer.

The relationship that unfolds in The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is a fitting vehicle for reflecting on the special gifts conferred by friendships between women and men. The affection and support between Silko and Wright display the basic structure of such friendships, which, among the varieties of human affection, have their own distinctive excellence. Granted, marriages and same-gender friendships share many of the goods produced and displayed by friendship between women and men: the giving of aid, comfort, affection, and joy; the contributing to each other's shared pursuit of the good. What makes friendship between women and men distinctive is the nature of the balancing required to keep it from transmuting into romantic or marital love. This balancing generates a tension that can itself be a creative, spiritual good if it is recognized and blessed for what it is:

a call to joyful renunciation that necessitates a conscious reliance on grace.

Silko and Wright's correspondence was initiated by Wright in 1978 with a letter of thanks to Silko for her book Ceremony. Though the letter is warm in its praise ("I think I am trying to say that my very life means more to me than it would have meant if you hadn't written Ceremony"), it also is unmistakably formal, from its opening, "Dear Mrs. Silko," to its closing, "Sincerely, James Wright." Leslie quickly responds in kind; between her formal opening and closing she gives fragments of personal revelation ("Your letter came at a time when I needed it most. So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children--it is good to know that my work means something"), along with praise for the directness and leanness of the poetry she remembers his having read at the conference where they met.

In the course of several letters, they move from being Mr. Wright and Mrs. Silko to being Jim and Leslie; within two months, their closings have moved from "Sincerely" through "With friendship" to "Love." Very soon, they are exchanging work, reflections on literature and their craft, and personal anecdotes. They quickly find and express a sense of solace in one another's being: Leslie says of Wright's poetry, "I trust your voice, just as I trust a few others," and Jim says, "I am extremely glad, and, in a way, relieved, that you exist." The correspondence itself becomes a connection they each value. Jim continues to write while he and his wife, Anne, spend several months traveling in Europe. On January 9 Jim writes from Nice that "nothing would give sharper pleasure than to hear from you again." In Leslie's response of January 23 she says, "I felt lonesome for you. So I was very happy to get the letter." She feels that Jim's cards and letters bring her along with him and Annie in their travels.

Part of what cements their friendship is a shared valuing of the power of well-crafted prose to capture the revelatory aspects of the mundane. Leslie is a storyteller down to her marrow, and her letters reflect this. Her rooster very early becomes a character within her narratives to Jim. She savors his cantankerousness:

I am glad I have this rooster because I never quite believed roosters so consistently were as the stories tell us they are. On these hot Tucson days, he scratches a little nest in the damp dirt under the Mexican lime tree by the front door. It is imperative for him that the kittens and the black cat show him respect, even deference, by detouring or half-circling the rooster as they approach the water dish which is also under the lime tree. If they fail to do this, then he jumps up and stamps his feet, moving sideways until they cringe. This done, he goes back to his mud nest.

She offers continuing updates on the rooster over the next months. In March, when coyotes come and kill the rooster and hens, she shares her sense of mourning: "He was a mean and dirty bird but we loved him in a strange sort of way. Our friends who had been pursued or jumped by rooster find it difficult to appreciate our loss."

In August, a roadrunner starts to make himself at home, stealing rags and pieces of paper out of the back of her truck. She takes him to be a sort of replacement for the rooster:

This morning he jumped on the ledge of our bedroom window and was looking inside with the same expression in his little crazed eyes that rooster used to have, though the roadrunner seems more determinedly curious and audacious than rooster ever was--I suppose because rooster was domesticated a little.

She decides that the roadrunner may be a more practical "pet" to have, since he will have more defenses against coyotes.

These simple stories touch Jim, generating a series of connected reflections, which he shares with Leslie:

Of course I never saw your rooster, and he never had a chance to jump me, but I can share your feelings for him, and for the small white hens. What you wrote about the improbability of loving this fierce little creature struck me very deep, because your words are so close to a passage in Spinoza's Ethics. . . . Spinoza says that the human being is a miraculous creature, and his miracle consists in his capacity for love. He can love anything, from an atom all the way to God. But it is just here, says Spinoza, that the tragic difficulty arises. For man must realize that his capacity for love gives him no right to demand that anyone love him in return. Not anyone. Not even God.

As the rooster generates an exchange of reflections on the nature of love, the roadrunner is the occasion for talking about restoration, return, and kinship with nature.

Lace becomes another significant topic. While in Belgium, Jim buys a piece of lace that he sends to Leslie as a birthday present. In the letter with which the lace is enclosed, he reflects:

Sometimes I wonder about things like lace, things that human beings make with their own hands, things that aren't much help as shelter from the elements or against war and other kinds of brutality. Lace was obviously no help to the Belgians during two horrifying invasions in this century. Nevertheless, the art continues to survive, the craftsmen weaving away with the finest precision over their woofs and spools.

Leslie responds:

Your letter with the lace, and the thought of how lace must not be much good in wars, brought me somehow to the blossoming trees, so white I can only think of a snowstorm, and how vulnerable (but of course that's the "good" of the lace--that it is no good against bullets--something like the rooster who was no damn good at all, making him precious indeed) the budded trees are in late winter storms.

Anne Wright, in choosing the title of the book and beginning it with Rilke's poem, "The Lace," draws a parallel between the nature of lace and the excellence of this friendship. Woven of the words that they exchange, it has the intricacy and the resiliency of fine lace. Its good, like the good of the lace and rooster, is intrinsic, not utilitarian. Their friendship is an intrinsic good, the excellence of which does good for its recipients. Writing to Jim about the rooster and the place of rooster stories in her family helps Leslie discover another dimension of storytelling and its importance. Regarding this, in a letter written in May she expresses a mixture of gratitude and longing:

For this and for your dear and beautiful letters I want to thank you. I am feeling a little lonely tonight and wishing this might be conversation and not a letter, though I love the letters just as much--you understand, I think. I miss you--take good care of yourself and Annie.

Jim replies:

Of course I can't know whether or not the world looks strange to God. But sometimes it looks strange to me. In the same mail with your letter . . . I heard from Lois Shelton, director of that Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. . . . She's asked me to come down in the spring of 1980. Annie and I will certainly come there. . . . We will certainly meet and have good long walks and talks some time or other. But I was moved that those two letters arrived at the same time. The world can go on being as strange as it likes, for all of me. There are good signs appearing in it from time to time.

By November, Jim feels the paradox of an intimacy grown at such a distance: "I miss you--again, an odd thought, since we've never really met. But we will. Please write when you can."

Jim, from the beginning, wants to be of help to Leslie in whatever way he can. In his second letter to her, he offers to write a letter of recommendation for her if she wishes to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Much later in their friendship, he delicately inquires about her financial situation. Though there is at times a hint of paternalism based on the gap in their ages and professional standing, overall the friendship is (as Aristotle thinks all friendship must be) a relationship of equality in which help-giving is mutual.

Much of what Leslie and Jim give each other is through the exchange of stories. When Leslie loses her child custody case, she shares her pain and distress:

This is my second divorce, while Laguna is just now learning about divorce at all . . . it's shaping up that I am known now for my husbands; many of the older people who remembered me for the horses I was always training and falling off--so many of them are gone now. I'd rather be remembered for the horses.

Leslie, in her first two letters, had alluded briefly and sketchily to problems with her marriage and children. Jim had deftly responded, "I once endured a divorce. I mention this, not to tell you the story of my life, which is commonplace and boring, but only to suggest that I can understand how bruised, even shattered, you have felt." It is not, thus, surprising when she writes:

you, dear friend, are the only person I am able to correspond with these days. I feel particularly mute with members of my own family and other friends who know too well the recent events--the court custody fight, etc. There's not really anything to say about it, but I feel a tension--people expecting an explanation or accounting. I suppose I might just be imagining this, but anyhow, I can't write to anyone.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 28

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