The Oxford Book of Friendship

''Friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship''--so wrote Cole Porter for the musical DuBarry Was A Lady--a song and a sentiment we all can harmonize with. We all have friends, and if some writers have been more than a bit cynical--Emerson thought that friendship resembled the immortality of the soul ''in that it is too good to be true,'' and Schopenhauer compared friendship to a sea serpent, ''no one knows whether they are fabulous or really exist somewhere''--for the most part the world's literature and our own experience are filled with fine examples. In The Oxford Book of Friendship, one of England's best known poets, D.J. Enright, and David Rawlinson have brought together some of the world's best thoughts on friendship, found in excerpts from Shakespeare and the Bible, novels and poems, autobiographies, letters, and diaries, even personal ads from The New York Review of Books (''Handsome NYC poet emeritus, 59, seeks beautiful, bright, non-smoking woman. Dutch treat, naturally''). Here is friendship in all shapes and sizes: from the Bible and classical literature (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias), among literary figures (Goethe and Schiller, Lamb and Coleridge, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), even among animals (the friendship of Mole and Badger for Toad in The Wind in the Willows). There are interracial friendships (Queequeg and Ishmael, Huck Finn and Jim), friendships formed in concentration camps, young friends (Steerforth and David Copperfield), even the friendship we have for our pets. Thomas Mann, in ''A Man and his Dog,'' writes of his dog Bashan--''Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote''--and Alexander Pope, in his last known couplet, mourns the death of his pet Bounce. The ups and downs of friendship are also covered (Beethoven once wrote his friend Johann Hummel, ''You are a false dog, and may the hangman do away with all false dogs,'' and the very next day wrote, ''Come to me this afternoon.... Kisses from your Beethoven, also called dumpling''). And the editors conclude with a delightful potpourri of short sayings, such as the proverb, ''it is easier to visit friends than to live with them,'' and Emerson's sage advice, ''the only way to have a friend is to be one.'' C.S. Lewis observed that friends rarely talk about their friendship. In The Oxford Book of Friendship, Enright and Rawlinson have found thousands of sources to do the talking for us, to question what we've taken for granted, and bring out in the open what we've always left unsaid.

An anthology exploring all aspects of friendship from biblical times to today. The book is divided into 12 sections, beginning with thoughts on the nature of the phenomenon, and how to keep friends and how to lose them. The book looks at friendship among men, among women and between both sexes. Thoreau said that the honourable institution of friendship is `older than Hindostan and the Chinese Empire'. Much older in fact, for it originated with Adam, who soon desired the `rational delight' of fellowship, whereupon God agreed that it was not good for him to be alone. But the word `friendship' has many connotations, and this book divides into twelve sections to explore them all in detail. Beginning with thoughts on the nature of the phenomenon, and how to lose friends as well as keep them, the editors move on to friendship among men, among women, between women and men (including the troubled territory where friendship pays the penalty for blossoming into love), between humans and animals, in youth and in age, between individuals of disparate races and creeds, friendship under stress, in time of war and in prison camps, imaginary friends, failure and betrayal, reconciliation, absence and loss. From biblical friendships (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) to literary ones (Goethe and Schiller, Pound and Eliot), the evidence of deep and passionate feelings abounds, often expressed most eloquently in letters, such as the fifteen-year correspondence between John Masefield and a much younger admirer, and that between William Archer and his friend of forty years George Bernard Shaw. Is it better to have many friends or few? Are old friends best, or should we look for new ones? What do we most commonly expect of our friends, assistance or amusement? Hopes alternate with doubts, sceptics are represented (for Schopenhauer, true friendship belonged to the same category as the Loch Ness Monster) as well as enthusiasts, the down-to-earth as well as the high-minded. Embracing the intense and the tranquil, the sorrowful and the comical, The Oxford Book of Friendship makes irresistible reading and the perfect gift.