A tale of camaraderie lost to politics

Boston Globe

5 hours ago

Night after night they let him sit nearby, watching and listening as they talk about the weather, the Swedish immigrant farmers, the cattle, the planting, the chanciness of farming, whether they prefer 'Richard the Second' or 'Hamlet,' the transit of Venus, and eclipses of the sun and moon.
The story takes on an elegiac tone as the now grown-up narrator remembers those nights, the two men sitting in the shadows, the pinkish-brick wall behind them, the moonlight drenching the scene. 'They seemed like two bodies held steady by some law of balance, an unconscious relation like that between the earth and the moon. It was this mathematical harmony which gave a third person pleasure.'
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But then politics enters the equation and the harmony is shattered.
Up until now the fact that one man is a Democrat and the other a Republican hasn't really mattered. Their differences have been tolerable, even something to joke about. But the story takes place during the turbulent 1890s, when political allegiances suddenly became much more polarized and political passions turned to hate. Dillon becomes deeply involved in electioneering for his party's charismatic candidate. Trueman loudly expresses his contempt for the ideas Dillon is espousing, calling them naive and dangerous. The friendship quickly and permanently falls apart.
One man dies of pneumonia soon afterward. The other leaves town and dies a few years later in a San Francisco hotel. Without the equilibrium of the friendship, both men founder.
'Two Friends' is a compassionate but also dispassionate story. By the time Cather wrote it, the political figures and the entire political landscape of the 1890s had faded. She was not trying to rile us up about politics; she's looking at the way riled-up politics can poison personal relationships and entire communities.
Yet she was not advocating for reconciliation at any cost or suggesting that we should abandon our principles in order to preserve a dishonest calm. She's not trying to teach a lesson or to tell us what to do. She's just observing, the way her narrator did as a boy and does again as a man looking back with the benefit of hindsight.
At the end of the story the narrator brings us back to the memory of those moonlit nights. Writing of the rupture between the two friends, Cather has him say, 'It lost me my special pleasure of summer nights: the old stories of the early West that sometimes came to the surface; the minute biographies of the farming people; the clear, detailed, illuminating accounts of all that went on in the great crop-growing, cattle-feeding world; and the silence — the strong, rich, outflowing silence between two friends, that was as full and satisfying as the moonlight. I was never to know its like again.'
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Joan Wickersham's latest book is, 'No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck." Her column appears regularly in the Globe.