Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Drifting along on the shifting tides of friendship

FAILED FRIENDSHIPS, like successful ones, have their own distinct chemistries. As a high schooler prowling the mean streets of Henderson, I was part of a trio of best friends (let's refer to the other two by their initials, A. and H., to protect the guilty). A., in particular, complemented my personality, with his lazy smarts and rabbit-punch sense of humor; we spent years commiserating with each other about women and engaging in brainless high jinks (stealing jack o' lanterns every Halloween was, in retrospect, a personal low). As time wore on, we assumed our buddy system would last forever, and it seemed to -- until the chemistry changed. Now I see H. just occasionally and haven't heard from A. in ages.

I was reminded of this sad state of affairs by the tale writer Paul Theroux tells in his new book (excerpted recently in the New Yorker) about his once-strong and now-ruined friendship with writer V.S. Naipaul.

Initially forged as a writers' mutual admiration society, with Theroux playing young pup to Naipaul's wise old dog, their relationship softened into real friendship. Theroux recounts moments of intimacy, trust and caring.

Nonetheless, things eventually curdled. Theroux doesn't seem to know why; the only real explanation that surfaces in the New Yorker excerpt is this: chemistry changes (the title of the piece is apt: "The Enigma of Friendship"). Naipaul's legendary prickliness darkened into a series of unpleasant snubs. Theroux's book is the slammed door at the end of a 30-year friendship, a sad, engaging spectacle.

Not all turbulent friendships end badly, of course. E.B. White and James Thurber, two of the leading lights of the old New Yorker, were fast friends until the 1940s, when fame and booze and health problems went to Thurber's head. He developed an unconcealed dislike of White's wife and wrote things that angered White. Nonetheless, a tenuous thread of affection remained, and the two eventually reknit their friendship. "I do not lose great friendships for reasons of weather, mundane or mental," Thurber wrote.

Ah, but you can't always ignore the weather. While A. and H. and I stayed tight for a long time (long enough to outgrow pumpkin-napping), A. finally sought to remedy his post-high-school aimlessness by joining the Navy. I saw him a few times during his hitch, including memorable visits to his postings in San Diego and Seattle, but he was changing, inexorably. The coarse grip of military life exacerbated his latent redneck intolerance and anti-intellectualism. In other words, the A. who mustered out of the Navy wasn't the A. who'd gone in. And although he briefly lived in my spare bedroom a few years later, neither proximity nor anything else could rekindle our friendship. He didn't bother to sign his last Christmas card, but that's OK -- I didn't send him one at all. Chemistry changes.

"If a person wishes to vanish from your life," Theroux writes, "there is really no miracle you can work to get him back." And so people who once had a hand in shaping your character drift out of sight or, like H., lodge in your peripheral vision. He lives just a few minutes from my house, but we're lucky to see each other a few times a year.

Still, I don't count H. as a failed friendship, just one laying low at the moment, waiting for a change in the weather.

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