Men As Friends: From Cicero to Svevo to Cataldo

By Irwin Epstein

Neither a cautionary tale nor a polemic, Men as Friends is about a variety of male friendships and a variety of men. A "coming-of-old-age story," it speaks to an audience of men who love or have loved oth

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781646639922

Irwin Epstein

Irwin Epstein, PhD, is a professor emeritus of the City University of New York and has enjoyed an award-winning international career as a health and mental health educator and researcher on topics ranging from neonatal abnormality in the UK to "good death" in Hong Kong. Irwin became a Fulbright senior scholar at the University of Wales (Cardiff) at thirty and has authored several research texts and innumerable journal articles too boring to describe. A onetime single father who raised two writers, he has been married to a courageous cancer-battler for thirty years.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book is about men I’ve loved and a few I didn’t. At a time when so much is written about male toxicity, predation, destructive aggression, and pathology—epitomized to my great embarrassment by Jeffrey Epstein, who shared my surname but little else—I thought it might be the perfect time for me to explore my loving and lasting relationships with the men who were my fellow travelers. Nice men. Good men. Imperfect men. Men trying. Like me.

In so doing, I consider a few men I might have loved but didn’t, despite long years of highly productive collaborative work together as researchers, academics, and co-authors, as well as men who shared personal details of lives we each led, in part, together. Arguably, I might have loved them, but something always stood in the way. Something I didn’t articulate to myself, nor until recently ever really thought about.

As I write this book, I wonder what it was that stood in the way. But I’m hoping that by examining those relationships in comparison with men I so easily and lastingly loved, I might come to understand more about me and them and our not-so-loving friendships. When I was a sociologist and research professor, I might have called the effort a comparative case study. For me now, it is so much more. It’s an effort to make meaning of an essential, structural axis of my life.

This book is written for men, for women who love men, and for women who don’t believe men are capable of intimacy with other men, or women, or anyone at all. Most importantly, it is written for men who, for whatever reasons, might resist and thereby deny themselves this form of intimacy with other men and resist naming it love.

Recently, my wife, Fran, called my attention to a two-column death notice in the New York Times. The author, a man of approximately my age, wrote touchingly of a tender and mutually supportive friendship that survived seven decades he had shared with a guy named Eddie. After reading it, my competitive male agro impulse was, I hope this guy isn’t writing a memoir about Eddie and him, until Fran pointed out that, notwithstanding the profound grief and quotidian details of their friendship since the age of fifteen, the word love never appears in the notice.

Months later, it was August of 2022. We were in the hospital once again. Fran, my hero who had courageously done battle with three different cancers over the course of three decades, was receiving yet another form of chemotherapy. Though I had been a research consultant at the same hospital for over two decades, that day I was merely arm candy. As Fran dosed off, I asked whether she had anything I could read?

She handed me a rolled-up copy of the latest New Yorker. In it was a review by a woman about two books on the topic of male toxicity—one book about contemporary man and the other beginning with Neanderthals. Months later, my daughter forwarded an article from the New York Times about men’s incapacity to forge deep and lasting friendships with other men. Instructions were proffered, instructions my daughter pointed out were written by a woman. She wondered why?

It was time for my book, we both agreed. For all their concupiscence and cupidity, I thought both contemporary men and Neanderthals had gotten a bad rap. Nearing age eighty-five, I couldn’t have been there caring for Fran so devotedly if not for the lifelong support and love of my various male friends.

This book is about them. It harkens to the distant voice of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman who wrote about friendship and old age. It listens to the more recent Modernist voice of Italo Svevo, the Triestine Jew whose essays about aging echoed Cicero but added a tender, self-effacing humor. Svevo was arguably Joyce’s model for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Joyce was famously quoted to say that men could not love other men. If I were a literary scholar, I might argue that Joyce loved Bloom and Svevo, by proxy.

But if I have any objective at all, it’s to embark on a fearless journey of discovery, self-understanding, and self-healing like that of Bernard Ollivier’s, but without my schlepping to Samarkand—savoring without privation a celebration of that part of my life that has been a joy and comfort by memorializing the not-famous men who made those emotions possible in good and in bad times. If my primary purpose seems selfish, at least it’s well-intended. This is not a revenge memoir—about my father or about men I could not truly love. Though I am at times critical of their behaviors, I mean no ill to their memories. After all, he was my father, and they remained my friends.

CHAPTER 1

MY FATHER, MY PATERFAMILIAS*

As a semantic term, paterfamilias thus connoted heads of household who were thought to combine the affective tenderness of a father with the stern coercion of a slave-owner in ordering their households.

~Wikipedia.

Not every paterfamilias is tender. A master diamond setter by trade, my father was paranoid, perceptive, and psychologically powerful by adult inclination. He wasn’t born that way, but the external circumstances of his life shaped him. At work, those attributes came in handy.

Just as for all diamond setters—skilled artisans who set gemstones into fine jewelry—survival and success in business meant being obsessively attentive to minute details and having hands that could cease pushing platinum and white gold prongs over at precisely the right moment the valuable stone in the center of the engagement ring is as secure as the marriage it portends. But despite lofty promises, marriages dissolve, and despite their notorious strength, diamonds can chip and even explode with the slip of a tool. If you’re setting someone else’s 5-carat, perfect blue-white gem in a platinum engagement ring and you inadvertently break it, you eat it.

Genuine emeralds are much softer than diamonds and often internally flawed. Consequently, they are even easier to break, but just as scratchy going down the gullet. In my father’s tiny workshop, when emeralds were being set, the radio was turned off. Conversation was unthinkable.

The atmosphere in my father’s workplace alternated between one of extreme stress and occasional breaks for casual schmoozing with visiting Orthodox Jewish diamond dealers whose long black coats held wallets full of diamonds—each with its own stories of origin, ownership, polishing, travel, and consensually arrived-at value. Stories were told in English, with a smattering of Yiddish. When I was there, I was grateful for the English. The stories themselves were often ironic with a humorous ending. Like when the estate buyer next door gave his wife a recently acquired diamond pin to wear to a wedding—where the owner of the stolen pin and her husband, a judge, summoned the police! It was in the New York Daily News. Front page!

My father was a gifted storyteller as well, but all his stories started in danger and ended in near disaster. Like when he walked home from work in a hurricane and nearly stepped over a dead body that the police had not properly cordoned off. If my father hadn’t been so alert, he could have been electrocuted as well just by touching the body.

His narrow, two-workbench office was at 71 Nassau Street in downtown Manhattan—a jewelry manufacturing district far from and lesser known than the infamous Diamond District on West 47th Street. Though in a jewelry-dedicated office building—now a luxury residential condominium—it was neither an office, a store, nor a lowly workshop to him. Instead, he referred to it as the place. He did piecework, in which he charged by the individual necklace, ring, or brooch and paid in cash. Records—one for each customer—were kept in easily discarded brown pocket notebooks, should the IRS arrive unannounced.

I started working for him on Saturdays when I was about ten, and my not-so-comforting introduction to the neighborhood was his telling me that convicted criminals caught anywhere on the streets surrounding the place were ipso facto in violation of their paroles and subject to arrest by plainclothesmen (a.k.a. flatfoots) who cruised the busy streets. I imagined streets full of criminals, but he assured me that I was safe because no one would suspect a kid like me was picking up and dropping off precious jewelry. But I was instructed to always (emphasis his) walk with one hand in the pocket holding valuables to thwart the many pickpockets lurking on the street just looking for an innocent and unsuspecting kid like me.

With proper training and nurturance, paranoia can flower at an early age. Fearing cops as well as thieves, I imagined being taken for a thief or pickpocket and having to answer to a very big and tough detective’s, Where’d you get the diamonds, kid? Since my father thought that all cops were crooked as well, this set of contradictions troubled me greatly even when he just sent me to get him an extra-lean corned beef sandwich from the deli across the street. Slip the counter man a quarter, he’d say, "before you order, so you’ll be sure to get it the way I want