SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

By Pico Iyer

ONE OF THE MOST REVEALING MOMENTS IN NORMAN Sherry's massive, ongoing biography of Graham Greene (with the second volume just published, he has now devoted 1,352 pages to Greene's first 51 years) comes at the very beginning, when Greene charges Sherry with compiling a list of his, the novelist's, enemies. Every man has enemies, Sherry replies. By the time the night is over, Greene has composed, with the help of his brother Hugh, his own extensive list of his lifetime's opponents and handed it to his biographer.

That might be said to be the paradoxical trademark of Graham Greene: that he rarely gave himself the benefit of his unending doubt, and that he invariably gave the men he was supposed to hate his best lines. He saw the folly, and the frailty, of everyone around him. Thus adulterers come to feel compassion for the husbands they're cuckolding; victims see the human side of their criminal tormentors; Fowler in The Quiet American comes to mourn the death of his rival in love and opponent in politics (schadenfreude in reverse, you could say). Even when he was writing wartime propaganda for the British government, Greene described an Englishman's shooting of a German lieutenant-and then finding in the dead man's pocket a picture of his baby.

That issue is one of the hardest struggles in every serious life, and one that faces us daily in the office, the bedroom, even the income tax form we sign: What to do with the person who opposes us? We know, more or less, how to deal with our friends, but what to do with those who tempt us to awaken the devil in ourselves (a far more pernicious temptation than any external devil affords)? Many religions counsel us to forgive those who trespass against us and to extend charity even to the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world; Buddhists actually argue that our enemies are our best friends because they challenge us to transcend ourselves. Yet still the debate between mercy and justice is as unending as the one between duty and love.

If all Greene's novels are essays on fallenness (and self-accusations), they are also, by the same token, arguments against the whole notion of enmity, or reminders, at least, that our enemies are no less vulnerable and right in their own minds than ourselves. With his famous taste for ambiguity, and refusal to see things in black and white (except in his condemnation of any institution that would treat humans as tokens, statistics or pawns), Greene made it his lifework to understand every position: one of his plays is even called Yes and No. And as a headmaster's son, he was a lifelong connoisseur of divided loyalties, knowing that for every commitment you honor, you betray another. As he put it in The Power and the Glory, "When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . When you saw the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."

To many, that kind of sympathy with the enemy could seem the worst kind of two-facedness or moral relativism: not so much turning the other cheek as sheer turncoatism. And by trying to see both sides of every argument, Greene contrived to make enemies on both sides of every fence: Catholics and agnostics, McCarthyites and communists, all found his conviction wanting. A would-be Christian who admits to putting people before principles gets accused of sentimentality by skeptics and of hypocrisy by believers. Those issues found their focus in Greene's unshakable loyalty to his old boss in British intelligence, the Soviet double agent Kim Philby: Which of us, he wrote, in introducing Philby's memoirs, has not betrayed something even more important to us than country?

Yet it could be said that Greene was never a truer Christian than when forgiving even his un-Christian enemies. This is not to whitewash a self-styled scapegrace who had so many treacheries and transgressions to confess (though it is to give him credit for confessing so openly to them). If he could be unusually tender toward his enemies, he could be unnaturally negligent of his loves. In his championing of the voiceless, the forgotten, the oppressed, he could conceive irrational and implacable prejudices against those he regarded as Established (No`l Coward, say). And sometimes, by his own admission, he could do the right thing for the wrong reasons, refusing to be straight with someone because he lacked the nerve.

It is, in fact, the ultimate strength of Greene's books that he shows us the hazards of compassion. We all know, from works like Hamlet, how analysis is paralysis and the ability to see every side of every issue prevents us from taking any side at all. The tragic import of Greene's work is that understanding can do the same: he could so easily see the pain of the people he was supposed to punish that he could not bear to come down hard on them. He became hostage to his own sympathies and railed at pity with the fury of one who was its captive. The most sobering lesson of Greene's fiction is that sleeping with the enemy is most with us when we're sleeping alone; and that even God, faced with a wounded murderer, might sometimes feel himself agnostic.