Sleeping with the Enemy

 

"Hate was just a failure of imagination."

Hận thù chỉ là thất bại của trí tưởng tượng.

 

Graham Greene đề nghị:

 

Cách tốt nhất để giải oan cho cuộc chiến Mít, là mời 1 anh, hay chị VC vô nhà và ngủ với người đó!

 

Pico Iyer là đệ tử của Graham Greene. Cuốn trò mê nhất của Thầy là “The Quiet American".

 

                               "Sleeping with the Enemy"

 

          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 fifty-one 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   shooting a German   lieutenant—and   then finding in the dead man's pocket a picture of his baby.

     That issue is one of the hardest dilemmas 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 life's work to understand every position. In Vietnam, in the 1950s, he sympathized with the Vietnamese guerrillas, and with the French colonialists they opposed; if he couldn't say no very easily, he couldn't say yes. And as a headmaster's son, he was a lifelong connoisseur of divided loyalties, knowing that for every commitment 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 turn-coatism. 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 (Noel 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.

 

                                                                    (1994)