Friends and Countrymen

By Roger Rosenblatt

Friendship among nations usually takes the shape of treaties and alliances, so it is arresting to observe the genuine article from time to time: Anwar Sadat's attentiveness to the Shah, for recent example, or Canada's rescue of U.S. embassy personnel in Iran. Hard hearts like La Rochefoucauld demean such acts as "species of commerce," as debts paid or incurred. Yet most people saw Canada's courage and Sadat's ministrations simply as exertions of affection over inconvenience. And it is fascinating to note the effects that such acts always have on us, how quickly they divert the gaze from politics and toward things more generally human.

But what is friendship exactly? Is it an idea that applies to nations at all? Sociologists, both pop and classical, who write obsessively on all other social relationships stay clear of this one, perhaps because it lends itself more easily to art than to numbers. Even poets have had quite a time with it. Shakespeare, although managing a fine friendship between Hamlet and Horatio, created a ludicrous situation in Two Gentlemen of Verona, with Valentine preserving his friendship by casually offering to hand over his girl. Painters have rarely touched the subject. The dozen or so versions of The Good Samaritan are notable exceptions, but the moral of that parable is really charity, not friendship.

Philosophers have taken to friendship more often and with more zeal, although the subject seems to bring out the worst in them, hitting the soft spots. Emerson waxed so lyrical about it as to sound insincere. Montaigne, who wrote the most beautiful essay on friendship, gave more of a personal tribute to his friend La Boetie than a definition. Bacon, who thought "Of" everything, wrote Of Friendship as well, but he was a very bad friend. For one thing, he considered friendship a "hazard," one he avoided neatly by prosecuting his old friend Essex for treason. For another, he was mainly concerned with the practical business of friendship, with what it does rather than what it is. What it is offers more of a problem. When either people or countries smile and say "friend," they can mean anything from darling to sucker.

There are friendships based on passion, on pity, on pleasure, on companionship, on professional advantage, on camaraderie-in-arms, on intellectual agreement, on mutual admiration, on spiritual conviction, on personal advancement, on hero worship, on protection, on fear, on need, on loyalty. None of these elements precludes any other, and most friendships incorporate several of them at once. But every friendship has its own main reason for being, the place that you must reach to repair or destroy it. The places vary. What all friendships, both personal and national, have in common is that they are voluntary. Then, too, they all operate on faith, no matter how reasonable they appear.

In the movie Frankenstein, there is a touching scene in which the escaped monster comes upon the cottage of a blind hermit. The hermit, thinking his visitor merely inarticulate and impetuous, calls him friend, which the monster repeats and comprehends. Their idyl is disrupted by the pursuing villagers, but until they arrive the hermit exhibits the essence of friendship. He sees only the man within the monster, holding wider judgments in abeyance, or leaving them to others.

So Samuel Johnson, who mixed gratitude with friendship, defended a benefactor, Henry Hervey, a reprobate despised by everyone else, including Hervey's father. "If you call a dog Hervey," said Johnson to Boswell, "I shall love him." Boswell himself, though no monster, could get on Johnson's nerves, yet Johnson loved him too. His friendship for Boswell was probably based on the need for attentive company, as was Boswell's for him on the need for the approval of an elder. Such friendships between unequals are precarious, but so are all friendships. Passion cools, pleasure fades, pity and hero worship breed resentment, companionship grows boring, need degenerates to dependence, comradeship loses its occasion. Suddenly, it is clear how fragile friendship is, how quickly it can be replaced by enmity, or by nothing.

The one type of friendship that does not break easily is that based on loyalty, since loyalty comes only after an accumulation of other feelings, and must be earned. Friendships among nations, when they mean anything, are based on loyalty, because loyalty incorporates a sense of history. At the same time, loyalty, which is often as blind as love and justice, can also be dangerous. Harry Truman stood by his fellow Missourian, Harry Vaughan, a shady military aide who consorted with influence peddlers throughout Truman's Administration. Ike had his Sherman Adams, Carter his Lance. "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss," Dean Acheson told reporters in January 1950, citing as his precedent Matthew 25:34.

In those particular instances, the dangers of loyalty were largely professional. When wider issues are at stake, however, a loyal friend may be a traitor to the rest of us. E.M. Forster, who wrote a moving, if porous, defense of personal loyalty in 1939, of all years, declared: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Forster then went on to concede that his viewpoint might be shocking and called upon Dante for support, arguing that Dante placed "Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome." In fact, Forster had it backward. Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the ninth circle for the same reason he put Judas there, not because the three sinners were disloyal to friends but rather because they were disloyal to Church and Empire, and thus to the divine order of things, which Dante trusted far more than people.

It is telling that Kim Philby's fellow spy, Guy Burgess, was fond of quoting Forster's doctrine, since, thanks to a tip-off from Philby, Burgess was able to flee England for the Soviet Union. Not that Forster would have approved of Philby or Burgess; the event merely shows that personal loyalty can sound prettier than it is. In The Third Man, Graham Greene created a wholly honest hero, honesty being a tenet of good friendship, who is a loyal friend to an evil man. In the end, Holly Martins betrays the child-murderer Harry Lime because he comes to value the friendship of mankind, or, more abstractly, the friendship of doing right, over that of a single person. That, too, takes guts. Huck Finn, who had both God and friendship on his side, was luckier.

The trick, which no one has yet mastered, must be to choose one's friends so carefully that conflicts of loyalty do not arise. That may be why the New Testament generally ignores the idea of friendship: in order to suggest that individual friendships, like other temporal relationships, should be subsumed in Christianity. Yet Jesus loved John, and even Paul had friends. Whatever grand and lofty purpose friendship may serve, it is still most clearly recognized as something that one individual gives to another, something generous, expansive, akin to love but not exactly love. In a way, it is more difficult than love because it often makes moral demands that love overlooks.

No wonder, then, that the U.S. has suffered some acute headaches this past year watching its allies--its official friends--in various tests and then deciding which of them is worthy of the name. If Britain was true blue in joining the American shout at the Ayatullah, was Australia less of a friend in refusing to support the Olympic boycott? What of France, of France especially, America's oldest international friend, its Revolutionary War buddy? How could it turn its back on the U.S.? The fact is that France, irritating as its behavior may be, as strictly disloyal as it may be, has been behaving more or less as Americans say that they wish their friends to behave: with a glowing, stalwart independence. Ideally, friends may gain a truer understanding of each other when they agree less and diverge more, and ideally, mutual understanding is an aim of friendship. And so, ideally again, the U.S. should have thumped old France on the back it turned. Of course, ideals really have nothing to do with the relationship. The U.S. is sore as hell at France (the U.S. is usually sore as hell at France) because France insists on being itself. Not that being oneself is necessarily a virtue in this instance. Friendship also depends on a shared sense of values.

As the U.S. mulls over the relationship with its allies these days, it may be no more sure of what makes for good friendship than what makes for good government, of where kindliness becomes interference, assistance domination: these are the old familiar battle lines. For their part, the allies may be wondering if the U.S. understood friendship as a true partnership or merely as a kind of protectorate, the protector now petulant and moody after several open rebuffs. Friendship applied to countries is as slippery as that applied to individuals, and must be safeguarded in similar ways. Each side has to realize when it has diverged too far--when, for the sake of the cheap thrill of discomfiting one's friend, it risks the friendship entirely.

The truth is, however, that while countries tend to see themselves as individuals, they are not individuals, and the friendships formed among nations have little of the gentleness and magnanimity, and even the common sense, that we associate with the best of friends. That is what made Sadat's and Canada's behavior so noticeable. The reason that Shakespeare had Mark Antony address his audience as "friends" before "Romans" and "countrymen" is that he knew how the heart leaps up at the smallest signs of brotherhood. Feeling more alone in the world than ever, we also leap at those signs.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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