The Strength to Survive : As hostages, three men shared similar experiences. But reclaiming their lives meant writing books with singular tales of resurrection.

They were locked in a box of a cell, chained to walls and permitted just 10 minutes a day to relieve themselves.

Humiliation ran high; sanity was precious, and possibly fleeting.

To guard his mental equilibrium in these conditions, one man wrote an entire book inside his head. Another reclaimed the long-abandoned faith of his childhood. A third, shut off from sun and soil, replenished his tattered reserves of reason with dreams of landscape gardening.

Released from confinement at the hands of Islamic extremists, Terry Waite, Terry Anderson and Brian Keenan sped their separate ways. But now, with books by the three ex-hostages launched simultaneously in this country, they find themselves reunited in an odd literary horse race.

Publishing their stories in a single season pits Waite, Anderson and Keenan in a marketing strategy where heroism takes on a competitive edge. In reviews, the books are lumped together in the recently evolved genre known as “hostage memoirs.”

Comparisons are inevitable, and so apparently is the urge to offer more than three interpretations of the same dehumanizing experience. Already, magazine excerpts from Anderson’s “Den of Lions” (Crown) have painted a tense “tale of two Terrys” that suggest that he and Waite, in particular, grew to loathe one another.

Anderson, embarrassed by what he insists was sensationalistic manipulation of his manuscript, promptly called Waite to apologize. What a silly trivialization of a saga that is most of all about survival, Anderson said. Besides, he pointed out, who on Earth could be surprised that five men locked in a room together for years on end might on occasion be “less than gentle and polite?”

“People want to dwell on the discord,” the former Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press said from his home outside New York City. “What they don’t dwell on is the support we gave one another.”

To promote “Taken on Trust,” Waite’s publisher, Harcourt Brace, meanwhile has taken out full-page ads in book sections around the country that promise the true story from “the most famous of all the hostages.”

By telephone from England, the former envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury decried this strange claim-to-confinement-fame as simple gimmickry. But then Waite asked, “How’s my book doing over there?”--the only one of the three to seek such information. “What about Terry’s? And Brian’s?”

And Brian Keenan, secluded in an Irish village, waxed ambivalent about the prospect of leaping onto the hostage book bandwagon. His “An Evil Cradling” soared to the top of British best-seller lists when it was published there last year, making Keenan all too aware of the perils of public scrutiny.

“It’s rather like coming out of the freezer and into the frying pan,” Keenan said. “One of the things I tell people is it seems its own kind of prison. And I’ve had enough of those.”

Yet while mindful of the consequences of reliving their ordeals, each ex-captive was acutely conscious of the benefits. In his nearly five years of confinement following his capture in January, 1987, Waite transformed his imprisonment into a journey of self-analysis.

“A small boy sits on a garden chair under a clear blue sky,” he wrote, longhand, on the yellow pad that awaited him following his release in 1991. The words poured forth because they had already formed clearly in his head, serving as the ballast that Waite believes may well have been the key to his survival.

“By objectifying the experience you learn how to understand it, and how to handle it,” explained Waite, who, held in solitary, did not even see his fellow hostages for almost four years.

Exploring his childhood, his work as an envoy for the Anglican Church and his status as a political prisoner allowed him also to delve into the deep philosophical questions of life, Waite said. Time, especially, took on new significance.

“In some ways the past, the present and the future find their meaning in the moment,” Waite said. “In some ways, without meaning to sound highfalutin, you begin to capture what is meant by eternity.”

For Keenan, the process of writing was about repossession. Keenan, a Belfast-born poet, had been in Beirut just four months, teaching English literature at the American University, when he was grabbed by Shi’ite gunmen in 1986. Amid the beatings, the illness, the degradation and the disappointment of what he calls, with dripping irony, 4 1/2 years of “holidays in Lebanon,” Keenan battled his own demons, daring madness to “take me where it would.”

Returning to freedom, Keenan plunged into the rigorous emotional portrait that became “An Evil Cradling” because “so much is taken and so much is lost” in the brutal depths impoundment.

“Your identity. Your sense of values. Your future,” Keenan said. “You have to repossess them.”

But Anderson--Boy Scout, honor student, Marine--was determined to leave no shred of himself with his captors.

“To come out whole meant that we didn’t give them anything,” said Anderson, held for 2,455 days--the longest of any of the foreigners imprisoned in Lebanon.

“I don’t think I was damaged,” he went on. “The only way that experience could have had that kind of effect was if I continued to hate (his captors), to be bitter and angry, and to think about the things that I missed in those seven years.

“If I had done that, they might not have won, but they would have damaged me--and I’m not going to let that happen. I don’t think that would be right.” After all, said Anderson of the Islamic Holy warriors who held him, “They don’t care whether I hate them or not--and all that kind of thing can do is to spoil my life now.”

After his release on Dec. 4, 1991, Anderson spent eight months reclaiming his life. He got to know his daughter, Sulome, born three months after he was taken prisoner. He married Madeleine Bassil, Sulome’s mother. He wrote poetry. Then the onetime investigative journalist systematically investigated his own story.

Re-embracing Catholicism helped him endure, Anderson relates in “Den of Lions.” But Anderson had faith also in the love of Bassil, whose voice filters through “Den of Lions” in the form of long, italicized passages. Anderson said the couple wrote the book in tandem, and found that “as we were writing the book, we were telling each other very clearly what happened to each other. I found that enormously helpful.”

Each had been living in a separate kind of prison, they discovered. “She was nominally free,” Anderson said. “But I didn’t have to make decisions the way she did. I was chained to a wall.”

And so “Den of Lions” emerged most of all as a love story, with devotion put to the unthinkable test of dire and desperate circumstance. Its outcome has brought Anderson a comfort he scarcely allowed himself to dream of.

“It’s something I don’t know if I can explain to anybody, to know that someone loves me that much,” he said.

In the dreadful dungeon where they were held, the men forged fondness of another kind. They were in many cases the most unlikely of acquaintances, and theirs was a kind of enforced friendship. Thrust together, they found companionship and, grudgingly, the pure love that unites the closest of cronies.

Keenan, a working-class Irishman, writes movingly of the improbable emotional bond that grew between him and John McCarthy, an upper-class Englishman who had come to Beirut to film a news feature about Keenan’s disappearance--only to be taken hostage himself. It was humor that cemented Keenan and McCarthy; laughter and an appreciation for the absurd that saw them through the beatings and the depths of despair.

Some days, Keenan writes, “We were children playing games. In his foolishness, John, as he raced around, would slap his backside pretending to be riding a horse.” Other days, they would sit opposite one another, holding imaginary telephones, impersonating overblown British political figures.

“In our laughter, we discovered something of what life really is,” Keenan recounts in “An Evil Cradling.” “We were convinced by the conditions we were kept in and the lives that we managed to lead that if there was a God that God was, above all else, a comedian. In human, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calculated, often childish humor, life was returned to us.”

Confined in separate rooms, Keenan and Waite never met face-to-face. Still, they managed to “speak” through a wall. But Keenan and Anderson spoke daily and directly, often engaging in long and amiable semantic debates.

“Courage” was a word whose meaning they often discussed. Another was “hero.” And then there was “love.” Just what could those terms really mean to five men in a hole?

“The argument was really about the lacking in our language of words to describe what we were experiencing,” Keenan said as he recalled these ongoing verbal jousts. “It was my sense that words were insignificant to convey what we understood about ourselves.”

Keenan laughed, because the differences of opinion were never resolved.

“Terry (Anderson), of course, being a journalist, good-humoredly could not accept that,” Keenan said.

There were, of course, moments when good humor did not prevail. “We were all difficult men to live with,” Anderson said--and he was no exception. “I spend half the book saying what a (expletive) I was.”

Uncertainty made him crazy some days, and cranky on most, Anderson said. “But what was craziest of all was being away from my family--and having absolutely no privacy, 24 hours a day.”

As a consequence, the hostages learned “to give each other mental and psychological privacy,” Anderson recalled. This took some doing: “It was very difficult for a man of my temperament--aggressive, arrogant--to accept the kind of petty humiliation” that took place in custody.

But bickering was only that, Anderson said. “It’s wrong to have a picture of this roomful of men arguing with each other.” In fact, “we became enormously close. We helped each other. We nursed each other. We encouraged each other.”

For some, the contact has continued. Keenan said Anderson visited him in Ireland three times in the first year following their release. Anderson and Waite have spoken on the phone on several occasions, always cordially. All speak of each other with respect and fondness.

Held apart from the others for four long years, Terry Waite was initially thrilled to join his fellow hostages in a communal cell. But soon minor irritations grated on all of them. McCarthy’s relentless jocularity especially irked Waite.

“I got totally, irrationally angry with John McCarthy,” Waite said.

Waite entered the group situation in frail health. His asthma made him wheeze like a locomotive. “Imagine having to put up with my heavy breathing,” he said. “I was a great strain on the group.”

They were wildly different individuals, Waite pointed out. “None of us, I suppose, would necessarily have chosen each other for companions or friends.” But “many people tend to think of ‘the hostages’ as a unit.”

Individually or collectively, Waite maintained, these captives of fate and politics happened upon a role of exaggerated proportions.

“I think for all of the hostages, it is the mythical element--disappearance, which equates to death, and reappearance, which equates with resurrection--that interests people,” Waite said.

But while “the situation of suffering faced by the hostages was made unusual by the circumstances,” he said, “it is really no greater in fact than the suffering of a family that sits by the side of their dying child.”

This thought makes Terry Waite, for one, rush to shrug off the label that is so often attached to all the hostages. “Heroes?,” Waite asked. “The world is full of heroes.”

It is much the same impulse that makes Brian Keenan strive to “get rid of the idea of being ‘Brian Keenan, hostage.’ ” Writing their books has defined them in this way, like it or not.

But “one of the things that happened to all of us, certainly to me, is that you rediscover things in yourself,” Keenan said. “So many things come into your mind. You hone them and shape them to keep yourself sane.

“And if you don’t go and do something with them,” he wondered, “then aren’t you still locked up?”

Anderson, too, refutes the notion that as a returning hostage he is imbued with superhuman valor.

“That’s one thing I’m not, a hero,” he said. “Heroism involves making choices. It involves courage. I didn’t have any choice. I just did what I had to do.”

What he has to do now, apparently, is “speak my mind--which I have to tell you, is an enormous amount of fun.” Anderson is co-chair of the Vietnam Memorial Assn., which hopes to “build a memorial to the 2 million Vietnamese who lost their lives in the war, as a gesture of healing and recognition of their loss.” He has also set up the Alliance for New York Renaissance, a grass-roots civic organization aimed at reforming government in New York state.

Rumors persist that Anderson will seek elective office. But “whether I am going to run for anything or not is an open question,” he said.

Locked up in his cell, Waite resolved that “if I ever get out of here, I’m going to read more, I’m going to write more and I’m going to continue to engage in humanitarian activities.”

The first has happened, he said, and with the publication of “Taken on Trust,” so has the second. (Next, Waite promises, a sequel--and later, a novel.) And in Britain, he continues to work with a support program for victims of violent crime, among other service groups.

“I’m not at all sure that I really want to go back into the employ of someone else,” he said.

As for Brian Keenan, teaching is the stuff of a previous life. “I might try and write a book about a fabulous Irish musician called Turlough O’Carolan,” a blind harpist who lived in the late 1700s. “Being Irish, he’s quite forgotten,” Keenan said.

But more likely, he will turn to the soil. “There I was in this hole in the ground, and I wanted to know everything about plants and color and form,” Keenan said. Thoughts of a garden sustained him when he was a hostage, and made him feel, in that crater of helplessness, omnipotent.

“It’s what you have to do with your own existence, isn’t it?” Keenan said. “You have to reshape your own landscape too.”

TERRY WAITE

Born: May 31, 1939, in Bollington, Cheshire, England.

Kidnaped: Jan. 20, 1987, while serving as Middle Eastern emissary for the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Released: Nov. 18, 1991

Personal data: Married since 1964 to Helen Frances Watters; four children. Writes in an office provided by Cambridge University, and also has homes in London and the English countryside.

BRIAN KEENAN

Born: Sept. 28, 1950, in Belfast, Ireland

Kidnaped: April 11, 1986, while teaching at the American University in Beirut.

Released: Aug. 24, 1990.

Personal data: Recently married to his physical therapist, Audrey Doyle. They live in Ireland.

TERRY ANDERSON

Born: Oct. 27, 1947, in Lorain, Ohio

Kidnaped: March 16, 1985, in Beirut. Anderson was working as Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press.

Released: Dec. 4, 1991. He was the longest-held Western hostage.

Personal data: Married to Madeleine Bassil. They have a daughter, Sulome, 8, and live outside New York City.