The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  Yet if I were really to want to learn about hauntedness—those people who seem so to stalk our footsteps that we can never be sure if they have slipped inside our beings or we are just drifting through their imaginations—the writer I would most likely turn to is, in fact, Graham Greene. The dream analyst he lived with as a boy no doubt reminded him that it was his mother’s first cousin who gave the world the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the perfect image for a writer who would habitually describe himself, like his grandfather, as manic-depressive, unable in his melancholy moods to imagine the prankster who, when full of deranged energy, could not begin to imagine that person who felt leaden, weighed down with guilt. Greene ends his slippery memoir, Ways of Escape—ways of escaping telling us anything at all, a skeptical reader might say—with an enigmatic epilogue called “The Other,” in which he describes how relentlessly shadowed he had long been by a man (or maybe two) who traveled the world, seeming to slip into his identity and doing the wildest things in his name.

  He received letters from strangers he’d never met, the novelist Greene tells us, that fondly remembered times they had passed together; he saw photographs in newspapers, from Jamaica to Geneva, of “Graham Greene the writer” squiring glamorous women around town and looking debonair (though the women in the photos were as strange to him as the man posing as “Graham Greene the writer,” who used his name to stay on tea plantations and wrote letters to an English magazine, claiming to be “simply a newsman after the truth”).

  At one point, the “other” Graham Greene seemed to end up in jail and asked the Picture Post in London to send him a hundred pounds because he’d lost his passport; it did so, and when the real Greene was tracked down, he promptly suggested to the same magazine that he fly over to Assam to interview his alter ego. Before long, however, the nimble impersonator had skipped bail and was off to his next exotic destination, or the next woman he planned to charm, partly by saying he was Graham Greene.

  It might almost have been a parable Greene had fashioned about the paradoxes of writing: the man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they’ve met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.

  Greene had long been fascinated, he confessed, by a poem of Edward Thomas’s, “The Other,” about a man shadowing someone like himself—“I pursued / To prove the likeness, and, if true, / To watch until myself I knew”—and now he wondered if, in following the exploits of this fugitive, he was indeed learning something about himself. Once, after having lunch with President Allende in Chile, he was himself taken to be the “unreal” Graham Greene, a fake. “Had I been the impostor all the time?” he ends his memoirs by writing. “Was I the Other?”

  Yet Greene was never quite so innocent as he claimed; he had devised an Other of his own, whom he called “Hilary Tench,” and sometimes he would address his wife or win magazine competitions under the pseudonym of “H. Tench,” a dark and cruel figure who seemed to speak for a shadow self, the unconscious impulses that made him do things “unlike himself” that he wished belonged to someone else. Traveling, he gave out business cards with the names of characters from his books on them, among them “H. Tench”; the first two words in his most celebrated novel, The Power and the Glory, are “Mr. Tench,” the name he gives an exiled dentist who lives in a Mexican village. Greene sometimes kept two versions of his diary—the book in which he might be expected to be most transparent—as if there were at least two versions of any day or story, Jekyll’s, perhaps, and Hyde’s.

  One day, he found another “Graham Greene” listed in the London phone book—the name is common enough—and called up the poor man to ask if he was the one responsible for the “filthy novels.” When the man stammered out his demurral—yes, his name was Graham Greene, but he was a retired solicitor—Greene berated him further for not having the courage to confess to the scandalous writings.

  It was a curious kind of self-attack from a man who claimed to have been assaulted (or praised) by strangers for deeds he had never committed; it spoke to a theological vision that suggested that few of us are innocents, yet all of us are innocent of most of the crimes that we are accused of, often by ourselves. Slipping in and out of identities would be what kept Greene alive, officially and otherwise, all his life.

  Graham Greene the novelist appeals to some of us, I think—even challenges our sense of who we are—in part because he is so acutely sensitive to all the ways we can fail to understand one another, even those people closest to ourselves; he knew his characters, he wrote in his memoirs, better than he knew anyone in real life. He becomes the caretaker of that part of us that feels that we are larger and much harder to contain than even we can get our heads around, and that there is a mystery, fundamental and unanswerable, in ourselves as in the world around us, which is in fact a part of what gives life its sense of hauntedness. It’s the best side of us, in his books—our conscience, our sense of sympathy, our feeling for another’s pain—that causes us the deepest grief. And God, if He even exists, is less a source of solace than a hound of Heaven, always on our path.

  Graham Greene knew the craving for knowledge, the horror of being reductively known that seems to trouble some of us. He inscribed his copy of The Quiet American in French to Yvonne, his companion of more than thirty years, “From the unknown Graham.” He knew that some things make little sense, like the fact that a con man can impersonate one of the best-known writers in the world, or that a scruffy mongrel living in Japan can feel that his deepest life story is being told by an Englishman of two generations before. The haunting power of his novels, often, comes from the “hunted man” at their center, the fugitive whom we long to see to safety as he tries to flee his pursuers and find the stillness and comfort that are all we can expect of Heaven (and are equally far from our reach). The pathos, the smothered kindness of his novels comes from the fact that the more generously the man tries to act, the more remote his salvation seems to become.

  When I was a boy, a terrible chill went through me as soon as I heard the opening chords, and voice-over, of the television show in the next room, where my parents sat at night. Television was a new presence then, especially in Oxford, a disembodied voice suddenly in our midst, and I could not begin to understand why the words so terrified me. But every time I heard the theme song of The Fugitive and the opening sentences about a wrongly convicted doctor in pursuit of a one-armed man who has killed the doctor’s wife, some ancient terror rose up and I buried myself more deeply under my bedclothes, trying to block out the sound, though now the image of a man running, out of breath, across the black-and-white darkness, and a killer on the loose, was with me all night, as potent as any memory of the convict Magwitch suddenly rising from among the gravestones in Great Expectations.

  Childhood is the time when such terrors are alive in us, unnameable but devouring, as if we are just back from a realm where a penetrating darkness is as present to us as an unfallen Eden, and we cannot put away the memory of either. The space at the back of our garden, which I never went close to, because I was sure that to go there was to lose myself, to be sucked into a black hole forever; the name of the children’s home that I would sometimes hear my parents mention, as the place where I might end up if I misbehaved; the tread of my friends’ father as he came up the stairs after lights-out, wielding a shoe he was ready to use on any one of us: all of them haunt me still, as very little in my subsequent life has the power to.

  Like any little boy, I was terrified of the masked man who loomed down on me, wielding silver drills and sticks to poke into my mouth, assuring me, “This won’t hurt,” because he knew it would. The implements lined up beside the basin were instruments of torture. My mother took me a
long at regular intervals to the dentist on Beaumont Street, in Oxford, and, as a good local boy drinking nonfluoridated water and eating sugar-filled toffees for every other meal, I always had several holes in my mouth that the dentist was eager to probe and prick and explore.

  Dentists are a constant preoccupation in Greene, the most chilling image in daily life of a faceless administer of justice; you can find them everywhere in his world (even in Mexico, the local man who accompanies a nonfictional Greene to a nightclub, and then the vocal American he encounters on a boat, are dentists. In the little town of Orizaba, he sees “a whole street of dentists’ shops”; dentists come to speak for the way pain and its seeming cure, our powerlessness and our terrifying redemption, lie all about us). A dentist is really a priest in a different kind of white robe, administering suffering as a way, he assures us, of keeping deeper suffering at bay.

  I didn’t know, as I walked, aged five or six, to Beaumont Street that, only a few doors away, Mrs. Graham Greene had recently made her home, with the novelist’s two children, scratching into a window with her diamond ring her and her husband’s initials next to the dates of every time he chose to revisit her. I had no reason to be aware that Graham Greene himself had lived for a time off the Woodstock Road, five minutes away by foot, the road on which I was born (in the same hospital as his daughter), and next to the road on which I grew up. I learned only long after beginning this book that Greene’s son went to the same elementary school that I did, the Dragon, down the street.

  My closest friend when I was at school was a fresh-faced son of privilege who was so deeply rooted in the ruling classes of England that he clearly longed for everything that was the opposite: escape, at least for a while. We sat in our dusty medieval classroom, while a hand-waving, wild-haired teacher tried to get us to absorb “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and Louis (as in Armstrong—or Mountbatten) slipped me the copy of Live/Dead he’d managed to score over the holidays, told me about the Zappa concert he’d seen at the Hammersmith Odeon the week before. He zipped into Tammy Wynette songs for no reason at all—I began to think he’d committed Marlon Brando’s entire performance in the new film The Godfather to memory—and as our teacher tried in vain to lead us into the jeweled rhapsodies of Antony and Cleopatra, Louis, well suited to being fifteen, intoned, “The bhaji [and not ‘The barge’] she sat on …” because strange-smelling Indian restaurants were now more evident than royal vessels.

  I first got to know him well when, with characteristic generosity, he invited me to come and stay with his family during “Long Leave,” a break of six days in the middle of the term when boys could revisit their families (but that was too short for me to go all the way back to my parents in California). We sat in a stately expanse worthy of Brideshead Revisited and Louis played me the stinging, eccentric ditties of Loudon Wainwright III (“Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House”) and tried to persuade me of the brilliance of Evelyn Waugh. His face turned red in the sun, and his pale skin and very fair hair seemed to rhyme with all the ancestral portraits, stretching back through centuries, in the drawing room.

  When we left school for nine months before going to university, and I poured water in a Mexican restaurant to save up to ride buses from Tijuana to Titicaca, Louis went to work at a home for impoverished kids in South Africa. When I saw him again, at college, my friend was exactly the antic, pinwheeling character I’d come to cherish, grabbing me by the thighs along Oxford’s High Street and always up for a summer trip to Vegas where we could try to live off the vouchers for free meals by which casinos hoped to lure the innocent. But in his time working with the children of Cape Town, I later learned, something dramatic had happened. He rarely spoke of it—and only after a long time to me, one of his oldest friends—but one day he had been lying on his bed, he said, and suddenly an overwhelming conviction had run through him, and he had risen from the bed a Christian. This wasn’t an easy road to take—years of enforced chapel twice a day had made most of us think of the Gospels as the enemy, exactly what we longed to flee—and it made him sad to be set apart from the parents and siblings he so unstintingly loved, who didn’t fully share his belief. But the faith he slipped into his life, like a secret business card, meant that he could be wilder and more uninhibited than ever in his explorations because, deep down, he knew precisely where he stood.

  To sustain the friendship we had started in school, Louis and I began to take trips around the world, when we could save up the money—to Burma, to Turkey, to Morocco and Haiti and Cuba. Louis was the ideal traveling companion, I found, because he had a hunger for danger and drama and was strong and settled enough to be uprooted by almost nothing. His zest for adventure and unhardened delight meant that no door was closed to him; he could pick out the most attractive girl in any room—and, more amazingly, be next to that girl, one of her best friends, within minutes, as she sensed that he was fun, open-hearted, spirited and funny, but beneath that would never hassle her, because bound to a deeper, less worldly commitment.

  Down the roads of the underdeveloped world we bumped, Louis usually at the wheel, planning the next party, playing me John Cipollina’s strangest riffs (and sermons from the evangelical preacher he now listened to in the City), carrying himself with the élan of a schoolboy James Bond who had ended up, in his faded linen suit and Panama hat, more of a carefree, though often bedridden, Bertie Wooster. Things always happened when he was around—his impatience with feeling bored ensured they must—and every evening, as he got into his tragicomic blue djellaba to go to sleep, he’d pull out the worn black book he read every morning, too, and kneel by his bed, eyes closed.

  One year, when we were in our mid-twenties, suddenly he appeared in California, and we went to the Dead’s New Year’s Eve concert at the Oakland Coliseum; in the early hours of the year’s first morning we found ourselves winding around curving roads in the hills, next to guileless, smiling faces in bobble caps singing “Scarlet Begonias.” Louis had long been fascinated by my father—an embodiment, it might seem, of everything his highly established England had seldom seen before—and perhaps he was more open then I to following the lead of some other. I came up the stairs from my bedroom one morning and found that (as on his trip ten years before) he’d sat up all night listening to my father, as my wildly colorful parent spun elaborate, riveting stories of the Albigensian heresy and Nixon’s secret operations with the CIA.

  Some door in me swung open as I watched my friend and saw how far true faith could be from mere piety, and how a real commitment to some religion could mean liberation as much as constraint. I could never quite buy what I heard on the evangelical tapes he played, but there was no doubt that faith had provided a frame for him to act with even more clarity and kindness than he might have done otherwise. Every time I met him, he seemed to have slipped away from his job as a managing director of Goldman Sachs to go on some barely explained Christian rescue mission—to Moldova or St. Petersburg or Tallinn (a stranger would have taken him to be a spy). He never walked past a beggar in Fez without offering him some help.

  Often, inevitably, we ended up in places where Greene had been, too, but the correspondences that arose seemed only to heighten the eerie sense of possession I felt with the semi-imagined friend I’d fashioned in my head. We stepped out, one sweltering afternoon, of the little Casa Grande Hotel in Santiago de Cuba and, as soon as we got into a car, a stranger slipped in and promised to show us around; a few years later I read how Greene had stepped out of the little Casa Grande Hotel in Santiago de Cuba, thirty-five years before we did, and, as soon as he got into a car, a stranger slipped in, promising to show him around.

  I told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama’s teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we’d read at school, from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I’d spent five years writing a study of the Dalai Lama, to address Graham Greene’s questions under a different cover: how act with consc
ience and clarity in the midst of the world’s confusions and how see things as they really are and still have faith in them? Then—we were staying in a convent on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem—I searched the hostel’s bookshelves and found a copy of Greene’s late novel, Monsignor Quixote. I opened the epigraph page and read, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

  Louis had little time for Greene and his many doubts; faith for him was a way to allow you to act with full confidence because your foundations never wavered. So I didn’t know how to explain to him the hauntedness I felt. All his life, I’d read, Greene had an obscure fear of seeing his house burn down. Then, when he was thirty-seven, his home really did go up in flames, during the Blitz, and he took the opportunity to leave his family behind and never really lived in a domestic setting again. One day, when I was thirty-three, I climbed upstairs in my family home and saw seventy-foot flames through every picture window. By the time the California wildfire had reduced our house and everything in it to rubble, I had decided to make my sense of belonging truly internal and go to the most clarifying society I knew, Japan, to live in a two-room flat with little on its shelves but a worn copy of The Quiet American.

  CHAPTER 4

  Yet everyone has these figures in their heads, and their presence inside and around us is often more unsettling, because more mysterious, than that of the people we meet. Henry James knows my innermost thoughts, I’d hear a friend say, to the point where I’m scared to see what he will write next; Joni Mitchell, in Blue, has been reading my diary, someone else would confess, and it’s spooky how she knows the secrets I never tell to anyone. It might be a character in Henry James, or some actor we’ve never met; but everyone I know carries around such presences, which—like old loves or private faiths—hold us precisely because they are impossible to explain away.