by Pico Iyer
I never wanted to seek out Greene’s manuscripts or letters in research libraries; I made no conscious effort to track down those people who’d known him. He lived vividly enough inside me already, in some more shadowy place. I’d watch myself sending a long e-mail to someone I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked or trusted and hear Greene say that it was a form of “moral cowardice” to sustain a connection just because you couldn’t find the right way to end it. I’d pray to some spirit I wasn’t sure I believed in, on behalf of someone I cared for, and then hear Greene whisper that to enter such a relationship was to give up much more than you could hope to get in return. I’d tell myself that having a house burn down was ultimately for the best, and I’d hear him, ever-agile, note that no piety can be trusted if it answers too closely to our needs.
Sometimes, as a boy, I’d look up at my father’s bookshelf and see the black-and-white framed photo there he kept of his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, striding barechested towards some righteousness he loved. Living without many possessions, universal in his loincloth, blessed with a lawyer’s canny sense of theater, he might have been offering the world a model and something of a silent admonition at the same time. I shuddered a little when I learned that Gandhi was born on the same day of the year as Greene, thirty-five years before, with the result (would this have caused Greene to smile?) that October 2 is now known to some as the “International Day of Non-Violence.”
I had already been deep in Greene for more than fifteen years when, finally, one midsummer day of coastal fog, our house in California seeming to sit above the world, removed by the clouds below it, I picked up his very first published novel, spookily entitled The Man Within. I’d never been much interested in the early books, which Greene himself had furiously renounced, and it was the man of the middle years, holding himself to rigorous account, who transfixed me; but now, picking up the small blue volume, I felt as rattled as if a stranger were shouting obscenities in my face.
A boy is running across a down as darkness falls—this was how the novel, completed when Greene was just twenty-four, begins. He is being pursued by a gang of smugglers—his father’s gang—whom he has betrayed to the authorities; his pursuers, therefore, are being pursued, too, by the law. As he stumbles through the gloom, he sees a light ahead and comes upon a kind of fairy-tale cottage in the dark. In front of it stands a “slim upstrained candle-flame, a woman,” pointing a gun at him.
In time she agrees to take him in, and when he asks her why there’s a coffin in her room, she explains that the man inside it had been a quasi-father to her, as well as a tormentor. The girl, Elizabeth, is nineteen, younger even than the boy, but soon, very soon, given shelter by her, the boy comes to feel she’s holy, his redemption. “She is a saint, he thought,” I read on page 50, and then, twelve pages later, “ ‘She is a saint,’ he thought.” She gives him a sense of peace—of safety—he’s known only when listening to music, or, oddly, at school.
But in order to earn his place in her sanctuary, he has to go back out into the world; Elizabeth urges him to testify publicly against his former gangmates in the local court. So he heads out into the dark once more and makes his way to the nearest town, and an inn named after a goat. He tells the people he meets there that his name is Absalom, like that of the character in the Bible who tries to kill his father, David. He picks up a young and easy woman on the arm of an older man, but—as she notes bitterly—spoils even their brief coupling with his overanxious conscience. There is no justice in the world, he comes to see as the smugglers are acquitted, while pure Elizabeth is characterized in court as a harlot; yet some iron law of punishment within ensures that he must pay in some way for his betrayal of the criminals.
The constant sense that haunts the novel of a boy torn between the romantic in him and the would-be cynic—the believer and the devil—is perhaps not so unusual; but the violence of the feeling is intense. “There’s another man within me,” run the very first words of Greene’s first published novel, in an epigraph from the seventeenth-century essayist Sir Thomas Browne, “and he’s angry with me.” Again and again we read, of this first protagonist, “He was, he knew, embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying, desiring child and another more stern critic.” The first novel Greene ever wrote, never published, was, bizarrely, the story of a black boy born unhappily to white parents in England. The same Greene who could write with such urbanity about the “other” Graham Greene who impersonated him around the world could apprehend the other within himself—his lifelong theme and antagonist—only with a sense of near-despair.
I knew Greene,” my friend Paul began telling me, one warm afternoon in December, as we sipped tea after lunch on his expansive estate in Hawaii, and he pointed out the twenty kinds of bamboo on the property (a modern-day version, I thought, of the house that Greene’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson had made on Samoa). Half a dozen geese clucked along the path, and in the bungalow where Paul did his writing, fierce tribal masks from Angola and the Pacific Islands grinned down unnervingly; on one desk sat a signed Helmut Newton print, of a woman in a black hat and veil fellating a fully clothed man, his face out of view.
“But you couldn’t really know him,” he went on. “He didn’t want you to. He never inhabited places. He lived in flats; he didn’t like to be at home.”
They had first come into contact when Greene, in a characteristic act of largesse, had offered some words of public praise for Paul’s first book of travels, The Great Railway Bazaar, perhaps because he saw strong echoes in it of his own early book and first commercial success, Stamboul Train. A train is a perfect setting for a story, Greene had realized, since every one of the passengers is carrying his own secrets, unguessed at by the others, and the setting is always changing. The backdrop shifts, propulsively, even as the figures in the foreground sink deeper and deeper into their half-curtained dramas. Greene was always eager to help younger writers, especially if they seemed to lack official connections.
“The first time we met,” Paul now recalled, “we talked about infidelity. I bared my soul to him. I’d had this image, before we met, of a power figure, shamanic. But he didn’t type, he didn’t drive, he couldn’t boil an egg.
“He wasn’t much older than my father. But he seemed to come from a different age. I wanted his blessing. The older writer is always a father figure. And I needed approval from him, guidance from him. I wanted to be him.” A few years later, Paul had actually written a novel, Picture Palace, in which his protagonist, an elderly American photographer, Maude Coffin Pratt, begins her story by flying across the Atlantic to meet Graham Greene in his favorite lair, the downstairs bar at the Ritz.
“The novelist’s eyes were pale and depthless,” Paul had written, through Maude, “with a curious icy light that made me think of a creature who can see in the dark, the more so because they were also the intimidating eyes of a blind man, with a hypnotist’s unblinking stare.” Greene comes across to his visitor as many things at once: a father confessor, a louche clergyman, a wise old lion guarding his secrets. But most of all—and this was what so many found in Greene—he seems to her somehow a reflection of herself. Soon after they meet, she sees him as “an older brother, a fellow sufferer.” But as the evening goes on, she comes to feel that, for all their differences in gender, age and nationality, really she is looking at herself. She wants to take his picture, to make it the final piece in her coming retrospective, because, she realizes, strangely, “it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”
The whole point of an adopted parent, I’d often thought, is that you can have him to yourself. He’s a figment of your imagination, in a sense, someone you’ve created to satisfy certain needs, so he’s always there, in your head, at your disposal. Real parents have lives to attend to, lives beyond our understanding, and they commit, most of all, the sin of being real; they’re human and distractible and fallible. Sometimes we seem to create ourselves in the light of their mistakes.
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p; But the parents we construct in our minds—the ones we enlist for our purposes—are more like the people we want to be, or at least the ones whose affinities we gladly acknowledge. Someone says you look like your father, and you wince, or recoil; the great project of self-creation has clearly failed. Someone says that you sound like that eminent novelist, and you’re flattered. You’ve followed intuition, or yourself.
With Greene, of course, this could never be so straightforward; I’d already come across at least six books in which a contemporary writer had come to feel so under his spell that he (or occasionally she) had woven stories around the man within his head, and usually they were stories about young writers growing possessed by him to the point where he seemed to take over their lives (most eerily in Alan Judd’s novel The Devil’s Own, whose protagonist becomes Greene, in effect, and hears a phantom scribbling whenever he picks up a pen). Greene got into people’s heads and souls—under their skin—as contemporaries of his who were often more highly regarded (Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell) rarely did with quite the same intensity. When Paul told him that his wife had taken up with another man while he was traveling, Greene asked if Paul had left her. “No,” Paul said.
“I would have done,” Greene replied. And then, a little later, “And I’d have regretted it.”
That doubleness was itself part of what Greene handed down to so many of us (Paul had later written a series of books, riveting and unsettling, about the secret life he might or might not have led). I remembered how the Vietnamese spy I’d met in Saigon had said, when asked how he could send parallel reports to Time and to Ho Chi Minh, “The truth? What truth? Two truths—both are true.”
Yet the existence of all these others who felt such a kinship with Greene made me feel doubly uneasy; the sacred trust of friendship is that you see something in the other that no one else can see, and he the same with you. And the nature of affinity (and in Greene’s world, of love) is that it stands to no reason at all. “That’s another mystery,” a police chief declares in The Power and the Glory, “how you think you’ve seen people—and places—before. Was it in a dream or in a past life?”
I did dream of Greene, more than once, most often when I was up in the air, between places; the very lack of drama in our meetings confirmed my sense of him as an unsought familiar.
I met him one evening in a town just south of Santa Barbara—this is what I saw once, in a plane above the Pacific—and we had dinner together and drove towards the town where my parents lived in life. It wasn’t hard to talk to him, yet everything I did ended up wrong somehow. At dinner, lost in conversation, I’d let him pay (as he took pains to remind me). “Can I get you a drink?” I’d asked, to make amends.
“A drink, then, yes.”
He was driving a large white SUV, very precisely (though in life, a part of me knew, he couldn’t drive at all). We stopped near a place on the beach. He ordered drinks for himself, and we met in an ill-lit bar. As it came on for 11:00 p.m., Hiroko appeared, my mother, but I had to tell them to stand by while I took care of my distinguished guest.
I asked him about Scott Fitzgerald; the scene reminded me of a moment in The Last Tycoon. He confessed to liking no American writer.
“They’re completely different,” I agreed, and he shook his head slowly. He got more drinks and started lamenting a biography that had just come out about one Ben Jackson. A hero of Empire, in his forties, and yet—Greene said—a modern writer had got him all wrong.
He drank and drank; I recalled that even in his eighties he could drain two bottles without effect. But now he looked wasted, quite vulnerable, and at times he disappeared. I realized I’d have to drive the few blocks back to his hotel. I got into the new SUV and I couldn’t move; the brake was on.
Then I started moving around a roundabout, and I thought I glimpsed him, but he was gone. He’d be angry, I thought, if he knew I was looking for him—even though I’d paid for the drinks—and I began to feel I’d failed in every part of the evening. I’d tried not to ask him anything that would put him out, but now he was drunk, unsteady, and I’d lost him in a place I knew he’d never like.
In 2004—the hundredth anniversary of Greene’s birth—the man was suddenly everywhere again, as if he hadn’t died thirteen years before. The third and final volume of a huge authorized biography by Norman Sherry came out, and others who’d known or heard of him emerged to offer their own anti-gospels, or settling of accounts; a group of young Americans was settling into a Green Zone in Iraq, talking of local forces with whom they could make alliances and determined to remake Mesopotamia with the latest ideas of Boston. A new film of The Quiet American had recently been completed, but it had been screened for its producers on September 10, 2001, and then had to be held back for more than a year because it described the future (the present) much too well.
In honor of the centenary, his publishers decided to bring out all Greene’s novels in new editions, and I was asked to write an introduction for a collection of his short fiction. I’d never much liked his stories—they were too angry and private, often, and he didn’t have the space to develop the unexpected sympathies and painful paradoxes of the novels—but to read the shorter work all through gave me a chance to see him in the round: from the raging young man imprisoned within England and gray corridors, who loves to write of murder; to the much more anguished and self-incriminating explorer of the middle years (who writes of suicide); to, at last, the mellow ironist in his sixties who has learned to smile a little at what he cannot change and, approaching death, to cherish youth with new delight precisely for its unknowingness.
As I sat in the house my mother had rebuilt after the fire, however—my father had passed away by then—suddenly something curious happened, which took me back to a hotel room in Bolivia, and Easter Island. Uncalled for, and without wanting to, I began writing Greene stories instead of reading them. Out they came, from nowhere I could recognize, in a single burst, day after day: now I was imagining an old classmate of his, visited by a young biographer, and telling stories of the schoolboy Greene that the biographer (and we) cannot begin to assess as truth or fiction. Now I was imagining a London cabbie talking about his predicament in life: his parents, a well-meaning Mr. and Mrs. Greene, have baptized him “Graham” and whenever he tells someone his name, she thinks he’s having her on or attempting a not very good joke. Yet he cannot change his name without altering his destiny.
Now I was seeing him set up a counseling center in Oxford with a likable rogue he’s met from (where else?) Bolivia; now he was following a young love to El Salvador, and losing her to two new passions she develops—for the Church and social justice—with which he knows he can never compete.
I couldn’t begin to tell where any of these stories came from; I sat at my desk every morning and transcribed them, as if taking dictation. When they were in front of me, I didn’t know what to make of them (he’d never been to Java, I knew, and he couldn’t have met Ho Chi Minh in Paris in 1923). But somehow, I came to think, he became the way I could unlock something in the imagination; he was the way I could get into places in myself that were otherwise well-defended.
Perhaps, I reflected, that was one of the less obvious things we shared. “Whenever I talk about myself,” he’d told his longtime companion Yvonne, “I wear a mask.” To which, in a very different context, referring to acting, his friend (and companion in Haiti), Peter Brook, had noted, “The fact that the mask gives you something to hide behind makes it unnecessary for you to hide.”
Like Greene, I suspect, I’d never had much time for memoir; it was too easy to make yourself the center—even the hero—of your story and to use recollection as a way to forgive yourself for everything. Besides, there was a falsity in trying (or pretending) to soothe the rush of often contradictory and inexplicable events in every life into a kind of pattern with easily decipherable meanings and even a happy, redemptive ending. But the phantom stories startled—and intrigued—me because they reminded
me how, in every book, there is another text, written in invisible ink between the lines, that may be telling the real story, of what the words evade.
CHAPTER 5
I was eight years old when my mother and father moved us to California. I looked around me on the dusty, unpaved lane where we ended up—“Banana Road,” as it was unofficially called—and felt bewildered. There were dry brush mountains at the end of the path, and a boy called Duane was showing me how to look out for rattlesnakes and turn over a spider to see the red hourglass on the stomach that revealed a poisonous black widow. There were almost no houses within view, and only nine months before our arrival, a huge wildfire—the Coyote Fire—had swept through the area, taking down one hundred houses and leaving the slopes as charred and ugly as a man who’s just had his hair hacked off.
I could hardly believe that, only a few months earlier, I’d been running along Winchester Road in Oxford, past long rows of semidetached porridge-grey houses, from which Russian or Polish or Arabic drifted out, or the elaborate études our local member of Parliament played on the piano deep into the night, in his second-floor bachelor flat. Almost everyone had known everyone else there—most were attached to St. Antony’s College, named after one of the first Western ascetics to wander off into the wilderness—and there was a sense that things were done as they had been done for seven hundred years or more. Eager visitors came to see the sights and I tagged along as my parents showed them the radical new statue of the risen Lazarus in New College, or the sculpture of Percy Bysshe Shelley, naked and washed up on the shore, tucked into a late Victorian dome in the college called University.
