The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  I headed back to Bole International and found a huge hangar: sixteen centuries of confiscated crosses seemed to have been collected there, to gather dust. Things moved slowly anyway in this deeply impoverished country, and here I couldn’t be sure that anything would ever stir. I sat against a wall in the drafty warehouse, and, now that Louis was gone, called upon my only other companion for the trip, Graham Greene. The last time I’d read The End of the Affair, I had been swept up in the story of passion and then, as so many other readers have been, felt stranded and confused by the notion of a man cuckolded by God. Now, with the chants going through me from the Christmas services, with my friend off to his first commitment, with the sight of the people walking across the high plateaus burning inside me, I began to understand how one could be transported—and left in the cold—by the spiritual surrender of another. God, if He exists, has to be something larger, more complex and mysterious than just a headmaster reading rules. Sometimes you know He exists, as with a love, only when He’s very far away and you’re shouting out your rage at Him.

  Farce and tragedy are separated by nothing but a trick of light: look at things one way and you can’t stop laughing. Look at them in another and you feel completely helpless. A car crashes in an empty place and it could be the end of life; a good Samaritan comes to the rescue, as in an ancient parable, and the next thing you know, he’s red-faced with drink and reenacting Planes, Trains & Automobiles for some bewildered kids from London.

  What makes one weep and what makes one break out laughing are identical twins in Greene’s work, and it sometimes seems almost a freak of fate, pure randomness, whether a character picks one or the other. Two telegrams are delivered in the wrong order—this had happened to Greene himself when his father died—and a message announcing a serious illness is delivered after the message announcing a death: is one’s far-off father a Lazarus, or is life just playing a cosmic joke that can shatter one’s heart?

  A boy—another classically Greenian story—is summoned to his housemaster, who has difficult news to break: his father has been killed. By—as it happens—a falling pig. We know we shouldn’t laugh, yet it’s hard to summon the solemn tears the occasion calls for. We have to respond in some way, but we know that all our responses are likely to be the wrong ones.

  Greene would always, with precise perversity, come at faith through the back door, not by way of the man of principle or woman of piety, but through the confused bungler who inspires our pity and perhaps even our love with his fallenness. “The cruel come and go,” as Wormold, the hapless main character in Our Man in Havana tells us, sadly, but the clown “was permanent.” This ensured, perhaps, that the novelist would always feel much of the anguish of religion but little of its joy; it was rarely a pick-up to rally his spirits but always, if anything, a cause for remorse and a sense of unworthiness. It also meant that an act of conscience, even selflessness, on the part of a sinner invariably excited Greene more than (what most of us are excited to discover) an act of hypocrisy or folly in a priest or saint.

  Yet every time I started to dwell on the agonized semi-Catholicism, and the man twisting and turning on his iron bed, I had to remember: many of his books were funny, wildly so, even as they rocked between moods—with their irregular system of chapters and sections—so you could never tell what was coming next. A cuckolded man (a dentist, of course) sits on a trick cushion, and it starts to play “Auld Lang Syne” as he weeps. A lonely man in Havana sends vacuum-cleaner designs to MI6 in London—he wants to earn enough money to buy his teenage daughter a horse—and when the designs are taken to be top-secret maps, innocents are killed on the basis of them. Sometimes Greene called his books “entertainments,” but they were always shot through with a sense of sadness and being lost; the ones he called novels often had scenes of such riotous misunderstanding and knockabout poignancy that professors would refuse to take them seriously.

  When he was stationed in West Africa during the war, by British intelligence, “Grim Grin” (as Kingsley Amis called him) came up with the idea of recruiting a French madam to set up a brothel at which he could pick up all the secrets of relaxing Vichy officers (the plan was almost adopted); whenever a London magazine ran a competition calling for parodies of Graham Greene, the man himself entered—and often won—then went on to incorporate the self-parodies in novels and memoirs. When, immediately after the war, he was working at a publishing house, Greene went to great trouble to make up a difficult author, Mrs. Montgomery, who started making furious calls to everyone on the staff, asking each in turn what had happened to her manuscript (he even used a friend to play the nonexistent writer on the phone). At one point he went so far as to take out an ad in The Spectator magazine from a make-believe biographer of Mrs. Montgomery (an allusion, perhaps, to the marginal character in Henry James’s Washington Square?), and then wrote a letter from the imaginary Montgomery, in a subsequent issue, repudiating the biography.

  It was as if, whenever the pressure began to build in him, pushing him towards a depression that ran so deep it could lead to thoughts of suicide, he tried to look for a burst of manic comedy to release him. Like many of us at our desks, he wrote his lightest books (Our Man in Havana, say) at a time when he was feeling defeated and battered by life, as if fiction could map out for him an alternate destiny. And his refusing to say, sometimes, whether his stories were sad or comical—his constant wavering between the two—came also from his sense, as he wrote in the Cuban novel, that “there was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.” He would amuse himself with a prank and then—the writer in him rising up—see the story from his target’s point of view. I sometimes felt that Greene had created his version of God, as much as the other way round, so that he’d always have an external embodiment for his guilt and a reason to believe in justice, even if that meant his condemnation.

  There are often Henrys in the work of Henry Graham Greene—“A name I have always disliked,” he later wrote—and they are nearly always mousy men, unnaturally passive, a little fearful of the world; they might almost stand for the part of their maker closest to his unworldly father, Charles Henry Greene, who once sent students off to see Tarzan because he thought it was an educational film. The nearest characters to Greene—or his other self—in the books tend always to be known, as in a British boys’ school, by their last names, and these names sound as moldy and Anglo-Saxon as curses: Wormold, Bendrix, Fortnum, Fowler. Most of them grow movingly sympathetic as their stories go on, but still the world knows them and sees them only from afar, and the stress on their names falls always on the first syllable, so we’re among “Worm,” “Bend,” “Fort” and “Fowl” (the women by their sides are always more tenderly and mellifluously seen—Milly, Sarah, Clara, Phuong).

  Greene’s main characters flinch from nicknames, as Greene did in life, and when the quiet American, in his innocence, tries to call Fowler “Tom,” the older Englishman recoils at the unsought closeness, and says, “I’d rather you called me Thomas.” That is, of course, the name of the disciple who doubted, and, through no coincidence, the name that Greene himself took on when being received into the church.

  Greene told people that he turned to names like “Brown” and “Smith” and “Jones” because, when he chose, as a young writer, to give someone he’d met in Africa, in a nonfiction book, the more unusual name “Oakley,” a real person called Oakley sued, won damages and forced the book out of print for several years. But that, like so much in him, seemed an intricate evasion. The effect of the anonymous names is to suggest grey and unloved Everymen wandering across an allegorical heath, like characters out of Beckett in their trash cans, though in these cases the wilderness is called Freetown or Port-au-Prince or Asunción. The books they inhabit stress always the human factor—five of his titles have “man” or “human” in them—and in two of the novels (The Comedians and A Burnt-Out Case) the protagonist is not even given a Christian name. Perhaps the most famous figure in all of Greene—the whisk
y priest we were made to read about at school—has no name at all.

  “There is a strange importance about names,” says Jim, the young boy at the center of Greene’s last novel, The Captain and the Enemy, as he takes on the new name his adoptive parents have given him. It’s an estimable sentiment—names are how we try to fix an identity and measure our closeness (or lack of it) to those around us—but the fact remains that Jim was once called “Victor.” The charming crook who whisks him out of his school claims to have been born as “Brown,” though at one point his friends call him “Roger” and elsewhere he goes by “Colonel Claridge.” He signs checks as “Cardigan” or “Carver” and in Panama he passes as “Smith.” At one point, he even signs a restaurant chit as “J. Victor (Capt.),” though shedding the name soon, if only because sympathy in Greene goes never to the victors and only to losers and the lost.

  My first two names are the rather exotic and aspiring ones my father chose for me (that of the Buddha and the Neo-Platonist heretic); and my third and fourth names are, in fact, his, exactly, as if I were split down the middle—between his hopes for me and his inheritance to me, himself. He was wise enough to give me a global, European name, common to many languages, which would prove invaluable in an international life—easy to spell and to pronounce—and perhaps he intuited, too, that I would spend most of my life in a Buddhist country. When I write out all my initials and my name—the way I was known in school—it looks almost like a summons to sprightliness, or a boast.

  Yet the fact that he was so charismatic has, almost inevitably, made me a little suspicious of charm, and determined to make myself neutral, private, ideally unseen; and the more I watched his fascination with magic, the more I tried to turn myself into a rationalist. Every son aspires to script an act 6 in a parent’s life, and it’s bound to veer off in a different, probably contrary direction. But every son is helpless before the lines on his palm.

  “Look,” said a Japanese matron who had installed herself on a landing in a Vancouver megabookstore, offering a free handwriting analysis to anyone who scribbled some words on a page.

  “What’s that?” I said, as she pointed towards the bottom of the page on which I’d written a few specimen sentences. She’d already unnerved me by identifying attentiveness, frugality, and even seeming contradictions—“This shows optimism,” she said, motioning towards the slant of my script, “and this a wariness about the future,” gesturing at my right-hand margins—that many a longtime friend might never quite see.

  “You tell me.”

  “But isn’t that your job?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s nothing mystical. Just look.”

  She was right. The first name was so much larger than the second in my signature that it looked as if I was trying to define myself by myself, and not by my family. Even though, of course, both came from exactly the same place.

  CHAPTER 7

  As I fell deeper—and deeper—into my Greene thoughts, in a Greene shade, I noticed Hiroko looking at me strangely. She has a wonderful, bracing lack of interest in all the things complicated men dream up at their desks and a complete indifference to—an innocence of—the stuff that people chatter about in the literary circles of London or New York. When I heard critics drone on about how Phuong in The Quiet American was “objectified,” or two-dimensional, the product of a man’s boyish fantasy, I wondered how they could speak so coldly about the mysteries of human kindness and affection. A companion is someone who refuses to take the things we fret about too seriously—starting with ourselves—even though she cares for us entirely. Phuong offers the unquiet Englishman exactly the sense of peace and acceptance he longs for—and cannot find—in church.

  “You really want to spend all this time with Graham Greene?” Hiroko asked.

  “I suppose so. It’s a way of working things out, as I couldn’t otherwise.”

  “Otonoashii Amerikajin?” she asked, incredulous; I’d foisted The Quiet American in Japanese on her years before.

  “Well, not only that.”

  My life at my desk, my silly scribbles, were as strange to her as her job, selling clothes, was to me.

  “You’re going to write about his life?”

  “Not exactly. About my life. Or how we project onto others …”

  And then I stopped, because she deserved something better.

  “Like His Holiness?”

  “Well, a little bit like the Dalai Lama. He does teach me about kindness.”

  “You need hope in a book,” she said, as she went out. “You won’t forget toilet paper from the supermarket?”

  As soon as I met Carlos, on the streets of Havana, I could tell that he was a hustler of sorts. “Interesting,” he said, as he saw me looking at a Space Age building along La Rampa, and I turned around; what was most interesting to me was that he spoke English, as few people did in Cuba in 1987. He had crinkly, strangely Chinese eyes and an ambiguous smile; his white shirt hung out from his trousers, and he might have been the kind of dissident who sidled up to foreigners on the streets of Prague or even Madrid. That I was a foreigner was evident from the fascination with which I was staring at a construction that must have looked like the future many years before; the only people who were transfixed by Cuba’s future were the ones with the freedom to fly away from it.

  “Come,” he said, “I’ll show you something more interesting,” and he led me into a bus and downtown, to a dusty, high-ceilinged apartment, up a creaking, sweeping staircase, which might have belonged to Miss Havisham if she’d gone to serve her country in the tropics. There was a large, smiling black boy there, whom Carlos introduced, implausibly, as his brother; there were two girls, bubbly and unguarded, hanging their underwear to dry on the balcony. Though I’d arrived on the island only the night before, already I could feel the charm and sadness that lay in the “slow erosion” that Greene had described so hauntingly in Havana twenty-nine years before.

  “So,” Carlos said, as we left the others behind and went to a shiny (by Cuban standards) restaurant, where only foreigners (and their guests) could eat, and took our place in the long, long line gathered under the sun in the street. “How about you give me your passport? I fly to the Estados Unidos. You go to the American Interests Section on the Malecón and get a new one. I go to New York. I help you when I get there. You win. I win.”

  “I see the logic of it,” I said, “but let’s wait a bit.” I’d known the man only two hours and I could tell already that need was so advanced in Cuba that it infected every transaction.

  “O-ka,” he said, and for the next week Carlos was as good as his word. He never mentioned any such exchange again, and he took me everywhere I could want to see, offering a wry and literate and warm unofficial narration to what was not acknowledged in the huge billboards shouting “Venceremos!” or “Patria o Muerte.” He invited me to stay in his apartment, if I liked, where kids were catching the AM stations from Miami, while a rooster clucked around and out onto the adjacent rooftop (the bird was called “Reagan,” Carlos said, because he never stopped squawking). He pulled out books from his shelves—Spinoza, Saroyan—and asked me what I thought of them. He slipped me into nightclubs that were open only to those who knew how to knock on the door in the right way; he offered me girls, cigars, anything I might need.

  “My dream,” he said, “when I get out, is to make a library. In New York City. Where people can drink coffee and read books.”

  “A library?”

  “No, sorry. A ‘bookstore.’ A bookstore café where people can talk about anything. In freedom.”

  When I flew back to California and asked him what I could send him—anything at all—he asked only for an American flag and a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  I’d met Carlos many times already in my twenty-nine years; the previous fall, in the little town of León, in Nicaragua, I’d passed a friendly young woman on the street and she’d caught my eye and smiled. Within five minutes, she’d asked me (then and
there, on the street) if I’d marry her. I smiled, but she was serious; she wanted to escape, and if I could give her what she wanted, she could give me something, too.

  In Burma, two years before, I’d met a sweet-natured young character who hung around the fanciest hotel, the then-derelict Strand, and who remembered having met me there two years earlier; he became my shadow guide to the city, telling me what his closed country was like under the surface as I told him what America and Britain were like, beyond the rumors that he’d heard of them. In difficult or impoverished countries, the leap of faith becomes instantly human, and very personal, as in every Greene novel I’d loved: How much do you trust this stranger who seems so ready to be your friend? How much does he—or should he—trust you?

  Like many who had been to the island, among them Greene, of course (and the Greenian Trappist, Thomas Merton), I fell quickly in love with the complications of Cuba, and the day after I returned to California following my first trip, I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket to go back, three months later. I had never seen a place so stirring in its passions and so constant in its doubts and rumors; Cuba was like a furious, never-ending debate on whom and what to believe, which words to trust, whether to enjoy the warm wind coming off the water along the seaside road, with its fading, rainbow-colored buildings—or the desperate kids gathered on the rocks below, trying to slip away.

  I’d never met such resilient, spirited, often irresistible people, but the result was that the whole country seemed a kind of hotheaded family that had been cooped up in the same quarters for much too long.

  The strict father bolted the doors, his daughter tried to slip out through a second-floor window, his son shouted constant imprecations at him and the tearful, desperate mother sobbed and clutched at the elbows of all the other three, asking them to settle down, while she took silent notes to report on her loved ones to her sister.