The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  When I flew back for my second trip—to coincide with the celebrations for the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Revolution and Carnival—Carlos was waiting for me at the airport, ready to take me to Santiago or Artemisa or the home of Lourdes, who had so liked me, he said, when we met before (but to whom, I knew, I could never give the freedom and escape that she needed). “The man I remembered might have been a swindler,” I recalled having read in Greene’s account of Cuba in his memoirs, “but he had been a good guide to the shadier parts of Havana, and I had no desire for a dull and honest man to be my daily companion on this long trip.” I knew Carlos had something to gain from me—almost the only foreigners to be seen in Havana in 1987, other than Russians, were pasty-faced Bulgarians, emptying the tinned peaches in the breakfast rooms of ghostly hotels, and North Koreans walking in pairs, with a small badge depicting the “Great Leader” next to their hearts.

  But I had something to gain from him, too, and we’d have become friends in any circumstances. He was quick-witted, deeply cultured, kind; his hunger to learn about the United States, the place where he might be able to make a new life, seemed perfectly to match my hunger to learn about how the Revolution really felt to its so-called beneficiaries, at some level deeper than mere politics. Some people who’d never been to Cuba called it a socialist paradise; the U.S. government, under Reagan, was convinced it was a totalitarian hell. Neither began to correspond to the quicksilver, open, ardent and suspicious place I saw, which reminded me daily, as Greene would have said, that in matters of love and family, there are no easy answers or unmixed emotions.

  After I got home from my second trip, Carlos kept on sending me letters, reporting on the many ways he was trying to make his escape: he had “married,” he said, a woman he’d been married to before, because her father had fought with Fidel and might look out for him. He was going now to the Peruvian embassy to seek amnesty, and he was hoping to use thousands of dollars to get a fake passport from the Dominican Republic. He’d been in prison once, so there was a chance he could come out legally, as a political refugee; he needed my help with the authorities in Washington.

  I’d been through versions of the same story time and again—it sometimes seemed the story of my life—but never had I felt so close to the situation that is at the center of most Greene books: two men come together in the dark and open their hearts as they can, perhaps, only with strangers, forming a bond, even as they know little of each other. It’s often the closest thing to faith as exists in the work. It wasn’t just trivial correspondences, I was coming to see, that made me feel close to the English novelist, the way we’d met similar people, or both found an air of bungled secrecy and cruel misunderstandings on the backstreets of Santiago; it was that he was giving me a searchlight to understand how Carlos, in his life of rumor and drama, was leading an existence that I could hardly imagine, and how my life of relative peace seemed fantasy to him. The comedian, as Greene would have it, always gets implicated in the end.

  At last word came through that Carlos had indeed gotten out, as a former inmate of Castro’s prisons, and now I began to receive calls from him, in his temporary home in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. I happened to be flying back to the city a little later, and we met in Times Square, the place he’d dreamed of all his life, and went for a celebratory meal at Victor’s, the Cuban restaurant on Fifty-second Street.

  “We’re only a few blocks away from the office where I first wrote about you,” I told him, gesturing at the Time-Life Building, on Fiftieth. He toasted us and ordered more roast pork and declared that now, for the first time ever, his future could be what he wanted.

  But life is difficult for newcomers to the Land of the Free from a very different system; Carlos soon ended up in New Jersey, and then headed down to Florida, the very place he’d told me he never wanted to go (“Too much like Cuba”). He wrote to me constantly, and we spoke often on the phone—it had rarely been possible before—and when I flew down to Havana again, for my sixth visit, he suggested we meet up, on the way, in Miami.

  He was staying in a beat-up motel, I gathered, though he made sure that I didn’t see it; he insisted on putting me up (at his expense) in a top-floor suite in the smallish hotel where he was working now. We were happy to meet again; it felt as if we’d been through several lifetimes together. But there was no talk of a bookstore café now, I noticed. The future had seemed illimitable in Cuba, so long as it had not been something real.

  “You hear from Peter and Lourdes?” he asked me.

  “Now and then. I’ll see them this week when I’m back in Havana.” (Peter, though, was in prison now, and when I went to visit him there, exulted in the fact that he had three solid meals a day, a steady roof above his head, all the things he could not be sure of on the outside.)

  Carlos took me to a mall, the very brightest and splashiest, I could imagine, in South Florida. We stood outside the entrance to a theme-park café. It was a long line, and we both thought of the long line we’d been standing in our first morning together, when he’d asked me for my passport, so he could enjoy a piece of my life.

  “You know, I write to Peter and Lourdes,” he now said. “I talk to them on the telephone sometimes. I tell them, ‘Is better where you are. For me is okay here. I can hustle.’ ” The crinkly eyes had not changed at all. “But for them is better in La Habana. No work, but no hassle. No future but no schedule.”

  “Death by gunshot or death by starvation,” I said, reminding him of what an old man in Santiago had said to us about the difference between life under Batista and life under Fidel.

  He smiled, in recognition. Greene had been ignorant, by his own admission, of some of the brutalities that were taking place behind the devil-may-care atmosphere he so enjoyed, and when he went back to Cuba and became a friend of Fidel’s, he seemed almost perversely eager to champion the place as a way of tweaking the newly dominant world power in Washington. “There is a touch of ancient Athens about Havana today,” he’d written in London’s Sunday Telegraph, after a trip in 1963. “The Republic is small enough for the people to meet in the agora.” It was often suspected that he was reporting on the island for MI6, and that maybe even his support of the Revolution was a front.

  But beneath all the geopolitical ironies, and the ways he’d chosen to turn the place into a free-and-easy escape of sex shows and bordellos, Greene had given me something deeper, which now I couldn’t shake off. We had dinner at the theme-park café, and we talked about everything but the future—or the present. When I looked at Carlos, I tried not to say all the things that were coming to both our minds, as he smiled, ambiguously as ever, and asked me if I wanted dessert.

  CHAPTER 8

  Often, as the years went on, I told myself I’d had enough of Greene. I never wanted to hear another word from him or about him. I had no interest in encountering again his close readings of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies or reading how The Roly-Poly Pudding, by Beatrix Potter, is a “masterpiece,” by an author comparable to Henry James. I grew tired of his self-conscious talk of Russian roulette and suicide, though I could believe—since it came out so often in his work—that he frequently did see death as a release or a liberation. I wasn’t sure even the younger Greene would have liked the scold of later years, lecturing the press on Central America—although my travels there had shown me he was right—and I found it hard to get inside his frequent melancholy. The “honesty” with which Greene insisted on telling his women about the other women in his life sounded like pure selfishness; the confessor is determined to get his betrayals off his chest, even if that means just foisting them on someone else.

  He was like any friend, in short, with whom one’s spent a lot of time; I thought of Louis’s eagerness to run away from the good deed he’d so instinctively performed in Ethiopia, though that did nothing to diminish the goodness or the deed. Greene was the opposite of a holy book, by his own admission; he was a human book, in whose novels the characters act well only in spite of them
selves, and after a long series of self-betrayals. I knew the paradoxical truth he was getting at—“If only you’d forget your guilt,” his wife used to say to him, “you’d treat me more nicely”—but I couldn’t bear reading the early stories, so bitter and cruel and thick with dissatisfaction. And his travel books were a near-perfect example of how not to write or think about travel.

  Pick up The Lawless Roads, Greene’s account of wandering through Mexico, in fact, and you will never want to pick him up again. It’s hard to imagine any work about a journey abroad—the completion of a trip that the author has planned and looked forward to for two and a half years—so dyspeptic, so loveless, so savagely self-enclosed and blind. “Hate” is the word that resounds throughout, as in much of the early work, like an inverted “Amen.” Within a day or two of arriving in Mexico, Greene declares, “That, I think, was the day I began to hate the Mexicans.” Many pages later, he is still intoning, “I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate.”

  The book might almost be a parody not just of Graham Greene, but of the kind of Englishman who hates Abroad the minute he sets foot in it, yet punishes himself—and the rest of us—by choosing to go there again and again. A child in Mexico is “odious.” Mexicans are “like mangy animals in a neglected zoo” observing “the jungle law.” By the time the trip, which lasted less than two months, is coming to an end, Greene is confidently asserting, “It is not inconceivable that the worst evil possible to natural man may be found years hence in Mexico.”

  “The whole atmosphere of the place is rotten.” “Lunch was awful, like the food you eat in a dream, tasteless in a positive way, so that the very absence of taste is repellent.” A market is “far more squalid than anything I had seen in the West African bush.” Sex is the “deed of darkness” and when he records a “silly dream,” it is one of “triumph and happiness.”

  Every now and then the thirty-three-year-old Englishman does catch a glimpse of simplicity and peace, as of life before the Fall, but this only makes the rest of his days more terrible. “One did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country,” he writes, and decides to pick up Cobbett and Trollope as he’s passing through some of the most spectacular scenery he could have encountered in his young life. He is developing, he notes, “an almost pathological hatred” for Mexico. As he nears the end of the trip, as if impervious to all he’s been saying and thinking, he writes, “How one begins”—begins!—“to hate these people.”

  A few months after completing the nightmare journey—England, when he returns, is so miserable, he wonders how he could have hated Mexico—Greene wrote a novel, arising out of one stray detail he’d picked up on his journey: a story of a drunken priest so feckless that he’d christened a boy “Brigitta.” In The Lawless Roads the tale is merely one more instance of Mexican clumsiness and folly, another reason to hold the malfunctioning country in contempt. In the novel, however, The Power and the Glory, the tiny anecdote becomes the foundation for a devastating, heartfelt story of a priest who violates every rule of the church and yet can never quite manage to betray its spirit.

  The novel was so full of compassion and fellow feeling for the man—indeed, for all the luckless and broken figures in the Mexican landscape (not least the lieutenant in pursuit of the priest)—that it became the book that established Greene as a major writer on religion and remained the one novel even its contentious maker admitted to liking through most of his life. When Catholicism was on the run, he’d side even with the Catholics. When a priest was a fallen, sinning man much like the rest of us, Greene could summon sympathy even for a priest. All that was so hateful and bereft of light and beauty to the traveler, watching from the sidelines, becomes moving and deeply personal for the novelist, as soon as he sees and feels from within an abandoned little girl and the fugitive who’s been trying for ten years to run away from what he loves.

  That Greene should find hate everywhere in Mexico was off-putting enough; but that Greene should sense that this hate was really in himself was even more harrowing, especially for an admirer. He was a professional writer of fiction, yet Greene was never one to lie to himself, I felt, despite those two versions of his diary. That was what commanded respect even when I couldn’t give him affection; he looked unblinkingly at precisely the shadows in the self (and in the world) that most of us try to look away from, drilling, as a dentist might, into the most tender and infected spaces because that was where the trouble lay. That was what allowed so many to write so venomously about Greene; he gave them all the evidence they needed in his compendious accounts of what he called his “evasions and deceits.”

  There is a moment in The Lawless Roads that stuck with me every time I read it. Greene goes to Villahermosa—or “Beautiful City,” as it would be in English—and in the midst of what looks as if it might almost be redeeming, he catches sight of a dentist’s office, with its “floodlit chair of torture.” As if caught in some nightmare in which he can’t escape himself, he is told, improbably, “Why, everybody in Villahermosa is called Greene—or Graham.” Two pages later, “a young Mexican dentist called Graham joined us.” As he leaves Villahermosa, Greene goes into the depths of the jungle, where (of course) his landlord is “dumb with misery—he had toothache.”

  It is as if he is trapped in a hall of mirrors, and every road he travels brings him back to his own pain. He is lost, raging, inside his own head. One can feel the anguish of such a situation—but that makes it no easier to like the man who’s going through it.

  I thought again of his early stories set in England, so full of places called “Fetter Lane” and “Leadenhall Street”—“Wotton-under-Edge”—and the overwhelming impression was of a man imprisoned, in a cell that he has committed himself to of his own free will. He has given himself to a marriage, though he knows that he can never settle down; pledged himself to a faith, though his captious mind refuses to believe in anything but uncertainty; and put himself inside a family though nothing makes him feel less at home. The medicine he’s taken is the one that makes him ill—and the only person he can blame for all his suffering is himself.

  In his early novel Stamboul Train (the one that helped make him truly independent, after it was bought by Hollywood), every character on the eponymous train is a fugitive and a solitary of sorts, and the very carriages that might seem vessels of freedom become vehicles of imprisonment. But the worst of the itinerant figures is a thief and adulterer who is even, we are made to guess, guilty of murder. Greene gives him, a little implausibly, the name “Grünlich,” which in German, of course, means “greenish.”

  And yet The Power and the Glory, arising out of the trip he so claimed to hate, seemed to release Greene a little: from Britain, from his sense of enclosure, from self-division. There is more daylight, even sunshine in the books that follow—the Mexican novel is the first with no Englishman at the center and with a vivid habitation of a foreign landscape—and though there is always contention at their heart, it is sweetened, sometimes soothed by the passions of a foreign country, as the writer’s alter ego tries to bring his loves in tune with the complex environment around him. In time he would step beyond even those tensions and give us the gentler landscape of friendship (in Monsignor Quixote) or of a too-innocent man being introduced to the follies of moralism by a woman (Travels with My Aunt). The country he claimed to hate would turn him towards love.

  If you look at Greene’s private life, it’s easy to believe that you’re reading a kind of cautionary tale fashioned by some malign allegorist. The woman he married, Vivienne (later Vivien) Dayrell-Browning, bore a family name that showed her connection to the Victorian poet Greene always loved, the slippery hymnist of doubt and desire who’d written, “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.” Yet at the same time she was a deeply devout nineteen-year-old convert to Catholicism who had contacted him when she read an article he’d written in an Ox
ford undergraduate magazine on how people were “considerably oversexed”; you couldn’t, she advised him, use the word “worship” in the context of the Virgin Mary (the correct term was “hyperdulia”).

  Vivien would become, of all improbable things, an expert on doll’s houses, who found herself married to what she later called “the wildest of creatures, and the least domesticated.” She put a crib in the family dining room every Christmas so that the Holy Child could sit in the middle of the household, even as her husband was in perpetual flight from any reminder of sanctity and fidelity. When Greene joined the Church in order to marry his shy young bride, then working for the Oxford publishers Blackwell’s, he was prepared for conversion by a “Father Trollope” who had been an actor on the London stage.

  In later years he would move in the opposite direction; his strongest loves were a Swedish actress, Anita Björk; his longtime American mistress, Catherine Walston; and the married Frenchwoman he met in Africa who would share his final thirty-two years with him, Yvonne Cloetta. Walston had approached him as a stranger—the heavy hand of bad drama intrudes again, as he might have put it—because she’d decided to become a Catholic, she said, after reading his books; she wanted to know if he’d be her godfather. He was happy to say yes, but, since he was busy at the time of her ceremony, he asked Vivien to go in his stead. Later it would be rumored that he and Walston read theology in bed and made love behind every other high altar in Italy. She incited his jealousy—which he could never distinguish from love—by flirting with priests in particular, one of whom had authored a book called Morals and Marriage: The Catholic Background to Sex.

  At the moment Catherine entered his life, in 1946, he had been spending much of his time for the past eight years with another mistress, Dorothy Glover. She was—unusually for Greene—English, unmarried and not physically commanding, according to his friends. But they’d grown close in the Blitz, when London had seemed almost a foreign city, alight with drama, and they’d made love in public air-raid shelters, while choosing to remain in the middle of the conflagration, on fire watch. Greene wrote (anonymously, at first) the texts to books called The Little Train, The Little Fire Engine, The Little Horse Bus and The Little Steamroller so that Dorothy’s illustrations to these stories could be published. When she died, in 1971, Greene wept bitterly, Yvonne Cloetta writes in her memoirs, for almost the only time in their more than three decades together.