The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  I never felt myself,” wrote the Englishman always on the move, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me”; he seemed desperate, throughout his adult life, to be away from the cocktail parties and literary conversations he knew too well in London. He haunted the opium dens of the Far East and visited Tahiti, where dramas were less predictable; he stayed in Capri, wondering “who I am,” and everywhere he went, he collected expats, lonely men and renegade priests who’d made a kind of life abroad. Finally he settled in the south of France and wrote something called The Tenth Man.

  His travels seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery; if he did not really believe in God, he wrote, he always had a keen sense of the devil. Much of his life, in fact, he saw as a spirited argument with God: “I should have thought that it was God who had cause to be humble,” he wrote, “when he reflects upon what an indifferent mess he has made in the creation of a human being.” He had a special symbol stitched into the cover of all his books—he was always fascinated by spells—to protect him from the evil eye, and in one early novel, a character bargains with God, having “conceived the notion that if she promised God to give him up, God would spare him.”

  Yet at the same time, he had no patience with missionaries or sermonizers, anyone who would lay down a simple law of right and wrong; his travels, his very novelist’s intuition, gave him a supple appreciation of how much in each of us lies beyond the grasp of reason. He was never a joiner, and it was boredom that seemed to propel him away from Mayfair; his countrymen mocked him for his readiness to help prostitutes—he had a soft spot for the fallen—and his problem, he was shrewd enough to see, was that he had a gift for getting involved with the wrong woman and then lacking the courage to break off the connection.

  He was always too popular and readable to win much critical acclaim; Hollywood continues to make films out of even his lesser works, and suspicion attaches to him because of all the work he did for British intelligence (he wrote spy novels as well as exotic entertainments). Though clearly romantic, and full of a gentleman’s often fatal sense of chivalry, he never denied the “essential aloofness” that the writer’s job demands and sensed that his soft heart would always get him in deeper trouble than his cool mind. He recoiled from a formal divorce from his wife because, as he said, no woman would ever take pity on a weak man. “Pity” itself he saw as a great affliction, a kind of weakness disguising itself as charity.

  Yet perhaps the single most important thing to be said about him was that he was an undeluded, open, antimoralistic adventurer (his work was denounced by the Vatican) who wanted to see every situation in the round. “It would be silly,” he wrote during the war, “to deny that our enemies have some of the same virtues as we; they have at least courage, loyalty and professionalism.” He ended his days still in exile, looking back on his old boarding school and writing pieces like “The Three Fat Women of Antibes.” From the outset he had been painfully aware (as only the innocent can be) that innocent intentions are the undoing of many a man: “In this world,” a character says in a novel he wrote when he was barely thirty, “it’s the good who do all the harm.” Fascinated by goodness, he always had a complex, shifting sense that humanity lay far beyond our salvationist ideas. “Perhaps even the best of us are sinners,” he wrote (too characteristically), “and the worst of us are saints.”

  Somerset Maugham, however—the “he” in every one of the above clauses, though nearly every one fits Greene—was so close to his successor in his worldly acuity, his hunger for the far-off place and his love of human waywardness and surprise that Greene claimed to have no affection for him. Maugham relied too much on the anecdote, he said, and lacked the inwardness, the nuance and the risk taking that marked out Greene’s chosen literary mentor (and Maugham’s anathema) Henry James; ultimately he put storytelling before psychology. Greene constantly stressed how little he owed to Maugham, the way some of us stress how different—how very different—we are from our fathers, the ones we’ve spent our lifetimes defining ourselves in opposition to; in much the same way, John le Carré, Greene’s literary son, often got prickly when asked what he owed to the apostle of doubt who was, he once admitted, a “guiding star” to him when young.

  Yet Greene read Maugham’s Ashenden before embarking on Our Man in Havana (the clear model for le Carré’s Tailor of Panama) and mocked romanticism and idealism as only a sometime romantic and idealist, like Maugham, could do. When V. S. Naipaul visited Greene in Antibes, he claimed to be able to see through the window, down the coast, Maugham’s huge villa in Cap Ferrat, mocking and contrasting in its splendor the functional anonymity of Greene’s one-bedroom flat.

  How arbitrary such affinities are, I thought every time I returned to Maugham: why, in a country full of elegant women with silky dark hair, should I feel that Hiroko—and only Hiroko—was a person I could give myself to forever, a lost piece of myself? Why, when Maugham gave me stories of exploration and escape that I read and reread with such delight—“It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with”—did I feel that he was an author close to my heart, and yet Greene somehow a secret nestled within that heart, reflecting it back to me? Why did certain forgotten pathways in the eastern hills of Kyoto have the capacity to pierce me as none of the streets I knew in the Oxford of my birth or the Santa Barbara of my upbringing could ever do?

  It was as if, underneath the self I knew and was in public, there was another self, mysterious even to its owner, that lived beyond the grasp of explanation but would read Greene’s works as if they were a private diary, Maugham’s as if they were only a brilliant fiction. And in the process—much like Greene, in fact, whenever he was asked about Maugham—bridle testily and throw out subterfuges whenever I was asked about the real person I resembled, the one with the wild hair exploding at the sides and the mischievous glint in the eye, whom I saw whenever I looked in the mirror.

  CHAPTER 9

  There were fires raging all across the hills around our house, and I was sitting in a downtown restaurant with my mother and Hiroko. I’d flown into Santa Barbara two days before, and, driving along the empty road that leads from the airport to our house ten minutes away, I’d looked up into the hills to where the lights of our home shine alone on our ridge, and my heart had stopped. There were two bright blazes of orange cutting through the darkness, with a speed and efficiency I remembered from the time when our home—in the same location—had burned down (with me beside it) some years before.

  I accelerated wildly up the hill and started taking the curves along the mountain road leading up to our solitary house at a crazy speed. The air to the north was already red and full of smoke—infernal—and as I pushed the car to go faster, I saw sightseers along the side of the road gathering to watch the unearthly light show, great towers of orange, a hundred feet high, rising from the valleys just below our home and smoke turning the sky into a sickly pall.

  I swerved, brakes screaming, into our driveway, and summoned my wife and mother out to see what was happening a mile or two away. It looked to be remote still, but I remembered how, during the previous fire, the flames had raced through the brush at seventy miles an hour, so that an orange gash in what looked to be a distant slope was suddenly a pillar of flames arcing over our living-room windows.

  The next day we awoke to the sound of helicopters whirring overhead. The sky was a grisly blood-red color. The house felt hot already, and, although the smoke seemed to clear as the wind shifted and returned us to a placid blue midsummer day, as the afternoon went on the sky above the ridge next to us turned a hideous, end-of-the-world color, or discolor really, ash falling around us like snow.

  I went with Hiroko down to the post office, and as we came out, after a short transaction, the whole suburb around us was black with coughy smoke. We looked up to the hills, to where our house and our far-off neighbors were, and all we cou
ld see were one, two, three slashes of orange angrily starting up across the slopes. We began to drive home and, switching on the radio, I heard that our house and the few up the road had been issued an “evacuation warning.” I turned into our little road and began driving up it, and the announcer on the local radio, frantic, said that the “evacuation warning” had been turned into an “order”: we had to leave now, or we would be forced out.

  We drove the remaining five minutes at a crazy speed again, collected my mother, her dazed cat inside a little cage, gathered as many precious papers and photos as we could in five minutes and then tore down the road again, fire trucks coming past us in the opposite direction, plumes of smoke seeming to rise from all the valleys and the crevices in the hills, the air so thick we were choking already and driving out of what seemed to be an oven, the huge flames cresting above our house as if ready to engulf it.

  Now, barely twenty minutes away, downtown Santa Barbara was dreaming through another placid blue-sky afternoon, a miracle of calm; the angry smoke and orange burns to the north seemed to belong to another universe. We had to go about our life as usual—the next day would bring a fireworks display along the beach, for July the Fourth, and the day after that, I was due to perform a wedding ceremony for a college friend who was flying over from England for the occasion. We needed dinner, preferably in some inexpensive place not far from the house where we were staying while technically homeless (the same building that had housed my mother and me for four months after our house burned down before).

  “There’s a story of the Buddha,” my mother began telling us now, perhaps to take our mind off the conflagration, and I listened to her, though usually all the wisdom that came from her, a teacher of comparative religions, I tried to block out because I was a son. “When his closest disciple, Ananda, asked him what was the greatest miracle,” she went on, “walking on water or conjuring jewels out of thin air, changing the heat of one’s body through meditation or sitting undisturbed in a cave for years and years, he said, ‘Simply touching the heart of another human being. Acting kindly. That’s the greatest miracle of all.’ ”

  “The church of humanity, in other words,” I said, “like Graham Greene.” I didn’t care that I was citing the very writer my mother had liked when I was at school and I had mocked. (“You remember,” she said, not unexpectedly, “who it was who told you to read Graham Greene?”). “It was what he always believed in, the human predicament, the possibility for kindness and honesty even in the midst of our confusions and our sins. He could never quite bring himself to believe in God; God was the Other with whom he played his incessant games of ‘He loves me, He loves me not.’ But in humanity he had the strongest, if most reluctant belief. In our fallenness lies our salvation.”

  The other two looked at me blankly, nonplussed by this explosion. “He never could have much confidence in faith and hope,” I said, concluding a sermon that no one had asked for. “But charity was the one thing he couldn’t turn away from. Many writers try to take a journey into the Other. But in him it becomes a kind of creed, his version of religion, even when he’s just traveling into the Other in himself.”

  What I really could have been saying was that we were now in the world he’d made so real to me in his books, at the mercy of much larger forces, pushed back to essentials, without a home. The only thing you could possibly do in such circumstances was see that so many others were in a similar predicament and reach out towards them; what you shared was not faith, usually, but unsettledness.

  Up in the hills, meanwhile, the fires continued to blaze.

  He was very sweet and modest,” said his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh, of Greene, though Waugh was never given to syrupy or benign pronouncements, “always judging people by kindness.” He had agreed to look at a much-rejected manuscript called Swami and Friends in 1935, and gone to the trouble of finding a publisher for it, and become a staunch champion and finally a friend of its previously unknown writer, R. K. Narayan (born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami Iyer, I later learned, the only member of our extended clan to have won a name for himself in English letters). In judging him unworthy of a Nobel Prize in 1950, Per Hallström, a member of the Nobel committee, had written that compassion in Greene is “the only way to achieve human kind’s and life’s inner meaning,” more or less the center of his religion. But Greene was reluctant, almost ashamed, to be seen being kind; it was only at his memorial service that Muriel Spark revealed that he had sent her a little money every month so that she could go on writing—accompanied by some bottles of red wine, so she wouldn’t feel like a charity case.

  Greene often took up irrational hatreds in his life and never missed a chance to plague do-gooders and moralists; whenever I met someone who knew him well, the word that came up, in the midst of admiration, was “difficult.” With a tendency, as more than one acquaintance noted, to need to make conflict out of peace, as if to answer to some turmoil inside himself, he was so brutal on the unmet Noël Coward that Coward sent him a plaintive letter in verse, asking him what he’d done to deserve it (find success and avoid heavy-handedness?). He seemed to feast on confrontations, perverse or paradoxical positions, as if he would take any stance so long as it kept him apart from the crowd.

  But if his books have one signal quality, it is compassion—the fellow feeling that one wounded, lonely, scared mortal feels for another, and the way that sometimes, especially in a moment of crisis, when we “forget ourselves” (which is to say, escape our thoughts and conscious reflexes), a single extended hand makes nonsense of all the curlicues in our head. It can even make our terrors go away, for a moment.

  “It’s not really an established church or creed,” I might have said, if my mother and Hiroko had not saved me over my pasta from myself. “He was an apostle in a church of one. But what he was laying down, in effect, was a code of right action. Not faith, or God, or even justice—in none of which he can really believe; just the possibility of a single decent action. For no reason at all.”

  The next day, when Hiroko and my mother and I woke up in a strange house, in downtown Santa Barbara—odd to think we’d thought, in coming back here from Japan, that we could help my mother—I walked out into the parking lot to see what I could make out in the distance, where our house had been. The skies were black. It was as if a curtain had come down to separate us from whatever the rising fires were doing a few miles to the north. On the news, as ever, the reports said that the fire was less than twenty percent contained; hundreds of firefighters were being called in from across the country, and the governor had declared a state of emergency. The previous year, two miles from our house, the second largest fire in California history had wiped out 240,000 acres of land. The roof of my aging green Toyota was still splotched with permanent brown bruises from the ash.

  We were stuck now in this halfway house, unable to return home; calls, e-mails were coming in from friends: “We just saw the map on the Internet. It looks as if the fires are a few hundred yards from your house.” “We heard on the news that they have a fire truck stationed next to every house on your road. It can’t happen again, can it? Twice in less than twenty years.”

  We needed to get away from this, I thought—all the human chatter, and anguish over what we could do nothing about—so I got into the little car, with Hiroko by my side, and we drove up to a monastery in the hills a few minutes away, several ridges south of our house, where often I went to collect myself, and to gain clarity and direction. It was in this same place, in fact, that I’d decided to pursue Graham Greene the previous month, though all sense and logic (like the contracts I’d signed) said I was meant to be addressing the much more attractive theme of Japan’s changing surfaces and life as a happily bewildered foreigner.

  We drove up past the old Spanish mission, one of the most beautiful churches in California, with a convent next to its garden and courtyard, and took the steep road up along the hills, past the local reservoir, and then to the great open space t
hat leads to hidden Mount Calvary. I’d discovered the place only a few years before, after thirty-five years in Santa Barbara; it had become my secret home, to be used whenever I could not visit the monastery three hours up the coastal road to the north, in the stretch of coastline called Big Sur, where I’d begun to stay seventeen years before.

  Now, though, that monastery to the north was surrounded by flames, too; twenty-six structures in the area were gone, and the fire had been blazing there for almost two weeks. In Colombia one morning, the previous week, I’d received an e-mail from a nun friend saying that the hermitage we both loved was going up in flames, and I should pray for it, and our common friends there.

  Today, ironically, the firefighters protecting my beloved sanctuary in Big Sur were being summoned down to Santa Barbara to protect our house and the ones around it. It was like some parable in which all the escape lanes in one’s head are blocked; wherever one turns, there’s a wall of fire.

  We got out of the car at the top of the mountain, after following the narrow, empty road up through the hills and then turning into a tiny entrance that snaked around the dry brush for a few quiet seconds to the Santa Barbara retreat house. The air pulsed with silence around us. We could feel the stillness, the clarity in a place like this, as if murmured prayers, over years, unending, had polished the silence till it shone, the way workers in fancy hotels polish the windows and the wooden floors.