by Pico Iyer
I followed Hiroko in through the main entrance, and we walked into a little sunlit courtyard. Sitting there, in a circle of light, in the silence, yellow and orange flowers along the borders, a makeshift crucifix in front of us, with skulls around it, we said nothing, letting the gathered tension of the last few days come out of us. There was a wooden bench, with a small plaque remembering a donor who had died; we might have been in sixteenth-century Spain, a place where fires in Santa Barbara had never been heard of and people lived their lives according to a calendar that had no dates.
“Remember the last time we came here?” I asked her.
“Two years ago?” (She remembers everything, keeping me honest.) “When you were going to Sri Lanka?”
“Right. I don’t know why, but I felt I needed blessings then, protection. I don’t even know if I believe in gods, but this was the only place to come to.”
“It’s okay,” she said, though forty-eight hours earlier, fleeing the burning hills, she’d broken into uncharacteristic tears. “Everything will be fine.”
Just sitting in the silent courtyard made everything fall away. The days, our cares, the fact that we were staying in a house not our own, our belongings engulfed. The silence seemed to be a sifting mechanism, so that everything trivial and divisive disappeared—the setting, too—and all that remained was what was clear and impossible to argue away.
“You feel better?” I asked Hiroko, after perhaps thirty minutes.
“It’s calm.” Which wasn’t exactly a yes.
“Shall we go?” Just a short time collecting ourselves—recollecting ourselves—in such a place made all the difference; now whatever came at us over the radio, from thoughtful friends, from the furnace of our minds would have a frame around it, a background of unchangingness to set against it.
As we walked out of the main building, letting the heavy door close behind us, and walked towards my car, the unsightly puddles of corroded brown on its green roof recalling the fire of the summer before, I looked over along the hills to where I didn’t even expect to see our house. There it was, to my amazement, a tiny structure from this distance, impossibly frail, by itself on the ridge, huge plumes of smoke rising all around it. Then the thick black clouds descended once again, and I was sure that it was gone.
The world of Greene is a world of greys, I thought, back in our temporary quarters—which is to say, the world of our conflicting emotions. It is not that good and bad do not exist, but that they are so improbably mixed, in constantly shifting proportions, that we cannot begin to tell friend from foe or right from wrong; the priest is likely to be a reprobate and the sinner to have some residual kindness in him. The God we believe in dispenses suffering—and the devil promises us happiness, or peace. The quiet American is a fool because he wishes to lay down theories and systems on what is as impossible to predict or control as a forest fire; the unquiet Englishman is a fool because to give up on hope and caring is to commit oneself prematurely to a kind of death-in-life. Vienna’s main sewer—in the classic film Greene wrote, The Third Man—flows straight into the Danube.
He was part of the first generation to grow up with the cinema—he watched two hundred movies a year in his stint as a film critic in his early thirties—and the roaming camera gave him a sense of how point of view is always provisional, and always changing, and how we can shadow a character in all his stumblings, so that we feel him bumping around in the dark and don’t just watch him from on high. He was also part of the first generation to grow up with the airplane—one title he had proposed for his autobiography was 110 Airports—and this habit of mobility, touching down in Cuba or Saigon or Tahiti only days after he’d been in England, gave him a sense of how much wider the world is than our minds and how much the truths and certainties of London look like folly when you’re sitting in Havana, or vice versa.
Part of his special skill was to learn from the camera how to tell a story out of sequence and with a minimum of distraction—dialogue should be a form of action, he contended, and his slow, often heart-torn sentences are always pushing forwards—even as the real question at the core of every novel is whether the figure at its center will somehow survive, to face more doubts. A complex tale of murder and betrayal is put together like a jigsaw puzzle in The Quiet American, with a disappearance at the beginning to cast a shadow over any happiness that follows; but what lingers with us is not the temporary resolution or the economic stitching together of several themes and plots—it’s the sense of hauntedness, and irresolution. “Everything had gone right for me,” the narrator says in the last sentence of that book, “but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”
We waited, my mother and Hiroko and I, for day after long day in our temporary lodging, looking up at the hills in the distance or, in my case, not looking up at all, for fear of what I would see. For night after night I dreamed of fire—three straight nights—and each time, when I awoke, it was with the sense, unanswerable, that our house was gone. I would never see it again, my unconscious seemed to be telling me.
When the earlier fire had burned down our house—and four hundred and twenty-six others—it had come as a sudden, one-night epiphany. A wildfire had broken out on a distant ridge at six in the afternoon; within ten minutes or so it was all around our home. I had fled to a lower spot, trapped for three hours as I watched the outlines of our lives stripped away, and by the end of the night nearly all the damage had been done. The fire, whipped on by “sundowner” winds, roared down from the hills into the crowded residential areas and then jumped the six lanes of the freeway, seemingly intent on passing through every neighborhood until it reached the sea.
This time there was none of the sudden shock and quick release into a world of ashes. Day after day we looked up and saw smoke now surrounding our house, now seeming to have left, and each day, as the sun set, we girded ourselves for late-afternoon winds suddenly to pick up and send the flames skittering, unstoppably, in the direction of the town again. The local newspaper told us that the fire chief himself expected to lose a hundred houses—ours and all our neighbors’—the night we evacuated; “the whole bloody world’s on fire,” as a fire officer in Greene’s Blitz had memorably put it.
In time, after ten days or so, the wind blew the flames up over the top of the mountain and away from all structures, and, thanks mostly to the firemen who formed a single line to stand the blaze down, we and those around us were safe—until the next time. We drove back to the house; we unpacked the boxes stuffed with papers and passports and jewelry and objects of sentimental importance again. Sometimes we were lucky, it seemed; sometimes we were not. The only lesson the fire taught was that you never know what will happen next—our destinies can unravel even as we think we’re writing them.
Hiroko and I returned to Japan a few weeks later and summer began to subside, giving way to the peaceful blaze of autumn. Then, in mid-November, at least a month after “fire season” ended, I was talking to my mother on the phone when she said, “I went out with a friend to see a movie last night, but as soon as we passed the turn, midway down the hill, I saw huge flames around the town. It looked a long way away, but you know how it is. The winds were moving at sixty miles per hour.
“I told Nancy, ‘You go to the movie. I’m afraid if I go, I’ll just be worrying every moment. Would you mind dropping me home again?’ ”
That was where she was now, she said, and the fire was, so far, on the other side of town. Before the day was over, though, I heard of a friend who’d lost his house. The brother of another friend went to a movie and came out to be told that he couldn’t drive home and, in any case, he had no home to drive to. The fire was moving so quickly that more than two hundred houses were destroyed, many before firefighters had had the chance to react.
The one item that all the media covered—I heard it as soon as it happened, from a newspaper editor in Los Angeles—was that a monastery in the hills, Mount Calvary, the place where Hiroko and
I had gone to collect ourselves as our home and my usual monastery up the coast in Big Sur were threatened, was one of the first buildings to go; the sanctuary I’d begun to turn to, with its polished silence and its humbling views over the town and the Pacific, was now nothing but ash.
Six months later, I flew back to Santa Barbara from New York, and arrived at the airport to see a roar of fire rising over a ridge just behind our house and storming down towards it again. This time—Greene’s work could have told me this—an “evacuation warning” was issued to the entire town.
CHAPTER 10
I was almost thirty-eight when my sense of Greene was burned to the ground. I knew him inside out by then, I liked to think, in all his many faces: I knew his guardedness, precisely because of all the feelings that were rising inside him; I knew his inability to settle to faith, or to any definition anyone was likely to impose on him; I knew his kindness, the stronger because of the obscure sense of darkness and treachery he always carried with him. When he wasn’t fleeing boredom, he was simply trying to escape the familiar—the emotional obligations of making a family—moving from one place to another, one woman to the next as if to tell them, as well as himself, that there was less danger that way of hurting anyone.
He couldn’t easily stay with another soul, yet he had a lifelong, almost visceral terror of giving pain (he had always fainted at the mere mention of an accident); he longed to find love, and the peace it might bring, and yet he knew that he would always recoil from commitment, and the prospect it brought of losing everything (or gaining fixity, and obligation); he spent his whole life searching for a haven that, were he to find it, he would only exile himself from or spoil, and then begin the search again.
Just then, his authorized biographer brought out his second volume of Greene’s life, covering the middle years, and I, like many others, read for the first time the letters Greene had written to Catherine Walston, from the time they met through the time when their passion finally began to spark out, more than a dozen years later. The letters were a revelation, volcanic; seldom had I read any appeals, declarations or promises so passionately unguarded and from the heart, it seemed. It was like suddenly seeing a wildfire blaze above the hills, next to which Greene, Catherine, the families they were deserting came to look like silhouettes against a wall of flames.
“I can’t get you out of my heart. You’ve splintered inside it and surgeons are useless. They say one day I may die of the splinter, but it cannot be removed.” “How one can go on falling in love with the same person … sometimes several times a day. My God how I miss you.” “I can’t get you out of my mind & I don’t know how to keep going.” “I’ve never dared to write like this to another person, or wanted to. Dear heart. I am all yours. I can only offer myself to God through you.”
Perhaps many a man might write like this at the beginning of an infatuation, the more so if he is an eloquent man, at once relieved to get all his feelings out and a little excited by all that’s being released. The words themselves are as reckless and even generic as those of the novelist Greene, measuring out his five hundred words a day, are drily precise and melancholy. Yet on and on they continued, for more than a decade, long after the first disappointments, the first betrayals, the realization of all that would not be possible were far behind the couple.
“Marry me, Catherine … How many times one writes the same words till they must be stale as dry bread to you, that never has one conceived the possibility of living so completely before.” “No one has ever been more loved than you except the saints.” “I’m lost. I don’t know what to believe any more. Please pray for me as you’ve never done before.” “You are all I have in the world & I make such a mess of things. Pray for me.”
More than once I had to put the letters down; it was like picking up a casserole dish straight from the oven. In a way, they confirmed everything I liked to believe of Greene; by bringing his heart to the surface, they showed precisely the tender, solicitous, generous and fervent man whom otherwise he tried to keep hidden (or, in his books, powerfully imminent). It was like seeing the soul, intimate and beseeching, emerge from behind the personality. He was still as treacherous and inconstant and sometimes bitter to Catherine as he showed himself to be in his novels; it must have been terrifying, I thought, to be on the receiving end of such letters—and Catherine had replied (and perhaps fanned the flames) by keeping him at a distance, suggesting their relationship remain platonic, even telling him of her affairs with other men. Sometimes it could seem as if it was the very fact that she was so difficult to hold that drove him on, even as she was reflecting back to him exactly the burdened sense of duty, the changing faces, the reluctance to stay put that he brought to others.
Yet it was like having a bet paid off, and a friendship vindicated, the way I’d felt when Louis, without a moment’s hesitation, had thrown aside his wailing renditions of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” to race into the empty road in Ethiopia to tend to two strangers in need.
The classic Englishman—I thought of Maugham again, and John le Carré—is especially ardent because he’s been holding in his feelings so long, and for Greene this sudden love made sense only because it was instantaneous, out of control and, in some ways, senseless (Catherine had four small children and, as a Catholic, was particularly unlikely to give herself over to him, which perhaps made him feel both safer and more fired by the hunt). It came in the face of his habitual doubts, his forty-two years of failing to find a place for faith, his knowledge of how much he should know better. I thought of the moment in The Quiet American that lies at the heart of the story when Fowler, so intent on presenting himself as uninvolved and beyond youthful caring, goes into the toilet of the American Legation, certain at last that he’s lost Phuong, and collapses into tears of jealousy and pain.
Just then, on something of a whim—perhaps I wanted to revisit my hometown of Oxford with Greene, and see him anew in the light of these burning letters—I decided to go back for the first time to the initial volume of the biography, which I’d ignored when it came out, not wanting the art to be obscured by the life. When I did so, I was shocked. Midway through the book, Greene is approached by the young reader, Vivien, and, very soon, he is pouring out the same kind of torrent to her, when he is only twenty. Out comes a flood of charming, boyish, ingenious messages—letters in code, antic flights, veiled emotional threats, words of adoration that might be laid before a saint. In two and a half years, according to the biography, the young Greene sent the virginal Catholic teenager two thousand letters, often up to three a day, literally counting the moments till they would meet. When he saw how much Norman Sherry quoted from these letters in his book, the aging Greene was so upset that he made his bumptious Texan Boswell weep; he never seemed to mind if someone revealed his cruelties, his lies, his betrayals—he appeared almost to thrive on that, and the relief of being found out—but if someone made public his tender and adoring heart, he flinched.
“Dear love, dear only love for ever, dear heart’s desire. I’m aching for you, I need you as much as any cripple might.” “Come back to me & I’ll soon make you believe again that I shall love you as long as life & if there’s life after, afterwards.” “My miracle-worker … You’ve given trees shade, and the flowers scent, and the sun a gold it’s never had before.” “More than earth / More than fire / More than light / Darling.”
He would kneel before God, he wrote to Vivien, if only she would marry him; he would honor her wish for celibacy, if only they could be wed. In truth he did become a Catholic just so she would accept him. Yet, as with Catherine more than twenty years later, he seemed to be courting his love as the true object of his faith; it was less that she would bring him to God than that he would use God as a way to get her heart. “You are my saint,” he wrote to Vivien (just as the young boy in his first novel, The Man Within, thinks of the girl he meets in his fairy-tale cottage); “miracles will be done at your grave.” “You are simply the symbol of the Absolute,”
he writes. The deeply devout woman who had written him about the Virgin Mary must have been more than a little unsettled by the intensity and wondered why he seemed to be prostrating himself not before God but fallible her.
It was as if there was a question mark where his heart should be, and perhaps he could answer it only with such passion; it was hard, reading Greene, to forget that he had titled one play Yes and No and seemed to live in an eternal maybe. Always impatient with anyone who would put his faith in an abstraction, able only to repose his confidence in the wavering heart, he seemed almost to need to solve the riddle of belief by taking a leap of faith towards another mortal. The passionate letters might have been a way of trying to will himself into conviction and trust, because he knew and feared that, soon, very soon, his foothold would begin to slip and he would be in the abyss again.
A woman came to my apartment once when I was living in New York City, in my mid-twenties, having asked me, and asked me, for five weeks when I would be free (I should have said, “Never,” but perhaps I, too, was not yet ready to close the door on possibility). We’d met a couple of months before, and I’d found her to be bright, quick and fun, a recent student of my father’s in California who’d made contact with me after she’d read a long piece I’d written for Time magazine on the cocaine trade. Kristin (she shared a name with my college girlfriend) was bursting with life and spirit, but I was on my way to Asia for many months and she was living with her college boyfriend, and, through the vagaries that made me like corn, say, but never eggs, I knew she would never be my type.
