by Pico Iyer
When I offered her some juice, though, soon after she arrived, she slipped something into my glass (“ADAM,” as she would later explain, her fond nickname for the new drug that was just beginning to make itself known in New York, MDMA, or Ecstasy). For thirty minutes or so I felt a wild pounding of the heart (she sat next to me, clearly shaken by what she’d unloosed). Then, very suddenly, I was in love with her, a perfectly attractive person I’d have walked by on the street, a hundred times a day, without noticing.
She stayed with me for the sixteen or eighteen hours the drug’s effect was said to last, but after she left, it didn’t begin to subside. I started writing letters to her, feverish, long letters that went on for page after page. I went to my office, to write more endless articles on the violent struggle around apartheid in South Africa, the killing of Ninoy Aquino in the Philippines, but really all I was doing was turning from my typewriter to my desk to scribble out page after page of handwritten madness. Kristin didn’t know quite what to do with this—whatever hopes she’d had the night had ended—but she gamely took responsibility for the spirit she’d released.
In time, after two and a half months or so, and seventy days of writing five, ten pages a day, the tablet’s effect faded, and I never looked at the love drugs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with quite the same skepticism again. We ended up, through a small miracle, as fast friends who’d somehow come out on the far side of a romance, intimate and trusting, without ever having had a relationship. But Kristin was not the only one to wonder what in the world had happened. How much does a drug, an infatuation, place feelings inside one, and how much does it only uncover what was there all along? And how true, how deep were all the sentiments that came pouring out of me? Were they aimed at her, at the excitement of covering pages or just, at some level, at the feeling itself, intoxication?
So much of writing is a performance, a design or presentation aimed to charm or divert or persuade; the great challenge of the desk is to push past every agenda and self-consciousness to whatever lies beneath. Greene often said that he could not imagine how anyone could handle the shocks and confusions of a regular life without the catharsis and the clarifying agent of a pen. And the reason I loved him and he moved me so much was that he had the gift of seeming at last to set aside his evasions and false selves as soon as he began writing in another voice (in nonfiction, he could be as hard to catch as he no doubt was in life).
But what came out of his honest self-reckonings were always new questions about himself. Jim, the young protagonist of his last published novel, comes, after many years, upon the letters of the slippery character who’s taken him under his wing and is always leaving behind the woman he loves, and he is shamed, silenced by their obvious sincerity, their almost painful solicitude. By contrast, Jim reflects, as he sits in his “two-roomed flat,” trying to become a writer, he completes rough drafts even for his love letters, and in his most private correspondence “worked hard to produce the maximum effect on the reader.” At the end of his life, Greene seems to be wondering, through his final alter ego, if he’s ever loved at all—the same question that has haunted all his novels, full of feeling and sympathy and pathos as they are.
Sometimes I’d wondered the same thing about my father, or even myself; words came so easily to him that I could not tell how much he was inside them, how much outside, knowing just the effect that eloquence can have. Or maybe, I often thought, he himself could not tell how true or how deep his sentences were—as he spoke with such unstoppable fluency on silence and the need to leave all words behind—and from which place inside him they came. I’d turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it’s harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. But of course living with words had moved me to trust most those moments that come only when words run out.
On first meeting the letters to Catherine, I’d liked to believe that she had freed Greene at last from second thoughts, offering him passion without a real threat of domesticity; he’d asked her again and again to marry him, but he surely knew that he could no more easily settle to her, ultimately, than to himself. If he got his wish, he’d soon long to undo it. But to find him making the same protests of eternal devotion half a lifetime before, to a woman who could not have been more different (part of Catherine’s appeal was surely that she was Vivien’s wild opposite) was like having his most naked confessions in church doubted.
The only consolation—though was it one?—was that Greene, as always, seemed to be wise to his own maneuvers. In The Quiet American, his middle-aged Englishman writes to the wife he’s abandoned back in England to ask for a divorce (exactly the kind of scene I could imagine being incited in life by Greene’s sudden passion for Catherine). She responds to him, in what sounds like his own wife’s voice, full of the same undeluded calm and clarity: “You say it will be the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used exactly that phrase to me—I could show you the letter, I have it still—and I suppose you wrote in the same way to Anne. You say that we’ve always tried to tell the truth to each other, but, Thomas, your truth is always so temporary.”
The questions tore at me because all Greene’s books are, deep down, about the shaking of the heart, and not the body. It’s easier to find concrete evidence for sex than for love, so his official biographer, Norman Sherry, eagerly visited a brothel in Haiti to cross-question a madam on her long-ago client, and his dark counter, the American critic Michael Shelden, who all but accuses Greene of murder, recorded the testimony of a chambermaid in Jamaica as to the state of Greene’s sheets after he had been staying there with Catherine. But always I remembered Fowler, in The Quiet American, in one of his moments of sudden candor, saying, “None of us needs it as much as we say.” He’s had only four loves in his life, he says, and he wonders what the other forty or so partners were all about.
No one talks about sex so much as a schoolboy who knows next to nothing about it, and sometimes I wondered if Greene, like many of his protagonists, was only pretending to be wicked; he made such a big display of his interest in sex shows and brothels that it was easy to believe, as his friend Malcolm Muggeridge said, that he was a “sinner manqué.” A friend of mine sent Greene a novel he’d written, and the only word the older novelist objected to in it was “panties” (“Couldn’t you use ‘step-ins’?” was his bizarre suggestion.) It’s remarkable how, a decade after Lady Chatterley, Greene chose never to go much into sex at all in his books, even as he was offering to risk imprisonment to bring Lolita into print in England.
His women were friends at least as much as they were loves; he stayed in close contact with Dorothy and Catherine and Anita Björk until death intervened, and his need for intimacy (call it absolution or just understanding) seemed at least as strong as his need for apartness. He came to life around women, every one of his friends told me; but clearly, too, women came to life around him. They could feel his vulnerability, which he never tried to hide, his strange mixture of shyness and need, and they could see that he put feelings before everything (in his books at least) and kindness before mere doctrine. Sometimes I suspected that he really did believe, with a curious innocence, that it made sense to turn to professional lovers because there was no chance of betraying them; tenderness would come without a price tag (or, more precisely, with a financial price tag, which would always be easier to take care of).
In Toronto, one hot summer at the beginning of the new century, I happened to be one of fifty-eight people asked to talk for twenty minutes, onstage in a large theater, on our passion of the moment (I, too typically, spoke about the new possibilities of our global order, and the way it allowed for multiple homes and multiple selves). One evening, one of the only other writers there sought me out and started to talk about the writers she especially loved.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Well, I’ve been preoccupied for many years with Graham Greene.”
Her face lit up. “That story of his,” she said. “
You know ‘The Blue Film’?”
“The one about the man in Bangkok who takes his wife to see a ‘French film’ in a little hut? And then realizes that the man undressing in the movie is himself, thirty years before? With the only woman he’s ever truly loved, a street girl hired for the picture?”
“Right,” she said. “Every time I read it, I cry.”
It looked to me as if she was close to tears now; she seemed to waver a little in the glossy atrium of the high-tech building where we were being served canapés. She had, as it turned out, been a professional call girl herself—that was what she wrote about—and now maintained a column on the intricacies of male-female relations, as seen from her unusual perspective. Perhaps she knew, I thought, about those men who wanted to be held as much as touched; perhaps someone like her could read a man like Greene in the dark.
CHAPTER 11
One day, almost by mistake, I stumbled upon a perfect description of Graham Greene—coming, curiously enough, from a daughter. “He never seems to like a steady diet of any one thing or person,” she had said, and “has an overwhelming horror of being bored.” Since he also had an “overpowering hatred of hurting people,” this meant that he was often in flight from society, afraid of being oppressed, and fell into what his biographer called an “extraordinary restlessness” as he tried to outrun the “deep, inner wound of his childhood.”
The only problem was that the person being described there was not Graham Greene, but P. G. Wodehouse.
Not much later, I came across the following: “His eyes were an intense blue. I thought that here was a man who had seen a lot of the world, who was experienced, and yet who seemed to have suffered … He had a gift for creating an atmosphere of such intimacy that I found myself talking freely to him. I was impressed by his beautiful manners.”
Yet the woman who delivered this, Eleanor Brewer, was here talking, again, not of Greene, but of his famously traitorous friend and sometime colleague, Kim Philby, who had once said, after defecting to Moscow, that all he wanted in life was “Graham Greene on the other side of the table, and a bottle of wine between us.” Brewer was not completely unworldly; she was married to the chief Middle Eastern correspondent for The New York Times in Beirut at the time she fell under Philby’s spell and left her husband to become his third wife. But he’d gotten under her skin with the notes he’d written, sometimes several every day.
“Deeper in love than ever, my darling,” he wrote to Brewer, on pieces of paper taken from cigarette packs. “Deeper and deeper, my darling.”
So there I was again: the man I felt such closeness to was a type, and there were many others of his background who matched aspects of his type to the letter. Yet it was only Greene I saw when I looked into the mirror of what I’d written, and only his unholy book I found next to the Gideons’ Bible in a foreign hotel room, as if slipped there by some intruder. It liked to say, his gospel for the fallen, that all of us know what we’re supposed to do—trust in God, trust in ourselves, remember that “this too shall pass”—but that none of that helps us when we’re looking for consolation in the dark. It said that wisdom is wonderful on a mountaintop, but that in the world an unwise man might have more to offer us than any sage does. It said that what we don’t know is more likely to save us than what we do know.
The fugitive priest at the center of The Power and the Glory, a moth-eaten, unshaven man with the air of “somebody of no account who had been beaten up” is described, early on, as a “black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair”: the archetypal Greene protagonist. But only twenty pages later, the ruthless lieutenant who is pursuing him is similarly described: “a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun.” The Captain, in Greene’s final novel, more than sixty years on, is “an eternal questionmark never to be answered, like the existence of God.” When Greene, one New Year’s night in Stockholm, picked out a fortune from a pool, it turned out to be a question mark. All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing.
I was in Bogotá one grey day in July—the city Greene once sailed towards, with Henry James, in a dream—and church bells were ringing around the deserted business area in the north of the city where I was staying. As ever, the hills that encircle the place, thickly forested, were swathed in clouds, and it looked about to rain, about not to rain, at any moment. A long line of people from the poor parts of town and the countryside snaked around the base of Monserrate, waiting for a cable car to carry them up to the little church at the top of the mountain, above the clouds.
I decided to go out to the city’s suburbs with the young volunteer, Maria Paula, who had been deputed by a magazine editor to show me around her town. We traveled away from the broad boulevards and the green-glass skyscrapers of the modern, hopeful area into a disorderly shambles, so rough that Maria Paula put a finger to her lips to remind me not to speak English and draw attention to my foreignness. We walked for ten minutes or more through a marketplace, much of Bogotá surging up the chill steep slopes on the midsummer Sunday morning, till we came to a little plaza where stood a modest red-brick building, and what looked to be a huge hotel beside it.
Inside, it was so crowded we could hardly move. People were pushing and crushing and being pushed into a little shrine where sat a Holy Infant, the protective treasure of the Iglesia 20 de Julio. Some were dressed in the heavy woolen ponchos of the interior and had wrinkled, pre-Colombian features; others were Indian women in bowler hats, as from the Andes; the young blades of Bogotá were here, with their gangsta ways and their girls, and lanky black guys, from the Caribbean coast, towering above the crowd. Colombia was more crisscrossed with factions and almost unimaginable brutality than any country in the Americas: the leftist guerrillas were fighting the government soldiers and groups of paramilitary vigilantes were trying to get the better of the guerrillas by cutting off tongues and quartering victims with chainsaws; the narcotraficantes had been responsible for cities like Medellín boasting the highest murder rate in the world; and two days after I visited the church, a daring government rescue mission would retrieve the former presidential candidate, Íngrid Betancourt, who had been held by guerrilla kidnappers, along with fourteen others, for more than six years.
But now, as far as I could see—and Maria Paula agreed—all the feuding groups were here, in the crowds swelling the aisles of the main church, clapping along as an acoustic guitar was strummed softly, far away at the front, unseeably far, while a lone female voice struck up the sweet chorus.
“¡No pasarán!” said Maria Paula, speaking to me, but also joining in the refrain—a folk song that could have been serving as an international anthem—and when the priest spoke again, mothers held up babies, worn campesinos held up bottles, or copies of the day’s schedule, to try to receive blessings from the altar at the front.
I walked around amidst the faces of the country, not wanting to romanticize this tough and often menacing place, or see what wasn’t there; if I found innocence here, it was only because I couldn’t read the signs, or didn’t know what to look for. Young girls were snuggling up against their novios, who looked very much as if they were about to go to war (for the leftists or their enemies, I couldn’t tell). Beggars in their forties, with thin, uncared-for hair, put up their palms for blessings, closed their eyes to the strummed guitar. Families kept shuffling in and out of the interior—a perpetual commotion—as clapping rose from the overflow crowd next door.
“You won’t find this in the rich areas,” said Maria Paula, who belonged so staunchly to those areas that she had been worried about stepping outside them today, except that she remembered coming to the church with her grandmother. “The power of hope is great.”
“Prepaid” women, as she engagingly translated the term, stood by their mafiosi protectors, and hit men and soldiers and fighters who had lost limbs to the mafiosi joined in the song. The man next to me had a bleached spot on his cheek; others had scars all across their faces. Nobod
y looked very safe or happy for long.
I remembered the one previous time I’d come to the city, at eighteen, with my friend from high school. We’d ended up in a completely unlit area—Colombians shivered as I described the scene for them now—where girls in hot pants and men with guns roamed up and down the barely paved lanes. Like innocents from Greene’s Monsignor Quixote (we anticipated the scene from that novel by just seven years), we were the only residents of the Hotel Picasso who never thought to wonder why all the other guests of the hotel were young, female and very scantily clad, much more ready to say hello to us than anyone else we’d met on our trip so far had been.
Maria Paula and I spent a long time in the church—it was the first time I’d felt at all close to the heart of Colombia—and then we walked (a finger to the lip again) back through the sloping streets where families were gathering in broken little cantinas for Sunday lunch and into the chaos of the marketplace, to find a taxi driver who would not grow too hungry or suspicious if we asked him to take us to the rich side of town.
“I wasn’t expecting much of this,” I said that night at a Mexican restaurant, talking with the only other writer from the United States who had defied a State Department warning to come here to speak on the state of the world. “Today, onstage, a woman started talking to me about V. S. Naipaul’s wounds and asked me what mine were.”
“What did you say?”
“Something about detachment. Not being good at settling down.”
“What about Greene? What do you think his wound was?”
I said nothing for a moment, untypically. “Doubt,” I came out with at last. “The fact that he could never give himself entirely to a person or a faith, even though his conscience was alive enough to know that not to do so was untenable.”
