The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  We fell silent then, and my mind went back to the little children, the dirty ponchos, the clapping that had greeted the end of the service that morning. Hoodlums coming in and out, bearing babies on their shoulders, drug dealers cupping their girls tenderly at the small of their backs, soldiers taking off their caps and then leading their grandmothers towards the Holy Infant.

  It was the oddest thing, I thought as I walked around the streets of Bogotá the next day, not knowing who was who and what to make of them, but what Greene had really done, for me at least, was dismantle the entire notion of an “enemy.” Holy books, again, teach us about kindness and forgiveness and union; he, much too typically, taught us, as he liked to put it, about “hate.” We know, more or less, what to do with our friends; it’s our seeming enemies who pose problems—and therefore possibilities—at the core.

  The adulterer Bendrix, in Greene’s most passionate novel, The End of the Affair, ends up not just moving in with the husband he’s cuckolded, but going on long walks with him, his hand protectively on his rival’s arm; they begin to seem like a couple brought together by the great love they have in common. Wormold, the shy lost father in Havana, finds himself at the climax of his story playing checkers with a notorious Cuban police officer who is said to carry a cigarette case made of human skin. But he learns, as the night goes on, that the case is not a sadist’s relic of some innocent the man has tortured; it’s a reminder of what was done to his father. All Segura is doing, in effect, is carrying his father’s skin round with him.

  In The Quiet American, the unquiet Englishman makes it a defining principle to dislike and deride the quiet American, and the quiet American appoints himself Fowler’s rival in love as well as politics. Yet much of the anguish and complication of the book, its bitter intensity, comes from the fact that each has only the other to confide in in a very foreign country, and neither knows what to do with the affection and sense of solicitude they feel developing between them. The Quiet American is much more about the difficult, treacherous love between the two male rivals than about the love either feels for Phuong.

  The great religious books and teachers tell us to love our neighbor as ourself, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, to put white before black. But Greene asks what happens if the neighbor you’re loving is, in fact, your neighbor’s wife. He asks why you would ever do to someone what you want him to do to you—because what you feel you deserve at his hands is retribution. He tells us that black and white are figments of the imagination; the deeper you see anything, the less you can reach for absolutes. “Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies,” as Fowler says, in a political context, “and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.” It can sound like a pretty, too-Greenian paradox until you realize that in his books, as in many lives, enemies do suddenly become friends and then turn enemy again.

  Whenever I read Greene—he mocks America’s civilization, yet his greatest love was an American, as was his favorite writer; he constantly pricks holes in Catholicism, yet his fallen, errant, sinning Catholic priest becomes a hero precisely because he refuses to flee when a dying mother needs his priestly ministration—I noticed that the only reliable and constant enemy in all his work was, in fact, a version of himself. That was the way in which he was most deeply Catholic, if only in a backwards way: that he never gave himself the benefit of the doubt and always assumed that the other man had a point. And whatever woes his protagonists face, the challenges never seem quite arbitrary, and they have to assume that they’ve done something to deserve them. The fact we can’t argue with our own fate is what renders us bereft.

  “Inexorably the other’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocence,” he wrote, in The Heart of the Matter, and the very violence of the phrasing shows how alive and terrible the pain was. “Hate was just a failure of imagination,” he wrote in The Power and the Glory, more or less compressing his belief and reason for writing into seven simple words. All Greene’s work is about the conundrum of feeling someone else’s position too acutely, to the point of not being able to hear, or act on, one’s own. And that natural sympathy for the other’s point of view is made more agonized—more complex—because one can have so little faith in oneself. Greene could write with harrowing compassion for every character except the one who might be taken as Graham Greene.

  When his old boss and drinking buddy Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union, having sent many innocent Englishmen to their deaths, Greene horrified many by remaining loyal to him, going again and again to visit him in Moscow and even writing the foreword to Philby’s memoir about his treacheries. Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry writes that he never felt “the pale compelling hardness” of Greene’s eyes, enraged, so much as when he, Sherry, dared (as most people did) to question Philby’s integrity. For Greene, Philby had a dedication to his cause (however mistaken) that the novelist envied and that put him to shame; and for Greene, loyalty to a friend was always as impossible to doubt as devotion to an abstraction was impossible to believe. “Would the world be in the mess it is,” asks Wormold in Our Man in Havana (and it is a refrain that runs through much of Greene), “if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”

  And when Sherry spent a long day with Greene, and the issue of the novelist’s enemies came up, Greene went away, consulted his brother Hugh and, a little later, volunteered a list of all the people who might have something to say against him. It was characteristic of a man who seemed to have no interest in self-exoneration and was ready to convict himself of virtually every sin. Greene could not bring himself to believe in God and so, by his own lights, he was cursed. But he could not entirely believe in himself or his own positions, including his arguments against God, and so there was always a small chink of hope.

  CHAPTER 12

  After I left the Dragon School, at the age of thirteen, I and many of my classmates found ourselves in an even older all-male institution, somewhere between the grey towns of Slough and Windsor, interned within New Buildings (so called because they contained the oldest classroom in the world, from 1440). Our little studies—every boy had a room of his own—looked out on a cobbled courtyard, a clock tower and a statue of our distant patron, Henry VI; the fields around us were called Agar’s Plough, Sixpenny and—too perfectly—Mesopotamia. Every morning, at 6:45, a white-coated retainer of sorts, Mr. Gower, knocked on each door, and opened it a crack—“Morn, sir!”—and then we trudged down the icy stone spiral staircase to where a vat of tea and our copies of The Times awaited us.

  The fields were still wet with dew as we walked across them to the first class of the morning—Caesar most likely—at 7:30. Then we wandered back across the grass to kippers or porridge in our old wooden hall and, putting on white surplices over the full morning dress (black tails and white ties) we had to wear each day, with black gowns on top, marched in a solemn line, singing, “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise,” to our places in the near-cathedral across the courtyard. Bells tolled to summon us to prayer, across the cloisters where sat our copy of the Gutenberg Bible, through the long passageways with names of the departed along the walls, into the little rooms where, as the Dame’s patrolling feet were heard each night at 9:00, we buried ourselves with copies of Richard Brautigan, Hunter Thompson, the sea-mail copy of The Village Voice that found me every week, two months late.

  When we had to recite passages from the classics—I mischievously chose Siddhartha for my text, smuggling a piece of California into rainy Berkshire—we stood among busts of Wellington and Gladstone and my father’s hero Shelley; their names were inscribed in the walls and desks all round, to remind us of where duty beckoned. In the drizzly afternoons of October we ran a “Steeplechase,” as horses might, for five miles across the mud, splashing near the end across a fifteen-foot stream, and as the cold and damp grew ever deeper, we assembled by the Wall in late November for a game played nowhere else in the world. One boy sat on a ball, nineteen larger boys, from two teams, sat on top of
him, everyone was invited to punch and pummel everyone else (though the rules specifically forbade “gouging out an eye”) and no one, by tradition, mentioned that the last goal scored had come in 1909.

  I didn’t resent all this, however much I was sometimes unnerved by it; as the years went on, I came to think that this was the kind of system, refined and perfected over centuries, that knew exactly how to cherish and encourage freedom precisely by placing it within clear limits. The school had acres and acres of grounds—rivers running along under stone bridges, secret gardens tucked among the elms, a whole town that had grown up round it—and on several afternoons a week we had all our hours free after lunch (though two or three essays to write by the next morning). We were being trained, in effect, to rule ourselves and to become masters of time; as president of the Chess Club, I used the special key I was given to admit myself into a private library, lavish with sofas, eighteenth-century portraits above the fireplaces, shelves and shelves of books in several rooms, and no one to disturb the peace for hours.

  I could write my essays—“Antony is just an aging rake: discuss” “Offer a five-year economic plan for the newly independent nation of Malawi” (easily done if, as I did, you contacted the Malawian embassy in London and requested its assistance for ideas)—and then still come out by late afternoon to play games of tennis next to the King of Siam’s Garden or gather in the drinking place to which every boy had access as soon as he turned sixteen.

  At the end of each term, and “Trials,” as they were called, all 250 boys in the year assembled in a large auditorium so that everyone could be told precisely who had placed 1st, and who 51st, and who 249th and 250th. Privileges for years thereafter—could we have a record player in our rooms, were we allowed into the in-house library?—depended on these standings. As younger boys, we had to be servants of the elders, shining their shoes every day, bringing them their newspaper in the morning, starting their fires in the winter; every time the deafening call “Boy Upppp!” rang through the corridors, we had to drop everything we were doing (homework, most likely) and hurtle up to the source of the cry. The last one there had to race across town to fetch an older boy a magazine, or deliver a message for him. Older boys were allowed to beat younger (as masters were not), and rumors gleefully recalled that, if bored, our seniors would summon a few juniors, ask them to spread out their hands on a table and, blindfolded, jab among the fingers with their compasses.

  Bad pieces of work were torn in two in front of the whole class, and we were ranked in every single subject every two weeks, obliged to take our report cards to be inspected by two separate overseers; yet one beauty of the system—even we could see—was that we were in the hands of men, often Old Boys themselves, who had one great skill in life, and that was the management of hormone-addled, restless, adolescent boys. Our parents became liberators, the bringers of possibility we were delighted to see, and all the struggles of puberty played out in other lives at home, leaving scars and sometimes enmities for life, were here handled by impersonal agents of authority, whom we had no qualms about leaving behind or defying, even as our parents (or mine at least) spoiled us with condolences and trips to the movies and freedom to stay up past nine o’clock.

  Every time I flew back, in fact, to visit my mother and father, it was like stepping out of a formal, intimate dance, a costume drama in a garden maze, and into absolute emptiness again. Just as when we’d first moved to California several years before. None of the words I learned in our ancient classrooms carried, and nothing in post-’60s California made much sense within our grey-stone cloisters. It was like flying between different dimensions of the mind, and one world could no more understand the other than I, in a skeptical mood, could feel sudden moments of rapturous transport, or, when dreaming, could begin to make out the parade-ground rat-a-tat-tat of reason.

  At school, when we were allowed to put on a play without any help from teachers, we chose, almost inevitably, the fiendishly complex and malevolent Jacobean drama The Revenger’s Tragedy, and I found myself playing an illegitimate prince who has slaughtered his father and is now lasciviously wooing his mother (a part taken on for us by a master’s daughter with the highly typical name of Iona Stormonth Darling). No one could much appreciate this in Santa Barbara, even though I pointed them towards the cool new Pynchon novel that reenacted a Jacobean drama within suburban, acid-dropping Southern California.

  When I flew back to England, after three or four weeks of license, it was into a world where most of us decorated our rooms with black-light posters and secretly slipped one another copies of Ladies of the Canyon, at least one in our class along the paths around Hardy’s Wessex clearly tripping in some deeper way. Saturnalia and the Revolution were irresistible here only because they were so far away, and existed mostly in our heads. It was like moving through some allegory between a City of Hope, where history has been abolished, and a City of History, where hope can be slipped in only as contraband, a highly illicit substance.

  I was moving, I suppose, every three months, between the worlds of Fowler and Pyle. The Quiet American could never be just a book to me; it was like a diagram of the world I knew, my boyhood, and every time I picked it up, it was like being on the plane again, moving in either direction, between young Americans who were engagingly full of ideas of salvation and self-improvement and Brits who reflexively claimed to believe in nothing at all. It wasn’t just that my father was giving his students the classical roots of possibility while we, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” were receiving a crash course in reality; it wasn’t even just that each of these mutually incomprehending worlds, almost inevitably, longed for the other, the Californian kids I knew seeming to yearn for tradition, constancy, even (though it was rarely stated) hierarchy, while my English friends, when they came to visit, instantly asked if we could drive up to Esalen.

  It was something deeper: “What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old,” as Greene writes in a late book of stories. “But all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.” That was the most poignant of all the paradoxes he lived among, as every one of his characters sought to learn hard truths about the world and himself, and to come to a place beyond illusion; and then, once there, wished, at some level, he could be a young fool again.

  If you delivered the title of that book of stories, May We Borrow Your Husband?, in an American voice, it sounded boyish, polite, full of openness; if you said it in an English voice, it sounded feline, jaded, even decadent. In the distance between the two lies the heartbreak.

  Greene made it his practice, as I’d admired, never to let himself off the hook for anything; when people sought him out for counsel or confession—often priests, convinced he was the saint of sinners, the only one who understood their doubts—he invariably told them how hopeless he was and how different from the person they thought they knew, a cry that grew more anxious after he appeared on the cover of Time in 1951. He sounded, at times, like the convict protagonist in his friend Narayan’s novel, The Guide, who is taken to be a sage the more he protests his unworthiness, and who is acclaimed for his humility the more he simply tells the truth about his many crimes.

  Yet deeper than that, I always saw in Greene the boy who sat next to me in class, or who took off on a “Long Run” (he relished such exercises, friends of his told me, because they allowed him to be alone), who clearly had learned well the lesson we were repeatedly taught at school (which left us especially at sea in unembarrassed, aspiring America): that the one thing we should never talk about was our acts of kindness, or selflessness, and what we should always stress were our failures, our faults, and our follies. This was an act of prudence, in part; each of us, after all, was surrounded by 1,249 boys just waiting to sniff out a trace of traitorous goodness. But it was also the principle of the perhaps outdated gentleman’s code in which we were being trained: it was unseemly to push yourself forward, or to think very much of yourself at all. When Greene wrote, in The End of the Affair, “Virt
ue tempted him in the dark like a sin”—in The Power and the Glory, an errant priest feels “the wild attraction of doing one’s duty”—he wasn’t just indulging his weakness for paradox; he knew that a certain set of behaviors had been deeply instilled in his characters, and it required courage, the quality he admired most, to stray from them.

  We learned this and we learned this, and then I got off TWA 761, in Los Angeles, and found that everything was turned on its head there. People were ashamed of their vices in innocent California, more than of their virtues, and conscience was something to be shouted out, not quietly observed in private; reticence was translated as “repression” and stoicism became “denial.” It was as if everything we’d been trained to do and be in England condemned us as corrupt here, and unpardonably complex. Greene noted in The Quiet American how “honour” lost a “u” when it went across the Atlantic, but the deeper stress—incurable—was that in the New World “honor” was associated with letting it all hang out, where we had been taught that it lay in keeping things in.

  None of this would have mattered much except that I wondered how people in this fresh open society could begin to understand a man who might be keeping quiet about the more sacred or heartfelt parts of his life. And how they could possibly register feeling that was strong precisely because it was not being voiced. How could they ever understand a cry like that of the writer, in Monsignor Quixote, “O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference”?

  Indifference here had been thrown out along with British tea.

  A journalist called Ronald Matthews once completed a work with the highly presuming title, Mon Ami Graham Greene. Greene, expectably, fought with cold tenacity to ensure that it would never come out in England (it appeared only in France). But, having done so, he also, for no apparent reason, sent Matthews’s son through expensive private school and then paid his way through Oxford, and even a year the boy took off. A skeptic might see the outlines of some blackmailing scheme in the charity, but extravagant generosity and a refusal to let himself get away with anything were never out of character in Greene.