The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  He bought his Swedish mistress a house (in part, perhaps, because he could not give her a home), and he bought another house for the daughter of his French mistress, whom he spent years defending against the French mafia in his old age. He bought his French agent a car. He bought a house for his English mistress Dorothy Glover. He donated thousands of pounds to the Society of Authors, to help writers less fortunate than he, and, two weeks before his death, with characteristic punctiliousness, he wrote to resign from the same organization, because he felt he no longer deserved the name of “author.” It took one kind of gift to respond to an Indian at Oxford who asked him to read a manuscript by an unpublished young friend in faraway India; it took another to spend the next fifty-six years, until his death, carefully correcting the English in R. K. Narayan’s manuscripts, offering forewords to his books, serving as his unpaid agent and providing counsel from afar to a man he didn’t meet for twenty years.

  “He was a father confessor to me,” my old colleague Bernie Diederich told me one thundery night in Coral Gables, of the man who had been his traveling companion for more than thirty years, across Central America and in Haiti. “He always kept his word. Never forgot things. He was very, very loyal.” His “haunted disciple” (in the fine words of the critic Harold Bloom), John le Carré, singled out Greene’s “transcendent universal compassion,” as if to identify the one quality he had failed to acquire himself, as a literary heir, for all the brilliance of his extended portraits of torn loyalties and the modern search for faith. At times, in fact, it was Greene’s very softheartedness and flinching from brutality (even the would-be tough Fowler “cannot bear to see another man in pain”) that kept him further from belief. “They are always saying God loves us,” a “sort of mother” declares in his final novel. “If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.”

  Yet as I went back and forth, in my life and then my head, between unquiet Englishmen who were often more compassionate than they let on and quiet Americans who were not quite so innocent as they liked to seem, I came to see how much it was a story, in the end, of fathers and sons. The shining children of affluence I knew in California had been told to do their own thing and never to trust anyone over thirty; yet they knew they needed guidance of some kind, and for that they now turned to their elders or the traditions of the East. Louis, meanwhile, was busy devouring James Ellroy’s stories of Californian murder and horror as we sat in Haiti—My Dark Places—and crooning “Friend of the Devil” to Ethiopian drivers, precisely because he’d never be very far from his inheritance wherever he went. Well into his fifties, like many of my English friends, he was spending weekends, delightedly, with his parents.

  Reading The Quiet American was like opening the door to some debate inside me that my boyhood had made ceaseless. It was the story of an internal discussion, anguished and unending, between the chivalrous youth in us and the part of us that takes pride in being grown-up and beyond the reach of illusion. Greene was such a master of his craft that, on beginning A Burnt-Out Case, for example, he estimated that it would be 65,000 words long (220 pages, in a typical typeface); when he concluded, much, much later, it would come to 64,875 (or 219 and a half pages). To many that would make him too efficient, too settled in his unsettledness; for all the convulsions that made the stories shudder, he knew where they were going and had everything under control. But in The Quiet American there is one huge technical flaw that hit me (as many another reader) every time I returned to it. “Like a sandwich?” the young American says. “They’re really awfully good.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he says at another point. “It’s going to be quite chilly.”

  Greene was never a master of voices, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he couldn’t write American. But the deeper truth is that Pyle is just the young quixote and gallant that Fowler had been once upon a time; that in fact is precisely why Fowler so fears him and wants to emphasize his distance from him. The two are more or less the same person, at different stages of life—father and son, you could say, who don’t know how much to love each other and how much to compete.

  Fowler longs to be disdainful of the young American and retreats into schoolboy mockery every time he’s confronted by his good intentions; but that is only, he’s almost wise enough to see, because he knows that he wishes those intentions were still his. Over and over he acknowledges that Pyle is in fact a better man for Phuong; his sense of rivalry is persistently haunted by a strange tenderness and almost stealthy solicitude. “I’m glad it’s you, Pyle,” he says, when the younger man finally takes Phuong away from him (and earlier, he even goes so far as to woo Phuong on Pyle’s behalf, because the young American’s French isn’t up to it). When he visits the quiet American’s flat after his death, Fowler pockets for himself as a sentimental keepsake the very book by York Harding, a fictional New World pundit, that he’s been deriding throughout the novel.

  “I know you better than you do yourself,” Pyle at one point says to Fowler. And Fowler’s most haunting sentence in the book may well be, “Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?”

  Greene’s great theme was always innocence, if only because he could never disguise how much he missed it; most of his stories are set just outside the Gates of Eden, with one character looking back at the hopefulness he’s just lost and another, still unfallen, whose imminent exile we ache for. That was part of what always held me in the novels: that none of the characters was entirely cynical, able to write off all belief, and yet none of them can be a simple believer, either. They’re all trembling in the balance, and the innocent American who so longs to rescue people kills civilians in the service of his dreams; the Englishman who is so strangely tender and protective towards the young American, as a father might be, plays a part in bringing about his death. The woman they both crave for her sweetness shows a bracing matter-of-factness about her emotions, silently carrying her hopes back and forth between the Grand Canyon and the Cheddar Gorge.

  “It’s all you write about,” the most discerning reader among my friends had said when I was in my twenties: “innocence and its loss.” And perhaps the way that both are always inside us as we travel between a father’s world and a boy’s.

  But there was something deeper going on than just the passage between wide-openness and discrimination as I flew back and forth across the Atlantic, from the teachers we called “Twiggy” and “Yakker” and “B.O.”—we officially knew them and sometimes ourselves only by their initials—to the Harvard philosophers around our home in Santa Barbara who were so eagerly setting about remaking the world and eliminating humiliation and inequality and struggle (perhaps reality itself) by remaking themselves.

  When I thought of my father, I always saw bright colors: the yellow shirts he wore, the house he’d painted the saffron of a Buddhist monk’s robes, the mustard-yellow Alfa-Romeo he drove fast around our mountain curves (“Slow down, Raghavan!” my mother would cry, and he’d accelerate). Some of the time he sat, endearingly rapt, before South Pacific on the television, his copies of books on Einstein and Adler piled in high towers around the foot of his blue chair, orange and black folders laid out around them, in a system known only to himself. But always there was a sense of conviction in him, and the bright colors of someone who seemed to know exactly what he thought and wanted others to believe the same.

  The Greene I carried in my head was drab-colored and loved to be invisible. Since his earliest years, his mother used to say, he’d hated having attention drawn to him. He longed to disappear into the larger world, I always felt, and he liked to think that shared doubt drew men together more than common faith did. The people he most distrusted in his books were the ones who seemed most sure of themselves.

  We run and run from who we are—this was Greene’s theme from the beginning—only to discover, of course, that that is precisely what we can never put behind us.

  CHAPTER 13

  I loved Greene’s sadness,” the older American novelist said, as Czechs in high heels and
men in suits walked down the imposing steps behind us. We were sitting in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, on a blustery summer’s day, one of the four days of sunshine permitted every year in Britain by royal decree.

  “My mother had trouble with her moods,” he went on, “and I was prone to bouts of sadness, too. That was part of what drew me to him. When I was growing up, I never felt I could be Faulkner or Melville or Proust, any of the writers I admired. But I felt I could become Greene. Even though I couldn’t, of course.” He “had the gift of getting readers to fall in love with him, on the page,” another friend who’d known the novelist well, and liked him, told me. “It’s what he did. Robert De Niro plays mobsters and he played this part that was hard to resist.”

  It was never easy for me to come back to England; it was associated with the past, and with a place I knew too well. I knew its limits, I felt, and had exhausted the small range of what was possible there. In Greenian terms, that was proof that this was “home.” But I was on an excursion to Turkey at the time, and Mike had gotten in touch, and, without intending it, we’d found ourselves in the heart of Greeneland in its deepest sense: on one side of the main street were the gentlemen’s clubs and private tailors that might have spoken for his background, along with the Ritz, where he stayed when he came back to London; on the other was Shepherd Market, which still smelled of perfume and two centuries or more of streetwalkers’ incitations.

  Mike had gotten to know Greene when he was a young man; a priest had told him to send the older novelist a letter and introduce himself, since he was nearby. He hadn’t expected Greene to respond, let alone to be so open and loquacious; though famous, and already living quietly in his “two-roomed” flat in Antibes, Greene had invited him to dinner and soon began talking about sex clubs and his infidelities. “He didn’t want to be alone,” as Mike saw it. “But he didn’t want the burden of obligation, as it were. He never wanted to be part of a coterie, to take in the literary scene.”

  “That’s part of what makes him so alluring. Even approachable. That he always seems to be alone. Weakness is what he wrote from. It was what he wrote about, as well.”

  “Yes,” said Mike, who had also gotten to know many of the other roaming novelists of the time, from Anthony Burgess to Paul Bowles. “There was something defenseless about him. Like a turtle without a shell. He couldn’t drive; he had an air of helplessness about him. I think that was part of his appeal to women. The fact he seemed to need taking care of.

  “I don’t think he did, really, but he gave that impression. When I heard he’d been in Malaya chasing guerrillas, or in the Gaza Strip, a part of me found it hard to believe. He wasn’t a very practical man.”

  I thought of his unfortunate biographer, Norman Sherry, who had dreamed, I guessed, of becoming the fearless adventurer he took Greene to be. He’d tramped across Liberia, because Greene had done so; he’d contracted dysentery in the same remote mountain village in Mexico—even in the same tiny boardinghouse—where Greene had contracted it, forty years before; he’d tried to befriend the writer’s friends, to draw close to his family, even taken on Graham Carleton Greene, the writer’s nephew, as his literary agent. And yet, as the years went on, he seemed only to have become Greene the figure of tormented self-doubt. He has spent the last twenty-eight years of “continuous reflection,” he writes, more than once, at the end of his 2,218-page biography, trying to catch a man who, he now realizes, will always remain outside his grasp; instead of living out his own later years, he’s tried—and failed—to relive someone else’s.

  “You’re not writing a biography?” Mike now asked.

  “Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don’t think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.”

  “It’s difficult,” said Mike, tactfully. “He’s a hard person to pin down.”

  If you knew where to look, I thought, it wasn’t hard at all to find him; Greene would always reveal himself with an almost desperate openness if only he could find a cover. It was his confessional impulse that led him to become a novelist, I’d generally assumed—to give us the equivalent of the dreams (sometimes fictional) he spun out for his psychoanalyst as a boy; and to work out some of the tangles he could not easily speak about in life. One may get drawn in, even spellbound, by a mystery, but one felt close only to someone one could think of as a friend.

  One of the earliest books he’d written—an odd enterprise on which to waste so much energy at the beginning of a novelist’s career, with finances uncertain—was a biography of the bad-boy seventeenth-century poet Lord Rochester he’d completed in his late twenties, though it was rejected then and came out, with a nice irony, only when Greene was in his late sixties. I could see why the book was turned down when I read it in my own late twenties; the prose was workmanlike and flat, and about the life of a famously satirical, silver-tongued and rakish courtier who died, as the young Greene put it mournfully, “of old age at thirty-three,” apparently converting to Christianity just before he did so, Greene had made nothing but an uninflected recitation of facts.

  But when I picked it up now, I realized that it didn’t have to tell us much about Lord Rochester; it told us more than enough about the young Graham Greene. And even more about the person he perhaps intuited he would become. Infidelity, he wrote, only recently married himself, “tormented Rochester’s conscience”; the poet of licentiousness knew that “the whole system of religion, if believed, was a greater foundation of quiet than any other thing whatsoever.” But, Greene wrote, the poet’s “twisted, passionate, metaphysical” mind prevented him from ever accepting it. Greene might almost have been writing parts of his own obituary in advance. “Life has somehow to be lived,” he’d written, “and Rochester drank to make it endurable; he wrote to purge himself of his unhappiness; he tried to supply artificially the adventures which no longer came to him in war and acted the innkeeper and astrologer; he flung himself, the better to forget the world, into those two extremes, love and hate.”

  I’d never drunk; I never felt the need to escape unhappiness or bring new drama into my life. But I knew how this kind of identification could work and how it was only through another, sometimes, that you could see yourself with shocking clarity. A real father is too close for comfort, or your vision is too clouded in trying to see what of him is in you and what in you is just a reaction against him. But a chosen father was essentially the way you—or I at least—could look long and hard at the way school had prepared us for the world but not for the domestic sphere; at how the search for truth could keep one much more engaged than accepting the finality or totality of any one position; at how the part of one that wished to be helpful also, always, feared the burden of obligation, as Mike had put it, and intrusions on one’s sacred privacy.

  It made no sense at all for Greene to leave off novel writing to spend all this time on a biography of a pornographic poet, except that it was a way, perhaps, for him to rebel against what he was afraid of becoming (a successful commercial writer). It was a way of asserting himself as a would-be good-for-nothing even though he had taken a wife, new responsibilities, a God into his life. It was a way of allowing H. Tench some air, still, the chance to wreak havoc and speak for the night side of things, even as he never denied the presence of the good. Greene seemed to distrust, more than anything, the sense that he (or we) might use belief or faith as a way to pretend we didn’t have demons.

  What gives Greene’s Rochester rare poignancy and power, in fact, is that, with every sin and at every moment of his self-dynamited and errant life, the poet had a woundingly keen alertness to what he was letting down. “I myself have a sense,” he wrote—and Greene highlights this—“of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict.” He never lost his faith in kindness,
even if he could not come to belief as a whole, and “to be half kind,” he wrote in one letter, “is as bad as to be half witted.” His tragedy was not so much that he was a sinner as that he could always see what he could have become, the possibility of something better. “I know he is a Devil,” his friend Etherege had written in a play—and Greene quotes it more than once—“but he has something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him.”

  Greene would not be surprised if I told him that he’d written his own life story—the only searching and revealing memoir he did write—when he was in his twenties, and thinking he was completing a biography of a man long dead. He had a clearer sense than almost anyone of his class and world of all the ways the subconscious is in tune with not just what’s happened, but what’s to come and can write in fiction in 1938 of “the Indo-China Problem,” as if knowing that it will be a headline fifteen years later, or could invent in February 1934 a dead woman found in a railway station only for a dead woman to be found in a British railway station four months later. Writing for Greene was always a form of self-examination akin to talking out one’s dreams. It was also the reason that he could never dismiss religion, much though his rational mind might want to.

  As a boy of five, he’d dreamed one night of a ship going down; he awoke to learn that the Titanic had sunk during the night. Twelve years later he dreamed again of a boat sinking, this time in the Irish Sea; a few days later, he learned that a boat had gone down that very night, as he was sleeping, in the Irish Sea. At least two of his novels arose directly from dreams, and the last book he produced was a record of his dreams, collected in diaries when young and for twenty-four years at the end of his life and meticulously indexed (he dreamed of meeting Jean Cocteau and Ho Chi Minh, of walking through the world of the Gospels). One reason he could benefit from spending the night alone was that he could read what he’d written that day, just before he slept, and then, while he was dreaming, the “pre-conscious,” as he called it, could work on the material as an outsourced accountant in Bangalore might, so that he would awaken with his narrative problems solved overnight.