The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  That he was tapping into the future in this way was often a source of terror: he dreamed of V-1 rockets flying over London during the war and then, not long thereafter, the unmanned planes really were descending in droves. After his main character Scobie, so similar to his maker in his predicament, torn between responsibility to a wife he mostly pities and a mistress he doesn’t love, takes his own life in The Heart of the Matter, Greene’s wife, and no doubt the man himself, worried that he might be foretelling his own future. He always had a mediumistic gift, the spiritualist wife of his boyhood psychiatrist remembered in her nineties; writing, he would sink so deep into his characters that he would actually dream their dreams.

  I knew how this worked from the hours I’d put in at the desk; there was no magic in the process, but there was certainly mystery. I wrote about a couple similar to one in life, but ended my book with the couple apart; as soon as the advance galleys of that work arrived on my doorstep, the couple, who had seemed very close in life, separated. I decided, one spring, to deliver my next book to my editor on September 12, 2001, before heading back to Japan; as the planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, I could not follow the drama that was unfolding because I was busy proofreading my novel about Islam and its quarrel with the West.

  Sometimes my father would pick up a stranger’s hands and read her fortune by looking at the lines on her palm; I silently looked away and assumed that this was what foreigners wanted of the “mystic East.” But years later Louis told me that his mother had said that my father had seen things in her hand that no one else could possibly have known; one day, my father stopped in the middle of a reading and refused to go on, and the young woman so eager to hear about her future ended up throwing herself over a bridge, disappointed in love, six months on.

  Growing up in a household with so rich and vibrant a sense of spirits spooked me at times, so I took shelter in the robust skepticisms of school; I was more than happy to close the door on forces I knew I couldn’t control. But travel itself is a journey into the limits of your knowledge, as every truly alien culture shows you, sometimes terrifyingly, lines of power you’d never guessed at. In Haiti, Greene’s protagonist sees the loyal soul who’s become his only companion in his empty hotel suddenly turn into something else and release something dark and atavistic, primal, in a voodoo ceremony; in Kenya, during the Mau-Mau Rebellion, the very person many a Brit had taken as his faithful and all-knowing Jeeves began to “drink on his knees from a banana-trough of blood,” as Greene had it, and enjoy “sexual connection with a goat.” And if you credit such bush devils and Catholic voodooists—this is of course at the heart of Greene’s work—then it becomes impossible to write off the Holy Ghost.

  It sometimes seemed that Greene was never able to discount the existence of God precisely because he believed so fervently in the existence of His shadow. From a very early age, he’d had an unusually keen sense of evil, and story after story, through his life, shows young boys driven by a motiveless malignity who are capable of doing almost anything. That’s one reason why even his most drifting characters cannot erase an image of goodness, or a code of some kind of virtue, from their heads. It doesn’t stand to reason that there could be shadow without light.

  One day, when I was in my early thirties, someone gave me a letter he’d found from my father. My father had never been a great correspondent—speaking, being public, was his medium—but he’d sent me blue Air Letters, twice folded, when I was away at school, full of moral advice and philosophical reflection; once, when I’d stolen into a house for teachers and placed an international collect call to my parents from a phone there, dramatically wheezing into the receiver as if an obscene phone caller, he’d flown all the way over the Atlantic to rescue me from a place that could set off such a seeming bout of asthma. But he’d always remained curtained from me—he was not a writer, who puts his fears and doubts down on the page—and when I read the letter, pleading with a close friend he felt slipping away, it was as if the curtain had been torn back.

  It went on for eighteen pages in all, in his small, racing hand, and I could tell from the fluency, the fervor pulsing through it, that it had been written in one sitting. As ever, there were no crossing-outs or hesitations, but there were postscripts scribbled along the margins, and afterthoughts, additions, new arguments written in at the bottom of many pages. The P.S.’s alone went on for six or seven pages at the end.

  I didn’t know what to do with the letter when I was done; I put it away in a closet, but the mystery of it was still inside our house, pulsing, breathing. It felt like coming into a space to see precisely the person you’d never see otherwise, because he’s alone and lost in thought. I’d never known my father to plead like this, to berate, to summon forces of threat and a kind of prayer. Suddenly, he was very human—far from the commanding figure on stage with words for everything—and came to seem, wounded, less public inspiration than something very close to home.

  CHAPTER 14

  Greene’s books are nearly all haunted by fathers: the fathers a boy has lost, and the engaging crooked adventurers who suddenly arrive on the scene and present themselves as shadow fathers of a kind. The boy on the run in his first published novel recalls the day his errant father visited him at school and talked to the headmaster; the boy on the run in his last published novel, brought out sixty years later, is abruptly visited in school, and taken from his headmaster, by a likable rogue who claims to have won the boy in a backgammon game from his real father, or the “Devil” (as he’s known throughout the story).

  I was taking a trip one summer around the sites of the Holy Land with my mother, and when we stopped at Sorrento, she went off to see the ruins of Pompeii, while I took a boat to Capri. I caught a bus at the port—so crowded I found myself breathing into a stranger’s shirt—up to the little village of Anacapri; when I went into a money changer’s booth there (I could see nothing like an information office) and said, “Villa Rosaio,” the shopkeeper looked bewildered. I said it again, and suddenly he understood. “Il Rosaio!” He scribbled off a little map, leading through a labyrinth of whitewashed passageways and out of the village to an even smaller settlement, ten minutes away. As I followed his marks, footsteps falling away, at last I came to a modest house behind a gate where the local Lion’s Club had put up a plaque honoring the “cittadino onorario di Capri” Graham Greene.

  There was no mention of his books, but I thought of the tiny room on the top floor furnished only with a rough bed, a wooden trestle table, a crucifix and a skylight; for more than forty years, this had been his favorite place to write, and he’d written parts of all his later works here.

  Not far away, in a bookshop, I chanced to pick up a volume that contained two short film treatments that had been properly published only after Greene’s death, and when I read the second, “The Stranger’s Hand” (taken from one of the magazine competitions asking for a parody of Greene that Greene himself had won), it was to find as desolate a piece as I have read, although it was about nothing more than the longing for a protector, or a friend.

  A boy is deposited alone, on a plane, by his aunt—his mother is long gone—and arrives in a huge room in a Venice hotel, where he is meant to meet his father. The older man gets waylaid by a vicious wartime plot, and the little boy, who hasn’t seen his father in nearly three years, starts walking and walking through the maze of the city, trying to locate the man. All he knows is that the older man has a limp and a clean-shaven face; if he sees him, he thinks, he may not even recognize his own parent.

  It is a piercing picture of bereftness. The boy decides to look through every seventh doorway, he changes step every thirteen paces, he crosses two fingers to try to magick his father back to him. But Venice, so often seen as a city of lovers, is here a “city of strangers,” and the boy wanders and wanders, as one hour after another passes, and people keep asking him, “Where is your mother?” His policeman father (we know, but he does not) has been literally paralyz
ed in a murderous political operation on the other side of town.

  It could be one of the dreams that Greene published in his final book (growing up, he would sometimes imagine he had been deserted by his family). A waiter appears and plays a game with the boy, to keep him occupied.

  “Will they find my father?” the boy asks. “The waiter said, ‘There is always hope.’ It was the most hopeless thing he could say.”

  Even at eight, Greene coolly notes of the boy, “one knew that all endings were not happy.” A few hours later, the waiter says, “Things are not so bad if you have a friend.”

  The whole story might have been a parody of Greene, a skeptic would say: the quest, certain to be vexed, for a father, a Father; the man entangled in some murky world of violence in the shadows; the somewhat untrustworthy stranger who arrives to play father to the lost boy. And, of course, the friendship that results: friends are the only refuge Greene characters can turn to, and they cling to strangers even as they know that, in most cases, they are not to be trusted, or will be spirited away as soon as they are. “The Stranger’s Hand”—extended in kindness (or in threat?)—could be the title for much in the emotional landscape of Graham Greene.

  I didn’t have to think of myself, as I read the story, arriving, three times a year, alone at a faraway airport, to go to a school where I would be (more or less happily) imprisoned for seventy days, or eighty-four. I wasn’t usually in search of anything then and felt quite content stretching out on a plastic molded chair at Heathrow, using my huge suitcase as a pillow. I knew I could take the movement between places, my own company, my friendships as home. But it did make me think again of the fathers we choose, sometimes even from books, over the ones that we inherit. Real fathers, unlike conscripted ones, sometimes misplace their sons and then spend all their lives wondering how they can ever get them back.

  Parents make promises in Greene—they even make prayers, as often as lovers do—and tell God they’ll give up their faith if only He will spare an innocent; the one time a mother plays a prominent part in the novels, she is taken, throughout the book, to be an aunt. There are not many siblings in his fictional world, and his protagonists rarely have sons; one character who does is the hangdog detective in The End of the Affair, and he has the sad task of introducing his little boy Lancelot (who was meant to be called “Galahad,” after the questing knight) to all the adulteries and dirty secrets of the world.

  Sometimes the man will have a daughter who (as in Our Man in Havana) is much more grown-up, more capable and well connected than he is, even if she’s only sixteen. Another of the most conspicuous daughters in Greene’s work belongs to the renegade priest in The Power and the Glory; but the little girl seems to hate her father—plus, she’s an embodiment of his mortal sin—and every time he draws close to her, she shrieks, “Don’t touch me.”

  Yet the priest’s predicament, as with so many fathers in Greene, is that he loves her even if that love is certain to destroy him. In The Heart of the Matter Greene’s alter ego Scobie cross-questions a fat and teary Portuguese captain coming into port (much as Greene had had to do in life, realizing that he’d never have the heart to be a policeman). He’s found a letter hidden in the captain’s toilet, to his “little money spider,” promising to be good, but expressing his devotion to his daughter in such sensual terms—“If only I could feel your fingers running across my cheek”—that he might have been writing to a young lover. Mistress or daughter? The confusion between the two ensures there’ll always be even more to unsettle every Greenian soul, and the people around them.

  Our cruise continued—Jerusalem, Nazareth, Patmos, the cave from which the Book of Revelation was said to have issued—and sometimes I thought how the fathers who create us are much harder to forgive than the ones we create, in part because they’re much harder to escape from. I would seldom listen to anything my father said—he, after all, was the one it was my destiny to grow away from; though if I’d heard the same thing from someone else, or read it in a book called Our Man in Havana, I’d have taken it as wisdom, as I always did when someone told me something I probably knew already.

  “I’m interested in how one can feel closer to someone one’s never met than to those one’s known all one’s life,” I told Hiroko when she asked what I was up to. “Why do I feel he understands me as nobody I’ve met in my life can do? Why do I feel that I understand him, as none of his other readers quite do? How can I know, reading one of his books, what his protagonist will say and do, word for word, pages before he says or does it?” Blood relations are not always the closest ones.

  I’d picked up, on my way to the boat, the late novel of Greene’s, The Captain and the Enemy, which I’d raced through and thrown down in a fit of disappointment when it had come out, twenty years before. I was barely out of my twenties then, busily trying to write my own destiny, and if there was one thing I had no interest in, it was fathers—and sons. Now, though, when I picked it up, I was back with the stranger’s hand extended once again.

  A boy is raised by his aunt, his mother long dead. He is taken from his divinity classroom by the “Captain” and set up in a shabby room next to a basement, with an ambiguous young woman he’s told to treat as a mother. The minute he’s in the company of the charming but obviously untrustworthy con man, he feels as if he’s on his way to “the romantic city of Valparaiso,” the valley of paradise. When the Captain asks the boy if he misses his mother, Jim (once Victor) says, “Not really.”

  “Mother is just a generic term,” the Captain says hopefully.

  The boy’s true father is a criminal, too, we learn—“a bird of passage,” in his own elusive phrase—who occasionally visits his son in his “semi-detached house” and claims to have lost him in a game of chess, not backgammon (the pedantry about the small detail itself a kind of obituary). The Captain, meanwhile, trains his eager young acolyte in all the skills of an undercover life—how to sign chits for bills you’ll never pay, how to change your name according to the occasion, how, in effect, to practice a kind of fiction making in life. Then, much later, he disappears to Panama, where the boy goes to seek him out.

  The Captain’s final secret—I thought of Louis and our schoolboy code—is that he’s been flying missions on behalf of the oppressed; he’s not, ultimately, after gain or even escape, just clandestine acts of conscience. His criminal secret is that he’s selfless. He’s keenly aware of his responsibilities to the woman he loves and the boy he’s abducted, even as he flies away from them again and again, saying that not being there is how he can best protect them.

  In life Greene was, by his own reckoning, a very poor parent, leaving his children effectively fatherless. In his final days, he let his daughter Caroline help care for him—he had earlier bought her a thousand-acre ranch in Canada with the profits from the movie sale of The Quiet American. But he had never been so kind to his son, Francis, let alone their mother, and with the relatives he’d acquired through marriage most of all he lived in that peculiarly Greenian limbo of betraying them daily and being self-aware enough to feel the cost of that betrayal every hour. It’s strange to recall how, in his first novel, he gives the same name to a loose woman he will soon give in life to his infant daughter, and the same name to a troubled fugitive he’ll later give to his son. “That’s the only subject I’ve got,” says a sculptor who works on a huge statue of God in Greene’s play, Carving a Statue, while his son keeps asking about the death of the boy’s mother. “My indifference and the world’s pain.”

  His father was a headmaster, readers sometimes said, so of course he was always trying to run away from those who administer punishment, on earth as much as in Heaven. But the more interesting thing about the father, according to Greene’s biographers, was that he remained so dangerously innocent and trusting in men’s goodness; his wife, when reading books to him, was wont to censor novels (even those written by their son). A boy is always determined to set himself apart from innocence, the more so as his elders te
ll him, wistfully, that it’s his innocence that saves him.

  When very young, Greene loved to devour boys’ adventure stories about explorers and spies, which later, as a writer, he would in some respects re-create, though always with a troubled heart beating beneath the fast-moving drama. Yet as he came of age, he enlisted a literary father—to go with the shadow brother who was Lord Rochester—who could not have been further from a simple child’s sense of right and wrong.

  The first four pieces in Greene’s Collected Essays—after a piece in childhood—are all about Henry James, and it is a James that few of us have seen, before or since. The novelist known for his fascination with social intricacies and psychology, for the young Greene (who wrote the two central essays between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-two), has “a sense of evil religious in its intensity.” He is preoccupied with “failure,” “treachery” and “lies.” A man most of us thought was writing about the complex mating dance of New World and Old—no alien theme to Greene—was, for Greene alone, writing novels that “are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense.”

  It was as if Greene was fashioning himself again through the man within his head. “We must always remain on our guard when reading these prefaces,” he writes of the introductions to his fiction that James dictated in later life, “for at a certain level no writer has really disclosed less.” Graham Greene, however, comes very close in the introductions to his early books he published only a few years after that sentence. “You cannot render the highest kind of justice if you hate,” he asserts, somehow using James’s stories as the crucible for his own central code. “To render the highest justice to corruption, you must retain your innocence: you have to be conscious all the time within yourself of treachery to something valuable.”