The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  I thought back to what the English novelist had said in his early sixties to an interviewer. “One may have outgrown one’s own father,” he suddenly volunteered, “but one still likes to feel there’s somebody there.”

  All the time I was growing up—was it sailing into Port Said that brought this back to me? I’d last been here at the age of two, on my way to India for the first time—my father pressed only two books in my hands that I can remember well. He had more than thirteen thousand on his shelves—we had to build a hut on the hillside under our yellow home to house the overflow—and he was always ready to refer his spiritual children, as I thought of them, his students, to some high work of philosophy or the spiritual quest. But with me it was as if he was offering more worldly and more practical counsel; I could never understand why he gave me Cards of Identity, the antic 1950s satire of postwar Britain (though I was amused, decades later, to find that its author, Nigel Dennis, had been a writer for Time and a friend of the Greenes’, and had taken Vivien out in New York once, after her husband left her alone in their hotel room).

  Now, however, when I thought back to the eccentric story of class divisions and manufactured personalities, I could see how it might appeal to the bright-eyed imp in my father, as to his fascination with the secrets of identity. A group of quasi-psychiatrists sits in a country house, idly assigning selves—and constantly shifting names—to the patients in their care. The result is that people change guises so often you can’t begin to see who they are. “Often a man is most himself when he least appears to be,” says a Mr. Paradise, near the beginning of the book. Towards its end, the novel suddenly flies into a fifty-eight-page pastiche of Shakespeare:

  Our play’s a riddle in which ours display

  The guises which your living selves portray;

  The many semblances that make one you,

  Shall play, through us, the game of who is who.

  I didn’t know why my father gave me The Summing Up, by Somerset Maugham, either; I read it at nineteen and felt I was listening to some high-toned godfather in a smoking jacket, telling musty stories from his armchair in a London club. As I began to travel, though, I came to take Maugham with me more and more often; no one, other than Greene, had so thoughtfully mocked conventional, too-simple morality, shown the follies of old-school British chivalry, given voice to all the passions, romances and visions that do not fit into our Boy Scout handbooks. And I never met a writer more driven by a genuine, ravenous philosophical curiosity about the human heart, the world and, in fact, the very nature of good and evil. He had, I recalled, a statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, on display in his hall in Cap Ferrat; he read metaphysics every morning before breakfast as some people do yoga. There was always a spiritual hunger in Maugham that he made plausible and compact by the feline realism he never entirely let go of.

  Such books often seemed the most reliable companions my father ever found; he would sit in his blue chair, our cat squeezed next to him, thrumming his long fingers excitedly on its arms, sometimes with an intensifying raga playing behind him, and stay there all night, underlining passages in red, scribbling one-line responses along the margins, inscribing, in black letters that could look like Arabic, adjectives and esoteric signs. For all his love of the public world, his deepest passions were always very private. Three days after he died, I took The Summing Up to a quiet stretch of land north of Santa Barbara and, a set of train tracks beside me, and then the wide-open sea, read Maugham’s retrospective again, noticing for the first time how many of his ideas, their romanticism given fiber by their obvious shrewdness, took me back to Greene.

  Fourteen years later, I found myself in Varanasi, on my first trip to the spiritual heart of Hinduism, and a friend in Santa Barbara gave me the name of an old friend and teacher he suggested I look up. The professor had been his mentor at Harvard, decades before, my friend told me, and now, in retirement, had returned to his ancestral home near the Ganges, for half of every year, to deepen his studies and complete a few more works of scholarship. He spoke for an old world of literature and courtesy not often encountered in the West anymore. I went to visit the professor one evening—we sipped lime juice in the echoing, mostly empty high-ceilinged house, where generations of pandits had come to visit—and after dinner he began to recite for me the opening three books of Paradise Lost, which he had by heart. “Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the world …”

  He grew up in an age in which boys were taught to commit thousands of lines to memory, he explained; it was a way of sharpening the mind—and of incorporating into your being the wisdom that had sustained your fathers and grandfathers, and generations before.

  Then he asked a little more about me, and when I mentioned Santa Barbara, and parents who were philosophers, a fond light came into his eyes.

  “I knew your father, you know.”

  “No!”

  “Years ago, sixty years ago now. We were students together at the same small school in Bombay. He was our absolute idol. The brightest star in our solar system. We used to go over to his house just to listen to him talk.”

  “You must remember my grandmother, too? My uncles and aunt?”

  “No,” said the professor, a little apologetically. “We had eyes only for your father. He was always so generous to us. You must have known this. We were just young fools, two or three years younger than he was. But he was always so patient with us, always had time.

  “I remember once he told us we just had to read this obscure new book he’d recently discovered!” The professor, now seventy-seven, smiled and lit up again at the faraway memory. He let the old title roll off his tongue. “The Road to Xanadu. By John Livingston Lowes. About a professor of Chaucer who stumbles upon a line somewhere that reminds him of something in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and then finds how some image that Coleridge had met in a poem mixed with another line he’d got from somewhere else, and then with a footnote he’d found in some other work, and they’d all coalesced in his head while he was dreaming.”

  “Really?”

  “He was always in touch with works that sounded very obscure to us, but could change our lives.”

  I didn’t know quite how to tell him how, that very morning, jet-lagged and seated at the guest relations desk in the lobby of the Taj Ganges Hotel, taking care of e-mails while other early risers headed out into the fog to see dead bodies floating down the river at dawn, I’d received a message from a small publishing house in New York, asking me to write a few sentences on some little-known book that everyone should read.

  Without a thought, I’d started writing about the book I’d so proudly discovered in college, a secret talisman now for thirty years. The Road to Xanadu, by Livingston Lowes. Would I have loved it so if I’d known how much it meant to my father? It was like hearing, from my mother, three days after he died, that my father’s favorite poem, which she asked me to read at his memorial service, was Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” the same relatively obscure poem (I had thought) I had recited for years to new companions.

  CHAPTER 15

  The wind, too perfectly, picked up and the sky began to grow dark as I pulled at last into Berkhamsted on the local train from London Euston, continuing to Tring and Leighton Buzzard. The day before had been a glorious, anomalous, eighty-six-degree summer fantasy, but now it was blowy and close to rain and the low English sky had turned grey, even imprisoning, by the time I got out of the train. I had never consciously sought out a Greene location before—the trip to Capri was something I’d stumbled into—but I had a day free in London and somehow, as never before, I felt the presence and proximity of all those birds and bats and other swarming terrors he’d felt around him in his ancient hometown, not far away.

  Outside the small station ran green fields and a narrow road leading up to a small bridge. I asked after the school and was directed to the left and down a grey lane that seemed to be called
Castle Street (I remembered all the haunted men called Castle in Greene’s books, including the one in The Human Factor who leads his son around the “forgotten hiding-places and the multiple dangers” of Berkhamsted Common). Just after Castle crossed Chapel Street, the black, heraldic gates of Berkhamsted School loomed up on my right.

  I had known what I would find here just by drawing on old memories: long, empty playing fields, grey plaques and chapels with locked black doors at their entrances; the cloisters would echo with the sound of my lonely footsteps. I might have been returning to one of my schools off the plane from California, four hours earlier than everyone else, thirty-five years before. At the tail end of a long summer holiday, the place would be an image of abandonment.

  But as I walked through the gates now, I found the front courtyard packed: tall, tanned blond girls, in chic leggings and skirts (if only they’d been here when Greene was a student), flush with the Greek islands or villas in southern France they’d just returned from; red-faced, spotty boys, hands thrust deep into their pockets, lounging in a circle as they shot anxious glances at Old Hall and wondered whether to go in there now or whether to brave it out a little longer; a couple of mothers fussing around little Amanda or Graham, while their charges cast wistful looks at the groups of classmates not so parentally encumbered.

  It was the kind of timing I’d never have believed in a novel: I had arrived at 9:55 a.m. on Thursday, August 20, and, quite by chance, 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 20 was the time when A-level results were being announced, essentially telling the school’s departing students what the rest of their lives would be. I remembered the terror that attended these national school-leaving exams when I was a boy: how you did in them determined which college you could go to—if you could go to college at all—and what destiny, what life might await you.

  The kids—they looked so grown-up now, especially with the stylish girls around (almost as if they were in a private school in a place called Hope Ranch)—headed, one by one, through the imposing door that leads to Old Hall (I strolled in behind them and saw large portraits of the school’s headmasters on the walls, most prominent among them a stiff-shouldered and bespectacled Charles Greene). A minute or two later they emerged, as from their interview at St. Peter’s Gate. Some athletic-looking girls with blond ponytails were jumping up and down, hugging one another, pushing away tears of joy that smeared their mascara; another girl walked over to an ax-faced mother, who tried to keep very different tears out of her eyes as she led her charge over to a wooden bench, where a teacher was handing out alternative destinies.

  “Dad!” cried a red-faced boy with self-cut hair—an apprentice football hooligan, so it seemed—as he pulled a cell phone out to share the news. “It wasn’t bad at all! Yes, a D and three F’s.” He paused. “Actually, Dad, that’s pretty good. It was a very high D.”

  Gangs of boys were pushing one another around, anxious to show how little they cared about all this, and punching one of their number who’d dared to get a B. A small girl trudged, as into a dentist’s office, through the door marked “Careers Centre.” “It wasn’t brilliant,” a brown-haired girl with pink cheeks was saying to a shyly enquiring boy; her tone of voice said it might as well have been.

  I sat on a bench next to a boy who, hands shaking, began to open his envelope; another boy was rolling his finger around the inside of his cheek, as if to steady himself.

  “You’re not going to open it?”

  “No. I’ll wait.” A small, studious-looking boy with a mop of black hair affected cool, and then looked around. What would he do while he waited for his future?

  “Look, look, look”—a tall boy’s voice went falsetto. “I got a B!”

  I remembered myself at the same day of reckoning, though by then I was already on the road, traipsing around India for my summer holidays with a huge suitcase loaded down with books on Jung and carrying a new acoustic guitar, a worn cassette of Leonard Cohen’s Songs and the faint ambition to become a darker-skinned Leonard Cohen, first by falling in love with a blond Nordic girl and then by pursuing dissolution and the mystical life, ideally in the same breath.

  In the mornings I walked across the Oval in Bombay—cricket games everywhere, many at once, crisscrossing wildly on the worn, bald grass—past the men seated on the street, selling piles of books (Improve Your I.Q., Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Right Ho, Jeeves), to the dark, largely unlit library at the University of Bombay, my parents’ first place of higher education, where I had to make my way through a single-volume Complete Shakespeare to prepare for university exams back in England, while birds flapped in the roof up above and I tried not to sneeze from the dust.

  In the afternoons I walked back through the commotion, glanced at The Times of India to see if Richard Nixon had announced his resignation yet and walked up the stairs to my room at the West End Hotel, to compose a Leonard Cohen song rhyming “stranger” with “danger” and “love” with “above.” When the telegram came from England, with its row of letters, it might have been a news report from another planet.

  I woke up from my memory now and looked around the main street in the small, too-typical town—the copies of the Berkhamsted and Tring Gazette on sale at the newsagents, the women pushing prams past the little B and B offering “Bacon Sandwiches,” the Denture Care office next to a funeral director’s parlor—and felt how an amiable and well-meaning town like this could close in on one till all life was gone.

  There were churches everywhere—one of them had even set up a currency-exchange counter—and the people walking past me in the grey summer morning looked as comfortable and settled in their belief as parishioners. “Please Pray for All Those who are suffering in silence and who has not gotten a voice,” someone had written on a scrap of paper inside the eight-hundred-year-old Norman church, onto whose graveyard Greene’s nursery had looked. When I went into the local library, a kindly worker gave me a code to become a temporary member of the community and showed me the books of local history describing this as “A Commuter’s Paradise.”

  Yet one morning in Berkhamsted had me longing for anywhere else—even somewhere dangerous and dark—instead of the innocent treadmill the town seemed to represent. By the time I returned to the school in early afternoon—“Time and Tide Wait for No Man,” intoned the motto above the school clock, not far from the Admiral House Dental Practice—all the students had dispersed again, off into their future lives, and among the arched windows and turrets, the red-brick buildings towering above lawns, bulletins told me about “The 3rd Annual Scholars and Rogues Eton Fives Tournament (Sign up with Mr. Petit or Mr. Foster).” A plaque in the cloisters, not far from the classroom called “Greene’s,” reminded, “Berkhamsted depends on its tradition of loyalty and simplicity and discipline.”

  I walked across Greene’s Field, home to the school tennis courts, and came to a narrow canal, with houseboats bumping along its sides and small red-brick bridges arching over it, like a slightly roughened dream of English rural paradise. A pair of teenage lovers courted shyly on a picnic table. Another walked along the bank, too embarrassed to look at each other. Off near the station, a grey set of flats made for lonely men and the love poems they wrote—it could have been North Oxford—was guarded by a black sign, “PRIVATE ROAD,” and called itself, I noticed, “Greenes Court.” At the station, as I waited to escape again, an announcement intoned anxiously, and monotonously, “Stand well back from the platform edge,” while rumors came in that a vessel of escape was approaching.

  It was always the most chilling moment of the day, akin to the night of the Angel of Death; in our third “Division,” just after Chambers, as it was called (when we awaited our black-gowned teachers around the “Burning Bush”), suddenly we might hear a pair of footsteps moving very rapidly along the corridor outside, past the long lines of names of the dead, past the bulletin boards summoning us to divinity class or listing the names of those who were required to show up on Saturday nigh
t for military exercises. Something would stop in me—in all of us—and then there would come a rap on the door and it would fly open and an older boy with a “stick-up” white collar would step into the classroom.

  “Is Iyer in this Division, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is to see the Head Master at eleven forty.”

  For drawing on Treitel’s trigonometry answers, or stealing across the bridge in mufti to hear the Strawbs play in Windsor. For sins I hadn’t even known were infractions.

  In time—this was the logic of the system, teaching you to obey and to command, to work within a precisely determined order (all things come to pass and the young, too, shall one day grow old)—I, in turn, would become a praepostor (the word comes from a medieval term for a monastic prior) and start making official visitations from our local God. You had to learn how to administer hardship as well as to endure it, the system was saying; it was fine to read “Endymion” and play Mozart on the piano next to the Lower Tea Room—near-perfect recitals would float up through the stairwells to where we were doing homework, from other boys, and one teacher would earnestly show us the parallels between Keats and Joni Mitchell—but the world expected firmness, and to be wet was to be lower than the mud. There were two sins: admitting to an act of decency (indecency was prized, of course) and underestimating the toughness and complexity of the world.