The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

Darkness fell, and still I was writing. Words of radiance and affirmation that might have come from some unfallen self inside me I’d all but forgotten. When finally I got up, it was seven thirty—four and a half hours had passed—and I hadn’t begun to unpack my carry-on.

  Very quickly, I found that the hermitage was as exciting and alive a place as I had seen, and coming there at least as great an instruction and adventure as going to Bolivia or Cuba or even Ethiopia: the place that gives the other places meaning. I came back three months after my first stay, and then four months after that (to spend the days reading Henry Miller). I came back the next spring for two weeks, and then returned a little later for three weeks. Here I could step behind the many voices I could speak in, and into a place of absolute wholeness, which is self-trust; I couldn’t imagine second thoughts or mere courtesies here, and whatever instinct I followed—and that’s all I did—I knew at the core to be the right one.

  When the fourteen guest rooms were full, the monks, with typical kindness, allowed me to stay with them in the cloister. Once I occupied a Silver Bullet trailer reserved for those who worked on the property; sometimes they put me with other monastery workers in the two-story Ranch House, and every time I came down the creaking stairs, it was to see a monk doing chin-ups in the dusty boarding-school room, or pulling a copy of Robert Evans’s roguish autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, out of the Ranch House shelves. Sometimes, in one of the guest trailers on the hill, with the rain pouring down and not a soul or light to be seen within the fog, for day after dark day, I felt in some biblical place of terror, a wilderness. The chilling line from The Cloud of Unknowing came back to me: “The Devil has his contemplatives, as God has His.”

  I came to see how monks live with furious doubts, as any lovers do; when the rain came down, screening me from the world, I sometimes felt as alone and undefended as in a desert. I devoured Emerson and Thoreau every morning with my breakfast, though the silence itself was writing new volumes of theirs each day; then I spent long days with Melville or Cormac McCarthy, so that I could hear what thunderous challenge sounded like, too. A love affair that is all light—which is what being here felt like—is itself a kind of trick, probably put about by the dark.

  One sultry day in midsummer I invited a troubled friend from down the coast to visit me in the hermitage; if anywhere could bring her calm, I thought, it would be here. As soon as I led her into the chapel, she broke into tears before the small cross suspended from a skylight in a warm, round, golden space.

  “You’re moved?” I said.

  “Not only.” I could hear what even the stillness could not heal. “I can feel all the things I never had when I was growing up. That sense of protectedness, of being held.”

  She might have been speaking with Greene’s voice, I thought, so ambivalent about a peace that he could see, but from which he would always be excluded, usually by himself. And in any case, he would surely have added, a place of quiet can only be a hideout, a refuge from the world and its troubles, not a response to it. For a certain kind of soul, a sanctuary is precisely the place where you feel least calm, or deserving.

  I was never much interested in Greene the man of politics or Greene the Catholic, Greene the rumored spy, in part because I didn’t think he was much interested in them, at the deepest level; all were mere symptoms of some more fundamental trembling. No one can be defined by the roles he plays onstage. I watched my neighbors in California embark on lifelong excursions into the self, while seeming baffled by the world; I saw my friends in Britain more or less take over the world, but only by never looking too closely within. Greene, I felt, was always in his books hoping to give us a sense of responsibility—of conscience—in part by bringing himself before an unsparing tribunal.

  At heart he offered me a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology, a preparation for a way of acting. It didn’t matter if the man within my head—this one at least—was carefully edited or artfully fashioned; his unearthly, unflinching blind man’s eyes gave me an image of attention, and the spirit that lies behind it.

  One evening I stepped into a tiny flat in Bangkok—it belonged to an Englishman I’d met only briefly—and saw a guitar by the bed, a stuffed panda nestled against the pillows, a little photo of a monastery in the Himalayas propped against the corner of one shelf. I’m not sure my new friend would ever have imagined a room like this—a room from school, really—awaiting him when he was fifty-five. A long line of books, mostly biographies and history works of an imperial cast, filled a single shelf, and next to them ten BBC videos that he pulled out for me.

  In an alcove sat a computer and on its top a picture of a sweet-looking Thai girl in her twenties.

  “She’s the first in her family to go out into the modern world,” my friend told me, with obvious pride. “Her father’s a fisherman. Her degree was in English.”

  “Have you known her long?”

  “Four years.”

  “Do you think you’ll …?”

  “I’ll introduce her to my mother, back in England. But I tell her—I told her father, too—that I wouldn’t wish me on her. She deserves something better. I’ve never—well, I mean, she’s still a virgin.”

  Greene was the only novelist I’d heard of who prayed for the fearful creatures he’d created.

  I never wanted to meet Graham Greene, I often told myself; the one person in his life I’d have liked to talk to was his long-abandoned wife, Vivien, who seemed to have seen him as clearly as anyone, with just the lack of delusion that he cherished, and then had had sixty years to reflect upon this fugitive who had brought her children into the world only to haunt them with his long absences. Besides, it was Greene himself who had taught me how the author we meet can never, by definition, be quite the one we love; as soon as he’s meeting us, he’s looking away from his desk, putting on a public face to greet the world.

  I knew how it would be if I took the train down to Antibes and then the short walk to his unpresuming, modern apartment building. I’d press the button at the bottom that said “Green” (a threadbare camouflage) and he’d be waiting for me at the door as I came up. I’d ask him about the Cuban painting that Fidel had given him, hanging on the wall, and the Haitian artifacts that were the most striking things in a room that revealed relatively little of his life or circumstances. As he made us drinks, I’d run my eye, as if surreptitiously, along the books neatly lined up on the white shelves, and when I sat down in the bamboo chair, I’d be prepared for him to disclose certain things I might take as private; offering a few secrets is how you throw people off the scent of others. I’d be muffled, deferential, not wanting to set him off with a stray, foolish reference to one of his friends, so it would be almost guaranteed that nothing real would get said.

  I’d come away, of course, with a souvenir—the illusion that I “knew” him a little—but the cost would be tremendous: now I’d be distracted by the unexpectedly high voice, the erect carriage, the reddened face. I’d be further from knowing him than ever. A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core; accompanied by flesh and blood, it comes up to the surface, and you’re aware only of the good manners and laughter that keep you on the far side of a barrier.

  Winters are cold in Bhutan. I had stolen into the country, largely closed though it is, through a loophole in the immigration laws—those with Indian passports could come and stay for weeks or months, paying a tenth of the two hundred dollars a day demanded of the strictly regimented tourist—and I’d taken a room in the modest Druk Hotel, at the center of Thimphu, the capital. “Capital” is a grand word for a place without traffic lights or television; the little town of twenty thousand was one of the most silent places I’d seen, and as I sat with my mango juice at the breakfast table, I glanced outside to find men in traditional costumes—they looked like dressing gowns—walking to an empty field between the willows to practice archery.

  There was lit
tle to do in Bhutan after I’d taken a car out to its distant valleys and temple-fortresses built on remote crags, and in the quiet, unfurnished days I found myself rummaging among the shelves of the tiny library in the capital for Jackie Collins books, or watching the crowds assemble for the night’s Stallone movie at a cinema. A few Japanese businessmen sat anxiously around tables in the Druk dining room, but after I’d eaten dinner, there was little company to be had except for books.

  I’d brought along, inevitably, my most reliable companion, and one afternoon, with nothing else to do, I opened The Comedians. It is a typical Greene tale—too typical, some would say—in which the main characters, Brown and Jones, are almost indistinguishable rogues, on the run, with identities they change at every moment and no real friends or family to hold them to their word. Brown lives in an empty hotel he owns in Port-au-Prince—he was born in Monte Carlo to a father he never saw and a mother of uncertain parentage—while Jones, who turns out to be partly Indian, will die “along the international road.” All their lives, we’re meant to assume, they’re lingering on the border, neither one thing nor the other, comedians sailing into Haiti to try to turn its moral darkness to advantage.

  Set against these two masters of neutrality is an earnest couple from Philadelphia, the Smiths, who are missionaries determined to make the world a purer place, quiet Americans who’ve grown a generation older but not up. In the savagery of Papa Doc Duvalier’s dictatorship, their good intentions seem especially pitiful—until we see that their goodness and innocent conviction move them to acts of courage and righteousness that the nonbelieving Brown (picking up a diplomat’s wife as his sometime mistress and mocking them as an adolescent might) can never rise to. As with many of the Americans in Greene’s work, their high hopes for the world seem foolish until we see the alternatives.

  This was none of it so different from what I knew already from the many Greenes I’d read. In the middle of the comedy—Jones slips into an ambassador’s house dressed in women’s clothes; we meet a couple of Duponts, as in a Tintin book (and, later, a prostitute called “Tin Tin”); the passengers on the good ship Medea blow up condoms to serve as balloons—we see that the realest thing of all is terror, which leaves no space or scope for mere detachment. “Cynicism is cheap,” says Greene’s cynical protagonist Brown, “you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor quality goods.” The last words his dying mother had said to him, before leaving him the hotel, were “Which part are you playing now?”

  This was all familiar enough to me. But as I flipped through the pages, with nothing to distract me—it was silent outside in the square, and the light was beginning to fade—something strange began to happen. I felt as if I was on the inside of the book, a spotlight unerringly trained on my interior. Whatever questions the story was posing to Brown, about where he stood and what he’d do, it seemed to be posing to me. Why was I here, in a country with which I had no connection when I could be somewhere that had real stakes for me? Why was I not with my new love, Hiroko, in Japan, instead of collecting impressions of a place that ultimately meant little to me? Wasn’t love (or faith, in fact) a matter not of feelings but of actions, and those actions measured by how many of them you’d have done without the love (or faith)?

  I read and read, not noticing how deep I was getting. The winter sun began to sink behind the mountains, and it grew chill. I put on the gas heater next to the bed—two orange bars began to glow—and then I put on the lights. As the action went on, Brown’s very urbanity and Englishness began to seem a crime, a sin in a world of unequivocal evil; as ever for me in Greene, the power of the story came from the stab of self-accusation. “The Church condemns violence,” I read, “but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never.”

  And then—this was travel, in all its tragic comedy—the lights went off. Across the country, I came to believe. I was in the dark, quite literally, except for the two rows of orange on the floor. I fumbled across the room and made out a shape that seemed to be the bedside table. There looked to be a candle there, but I had no expectation of matches, and even if there was a box somewhere, I had no way of laying my hands on it.

  Outside, the town was entirely silent. Not even a honk or a shout.

  The people around me were used to this, I assumed; they were plunged into darkness every other night, perhaps. There was no sound of scrabbling, or of improvised solutions. The whole country might have been waiting in a state of suspended animation.

  But I was aflame, and I needed to be back in the world that had possessed me. I carried my book over to where I could see the bars of orange and sat down on the floor, to keep reading by their light. I read and read in the dark, the silence of a monastery (or a hall where students were taking some exam) around me. When I was finished, I lay on my bed and my heart thumped, thumped against my rib cage.

  I didn’t know what to do; it was like being in the middle of a conversation and then looking up and noticing you are alone, in a dark room, in a silent land of mountains.

  I got up and stumbled across the room to a dresser, where I’d noticed there was a decorated folder with some writing paper inside it. I brought back a few yellow pages—“Druk Hotel” on them, and ornamental designs evoking the Land of the Thunder Dragon—and began, crouched on the floor next to the fire, to write. To myself? To whoever cared about my little predicament? To the name I put at the top?

  Out it all came, like a confession and an essay all at once: everything the novel had made me feel as it pinned me against the wall and asked the cost of watching from the sidelines. I covered two pages, and then three more, then I scribbled across a sixth page, and put my name at the bottom.

  The lights were still out for as far as I could see, and I lay on my bed, heart pounding like a gong. No dinner that night, no anything. The next morning, the sun showed up again over the hills—I heard people walking along the corridor—and, now that it was no longer needed, the electricity of course returned.

  I went out into the winter morning—the cold slapped me awake after the two bars of heat in my room—and walked amidst the medieval dressing gowns and sturdy white houses built in traditional fourteenth-century style to the post office. Letters here seemed about as plausible as time capsules sent into space; in the Druk Hotel, it had been almost impossible even to communicate with the front desk. But I pulled out the address book I had in my shoulder bag and scribbled down the names I always carried with me as a talisman: “Graham Greene, Residence des Fleurs, avenue Pasteur, Antibes, France.”

  Then I handed the ornamental envelope over and returned to my day-to-day life.

  A few days later I was out of Bhutan, though still feeling naked and raw, and a few weeks later I was back in California, floating through the usual dinners and distractions that ensured I’d never have the time or space to cut beneath the surface. I might never have read the book, it would seem to somebody watching me. But something in me had turned, and I realized that wit or clever observation would never be enough. The safe position was rarely the right one.

  I wondered how long I would write in hotels and what might be the price of being untied to any one culture, all the things I loved so habitually. I thought about how I could begin to rectify this and plant my feet on solid ground. But, as with any intimate conversation, especially with a stranger, these weren’t reflections I could easily share. A few months later, I wrote another long letter, to the same address, telling its recipient, now eighty-five, how much I knew he valued his privacy and how well I knew all the questions he didn’t like to be asked. Still, if he wanted to explain himself to Time magazine—he continued to write indignant letters to the magazine, and he’d sometimes written for Life; he’d gone out of his way to mention Time in The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-Out Case—I’d be happy to serve as a cross-examiner.

  A few weeks later, the little blue envelope arrived, as I knew it would, with the single sheet
inside (typed for years by his sister Elisabeth), his spidery signature at the bottom. If any letter could make him succumb, he wrote, in just the courteous, elegant tones I’d expected, it would be mine. But time was short now, and he had much to do.

  Months earlier, as it happened, Elisabeth had suffered a stroke, and Greene had been so devastated that he could barely look at her, I later heard, and collapsed in sobs. The old man was himself unwell, and had lost another part of himself when his closest brother, Hugh, died, two years before. Seven months later, our house burned down, and his letter, and all the thoughts I’d scribbled down of him, my plans for becoming a writer, were reduced to ash. Ten months after that, I turned on the radio one morning and heard that Graham Greene was dead.

  Now our exchanges were safer—more intimate—than ever.

  CHAPTER 17

  My father never mentioned Graham Greene, that I can remember; he disliked Catholicism—a longtime rival to the Neo-Platonism he cherished—and rejoiced when his infant son, in the maternity ward, began to bawl every time a Catholic nun came to pray for him, setting off a room full of bawls that drove the poor sister away. Yet he had been taught, of course, by Catholics, at schools named after half-forgotten saints, and it was they who had given him Othello and “The Scholar Gypsy” and the English he now used so powerfully. It was they who had, indirectly, sent him to England, and I’m not sure he’d ever have had time for Englishmen like Greene, with all the “advantages,” who were so determined to turn their backs on that inheritance and concentrate on the failures of Empire, the worthless and the forgotten.

  They might almost have been moving in opposite directions: my father, through the innocence of his background and his unembarrassed hopes, eager to enjoy the spaciousness and history of Britain, while Greene sometimes seemed to long for nothing more than an anonymous house on the backstreets of Bombay. Both longed, as most of us do, for precisely the world they never knew, and had they met, it might have been on one of the busy streets of Piccadilly, where each would be walking towards the other’s home.