by Pico Iyer
There were a few more volumes by his bedside—maybe company for the night—and one of them, I saw to my amazement, was another copy of that first book, which couldn’t have been the easiest one for a father to delight in with its raucous and heedless adventures across ten countries in the East.
In all its 378 pages, there was only one marking: at the top of one page, my father had carefully copied out a sentence I’d cited from Proust, “The real paradises are the paradises lost.”
A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father, as Greene saw as well as anyone, is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard. Another advantage virtual fathers have.
“In the time left to me,” Greene had written in his letter, after I’d asked if he might be willing to sit still for a profile in Time magazine, and the phrase had stuck with me, haunting, as the words of those in their eighties often are. Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they’ve come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring—youth—is visible, there’s always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else’s perhaps too-innocent illusions.
His inability to trust himself would not have mattered if he hadn’t so hungered for peace, and his longing for peace would not have been so poignant if it hadn’t been his unquiet mind that always kept him from finding it. “From childhood I had never believed in permanence,” Fowler says, “and yet I had longed for it.”
There weren’t many things I still had to ask him; his life was an open book, he’d laid himself so naked to the world on the page. If I met my father I might have asked—though perhaps something would always prevent me from broaching the difficult stuff—“How much did you really believe? What is it that most compels you? Where do the lines of faith run in you and where do they stop?” But with Greene there’d be no need of words at all. He knew me better than I did myself. I knew him better than I knew Louis or my father or many of the people closest to me, when it came to his secrets, his sins, his most intimate needs. I closed the door of my father’s final temporary residence and got back into my car to drive up the hill, to where a rebuilt house, no longer yellow, sat alone on a ridge, and a quiet American, inside a faded orange book, was ready to keep me company with talk about the importance of never mocking innocence too readily—and the snarls that invariably turn around compassion.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, first of all, to my dear old friend (and sometime editor) Louise Dennys, who, along with her late sister, Amanda, and brother Nicholas (all following in the footsteps of their mother, Elisabeth), has done so much to keep alive the legacy of her uncle Graham, and with her husband, Ric Young, has passed so much of Greene’s memory down to the rest of us; to my old colleague Bernard Diederich, for remaining so staunch a protector of his longtime friend, and for sharing with me, over many years, talk of their adventures together; and to my newer friends Paul Theroux and Michael Mewshaw, for offering glimpses into the older writer who took them in and showed them kindness. And thank you, of course, to the unmet Norman Sherry, for his untiring work of biographical excavation, to which this book, as so many others, is transparently indebted.
Thank you to my old school friend Louis, for showing me, amidst so much else, how belief in God could be not just a namby-pamby, Sunday Schoolish kind of thing, but a catalyst to deeply engaged, thoughtful compassion in the world, extended even to such half believers as me; to U2, for some of the same; and to Sigur Rós, for offering a glimpse of peace and clarity without the clutter of personality. And thank you to the monks of New Camaldoli, for providing shelter, warm friendship, silence and, most of all, a vision of surrender to so many of us caught up in the storms of the world.
Thank you to everyone at Alfred A. Knopf, my books’ first home for more than a quarter of a century now, starting with my literary godfather, Sonny Mehta, and my editor, Dan Frank, who has, so searchingly and tenaciously, over five books now, pushed me to go deeper and closer to the bone, then come up with dozens of inspired textual suggestions; to my old friends at the company, among them Marty Asher, Robin Desser, Pam Henstell, Sheila Kay, Nicholas Latimer and the brilliant jacket designer Abby Weintraub; and to my irreplaceable friend and agent, Lynn Nesbit, as well as to Cullen Stanley, among many other stalwart protectors at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.
Thank you, finally, to Hiroko, for more than everything, and to my mother, for all the things I’ve long forgotten and failed to thank her for, and thank you to the author who, almost in spite of himself, taught me and so many others how to move around the world and even how to hazard trust—especially when the evidence may be against it.
A Note About the Author
Pico Iyer has written nonfiction books on globalism, Japan, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and forgotten places, and novels on Revolutionary Cuba and Islamic mysticism. He regularly writes on literature for The New York Review of Books, on travel for the Financial Times and on global culture and the news for Time, The New York Times and magazines around the world.
