The Man Within My Head (5 page)

As I tapped away at my excited account, trying to inhale the smells and ironies to send across the waters to England (or New Mexico, or wherever my friend happened to be), a woman slipped in from the N.Y.-Saigon bar next door.

Greene would never have called her a woman; she was a girl, as confounding as any of her cousins who attach themselves to foreign males abroad, with a beauty-queen face and a tigress air to her and, I was sure, a keen head for numbers. She was tiny and wearing high heels, and her legs were long and shapely.

Business must be slow in the N.Y.-Saigon today, I thought as she perched herself on one of the tall stools in front of a terminal and began logging on to her hotmail account.

If you have a dangerous curiosity about the world, or if you’re just a writer of sorts, trained to collect observations, you become, in such situations, shameless. “There is a splinter of ice,” Greene wrote in his memoir, “in the heart of a writer,” and he needs that sense of cool remove to do his job, as any diagnostician does. I looked over, while deep in my message, to see what the young lady was responding to.

It was (of course) a love letter from an admirer now in Germany. “Dear Phuong,” it began, and the immemorial cadences of half-requited love tumbled out.

“You know,” I could imagine my friend Henry saying, “Greene stayed in the Majestic, too.” (I hadn’t known.) “That was where he met the young woman whom he turned into Phuong.”

O
f course, Greene might have said, if presented with such evidence; a writer’s job is to see what will happen to a stranger tomorrow. He has to plunge so deeply into his recesses that he touches off tremors that find an echo in a reader; and if he goes deep enough into the subconscious, he will find the future hidden there as much as the past. A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.

Greene never wanted to be seen as fortune-teller or prophet, but I’d found him leading as much as shadowing me across the globe, if only because he listened to the world so closely he knew what it would do next, as any of us might do with an old friend or love. Were I to go to Cuba tomorrow, the only guidebook I’d take, to lead me through its animated torpor and the lightning passions that make it at once so alluring and so confounding, would be his portrait of pre-Revolutionary Havana in 1958. When I visited the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, thirty-six years after Greene’s
Comedians
, it was to find, to the syllable, the ghostly hotel that he’d described (still, as in his book, with only one guest in residence). At the cocktail hour, a slippery charmer called Aubelin Joliecoeur (gossip columnist and seeming government informer) drifted into the lobby, looking for new friends and eager to gather data on all the newcomers off the plane. To many he would say, “You’ve met me already in the work of my friend, Monsieur Grin. Petit Pierre in
The Comedians
.”

Ten years before American involvement in Vietnam approached its peak, Greene was writing about “napalm bombings” and describing CIA intrigue there and fumbled attempts
to make contact with local proxies. The whole of
The Quiet American
could be taken as a questioning of men’s efforts to save a world that’s much larger than their ideas: “God save us always from the innocent and the good,” Fowler says early on, with typical (if slightly showy) Greenian irony; half a novel later, he tells the quiet American, “I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

Yet even as he’s outlining, enduringly, the perils of high- and simple-minded innocence around the world, Greene is also, more subtly, stripping the veil from the Englishman, so keen to tell us that he’s not involved, if only to persuade himself that he’s too seasoned to have feelings or opinions. Even the young American can see through him. “Now you are pretending to be tough, Thomas,” he says to the English Fowler and, sixteen pages later, “I guess you’re just trying to be tough. There’s something you must believe in” (and there is, we see—in the prospect of peace, the hope of a temporary permanence with his Vietnamese girl, a life abroad, all the things Fowler keeps telling himself he doesn’t care about).
The Quiet American
is still cited, and not only in Hanoi, as a timeless look at the vagaries of American foreign policy, but inside it hides a more private and anguished book, much deeper, that could be called
The Unquiet Englishman
. The words that recur, again and again, in its opening pages are “pain” and “love” and “innocence” and “home,” and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other.

I looked back at the real Phuong now, typing out an answer to her faraway suitor in Europe. “I think about you all the time,” I knew she’d write, though misspelling a few of the words. “I miss you. When you come back Saigon?”

Then she noticed I was spying on her and gave me a long, slow smile, an invitation. I could be her Fowler tonight, she might have been saying—or her Pyle. A watchful English-born journalist or a naïve young graduate from the New World, so eager to save her and her country that he seemed certain to ensure the destruction of them both. I knew about such girls because I’d met them in the movie of Greene’s
Honorary Consul
, viewed many times just before I took off for Southeast Asia at the age of twenty-six. On arrival in the tropics I’d found precisely the mix of languor and alertness, apparent complaisance and self-possession that Phuong embodies in all the professional charmers who’d been so keen to be my (or any visiting foreigner’s) friend.

The problem was, they were never so simple as my notions of them. They were much sweeter and more open and unguarded than their profession would suggest—and never quite so innocent or dreamy as they professionally suggested. They were—as Phuong is—walking paradoxes of a kind, deliberately blurring the gap between material and emotional need, more impenetrable even than those British and American men who were busily rearranging their names and selves so as to respond to the flattering attentions of young beauties.

Greene loved to write and talk of brothels, paid companions, and it was one of the habits that put off many an otherwise sympathetic reader, or convinced friends that they were dealing with an adolescent. But underneath the wished-for bravado there always seemed to lie something quieter and more sincere than simply a wish to shock. He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things we do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe. In one play that he barely acknowledged—it
was never published in his lifetime—he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men’s confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.

The only crime in such a place, he suggests—the play is called
A House of Reputation
—is to feel shame about one’s presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange with talk of love (as one “sentimental ignorant fool” does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he’s confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory—even a religion—before a human being.

P
huong means “phoenix,” the author tells us on the opening page of
The Quiet American;
it stands for something that rises again and again from the ashes, whether those of warfare or of love. It stands for a country, you could say, that is still standing, and bustling about its business, even after being attacked by France and then by the United States, while having China on its doorstep; it stands for a spirit that never dies, too, and perhaps a figure—a situation, a setting—that arises again and again even as the rue Catinat becomes raucous Tu Do Street, and then “Simultaneous Uprising” Street. Phuong steps out of the milk bar and back into the road, to meet her aging English suitor, and a generation or two later another sylphlike beauty appears along a dark street in Saigon, after midnight, and tries to entice a newcomer in the terms of her new century.

I went back to the Majestic—girls around the lobby gazed hopefully up at me—and tried to pick up the thread of my own life. Walking through a book by an author long dead is not a comforting experience; I began to feel I was just a compound
ghost that someone else had dreamed up, and his novels were my unwritten autobiography. I had reread
The Quiet American
perhaps seven times at that point, sometimes feeling my sympathies with the Englishman, whom I recalled from friends at school, sometimes with the young American (whom I had met when studying innocence in Harvard Yard). Sometimes I even felt my heart with the Asian woman, whose wise acceptances and gift for adapting to any situation were a large part of what I hoped to learn when bringing myself back to my parents’ continent.

Yet if I were really to want to learn about hauntedness—those people who seem so to stalk our footsteps that we can never be sure if they have slipped inside our beings or we are just drifting through their imaginations—the writer I would most likely turn to is, in fact, Graham Greene. The dream analyst he lived with as a boy no doubt reminded him that it was his mother’s first cousin who gave the world the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the perfect image for a writer who would habitually describe himself, like his grandfather, as manic-depressive, unable in his melancholy moods to imagine the prankster who, when full of deranged energy, could not begin to imagine that person who felt leaden, weighed down with guilt. Greene ends his slippery memoir,
Ways of Escape—
ways of escaping telling us anything at all, a skeptical reader might say—with an enigmatic epilogue called “The Other,” in which he describes how relentlessly shadowed he had long been by a man (or maybe two) who traveled the world, seeming to slip into his identity and doing the wildest things in his name.

He received letters from strangers he’d never met, the novelist Greene tells us, that fondly remembered times they
had passed together; he saw photographs in newspapers, from Jamaica to Geneva, of “Graham Greene the writer” squiring glamorous women around town and looking debonair (though the women in the photos were as strange to him as the man posing as “Graham Greene the writer,” who used his name to stay on tea plantations and wrote letters to an English magazine, claiming to be “simply a newsman after the truth”).

At one point, the “other” Graham Greene seemed to end up in jail and asked the
Picture Post
in London to send him a hundred pounds because he’d lost his passport; it did so, and when the real Greene was tracked down, he promptly suggested to the same magazine that he fly over to Assam to interview his alter ego. Before long, however, the nimble impersonator had skipped bail and was off to his next exotic destination, or the next woman he planned to charm, partly by saying he was Graham Greene.

It might almost have been a parable Greene had fashioned about the paradoxes of writing: the man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they’ve met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.

Greene had long been fascinated, he confessed, by a poem of Edward Thomas’s, “The Other,” about a man shadowing someone like himself—“I pursued / To prove the likeness, and, if true, / To watch until myself I knew”—and now he wondered if, in following the exploits of this fugitive, he was indeed learning something about himself. Once, after having
lunch with President Allende in Chile, he was himself taken to be the “unreal” Graham Greene, a fake. “Had I been the impostor all the time?” he ends his memoirs by writing. “Was I the Other?”

Yet Greene was never quite so innocent as he claimed; he had devised an Other of his own, whom he called “Hilary Tench,” and sometimes he would address his wife or win magazine competitions under the pseudonym of “H. Tench,” a dark and cruel figure who seemed to speak for a shadow self, the unconscious impulses that made him do things “unlike himself” that he wished belonged to someone else. Traveling, he gave out business cards with the names of characters from his books on them, among them “H. Tench”; the first two words in his most celebrated novel,
The Power and the Glory
, are “Mr. Tench,” the name he gives an exiled dentist who lives in a Mexican village. Greene sometimes kept two versions of his diary—the book in which he might be expected to be most transparent—as if there were at least two versions of any day or story, Jekyll’s, perhaps, and Hyde’s.

One day, he found another “Graham Greene” listed in the London phone book—the name is common enough—and called up the poor man to ask if he was the one responsible for the “filthy novels.” When the man stammered out his demurral—yes, his name was Graham Greene, but he was a retired solicitor—Greene berated him further for not having the courage to confess to the scandalous writings.