The Man Within My Head (7 page)

Often, inevitably, we ended up in places where Greene had been, too, but the correspondences that arose seemed only to heighten the eerie sense of possession I felt with the semi-imagined friend I’d fashioned in my head. We stepped out, one sweltering afternoon, of the little Casa Grande Hotel in Santiago de Cuba and, as soon as we got into a car, a stranger slipped in and promised to show us around; a few years later I read how Greene had stepped out of the little Casa Grande
Hotel in Santiago de Cuba, thirty-five years before we did, and, as soon as he got into a car, a stranger slipped in, promising to show him around.

I told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama’s teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we’d read at school, from
Hamlet:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I’d spent five years writing a study of the Dalai Lama, to address Graham Greene’s questions under a different cover: how act with conscience and clarity in the midst of the world’s confusions and how see things as they really are and still have faith in them? Then—we were staying in a convent on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem—I searched the hostel’s bookshelves and found a copy of Greene’s late novel,
Monsignor Quixote
. I opened the epigraph page and read, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Louis had little time for Greene and his many doubts; faith for him was a way to allow you to act with full confidence because your foundations never wavered. So I didn’t know how to explain to him the hauntedness I felt. All his life, I’d read, Greene had an obscure fear of seeing his house burn down. Then, when he was thirty-seven, his home really did go up in flames, during the Blitz, and he took the opportunity to leave his family behind and never really lived in a domestic setting again. One day, when I was thirty-three, I climbed upstairs in my family home and saw seventy-foot flames through every picture window. By the time the California wildfire had reduced our house and everything in it to rubble, I had decided to make my sense of belonging truly internal and go to the most clarifying society I knew, Japan, to live in a two-room flat with little on its shelves but a worn copy of
The Quiet American
.

Y
et everyone has these figures in their heads, and their presence inside and around us is often more unsettling, because more mysterious, than that of the people we meet. Henry James knows my innermost thoughts, I’d hear a friend say, to the point where I’m scared to see what he will write next; Joni Mitchell, in
Blue
, has been reading my diary, someone else would confess, and it’s spooky how she knows the secrets I never tell to anyone. It might be a character in Henry James, or some actor we’ve never met; but everyone I know carries around such presences, which—like old loves or private faiths—hold us precisely because they are impossible to explain away.

I never wanted to seek out Greene’s manuscripts or letters in research libraries; I made no conscious effort to track down those people who’d known him. He lived vividly enough inside me already, in some more shadowy place. I’d watch myself sending a long e-mail to someone I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked or trusted and hear Greene say that it was a form of “moral cowardice” to sustain a connection just because you
couldn’t find the right way to end it. I’d pray to some spirit I wasn’t sure I believed in, on behalf of someone I cared for, and then hear Greene whisper that to enter such a relationship was to give up much more than you could hope to get in return. I’d tell myself that having a house burn down was ultimately for the best, and I’d hear him, ever-agile, note that no piety can be trusted if it answers too closely to our needs.

Sometimes, as a boy, I’d look up at my father’s bookshelf and see the black-and-white framed photo there he kept of his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, striding barechested towards some righteousness he loved. Living without many possessions, universal in his loincloth, blessed with a lawyer’s canny sense of theater, he might have been offering the world a model and something of a silent admonition at the same time. I shuddered a little when I learned that Gandhi was born on the same day of the year as Greene, thirty-five years before, with the result (would this have caused Greene to smile?) that October 2 is now known to some as the “International Day of Non-Violence.”

I
had already been deep in Greene for more than fifteen years when, finally, one midsummer day of coastal fog, our house in California seeming to sit above the world, removed by the clouds below it, I picked up his very first published novel, spookily entitled
The Man Within
. I’d never been much interested in the early books, which Greene himself had furiously renounced, and it was the man of the middle years, holding himself to rigorous account, who transfixed me; but now, picking
up the small blue volume, I felt as rattled as if a stranger were shouting obscenities in my face.

A boy is running across a down as darkness falls—this was how the novel, completed when Greene was just twenty-four, begins. He is being pursued by a gang of smugglers—his father’s gang—whom he has betrayed to the authorities; his pursuers, therefore, are being pursued, too, by the law. As he stumbles through the gloom, he sees a light ahead and comes upon a kind of fairy-tale cottage in the dark. In front of it stands a “slim upstrained candle-flame, a woman,” pointing a gun at him.

In time she agrees to take him in, and when he asks her why there’s a coffin in her room, she explains that the man inside it had been a quasi-father to her, as well as a tormentor. The girl, Elizabeth, is nineteen, younger even than the boy, but soon, very soon, given shelter by her, the boy comes to feel she’s holy, his redemption. “She is a saint, he thought,” I read on page 50, and then, twelve pages later, “ ‘She is a saint,’ he thought.” She gives him a sense of peace—of safety—he’s known only when listening to music, or, oddly, at school.

But in order to earn his place in her sanctuary, he has to go back out into the world; Elizabeth urges him to testify publicly against his former gangmates in the local court. So he heads out into the dark once more and makes his way to the nearest town, and an inn named after a goat. He tells the people he meets there that his name is Absalom, like that of the character in the Bible who tries to kill his father, David. He picks up a young and easy woman on the arm of an older man, but—as she notes bitterly—spoils even their brief coupling with his overanxious conscience. There is no justice in the world, he comes to see as the smugglers are acquitted, while pure Elizabeth
is characterized in court as a harlot; yet some iron law of punishment within ensures that he must pay in some way for his betrayal of the criminals.

The constant sense that haunts the novel of a boy torn between the romantic in him and the would-be cynic—the believer and the devil—is perhaps not so unusual; but the violence of the feeling is intense. “There’s another man within me,” run the very first words of Greene’s first published novel, in an epigraph from the seventeenth-century essayist Sir Thomas Browne, “and he’s angry with me.” Again and again we read, of this first protagonist, “He was, he knew, embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying, desiring child and another more stern critic.” The first novel Greene ever wrote, never published, was, bizarrely, the story of a black boy born unhappily to white parents in England. The same Greene who could write with such urbanity about the “other” Graham Greene who impersonated him around the world could apprehend the other within himself—his lifelong theme and antagonist—only with a sense of near-despair.

I
knew Greene,” my friend Paul began telling me, one warm afternoon in December, as we sipped tea after lunch on his expansive estate in Hawaii, and he pointed out the twenty kinds of bamboo on the property (a modern-day version, I thought, of the house that Greene’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson had made on Samoa). Half a dozen geese clucked along the path, and in the bungalow where Paul did his writing, fierce tribal masks from Angola and the Pacific Islands
grinned down unnervingly; on one desk sat a signed Helmut Newton print, of a woman in a black hat and veil fellating a fully clothed man, his face out of view.

“But you couldn’t really know him,” he went on. “He didn’t want you to. He never inhabited places. He lived in flats; he didn’t like to be at home.”

They had first come into contact when Greene, in a characteristic act of largesse, had offered some words of public praise for Paul’s first book of travels,
The Great Railway Bazaar
, perhaps because he saw strong echoes in it of his own early book and first commercial success,
Stamboul Train
. A train is a perfect setting for a story, Greene had realized, since every one of the passengers is carrying his own secrets, unguessed at by the others, and the setting is always changing. The backdrop shifts, propulsively, even as the figures in the foreground sink deeper and deeper into their half-curtained dramas. Greene was always eager to help younger writers, especially if they seemed to lack official connections.

“The first time we met,” Paul now recalled, “we talked about infidelity. I bared my soul to him. I’d had this image, before we met, of a power figure, shamanic. But he didn’t type, he didn’t drive, he couldn’t boil an egg.

“He wasn’t much older than my father. But he seemed to come from a different age. I wanted his blessing. The older writer is always a father figure. And I needed approval from him, guidance from him. I wanted to be him.” A few years later, Paul had actually written a novel,
Picture Palace
, in which his protagonist, an elderly American photographer, Maude Coffin Pratt, begins her story by flying across the Atlantic to meet Graham Greene in his favorite lair, the downstairs bar at the Ritz.

“The novelist’s eyes were pale and depthless,” Paul had
written, through Maude, “with a curious icy light that made me think of a creature who can see in the dark, the more so because they were also the intimidating eyes of a blind man, with a hypnotist’s unblinking stare.” Greene comes across to his visitor as many things at once: a father confessor, a louche clergyman, a wise old lion guarding his secrets. But most of all—and this was what so many found in Greene—he seems to her somehow a reflection of herself. Soon after they meet, she sees him as “an older brother, a fellow sufferer.” But as the evening goes on, she comes to feel that, for all their differences in gender, age and nationality, really she is looking at herself. She wants to take his picture, to make it the final piece in her coming retrospective, because, she realizes, strangely, “it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”

T
he whole point of an adopted parent, I’d often thought, is that you can have him to yourself. He’s a figment of your imagination, in a sense, someone you’ve created to satisfy certain needs, so he’s always there, in your head, at your disposal. Real parents have lives to attend to, lives beyond our understanding, and they commit, most of all, the sin of being real; they’re human and distractible and fallible. Sometimes we seem to create ourselves in the light of their mistakes.