The Man Within My Head (18 page)

“Dear love, dear only love for ever, dear heart’s desire. I’m aching for you, I need you as much as any cripple might.” “Come back to me & I’ll soon make you believe again that I shall love you as long as life & if there’s life after, afterwards.” “My miracle-worker … You’ve given trees shade, and the flowers scent, and the sun a gold it’s never had before.” “More than earth / More than fire / More than light / Darling.”

He would kneel before God, he wrote to Vivien, if only she would marry him; he would honor her wish for celibacy, if only they could be wed. In truth he did become a Catholic just so she would accept him. Yet, as with Catherine more than twenty years later, he seemed to be courting his love as the true object of his faith; it was less that she would bring him to God than that he would use God as a way to get her heart. “You are my saint,” he wrote to Vivien (just as the young boy in his first novel,
The Man Within
, thinks of the girl he meets in his fairy-tale cottage); “miracles will be done at your grave.” “You are simply the symbol of the Absolute,” he writes. The deeply devout woman who had written him about the Virgin Mary must have been more than a little unsettled by the intensity and wondered why he seemed to be prostrating himself not before God but fallible her.

It was as if there was a question mark where his heart should be, and perhaps he could answer it only with such passion; it was hard, reading Greene, to forget that he had titled one play
Yes and No
and seemed to live in an eternal maybe.
Always impatient with anyone who would put his faith in an abstraction, able only to repose his confidence in the wavering heart, he seemed almost to need to solve the riddle of belief by taking a leap of faith towards another mortal. The passionate letters might have been a way of trying to will himself into conviction and trust, because he knew and feared that, soon, very soon, his foothold would begin to slip and he would be in the abyss again.

A woman came to my apartment once when I was living in New York City, in my mid-twenties, having asked me, and asked me, for five weeks when I would be free (I should have said, “Never,” but perhaps I, too, was not yet ready to close the door on possibility). We’d met a couple of months before, and I’d found her to be bright, quick and fun, a recent student of my father’s in California who’d made contact with me after she’d read a long piece I’d written for
Time
magazine on the cocaine trade. Kristin (she shared a name with my college girlfriend) was bursting with life and spirit, but I was on my way to Asia for many months and she was living with her college boyfriend, and, through the vagaries that made me like corn, say, but never eggs, I knew she would never be my type.

When I offered her some juice, though, soon after she arrived, she slipped something into my glass (“ADAM,” as she would later explain, her fond nickname for the new drug that was just beginning to make itself known in New York, MDMA, or Ecstasy). For thirty minutes or so I felt a wild pounding of the heart (she sat next to me, clearly shaken by what she’d unloosed). Then, very suddenly, I was in love with her, a perfectly attractive person I’d have walked by on the street, a hundred times a day, without noticing.

She stayed with me for the sixteen or eighteen hours the drug’s effect was said to last, but after she left, it didn’t begin
to subside. I started writing letters to her, feverish, long letters that went on for page after page. I went to my office, to write more endless articles on the violent struggle around apartheid in South Africa, the killing of Ninoy Aquino in the Philippines, but really all I was doing was turning from my typewriter to my desk to scribble out page after page of handwritten madness. Kristin didn’t know quite what to do with this—whatever hopes she’d had the night had ended—but she gamely took responsibility for the spirit she’d released.

In time, after two and a half months or so, and seventy days of writing five, ten pages a day, the tablet’s effect faded, and I never looked at the love drugs of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with quite the same skepticism again. We ended up, through a small miracle, as fast friends who’d somehow come out on the far side of a romance, intimate and trusting, without ever having had a relationship. But Kristin was not the only one to wonder what in the world had happened. How much does a drug, an infatuation, place feelings inside one, and how much does it only uncover what was there all along? And how true, how deep were all the sentiments that came pouring out of me? Were they aimed at her, at the excitement of covering pages or just, at some level, at the feeling itself, intoxication?

S
o much of writing is a performance, a design or presentation aimed to charm or divert or persuade; the great challenge of the desk is to push past every agenda and self-consciousness to whatever lies beneath. Greene often said that he could not imagine how anyone could handle the shocks and confusions of a regular life without the catharsis and the clarifying agent
of a pen. And the reason I loved him and he moved me so much was that he had the gift of seeming at last to set aside his evasions and false selves as soon as he began writing in another voice (in nonfiction, he could be as hard to catch as he no doubt was in life).

But what came out of his honest self-reckonings were always new questions about himself. Jim, the young protagonist of his last published novel, comes, after many years, upon the letters of the slippery character who’s taken him under his wing and is always leaving behind the woman he loves, and he is shamed, silenced by their obvious sincerity, their almost painful solicitude. By contrast, Jim reflects, as he sits in his “two-roomed flat,” trying to become a writer, he completes rough drafts even for his love letters, and in his most private correspondence “worked hard to produce the maximum effect on the reader.” At the end of his life, Greene seems to be wondering, through his final alter ego, if he’s ever loved at all—the same question that has haunted all his novels, full of feeling and sympathy and pathos as they are.

Sometimes I’d wondered the same thing about my father, or even myself; words came so easily to him that I could not tell how much he was inside them, how much outside, knowing just the effect that eloquence can have. Or maybe, I often thought, he himself could not tell how true or how deep his sentences were—as he spoke with such unstoppable fluency on silence and the need to leave all words behind—and from which place inside him they came. I’d turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it’s harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. But of course living with words had moved me to trust most those moments that come only when words run out.

On first meeting the letters to Catherine, I’d liked to believe that she had freed Greene at last from second thoughts, offering him passion without a real threat of domesticity; he’d asked her again and again to marry him, but he surely knew that he could no more easily settle to her, ultimately, than to himself. If he got his wish, he’d soon long to undo it. But to find him making the same protests of eternal devotion half a lifetime before, to a woman who could not have been more different (part of Catherine’s appeal was surely that she was Vivien’s wild opposite) was like having his most naked confessions in church doubted.

The only consolation—though was it one?—was that Greene, as always, seemed to be wise to his own maneuvers. In
The Quiet American
, his middle-aged Englishman writes to the wife he’s abandoned back in England to ask for a divorce (exactly the kind of scene I could imagine being incited in life by Greene’s sudden passion for Catherine). She responds to him, in what sounds like his own wife’s voice, full of the same undeluded calm and clarity: “You say it will be the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used exactly that phrase to me—I could show you the letter, I have it still—and I suppose you wrote in the same way to Anne. You say that we’ve always tried to tell the truth to each other, but, Thomas, your truth is always so temporary.”

T
he questions tore at me because all Greene’s books are, deep down, about the shaking of the heart, and not the body. It’s easier to find concrete evidence for sex than for love,
so his official biographer, Norman Sherry, eagerly visited a brothel in Haiti to cross-question a madam on her long-ago client, and his dark counter, the American critic Michael Shelden, who all but accuses Greene of murder, recorded the testimony of a chambermaid in Jamaica as to the state of Greene’s sheets after he had been staying there with Catherine. But always I remembered Fowler, in
The Quiet American
, in one of his moments of sudden candor, saying, “None of us needs it as much as we say.” He’s had only four loves in his life, he says, and he wonders what the other forty or so partners were all about.

No one talks about sex so much as a schoolboy who knows next to nothing about it, and sometimes I wondered if Greene, like many of his protagonists, was only pretending to be wicked; he made such a big display of his interest in sex shows and brothels that it was easy to believe, as his friend Malcolm Muggeridge said, that he was a “sinner manqué.” A friend of mine sent Greene a novel he’d written, and the only word the older novelist objected to in it was “panties” (“Couldn’t you use ‘step-ins’?” was his bizarre suggestion.) It’s remarkable how, a decade after Lady Chatterley, Greene chose never to go much into sex at all in his books, even as he was offering to risk imprisonment to bring
Lolita
into print in England.

His women were friends at least as much as they were loves; he stayed in close contact with Dorothy and Catherine and Anita Björk until death intervened, and his need for intimacy (call it absolution or just understanding) seemed at least as strong as his need for apartness. He came to life around women, every one of his friends told me; but clearly, too, women came to life around him. They could feel his vulnerability, which he never tried to hide, his strange mixture of shyness
and need, and they could see that he put feelings before everything (in his books at least) and kindness before mere doctrine. Sometimes I suspected that he really did believe, with a curious innocence, that it made sense to turn to professional lovers because there was no chance of betraying them; tenderness would come without a price tag (or, more precisely, with a financial price tag, which would always be easier to take care of).

I
n Toronto, one hot summer at the beginning of the new century, I happened to be one of fifty-eight people asked to talk for twenty minutes, onstage in a large theater, on our passion of the moment (I, too typically, spoke about the new possibilities of our global order, and the way it allowed for multiple homes and multiple selves). One evening, one of the only other writers there sought me out and started to talk about the writers she especially loved.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve been preoccupied for many years with Graham Greene.”

Her face lit up. “That story of his,” she said. “You know ‘The Blue Film’?”

“The one about the man in Bangkok who takes his wife to see a ‘French film’ in a little hut? And then realizes that the man undressing in the movie is himself, thirty years before? With the only woman he’s ever truly loved, a street girl hired for the picture?”