The Man Within My Head (21 page)

If you delivered the title of that book of stories,
May We Borrow Your Husband?
, in an American voice, it sounded boyish, polite, full of openness; if you said it in an English voice, it sounded feline, jaded, even decadent. In the distance between the two lies the heartbreak.

G
reene made it his practice, as I’d admired, never to let himself off the hook for anything; when people sought him out for counsel or confession—often priests, convinced he was the saint of sinners, the only one who understood their doubts—he invariably told them how hopeless he was and how different from the person they thought they knew, a cry that grew more anxious after he appeared on the cover of
Time
in 1951. He sounded, at times, like the convict protagonist in his friend Narayan’s novel,
The Guide
, who is taken to be a sage
the more he protests his unworthiness, and who is acclaimed for his humility the more he simply tells the truth about his many crimes.

Yet deeper than that, I always saw in Greene the boy who sat next to me in class, or who took off on a “Long Run” (he relished such exercises, friends of his told me, because they allowed him to be alone), who clearly had learned well the lesson we were repeatedly taught at school (which left us especially at sea in unembarrassed, aspiring America): that the one thing we should never talk about was our acts of kindness, or selflessness, and what we should always stress were our failures, our faults, and our follies. This was an act of prudence, in part; each of us, after all, was surrounded by 1,249 boys just waiting to sniff out a trace of traitorous goodness. But it was also the principle of the perhaps outdated gentleman’s code in which we were being trained: it was unseemly to push yourself forward, or to think very much of yourself at all. When Greene wrote, in
The End of the Affair
, “Virtue tempted him in the dark like a sin”—in
The Power and the Glory
, an errant priest feels “the wild attraction of doing one’s duty”—he wasn’t just indulging his weakness for paradox; he knew that a certain set of behaviors had been deeply instilled in his characters, and it required courage, the quality he admired most, to stray from them.

We learned this and we learned this, and then I got off TWA 761, in Los Angeles, and found that everything was turned on its head there. People were ashamed of their vices in innocent California, more than of their virtues, and conscience was something to be shouted out, not quietly observed in private; reticence was translated as “repression” and stoicism became “denial.” It was as if everything we’d been trained to do and be in England condemned us as corrupt here, and
unpardonably complex. Greene noted in
The Quiet American
how “honour” lost a “u” when it went across the Atlantic, but the deeper stress—incurable—was that in the New World “honor” was associated with letting it all hang out, where we had been taught that it lay in keeping things in.

None of this would have mattered much except that I wondered how people in this fresh open society could begin to understand a man who might be keeping quiet about the more sacred or heartfelt parts of his life. And how they could possibly register feeling that was strong precisely because it was not being voiced. How could they ever understand a cry like that of the writer, in
Monsignor Quixote
, “O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference”?

Indifference here had been thrown out along with British tea.

A
journalist called Ronald Matthews once completed a work with the highly presuming title,
Mon Ami Graham Greene
. Greene, expectably, fought with cold tenacity to ensure that it would never come out in England (it appeared only in France). But, having done so, he also, for no apparent reason, sent Matthews’s son through expensive private school and then paid his way through Oxford, and even a year the boy took off. A skeptic might see the outlines of some blackmailing scheme in the charity, but extravagant generosity and a refusal to let himself get away with anything were never out of character in Greene.

He bought his Swedish mistress a house (in part, perhaps, because he could not give her a home), and he bought
another house for the daughter of his French mistress, whom he spent years defending against the French mafia in his old age. He bought his French agent a car. He bought a house for his English mistress Dorothy Glover. He donated thousands of pounds to the Society of Authors, to help writers less fortunate than he, and, two weeks before his death, with characteristic punctiliousness, he wrote to resign from the same organization, because he felt he no longer deserved the name of “author.” It took one kind of gift to respond to an Indian at Oxford who asked him to read a manuscript by an unpublished young friend in faraway India; it took another to spend the next fifty-six years, until his death, carefully correcting the English in R. K. Narayan’s manuscripts, offering forewords to his books, serving as his unpaid agent and providing counsel from afar to a man he didn’t meet for twenty years.

“He was a father confessor to me,” my old colleague Bernie Diederich told me one thundery night in Coral Gables, of the man who had been his traveling companion for more than thirty years, across Central America and in Haiti. “He always kept his word. Never forgot things. He was very, very loyal.” His “haunted disciple” (in the fine words of the critic Harold Bloom), John le Carré, singled out Greene’s “transcendent universal compassion,” as if to identify the one quality he had failed to acquire himself, as a literary heir, for all the brilliance of his extended portraits of torn loyalties and the modern search for faith. At times, in fact, it was Greene’s very softheartedness and flinching from brutality (even the would-be tough Fowler “cannot bear to see another man in pain”) that kept him further from belief. “They are always saying God loves us,” a “sort of mother” declares in his final novel. “If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.”

Yet as I went back and forth, in my life and then my head,
between unquiet Englishmen who were often more compassionate than they let on and quiet Americans who were not quite so innocent as they liked to seem, I came to see how much it was a story, in the end, of fathers and sons. The shining children of affluence I knew in California had been told to do their own thing and never to trust anyone over thirty; yet they knew they needed guidance of some kind, and for that they now turned to their elders or the traditions of the East. Louis, meanwhile, was busy devouring James Ellroy’s stories of Californian murder and horror as we sat in Haiti
—My Dark Places
—and crooning “Friend of the Devil” to Ethiopian drivers, precisely because he’d never be very far from his inheritance wherever he went. Well into his fifties, like many of my English friends, he was spending weekends, delightedly, with his parents.

Reading
The Quiet American
was like opening the door to some debate inside me that my boyhood had made ceaseless. It was the story of an internal discussion, anguished and unending, between the chivalrous youth in us and the part of us that takes pride in being grown-up and beyond the reach of illusion. Greene was such a master of his craft that, on beginning
A Burnt-Out Case
, for example, he estimated that it would be 65,000 words long (220 pages, in a typical typeface); when he concluded, much, much later, it would come to 64,875 (or 219 and a half pages). To many that would make him too efficient, too settled in his unsettledness; for all the convulsions that made the stories shudder, he knew where they were going and had everything under control. But in
The Quiet American
there is one huge technical flaw that hit me (as many another reader) every time I returned to it. “Like a sandwich?” the young American says. “They’re really awfully
good.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he says at another point. “It’s going to be quite chilly.”

Greene was never a master of voices, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he couldn’t write American. But the deeper truth is that Pyle is just the young quixote and gallant that Fowler had been once upon a time; that in fact is precisely why Fowler so fears him and wants to emphasize his distance from him. The two are more or less the same person, at different stages of life—father and son, you could say, who don’t know how much to love each other and how much to compete.

Fowler longs to be disdainful of the young American and retreats into schoolboy mockery every time he’s confronted by his good intentions; but that is only, he’s almost wise enough to see, because he knows that he wishes those intentions were still his. Over and over he acknowledges that Pyle is in fact a better man for Phuong; his sense of rivalry is persistently haunted by a strange tenderness and almost stealthy solicitude. “I’m glad it’s you, Pyle,” he says, when the younger man finally takes Phuong away from him (and earlier, he even goes so far as to woo Phuong on Pyle’s behalf, because the young American’s French isn’t up to it). When he visits the quiet American’s flat after his death, Fowler pockets for himself as a sentimental keepsake the very book by York Harding, a fictional New World pundit, that he’s been deriding throughout the novel.

“I know you better than you do yourself,” Pyle at one point says to Fowler. And Fowler’s most haunting sentence in the book may well be, “Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?”

G
reene’s great theme was always innocence, if only because he could never disguise how much he missed it; most of his stories are set just outside the Gates of Eden, with one character looking back at the hopefulness he’s just lost and another, still unfallen, whose imminent exile we ache for. That was part of what always held me in the novels: that none of the characters was entirely cynical, able to write off all belief, and yet none of them can be a simple believer, either. They’re all trembling in the balance, and the innocent American who so longs to rescue people kills civilians in the service of his dreams; the Englishman who is so strangely tender and protective towards the young American, as a father might be, plays a part in bringing about his death. The woman they both crave for her sweetness shows a bracing matter-of-factness about her emotions, silently carrying her hopes back and forth between the Grand Canyon and the Cheddar Gorge.

“It’s all you write about,” the most discerning reader among my friends had said when I was in my twenties: “innocence and its loss.” And perhaps the way that both are always inside us as we travel between a father’s world and a boy’s.

But there was something deeper going on than just the passage between wide-openness and discrimination as I flew back and forth across the Atlantic, from the teachers we called “Twiggy” and “Yakker” and “B.O.”—we officially knew them and sometimes ourselves only by their initials—to the Harvard philosophers around our home in Santa Barbara who were so eagerly setting about remaking the world and eliminating humiliation and inequality and struggle (perhaps reality itself) by remaking themselves.

When I thought of my father, I always saw bright colors: the yellow shirts he wore, the house he’d painted the saffron of
a Buddhist monk’s robes, the mustard-yellow Alfa-Romeo he drove fast around our mountain curves (“Slow down, Raghavan!” my mother would cry, and he’d accelerate). Some of the time he sat, endearingly rapt, before
South Pacific
on the television, his copies of books on Einstein and Adler piled in high towers around the foot of his blue chair, orange and black folders laid out around them, in a system known only to himself. But always there was a sense of conviction in him, and the bright colors of someone who seemed to know exactly what he thought and wanted others to believe the same.