The Man Within My Head (22 page)

The Greene I carried in my head was drab-colored and loved to be invisible. Since his earliest years, his mother used to say, he’d hated having attention drawn to him. He longed to disappear into the larger world, I always felt, and he liked to think that shared doubt drew men together more than common faith did. The people he most distrusted in his books were the ones who seemed most sure of themselves.

We run and run from who we are—this was Greene’s theme from the beginning—only to discover, of course, that that is precisely what we can never put behind us.

I
loved Greene’s sadness,” the older American novelist said, as Czechs in high heels and men in suits walked down the imposing steps behind us. We were sitting in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, on a blustery summer’s day, one of the four days of sunshine permitted every year in Britain by royal decree.

“My mother had trouble with her moods,” he went on, “and I was prone to bouts of sadness, too. That was part of what drew me to him. When I was growing up, I never felt I could be Faulkner or Melville or Proust, any of the writers I admired. But I felt I could become Greene. Even though I couldn’t, of course.” He “had the gift of getting readers to fall in love with him, on the page,” another friend who’d known the novelist well, and liked him, told me. “It’s what he did. Robert De Niro plays mobsters and he played this part that was hard to resist.”

It was never easy for me to come back to England; it was associated with the past, and with a place I knew too well. I knew its limits, I felt, and had exhausted the small range of what was possible there. In Greenian terms, that was proof that this was “home.” But I was on an excursion to Turkey at
the time, and Mike had gotten in touch, and, without intending it, we’d found ourselves in the heart of Greeneland in its deepest sense: on one side of the main street were the gentlemen’s clubs and private tailors that might have spoken for his background, along with the Ritz, where he stayed when he came back to London; on the other was Shepherd Market, which still smelled of perfume and two centuries or more of streetwalkers’ incitations.

Mike had gotten to know Greene when he was a young man; a priest had told him to send the older novelist a letter and introduce himself, since he was nearby. He hadn’t expected Greene to respond, let alone to be so open and loquacious; though famous, and already living quietly in his “two-roomed” flat in Antibes, Greene had invited him to dinner and soon began talking about sex clubs and his infidelities. “He didn’t want to be alone,” as Mike saw it. “But he didn’t want the burden of obligation, as it were. He never wanted to be part of a coterie, to take in the literary scene.”

“That’s part of what makes him so alluring. Even approachable. That he always seems to be alone. Weakness is what he wrote from. It was what he wrote about, as well.”

“Yes,” said Mike, who had also gotten to know many of the other roaming novelists of the time, from Anthony Burgess to Paul Bowles. “There was something defenseless about him. Like a turtle without a shell. He couldn’t drive; he had an air of helplessness about him. I think that was part of his appeal to women. The fact he seemed to need taking care of.

“I don’t think he did, really, but he gave that impression. When I heard he’d been in Malaya chasing guerrillas, or in the Gaza Strip, a part of me found it hard to believe. He wasn’t a very practical man.”

I thought of his unfortunate biographer, Norman Sherry,
who had dreamed, I guessed, of becoming the fearless adventurer he took Greene to be. He’d tramped across Liberia, because Greene had done so; he’d contracted dysentery in the same remote mountain village in Mexico—even in the same tiny boardinghouse—where Greene had contracted it, forty years before; he’d tried to befriend the writer’s friends, to draw close to his family, even taken on Graham Carleton Greene, the writer’s nephew, as his literary agent. And yet, as the years went on, he seemed only to have become Greene the figure of tormented self-doubt. He has spent the last twenty-eight years of “continuous reflection,” he writes, more than once, at the end of his 2,218-page biography, trying to catch a man who, he now realizes, will always remain outside his grasp; instead of living out his own later years, he’s tried—and failed—to relive someone else’s.

“You’re not writing a biography?” Mike now asked.

“Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don’t think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.”

“It’s difficult,” said Mike, tactfully. “He’s a hard person to pin down.”

I
f you knew where to look, I thought, it wasn’t hard at all to find him; Greene would always reveal himself with an almost desperate openness if only he could find a cover. It was his confessional impulse that led him to become a novelist, I’d
generally assumed—to give us the equivalent of the dreams (sometimes fictional) he spun out for his psychoanalyst as a boy; and to work out some of the tangles he could not easily speak about in life. One may get drawn in, even spellbound, by a mystery, but one felt close only to someone one could think of as a friend.

One of the earliest books he’d written—an odd enterprise on which to waste so much energy at the beginning of a novelist’s career, with finances uncertain—was a biography of the bad-boy seventeenth-century poet Lord Rochester he’d completed in his late twenties, though it was rejected then and came out, with a nice irony, only when Greene was in his late sixties. I could see why the book was turned down when I read it in my own late twenties; the prose was workmanlike and flat, and about the life of a famously satirical, silver-tongued and rakish courtier who died, as the young Greene put it mournfully, “of old age at thirty-three,” apparently converting to Christianity just before he did so, Greene had made nothing but an uninflected recitation of facts.

But when I picked it up now, I realized that it didn’t have to tell us much about Lord Rochester; it told us more than enough about the young Graham Greene. And even more about the person he perhaps intuited he would become. Infidelity, he wrote, only recently married himself, “tormented Rochester’s conscience”; the poet of licentiousness knew that “the whole system of religion, if believed, was a greater foundation of quiet than any other thing whatsoever.” But, Greene wrote, the poet’s “twisted, passionate, metaphysical” mind prevented him from ever accepting it. Greene might almost have been writing parts of his own obituary in advance. “Life has somehow to be lived,” he’d written, “and Rochester drank to make it endurable; he wrote to purge himself of his unhappiness;
he tried to supply artificially the adventures which no longer came to him in war and acted the innkeeper and astrologer; he flung himself, the better to forget the world, into those two extremes, love and hate.”

I’d never drunk; I never felt the need to escape unhappiness or bring new drama into my life. But I knew how this kind of identification could work and how it was only through another, sometimes, that you could see yourself with shocking clarity. A real father is too close for comfort, or your vision is too clouded in trying to see what of him is in you and what in you is just a reaction against him. But a chosen father was essentially the way you—or I at least—could look long and hard at the way school had prepared us for the world but not for the domestic sphere; at how the search for truth could keep one much more engaged than accepting the finality or totality of any one position; at how the part of one that wished to be helpful also, always, feared the burden of obligation, as Mike had put it, and intrusions on one’s sacred privacy.

It made no sense at all for Greene to leave off novel writing to spend all this time on a biography of a pornographic poet, except that it was a way, perhaps, for him to rebel against what he was afraid of becoming (a successful commercial writer). It was a way of asserting himself as a would-be good-for-nothing even though he had taken a wife, new responsibilities, a God into his life. It was a way of allowing H. Tench some air, still, the chance to wreak havoc and speak for the night side of things, even as he never denied the presence of the good. Greene seemed to distrust, more than anything, the sense that he (or we) might use belief or faith as a way to pretend we didn’t have demons.

What gives Greene’s Rochester rare poignancy and power, in fact, is that, with every sin and at every moment of his self-dynamited
and errant life, the poet had a woundingly keen alertness to what he was letting down. “I myself have a sense,” he wrote—and Greene highlights this—“of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict.” He never lost his faith in kindness, even if he could not come to belief as a whole, and “to be half kind,” he wrote in one letter, “is as bad as to be half witted.” His tragedy was not so much that he was a sinner as that he could always see what he could have become, the possibility of something better. “I know he is a Devil,” his friend Etherege had written in a play—and Greene quotes it more than once—“but he has something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him.”

G
reene would not be surprised if I told him that he’d written his own life story—the only searching and revealing memoir he did write—when he was in his twenties, and thinking he was completing a biography of a man long dead. He had a clearer sense than almost anyone of his class and world of all the ways the subconscious is in tune with not just what’s happened, but what’s to come and can write in fiction in 1938 of “the Indo-China Problem,” as if knowing that it will be a headline fifteen years later, or could invent in February 1934 a dead woman found in a railway station only for a dead woman to be found in a British railway station four months later. Writing for Greene was always a form of self-examination akin to talking out one’s dreams. It was also the reason that he could never dismiss religion, much though his rational mind might want to.

As a boy of five, he’d dreamed one night of a ship going
down; he awoke to learn that the
Titanic
had sunk during the night. Twelve years later he dreamed again of a boat sinking, this time in the Irish Sea; a few days later, he learned that a boat had gone down that very night, as he was sleeping, in the Irish Sea. At least two of his novels arose directly from dreams, and the last book he produced was a record of his dreams, collected in diaries when young and for twenty-four years at the end of his life and meticulously indexed (he dreamed of meeting Jean Cocteau and Ho Chi Minh, of walking through the world of the Gospels). One reason he could benefit from spending the night alone was that he could read what he’d written that day, just before he slept, and then, while he was dreaming, the “pre-conscious,” as he called it, could work on the material as an outsourced accountant in Bangalore might, so that he would awaken with his narrative problems solved overnight.

That he was tapping into the future in this way was often a source of terror: he dreamed of V-1 rockets flying over London during the war and then, not long thereafter, the unmanned planes really were descending in droves. After his main character Scobie, so similar to his maker in his predicament, torn between responsibility to a wife he mostly pities and a mistress he doesn’t love, takes his own life in
The Heart of the Matter
, Greene’s wife, and no doubt the man himself, worried that he might be foretelling his own future. He always had a mediumistic gift, the spiritualist wife of his boyhood psychiatrist remembered in her nineties; writing, he would sink so deep into his characters that he would actually dream their dreams.

I knew how this worked from the hours I’d put in at the desk; there was no magic in the process, but there was certainly mystery. I wrote about a couple similar to one in life, but ended my book with the couple apart; as soon as the advance
galleys of that work arrived on my doorstep, the couple, who had seemed very close in life, separated. I decided, one spring, to deliver my next book to my editor on September 12, 2001, before heading back to Japan; as the planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, I could not follow the drama that was unfolding because I was busy proofreading my novel about Islam and its quarrel with the West.