The Man Within My Head (6 page)

It was a curious kind of self-attack from a man who claimed to have been assaulted (or praised) by strangers for deeds he had never committed; it spoke to a theological vision that suggested that few of us are innocents, yet all of us are innocent of most of the crimes that we are accused of, often by ourselves.
Slipping in and out of identities would be what kept Greene alive, officially and otherwise, all his life.

G
raham Greene the novelist appeals to some of us, I think—even challenges our sense of who we are—in part because he is so acutely sensitive to all the ways we can fail to understand one another, even those people closest to ourselves; he knew his characters, he wrote in his memoirs, better than he knew anyone in real life. He becomes the caretaker of that part of us that feels that we are larger and much harder to contain than even we can get our heads around, and that there is a mystery, fundamental and unanswerable, in ourselves as in the world around us, which is in fact a part of what gives life its sense of hauntedness. It’s the best side of us, in his books—our conscience, our sense of sympathy, our feeling for another’s pain—that causes us the deepest grief. And God, if He even exists, is less a source of solace than a hound of Heaven, always on our path.

Graham Greene knew the craving for knowledge, the horror of being reductively known that seems to trouble some of us. He inscribed his copy of
The Quiet American
in French to Yvonne, his companion of more than thirty years, “From the unknown Graham.” He knew that some things make little sense, like the fact that a con man can impersonate one of the best-known writers in the world, or that a scruffy mongrel living in Japan can feel that his deepest life story is being told by an Englishman of two generations before. The haunting power of his novels, often, comes from the “hunted man” at their
center, the fugitive whom we long to see to safety as he tries to flee his pursuers and find the stillness and comfort that are all we can expect of Heaven (and are equally far from our reach). The pathos, the smothered kindness of his novels comes from the fact that the more generously the man tries to act, the more remote his salvation seems to become.

W
hen I was a boy, a terrible chill went through me as soon as I heard the opening chords, and voice-over, of the television show in the next room, where my parents sat at night. Television was a new presence then, especially in Oxford, a disembodied voice suddenly in our midst, and I could not begin to understand why the words so terrified me. But every time I heard the theme song of
The Fugitive
and the opening sentences about a wrongly convicted doctor in pursuit of a one-armed man who has killed the doctor’s wife, some ancient terror rose up and I buried myself more deeply under my bedclothes, trying to block out the sound, though now the image of a man running, out of breath, across the black-and-white darkness, and a killer on the loose, was with me all night, as potent as any memory of the convict Magwitch suddenly rising from among the gravestones in
Great Expectations
.

Childhood is the time when such terrors are alive in us, unnameable but devouring, as if we are just back from a realm where a penetrating darkness is as present to us as an unfallen Eden, and we cannot put away the memory of either. The space at the back of our garden, which I never went close to, because I was sure that to go there was to lose myself, to be
sucked into a black hole forever; the name of the children’s home that I would sometimes hear my parents mention, as the place where I might end up if I misbehaved; the tread of my friends’ father as he came up the stairs after lights-out, wielding a shoe he was ready to use on any one of us: all of them haunt me still, as very little in my subsequent life has the power to.

Like any little boy, I was terrified of the masked man who loomed down on me, wielding silver drills and sticks to poke into my mouth, assuring me, “This won’t hurt,” because he knew it would. The implements lined up beside the basin were instruments of torture. My mother took me along at regular intervals to the dentist on Beaumont Street, in Oxford, and, as a good local boy drinking nonfluoridated water and eating sugar-filled toffees for every other meal, I always had several holes in my mouth that the dentist was eager to probe and prick and explore.

Dentists are a constant preoccupation in Greene, the most chilling image in daily life of a faceless administer of justice; you can find them everywhere in his world (even in Mexico, the local man who accompanies a nonfictional Greene to a nightclub, and then the vocal American he encounters on a boat, are dentists. In the little town of Orizaba, he sees “a whole street of dentists’ shops”; dentists come to speak for the way pain and its seeming cure, our powerlessness and our terrifying redemption, lie all about us). A dentist is really a priest in a different kind of white robe, administering suffering as a way, he assures us, of keeping deeper suffering at bay.

I didn’t know, as I walked, aged five or six, to Beaumont Street that, only a few doors away, Mrs. Graham Greene had recently made her home, with the novelist’s two children,
scratching into a window with her diamond ring her and her husband’s initials next to the dates of every time he chose to revisit her. I had no reason to be aware that Graham Greene himself had lived for a time off the Woodstock Road, five minutes away by foot, the road on which I was born (in the same hospital as his daughter), and next to the road on which I grew up. I learned only long after beginning this book that Greene’s son went to the same elementary school that I did, the Dragon, down the street.

M
y closest friend when I was at school was a fresh-faced son of privilege who was so deeply rooted in the ruling classes of England that he clearly longed for everything that was the opposite: escape, at least for a while. We sat in our dusty medieval classroom, while a hand-waving, wild-haired teacher tried to get us to absorb “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and Louis (as in Armstrong—or Mountbatten) slipped me the copy of
Live/Dead
he’d managed to score over the holidays, told me about the Zappa concert he’d seen at the Hammersmith Odeon the week before. He zipped into Tammy Wynette songs for no reason at all—I began to think he’d committed Marlon Brando’s entire performance in the new film
The Godfather
to memory—and as our teacher tried in vain to lead us into the jeweled rhapsodies of
Antony and Cleopatra
, Louis, well suited to being fifteen, intoned, “The
bhaji
[and not ‘The barge’] she sat on …” because strange-smelling Indian restaurants were now more evident than royal vessels.

I first got to know him well when, with characteristic generosity, he invited me to come and stay with his family during “Long Leave,” a break of six days in the middle of the term when boys could revisit their families (but that was too short for me to go all the way back to my parents in California). We sat in a stately expanse worthy of
Brideshead Revisited
and Louis played me the stinging, eccentric ditties of Loudon Wainwright III (“Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House”) and tried to persuade me of the brilliance of Evelyn Waugh. His face turned red in the sun, and his pale skin and very fair hair seemed to rhyme with all the ancestral portraits, stretching back through centuries, in the drawing room.

When we left school for nine months before going to university, and I poured water in a Mexican restaurant to save up to ride buses from Tijuana to Titicaca, Louis went to work at a home for impoverished kids in South Africa. When I saw him again, at college, my friend was exactly the antic, pinwheeling character I’d come to cherish, grabbing me by the thighs along Oxford’s High Street and always up for a summer trip to Vegas where we could try to live off the vouchers for free meals by which casinos hoped to lure the innocent. But in his time working with the children of Cape Town, I later learned, something dramatic had happened. He rarely spoke of it—and only after a long time to me, one of his oldest friends—but one day he had been lying on his bed, he said, and suddenly an overwhelming conviction had run through him, and he had risen from the bed a Christian. This wasn’t an easy road to take—years of enforced chapel twice a day had made most of us think of the Gospels as the enemy, exactly what we longed to flee—and it made him sad to be set apart from the parents and siblings he so unstintingly loved, who didn’t fully share
his belief. But the faith he slipped into his life, like a secret business card, meant that he could be wilder and more uninhibited than ever in his explorations because, deep down, he knew precisely where he stood.

To sustain the friendship we had started in school, Louis and I began to take trips around the world, when we could save up the money—to Burma, to Turkey, to Morocco and Haiti and Cuba. Louis was the ideal traveling companion, I found, because he had a hunger for danger and drama and was strong and settled enough to be uprooted by almost nothing. His zest for adventure and unhardened delight meant that no door was closed to him; he could pick out the most attractive girl in any room—and, more amazingly, be next to that girl, one of her best friends, within minutes, as she sensed that he was fun, open-hearted, spirited and funny, but beneath that would never hassle her, because bound to a deeper, less worldly commitment.

Down the roads of the underdeveloped world we bumped, Louis usually at the wheel, planning the next party, playing me John Cipollina’s strangest riffs (and sermons from the evangelical preacher he now listened to in the City), carrying himself with the élan of a schoolboy James Bond who had ended up, in his faded linen suit and Panama hat, more of a carefree, though often bedridden, Bertie Wooster. Things always happened when he was around—his impatience with feeling bored ensured they must—and every evening, as he got into his tragicomic blue djellaba to go to sleep, he’d pull out the worn black book he read every morning, too, and kneel by his bed, eyes closed.

One year, when we were in our mid-twenties, suddenly he appeared in California, and we went to the Dead’s New Year’s Eve concert at the Oakland Coliseum; in the early hours of
the year’s first morning we found ourselves winding around curving roads in the hills, next to guileless, smiling faces in bobble caps singing “Scarlet Begonias.” Louis had long been fascinated by my father—an embodiment, it might seem, of everything his highly established England had seldom seen before—and perhaps he was more open then I to following the lead of some other. I came up the stairs from my bedroom one morning and found that (as on his trip ten years before) he’d sat up all night listening to my father, as my wildly colorful parent spun elaborate, riveting stories of the Albigensian heresy and Nixon’s secret operations with the CIA.

Some door in me swung open as I watched my friend and saw how far true faith could be from mere piety, and how a real commitment to some religion could mean liberation as much as constraint. I could never quite buy what I heard on the evangelical tapes he played, but there was no doubt that faith had provided a frame for him to act with even more clarity and kindness than he might have done otherwise. Every time I met him, he seemed to have slipped away from his job as a managing director of Goldman Sachs to go on some barely explained Christian rescue mission—to Moldova or St. Petersburg or Tallinn (a stranger would have taken him to be a spy). He never walked past a beggar in Fez without offering him some help.