The Man Within My Head (8 page)

But the parents we construct in our minds—the ones we enlist for our purposes—are more like the people we want to be, or at least the ones whose affinities we gladly acknowledge. Someone says you look like your father, and you wince, or recoil; the great project of self-creation has clearly failed.
Someone says that you sound like that eminent novelist, and you’re flattered. You’ve followed intuition, or yourself.

With Greene, of course, this could never be so straightforward; I’d already come across at least six books in which a contemporary writer had come to feel so under his spell that he (or occasionally she) had woven stories around the man within his head, and usually they were stories about young writers growing possessed by him to the point where he seemed to take over their lives (most eerily in Alan Judd’s novel
The Devil’s Own
, whose protagonist becomes Greene, in effect, and hears a phantom scribbling whenever he picks up a pen). Greene got into people’s heads and souls—under their skin—as contemporaries of his who were often more highly regarded (Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell) rarely did with quite the same intensity. When Paul told him that his wife had taken up with another man while he was traveling, Greene asked if Paul had left her. “No,” Paul said.

“I would have done,” Greene replied. And then, a little later, “And I’d have regretted it.”

That doubleness was itself part of what Greene handed down to so many of us (Paul had later written a series of books, riveting and unsettling, about the secret life he might or might not have led). I remembered how the Vietnamese spy I’d met in Saigon had said, when asked how he could send parallel reports to
Time
and to Ho Chi Minh, “The truth? What truth? Two truths—both are true.”

Yet the existence of all these others who felt such a kinship with Greene made me feel doubly uneasy; the sacred trust of friendship is that you see something in the other that no one else can see, and he the same with you. And the nature of affinity (and in Greene’s world, of love) is that it stands to no reason at all. “That’s another mystery,” a police chief declares in
The
Power and the Glory
, “how you think you’ve seen people—and places—before. Was it in a dream or in a past life?”

I
did dream of Greene, more than once, most often when I was up in the air, between places; the very lack of drama in our meetings confirmed my sense of him as an unsought familiar.

I met him one evening in a town just south of Santa Barbara—this is what I saw once, in a plane above the Pacific—and we had dinner together and drove towards the town where my parents lived in life. It wasn’t hard to talk to him, yet everything I did ended up wrong somehow. At dinner, lost in conversation, I’d let him pay (as he took pains to remind me). “Can I get you a drink?” I’d asked, to make amends.

“A drink, then, yes.”

He was driving a large white SUV, very precisely (though in life, a part of me knew, he couldn’t drive at all). We stopped near a place on the beach. He ordered drinks for himself, and we met in an ill-lit bar. As it came on for 11:00 p.m., Hiroko appeared, my mother, but I had to tell them to stand by while I took care of my distinguished guest.

I asked him about Scott Fitzgerald; the scene reminded me of a moment in
The Last Tycoon
. He confessed to liking no American writer.

“They’re completely different,” I agreed, and he shook his head slowly. He got more drinks and started lamenting a biography that had just come out about one Ben Jackson. A hero of Empire, in his forties, and yet—Greene said—a modern writer had got him all wrong.

He drank and drank; I recalled that even in his eighties he could drain two bottles without effect. But now he looked wasted, quite vulnerable, and at times he disappeared. I realized I’d have to drive the few blocks back to his hotel. I got into the new SUV and I couldn’t move; the brake was on.

Then I started moving around a roundabout, and I thought I glimpsed him, but he was gone. He’d be angry, I thought, if he knew I was looking for him—even though I’d paid for the drinks—and I began to feel I’d failed in every part of the evening. I’d tried not to ask him anything that would put him out, but now he was drunk, unsteady, and I’d lost him in a place I knew he’d never like.

I
n 2004—the hundredth anniversary of Greene’s birth—the man was suddenly everywhere again, as if he hadn’t died thirteen years before. The third and final volume of a huge authorized biography by Norman Sherry came out, and others who’d known or heard of him emerged to offer their own anti-gospels, or settling of accounts; a group of young Americans was settling into a Green Zone in Iraq, talking of local forces with whom they could make alliances and determined to remake Mesopotamia with the latest ideas of Boston. A new film of
The Quiet American
had recently been completed, but it had been screened for its producers on September 10, 2001, and then had to be held back for more than a year because it described the future (the present) much too well.

In honor of the centenary, his publishers decided to bring out all Greene’s novels in new editions, and I was asked to write an introduction for a collection of his short fiction. I’d
never much liked his stories—they were too angry and private, often, and he didn’t have the space to develop the unexpected sympathies and painful paradoxes of the novels—but to read the shorter work all through gave me a chance to see him in the round: from the raging young man imprisoned within England and gray corridors, who loves to write of murder; to the much more anguished and self-incriminating explorer of the middle years (who writes of suicide); to, at last, the mellow ironist in his sixties who has learned to smile a little at what he cannot change and, approaching death, to cherish youth with new delight precisely for its unknowingness.

As I sat in the house my mother had rebuilt after the fire, however—my father had passed away by then—suddenly something curious happened, which took me back to a hotel room in Bolivia, and Easter Island. Uncalled for, and without wanting to, I began writing Greene stories instead of reading them. Out they came, from nowhere I could recognize, in a single burst, day after day: now I was imagining an old classmate of his, visited by a young biographer, and telling stories of the schoolboy Greene that the biographer (and we) cannot begin to assess as truth or fiction. Now I was imagining a London cabbie talking about his predicament in life: his parents, a well-meaning Mr. and Mrs. Greene, have baptized him “Graham” and whenever he tells someone his name, she thinks he’s having her on or attempting a not very good joke. Yet he cannot change his name without altering his destiny.

Now I was seeing him set up a counseling center in Oxford with a likable rogue he’s met from (where else?) Bolivia; now he was following a young love to El Salvador, and losing her to two new passions she develops—for the Church and social justice—with which he knows he can never compete.

I couldn’t begin to tell where any of these stories came from; I sat at my desk every morning and transcribed them, as if taking dictation. When they were in front of me, I didn’t know what to make of them (he’d never been to Java, I knew, and he couldn’t have met Ho Chi Minh in Paris in 1923). But somehow, I came to think, he became the way I could unlock something in the imagination; he was the way I could get into places in myself that were otherwise well-defended.

Perhaps, I reflected, that was one of the less obvious things we shared. “Whenever I talk about myself,” he’d told his longtime companion Yvonne, “I wear a mask.” To which, in a very different context, referring to acting, his friend (and companion in Haiti), Peter Brook, had noted, “The fact that the mask gives you something to hide behind makes it unnecessary for you to hide.”

Like Greene, I suspect, I’d never had much time for memoir; it was too easy to make yourself the center—even the hero—of your story and to use recollection as a way to forgive yourself for everything. Besides, there was a falsity in trying (or pretending) to soothe the rush of often contradictory and inexplicable events in every life into a kind of pattern with easily decipherable meanings and even a happy, redemptive ending. But the phantom stories startled—and intrigued—me because they reminded me how, in every book, there is another text, written in invisible ink between the lines, that may be telling the real story, of what the words evade.

I
was eight years old when my mother and father moved us to California. I looked around me on the dusty, unpaved lane where we ended up—“Banana Road,” as it was unofficially called—and felt bewildered. There were dry brush mountains at the end of the path, and a boy called Duane was showing me how to look out for rattlesnakes and turn over a spider to see the red hourglass on the stomach that revealed a poisonous black widow. There were almost no houses within view, and only nine months before our arrival, a huge wildfire—the Coyote Fire—had swept through the area, taking down one hundred houses and leaving the slopes as charred and ugly as a man who’s just had his hair hacked off.

I could hardly believe that, only a few months earlier, I’d been running along Winchester Road in Oxford, past long rows of semidetached porridge-grey houses, from which Russian or Polish or Arabic drifted out, or the elaborate études our local member of Parliament played on the piano deep into the night, in his second-floor bachelor flat. Almost everyone had known everyone else there—most were attached to
St. Antony’s College, named after one of the first Western ascetics to wander off into the wilderness—and there was a sense that things were done as they had been done for seven hundred years or more. Eager visitors came to see the sights and I tagged along as my parents showed them the radical new statue of the risen Lazarus in New College, or the sculpture of Percy Bysshe Shelley, naked and washed up on the shore, tucked into a late Victorian dome in the college called University.

And now we were in this vast open space—736 Coyote Road—where the future was much more visible than the past, and I was waiting with a yellow Yogi Bear lunch box in my hand for a school bus to take me on an hour-long circuit every morning, around the sycamore canyons and eucalyptus-lined hills, to a school in the pastoral expanse of Hope Ranch. In Oxford my friends and I had all enrolled at the Dragon School, where, like generations of boys before us, we began Latin in the first grade, Greek in the second; here I was in a world I hardly recognized, except from sitcoms on TV, where the boys had crew cuts and braces on their teeth and girls rode their horses in the lazy afternoons through leafy streets called Via Tranquila or Via Esperanza. On Sadie Hawkins Day we were driven to the beach, where “California Girls” was playing on a radio, and as the teachers got to know me, they didn’t know which grade to place me in, I seemed so small in some ways and so well drilled in others. In Oxford we’d been told that the word for love was
amo
.

I’d always taken for granted that I was English; I sounded and lived just like the Campbells and Kirkwoods down the road. At SS Philip and James’ Church of England Aided Primary School, I’d taken on the part of Joseph in the Christmas pageant and every summer I’d eagerly headed off to the
medieval fair in St. Giles’, in the shadow of the memorial to the three sixteenth-century Protestants who had been burned in the street for heresy against “the Church of Rome.” It was a very bounded, safe world, Oxford in 1963, where someone might say that she’d just run into Mrs. Greene, the novelist’s wife, who lived across from the Ashmolean, and the family friend who’d take over the Dickensian job of being my “guardian” had been to the same college as the novelist.

Sometimes, I’d walk proudly along the street with my father to his office on Canterbury Road, three minutes from our home. He’d let me sort out all the magazines that had assembled over the past few months—the
New Statesman
,
Encounter
,
The Listener
—and I’d organize them according to date and title and make great piles along the floor. It seemed like one of those puzzles that appeared at the back of my comic books; it was only much later—perhaps too late—that I saw how much the names on the covers of those magazines (George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene) might mean to a young man from the suburbs of Bombay who’d always dreamed of living among the ancient cloisters and tolling bells he’d read about with such constancy from afar.