The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  ALSO BY PICO IYER

  Video Night in Kathmandu

  The Lady and the Monk Falling Off the Map

  Cuba and the Night

  Tropical Classical

  The Global Soul

  Abandon

  Sun After Dark

  The Open Road

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Pico Iyer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Iyer, Pico.

  The man within my head / Pico Iyer.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95746-7

  1. Greene, Graham, 1904–1991—Influence. 2. Greene, Graham, 1904–1991—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Novelists, English—20th century—Biography. 4. Iyer, Pico—Family. 5. Fathers and sons. 6. Iyer, Pico—Travel. I. Title.

  PR6013.R44Z6344 2012

  823′.912—dc23

  [B] 2011041285

  Jacket images: (top) Graham Greene sitting at his desk, by Sylvia Salmi, Bettmann/Corbis; (bottom) courtesy of the author;

  (dots) Sophie Broadbridge/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Abby Weintraub and Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1_r3

  For RICHARD RAWLINSON, RICHARD PEMBERTON and CHARLES ALLEN, three stalwart, lifelong friends, in memory of all our talks deep into the night in New Buildings

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1 - Ghosts

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 2 - Gods

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 3 - Fathers

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  What means the fact—which is so common—so universal—that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU to Lucy Brown,

  January 24, 1843

  CHAPTER 1

  I was standing by the window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out. Below—ten stories below—I could make out round-faced women in ponchos standing on the sidewalk of the city named for peace and renting out cellphones to passersby. At their sides, sisters (or could it be daughters?) were sitting next to mountainous piles of books, mostly advising pedestrians on how to win a million dollars. Along the flower-bordered strip of green that cuts through Bolivia’s largest metropolis, a soldier was leading his little girl by the hand, pointing out Mickey and Minnie in Santa’s sleigh.

  The skies were tumultuous this midsummer afternoon. In parts of the city it seemed to be raining, and shacks cowered under shades of grey and black; in others, great shafts of light broke through the swollen clouds as if to announce some heavenly arrival. Young couples brushed shoulders as they sauntered down a narrow boulevard at whose end seemed to loom a snowcap, rising to nineteen thousand feet. Everything seemed small, distinctly fragile in this elemental landscape.

  I drew the curtains and fumbled my way across to my bed. I fell asleep erratically, constantly in this thin-aired climate, and when I emerged, I stepped out of dreams of a many-chambered intensity I seldom knew at sea level. I couldn’t tell if a minute had passed—or an hour—when I got up now, but as I scrambled out of my bed, I made my way to the desk in one corner and began to write, unstoppably. I had nothing I needed to write—I’d come here seeking a break from my desk—but now the words came out of me as if someone (something) had a message urgently to convey.

  A boy is standing by a window at his school—this is what I began to transcribe—as the last parental car disappears down the driveway. He goes back to his bed and tries to prepare himself for the next twelve weeks of what can seem like hand-to-hand combat. It’s no good feeling sorry for yourself; that will give the others an opening. He has to use the only thing he has—his mind—to conquer the environment around him.

  Twelve weeks isn’t so long, he thinks; it’s only eighty-four days. And twenty-one days ago doesn’t seem so long at all. He just has to go through that four times. Besides, three days is nothing, and if he can endure that twenty-eight times …

  But things will not be so easy this term. In the holidays a friend of his mother’s—from her school, a hundred years ago—had come to visit and the mothers (knowing nothing) had suggested he play with the woman’s son. But the boy turned out to be a classmate of his, so now both of them were scarred by an association. It was hard enough to protect just yourself.

  Around him, as he tries to magick the numbers down, come the sounds of everyday. Boys are sniffling under their covers, and he can hear others tiptoeing across to another bed to whisper something to an ally. A master paces outside, his steps recalling to them the tennis shoe he’s ready to use on any malefactor. The previous Sunday a man from Salisbury had come to chapel and said that all of them had a Father in Heaven who was waiting to admit them to Eternity. But every father he knows has just vanished down the driveway, and Eternity is precisely what he’s trying to make go away.

  What was going on here? I put down my pen and stared at what I’d done, as if it were something I’d found rather than composed. I’d been at a school akin to this thirty years before—the emotions weren’t entirely foreign to me—but why was the main character in the sketch called “Greene,” as if he had something to do with the long-dead English novelist? Graham Greene had written, near the end of his life, about how he lay in bed at school and tried to face down the “twelve endless weeks till the holidays”; he sometimes wrote to his American mistress that he was counting down the days till they met, as if he was in school again.

  But school had mostly nurtured in him a longing to be alone and a sympathy for the oppressed. Why couldn’t I have used the name “Brown”—or “Black” or “White” or “Grey”?

  A knock came on the door, and I opened up to see a middle-aged chamberman staring back at me, extending a tank of oxygen. He’d appeared at my door three hours before, impassive under his mop of dark hair, with a tray of candies in the shape of watermelon slices. Was it the ten thousand feet altitude that made me not myself like this? The five or six cups of coca tea I’d drunk this morning, from the thermos set out in the lobby to help newcomers adjust to the heady atmosphere?

  Why had I suddenly remembered, this morning, how my father once, eyes alight and regularly magnetic, had broken into torrents of infectious laughter when the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music had burst into “Climb Every Mountain”? Forty years on, in a very different land, I’d heard myself do the same at exactly the same point in the story.

  I looked down again and saw the name in my handwriting: “Greene.” The novelist had never even come to Bolivia, so far as I knew. Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

  I drew back the curtains and, as the light came in, recalled that the same thing, weirdly, had happened three years before, pretty
much to the day: I’d taken my mother to Easter Island, at the end of the last millennium, so we could get away from frenzied talk about Y2K in the presence of stone enigmas casting long shadows across great patches of grass. Though far from Catholic ourselves, we’d decided to go to Sunday Mass in a little church in the main town: how often would we get to see a service on Easter Island? Pretty altar girls walked down the aisles, dipping blue collection bags in front of us, as if foraging for goldfish. A priest at the front threw his arms out so we could see the rongorongo symbols on his white robe. Jesus above the altar hung outstretched as if he were just another stone totem, commanding respect with his silences.

  We headed back to our simple motel, set beside the black volcanic rocks against which the surf pounded and subsided, with nothing to be felt but Pitcairn Island, thirteen hundred miles away. My mother retired to take a nap; I, for no reason I could tell, went out to the green lawns behind our sliding doors, bringing a chair from my nearly empty room, and began to write. About a young man in Italy who becomes a priest, dreaming of bringing comfort to the afflicted and light to the darker places in the world. He’s sent to the Pacific, famously fertile ground for missionaries, and there, very soon, on Easter Island, he gets converted himself, till soon he is sitting on a terrace with his cocktail, while the children he has made with a pretty island girl play around his feet. His only hope is that Rome will never find out.

  Morality is a free-and-easy thing on the island, with none of the hard edges he’s hoped to bring to it; his main business is making sure his happy-go-lucky brother-in-law doesn’t get into more trouble than he might. When a foreign woman approaches him, to complain that the boy has tried to trick her into an unwanted closeness, it is this unorthodox priest’s job to talk her down, by speaking with scrupulous vagueness of the Holy Spirit and its relation to the stone heads all around. His years of theological training have led only, it seems, to a shady (but invaluable) gift for using the unknown to protect the friendly souls around him from themselves.

  It wasn’t a story I’d taken consciously—or unconsciously—from anyone; it was inspired by this unworldly island. But if I’d shown it to my mother, she’d have said, “This renegade priest with his young girl and tropical lifestyle: isn’t this just a version of Graham Greene?”

  Graham Greene—his first name was, in fact, Henry—was born in 1904, in the unremarkable English Home Counties town of Berkhamsted. In later years, quite typically, he would recall an inn in the town called the “Crooked Billet” and claim that faces in his birthplace wore “a slyness about the eyes, an unsuccessful cunning.” He would remember the rambling house of his uncle Graham, one of the founders of Naval Intelligence, in which he spent summer holidays, a house “very suited to games of hide and seek.” Most of all he recalled the many terrors of his boyhood—of darkness, of strangers’ footsteps, of houses burning down.

  The fourth of six children—and third son—of a schoolmaster, he spent his early days on the grounds of the all-boys school where his father would later become headmaster; thus the Byzantine rules and shifting insurgencies of school shaped—and haunted—him more than they might any other boy. He would have gotten bullied anyway, no doubt, as a shy, painfully sensitive teenager who was bad at games and loved to hide out with his books, but as the son of the head man he was trapped whichever way he turned: if he went along with his classmates and their games of rebellion, he’d be betraying his father (and his upstanding elder brother, who became head boy); but if he walked through the green baize door in the corridor that led to his parents’ quarters, he’d be turning his back on his peers and ensuring for himself a traitor’s fate. He emerged from school, not surprisingly, with uneasy feelings about authority (on both sides of the door) and the overanxious tremors of one able to see both sides of any question, though likely to commit himself to neither.

  His mother, also a Greene, was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson, and her father was an Anglican clergyman who suffered from an excess of guilt and defrocked himself in a field; his father’s father was a manic-depressive who was buried in St. Kitts, where the man’s brother was said to have fathered thirteen children before his death at nineteen. At the age of sixteen, and apparently on the recommendation of his elder brother, a medical student, Greene, having tried and failed to run away from school, was allowed—remarkably for his time and class—to go to live with a therapist in London, Kenneth Richmond, and the man’s unsettlingly attractive wife, Zoë. While his classmates were dutifully reciting the Pater Noster and thronging around one another with details of the Hundred Years’ War, Greene’s only duty was to read history, and to describe his dreams every morning to the Jungian, probing his hidden selves as he told the shadow father, not without apprehension, how he had dreamed of the glamorous Zoë the night before.

  Decades later, in a memoir, he would describe his six months in this alternative home—twice—as “the happiest period of my life.” Again and again, in his fiction, a young male protagonist is spirited away from home and from school, to disappear into a half-lit underground world, guarded by a kind of unofficial father and his moll. Greene’s training at the hands of the unorthodox spiritualist seems to have recalled to him how much in the world extends beyond our grasp, even if we long for certainty and conviction.

  His peers at Berkhamsted were learning strength and how to go out and administer Empire, already in its first stages of dissolution. Greene, meanwhile, was learning the opposite: how to take power apart, how to do justice to its victims, on both sides of the fence, how to make a home in his life for pain and even fear. As classmates set about making the official history of their people, he began picking at its secret life, its tremblings, its wounds.

  He often dreamed, he would later recall, of his father, “shut away in hospital, out of touch with his wife and children.” Sometimes, in the recurring boyhood dreams, his father came home on a visit, “a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile.” And yet, he wrote in the same book, it was only in dreams, much later, that “his bruised love and sorrow for his dead father sometimes came to him.” In later years, his companion Yvonne would write, Greene’s own life would start, eerily, to resemble his early dreams of his father.

  The high, thin light was turning the shacks and shanties on the hills to gold as I put my thoughts of Greene behind me; La Paz was an ironist’s delight with its defiance of all reason. The poor had the best views here, overlooking the bowl-shaped valley of light, while the rich cowered below, not far from the wild rock formations of the Valley of the Moon. Just down the street from me, at the main church, the decorations on its façade, fashioned by Indians pressed into service by their Catholic overlords, swarmed with indigenous runes and subversive symbols; even now, during the twelve days of Christmas, the faithful were walking past the church entrance, up the steep slopes, to where they could buy llama fetuses from witch doctors and aphrodisiacs to win the hearts of obstinate strangers.

  The previous day, I’d traveled out to the town’s main cemetery, under a ridge of huts, and seen a monkey in a cage, with a coat on, handing out pieces of folded white paper—fortunes, I assumed—to members of the crowd that had gathered round him. Inside the city of the dead, a middle-aged man was patiently washing the windows of a drawer-like compartment in one of the multistory cabinets in which the departed lay, a red rose in front of most of their openings. Lovers stretched out on the grass next to huge sepulchres, enjoying the one spot in the city where their whispers would not be drowned out by the roar of passing buses. From somewhere along the long rows of cabinets, where Indian women rented out blue ladders for those whose loved ones were on higher floors, I could just make out a scratchy transistor radio: “Silent night, holy night …”

  And suddenly something in the poignant scene—a boy was pushing his toy car down long avenues of the dead—put me back in another life. I had come to Bolivia before, twenty-six years before, as a teenager, just released from high schoo
l, with a classmate; for three months we had bumped across Central and South America on buses, taking in the tough and unaccountable world that school had trained us for. When, a quarter of a century later, the trip came back to me, it was only Bolivia, of all the nine countries we’d visited, that kept bobbing up: the bowler-hatted women laboring up the steep streets near the cathedral, unsold goods slung over their shoulders; the billowing, snow-white clouds that looked fantastical in skies as sharp as those of Lhasa; the square-headed statues in the Altiplano, barely excavated in centuries.

  Around me in the crystal, breathless air, which gave to everything a sense of excitement, I’d seen sorcerers with many-colored woolen earflaps, muttering incantations as they sat on the ground outside the cathedral; others were waving sticks at the villagers who came to them in search of charms and spells. This was the country that sat in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most changes of government (in other words, coups d’état) per annum; this was the city where Cervantes himself, father of Quixote and a former convict, had once applied to become mayor (and failed).

  I always loved being alone—I had grown up commuting on planes between my parents’ home in California and my schools in England—and so long as I was loose in the world, uncompanioned, I was never bored or at a loss. Freed from my usual routine and small talk, I was away from the sense that I had to play a role, or to choose one self over another; I could find what lay at the heart of me, my core, and so bring back something clearer and more rounded to the people I loved. Home, I began to feel, was the half-formed beliefs you fashioned in the middle of all you didn’t and couldn’t understand, a tent on a wide, empty plain.

  Now, as I got ready to step out of the Plaza Hotel, to go to Titicaca, I called up my mother, in India with family for the holidays, and my sweetheart of fourteen years, Hiroko, celebrating the New Year in Japan, to wish them a good year; I’d see them both in a few days, as soon as my immersion in this other world was over. I looked to the street, where soldiers were pointing out the Three Wise Men—on llamas—to their toddlers, and then headed out myself, up the Prado, towards the area of magicians, to find a travel agency that could convey me across the Altiplano.