The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  How had he gotten here? How long had he been here? Who else was with him? My questions began to multiply and he, perhaps grateful for some company, began to ask me similar questions in return. I didn’t quite elucidate that I lived in a tiny neighborhood in rural Japan, with Hiroko, thousands of miles from the nearest relative, in a land where officials were inclined to strip-search me every other time I entered, so improbable did my presence seem. I didn’t quite say that a physical location is unimportant so long as you live among values and assumptions that strike you as your own—or the ones you’d like to learn. I didn’t even go so far as to assert that home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down. I noticed him putting a hand on the girl’s arm, and so another question was answered, and a life began to form behind the counter.

  Why Mexico? Why not the Gulf States or East Africa, or even Kobe, in Japan, where there would be other Indians like himself to share the burden of displacement? My ancestral people are an itinerant lot, given to putting themselves in faraway places where the law of supply and demand will sustain them even if that of cause and effect does not; in the battered Alaskan town of Skagway, a few years later, I’d run into a man from Bombay, with his wife and daughter, draping gold necklaces and pendants over the hands of cruise-ship passengers, in a tiny Gold Rush settlement that for seven months of every year saw no visitors at all. In Alice Springs sixteen months on, the man who checked me in to my hotel during a sudden downpour in the desert was a friendly émigré from Bombay, another Bombay exile smiling behind the counter of the next hotel down the street.

  But this man was alone, in terms of obvious kin, and I wondered about his nights, whom he turned to in the dark. Hiroko and I walked back to our hotel in the hot afternoon—knowing we’d be away tomorrow, in the next town of exiles—and yet I never really left the man behind. When I got back to Japan, I wrote a story imagining his life and now, more than fifteen years later, I’m still thinking about him, much more than I think about the ruins at Palenque or the see-through green waters running along the beach at Cancún.

  Other writers had offered me a version of the man, in similar places, but no one had found him so persistently in every corner of the globe as Greene had. I remembered, long after returning from Mérida, that Greene, in his nonfictional account of a trip across Mexico in 1937, The Lawless Roads, had, everywhere he turned, found Germans curiously settled in the middle of a forbidding landscape, solitary Americans riding the trains, people who ended up in an alien and sometimes terrifying country as if in some haunted place within themselves. “I wondered what odd whim of Providence had landed him here,” he had written of a German, “a teacher of languages in a Mexican mining town.” I didn’t remember then—or know—that Greene had written once about a stranger from India he came across when he was twenty-one. “He stayed in my mind—a symbol of the shabby, the inefficient and possibly the illegal.” I might, again, have been walking through a plot he’d dreamed up years before.

  It is often night in Greene’s fiction, and the scene usually turns around those two men together. They’re in a foreign place and circumstances are treacherous. They’ve nurtured all kinds of unflattering impressions of each other and, in a simpler world, they’d always remain apart, safe in their sense of enmity.

  But—in The Quiet American, say—Fowler and Pyle find themselves in a lonely watchtower above the rice paddies of the Vietnamese countryside after night has fallen, and two young local soldiers cower in the same space. Mines and gunfire explode outside as the evening deepens and somehow, brought closer by their sense of danger and the need for companionship, the two foreigners begin to talk of God and death, the women they have and haven’t loved. Each ministers to the other, just by listening, and honesty and intensity rise quickly as neither knows if he’ll make it through the night.

  The scenes rarely turn around a man and a woman and, in any case, men and women are seldom able to understand each other fully in Greene; they don’t share the same anxieties or fears. And there are seldom group scenes in Greene, rarely more than three or four people in a room. You realize quickly that friendship is his theme, more than romance; he became famous for traveling with loyal friends—the priest Leopoldo Duran, the journalist Bernard Diederich, the Hollywood producer Alexander Korda (whose movies he’d savaged as a critic)—and friendship seemed a kind of sacrament for him because with friends (unlike with loves) we don’t have agendas or designs. You can’t read the books in terms of ideologies, because both circumstances and the heart are so contradictory that no one who is honest can ever settle to anything for long; even the man of faith—maybe especially he—lives most of the time with doubt. You can’t read the books in terms of “gender issues” or colonialism, because in the dark all distinctions disappear, and we’re reduced to something essential and often scared.

  Greene seldom even tried to portray a native of the countries he described (let alone a young female character); his theme was foreignness, displacedness. And he kept on coming back to innocence, chivalry, as if he could not forgive them for so often leading to disenchantment in the end. Yet every assumption he sets up in us is overturned by each new twist in his painfully intricate plots.

  At the end of The Quiet American, Fowler, already jittery, runs into the loud journalist who was “an emblematic statue of all I thought I hated in America.” Throughout the book Granger has seemed coarse, cynical and domineering (and we can tell that Greene thought of himself as a journalist because journalists are almost the only group he treats dismissively in his fiction). When he sees this loud American coming up to him, the Englishman braces for a fight. But the man he likes to look down upon addresses him directly. I need to talk to you, Granger says; it’s my son’s eighth birthday, and he has polio, and things are looking bad. You don’t like me and “you think you know everything,” but you’re the only one I have to talk to here.

  Fowler tries to help—he learns that Granger has been praying, though he doesn’t really have faith—but now he is less able than ever to settle to anything. The man isn’t a buffoon, he sees; just a soul in pain. “Perhaps in Paradise,” Greene wrote in a private notebook, “we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity.” In Greene it’s rarely our actions that get us into trouble, only our uncertain thoughts.

  I was in Saigon one autumn, and had just checked in to the Hotel Majestic, along the Saigon River. It was midnight—which meant ten in the morning in California, where I’d woken up—and the day (for me) was just beginning. I walked along Dong Khoi Street (formerly Tu Do, or “Freedom,” Street) towards the Hotel Continental, a central site in The Quiet American. As I did so, I wondered how much places, or people, ever really change. They adopt new fashions with the seasons, lose hair or see crows’ feet gather around their eyes; yet the girl who was once nine years old is still visible in the grandmother of eighty-four.

  Dong Khoi (or “Simultaneous Uprising”) Street was alive with the somewhat illicit energy I recalled from an earlier trip, thirteen years before. The sound of “Layla” drifted up from an underground bar, and when I looked in on another ’60s-themed place—the Jefferson Airplane were playing “White Rabbit”—I saw Japanese couples shyly sipping at “Lynchburg Lemonades” and “Girls Scout Cookies.” Men in the shadows whispered promises of exotic pleasures and cyclo drivers pedaled slowly past, sometimes with a young woman in their throne, sometimes stopping to ask me if I wanted a friend for the night.

  As I made my way down the street—“Massage, massage,” murmured the men who were standing around—a young woman on a motorbike suddenly veered in front of me, stopped and, taking off her helmet, shook free her long hair.

  “We go my room?” she asked.

  The French war, the American war, the war against the Khmer Rouge had all come and gone, yet Saigon seemed not so different from what Greene had seen in 1951. Alive with adrenaline energy and the excitement of arrival—free at last after twenty
hours in a plane—I stepped into an Internet café to try to catch the scene while it was still alive within me.

  “It’s eerie,” I wrote to a friend who had grown up in the same neighborhood when I was six years old (his father had been a colleague of my own, teaching political philosophy at Oxford). “Phuong and Fowler, out from their room on the Rue Catinat, are all around me. I can almost imagine Greene, raincoat buttoned tightly around his throat, slipping around the next corner. It’s like stepping into his Vietnam novel.”

  My friend, like so many of the boys I’d grown up with, had become a traveler and a novelist in a deeply Greenian mode, spinning out stories of Englishmen of the middle classes, far from home and being tugged away from their lives by foreign affairs, uneasy questions, the streets of Panama. These stories, of lonely and displaced civil servants, or outsiders caught up in civil wars, might almost have constituted an entire genre, post-Greene; I sometimes thought that that was what school trained us for—Empire in the post-imperial age, toughing it out abroad and living in spartan places by ourselves, learning to observe, to read the world, to play at being unofficial spies. I recalled how, on my last trip here, when I’d gone to the “Continental Shelf” in search of local intelligence, I’d met a former colleague of sorts from Time magazine who had revealed, at war’s end, that he had been a North Vietnamese colonel all along, one of the “enemy’s” best sources of information. Now he sat among returning reporters, asking wistful questions about California.

  As I tapped away at my excited account, trying to inhale the smells and ironies to send across the waters to England (or New Mexico, or wherever my friend happened to be), a woman slipped in from the N.Y.-Saigon bar next door.

  Greene would never have called her a woman; she was a girl, as confounding as any of her cousins who attach themselves to foreign males abroad, with a beauty-queen face and a tigress air to her and, I was sure, a keen head for numbers. She was tiny and wearing high heels, and her legs were long and shapely.

  Business must be slow in the N.Y.-Saigon today, I thought as she perched herself on one of the tall stools in front of a terminal and began logging on to her hotmail account.

  If you have a dangerous curiosity about the world, or if you’re just a writer of sorts, trained to collect observations, you become, in such situations, shameless. “There is a splinter of ice,” Greene wrote in his memoir, “in the heart of a writer,” and he needs that sense of cool remove to do his job, as any diagnostician does. I looked over, while deep in my message, to see what the young lady was responding to.

  It was (of course) a love letter from an admirer now in Germany. “Dear Phuong,” it began, and the immemorial cadences of half-requited love tumbled out.

  “You know,” I could imagine my friend Henry saying, “Greene stayed in the Majestic, too.” (I hadn’t known.) “That was where he met the young woman whom he turned into Phuong.”

  Of course, Greene might have said, if presented with such evidence; a writer’s job is to see what will happen to a stranger tomorrow. He has to plunge so deeply into his recesses that he touches off tremors that find an echo in a reader; and if he goes deep enough into the subconscious, he will find the future hidden there as much as the past. A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.

  Greene never wanted to be seen as fortune-teller or prophet, but I’d found him leading as much as shadowing me across the globe, if only because he listened to the world so closely he knew what it would do next, as any of us might do with an old friend or love. Were I to go to Cuba tomorrow, the only guidebook I’d take, to lead me through its animated torpor and the lightning passions that make it at once so alluring and so confounding, would be his portrait of pre-Revolutionary Havana in 1958. When I visited the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, thirty-six years after Greene’s Comedians, it was to find, to the syllable, the ghostly hotel that he’d described (still, as in his book, with only one guest in residence). At the cocktail hour, a slippery charmer called Aubelin Joliecoeur (gossip columnist and seeming government informer) drifted into the lobby, looking for new friends and eager to gather data on all the newcomers off the plane. To many he would say, “You’ve met me already in the work of my friend, Monsieur Grin. Petit Pierre in The Comedians.”

  Ten years before American involvement in Vietnam approached its peak, Greene was writing about “napalm bombings” and describing CIA intrigue there and fumbled attempts to make contact with local proxies. The whole of The Quiet American could be taken as a questioning of men’s efforts to save a world that’s much larger than their ideas: “God save us always from the innocent and the good,” Fowler says early on, with typical (if slightly showy) Greenian irony; half a novel later, he tells the quiet American, “I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

  Yet even as he’s outlining, enduringly, the perils of high- and simple-minded innocence around the world, Greene is also, more subtly, stripping the veil from the Englishman, so keen to tell us that he’s not involved, if only to persuade himself that he’s too seasoned to have feelings or opinions. Even the young American can see through him. “Now you are pretending to be tough, Thomas,” he says to the English Fowler and, sixteen pages later, “I guess you’re just trying to be tough. There’s something you must believe in” (and there is, we see—in the prospect of peace, the hope of a temporary permanence with his Vietnamese girl, a life abroad, all the things Fowler keeps telling himself he doesn’t care about). The Quiet American is still cited, and not only in Hanoi, as a timeless look at the vagaries of American foreign policy, but inside it hides a more private and anguished book, much deeper, that could be called The Unquiet Englishman. The words that recur, again and again, in its opening pages are “pain” and “love” and “innocence” and “home,” and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other.

  I looked back at the real Phuong now, typing out an answer to her faraway suitor in Europe. “I think about you all the time,” I knew she’d write, though misspelling a few of the words. “I miss you. When you come back Saigon?”

  Then she noticed I was spying on her and gave me a long, slow smile, an invitation. I could be her Fowler tonight, she might have been saying—or her Pyle. A watchful English-born journalist or a naïve young graduate from the New World, so eager to save her and her country that he seemed certain to ensure the destruction of them both. I knew about such girls because I’d met them in the movie of Greene’s Honorary Consul, viewed many times just before I took off for Southeast Asia at the age of twenty-six. On arrival in the tropics I’d found precisely the mix of languor and alertness, apparent complaisance and self-possession that Phuong embodies in all the professional charmers who’d been so keen to be my (or any visiting foreigner’s) friend.

  The problem was, they were never so simple as my notions of them. They were much sweeter and more open and unguarded than their profession would suggest—and never quite so innocent or dreamy as they professionally suggested. They were—as Phuong is—walking paradoxes of a kind, deliberately blurring the gap between material and emotional need, more impenetrable even than those British and American men who were busily rearranging their names and selves so as to respond to the flattering attentions of young beauties.

  Greene loved to write and talk of brothels, paid companions, and it was one of the habits that put off many an otherwise sympathetic reader, or convinced friends that they were dealing with an adolescent. But underneath the wished-for bravado there always seemed to lie something quieter and more sincere than simply a wish to shock. He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things we do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe. In one play that he barely acknowledged—it was never published in his lifetime—he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men’s confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.

  The only crime in
such a place, he suggests—the play is called A House of Reputation—is to feel shame about one’s presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange with talk of love (as one “sentimental ignorant fool” does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he’s confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory—even a religion—before a human being.

  CHAPTER 3

  Phuong means “phoenix,” the author tells us on the opening page of The Quiet American; it stands for something that rises again and again from the ashes, whether those of warfare or of love. It stands for a country, you could say, that is still standing, and bustling about its business, even after being attacked by France and then by the United States, while having China on its doorstep; it stands for a spirit that never dies, too, and perhaps a figure—a situation, a setting—that arises again and again even as the rue Catinat becomes raucous Tu Do Street, and then “Simultaneous Uprising” Street. Phuong steps out of the milk bar and back into the road, to meet her aging English suitor, and a generation or two later another sylphlike beauty appears along a dark street in Saigon, after midnight, and tries to entice a newcomer in the terms of her new century.

  I went back to the Majestic—girls around the lobby gazed hopefully up at me—and tried to pick up the thread of my own life. Walking through a book by an author long dead is not a comforting experience; I began to feel I was just a compound ghost that someone else had dreamed up, and his novels were my unwritten autobiography. I had reread The Quiet American perhaps seven times at that point, sometimes feeling my sympathies with the Englishman, whom I recalled from friends at school, sometimes with the young American (whom I had met when studying innocence in Harvard Yard). Sometimes I even felt my heart with the Asian woman, whose wise acceptances and gift for adapting to any situation were a large part of what I hoped to learn when bringing myself back to my parents’ continent.