Greene Graham - The Man Within My Head

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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 bookT.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95746-7
1. Greene, Graham, 19041991Influence. 2. Greene, Graham, 19041991Criticism and interpretation. 3. Novelists, English20th centuryBiography. 4. Iyer, PicoFamily. 5. Fathers and sons. 6. Iyer, PicoTravel. I. Title.
PR6013.R44Z6344 2012
823.912dc23
[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

What means the factwhich is so commonso universalthat 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

I was standing by the window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out. Belowten stories belowI 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 Bolivias largest metropolis, a soldier was leading his little girl by the hand, pointing out Mickey and Minnie in Santas 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 couldnt tell if a minute had passedor an hourwhen 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 writeId come here seeking a break from my deskbut 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 schoolthis is what I began to transcribeas 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. Its no good feeling sorry for yourself; that will give the others an opening. He has to use the only thing he hashis mindto conquer the environment around him.

Twelve weeks isnt so long, he thinks; its only eighty-four days. And twenty-one days ago doesnt 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 mothersfrom her school, a hundred years agohad come to visit and the mothers (knowing nothing) had suggested he play with the womans 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 hes 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 hes trying to make go away.

W hat was going on here? I put down my pen and stared at what Id done, as if it were something Id found rather than composed. Id been at a school akin to this thirty years beforethe emotions werent entirely foreign to mebut 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 couldnt I have used the name Brownor 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. Hed 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 Id 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, Id 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?