The Man Within My Head (28 page)

Set against these two masters of neutrality is an earnest couple from Philadelphia, the Smiths, who are missionaries determined to make the world a purer place, quiet Americans who’ve grown a generation older but not up. In the savagery of Papa Doc Duvalier’s dictatorship, their good intentions seem especially pitiful—until we see that their goodness and innocent conviction move them to acts of courage and righteousness that the nonbelieving Brown (picking up a diplomat’s wife as his sometime mistress and mocking them as an adolescent
might) can never rise to. As with many of the Americans in Greene’s work, their high hopes for the world seem foolish until we see the alternatives.

This was none of it so different from what I knew already from the many Greenes I’d read. In the middle of the comedy—Jones slips into an ambassador’s house dressed in women’s clothes; we meet a couple of Duponts, as in a Tintin book (and, later, a prostitute called “Tin Tin”); the passengers on the good ship
Medea
blow up condoms to serve as balloons—we see that the realest thing of all is terror, which leaves no space or scope for mere detachment. “Cynicism is cheap,” says Greene’s cynical protagonist Brown, “you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor quality goods.” The last words his dying mother had said to him, before leaving him the hotel, were “Which part are you playing now?”

This was all familiar enough to me. But as I flipped through the pages, with nothing to distract me—it was silent outside in the square, and the light was beginning to fade—something strange began to happen. I felt as if I was on the inside of the book, a spotlight unerringly trained on my interior. Whatever questions the story was posing to Brown, about where he stood and what he’d do, it seemed to be posing to me. Why was I here, in a country with which I had no connection when I could be somewhere that had real stakes for me? Why was I not with my new love, Hiroko, in Japan, instead of collecting impressions of a place that ultimately meant little to me? Wasn’t love (or faith, in fact) a matter not of feelings but of actions, and those actions measured by how many of them you’d have done without the love (or faith)?

I read and read, not noticing how deep I was getting. The winter sun began to sink behind the mountains, and it grew
chill. I put on the gas heater next to the bed—two orange bars began to glow—and then I put on the lights. As the action went on, Brown’s very urbanity and Englishness began to seem a crime, a sin in a world of unequivocal evil; as ever for me in Greene, the power of the story came from the stab of self-accusation. “The Church condemns violence,” I read, “but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never.”

And then—this was travel, in all its tragic comedy—the lights went off. Across the country, I came to believe. I was in the dark, quite literally, except for the two rows of orange on the floor. I fumbled across the room and made out a shape that seemed to be the bedside table. There looked to be a candle there, but I had no expectation of matches, and even if there was a box somewhere, I had no way of laying my hands on it.

Outside, the town was entirely silent. Not even a honk or a shout.

The people around me were used to this, I assumed; they were plunged into darkness every other night, perhaps. There was no sound of scrabbling, or of improvised solutions. The whole country might have been waiting in a state of suspended animation.

But I was aflame, and I needed to be back in the world that had possessed me. I carried my book over to where I could see the bars of orange and sat down on the floor, to keep reading by their light. I read and read in the dark, the silence of a monastery (or a hall where students were taking some exam) around me. When I was finished, I lay on my bed and my heart thumped, thumped against my rib cage.

I didn’t know what to do; it was like being in the middle of a conversation and then looking up and noticing you are alone, in a dark room, in a silent land of mountains.

I got up and stumbled across the room to a dresser, where I’d noticed there was a decorated folder with some writing paper inside it. I brought back a few yellow pages—“Druk Hotel” on them, and ornamental designs evoking the Land of the Thunder Dragon—and began, crouched on the floor next to the fire, to write. To myself? To whoever cared about my little predicament? To the name I put at the top?

Out it all came, like a confession and an essay all at once: everything the novel had made me feel as it pinned me against the wall and asked the cost of watching from the sidelines. I covered two pages, and then three more, then I scribbled across a sixth page, and put my name at the bottom.

The lights were still out for as far as I could see, and I lay on my bed, heart pounding like a gong. No dinner that night, no anything. The next morning, the sun showed up again over the hills—I heard people walking along the corridor—and, now that it was no longer needed, the electricity of course returned.

I went out into the winter morning—the cold slapped me awake after the two bars of heat in my room—and walked amidst the medieval dressing gowns and sturdy white houses built in traditional fourteenth-century style to the post office. Letters here seemed about as plausible as time capsules sent into space; in the Druk Hotel, it had been almost impossible even to communicate with the front desk. But I pulled out the address book I had in my shoulder bag and scribbled down the names I always carried with me as a talisman: “Graham Greene, Residence des Fleurs, avenue Pasteur, Antibes, France.”

Then I handed the ornamental envelope over and returned to my day-to-day life.

A
few days later I was out of Bhutan, though still feeling naked and raw, and a few weeks later I was back in California, floating through the usual dinners and distractions that ensured I’d never have the time or space to cut beneath the surface. I might never have read the book, it would seem to somebody watching me. But something in me had turned, and I realized that wit or clever observation would never be enough. The safe position was rarely the right one.

I wondered how long I would write in hotels and what might be the price of being untied to any one culture, all the things I loved so habitually. I thought about how I could begin to rectify this and plant my feet on solid ground. But, as with any intimate conversation, especially with a stranger, these weren’t reflections I could easily share. A few months later, I wrote another long letter, to the same address, telling its recipient, now eighty-five, how much I knew he valued his privacy and how well I knew all the questions he didn’t like to be asked. Still, if he wanted to explain himself to
Time
magazine—he continued to write indignant letters to the magazine, and he’d sometimes written for
Life;
he’d gone out of his way to mention
Time
in
The Quiet American
and
Our Man in Havana
and
A Burnt-Out Case
—I’d be happy to serve as a cross-examiner.

A few weeks later, the little blue envelope arrived, as I knew it would, with the single sheet inside (typed for years by his sister Elisabeth), his spidery signature at the bottom. If any letter could make him succumb, he wrote, in just the courteous, elegant tones I’d expected, it would be mine. But time was short now, and he had much to do.

Months earlier, as it happened, Elisabeth had suffered a stroke, and Greene had been so devastated that he could barely look at her, I later heard, and collapsed in sobs. The old
man was himself unwell, and had lost another part of himself when his closest brother, Hugh, died, two years before. Seven months later, our house burned down, and his letter, and all the thoughts I’d scribbled down of him, my plans for becoming a writer, were reduced to ash. Ten months after that, I turned on the radio one morning and heard that Graham Greene was dead.

Now our exchanges were safer—more intimate—than ever.

M
y father never mentioned Graham Greene, that I can remember; he disliked Catholicism—a longtime rival to the Neo-Platonism he cherished—and rejoiced when his infant son, in the maternity ward, began to bawl every time a Catholic nun came to pray for him, setting off a room full of bawls that drove the poor sister away. Yet he had been taught, of course, by Catholics, at schools named after half-forgotten saints, and it was they who had given him
Othello
and “The Scholar Gypsy” and the English he now used so powerfully. It was they who had, indirectly, sent him to England, and I’m not sure he’d ever have had time for Englishmen like Greene, with all the “advantages,” who were so determined to turn their backs on that inheritance and concentrate on the failures of Empire, the worthless and the forgotten.

They might almost have been moving in opposite directions: my father, through the innocence of his background and his unembarrassed hopes, eager to enjoy the spaciousness and history of Britain, while Greene sometimes seemed to long for
nothing more than an anonymous house on the backstreets of Bombay. Both longed, as most of us do, for precisely the world they never knew, and had they met, it might have been on one of the busy streets of Piccadilly, where each would be walking towards the other’s home.

Sometimes my father sent folders downstairs to me through his students: did I want to see this essay about the Golden Ratio he’d just unearthed, and would I look at and edit this lecture of his that had been transcribed? There was this new version of the Gospel according to Thomas he was putting together, and he’d got caught up in the issues of
Antigone
again. He had books on public speaking beside his eccentric cigarillos (though when he died, a member of Parliament, writing in London’s
Independent
, would call him “the most eloquent, and erudite, student debater of the decade in the 1950s—or, perhaps, any other decade”); the
TLS
arrived in our mailbox even in the coyote-haunted hills of California and annual dues streamed in from the Reform Club (where Jim in Greene’s last novel goes to meet his wandering father). He was a Gandhian and a vocal socialist, but he had never fully managed to wash from his head all the golden visions of England he’d been given as a boy.

He’d been generous enough to send his only son through a British educational system that would ensure—though perhaps he hadn’t seen this fully in advance—that the son would have no interest in staying in Britain and no particular interest in getting ahead or having a life of settledness or public success. I’m not sure he realized quite how much the British system trains its subjects in going their own unlikely way and learning how to stand out mostly inwardly. He was delighted when Louis came to visit during the holidays, but less so, I
suspected, to see his own son, as British school had taught, leaving a seemingly secure job in midtown Manhattan to live in a rented two-room cell in an anonymous Japanese suburb, with no printer or car or fast Internet connection, and only a sense of time and space that could feel like deepest freedom.

O
ne winter day, when I was barely thirty, he said to me, “There’s one problem with California.” I wasn’t eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. “It has no understanding of evil.” Did he mean that it was too innocent, unready for the world? Or only that it didn’t know what to do with the dark? Certainly it had exiled history and chosen to ground itself in the future perfect, the born-again optimism of a place convinced, as even the Christian evangelists here said, that “The Future is your Friend.” But when it came to ancient words or unburied spirits, to the self-delighting chicanery of an Iago, or Milton’s Satan, it seemed painfully undefended, at least as those from older cultures tend to assume quiet Americans might be.

He pointed out a student of his—I’ll call him Simon—who did in truth seem the very incarnation of all the boyishness and openness that so revived us in California, Billy Budd reborn. Simon would do anything my father asked: go across town to buy him a plate of chile rellenos, drive two hundred miles to collect a classmate from Los Angeles Airport. When the sleepless professor needed someone to talk to at 1:00 a.m., there would be Simon, on our doorstep. I thought of him, with his politeness, his eagerness to please, his unqualified belief
in a better world and his trust in father figures, as the kind of ingenue we’d have remorselessly teased at school.