Lives in Writing (12 page)

One has, however, a tendency to make sense of individual lives in chronological terms, and I found myself, as I read the book, mentally constructing the outline of a conventional biography from the sparse and erratically supplied information about Pico Iyer and his family, supplemented by occasional recourse to the internet. He is the only offspring of two Indian scholars, the philosopher and theosophist Raghavan N. Iyer and the comparative religionist Nandini Nanak Mehta, born in 1957, two years after his father arrived in Oxford on a scholarship, and became in due course a Fellow of St Anthony’s College. When Pico (named after Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a neo-Platonist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance) was eight, and attending the famous Dragon prep school, his father accepted a post at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and bought a house in the foothills way out of town. For Raghavan, it was a good move. He was a charismatic teacher and thinker whose mixture of political radicalism and oriental mysticism made him a campus star in the ideological climate of the 1960s. The young boy, however, who had always thought of himself as English, felt uprooted and alienated. Every morning a bus made an hour-long circuit round the canyons before depositing him at a school where his abilities placed him among students who were two years older and had very different interests. He calculated that due to the strength of the dollar against the pound, he could fly back and forth to England three times a year and be a boarder at the Dragon school for less than the annual cost of his school bus fare. Improbable as that sounds, his parents agreed to let him go.

The mature Pico’s comment, ‘A curious decision, perhaps, for a boy of nine’, seems a monumental understatement. It invites interpretation as the son’s rejection of the father’s dominating presence, and a determination to succeed on his own terms. In retrospect we understand why, with no logical connection, a memory of the father followed quickly on the vignette of the schoolboy called Greene in the opening pages, and that the fictional boy’s feeling of desertion puzzled the writer because it had no equivalent in his own experience – he
chose
that kind of education and flourished on it. From the Dragon he won a scholarship to Eton (described but not named in the book) and from there another scholarship to Oxford, and then yet another to Harvard, where he taught for a couple of years before joining
Time
magazine in 1982 and becoming a successful, much travelled journalist and essayist, and in the last decade the author of several books, one of them entitled
The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home
. He seems to refer to it when he recalls ‘In Toronto, one hot summer . . . I spoke about the new possibilities of our global order, and the way it allowed for multiple homes and multiple selves’.

From an early age, then, Pico Iyer shared with Graham Greene a low opinion of home and an addiction to travel. But he had a parental home in California to which he returned regularly as a student, and this cultural commuting felt like ‘moving through some allegory between a City of Hope where history has been abolished, and a City of History, where hope can be slipped in only as contraband’. That eloquent image explains why
The Quiet American
was a key book for him: its narrator an ‘Unquiet Englishman’, a cynical, world-weary journalist in Vietnam who befriends, opposes and finally defeats, in both love and war, the idealistic but dangerously blinkered Yank, and is left burdened with guilt, ‘wishing there was someone to whom I could say I was sorry’. Privileging
The Quiet American
produces a somewhat distorted version of Greene’s
oeuvre
, making the later fiction seem more representative, and of higher quality, than it actually was, and leading to some dubious generalisations like ‘He could never quite bring himself to believe in God’. The man who wrote
The Power and the Glory
,
The Heart of the Matter
and
The End of the Affair
surely believed in God at the time in any ordinary sense of that formula, and the change in the novels from
The Quiet American
onwards to a sceptical, doubting ‘implied author’ makes that all the more obvious.

Iyer was never a believer, but he became increasingly interested in religion. He writes a book about the Dalai Lama and a novel about Islam. He goes to stay in a Catholic monastery in California, and almost at once begins to write as he did in the hotel room in La Paz: ‘words poured out of me, in spite of me, pages of them . . . Words of radiance and affirmation that might have come from some unfallen self within me that I’d forgotten.’ These moments – there are several of them in the book – when the writer describes composition as a spontaneous event scarcely under conscious control are reminiscent of first-person descriptions of conversion and mystical rapture in William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
, and they invariably have some association with Greene. The earliest, seminal one seems to have happened in the late 1980s. Bored in Bhutan one afternoon, on some travel-journalism assignment, Pico Iyer begins to read a copy of
The Comedians
he brought with him, at first idly and then, as light fades outside his hotel room, with increasing absorption. ‘Something strange began to happen. I felt as if I was on the inside of the book, a spotlight trained on something deep inside me.’ Just at that moment the real lights go out because of a power cut. He turns on the gas fire and continues to read, crouched on the floor, by its orange glow, and when he has finished the book he feels a compulsion to write a response to its author on sheets of the hotel notepaper. ‘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.’ It’s a pity that the sequence ends with those two tired clichés because it describes a crucial event, a kind of conversion. Next day he mailed the letter to Graham Greene, and returned to the ‘usual dinners and distractions’ of his social life. ‘But something in me had turned, and I realised that wit or clever observation would never be enough.’

Iyer knew Greene’s address in Antibes by heart although he had never written to the novelist before, nor tried to visit him there. He had read too many reports by others who had done so, and retired baffled by the affable but inscrutable persona Greene presented to them, to risk a disillusioning encounter with his hero. But a few months after sending his letter, having received no reply, he wrote another, offering to write a profile of Greene in the unlikely event that ‘he wanted to explain himself to
Time
magazine’. Greene replied courteously that ‘if any letter could make him succumb, it would be mine . . . But time was short now, and he had much to do.’ A year and a half later, the novelist was dead. One can work out that it was in these years – late 1980s, early 1990s – that Pico Iyer met his wife Hiroko, saw the family house in California burned down by terrifying bush fires, and ‘decided to make my sense of belonging truly internal and go to the most clarifying society I knew, Japan, to live in a two-room flat with little on its shelves but a worn copy of
The Quiet American
’. It sounds like an ending – this quasi-monastic withdrawal into a simple, austere way of life in provincial Japan, with
The Quiet American
as secular scripture – but that’s an illusion created by the absence of dates, for Pico Iyer continued to travel widely, and to interrogate himself.

‘As I went back and forth, in my life and then in my head,’ he observes, ‘I came to see how much it was a story, in the end, of fathers and sons.’ The boy Greene was unhappy at Berkhamsted school because his father was its headmaster, making him the target of suspicion and bullying by the other pupils – unhappy enough to run away and sleep rough on the local Common for several days, a microcosm of his future life. Young Pico was happy at the Dragon school but had chosen it to get away from his father’s dominating, extrovert personality, and in later life adopted Greene as his spiritual father. ‘At heart he offered me a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology.’ The publication of the second volume of Norman Sherry’s authorised biography in 1994 prompted Iyer to make Greene the subject of one of his
Time
essays, and shortly afterwards he picked up a recorded phone message from his father which seemed to be about the article but dissolved into helpless sobbing. ‘Something had obviously touched him, or devastated him, in the Greeneian theme of being unable to look anywhere but to oneself for blame.’ When they next met Pico thought he saw the pain of this realisation in his father’s eyes, but no explanation or reconciliation took place before Raghavan died a few weeks later after a short illness.

‘You really want to spend all this time with Graham Greene?’ Hiroko asks her husband. Her puzzlement is understandable, and will be felt to some degree by many readers of this book. Most of us have felt at different times of our lives a special kinship with a writer, and interpreted our lives in the light of his or her imagination, but seldom for so long, or so obsessively, as Pico Iyer. His excitement at finding some trivial connection between his life and Greene’s – for instance, reading the epigraph to Greene’s
Monsignor Quixote
shortly after the Dalai Lama quoted the same lines from
Hamlet
in conversation with him, or when he ‘shuddered’ at discovering that his father’s hero Gandhi was born on the same day, thirty years earlier, as Greene – can seem excessive, almost superstitious. Nevertheless this is a courageous, intriguing book, perhaps better described generically not as a memoir but a confession, of someone whose education and profession made him a privileged citizen of the whole modern world, but who found globalisation spiritually unsatisfying. If it seems obsessive, Pico Iyer could cite in self-defence Graham Greene’s observation, in his essay on Walter de la Mare: ‘Every creative writer worth our consideration . . . is a victim: a man given over to an obsession.’ But one can’t help hoping that he has got Graham Greene out of his system with this book, and will produce more writing like the episode near the end, vividly describing an alarming car accident and its aftermath in a remote part of Bolivia, which has no reference to the English writer, and owes nothing to him – except perhaps in style and story-telling.

1
Pico Iyer,
The Man Within My Head
(2012).

SIMON GRAY, WHO
died suddenly in August 2008 – why do I say ‘suddenly’, implying that his death was unexpected, when as he knew, and all the world knew, all his readers anyway, he had been suffering from several life-threatening maladies for years, including prostate cancer, of which his doctor said that there was no point in worrying about it since he would almost certainly die of one of the other things that were wrong with him before the prostate cancer could kill him, which turned out to be true – and yet it was
sudden, his death, even if not unexpected, which is not quite the same as expected, and was a shock to his friends, to me anyway, who counted myself among them, though not a close one.

Thus might Simon Gray himself have begun this essay, in the late style of his own diaries, a free-flowing stream of report and reminiscence which perpetually eddies back to question its own accuracy and authenticity. I first met him when I was Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the summer term of 1977. One of my duties was inviting other writers to come and talk about their work, and having greatly enjoyed his plays
Butley
, and
Otherwise Engaged
, and others written for television, I invited him. Gray was at that time combining his playwriting career with a lectureship in the English Department of Queen Mary College London, and I thought that he might, like myself, find it easier to talk about his creative work away from his academic home. Anyway he accepted, and arrived at my accommodation on the campus grasping a bottle of malt whisky, which was empty when he left the next morning. Perhaps because of the whisky, though he drank most of it, I don’t have a very detailed memory of his visit. It was agreeable enough, but no instant bonding occurred. He struck me as being either shy or guarded, I couldn’t decide which, and he had not at that date started publishing his very unguarded diaries.

We met occasionally after that, usually by accident – in a theatre bar, on a West End pavement, at a literary festival in Toronto – but exchanged mutually complimentary notes about each other’s work from time to time, more frequently in later years. In the summer of 2007 we realised a long-mooted plan to have dinner together with our wives in London, but Simon and Victoria seemed subdued that evening (with good reason – I learned later he had just been diagnosed as having lung cancer) and the background noise in the crowded restaurant was trying to my imperfect hearing, so it was a slightly disappointing evening. The last postcard I received from Simon, in the following year, urged that we should repeat the occasion in a more sympathetic venue. A few weeks later, before I could follow up the suggestion, he was dead.

It was, then, a tenuous relationship in terms of personal contact, and yet through the diaries I, for my part at least, acquired a sense of shared intimacy with Simon Gray. From the very first one,
An Unnatural Pursuit
(1985), I was a devotee of these books, buying them as soon as they appeared, and finishing them with a sigh of regret, having devoured them with the kind of trance-like pleasure that I associate with childhood reading, rather than the analytical attention of the professional critic. Rereading them after his death for the purpose of writing this tribute was enormously enjoyable, not least for the renewed laughter they provoked; but I was also made aware of their evolution into a wholly original style of journal-writing, and of their increasingly confessional nature.

An Unnatural Pursuit
and its successor,
How’s That For Telling ’Em, Fat Lady?
(1988), were both written during, and mostly about, the production of a play – in fact the same play,
The Common Pursuit
(1984), a key work in Gray’s
oeuvre.
The title is that of a well-known collection of essays by F.R. Leavis, who took it in his turn from T.S. Eliot’s definition of the aim of literary criticism, ‘the common pursuit of true judgment’. It was to sit at the feet of Leavis that young Gray went to Cambridge to read English, and he stayed on there for many years as a postgraduate and part-time tutor, though not a devout Leavisite. (Gray’s complex relationship to Leavis and his position in the Cambridge English Faculty is wittily and frankly anatomised in two essays appended to
An Unnatural Pursuit
.) The title of the play may also echo Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, ‘the pursuit of happiness’, for it is about a group of Cambridge graduates, five men and one woman, who fail to fulfil their promise or their hopes through a combination of circumstance and character. The first scene shows them as students involved in the publication of a literary magazine of which one of them is the editor (a character based on Gray’s friend, the poet and critic Ian Hamilton); the second and third show him struggling with the same task nine years later in the real world of publishing, variously helped and hindered by the others; and the fourth and final scene poignantly returns them, by means of a revolve, to the hopeful high spirits of the opening scene.