The Man Within My Head (12 page)

We walked around in a bit of a daze through much of the night; I don’t think anything separated Louis the Christian from me the fascinated outsider. Everyone was brought into a circle of candles, and somehow the prayers and hymns made more sense in the light not only of the forlorn metropolis that otherwise was so dark after nightfall, but in the light of our long journey, and the caves in the high plateau and then the long afternoon in the hospital with the bloodstains.

I took Louis to the airport the next morning and returned to my little room in the Hotel Ghion, the voices of the night before, the shining, excited faces lit up by the candles, the accumulated sensations of the past few days, complex and contradictory, building and building inside me, when suddenly the phone began to shudder. “Iyer!” my friend was shouting over the scratchy line (last names were how we’d been taught to show closeness at school). “You’ll never believe it! They took my cross away. The one I bought in Gondar. They say it has to be collected from some warehouse at the airport. Is there any way, do you think, you could …”

Go and collect it and give it to Giovanna, the stylish Italian travel agent who had set us up with our military driver.

I headed back to Bole International and found a huge hangar: sixteen centuries of confiscated crosses seemed to have been collected there, to gather dust. Things moved slowly anyway in this deeply impoverished country, and here I couldn’t be sure that anything would ever stir. I sat against a wall in the drafty warehouse, and, now that Louis was gone, called upon my only other companion for the trip, Graham Greene. The last time I’d read
The End of the Affair
, I had been swept up in the story of passion and then, as so many other readers have been, felt stranded and confused by the notion of a man cuckolded by God. Now, with the chants going through me from the Christmas services, with my friend off to his first commitment, with the sight of the people walking across the high plateaus burning inside me, I began to understand how one could be transported—and left in the cold—by the spiritual surrender of another. God, if He exists, has to be something larger, more complex and mysterious than just a headmaster reading rules. Sometimes you know He exists, as with a love,
only when He’s very far away and you’re shouting out your rage at Him.

F
arce and tragedy are separated by nothing but a trick of light: look at things one way and you can’t stop laughing. Look at them in another and you feel completely helpless. A car crashes in an empty place and it could be the end of life; a good Samaritan comes to the rescue, as in an ancient parable, and the next thing you know, he’s red-faced with drink and reenacting
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
for some bewildered kids from London.

What makes one weep and what makes one break out laughing are identical twins in Greene’s work, and it sometimes seems almost a freak of fate, pure randomness, whether a character picks one or the other. Two telegrams are delivered in the wrong order—this had happened to Greene himself when his father died—and a message announcing a serious illness is delivered after the message announcing a death: is one’s far-off father a Lazarus, or is life just playing a cosmic joke that can shatter one’s heart?

A boy—another classically Greenian story—is summoned to his housemaster, who has difficult news to break: his father has been killed. By—as it happens—a falling pig. We know we shouldn’t laugh, yet it’s hard to summon the solemn tears the occasion calls for. We have to respond in some way, but we know that all our responses are likely to be the wrong ones.

Greene would always, with precise perversity, come at faith through the back door, not by way of the man of principle or
woman of piety, but through the confused bungler who inspires our pity and perhaps even our love with his fallenness. “The cruel come and go,” as Wormold, the hapless main character in
Our Man in Havana
tells us, sadly, but the clown “was permanent.” This ensured, perhaps, that the novelist would always feel much of the anguish of religion but little of its joy; it was rarely a pick-up to rally his spirits but always, if anything, a cause for remorse and a sense of unworthiness. It also meant that an act of conscience, even selflessness, on the part of a sinner invariably excited Greene more than (what most of us are excited to discover) an act of hypocrisy or folly in a priest or saint.

Yet every time I started to dwell on the agonized semi-Catholicism, and the man twisting and turning on his iron bed, I had to remember: many of his books were funny, wildly so, even as they rocked between moods—with their irregular system of chapters and sections—so you could never tell what was coming next. A cuckolded man (a dentist, of course) sits on a trick cushion, and it starts to play “Auld Lang Syne” as he weeps. A lonely man in Havana sends vacuum-cleaner designs to MI6 in London—he wants to earn enough money to buy his teenage daughter a horse—and when the designs are taken to be top-secret maps, innocents are killed on the basis of them. Sometimes Greene called his books “entertainments,” but they were always shot through with a sense of sadness and being lost; the ones he called novels often had scenes of such riotous misunderstanding and knockabout poignancy that professors would refuse to take them seriously.

When he was stationed in West Africa during the war, by British intelligence, “Grim Grin” (as Kingsley Amis called him) came up with the idea of recruiting a French madam to set up a brothel at which he could pick up all the secrets of relaxing Vichy officers (the plan was almost adopted); whenever
a London magazine ran a competition calling for parodies of Graham Greene, the man himself entered—and often won—then went on to incorporate the self-parodies in novels and memoirs. When, immediately after the war, he was working at a publishing house, Greene went to great trouble to make up a difficult author, Mrs. Montgomery, who started making furious calls to everyone on the staff, asking each in turn what had happened to her manuscript (he even used a friend to play the nonexistent writer on the phone). At one point he went so far as to take out an ad in
The Spectator
magazine from a make-believe biographer of Mrs. Montgomery (an allusion, perhaps, to the marginal character in Henry James’s
Washington Square
?), and then wrote a letter from the imaginary Montgomery, in a subsequent issue, repudiating the biography.

It was as if, whenever the pressure began to build in him, pushing him towards a depression that ran so deep it could lead to thoughts of suicide, he tried to look for a burst of manic comedy to release him. Like many of us at our desks, he wrote his lightest books (
Our Man in Havana
, say) at a time when he was feeling defeated and battered by life, as if fiction could map out for him an alternate destiny. And his refusing to say, sometimes, whether his stories were sad or comical—his constant wavering between the two—came also from his sense, as he wrote in the Cuban novel, that “there was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.” He would amuse himself with a prank and then—the writer in him rising up—see the story from his target’s point of view. I sometimes felt that Greene had created his version of God, as much as the other way round, so that he’d always have an external embodiment for his guilt and a reason to believe in justice, even if that meant his condemnation.

T
here are often Henrys in the work of Henry Graham Greene—“A name I have always disliked,” he later wrote—and they are nearly always mousy men, unnaturally passive, a little fearful of the world; they might almost stand for the part of their maker closest to his unworldly father, Charles Henry Greene, who once sent students off to see
Tarzan
because he thought it was an educational film. The nearest characters to Greene—or his other self—in the books tend always to be known, as in a British boys’ school, by their last names, and these names sound as moldy and Anglo-Saxon as curses: Wormold, Bendrix, Fortnum, Fowler. Most of them grow movingly sympathetic as their stories go on, but still the world knows them and sees them only from afar, and the stress on their names falls always on the first syllable, so we’re among “Worm,” “Bend,” “Fort” and “Fowl” (the women by their sides are always more tenderly and mellifluously seen—Milly, Sarah, Clara, Phuong).

Greene’s main characters flinch from nicknames, as Greene did in life, and when the quiet American, in his innocence, tries to call Fowler “Tom,” the older Englishman recoils at the unsought closeness, and says, “I’d rather you called me Thomas.” That is, of course, the name of the disciple who doubted, and, through no coincidence, the name that Greene himself took on when being received into the church.

Greene told people that he turned to names like “Brown” and “Smith” and “Jones” because, when he chose, as a young writer, to give someone he’d met in Africa, in a nonfiction book, the more unusual name “Oakley,” a real person called Oakley
sued, won damages and forced the book out of print for several years. But that, like so much in him, seemed an intricate evasion. The effect of the anonymous names is to suggest grey and unloved Everymen wandering across an allegorical heath, like characters out of Beckett in their trash cans, though in these cases the wilderness is called Freetown or Port-au-Prince or Asunción. The books they inhabit stress always the human factor—five of his titles have “man” or “human” in them—and in two of the novels (
The Comedians
and
A Burnt-Out Case
) the protagonist is not even given a Christian name. Perhaps the most famous figure in all of Greene—the whisky priest we were made to read about at school—has no name at all.

“There is a strange importance about names,” says Jim, the young boy at the center of Greene’s last novel,
The Captain and the Enemy
, as he takes on the new name his adoptive parents have given him. It’s an estimable sentiment—names are how we try to fix an identity and measure our closeness (or lack of it) to those around us—but the fact remains that Jim was once called “Victor.” The charming crook who whisks him out of his school claims to have been born as “Brown,” though at one point his friends call him “Roger” and elsewhere he goes by “Colonel Claridge.” He signs checks as “Cardigan” or “Carver” and in Panama he passes as “Smith.” At one point, he even signs a restaurant chit as “J. Victor (Capt.),” though shedding the name soon, if only because sympathy in Greene goes never to the victors and only to losers and the lost.

My first two names are the rather exotic and aspiring ones my father chose for me (that of the Buddha and the Neo-Platonist heretic); and my third and fourth names are, in fact, his, exactly, as if I were split down the middle—between his hopes for me and his inheritance to me, himself. He was wise enough to give me a global, European name, common to many
languages, which would prove invaluable in an international life—easy to spell and to pronounce—and perhaps he intuited, too, that I would spend most of my life in a Buddhist country. When I write out all my initials and my name—the way I was known in school—it looks almost like a summons to sprightliness, or a boast.

Yet the fact that he was so charismatic has, almost inevitably, made me a little suspicious of charm, and determined to make myself neutral, private, ideally unseen; and the more I watched his fascination with magic, the more I tried to turn myself into a rationalist. Every son aspires to script an act 6 in a parent’s life, and it’s bound to veer off in a different, probably contrary direction. But every son is helpless before the lines on his palm.

“Look,” said a Japanese matron who had installed herself on a landing in a Vancouver megabookstore, offering a free handwriting analysis to anyone who scribbled some words on a page.

“What’s that?” I said, as she pointed towards the bottom of the page on which I’d written a few specimen sentences. She’d already unnerved me by identifying attentiveness, frugality, and even seeming contradictions—“This shows optimism,” she said, motioning towards the slant of my script, “and this a wariness about the future,” gesturing at my right-hand margins—that many a longtime friend might never quite see.