The Man Within My Head (24 page)

A boy is raised by his aunt, his mother long dead. He is taken from his divinity classroom by the “Captain” and set up in a shabby room next to a basement, with an ambiguous young woman he’s told to treat as a mother. The minute he’s in the company of the charming but obviously untrustworthy con man, he feels as if he’s on his way to “the romantic city of Valparaiso,” the valley of paradise. When the Captain asks the boy if he misses his mother, Jim (once Victor) says, “Not really.”

“Mother is just a generic term,” the Captain says hopefully.

The boy’s true father is a criminal, too, we learn—“a bird of passage,” in his own elusive phrase—who occasionally visits his son in his “semi-detached house” and claims to have lost him in a game of chess, not backgammon (the pedantry about the small detail itself a kind of obituary). The Captain, meanwhile, trains his eager young acolyte in all the skills of an undercover life—how to sign chits for bills you’ll never pay, how to change your name according to the occasion, how, in effect, to practice a kind of fiction making in life. Then, much later, he disappears to Panama, where the boy goes to seek him out.

The Captain’s final secret—I thought of Louis and our schoolboy code—is that he’s been flying missions on behalf of
the oppressed; he’s not, ultimately, after gain or even escape, just clandestine acts of conscience. His criminal secret is that he’s selfless. He’s keenly aware of his responsibilities to the woman he loves and the boy he’s abducted, even as he flies away from them again and again, saying that not being there is how he can best protect them.

I
n life Greene was, by his own reckoning, a very poor parent, leaving his children effectively fatherless. In his final days, he let his daughter Caroline help care for him—he had earlier bought her a thousand-acre ranch in Canada with the profits from the movie sale of
The Quiet American
. But he had never been so kind to his son, Francis, let alone their mother, and with the relatives he’d acquired through marriage most of all he lived in that peculiarly Greenian limbo of betraying them daily and being self-aware enough to feel the cost of that betrayal every hour. It’s strange to recall how, in his first novel, he gives the same name to a loose woman he will soon give in life to his infant daughter, and the same name to a troubled fugitive he’ll later give to his son. “That’s the only subject I’ve got,” says a sculptor who works on a huge statue of God in Greene’s play,
Carving a Statue
, while his son keeps asking about the death of the boy’s mother. “My indifference and the world’s pain.”

His father was a headmaster, readers sometimes said, so of course he was always trying to run away from those who administer punishment, on earth as much as in Heaven. But the more interesting thing about the father, according to Greene’s biographers, was that he remained so dangerously
innocent and trusting in men’s goodness; his wife, when reading books to him, was wont to censor novels (even those written by their son). A boy is always determined to set himself apart from innocence, the more so as his elders tell him, wistfully, that it’s his innocence that saves him.

When very young, Greene loved to devour boys’ adventure stories about explorers and spies, which later, as a writer, he would in some respects re-create, though always with a troubled heart beating beneath the fast-moving drama. Yet as he came of age, he enlisted a literary father—to go with the shadow brother who was Lord Rochester—who could not have been further from a simple child’s sense of right and wrong.

The first four pieces in Greene’s
Collected Essays
—after a piece in childhood—are all about Henry James, and it is a James that few of us have seen, before or since. The novelist known for his fascination with social intricacies and psychology, for the young Greene (who wrote the two central essays between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-two), has “a sense of evil religious in its intensity.” He is preoccupied with “failure,” “treachery” and “lies.” A man most of us thought was writing about the complex mating dance of New World and Old—no alien theme to Greene—was, for Greene alone, writing novels that “are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense.”

It was as if Greene was fashioning himself again through the man within his head. “We must always remain on our guard when reading these prefaces,” he writes of the introductions to his fiction that James dictated in later life, “for at a certain level no writer has really disclosed less.” Graham Greene, however, comes very close in the introductions to his early books he published only a few years after that sentence.
“You cannot render the highest kind of justice if you hate,” he asserts, somehow using James’s stories as the crucible for his own central code. “To render the highest justice to corruption, you must retain your innocence: you have to be conscious all the time within yourself of treachery to something valuable.”

I thought back to what the English novelist had said in his early sixties to an interviewer. “One may have outgrown one’s own father,” he suddenly volunteered, “but one still likes to feel there’s somebody there.”

A
ll the time I was growing up—was it sailing into Port Said that brought this back to me? I’d last been here at the age of two, on my way to India for the first time—my father pressed only two books in my hands that I can remember well. He had more than thirteen thousand on his shelves—we had to build a hut on the hillside under our yellow home to house the overflow—and he was always ready to refer his spiritual children, as I thought of them, his students, to some high work of philosophy or the spiritual quest. But with me it was as if he was offering more worldly and more practical counsel; I could never understand why he gave me
Cards of Identity
, the antic 1950s satire of postwar Britain (though I was amused, decades later, to find that its author, Nigel Dennis, had been a writer for
Time
and a friend of the Greenes’, and had taken Vivien out in New York once, after her husband left her alone in their hotel room).

Now, however, when I thought back to the eccentric story of class divisions and manufactured personalities, I could see
how it might appeal to the bright-eyed imp in my father, as to his fascination with the secrets of identity. A group of quasi-psychiatrists sits in a country house, idly assigning selves—and constantly shifting names—to the patients in their care. The result is that people change guises so often you can’t begin to see who they are. “Often a man is most himself when he least appears to be,” says a Mr. Paradise, near the beginning of the book. Towards its end, the novel suddenly flies into a fifty-eight-page pastiche of Shakespeare:

I didn’t know why my father gave me
The Summing Up
, by Somerset Maugham, either; I read it at nineteen and felt I was listening to some high-toned godfather in a smoking jacket, telling musty stories from his armchair in a London club. As I began to travel, though, I came to take Maugham with me more and more often; no one, other than Greene, had so thoughtfully mocked conventional, too-simple morality, shown the follies of old-school British chivalry, given voice to all the passions, romances and visions that do not fit into our Boy Scout handbooks. And I never met a writer more driven by a genuine, ravenous philosophical curiosity about the human heart, the world and, in fact, the very nature of good and evil. He had, I recalled, a statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, on display in his hall in Cap Ferrat; he read metaphysics every morning before breakfast as some people do yoga. There was always a spiritual hunger in Maugham that
he made plausible and compact by the feline realism he never entirely let go of.

Such books often seemed the most reliable companions my father ever found; he would sit in his blue chair, our cat squeezed next to him, thrumming his long fingers excitedly on its arms, sometimes with an intensifying raga playing behind him, and stay there all night, underlining passages in red, scribbling one-line responses along the margins, inscribing, in black letters that could look like Arabic, adjectives and esoteric signs. For all his love of the public world, his deepest passions were always very private. Three days after he died, I took
The Summing Up
to a quiet stretch of land north of Santa Barbara and, a set of train tracks beside me, and then the wide-open sea, read Maugham’s retrospective again, noticing for the first time how many of his ideas, their romanticism given fiber by their obvious shrewdness, took me back to Greene.

Fourteen years later, I found myself in Varanasi, on my first trip to the spiritual heart of Hinduism, and a friend in Santa Barbara gave me the name of an old friend and teacher he suggested I look up. The professor had been his mentor at Harvard, decades before, my friend told me, and now, in retirement, had returned to his ancestral home near the Ganges, for half of every year, to deepen his studies and complete a few more works of scholarship. He spoke for an old world of literature and courtesy not often encountered in the West anymore. I went to visit the professor one evening—we sipped lime juice in the echoing, mostly empty high-ceilinged house, where generations of pandits had come to visit—and after dinner he began to recite for me the opening three books of
Paradise Lost
, which he had by heart. “Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the world …”

He grew up in an age in which boys were taught to commit thousands of lines to memory, he explained; it was a way of sharpening the mind—and of incorporating into your being the wisdom that had sustained your fathers and grandfathers, and generations before.

Then he asked a little more about me, and when I mentioned Santa Barbara, and parents who were philosophers, a fond light came into his eyes.

“I knew your father, you know.”

“No!”

“Years ago, sixty years ago now. We were students together at the same small school in Bombay. He was our absolute idol. The brightest star in our solar system. We used to go over to his house just to listen to him talk.”

“You must remember my grandmother, too? My uncles and aunt?”

“No,” said the professor, a little apologetically. “We had eyes only for your father. He was always so generous to us. You must have known this. We were just young fools, two or three years younger than he was. But he was always so patient with us, always had time.

“I remember once he told us we just had to read this obscure new book he’d recently discovered!” The professor, now seventy-seven, smiled and lit up again at the faraway memory. He let the old title roll off his tongue. “
The Road to Xanadu
. By John Livingston Lowes. About a professor of Chaucer who stumbles upon a line somewhere that reminds him of something in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and then finds how some image that Coleridge had met in a poem mixed with another line he’d got from somewhere else, and then with a footnote he’d found in some other work, and they’d all coalesced in his head while he was dreaming.”

“Really?”

“He was always in touch with works that sounded very obscure to us, but could change our lives.”

I didn’t know quite how to tell him how, that very morning, jet-lagged and seated at the guest relations desk in the lobby of the Taj Ganges Hotel, taking care of e-mails while other early risers headed out into the fog to see dead bodies floating down the river at dawn, I’d received a message from a small publishing house in New York, asking me to write a few sentences on some little-known book that everyone should read.

Without a thought, I’d started writing about the book I’d so proudly discovered in college, a secret talisman now for thirty years.
The Road to Xanadu
, by Livingston Lowes. Would I have loved it so if I’d known how much it meant to my father? It was like hearing, from my mother, three days after he died, that my father’s favorite poem, which she asked me to read at his memorial service, was Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” the same relatively obscure poem (I had thought) I had recited for years to new companions.