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PremiumFather figure: A 1982 photo of Graham Greene at his home on Antibes, France. Photo: Ralph Gatti/AFP.
The Man Within My Head | Pico Iyer
There are certain types of readers who return and return again to the novels of Graham Greene: cynics, Catholic schoolchildren (in excerpt form, the lurid bits edited out), those interested in colonial landscapes, and foreign correspondents, to name a few. The travel writer Pico Iyer—whose 10th book, The Man Within My Head, is an exploration of his relationship with the English author—also fits the mould, having opted for an itinerant, writing life, often wilfully estranging himself from loved ones in favour of travel, though he is certainly less of a misanthrope than Greene was.
Books from Greene’s late period are where the action is. The aptly named Querry, the protagonist of A Burnt-out Case, is a typical character from this period, which began after Greene, the English author of more than 30 books, was rendered homeless by the Blitz—or rather used the Blitz as a pretext to go on the road—and ended only when he was slowed by age (Greene died at 86 in 1991). Sick of his vocation and bereft of faith, Querry, a renowned architect of churches, drops out. He steps off a river steamer at a leper colony in the Belgian Congo, simply because it is the boat’s terminus, only to be hailed as a selfless missionary.
In The Man Within My Head, Iyer, who has spent much of his itinerant reading life in the thrall of Greene, has written a memoir that is part rumination on the influence on him of Greene, whom he at times has regarded as an adopted father—one he never met—and part meditation on his own father. The title is adapted from The Man Within, Greene’s moody first novel, published in 1929, in which Greene introduces what would be a lifelong theme: the presence of constructive as well as destructive inner monologues.
The Greene ecosystem is nicely summed up by Iyer, who writes that Greene is “often taken to be the patron saint of the foreigner alone, drifting between certainties; his territory is the small apartment in the very foreign town, the passion that is temporary, the border crossing that seems the perfect home for the man who prays to a God that he’s not sure he believes in."
For Iyer, fathers are a constant theme in Greene. “Again and again in his fiction, a young male protagonist is spirited away from home and from school, to disappear into a half-lit underground world, guarded by a kind of unofficial father and his moll," he writes. This gets Iyer thinking about his own philosopher father, a former Bombay University professor, who, though he uprooted the family for an academic job in California, sent his son to school in England. This gave Iyer a sense of rootlessness. He describes a childhood paradoxically characterized by English private school hierarchies and a disturbing predilection for The Grateful Dead and other 1970s West Coast hippie sensibilities.
In his travels, Iyer sounds more like the history-less, unremarkable “gentleman in the parlour" Maugham could become on the road, than the escapist Greene. Iyer writes that “so long as I was loose in the world, uncompanioned, I was never bored or at all at loss. Freed from my usual routine and small talk…I was away from the sense that I had to play a role, or to choose one self over another, I could find what lay at the heart of me, my core, and so bring back something clearer and more rounded to the people I loved."
There are lessons in Greene for the young travel writer, though. Iyer writes of him: “His peers (at school) were learning strength and how to go out and administer Empire, already in its first stages of dissolution. Greene, meanwhile, was learning the opposite: how to do justice to its victims, on both sides of the fence, how to make a home in his life for pain and even fear."
And, “I sometimes thought that that was what school trained us for—Empire in the post imperial age, toughing it out abroad and living in Spartan places by ourselves, learning to observe, to read the world, to play at being unofficial spies." In this regard, Greene himself is seductive, whether he’s traipsing through West Africa with his team of porters long after the age of Victorian travel came to an end or, again, in West Africa during wartime when, working for British intelligence, he was nearly successful in setting up a brothel for German soldiers in which he hoped his honeypots would extract Axis secrets.
Partially because his life leads itself to be romanticized so easily, Greene still continues to be fodder for writers and film-makers. Last year saw the release of the journalist Tim Butcher’s book of reportage Chasing the Devil: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene, and there was a well-reviewed film adaptation of Greene’s Brighton Rock in 2010. Nor is Iyer the first writer to produce a memoir through the prism on Greene—Shirley Hazzard’s good Greene on Capri comes to mind. Iyer’s could be the best, though. He is masterful at describing travel, a genre in which many writers run out of ways to say things differently. This ensures that The Man Within My Head is a rewarding read, albeit more so for Graham Greene enthusiasts who want to revisit the novels in a different way.
In six words
The enduring allure of Graham Greene
david.s@livemint.com
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