The Man Within My Head (15 page)

I
f you look at Greene’s private life, it’s easy to believe that you’re reading a kind of cautionary tale fashioned by some malign allegorist. The woman he married, Vivienne (later Vivien) Dayrell-Browning, bore a family name that showed her connection to the Victorian poet Greene always loved,
the slippery hymnist of doubt and desire who’d written, “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.” Yet at the same time she was a deeply devout nineteen-year-old convert to Catholicism who had contacted him when she read an article he’d written in an Oxford undergraduate magazine on how people were “considerably oversexed”; you couldn’t, she advised him, use the word “worship” in the context of the Virgin Mary (the correct term was “hyperdulia”).

Vivien would become, of all improbable things, an expert on doll’s houses, who found herself married to what she later called “the wildest of creatures, and the least domesticated.” She put a crib in the family dining room every Christmas so that the Holy Child could sit in the middle of the household, even as her husband was in perpetual flight from any reminder of sanctity and fidelity. When Greene joined the Church in order to marry his shy young bride, then working for the Oxford publishers Blackwell’s, he was prepared for conversion by a “Father Trollope” who had been an actor on the London stage.

In later years he would move in the opposite direction; his strongest loves were a Swedish actress, Anita Björk; his longtime American mistress, Catherine Walston; and the married Frenchwoman he met in Africa who would share his final thirty-two years with him, Yvonne Cloetta. Walston had approached him as a stranger—the heavy hand of bad drama intrudes again, as he might have put it—because she’d decided to become a Catholic, she said, after reading his books; she wanted to know if he’d be her godfather. He was happy to say yes, but, since he was busy at the time of her ceremony, he asked Vivien to go in his stead. Later it would be rumored that
he and Walston read theology in bed and made love behind every other high altar in Italy. She incited his jealousy—which he could never distinguish from love—by flirting with priests in particular, one of whom had authored a book called
Morals and Marriage: The Catholic Background to Sex
.

At the moment Catherine entered his life, in 1946, he had been spending much of his time for the past eight years with another mistress, Dorothy Glover. She was—unusually for Greene—English, unmarried and not physically commanding, according to his friends. But they’d grown close in the Blitz, when London had seemed almost a foreign city, alight with drama, and they’d made love in public air-raid shelters, while choosing to remain in the middle of the conflagration, on fire watch. Greene wrote (anonymously, at first) the texts to books called
The Little Train, The Little Fire Engine, The Little Horse Bus
and
The Little Steamroller
so that Dorothy’s illustrations to these stories could be published. When she died, in 1971, Greene wept bitterly, Yvonne Cloetta writes in her memoirs, for almost the only time in their more than three decades together.

I
never felt myself,” wrote the Englishman always on the move, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me”; he seemed desperate, throughout his adult life, to be away from the cocktail parties and literary conversations he knew too well in London. He haunted the opium dens of the Far East and visited Tahiti, where dramas were less predictable; he stayed in Capri, wondering “who I am,”
and everywhere he went, he collected expats, lonely men and renegade priests who’d made a kind of life abroad. Finally he settled in the south of France and wrote something called
The Tenth Man
.

His travels seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery; if he did not really believe in God, he wrote, he always had a keen sense of the devil. Much of his life, in fact, he saw as a spirited argument with God: “I should have thought that it was God who had cause to be humble,” he wrote, “when he reflects upon what an indifferent mess he has made in the creation of a human being.” He had a special symbol stitched into the cover of all his books—he was always fascinated by spells—to protect him from the evil eye, and in one early novel, a character bargains with God, having “conceived the notion that if she promised God to give him up, God would spare him.”

Yet at the same time, he had no patience with missionaries or sermonizers, anyone who would lay down a simple law of right and wrong; his travels, his very novelist’s intuition, gave him a supple appreciation of how much in each of us lies beyond the grasp of reason. He was never a joiner, and it was boredom that seemed to propel him away from Mayfair; his countrymen mocked him for his readiness to help prostitutes—he had a soft spot for the fallen—and his problem, he was shrewd enough to see, was that he had a gift for getting involved with the wrong woman and then lacking the courage to break off the connection.

He was always too popular and readable to win much critical acclaim; Hollywood continues to make films out of even his lesser works, and suspicion attaches to him because of all the work he did for British intelligence (he wrote spy novels
as well as exotic entertainments). Though clearly romantic, and full of a gentleman’s often fatal sense of chivalry, he never denied the “essential aloofness” that the writer’s job demands and sensed that his soft heart would always get him in deeper trouble than his cool mind. He recoiled from a formal divorce from his wife because, as he said, no woman would ever take pity on a weak man. “Pity” itself he saw as a great affliction, a kind of weakness disguising itself as charity.

Yet perhaps the single most important thing to be said about him was that he was an undeluded, open, antimoralistic adventurer (his work was denounced by the Vatican) who wanted to see every situation in the round. “It would be silly,” he wrote during the war, “to deny that our enemies have some of the same virtues as we; they have at least courage, loyalty and professionalism.” He ended his days still in exile, looking back on his old boarding school and writing pieces like “The Three Fat Women of Antibes.” From the outset he had been painfully aware (as only the innocent can be) that innocent intentions are the undoing of many a man: “In this world,” a character says in a novel he wrote when he was barely thirty, “it’s the good who do all the harm.” Fascinated by goodness, he always had a complex, shifting sense that humanity lay far beyond our salvationist ideas. “Perhaps even the best of us are sinners,” he wrote (too characteristically), “and the worst of us are saints.”

Somerset Maugham, however—the “he” in every one of the above clauses, though nearly every one fits Greene—was so close to his successor in his worldly acuity, his hunger for the far-off place and his love of human waywardness and surprise that Greene claimed to have no affection for him. Maugham relied too much on the anecdote, he said, and
lacked the inwardness, the nuance and the risk taking that marked out Greene’s chosen literary mentor (and Maugham’s anathema) Henry James; ultimately he put storytelling before psychology. Greene constantly stressed how little he owed to Maugham, the way some of us stress how different—how very different—we are from our fathers, the ones we’ve spent our lifetimes defining ourselves in opposition to; in much the same way, John le Carré, Greene’s literary son, often got prickly when asked what he owed to the apostle of doubt who was, he once admitted, a “guiding star” to him when young.

Yet Greene read Maugham’s
Ashenden
before embarking on
Our Man in Havana
(the clear model for le Carré’s
Tailor of Panama
) and mocked romanticism and idealism as only a sometime romantic and idealist, like Maugham, could do. When V. S. Naipaul visited Greene in Antibes, he claimed to be able to see through the window, down the coast, Maugham’s huge villa in Cap Ferrat, mocking and contrasting in its splendor the functional anonymity of Greene’s one-bedroom flat.

H
ow arbitrary such affinities are, I thought every time I returned to Maugham: why, in a country full of elegant women with silky dark hair, should I feel that Hiroko—and only Hiroko—was a person I could give myself to forever, a lost piece of myself? Why, when Maugham gave me stories of exploration and escape that I read and reread with such delight—“It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with”—did I feel that
he was an author close to my heart, and yet Greene somehow a secret nestled within that heart, reflecting it back to me? Why did certain forgotten pathways in the eastern hills of Kyoto have the capacity to pierce me as none of the streets I knew in the Oxford of my birth or the Santa Barbara of my upbringing could ever do?

It was as if, underneath the self I knew and was in public, there was another self, mysterious even to its owner, that lived beyond the grasp of explanation but would read Greene’s works as if they were a private diary, Maugham’s as if they were only a brilliant fiction. And in the process—much like Greene, in fact, whenever he was asked about Maugham—bridle testily and throw out subterfuges whenever I was asked about the real person I resembled, the one with the wild hair exploding at the sides and the mischievous glint in the eye, whom I saw whenever I looked in the mirror.

T
here were fires raging all across the hills around our house, and I was sitting in a downtown restaurant with my mother and Hiroko. I’d flown into Santa Barbara two days before, and, driving along the empty road that leads from the airport to our house ten minutes away, I’d looked up into the hills to where the lights of our home shine alone on our ridge, and my heart had stopped. There were two bright blazes of orange cutting through the darkness, with a speed and efficiency I remembered from the time when our home—in the same location—had burned down (with me beside it) some years before.

I accelerated wildly up the hill and started taking the curves along the mountain road leading up to our solitary house at a crazy speed. The air to the north was already red and full of smoke—infernal—and as I pushed the car to go faster, I saw sightseers along the side of the road gathering to watch the unearthly light show, great towers of orange, a hundred feet high, rising from the valleys just below our home and smoke turning the sky into a sickly pall.

I swerved, brakes screaming, into our driveway, and summoned my wife and mother out to see what was happening a mile or two away. It looked to be remote still, but I remembered how, during the previous fire, the flames had raced through the brush at seventy miles an hour, so that an orange gash in what looked to be a distant slope was suddenly a pillar of flames arcing over our living-room windows.

The next day we awoke to the sound of helicopters whirring overhead. The sky was a grisly blood-red color. The house felt hot already, and, although the smoke seemed to clear as the wind shifted and returned us to a placid blue midsummer day, as the afternoon went on the sky above the ridge next to us turned a hideous, end-of-the-world color, or discolor really, ash falling around us like snow.