The Man Within My Head (27 page)

But a friend who taught at a high school in Santa Barbara told me that he took his classes to the monastery every term, and he was amazed to see how even sixteen-year-old Californian schoolboys were cleaned out and rendered silent by the days in silence. The terminology, the doctrine, the Catholic apparatus weren’t important, my (non-Catholic) friend said; but in a place of quiet you could better see what you cared about and leave behind the self that usually smothered and entrapped you like a winter coat.

I drove up through the mountains—my mother and I were staying in a temporary apartment as our house was slowly rebuilt after the fire the year before—and then along the sea, passing elephant seals sleeping on the beach and lonely lighthouses above the rocks, great empty meadows rolling down to the ocean. Then I turned right at a high wooden cross and started to wind around the curves of an even more twisty road. Along the way I saw benches, empty, set out around every turn
to look out on the flat Pacific and the sun scintillant on the blue-green waters.

When I got to the parking lot, a monk led me to a small room and I found a wide desk in front of a huge window, looking out on a small walled garden, a white chair in front of a splintered wooden fence. Beyond that was a slope, running down between coastal live oaks and eucalyptus trees, towards the ocean. It sat before me in the winter afternoon—not a ship or island to be seen—and I realized that, from where I sat, I could not see a single human habitation. Only a blue jay alighting on the fence outside, a rabbit scuttling into the undergrowth, the still blue plate of the sea far below.

I sat down and began to write, though I had nothing to write about, I’d thought. Words poured out of me, in spite of me, pages of them, and I transcribed them as rapidly as if they were love letters aimed at nothing but the world around me. Bells tolled outside, and I guessed the white-hooded monks and their other nine visitors were gathering in the chapel. Bells tolled again, and I realized they were assembling in the rotunda for silent meditation. The sun began to disappear behind a ridge, and then colors, wild but more silent somehow than they would be in our own hillside home down the coast, began to line the sky.

Darkness fell, and still I was writing. Words of radiance and affirmation that might have come from some unfallen self inside me I’d all but forgotten. When finally I got up, it was seven thirty—four and a half hours had passed—and I hadn’t begun to unpack my carry-on.

Very quickly, I found that the hermitage was as exciting and alive a place as I had seen, and coming there at least as great an instruction and adventure as going to Bolivia or Cuba or
even Ethiopia: the place that gives the other places meaning. I came back three months after my first stay, and then four months after that (to spend the days reading Henry Miller). I came back the next spring for two weeks, and then returned a little later for three weeks. Here I could step behind the many voices I could speak in, and into a place of absolute wholeness, which is self-trust; I couldn’t imagine second thoughts or mere courtesies here, and whatever instinct I followed—and that’s all I did—I knew at the core to be the right one.

When the fourteen guest rooms were full, the monks, with typical kindness, allowed me to stay with them in the cloister. Once I occupied a Silver Bullet trailer reserved for those who worked on the property; sometimes they put me with other monastery workers in the two-story Ranch House, and every time I came down the creaking stairs, it was to see a monk doing chin-ups in the dusty boarding-school room, or pulling a copy of Robert Evans’s roguish autobiography,
The Kid Stays in the Picture
, out of the Ranch House shelves. Sometimes, in one of the guest trailers on the hill, with the rain pouring down and not a soul or light to be seen within the fog, for day after dark day, I felt in some biblical place of terror, a wilderness. The chilling line from
The Cloud of Unknowing
came back to me: “The Devil has his contemplatives, as God has His.”

I came to see how monks live with furious doubts, as any lovers do; when the rain came down, screening me from the world, I sometimes felt as alone and undefended as in a desert. I devoured Emerson and Thoreau every morning with my breakfast, though the silence itself was writing new volumes of theirs each day; then I spent long days with Melville or Cormac McCarthy, so that I could hear what thunderous challenge
sounded like, too. A love affair that is all light—which is what being here felt like—is itself a kind of trick, probably put about by the dark.

One sultry day in midsummer I invited a troubled friend from down the coast to visit me in the hermitage; if anywhere could bring her calm, I thought, it would be here. As soon as I led her into the chapel, she broke into tears before the small cross suspended from a skylight in a warm, round, golden space.

“You’re moved?” I said.

“Not only.” I could hear what even the stillness could not heal. “I can feel all the things I never had when I was growing up. That sense of protectedness, of being held.”

She might have been speaking with Greene’s voice, I thought, so ambivalent about a peace that he could see, but from which he would always be excluded, usually by himself. And in any case, he would surely have added, a place of quiet can only be a hideout, a refuge from the world and its troubles, not a response to it. For a certain kind of soul, a sanctuary is precisely the place where you feel least calm, or deserving.

I
was never much interested in Greene the man of politics or Greene the Catholic, Greene the rumored spy, in part because I didn’t think he was much interested in them, at the deepest level; all were mere symptoms of some more fundamental trembling. No one can be defined by the roles he plays onstage. I watched my neighbors in California embark on lifelong excursions into the self, while seeming baffled by the
world; I saw my friends in Britain more or less take over the world, but only by never looking too closely within. Greene, I felt, was always in his books hoping to give us a sense of responsibility—of conscience—in part by bringing himself before an unsparing tribunal.

At heart he offered me a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology, a preparation for a way of acting. It didn’t matter if the man within my head—this one at least—was carefully edited or artfully fashioned; his unearthly, unflinching blind man’s eyes gave me an image of attention, and the spirit that lies behind it.

One evening I stepped into a tiny flat in Bangkok—it belonged to an Englishman I’d met only briefly—and saw a guitar by the bed, a stuffed panda nestled against the pillows, a little photo of a monastery in the Himalayas propped against the corner of one shelf. I’m not sure my new friend would ever have imagined a room like this—a room from school, really—awaiting him when he was fifty-five. A long line of books, mostly biographies and history works of an imperial cast, filled a single shelf, and next to them ten BBC videos that he pulled out for me.

In an alcove sat a computer and on its top a picture of a sweet-looking Thai girl in her twenties.

“She’s the first in her family to go out into the modern world,” my friend told me, with obvious pride. “Her father’s a fisherman. Her degree was in English.”

“Have you known her long?”

“Four years.”

“Do you think you’ll …?”

“I’ll introduce her to my mother, back in England. But I tell her—I told her father, too—that I wouldn’t wish me on her.
She deserves something better. I’ve never—well, I mean, she’s still a virgin.”

Greene was the only novelist I’d heard of who prayed for the fearful creatures he’d created.

I
never wanted to meet Graham Greene, I often told myself; the one person in his life I’d have liked to talk to was his long-abandoned wife, Vivien, who seemed to have seen him as clearly as anyone, with just the lack of delusion that he cherished, and then had had sixty years to reflect upon this fugitive who had brought her children into the world only to haunt them with his long absences. Besides, it was Greene himself who had taught me how the author we meet can never, by definition, be quite the one we love; as soon as he’s meeting us, he’s looking away from his desk, putting on a public face to greet the world.

I knew how it would be if I took the train down to Antibes and then the short walk to his unpresuming, modern apartment building. I’d press the button at the bottom that said “Green” (a threadbare camouflage) and he’d be waiting for me at the door as I came up. I’d ask him about the Cuban painting that Fidel had given him, hanging on the wall, and the Haitian artifacts that were the most striking things in a room that revealed relatively little of his life or circumstances. As he made us drinks, I’d run my eye, as if surreptitiously, along the books neatly lined up on the white shelves, and when I sat down in the bamboo chair, I’d be prepared for him to disclose certain things I might take as private; offering a few secrets is how you throw
people off the scent of others. I’d be muffled, deferential, not wanting to set him off with a stray, foolish reference to one of his friends, so it would be almost guaranteed that nothing real would get said.

I’d come away, of course, with a souvenir—the illusion that I “knew” him a little—but the cost would be tremendous: now I’d be distracted by the unexpectedly high voice, the erect carriage, the reddened face. I’d be further from knowing him than ever. A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core; accompanied by flesh and blood, it comes up to the surface, and you’re aware only of the good manners and laughter that keep you on the far side of a barrier.

W
inters are cold in Bhutan. I had stolen into the country, largely closed though it is, through a loophole in the immigration laws—those with Indian passports could come and stay for weeks or months, paying a tenth of the two hundred dollars a day demanded of the strictly regimented tourist—and I’d taken a room in the modest Druk Hotel, at the center of Thimphu, the capital. “Capital” is a grand word for a place without traffic lights or television; the little town of twenty thousand was one of the most silent places I’d seen, and as I sat with my mango juice at the breakfast table, I glanced outside to find men in traditional costumes—they looked like dressing gowns—walking to an empty field between the willows to practice archery.

There was little to do in Bhutan after I’d taken a car out to
its distant valleys and temple-fortresses built on remote crags, and in the quiet, unfurnished days I found myself rummaging among the shelves of the tiny library in the capital for Jackie Collins books, or watching the crowds assemble for the night’s Stallone movie at a cinema. A few Japanese businessmen sat anxiously around tables in the Druk dining room, but after I’d eaten dinner, there was little company to be had except for books.

I’d brought along, inevitably, my most reliable companion, and one afternoon, with nothing else to do, I opened
The Comedians
. It is a typical Greene tale—too typical, some would say—in which the main characters, Brown and Jones, are almost indistinguishable rogues, on the run, with identities they change at every moment and no real friends or family to hold them to their word. Brown lives in an empty hotel he owns in Port-au-Prince—he was born in Monte Carlo to a father he never saw and a mother of uncertain parentage—while Jones, who turns out to be partly Indian, will die “along the international road.” All their lives, we’re meant to assume, they’re lingering on the border, neither one thing nor the other, comedians sailing into Haiti to try to turn its moral darkness to advantage.