Books

'The Man Within My Head'

by Pico Iyer

Knopf, 238 pp., $25.95

It's always interesting when an author wants to tell you about the writer who holds a special place in his imagination. And when it's Pico Iyer taking you deep inside his head and heart to explain his obsession with Graham Greene, you can be sure that you're in for a fascinating and also a very worthwhile experience.

Anyone who has thought so much about a man and his works for that many decades is bound to come up with something of value, and Iyer, as anyone who has read his books will know, may be counted on to use his unusual sensibility and sensitivity to people and their place to deliver some unique insights.

As befits its title, "The Man Within My Head" is a profoundly personal book. There's no doubt that the eponymous man is Greene, but then there is Iyer's philosopher father, who might lay at least some claim. Yet what really makes it personal is the extent to which Iyer — a writer in his way as enigmatic as Greene and perhaps, before this book, at any rate, even shyer about self-revelation — exposes himself as never before. Often this is to compare and contrast himself with Greene, but not always. And the result is an incomparable look behind the veils and the curtains that have hidden Iyer, the peripatetic observer, as he surveys the world in his travels.

Greene was also an inveterate traveler, and Iyer is acutely aware of what lies behind the rootlessness that sends people — and more particularly writers — wandering to the ends of the Earth. Greene's travels, he writes, "seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery ... '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.' "

Iyer notes the similarities between Greene and Somerset Maugham, another writer who gave him "stories of exploration and escape," but shows the special nature of his engagement with Greene by writing that Maugham "was an author close to my heart, and yet Greene somehow a secret nestled within that heart, reflecting it back to me."

What makes the congruence between Iyer and Greene so fascinating is how unlike were the journeys that brought them to their role of dedicated outsider. Greene began life as the ultimate insider, the headmaster's son at his boarding school. But the difficulties of negotiating the roles on either side of the door separating home from term-time residence destabilized him, making him flirt with suicide as a teenager and thenceforth conducting his life as a kind of dance with damnation. His marriage was certainly infernal for both spouses — very different from the glimpses Iyer gives of his — and he fled from it to a series of relationships as tortured and guilt-ridden as they were passionate.

Iyer reveals the extent to which he shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic during his childhood and adolescence. The English schoolboy found himself amid some very alien corn when his father's academic post took the family to Santa Barbara. So much was he the outsider in Southern California that he persuaded his parents to send him back to boarding school first in Oxford and then at the most prestigious one of all, Eton College, where aristocrats, plutocrats and even royalty go through arcane ancient rituals.

The double dose of culture shock he experienced several times each year as he landed on what he recognized as almost different planets certainly sent his subsequent life on its trajectory of rootlessness, exile and successive homes. And if his Indian ancestry inevitably made him something of an outsider among Etonians, his Californian domicile compounded this and rendered him a true cosmopolitan for life. Yet Iyer retains a lightness of spirit so different from Greene's dark "slough of despond" that the two bring to mind John Milton's pair of contrasting poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso."

For those who are fascinated with the man Iyer quotes Kingsley Amis as calling "Grim Grin" and are steady visitors to that strange place known as "Greeneland," "The Man Within My Head" is a must-read book. Equally, it must be admitted that for those unfamiliar with Greene and his fiction, Iyer's book might be a slog. Born as they are out of so many years of rumination and profound consideration, his readings of the novels and his interpretation of their author's mind and soul, excellent and true as they are, are not for beginners.

As he reveals his struggles to understand Greene, Iyer reveals so much more than ever before about himself, albeit sometimes by sleight of hand and always somehow on a slant to the central narrative, that for them, "The Man Within My Head" will hold special rewards.