Pico Iyer?s latest work The Man Within My Head is a detailed narrative of his fascination with Graham Greene, whom he describes as his ?companion along the way?. He revisits his own experiences, anthologises Greene?s and weaves a rich account of his observation about the influences his philosopher father, Raghavan Iyer, a professor at the University of California, and Greene exerted upon him. Born in England to Indian parents, brought up in California, educated at Eton and Oxford, and now a resident of Japan, where he lives with his wife, Hiroko, Iyer has earned numerous plaudits from critics and reviewers for his books, essays and articles. In this interview with Diana Ningthoujam, Iyer talks about his latest book, the challenges he faced while writing it and, of course, about Graham Greene. Excerpts:
You have always professed a deep-rooted fascination for Graham Greene. Do you think that The Man Within My Head has been a sort of purgation for you?
No, I think it was more like a long, long letter to (and often about) an old friend, the kind of presence who feels so close to me that I suspect I could go on addressing him (and so clarifying myself through our conversations and mirrorings) forever. I did write 3,000 fully polished and fact-checked pages to generate the 240 I published, so in that sense the book was a great release.
To write the book was a kind of adventure, to try to create a new kind of form. I?m a traveller at heart, though most of my travel takes place at my desk, and whenever I embark on a new book, my first question to myself is: ?How can I take myself?and, I hope, the reader?somewhere we?ve never been before? How can I make this fresh and unexpected to myself, shock myself into things I didn?t think I thought or knew? How to make sure this is not covering ground I?ve covered before??
In this book, that came through the interesting challenge of trying to stitch together a narrative that went back and forth across time and across continents, and somehow make memory, literary criticism, biography and almost-fiction seem part of the same enquiry.
The Man Within My Head belongs to a non-defined genre; very removed from your usual style of writing. How difficult was it for you to write a book on such an unexplored theme? Were you worried if readers would be able to relate to it?
It was indeed a challenge to put these pieces together, but that, of course, is the fun and the excitement of any new project; if I felt I knew how to write the book, going in, I would find it hard to summon the energy and eagerness to complete the whole project.
As you could no doubt see, the book is largely about mystery, the strange ways of the sub-conscious, and the way that Greene would dream of a ship going down in the night and awake to find that the Titanic had sunk while he was sleeping; or would make up a dead body to be found in a British railway station, only for a real dead body to be found in a British railway station four months later.
As a boy of 16 years, he tried to run away from school and was sent to live with a Jungian dream analyst for six months, and to me, this training in thinking about dreams?compounded by his life as a writer, tending his imagination?made him profoundly interested in synchronicity, patterning, the things we can?t explain (it even, arguably, left him open to having faith in God, not least because he had such a keen sense of the devil).
Given that the theme of the book was these shadow connections?the way the sub-conscious creates a different pattern to our life from the day-to-day?I thought it very important to try to create a non-linear narrative that would work on me and on the readers as a dream might, with shadow promptings and weird associations and circular patterning?s.
I realised this might leave many readers behind?after all, nothing is less compelling and lucid than hearing someone else?s dreams?but I did feel that most of us are aware that the strongest moments and forces in life (whether connected with love or faith or terror or wonder) are precisely the ones that stand outside our explanations. And we?re going to come at them not through reason or sequential logic, but in some backdoor way.
The title of your book is a reference to Greene?s first novel The Man Within. Was it an obvious choice as a title, as the book carries a strong theme of father-son relationship, like your book, which has a lot about your father.
It was, indeed: I had the title long before I had the book, and, as with many of my titles, it guided me from the outset, rather than coming as an after-thought
And, as you say, The Man Within does have a strong, vexed theme of fathers and sons, and I took great pains to sow seeds of this theme throughout the early parts of the book, even though I develop them only at the end. I had never guessed that fathers and sons were a significant theme for Greene, until I began thinking of them?and then suddenly I found them everywhere in his pages. But this is perhaps less a sign of how much he was thinking of them than of how much I was.
To me Greene is in some ways less important than the fact that we all have people in our heads who sometimes seem closer to us than the people we see everyday. And by investigating these mysterious presences we can sometimes begin to understand something of ourselves?why do we give EM Forster such a large part in our imagination, why are we haunted by Kurt Cobain, in ways we can?t explain to ourselves?
Who are you addressing within your head?Greene, your adopted father; Raghavan Iyer your biological father, or yourself?
I worked really hard to keep this uncertain, and towards the end I think the ?I? character deliberately tells my wife, Hiroko, that the man within my head isn?t my father, and may not be me or Greene, but just those parts of each one of us that dovetail with, or reflect back, the other two. I?ve noticed, for example, that I often dream of Paris, though I?ve not been there often, and I almost never dream of Oxford, where I was born and spent much of my first 21 years. I don?t think this has much to do with Paris, but it may have something to do with what I?m drawn to, what I want to suppress, which sides of life or myself are unresolved.
So, too, with Greene. I could have written a whole book on Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Thoreau or DH Lawrence or Keats or Leonard Cohen, all of whom live very powerfully inside me and probably inform my books more than Greene does; but none of them are about shadows and slippery identities as he is. I wanted my book to be as hard to hold, and as hard to push off, as a bar of soap.
You belong to the postmodern era, you are a man of the world, yet you have this profound connection to Greene, who is quintessentially an Englishman. Where lies the essence of this connection?
I was born in Oxford, England, of course, round the corner from where he had once lived, in the same hospital where his daughter was born, going to the same elementary school where his son had been. More deeply, I was formed?or some might say deformed!?by the same milieu that he made unmistakably his, on the page and in life. I spent nine years going through the boarding schools that shape and haunt his characters (as they did him) all their lives. I went on to Oxford, as he had done, and began to write there, as he did. I then did a four-year stint in journalism, as he did, and left that to travel to Mexico and Cuba and Vietnam and Paraguay and Haiti and South Africa, all places that he famously haunted.
I could list the correspondences forever (I was formed by the regimental friendships that we made at school, and by those low, grey English skies and the wish to escape them. I found myself eager not to make a steady home anywhere, and not be a member of any circle, and craved the position of observer and traveller, as he did, while seeing, as he saw better than anyone, that not to take a stand or make a commitment was the worst kind of escape.)
I think my real point in the book is that genes are not the only things that make us or explain us, and, as I write, that ?blood relations are not the only ones.? We may feel deeply close to an artist, singer, writer or even fictional presence,who seems to mirror us back to ourselves as no friend or parent quite does. That?s the beauty of those connections that don?t have any discernible root.
Apart from being taught in colleges, I don?t think Graham Greene is being read so much by the younger generation. Has he been relegated as a figure of the imperialist past?
It?s interesting to me that almost every year Hollywood seems to turn to Greene?s work to make some new movie (most recently Brighton Rock, and in recent years The End of the Affair and The Quiet American); he?s almost as much in demand as Somerset Maugham, Henry James and Jane Austen! And when The Quiet American was filmed most recently, it was screened before its producers on September 10, 2001, and then couldn?t be released for more than a year because it was so close to the day?s headlines.
All that suggests to me that Greene is as current as he ever was; The Quiet American is still the book streetkids in Hanoi try to peddle to tourists outside the Metropole Hotel. The Comedians is still the novel most visitors to Port-au-Prince pack and consult.
Greene can seem very much a figure of the 1950s and of an old-fashioned, black-and-white England that hardly exists any more. His attitude to women, to the less privileged classes in England and to the locals in the places he describes can all seem deeply retrograde. Yet my friends who do teach him in colleges tell me that their students often see him as very out-of-date in certain of his attitudes?indeed, an embodiment of the vanished British Empire?and then find they can?t stop talking about him, in his treatment of the heart, of the dialogue between innocence and experience, of the paradoxes of faith.
I?d almost feel more comfortable if he was more out-of-date than he is! But any writer worth his salt is addressing generations he will never see, and Greene, with his rare gift for intimacy on the page, and for cutting below the day?s events to find the tremblings of the heart that underwrite them, the ?human factor? (to cite the phrase that is most deeply associated with him), is not going to grow old any time soon.