Author evokes ‘literary father’ Greene
Iyer chronicles late writer
MARK MEDLEY Recently, a friend of the writer Pico Iyer asked him if he knew a woman named Virginia Beahan. Iyer recognized the name, as he’d contributed an essay to her book of photographs of Cuba a number of years ago. Apparently, wrote the friend, she was listed as the author of The Man Within My Head, which just so happens to be the name of Iyer’s latest book. In fact, according to Amazon.com, Beahan is the author of The Open Road, Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night, Sun After Dark and every other book that Iyer has ever written.
“Somehow, I’ve turned into Ms. Virginia Beahan,” says an obviously amused Iyer, recounting the story while sitting in the office of his Canadian publisher on a recent weekday morning. “This book that I laboured on so privately, such a solitary book, for eight years, now on Amazon is written by a stranger, this woman I’ve never met. Such a Greenian moment!”
He savours the irony. In The Man Within My Head, a chronicle of his lifelong fascination with the late British writer Graham Greene, Iyer recounts how, throughout his life, Greene was “shadowed” by a man who travelled the world impersonating the writer in order to secure free lodging and woo beautiful women. Iyer, it seems, now has an impersonator of his own, even if it’s only the result of a technical glitch.
“Pico Iyer has literally disappeared and turned into Virginia Beahan,” he laughs. “Graham Greene ... would have loved this.”
The Man Within My Head is itself an impostor, taking the place of a book Iyer was contracted to write about the changing face of Japan (he lives in the ancient city of Nara, about an hour south of Kyoto, with his wife Hiroko). This was put on hold when, in 2004, on the centenary of Greene’s birth, Iyer was asked to write an introduction to the author’s short stories, which were being reissued. He did far more than write a foreword: over the next eight years Iyer wrote 3,000 pages of fiction and non-fiction about the man he calls his “literary father.”
“I supposed one of the things that appeals to me in Greene is that he refused to settle to any category or label anybody would put on him,” says Iyer, who turned 55 on Saturday. “He would never commit himself to a faith, or a country, or sometimes even to a person. And I feel some of that discomfort with boxes, too, because as somebody of fully Indian blood, growing up in England, and raised in California, and living in Japan, I’ve always felt no definition would begin to catch many parts of me. And so that’s one reason I tried to create this strange, mutant, hybrid form. I wouldn’t say it’s really non-fiction. I wouldn’t say it’s fiction. It’s not memoir. It’s not biography. But it hovers in some dream space between the categories, which, to me, is Graham Greene’s space.”
The more you know Greene’s work the more you’ll enjoy this book, which Iyer alternatively describes as a “counterbiography,” an “inquiry,” an “anti-memoir” and a “collage.” It’s diametrically opposed to Norman Sherry’s monumental three-volume, 2,100-page biography The Life of Graham Greene. The cover features, along with a picture of Greene, an old photograph showing a young Iyer sitting on his father’s lap, yet it’s not a tell-all “or even a tell-something.”
“There’s more self-examination than self-disclosure,” he says. “There’s an important difference. I feel that most memoir is a kind of fiction. I think most people are least to be trusted when they’re writing or talking about themselves. So even when I write about myself here, if I showed that to the people who know me best, I don’t know if they’d necessarily recognize me.”
Iyer recognizes himself in Greene, whom he calls “the patron saint of the foreigner alone.” Iyer, like Greene, has spent much of his life visiting far-off locales and writing about them, his travel essays collected in books such as The Global Soul and Falling Off the Map.
“I don’t think any other writer has caught that particular situation of the foreigner alone in a foreign hotel room, confused, sometimes unsettled, not knowing right from left or right from wrong,” he says. While he detests Greene’s travel writing, Iyer marvels at how Greene captures those same countries in fiction; he praises novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Comedians. “Those are probably the ones that really resonate with me, because I’ve spent most of my life as a foreigner in a hotel room.”