Literary heroes, fathers and ghosts: Pico Iyer on Graham Greene

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

We run and run from who we are – this was Greene’s theme from the beginning – only to discover that this is precisely what we can never put behind us.

The title of Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head seems straightforward if you know beforehand that this book is about Iyer’s longtime obsession with the English writer Graham Greene. Almost from the first page, we learn that Iyer feels constantly haunted by the author – not just because of the themes of self-discovery and foreignness in Greene's work but also the little coincidences that seem to link their lives together: watching a fire burn his house down, just as Greene had done decades earlier; discovering that Greene’s son had gone to the same elementary school as he, Iyer, did. “I began to feel I was just a compound ghost that someone else had dreamed up,” he writes.

But continue reading and it becomes clear that the man Iyer is searching for – the man within his head – isn’t just Greene. This book, written by one of the major travel writers of our time, is in many ways a voyage of self-discovery.

At one point Iyer quotes from Edward Thomas’s poem “The Other”, about a man following someone like himself. The lines go: “I pursued / To prove the likeness, and, if true / To watch until myself I knew.” This seems an obvious reference to Iyer as a Greene-stalker, but there’s a deeper layer: the poem was a favourite of Greene’s himself, and in the epilogue to his ambiguous memoir Ways of Escape he described a mysterious doppelganger – someone he never met – who passed himself off to people as “Graham Greene the writer”.

If all this sounds a little complicated, it is. Real life and fiction continually inform each other in Iyer’s book, and the narrative contains many sets of doubles. (Early on, we learn that Greene’s maternal uncle was Robert Louis Stevenson, who created Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) One remarkable passage is an account of an “Englishman always on the move”, who is referred to from one sentence to the next only as “he”. (“His travels seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery ... 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 Inelligence; he wrote spy novels as well as exotic entertainments.”) The natural assumption is that it is Greene being discussed; only after two pages does one realise that the passage is about Somerset Maugham, whose life was uncannily similar to Greene’s in many ways.

But this isn’t just a playful connecting of dots. Iyer uses the similarity to comment on Greene’s own stated disavowal of Maugham’s influence, “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.” The relationship between fathers and sons (real and notional, biological and literary) soon emerges as another major theme, with Iyer’s reflections on his “adopted father” (Greene) moving alongside his attempts to understand his own real father.

Real parents have lives to attend to, lives beyond our understanding, and they commit, most of all, the sin of being real; they’re human and distractible and fallible ... But the parents we construct in our minds – the ones we enlist for our purposes – are more like the people we want to be ... Someone says you look like your father and you wince, or recoil; the great project of self-creation has clearly failed. Someone says you sound like that eminent novelist, and you’re flattered. You’ve followed intuition, or yourself.

Mesmerising in parts but also, by its very nature, uneven, self-indulgent and meandering, The Man Within My Head is many books in one. It is a tribute to (even a part-biography of) an enigmatic writer. It is an affectionate work of literary criticism, full of observations like this: “What makes one weep and what makes one break out laughing are identical twins in Greene’s work, and it sometimes seems almost a freak of fate, pure randomness, whether a character picks one or the other.” It is a travelogue – as all Iyer’s earlier books have, to some degree or other, been – as well as a contemplation of the relationship between readers and their cherished writers, and between writers and the world. [“The man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they’ve met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.”]

But it is also, alongside all these, a sort of autobiography written by a man who can only approach the subject of himself tangentially. “I’d never had much time for memoir,” Iyer writes in a telling passage, “It was too easy to make yourself the centre – even the hero – of your story and to use recollection to forgive yourself for everything.” By making someone else the ostensible hero of his story, he has written one of the most unusual memoirs you’ll read.

Susanna’s Seven Husbands, from short story to novella to script

[Did a version of this piece for Open magazine. Enjoyed writing it - it was like reviewing three stages of the same work]

Asked to write a film in the late 1940s, the novelist Graham Greene could only proffer a couple of lines he had once casually scribbled on an envelope flap: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

It was the bare outline of a story, having little to do with what producer Alexander Korda wanted – a thriller set in post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna – but Greene developed the premise, first into a novella and then a screenplay. That single-sentence scrawl begat one of the most visually distinctive films ever made – Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man, about an American pulp writer discovering that his supposedly dead friend Harry Lime was involved in a penicillin racket.

This back-story is a reminder that a full-length film can develop, incrementally, from a throwaway idea, so that the final product bears only a minor resemblance to the core text. Something comparable happened with Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest movie Saat Khoon Maaf, which was inspired by Ruskin Bond’s five-page short story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. Bhardwaj chanced upon the story a few years ago, requested Bond to expand it into a novella, and then developed a screenplay with his friend and associate Matthew Robbins. Now that the film is out, Penguin India has published the original story, the novella and the final screenplay (printed in a mix of Roman and Devanagari lettering) in a single book – an excellent idea, since reading them together provides a good insight into the conversion of a story into a filmable script, and what might be gained and lost along the way.

What makes this collaboration interesting is that Bond and Bhardwaj are unusual bedfellows. The former’s work is droll and genteel in the old-fashioned English way, evoking a bygone way of life, while the latter’s best films are set in the contemporary Indian hinterland, peopled by rough-speaking characters. The two men do share a penchant for dark humour (“I see Vishal Bhardwaj as the Hitchcock of Indian cinema, a master of the macabre,” Bond has said), but their personal styles are very different – Bond’s prose is marked by its seemingly effortless simplicity while Bhardwaj’s films tend to be dense and baroque, with layered use of colour and music. A few years ago he took Bond’s gentle children’s story “The Blue Umbrella”, gave it the texture of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, and shifted the narrative focus, providing Pankaj Kapoor with one of his best roles as a greedy Himachali shopkeeper. (A post about that film here.)

The original “Susanna’s Seven Husbands” is one of those concise, anecdotal tales that Bond does so well, with an unnamed narrator learning – through hearsay – about the life of Lady Susanna, an inveterate husband-collector (and probable husband-murderer) who lived in Old Delhi around a century ago. In the novella, Bond expands and modernizes the story, and gives us a new point of entry – a young narrator named Arun who lives next door to Susanna’s vast Meerut estate, forms a close friendship with her and tracks her conjugal adventures over the years with a mix of fascination, alarm and slight jealousy.

Reading this longer, commissioned version of Susanna’s Seven Husbands, one almost gets the sense of a storyteller writing an elaborate personal letter for a filmmaker friend – which is what Bond was doing in a way. He indulges himself, making a few filmi references: one of Susanna’s husbands is described as having a “Jackie Shroff-type moustache and the long legs of an Amitabh Bachchan” (a tongue-in-cheek attempt by the author to influence casting?), a minor character is named Shah Rukh, and there is a mention of Bhardwaj’s film Maqbool. The writing is somewhat hurried in places – as if done on a tight deadline – but all the Bond virtues are in place, notably the clarity and the graceful humour. More atypically, there’s even a bit of sex – nothing explicit, but candid enough. (“He started off by being tender and passionate, but his brain would not send the right message to his loins, and he found himself as ineffective as before.”)

The screenplay that follows retains some plot details – the idiosyncrasies of Susanna’s spouses and the manner of their untimely deaths, in which a “goonga” jockey and a middle-aged maidservant play their parts – but the changes are a pointer to the sort of film Bhardwaj wanted to make. Thus, one of the husbands, the Prince of Purkazi, becomes a well-known poet named Wasiullah Khan (facilitating the introduction of romantic Urdu couplets into the script) and a South American diplomat morphs into a Russian attaché who supplies comic relief by goofily speaking Hindi, using lines like “Mere paas ma hai” and singing “Awaara Hoon” at a piano.

In the original story, the narrator briefly likens Susanna to the husband-devouring Black Widow spider, and Bond jokingly expands on this in the novella (“It was some time since she’d dined off a fat, juicy male. Now she was thinking of moving her web elsewhere…”). However, the Susanna of the screenplay isn’t so much a spider as a chameleon, adapting herself to each new husband’s background and circumstances – she becomes a vodka-drinking “Anna” (and reads Anna Karenina) for the Russian Vronsky, she says namaaz when she’s married to the Muslim poet, and she sings a line of Rabindrasangeet for her Bengali husband. She’s a blank slate for these men – in one case, almost literally (one of the script's more romantic scenes has Wasiullah “writing” his name on her outstretched palm). And in the process she turns into a more sympathetic figure, which is one of the problems with this story’s makeover.

There are essentially two ways of handling the tale of a woman who bumps off a line of husbands: either be lightheartedly amoral about it or provide a properly worked out explanation for her psychosis. Bond takes the first approach in both his versions, helped by the fact that the original story was set in the time of the Raj – as he pointed out during a recent discussion in Delhi, distance lends a certain enchantment to sordid events: “Perhaps we find murder in colonial times easier to accept than murder in contemporary India!” In any case, the tone of his writing is influenced by the black humour of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets**, which didn’t much bother with conventional morality. The closest he comes to providing an “explanation” for Susanna’s impulses is a passage where she says she can’t help what she’s doing because after being married for a while she feels “the sudden hatred that practically every wife sometimes feels for her husband just because he is her husband”.

As psychoanalysis goes, this isn’t particularly deep or useful (at least not as a justification for multiple murders), and perhaps we should take it as a sign that Susanna has unfathomable depths and that her story is best read as a wickedly funny comment on gender equations. However, Hindi cinema doesn’t have a well-developed tradition of truly irreverent black comedy, and the screenplay tries for an uneasy middle ground; it retains the darkly comic aspects of the narrative but also resorts to sentimental explanations.

Bhardwaj and Robbins make the husbands more outright unpleasant, which has the effect of making Susanna likable in comparison. (One of the novella’s more flippant chapters – about a spouse who must be dispensed with simply because he is obsessed with his cellphone – has been dropped altogether, and replaced with an episode involving a shady policeman who gets his just desserts.) Another key difference is that Arun becomes a member of the servant class, an underprivileged boy on whom Susanna “Saaheb” bestows great kindness. To an extent, this was a practical consideration – Bhardwaj had to make his sutradhaar an active part of the story rather than someone whose life intersects with Susanna’s at irregular intervals – but it also performs the function of thickly emphasizing her compassionate side – something that was done in a few quick lines in the novella. (“She was kind to children and animals…kind even to odd creatures and freaks like the dwarf…her cruelty was reserved for another species of human.”)

On the whole, the script is at its least engaging when it tries to persuade us that Susanna “sacche pyaar ke talaash mein hai” (she’s searching for true love), and the resolution – with our heroine discovering the perfect “seventh husband” as well as personal salvation – is weak too, introducing ethical considerations and the concept of redemption into a story that could have done without them. Happily, though, this is one of those books where even the flaws are revealing and worth the reader’s time – especially if you’re interested in the complexities of story-to-film adaptation, and the nature of collaboration between artists with different sensibilities.

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** During his Delhi conversation with Bhardwaj and Mahmood Farooqi, Ruskin Bond also mentioned Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry as an influence on his darker writing - which was pleasing, for the film is a personal favourite.

A childhood skin-deep

Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:

Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult...she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry...Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

Full piece here. It was written more than seven decades ago, to describe the carefully cultivated, "sexualised" screen persona of a specific child star, but I think it’s just as relevant to all the little boys and girls who appear on TV reality shows like Boogie Woogie today, enthusiastically simulating the dance movements of adult Bollywood heroes and heroines, while their parents watch fondly in the audience. In the age of 15 minutes of fame, you don't have to be a Hollywood superstar to grow up too fast.

The poet of apprehension: Patricia Highsmith's short stories

I’ve been reading Eleven, a collection of some of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories (two of which I’d read before in other horror anthologies). Highsmith is an author I’ve long admired, but often from a distance. Even for people with a cynical view of human nature, her work can be discomfiting, or downright unpleasant, and this is perhaps truer of her short stories, which by their very nature are more intense than her novels (such as The Talented Mr Ripley and its sequels). Unsettling as the full-length books are, they have breathers that allow the reader to sit back and reflect on the plot convolutions or simply soak in a place description. But the shorter pieces, being more concentrated, offer fewer escape routes.

Other masters of the macabre (an obvious example being Roald Dahl, a contemporary of Highsmith) have a – dare one say it – feel-good style that makes their stories easy to savour, or at least chuckle at, even if you aren’t in a particularly wicked mood. Some of Dahl’s best work is marked by the twist in the tale, which means the reader can first anticipate a delicious ending and later feel the satisfaction of having experienced a neatly rounded-off story. Highsmith usually doesn’t provide such comforts. In contrast, the horror in much of her work comes from the fact that there isn’t a twist in the tale or a definite ending; that things simply continue to be as they are – bleak, unresolved. I’m thinking in particular of “The Cries of Love”, about two elderly women living together in what we assume is an old person’s home (or possibly a house for the mentally ill) – their mutual co-dependence, their inability to sleep in separate rooms, and the little acts of petulance and cruelty they direct at each other (destroying a precious cardigan, chopping off a braid of hair), which are natural offshoots of this lonely, parasitic existence. In such a story, the reader might expect a twist at the end – perhaps an act of supreme, unforeseen viciousness – but the story simply closes on an almost mundane note, with one of the women looking forward to Christmas (so she can damage the gifts that her roommate receives). It’s very depressing, because one sees then that the horror lies not in the specifics of the women’s actions but in the continuing banality of their lives: this endless cycle of vindictiveness, childlike sulking, recrimination and making up is all they have.

This isn’t to say that Highsmith doesn’t trade in more conventional thriller endings, but when she does it’s usually subtle and drawn-out – the effect isn’t so much of something suddenly springing out at the reader as he turns a corner but more that we are dragged along, reluctantly, towards the corner and to what lies beyond it.

There’s a definite mollusc fetish on view in Eleven, with two very creepy stories featuring people who become obsessed, in different ways, with snails: “The Snail-Watcher”, in which a seemingly innocuous hobby leads, in just a few short pages, to horrific consequences (the stunning matter-of-factness of the resolution has to be read to be believed); and “The Quest for Blank Claveringi”, about a professor visiting an island in the hope of sighting giant snails with shell-diameters of 20 feet. (While on shelled creatures, there’s also “The Terrapin”, about a little boy, his bad-tempered mother and the doomed terrapin that has been brought home for dinner.)

Highsmith’s writing can be savage and malicious at times. If you want to test your morbidity-endurance, try out the collection Little Tales of Misogyny, the opening story of which begins with the sentence “A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box – her left hand.” Don’t feel sorry for the young lady, she’s rotten to the core, as many of the women (and most of the men) in this book are. Highlights include “Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman” (who was constantly pregnant and had never experienced the onset of puberty, “her father having had at her since she was five, and after him, her brothers. Even in late pregnancy she was interfered with and men waited impatiently the half-hour or so it took her to give birth before they fell on her again”); “The Prude” (who wants her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters to “Be Pure in Every Way”); “The Breeder”, about a woman who has 17 children after nine years of marriage; and “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife”. The stories are subversively funny, as their titles suggest, but their critique of social conventions is so sharp-edged, bitter, even gratuitous at times, that the reader feels uncomfortable about participating in it. Highsmith seems to actively dislike many of her characters and relish their misfortunes, which is not the sort of thing one is accustomed to in satire. My response to this is ambivalent: like I said, I admire her work but I can’t read too much of it at one go.

But having mentioned the seeming heartlessness of some of her work, I’d like to recommend a very affecting, empathetic story that also features in Eleven. “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” is a little masterpiece about a timid woman named Geraldine escaping her louse of a husband and trying to reclaim her freedom. We learn about her past in bits and pieces, and through allusions, as the story proceeds. There is an unforced gentleness in Highsmith’s writing as she makes us care for this damaged, perhaps mentally unstable woman, and it all leads up to a devastating conclusion.

Incidentally Graham Greene wrote the Foreword to Eleven, and he astutely captures the moral disorder in Highsmith’s fiction:

She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience…it is not the world as we once believed we knew it, but it is frighteningly more real to us than the house next door. Her characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realise how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train…from Miss Highsmith’s side of the frontier, we realise that our world was not really as rational as all that. Suddenly with a sense of fear we think “Perhaps I really belong here”…she is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably.

And a nice piece about Highsmith here, by John Gray:

In making Tom Ripley attractive – sensitive to beauty, considerate to others in his everyday dealings, courageous and resourceful and endowed with an acute awareness of mood and place – Highsmith was not romanticising villainy; she was presenting a fact of life that moralists prefer to forget. The qualities that enable people to live an interesting and fulfilling life – and that make them valuable to others – are not all of one piece, and what are usually seen as the distinctively moral virtues are not always among them. Moral virtue is only a part of what makes life worth living, and not always the most important part.

P.S. At least three wonderful films – Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil and the John Malkovich-starrer Ripley’s Game – are based on Highsmith novels. Maybe David Cronenberg should adapt one of the snail stories!