- Incite Reading Series: Travel writer, novelist and essayist Pico Iyer sits down with Louise Dennys to talk about his latest work of non-fiction, The Man Within My Head. Monday, Feb. 20, 7: 30 p.m. at the Improv Centre, Granville Island, 1502 Duranleau St. Admission by donation.
TRAVEL writing inextricably links the work of Pico Iyer and Graham Greene.
In his new book, The Man Within My Head, Iyer takes us on a trip through their shared literary worlds. He spoke with the North Shore News about his fascination with the British author and the restlessness that permeates and defines his work.
North Shore News:
Do you recall when you first became interested in Graham Greene's writing?
Pico Iyer: I think as soon as I became a traveller and began going to places like Cuba and Vietnam. I just found that he caught those places 50 years ago better than anybody could have done last week. I think like many people I had to read a couple of his books when I was at school so I knew then that I never wanted to read him again and my mother was a big fan so that was a double strike against him. It took a little while to disassociate him from school text books and my mother's enthusiasms but I think probably when I was 26 or 27, and really began thinking about the world and seeing how it operated, the more he took residence inside me.
North Shore News: He went to all the corners of the world - the margins - not the easiest places to get to.
Pico Iyer: Exactly yes. I find myself going to those same margins and I began to wonder "What's up with this?" Why am I drawn to the same places he is and why do I find myself again and again, almost as if I am stumbling through a Graham Greene novel, as if he stepped into my life, or am I just a figment of his imagination.
North Shore News: You've travelled extensively since you were a child. Does it seem like second nature to you to be on the move?
Pico Iyer: It does and I think for somebody of my generation a plane is not so different from the way a horse-carriage or a train or a bus might have been in earlier times. So, you're right, travel has never actually been that astonishing to me because it's my second home, and because from the time I was nine years old I was going by myself six times a year back and forth between California and England. And probably realizing at some intuitive, unspoken level that my home was almost in the passage between those places in a state of movement.
North Shore News: How has the concept of travel evolved since you first started out on your own in the '60s?
Pico Iyer: More people everywhere, and of course more North American things everywhere, but I think the heart of the transaction is just as mysterious and powerful as it ever was. I know that there are some people who say there is no point in travelling now because you can access the remotest corners of Afghanistan online or go to the Discovery Channel and see parts of Tibet you could never see in real life, but I think just the face-to-face encounter with a foreign culture and a place you can't understand is very essential. It doesn't matter if you arrive in Beijing and their are 400,000 other foreigners or just three foreigners there - it is still a useful experience.
North Shore News: Are there any places you haven't been to yet that are on your travel bucket list?
Pico Iyer: Many, many and I think that at this point I will never go to them and that would be fine. I've been lucky to see so many of the places I wanted to see but I've been to very little of Africa, for example, and I've always wanted to go to Mali and maybe I won't go there at this point. I've always wanted to go to Afghanistan and Antarctica and lots of other places. Actually my parents are both from India and I haven't seen most of the essential places in India that most of the tourists visit such as Goa and Kerala. I still feel the world is really inexhaustible but I've also enjoyed being just in one place and not moving. I think it's a nice thing to have places in your head that you'll never visit.
North Shore News: We all have contradictions but they seem to have been a major driving force in Greene's life. The word "escape" is used a lot in describing his world.
Pico Iyer: He titled his second evasive memoir Ways of Escape. He felt this obscure sense of being a fugitive and always in flight but I think he was always in a quest too in trying to come closer to belief or come closer to goodness, and at some level knowing that if he ever did find them he wouldn't really be comfortable.
He didn't really fully want to be settled. He was on a quest that I think he hoped he would never complete.
North Shore News: You say you are quite happy to be in one place but it doesn't seem like he was happy to be anywhere.
Pico Iyer: He had a great curiosity which I think is the driving force of so many writers, myself included. At the end of his life he said he wasn't rootless but he was restless and I think that may apply to me also. I think if you ask my friends they would say that I am somewhat restless. Even when I think I am staying in one place by my friends' standards I'm still still moving around a lot so I think I do have that hunger to see something that I haven't seen before to look around the corner even if it's just in my hometown. But I do feel very rooted and I think it's the rootedness that allows me to be an explorer and I think it was the same with him.
North Shore News: There are so many fascinating aspects to Greene's life. I found it interesting that he and his sister were both MI6 agents. It almost seems like the perfect job for him. Pico Iyer: Yes, I think every writer is somewhat of a spy and especially if you are in a foreign country, you're trying to read the signs, you're trying to read the people around you. You're usually, certainly he was and certainly I am, quietly in the shadows taking things in, taking notes trying to make sense of the place, so it's not a hard transition from being an observer to being a writer to being a spy.
North Shore News: You comment that he was so popular critical analysis of his work doesn't come into play. What role did movies have in establishing that?
Pico Iyer: You're right there was 20 maybe 25 big movies made of his works and he did write one of the classic movies of all time The Third Man but I think he had established his popularity before that. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1951 and I think at that point there were only a few movies made of his books though he did write a book in the 1930s with the movies in mind and amazingly it did get bought by Hollywood even in the 1930s when I don' think they were buying many literary properties. He was a movie critic of course for two years at the end of the 1930s so I think the movies taught him how to tell a story very economically and how to hone his prose then cut it back to the bone even more. He would say things like "Dialogue must be a form of action," so he was always pushing the story forward. I think that's one reason why as you suggest he's still so popular but also why he's not taken seriously enough in the Academy. I think his great gift to us was to tell complex stories very readably.
North Shore News: He became a friend of Charlie Chaplin near the end of his life.
Pico Iyer: Yes, in fact, I had a little bit about that in my book originally and then I took it out. One of the things I like about Charlie Chaplin is he entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and didn't win. Somehow I think that would have tickled Greene.
One of the things I originally had in my book is whenever London magazines like the Spectator or the New Statesman held a Graham Greene parody competition the real Graham Greene entered and he often won - and more surprisingly he often used those self-parodies in subsequent books of his.
He certainly had a mischievous quality that he shared with Chaplin and I think he warmed to Chaplin because Chaplin was ill-treated by America at the time America was a big power and Greene was always speaking out on behalf of those unjustly oppressed. In fact his biographer suggests Greene played quite a part in the writing and crafting of Chaplin's autobiography which he did anonymously. Check it out in the Norman Sherry biography he has all the details. He almost suggests Greene ghost wrote it, edited it, put a lot of unpaid editorial time into it. And maybe even brought it to the publishers because he was working with publishers at that point in his life.
North Shore News: Your book is not just about Greene you have a lot of yourself in it as well.
Pico Iyer: Yes, and I have a paragraph in the middle of the book saying, "Oh I don't like memoirs to remind me that it isn't a memoir," but it has aspects of self-portrait in it or selfexamination. I thought it was a good challenge that Greene was urging me on because I grew up in England and in England you are taught to be fairly distant and reserved and not to talk about yourself and that's usually been my way. But Greene is so naked on the page in his novels and so ready to look unsparingly at himself and I thought that was an invitation that he was extending and I ought to try and take up a bit of it.
North Shore News: As a child you spent a lot of time moving back and forth between British boarding schools and southern California, two quite different worlds.
Pico Iyer: Opposite worlds. It was interesting because in those days in the 1960s it seemed to me that many little English boys at school had one dream in life and that was to be in California at the centre of the youth revolution and to have endless summer and so many Californians seemed to long for the sense of continuity and roundedness and order that England has in abundance. Going back and forth between them it was an interesting training in how different cultures dream about one another and project their longings on to each other. In Santa Barbara, Calif., where my parents lived, the students were burning down the Bank of America down the road from me and then I would get on a plane and 12 hours later I would be in a boarding school set up in the year 1440 where we had to wear full morning dress to class every day and sing prayers in Latin. They couldn't have been more different.
North Shore News: You have a lot of pop culture references in your work. Do you listen to a lot of music?
Pico Iyer: I do, no more than anybody else but that's the soundtrack to my life. Previous books have much, much more pop culture in them. I'm a product of my generation and I grew up with the TV in the background listening to Bruce Springsteen or U2 or Neil Young or whoever it might be. Especially I find in travelling the things that you take for granted at home acquire a much different value and meaning abroad so, for example, "Hotel California" - when I'm walking through a hill station in Vietnam or staying in a Tibetan refugee camp the people around me tend to deliver note-perfect renditions of "Hotel California" and I realized it's speaking to this other world that they're dreaming of. Nobody in California would pay that much attention to the song but as soon as you're far away it has a new power.
North Shore News: Did you set out to be a writer or a travel writer specifically?
Pico Iyer: A writer I would say and I still don't even know if I count as a travel writer but as you were saying before travel came naturally to me and the beauty of travel is that everywhere is foreign to you. I found going back and forth between England and California as a little boy, and a little boy of 100 per cent Indian blood, that India and England and California were all a bit foreign to me and therefore all interesting and therefore all places that I was intrigued to observe. And then I did probably a crazy thing which was study nothing but literature for eight years. Every year I was getting more unemployable so when I was 25 I realized pretty much the only thing I knew how to do was reading and writing and being on planes so I turned myself into a writer because I couldn't do anything else.
