Graham Greene

“I implore you, the last request of a dying man for a knock on the door may come at any moment–if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

The Comedians is a reread for me, but 30 years have passed and this second time, being older and wiser, Graham Greene’s words have their whole meaning. They touch a nerve. Who are we, and why do we always play a part? For power? Maybe, but thankfully not only.

It’s sometime in the 1960s in Haiti. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his secret police, the Tontons Macoute are in power, a brutal dictatorship unleashing terror and violence on the island, “an evil floating slum”. Papa Doc is a “bullwark against Communism” (that simple phrase sums up Greene’s view of American foreign policy at that time) and his regime has driven most foreigners and tourists away, ruining the economy, while at the same time raking in millions of US Aid for his personal coffers.

*Still from the film adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor (1967)*

Brown (the narrator), Jones, and the Smiths (yes, you read the names right) get off the boat at Port-au-Prince with their hopes, their dreams, their insecurities, their past, their doubts, but also their beliefs and their own interpretations of reality. Basically they are all of us, Comedians of life, more or less committed to a purpose, some with more integrity than others, but ultimately human when facing important moments. Brown has inherited a hotel from his estranged mother, and has a love affair with the German wife of a South American ambassador; the Smiths are innocent idealist Americans who want to open a vegetarian centre (in a country where hunger and poverty are rife); and Jones, well, nobody really knows who Jones is and what he does. They are thrown into the Haitian tragedy head-on and their lives are changed forever by the decisions they are forced to take when life is no longer a simple play.

This dark story is a marvellous book, exquisitely written, sometimes a black comedy but mostly an eye-opening tale about what it means to witness a rogue state in power. The tension, the secrecy, the stuffiness of the climate, the poverty, the hopelessness for a better tomorrow, it all jumps at you from the pages. The reader is drawn into this nightmarish world without apology, and yet, strangely, as the narrator, feels at home, enveloped by the palms, the heat, the disfunctionality, the voodoo, the stories the characters tell each other, by the human frailty and condition distilled chapter after chapter. The Graham Greene touch. It cannot really be explained, it has to be witnessed.

Published in 1965, the book was later turned into a screenplay (by Greene himself) for a film staring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Most importantly, it is one of Greene’s most political novels. With it, he wanted to deal a deadly blow to Duvalier whom he called “a mad man”. Greene had visited Haiti a few times and had never felt such fear anywhere, still having nightmares about it many years later. He wanted the world to know. Papa Doc was furious, and banned the book and the film. Greene, wisely, never returned.

It needs to be read and reread, a beautifully sad book that stays with you.

The Comedians by Graham Greene
Published September 30th 1976 by Penguin Books
Paperback, 286 pages

Well, this was an interesting and light enough read. I say “light enough” because, with Greene, the heavy stuff is always there somewhere, in the simple everyday sentences. Words are arranged in such a way that even when you think yourself reading something fun and entertaining, the existential dread finds you. As here, when the main character is examining his reflexion:

“But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish (…) the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquilliser.”

Greene in 1939, National Portrait Gallery

Sobering stuff…

Our Man in Havana is one of what Graham Greene called his “entertainment” novels, compared to the other more serious and “noir” ones, as Brighton Rock or The End of the Affair. It is the first book by Greene that I’m reading, so until I get the feel of a little more of his work, this review is bound to be a little limited and maybe superficial. Greene was really a prolific writer: novels, essays, book and film reviews, autobiographies. I have an inkling that I’m embarking on something big because I liked this introduction into his work.

Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman from Britain. He lives in Havana, Cuba, with his daughter Milly. It’s Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, before the communist Revolution, and the place is full of money, corruption, bars, prostitutes, and lottery tickets. His daughter being 17 and part of the European set, he never seems to have enough money to keep up with her purchases. His wife left him a long time ago, and his life revolves around the shop, his daughter, and daily drinks at the local bar with Dr Hasselbacher, a German.

When a fellow Englishman presents him with the possibility of some easy additional income, his problems seem solved. A bit of spying for the British secret service won’t hurt, it’s patriotic too… but time consuming. Why not just invent a few reports and informers?

“Is anything happening yet?”

“Thank goodness, no. As long as nothing happens anything is possible, you agree?” (…) But remember as long as you lie you do no arm.”

“I take their money.”

“They have no money except what they take from men like you and me.”

It’s all fun and games until everything unravels, as the false reports start coming true. I will not spoil the plot further, I promise.

This book is definitely and very obviously a ferocious criticism of the world of spies after WW2 and everything that goes with it: the theatrics of the Cold War, national allegiances, administrative heaviness and inefficiency. The British secret service is not painted in a good light here. We get the feeling of an enormous and clumsy department that is not even capable of detecting the most amateurishly constructed fake when it stares them in the face.

As the book was published in October 1958, all the Cold War tensions are well depicted, and sometimes, one cannot help but think that Greene was really on to something concerning Cuba while writing his story. The Bay of Pigs debacle was still in the future, and Castro and his guerrilla took power from Batista on New Year’s day in 1959. Yet, the story is eerily familiar. Greene worked for the secret service during WW2 but, as Christopher Hitchens rightly points out in the Introduction, we must not forget that his supervisor and friend was Kim Philby, the famous British spy later revealed as a Soviet agent.

Knowing that, the book also makes for a slightly uncomfortable read. Greene recurrently makes his characters question the concept of allegiance to one’s country, and there are sometimes annoying platitudes about friendship and love being the most important in one’s life. Yes, they are, but geopolitics is not a walk in the park. People often forget that if they are able to enjoy freedom and justice, it sometimes takes unconventional methods. It is also never really clear who are the ones behind the bad things that happen to Wormold and his entourage. Russians, Americans, Germans, East, West? It got me thinking and left me puzzled. Hitchens hints that Greene was a marxist sympathiser but as his readership was mostly in the West, he would always introduce a kind of ambivalence in his works.

The book was adapted in a film version by Carol Reed in 1959, starring Alec Guinness, Maureen O’Hara, Burl Ives, and Noël Coward. It was filmed on location in Havana, and Fidel Castro later complained that it did not depict really well and accurately the savageness of Batista’s regime. Furthermore, I found that one of the characters, Captain Segura (“Segura squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.”), evidently a portrait of one of Batista’s enforcers and torturers, was rather presented as cruel, yes, but also as charming, polite and philosophically inclined about the facts of life. Or was it just an attempt on Greene’s part to show an example of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil” as Hitchens puts it. Greene later wrote in his autobiography that

“Alas, the book did me little good with the new rulers in Havana. In poking fun at the British Secret Service, I had minimised the terror of Batista’s rule. I had not wanted too black a background for a light-hearted comedy, but those who suffered during the years of dictatorship could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent and not the justice of a revolution.”

*Still from the film adaptation by Carol Reed (1959)*

It is nevertheless an efficient story, a comedy of the absurd, with many gripping passages, good insights about morals and freedom and what we choose to do with them, a good dose of satire, and a whole lot of alcoholic drinks going around. Wormold is at times funny and at times pathetic, trying to be the clever one, but unable to cope with the consequences of his acts. Until a tragedy strikes and he finds himself changed, discovering the taste of violence. We are all Wormold in a way. Greene writes in such a way that it almost seems he is reading our own inner thoughts and anxieties. And as I was warned, the religious aspect in his writing is clearly visible. Is it better to have faith or not? the eternal question I guess. Lastly, it is also a very atmospheric depiction of one of the central characters of the novel, the city of Havana. You can feel every breeze, every smell, and the oppressive heat.

“ In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

A fine book.

Our Man in Havana, by Grahame Greene
Vintage Books, London, 2004, UK
225 pages