For me Bernie Diederich is the closest I’ll ever get to Graham Greene and the perfect introduction to the brand of close, undeluded, adventurous reportage that made Greene the trench-coated hero of so many. And what moves me, too — and what comes across so well in these pages — is that, unlike many others, Bernie never cashed in on his friendship with the famous author or took cheap shots at him after his death. He barely seems even to have quarrelled with a man who had a gift for picking ights even with those closest to him, although he never denies that there were moments when he was taken aback, even slightly disappointed, by his friend.
What he gives us instead is an unusually vivid, intimate, often exciting account of Greene on the road. We feel the writer’s celebrated impatience in these pages, his keen-eyed curiosity, and we witness, as if we were sitting in the back of Bernie’s beaten-up VW, the wild ups and downs of Greene’s moods. We can hear his inimitable cadences, see the tears of laughter in his eyes as things take a tragic-comic turn, register how the great lover of paradox was now consulting his horoscope in the papers and now complaining that the papers never got anything right. Greene trusted Bernie, you can tell, not just because he was such good and informative company but because he would turn his professional eye on everywhere he knew and give an evocative and knowledgeable description of it, without agenda or presumptuous theory.
Bernie Diederich was celebrated among us at Time as the man who had worked at a casino, served in the war and married a legendary Haitian beauty before raising one son who became a seasoned photojournalist and another who became a writer. But it wasn’t the drama of his life that made him a cherished correspondent so much as the accuracy and clarity of his reporting. I’m reminded of this every time I watch Greene here pulling out his tiny Minox camera or describing how he loves the Ritz in Piccadilly because everything goes wrong there. And for those of us who’ve felt Greene lead us into the most essential questions of good and bad, there’s something deeply haunting about hearing him say he doesn’t believe in hell as he and Bernie bump along the Haitian border (with a priest) or coming to visible life at the prospect of an ambush and sudden danger.
Yvonne Cloetta, Greene’s companion for his last thirty-two years, gave us in her memoir an enduring description of the private man, confiding his fears and beliefs to a lover; the priest Leopoldo Duran has shown us Greene in his later years, tooling around Spain with his clerical friend in a spirit of fun and theological enquiry. Bernie Diederich gives us here the final and perhaps most important piece of the puzzle, an indelible portrait of the novelist at work, taking everything in, treating the dark streets as his confessional, intuitively reading those who cross his path even as they vie to become characters in the next Graham Greene novel. As Diederich points out, Greene could combine, almost in the same breath, the ‘boyish exuberance’ of the lifelong adventurer and the watchful, penetrating gaze of a man who was taken in by very little.
When I put down the pages you hold in your hand I felt that I had myself travelled with the man who lives on in so many of us and felt the warmth of his fond, but always unsparing, glance.
Pico Iyer
Author of The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me
2012
| INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD GREENE
This story about Graham Greene begins in the high tops of the Pamir. The vessel’s arrangement of sails and ropes would have made perfect sense to Drake or to Nelson, but its hull and its four masts were made of steel — the ship belonged to two ages. One of its sailors was Bernard Diederich, a sixteen-year-old New Zealander who had quit school and family to sail across the Pacific in the majestic barque.
Diederich went on to serve the rest of the Second World War aboard an armed American tanker fuelling the Pacific war machine. The young sailor came ashore in more ports than I can imagine and saw for himself what Greene called ‘the dangerous edge of things’ — outposts of the modern age where greed and cruelty made no effort to hide themselves. Diederich was himself a mixture of old-fashioned virtues — courage, endurance and a sense of justice — all of them toughened by the demands of his life at sea. In the years that lay ahead his work would put him in the position of Conrad’s Marlow — reporting on things seen in ‘the heart of darkness’.
In 1949 Diederich decided to make his home in Haiti where he established his own newspaper, the Haiti Sun, and worked as a resident correspondent for the New York Times and other news agencies. In those days Haiti was free of crime and promised to become a paradise for tourists. The country had memories of freedom going back to the revolt of 1791 when Toussaint L’Ouverture led slaves to overthrow their colonial masters. Despite an American occupation from 1915 to 1934, Haiti was a democracy in the 1950s. As a newsman covering the visit of a celebrity, Diederich met Greene briefly in 1954 and then became much closer to him on a second visit in 1956 when Greene brought with him his mistress Catherine Walston, the inspiration for Sarah in The End of the Affair.
That was the last of the good years in Haiti. In 1957 François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a quiet and mannerly physician, took power and began to transform the country on psychopathic principles. He promoted a myth of terror based on elements of the Voodoo religion. Diederich tells us he became known as the zombificateur, the zombie-maker. His henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, robbed, beat, tortured, abducted or killed thousands of his real and supposed opponents. The rest of the world paid little attention to events in this obscure country, and the United States was disinclined to act for fear that Duvalier might be replaced by another Castro. It was impossible for his victims to regard Papa Doc as a ‘lesser evil’.
By 1963 the butchery in Haiti became widely known, largely owing to Diederich’s reporting. The regime decided that he, too, was an enemy. He was arrested and locked in solitary confinement while it was decided whether to kill him. He was cut off from his Haitian wife and young son — both of them now likely targets for the Tontons Macoutes. (This can be spelt several ways. In The Comedians Greene writes Tontons Macoute; I prefer Macoutes for the plural.)
His printing plant, his office and all his files were destroyed. In the end he was bundled on to an aircraft and expelled from the country. His wife, moving adroitly, was able to join him in the Dominican Republic. From there, he continued his reporting on the massacres.
In the late summer of 1963 Greene decided he had better see the country again for himself. After a harrowing visit, he went on to the Dominican Republic for further briefing from Diederich, before writing his long article ‘The Nightmare Republic’ for the the Sunday Telegraph (22 September 1963). The story Diederich had been telling for six years was now given enormous attention, and while the new Johnson administration dithered world opinion shifted and Duvalier’s Haiti became a pariah state.
It had been several years since Greene had written a novel — after the publication of A Burnt-Out Case in early 1961 Greene feared that he was near the end of his writing career. He wrote some short stories and an unsuccessful play, but Haiti now had a grip on him. In early 1965 Diederich took him on a tour of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including a memorable stop at the training camp of a tiny band of rebels in a disused lunatic asylum. For the first time in his life Greene wrote a novel with a political objective — to destabilize the Duvalier regime. Released in early 1966, and made into a major film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the following year, The Comedians was one of his finest novels, and it created exactly the storm of publicity that Greene had hoped for. The world could not turn its eyes from the horror.
In the years that followed Diederich continued to advise Greene on political developments in Latin America. He eventually engineered Greene’s visits to Panama where the novelist became a trusted friend of General Omar Torrijos, the strongman who was trying to map out a social-democratic future for his country. Greene’s travels with Diederich — by then the Central American correspondent for Time magazine — led to close contacts with Dan
iel Ortega, Tomás Borge, Ernesto Cardenal and other Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as well as with Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Through all this, his guide and political adviser was Bernard Diederich, whose journalism and books made him, as Greene put it the introduction to Diederich’s own book Somoza and the Legacy of US Involvement in Central America, an ‘indispensable’ historian for the region. Bernard Diederich observed the day-to-day movements of one of the century’s great novelists in some of his most important ‘involvements’. Himself a figure of quiet heroism, Diederich understood the broad and terrible context of Greene’s work through these years, and he knew intimately the people who stood just beyond the pages of Greene’s books. No writer is better placed to tell of Graham Greene’s political engagements in the second half of his career — indeed, little of what follows was known to Greene’s official biographer.
A work of observation and interpretation and, even more, a work of friendship, Bernard Diederich’s political biography of Graham Greene is one of the most important accounts ever written about this author. It is a unique record, and we are lucky to have it.
Richard Greene
Editor, Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
2012
A map of part of the island of Hispaniola showing the border area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the route of the journey taken by Graham Greene, Bernard Diederich and Fr Jean-Claude Bajeux in 1965 is marked.
PART I
Graham Greene in Haiti
1 | SEEDS OF FICTION
In Haiti they say life begins long before birth and that death is not an end but a continuation of the same long coil threading back to the beginning. The story of Haiti is certainly tragic, but unlike a work of fiction it has no end. It continues today with misery pouring down on a proud and independent people. The everyday Haitian’s answer to violence, poverty, sickness and death is always the same: bon Die sel ki kone, only God knows. They say it with a hopeful frown and an uncertain smile. And while they speak of God — Catholicism and Christianity are prevalent in Haiti — it is Voodoo that offers the people hope; it offers them immortality. This is the magic of Voodoo. It’s also the power of great fiction. It can immortalize a character, a story or a deep truth. This is why, on an overcast afternoon in January 1965, I found myself standing by the arrival gate at Santo Domingo’s Las Americas airport waiting for Graham Greene.
I wanted Graham to write a book about Haiti. Like many Haitians I was at war against the dictatorship of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Two years earlier I had been forced into exile with my Haitian wife, Ginette, and our infant son after living in Haiti for almost fourteen years. My first seven years in Haiti were full of the magic that some like to call the old Haiti. It was a time when the country was experiencing a cultural renaissance. There was virtually no crime. While the deforestation and over-population was noticeable, it wasn’t nearly as extreme as it is today. It was a clean, charming place populated with beautiful and interesting people. There was something intimate and exotic about Haiti. It was a popular tourist destination, particularly with artists, bohemians and the Hollywood set, which is how I came to meet Graham in the first place. Marlon Brando, Anne Bancroft and Truman Capote all visited the island during this time.
En route to the South Pacific I had sailed into Port-au-Prince, quit the sea to search for my stolen camera, fallen in love with Haiti and, after a short stint working at an American-owned casino, started an English-language weekly newspaper, the Haiti Sun, in 1950. Soon I picked up stringing work from the US and British media. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s Haiti possessed more than hope and charm: it had magic.
But the last seven years had been a horrible nightmare. In 1957, after Duvalier won the presidency, the country slowly descended into a state of fear as Papa Doc tightened his grip on power and declared himself President-for-Life. Many of my friends and colleagues were killed or disappeared. While I was busy reporting on the atrocities for the international media, I had to be careful of what I published in my own paper. I had to avoid the attention of Duvalier and his henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes. Whenever the government censors blinked I would telex or cable my stories, which were published, many times anonymously, in Time, Life, the New York Times, on NBC News and in the Associated Press. For seven years I walked a fine line, knowing that if Papa Doc found out I had written something critical I was certain to join the growing ranks of the ‘disappeared’.
As I watched Graham’s tall, lean figure make its way through customs, his blue eyes cutting across the airport with a hint of suspicion, I wondered if, indeed, he had the power to change Haiti. Could he bring down Duvalier? And, more to the point, would he write a book about Haiti?
Graham was sixty-one. His hair was thinning slightly, but he looked as robust as ever. He was dressed in tan linen trousers and a dark coat. His pale complexion stood out from the crowd of tourists and Dominican nationals arriving on the Pan American flight from Canada, where he had spent Christmas with his daughter Caroline.
We didn’t need to shake hands: a smile sufficed. As he thanked me generously for meeting him, I could feel his energy. He was so eager at the prospect of our trip he was giddy with excitement.
‘It’s wonderful to be back in the Caribbean,’ he said when he came out of customs. Then he took me by the arm. ‘I hope I’m not keeping you from your work.’
‘No, not at all,’ I replied.
He seemed to forget I had been the one to suggest we take a trip along the Haitian—Dominican border. He stopped, and now he smiled at me again and slapped me on the back of the shoulder as we walked out of the airport. ‘So when do we start?’
Hearing Graham talk this way, overflowing with enthusiasm, thrilled me. I had last seen him in August 1963. The British Ambassador in Santo Domingo had telephoned me with a message from Greene. He was coming to the Dominican Republic from Haiti and wanted to know if I could pick him up at the airport. I was taken by surprise. I hadn’t seen Graham since we spent a week together in Haiti in 1956. I never imagined we would cross paths again.
The Graham Greene I’d met in 1963 looked frazzled and slightly unkempt. He arrived with little luggage and a painting by Philippe-Auguste, which he said he had purchased with his winnings from a night at a deserted casino in Port-au-Prince. He was unusually quiet and let out a deep sigh as he squeezed into the seat of my Volkswagen Beetle. It was clear he was relieved to be out of Haiti. As we drove out of the airport he rested his arm out the window and took in the smell of the summer rains and the burning charcoal from the cooking fires of the neighbourhood colmados.
‘I thought I was doomed to stay,’ he said after a long silence. His face was stark and serious. He didn’t look at me; instead he stared blankly at the blue of the Caribbean as we drove along Autopista Las Américas.
‘I felt something was going to happen. I was so sure of it. I thought I’d be stopped at the last minute. And just as I was about to board the plane someone pressed a letter into my hand and whispered, “Please, give this to Déjoie in Santo Domingo.” I was afraid it could be a trap; perhaps a provocateur. I refused.’ He looked at me and tightened his grip on the bag he had on his lap. I understood. The risk was too great. He was concerned about his notes. ‘You think I did the right thing?’
‘I’m certain of it,’ I said. Louis Déjoie had lost the presidential election to Papa Doc in 1957. Like most of Duvalier’s opponents he ended up in exile in the Dominican Republic where he was trying to position himself as the leader of the Haitian exile community. But the former senator had no support among the exiles. He was alone. All he could do was continually to denounce the exile groups as Communist. At one point he got us all arrested.
Graham said he had gone back to Haiti on assignment for the London Sunday Telegraph. He had been reading stories of the growing terror in Haiti and wanted to see it for himself. ‘I had a hunch the exiles might launch an attack on Duvalier from the Dominican Republic,’ he said. The promise of action had l
ured him back to the island.
I didn’t tell Graham that I had been keeping track of his visit to Haiti. Diplomat friends returning from visiting Port-au-Prince always brought me a bundle of Haitian newspapers. Aubelin Jolicoeur’s column ‘Au Fil des Jours’ (‘As the Days Go By’) in Le Nouvelliste, of 13 August 1963, read, ‘The great writer Graham Greene is here to write an article on Haiti for the Telegraph of London. One of the greatest writers in the world, Graham Greene was welcomed to Haiti by the chargé d’affaires of Great Britain, Mr Patrick Niblock, and Aubelin Jolicoeur.’ Jolicoeur had worked for my newspaper in the 1950s. Modesty was not one of his qualities. He was a fixture at the Grand Hotel Oloffson and became Greene’s real-life model for the character of Petit Pierre in The Comedians. Graham’s physical description in the novel was dead on: ‘Even the time of day was humorous to him. He had the quick movements of a monkey, and he seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter.’ But it was his assessment of who Petit Pierre really was that was telling: ‘He was believed by some to have connexions with the Tontons, for how otherwise had he escaped a beating-up or worse?’ Years later Graham confessed to me he always suspected Jolicoeur was a spy for Duvalier. I never believed that. Like many Haitians he was a survivor. What other option did he have?
After listing Graham’s published works Jolicoeur noted, ‘This is Mr Greene’s third visit to Haiti and he will spend ten days at the Hotel Oloffson. He has expressed a desire to meet Dr François Duvalier. We wish the author of The Power and the Glory, considered a great work, welcome.’
I dropped Graham off at the British Ambassador’s residence. The following evening he came to our home in Rosa Duarte for dinner. I had also invited Max Clos, of Le Figaro, who had covered the war in Indochina at the same time as Graham and who had been on a reporting trip to Haiti.
The Seeds of Fiction Page 2
