The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  While the blan comedians are self-centred and only half-alive, the Haitians they meet at least exhibit purpose. A young poet, Henri Philipot, nephew of the dead minister, decides along with Dr Magiot to take up arms against Papa Doc. Together they have commitment enough to spare, and they try to breathe some spiritual life into the comedians. But overcoming Brown’s cynicism about life is not easy. The Smiths’ vegetarian scheme also withers. They, too, get caught up in the violence and corruption of Papa Doc’s Haiti, but at least they care about something. As they sail off to neighbouring Santo Domingo, Brown concludes that they are not comedians after all.

  Pineda, the cuckolded Latin American ambassador, likewise mirrors the book’s title: ‘Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars. Help yourself at the bar. My Scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.’

  Henri Philipot, the would-be guerrilla, replies to the Ambassador, ‘He [Papa Doc] is real. Horror is always real.’

  The Ambassador rejoins, ‘We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians — it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed — that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.’

  In his way Graham pays just tribute to the role of Haiti’s folk religion, Voodoo. ‘Certainly I am not against Voodoo,’ Dr Magiot tells Mrs Smith. ‘How lonely my people would be with Papa Doc as the only power in the land.’ Voodoo, Magiot says, ‘is the right therapy for Haitians’.

  And it is Voodoo (Graham, who attended a Voodoo ceremony in 1954 gets it right) that the young poet Philipot turns for help when all else fails him. ‘The gods of Dahomey may be what we need,’ he concludes.

  Of Philipot, Brown notes, ‘Governments had failed him, I had failed him, Jones had failed him — he had no Bren gun; he was here, listening to the drums, waiting, for strength, for courage, for a decision.’ Voodoo did not fail him. Brown attends the Voodoo ceremony above Kenscoff, high in the mountains, and the description of the service is remarkably well done for an author who had attended only one Voodoo ceremony in his life — and that more than seven years earlier.

  In a letter to Catherine dated 30 August 1954, from El Rancho Hotel, Graham scribbled down his impressions of the Voodoo ceremony he had attended the night before, which had ‘lasted until 3 in the morning’. The letter, reproduced in Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene, is headed with a request to Catherine: ‘Will you keep this letter in case I need it to refresh my mind?’ In fact, the rite Graham described in his letter was typical of the ceremonies that catered to the tourist trade.

  The importance that Haitians attach to sanctifying the dead came through in The Comedians. Haitians worship their ancestors. (A body-snatching by Duvalier’s police recounted in The Comedians is based on an event following Duvalier’s 1957 election when a kidnapping took place during the funeral procession of ex-candidate Clément Jumelle.)

  ‘Major’ Jones, the charming cheat and boastful liar who is pursued by Captain Concasseur, tries to escape dressed as a Haitian woman and takes asylum with Ambassador Pineda. Jones is finally conned by a jealous Brown, who believes he is having an affair with Martha. This is a chance to put his phoney wartime experiences to use. Undergoing a spiritual transformation and shedding his comedian’s mantle, Jones dies a hero’s death with poet Philipot’s guerrilla band. As the guerrillas withdraw from Haiti across the border into the Dominican Republic — our 1965 trip along the Dominican— Haitian border served Graham well in this last chapter of the book — Philipot, carrying the corpse of the torture victim Joseph, reports that Jones has vowed to keep Papa Doc’s pursuing soldiers at bay until the others have had time to reach the border road. Philipot and his guerrillas are interned in an abandoned lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo, not unlike the Haitian guerrilla camp that Graham and I visited in 1965. Brown, himself now not so remote, concedes that he would like to erect a stone where Jones died. ‘I shall get the British Ambassador, perhaps a member of the Royal Family.’

  Father Bajeux, our melancholy travelling companion during the three-day border trip, enters Graham’s novel as the Haitian refugee-priest who says Mass at the Franciscan church in Santo Domingo. Father Bajeux and I had told Graham about the Mass said by Bajeux on 27 April 1964 in memory of those killed during the bloody repression in Haiti the year before. After Mass the Kamoken had posed for their photograph together outside the church. Towards the end of The Comedians Philipot leads his dishevelled troops from the lunatic asylum to attend another Mass, this one for Joseph, limping no more from Concasseur’s blows, and for Jones, ‘whose beliefs were not known’ but who ‘was included out of courtesy’. Besides the guerrilla survivors there are Brown, Martha and her family. In the sermon the priest, a liberationist, condemns the indifference of the Browns of the world as evil. Graham’s description fits Bajeux: ‘a young man of Philipot’s age with the light skin of a métis’.

  Thus Graham was continually questioning faith, ideology and human behaviour. Shortly after The Comedians was published the Roman Catholic Church fell into a state of ferment, especially in Latin America, and 1968 was the year of the Second Vatican Council. The age-old image of the implacable, intolerant and inflexible Catholic Church was being buffeted by the winds of social change. The bishops of Latin America had met in Medellín, Colombia, and promised to sever the Church’s centuries-long alliance with the region’s military and entrenched élites. Graham was well aware of these events and was devoted to Pope John XXIII, the most popular pontiff in the century.

  Graham had written in his foreword:

  A word about the characters of The Comedians. I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume — I know it from experience — that an ‘I’ is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant’s wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don’t wish to add to my chameleon-nature characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth and an education by the Jesuits. Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene … It is often forgotten that, even in the case of a novel laid in England, the story, when it contains more than ten characters, would lack verisimilitude if at least one of them were not a Catholic. Ignorance of this fact of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a provincial air.

  I’ is not the only imaginary character: none of the others, from such minor players as the British chargé to the principals, has ever existed. A physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote — they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases.

  Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier’s rule are not invented … The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur; the interrupted funeral is drawn from fact; many a Joseph limps the streets of Port-au-Prince after his spell of torture, and, though I have never met the young Philipot, I have met guerrillas as courageous and as ill-trained in that former lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo. Only in Santo Domingo have things changed since I began this book — for the worse.

  The few Haitians privileged to read the book were eager to identify the players. I myself was increasingly persuaded that Brown, the principal character and narrator, was a composite, blending together slight resemblances to several real-life individuals, including the Hotel Oloffson’s American operator at the time of Graham’s 1963 visit. This Caribbean entrepreneur appeared blithely uncommitted as far as Papa Doc’s dictatorship was concerned and seemed to care only about the effects of media reports on the country’s tourism and specifically his clientele. And, in spite of Graham’s sweeping disclaimer, other characters in the book brought to mind certain actual people and settings. ‘Major’ Jones is reminiscent of many wheeler-deal
ers who were attracted to Haiti by the dictatorship’s need for guns. Mr and Mrs Smith, the elderly vegetarians, evoked a similarly idealistic but naïve American couple who were the only other guests besides Graham and the Italian casino operator at the Hotel Oloffson in August 1963.

  Henri Philipot closely resembled Fred Baptiste, the commander of the little guerrilla band that invaded Haiti from the Dominican Republic as poorly armed as any guerrilla group ever was. Years later Graham confirmed to me that Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe, another young Haitian who fought the regime, had inspired the young idealist Philipot. Graham also revealed that the individual he had in mind when he created Captain Concasseur was the intimidating officer who stared at Graham during his long hours in 1963 waiting in the Caserne François Duvalier, the Port-au-Prince police headquarters, for a permit to travel to the south of Haiti.

  Graham used the graveyard he found on his 1963 trip to south Haiti as the stage for the dramatic scene in The Comedians when the two main characters, Jones and Brown, ‘come alive’.

  ‘You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniacal butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier,’ Graham wrote, describing the Grand Hotel Oloffson as the Trianon.

  Our border trip along the Dominican—Haitian frontier was not wasted as source material. The last chapter of The Comedians draws heavily upon it. Graham’s description of the border was remarkably accurate: ‘I was glad enough when we came in sight at dusk, from our grey eroded mountain range where nothing grew, of the deep Dominican forest. You could see all the twists of the frontier by the contrast between our bare rocks and their vegetation. It was the same mountain range, but the trees never crossed into the poor dry land of Haiti.’ The vaunted international border road he described as ‘a grand name for a track little better than the Great Southern Highway to Aux Cayes’. And he later observes, the road ‘was more suitable for mules and cows’.

  The mean manager of the Alcoa bauxite operation at Cabo Rojo, Pat Hughson, bore more than a slight resemblance to the book’s Mr Schuyler Wilson, ‘a large fat man with an anonymous face shaved as smooth as marble’. Brown’s arrival at a mining site in the Dominican Republic after having fled Haiti recalls our arrival seeking a drink and a bed; he describes the scene faithfully if not a little colourfully.

  In his introduction to the US edition of The Comedians, published in 1966, Graham also noted, ‘The best I could do in January 1965 was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border — the scene of my last chapter — in the company of two exiles from Haiti. At least, without Doctor Duvalier’s leave, we were able to pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier future.’

  Few Haitians living abroad read The Comedians for its literary value. They were interested in its political content. It was the opposite for the reviewers. Literary critics and pundits were more interested in The Comedians in terms of its literary merit. Much to his mirth, they forever dissected his books in microscopic detail — perhaps because of Graham’s eclectic intellectualism — and because this was his first book in five years it received even closer scrutiny. ‘The Comedians,’ Graham himself later wrote, ‘is the only one of my books which I began with the intention of expressing a point of view and in order to fight — to fight the horror of Papa Doc’s dictatorship.’ He dragged the enigmatic Dr François Duvalier from the shadows into the floodlights of the world stage.

  There were few Haitian exiles around to share my copy of The Comedians since, by the time it appeared, most had been forced to flee Santo Domingo because right-wing death squads had them in their gun sights. It was not until the following year that I caught up with Father Bajeux and was able to discuss the book with him. Bajeux was by then working with the Rev. Ivan Illich, who headed a liberal think tank called CIDOC (the Centro Intercultural de Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Father Bajeux had just published an all-encompassing document entitled Un Cri pour Haiti (A Cry for Haiti) in which he analysed the political and economic situation under Duvalierism and called for drastic change. He was still struggling with his personal God.

  The Comedians enjoyed wide press coverage. Photographs that I had taken of Graham on the bridge over the Massacre River at Dajabón, using his little Minox camera, were published in both Time and Life magazines. (By then I was a full-time correspondent for both sister publications.)

  When I finally closed my copy of the book and handed it to my wife I thought this would be the end of our story and the end of Graham’s Haiti period. As he did following his Indochina, South America and Mexico periods, he would now move on to another place and another book. It was a little sad. Graham’s aim in Haiti was nearly perfect. His pen had proved to be a powerful sword against Duvalier. Although it did not decapitate Papa Doc — who managed to retain power for the rest of his life — the book was equivalent to winning a major battle against his evil tyranny.

  While Graham and I were later rarely at odds on any topic, we always disagreed about Jolicoeur. He was convinced that Jolicoeur was a government informer, a spy. To me, Aubelin, like so many Haitians, was simply a brash survivor. I had known him since the early days following his arrival from Jacmel and in 1952 had made him ‘Personality of the Week’ in my newspaper. As a social columnist, one of the first of that journalistic genre in Haiti, he wrote a column for my newspaper. If anything, he was simply over-zealous and adjective-driven.

  Graham, I learned later and unbeknownst to him, was under tight Tonton Macoute and police surveillance night and day throughout his 1963 stay. He was not aware that the street people, hangers-on and drivers around him were either Macoutes or police agents with orders to monitor his every move.

  Back in Haiti, iron censorship enforced by harsh penalties, possible imprisonment or even death kept The Comedians from entering the country. Haitians knew only too well that to be caught with any document or book that was unfavourable to Duvalier was suicidal. Customs inspectors were trained to weed out any literature that could be deemed to impugn Papa Doc. They examined books and even private papers carried by passengers arriving in Haiti. One man was especially assigned at the Port-au-Prince airport to censor foreign newspapers and magazines; scissors unabashedly in hand, he would clip out on the spot any mention of Haiti. Years later, after the Duvalier dynasty collapsed, the censor identified himself to me upon my return via the Port-au-Prince airport, declaring with shameless guile, ‘I used to enjoy your stories’ (referring to those bylined from elsewhere). It was one of the more bizarre compliments of my journalistic career.

  Gradually, however, Haitians learned through their telejiol (grapevine), and from other sources, about a book called The Comedians written by a famous English writer. They immediately presumed that they were the comedians, and it is not unusual to hear a Haitian say, even today, ‘Graham Greene was right. We are comediens — actors!’ This point of view was not without some logic. For all their earthiness, they exhibited many of the shoulder-shrugging characteristics of the uncommitted, but their masks were often more in keeping with the escapism of carnival, as they endeavoured to shut out reality and survive. Petit Pierre was not alone in his desire simply to stay alive.

  The survivors of Papa Doc’s death chamber reasoned that they might be safe so long as they did not provoke the beast. As an old Creole saying goes, ‘Tout bête genin mode (All cornered beasts bite). Graham had provoked the beast; now we waited for Papa Doc to bite.

  9 | PAPA DOC REACTS TO THE COMEDIANS

  One can see that Graham Greene and his accomplices managed to get off cheap, because on a simple order from President Duvalier he [Greene] could have been shot down like a wretch in any corner of the universe.

  — Le Nouveau Monde, Papa Doc’s newspaper

  In January 1966 the poet Gérard Daumec, one of Duvalier’s top publicists and literary advisers, returned from London with a copy of the British edition of The Comedians. Papa Doc was not always receptive to bad news, so Daumec later explained to me that he had handed the book
to Duvalier saying, ‘We need not be concerned about this book, it is a salopre (a piece of shit). Duvalier, Daumec recounted, chuckled when he saw the book’s title. For several days it reposed on Papa Doc’s desk, next to his Bible and loaded Magnum revolver. It was the only known copy of The Comedians in Haiti. Years later his son Jean-Claude Duvalier described his father to me, saying, ‘Papi was a good actor, a comedian.’

  Papa Doc’s English was limited and not sufficient to comprehend the novel fully. He didn’t bring up the subject of the book publicly until one day when he allowed himself to be interviewed on camera by a European television crew visiting Haiti. During the interview Duvalier dismissed The Comedians as having ‘no literary merit whatsoever’. Daumec recalled long afterwards that he thought that would be the end of it. But it was only the beginning.

  Later Duvalier asked Daumec about ‘Mister Gween’, as Papa Doc pronounced Graham’s name in his nasal whine. Daumec explained that ‘Mister Gween’ was a Catholic writer of considerable repute. Papa Doc, Daumec said, became visibly upset. The Comedians was particularly disconcerting to Duvalier because 1966 was the year he had decided to change his image. He had officially pronounced the end of what he termed the initial ‘explosive’ phase of his ‘revolution’ and had begun to patch up his relations with the Vatican. In his paranoid mind Papa Doc was convinced that The Comedians was part of a wider conspiracy to sabotage his negotiations with Rome.

  Duvalier showed his copy of The Comedians to Paul Blanchet, his xenophobic Minister of Information. Blanchet, it was said, understood that Duvalier was instructing him to ‘take care’ of Graham and his book. So in his ‘newspaper’ Panorama, the circulation of which was limited mostly to government offices, Blanchet published the only review of the book that was permitted in Haiti at the time. His broadside, in fractured French, was headlined, ‘Graham Greene: La machine a fairepeur (‘The machine that frightens’). ‘As for Greene,’ the review intoned, ‘he invents and makes machines to frighten us with. This is a compulsion: he must build up sinister and morbid situations.’ Graham’s message in The Comedians, in Panorama’s interpretation, ‘is a monstrous one and reveals only the Greene-type sensibility, that of the unsatisfied, or a Catholic living in hopelessness; it means a failure of Greene in so far as the difficulty of being a Christian could not be conquered’. The review made no mention of Duvalier or Haiti.