The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Elisabeth Dennys, Graham’s sister who had arranged his wartime job with SIS and who for many years had typed his manuscripts and correspondence, had suffered a stroke. Her daughter Amanda took over the task of typing his mail. (He was working on the ending of another manuscript that had been around for almost a decade.) Elisabeth’s illness affected Graham a great deal.

  ‘Thank you so much and so does Yvonne for your good wishes. I admire your courage in staying on in Haiti,’ he wrote to me on 10 December 1988 from Antibes.

  I am afraid I wouldn’t have the courage to return, all the more so because the picture you sent me must have enraged the Tonton. [It was a story I had reported on post-Duvalier Haiti.] It is a pity that you will have missed Gorbachev after all in Cuba. I have an enormous admiration for him and also considerable fear for his fate. I have now been three times to Russia — no, five times — in the last three years including Georgia, the Ukraine and Siberia. After 25 years’ absence the changes were even more startling for me. I am afraid Noriega has been disappointed at my failure to turn up! I don’t like the man and I have been resisting all the more as I have been travelling too much during the last year or two. I celebrated my 84th birthday at a party in Moscow when I had to blow out 84 candles! All the same I suspect I shall make the effort and go to Panama and Nicaragua sometime in the coming year. I hope it may coincide with your visit. When you see Daniel Ortega do give him my very warm regards. It would be delightful if you did come here with your son the photographer. You would be most welcome.

  Then, on 16 May 1989 he wrote:

  I would love to see you again after all this time and I don’t feel inclined at the moment to go to Panama. I have just been seeing Daniel Ortega in London — a very cordial meeting. I am afraid the end of May and beginning of June is not good for me. I am hoping to get away at that period to work in Capri and won’t be back until late June. July would be a safer month as far as I am concerned.

  In fact, although he did not mention it until we met again later that year in Antibes, Graham had taken a nasty fall in his favourite London hotel. He got tangled in a rug at the Ritz, fell and broke several ribs. Despite the pain, he had gone forth and introduced Daniel Ortega at a meeting in London.

  It was also around this time that a Haitian publisher decided to publish The Comedians and asked for my help in obtaining the French-language rights for Haiti. ‘It would be amusing to be published in Haiti,’ Graham wrote back in his characteristically understated style.

  Jean-Bernard and I joined Graham and Yvonne in Antibes to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Republic. The following day — Bastille Day — we joined what seemed like the entire French Riviera at a celebration in Juan-les-Pins. Graham appeared spry — he had recovered well from his fall — and was in high spirits when we arrived. His flat in Antibes looked the same as when I had visited four years earlier, except for a picturesque addition to the bathroom. Hanging on the wall and facing the toilet bowl was a large framed poster depicting Jean-Claude Duvalier in drag. He was resplendent in a red-lace dress with high-heel shoes, pointing a pistol to his head in the act of suicide.

  ‘You sent it to me after Duvalier’s overthrow,’ Graham said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was the Haitian artist.’

  The apartment had been burgled twice, but the intruders had taken little of importance. In fact, aside from his books there was little of importance. Obviously the burglars were not artistically inclined as a small sculpture of The Warrior by Henry Moore was still on the glass-top coffee table. But even more surprising was the fact that the thieves had left a gold nugget that Graham kept in a drawer.

  Graham relaxed in his rattan armchair facing the glass doors. He discussed Professor Norman Sherry’s first volume of his biography, which had only recently been published. I confessed I hadn’t yet read it.

  ‘It’s far too long,’ Graham said bluntly. He said he was displeased and embarrassed by the biographer’s examination of his personal life from 1904 to 1939. (My mind went back to our train ride across Panama when Graham had divulged that he was considering Sherry to be his biographer.) Almost in mid-sentence, Graham glanced at his watch; it was noon. ‘Let’s have a drink. What will you have?’ he said. Then the phone rang. ‘Blasted telephone. Where are my glasses?’ Why he required glasses to answer the telephone was never clear to me. He found them and answered. It was Yvonne. She could join us for lunch. A few minutes later, vodka bottle in hand, he prepared the habitual midday martini and resumed his critique. ‘Sherry has only reached the Second World War. Is there really any need to publish letters to one’s wife in their entirety?’ (Returning from Graham’s funeral in Switzerland, Sherry defended the biography: ‘My God, but there were more than 2,000 of those letters,’ he told me.)

  ‘I must say I much prefer the Victorian biography,’ Graham went on. He got up, went to his book-lined shelves, took out a slim dark-covered volume and demonstrated its lightness in his hands. It was, he said, little more than a hundred pages. He then replaced it on the shelf without bothering to tell us what the book was or who wrote it.

  I actually empathized with his biographer. How could Graham Greene’s life be squeezed into a hundred pages? He had lived too many adventures. Moreover, precisely because he had guarded his privacy so jealously he had opened his life to much speculation.

  To change the subject I congratulated him on finally publishing the manuscript he had carried around with him for fifteen years, The Captain and the Enemy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am rather glad to get rid of it. A dream helped me in the end … It’s probably my last.’

  ‘I seriously doubt it,’ I said.

  He laughed and explained that the old manuscript had originally been entitled Getting to Know the General, and then after Omar’s death he had given that title to the memoir instead.

  The first part of The Captain and the Enemy is vintage Greene fiction built around his unhappy days at school in Berkhamsted where his father was headmaster and a brother head prefect. There were bullies, ferocious games and lots of prunes. Through the years he had often referred to this period of his life as an unhappy time. In the book, the narrator, a boy called Victor, is kidnapped by a peculiar Captain who says he won him in a game of backgammon. The last part of the book is contemporary Greene and contemporary Central America. I was fascinated, I told him, by the book’s ending in which the Captain, with a plane full of explosives, attempts to crash and blow up Somoza, a kamikaze-type suicide run during which he manages to hurt no one but only kill himself.

  The story reminded me how at precisely 1.00 a.m. on Thursday 21 June 1979 a low-flying aircraft flew so low over the safe house I was sharing with Alan Riding of the New York Times and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post in Managua that we thought it might crash into our backyard. The plane came from the direction of Somoza’s bunker and dropped nine concussion grenades miles off target, wounding a woman. The bombing had a psychological effect as the Sandinistas had warned that they intended to bomb Somoza’s bunker and the InterContinental Hotel because it was filled with Somoza’s rubber-stamp parliamentarians and assorted hangers-on. (Torrijos had also sent the US Intelligence Service in Panama into a panic one night when he ordered Venezuelan bombers to bomb Somoza’s bunker. The Venezuelan aircraft had been flown to Panama and stationed there as part of an effort to pressure Somoza to quit. The bombers, it was later discovered, had no bombs.)

  At the end of The Captain and the Enemy the narrator says, ‘With the Captain dead what is the point of continuing it [writing]? I realize more than ever that I am no writer. A real writer’s ambition doesn’t die with his main character …’ The last lines of the book, which was to be, as Graham predicted, his final novel, are intriguing: ‘“I’m on my own now,” Victor says, before throwing what he has written into the wastepaper basket. “The line means Fini. I’m on my own now and I am following my own mules to find my own future.”‘

  Graham had dedicated the book to Yvonne
: ‘For Y with all the memories we share of nearly thirty years.’

  We talked of his thin manuscript about dreams, which lay on his work table. When I mentioned a nightmare I’d had in which Graham and I fell into a deep precipice in my Volkswagen during our trip along the Dominican— Haitian border more than twenty years ago, he said, ‘I had quite forgotten that incident.’

  It wasn’t one of his own nightmares, but since he had made a habit of compiling his nightmares over the years, putting them down on paper, he could enthusiastically commiserate about other people’s. He quickly warmed to the subject, went to his table and opened a folder with a thin sheaf of pages. It was the beginning of the manuscript. ‘I’ve already decided on a title: A World of My Own. Oh yes, I have included my Papa Doc nightmare,’ he said and conceded that Duvalier had inflicted on him what the author termed his longest-running personal nightmare — a transatlantic one, like a successful play.

  Yvonne eventually published A World of My Own a year after Graham’s death. The book is a strange, fascinating kaleidoscope, yet it opens a window into Graham’s subconscious. The dreams he related also amount to a revealing postscript to his adventurous career in what, in his book, he terms the real-life ‘Common World’, laying bare many of the fears — and pleasures — which he experienced but which, reticent as he tended to be about himself, he rarely discussed.

  With his pixie sense of humour, he begins A World of My Own with an introduction in which he points out that this is one book for which he can be neither sued nor prosecuted, since his dreams are a world ‘shared with no one else. There are no witnesses … The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me …’

  It is well that such is the case because many of his dreams, were they to be presented as fact, would appear potentially actionable. For example, in one sequence Graham takes a country walk with the writer Ford Madox Ford. They are in a field with a large bull and a young bull. Graham retreats to the road but, looking back, notes that the young bull has mounted on Ford’s shoulders. Ford doesn’t seem disturbed.

  Of special interest to me, of course, were Graham’s dreams about Haiti. Predictably, many were nightmares in which Papa Doc figured prominently. Thus, in one surrealistic episode, ‘Out in the yard [of the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince] there were a number of cars. An old lady stood by a car … I had seen her before in the streets of Port-au-Prince. “I believe that’s Papa Doc’s wife,” I said, and, sure enough, the President himself joined her and they rode away. I tried to hide my face with my hands, and I was very afraid.’

  Graham was in good humour. The spirit in which he laughingly described his nightmare gave no sense of the terror that François Duvalier could inflict on a person when he was still alive.

  I had my own Papa Doc nightmares, which plagued me for many years after I was freed from the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. Graham and I compared nightmares. In Graham’s dream, Duvalier is about to strike him. Like me, Graham is back in Port-au-Prince and trying to escape from Papa Doc. ‘I am in Haiti and I feel something is going to happen to me at any moment,’ he recounted to Jean-Bernard and me. ‘I get into a car and go to the British Embassy or I try to get there, and when I get there I find the Embassy is no longer there …’ The deafening roar of Antibes’ ubiquitous motorbikes below his fifth-storey apartment window drowned out the rest of his story.

  I noted to Graham that at least in one version of his bad dream he had had the advantage of a car. In my nightmare, which was realistic enough to wreck my sleep for years after my imprisonment, I find myself outside the penitentiary, naked and on foot. My main preoccupation, besides trying to get away while hiding my nakedness, is to disguise myself since most of Duvalier’s top Tontons Macoutes know me. An old lady tending her open-air kitchen is frying griot (seasoned pork) while other marchands (market women) are walking down the street balancing baskets of produce on their heads. They are zombie-like and don’t notice me. I usually woke up when the Macoutes arrived.

  It was ironic that we were talking about Papa Doc when his son lived only twelve minutes away by car. Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife Michele and their two children were living in a house loaned to them by a son of the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The house was situated in a hollow near the main highway to Nice and opposite a lettuce farm. When Jean-Bernard and I drove by the place, a farmer on a tractor ploughing his field in preparation for planting sent clouds of dust on to the former dictator’s front lawn.

  Graham confessed that when he and Yvonne drove into the hills for dinner they gave wide berth to restaurants Baby Doc was known to frequent.

  ‘And our friend, the exiled Haitian priest,’ Graham asked, ‘whatever happened to him?’ Bajeux’s own faith had slowly died. There had been no dramatic rupture with the Church. Instead, he felt abandoned by it. He quit the priesthood in the wake of the reformist Second Vatican Council, at the time when thousands of other priests were choosing to free themselves from ecclesiastical discipline and return to secular life. Materially speaking, Bajeux was better off than many clerical colleagues who had abandoned the cloth. He taught at the University of Puerto Rico and later at Princeton University. He was a poet and literary critic, and he wrote a book on three outstanding Caribbean poets: Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos and Aimé Césaire of Martinique. But he never stopped working to free his country from dictatorship.

  After the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 Bajeux didn’t wait to be issued a Haitian passport and a re-entry visa to Haiti. Waving a blue-and-red Haitian flag, the original colours that Duvalier had changed to red and black, in front of startled immigration officials and saying, ‘This is my visa,’ he was eventually allowed into the country. He went on to open what he christened the Ecumenical Centre for Human Rights in February 1987 and helped lead-fund Haiti’s largest post-Duvalier democratic political organization, Konakom (the Creole acronym for National Congress of Democratic Movements). Konakom brought together in its congress some 315 peasant and grassroots organizations from throughout Haiti and later become a political party.

  In 1990 Bajeux threw his support behind Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who won a historic victory. However, by October 1993, after Haiti’s military had once again seized control, Bajeux was back in exile in Puerto Rico after escaping assassination by neo-Duvalierists who sacked the house where he was living in Port-au-Prince. The beasts born of dictatorship are not easily tamed.

  The intercom system buzzed. ‘Confounded thing,’ Graham said as he got up to answer it.

  All we heard was a long ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said when he returned, and he lifted both hands in exasperation. ‘It was a Dutchman who wanted me to autograph a book. I asked him whether I knew him. I only autograph books for my friends.’

  The talk of autographs reminded him of an event during his latest birthday celebration that he felt was perhaps the most fun. The Greene King Brewery, founded by his great-grandfather in England in 1799, had issued one hundred thousand bottles of an especially strong Graham Greene birthday ale from St Edmunds, with Graham’s signature on the label. He lamented that he didn’t have a bottle for us but gave us the address of a London pub that might still have a bottle or two.

  With surprising receptiveness he acceded to Jean-Bernard’s request for a photo session. He stood and walked to the little balcony. ‘They usually like a photo here.’ The backdrop was the marina and white-capped sea beyond.

  ‘I would rather, if you don’t mind, just do your thing. Don’t take notice of me,’ Jean-Bernard said.

  ‘Oh,’ Graham laughed, ‘it is going to be painless, is it?’

  Later he sat at his table and read out snippets of the unfinished dream manuscript while Jean-Bernard photographed his hands.

  Yvonne drove us to Chez Félix au Port for lunch, and while Graham left us at the table to cross the street to purchase The Times Jean-Bernard snapped several more photographs of him. ‘Please,’ Graham said
, ‘don’t take any more photos outside. It attracts unwanted attention.’

  In Florida a colleague of mine who had covered the Vietnam War had asked me whether I might ask Graham if the character Pyle in The Quiet American was in fact Colonel Edward G. Landsdale of the USAF, an American army officer who had won fame as a guerrilla expert, helping Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay beat the Hukbalahap guerrillas and who later become Chief of the CIA’s Military Mission in Saigon.

  Graham laughed. ‘I should get angry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asked that question so many times, and no one seems to take any notice when I say no.’ He leaned forward and shouted, ‘No!’ Then he added that Landsdale had not yet arrived in Vietnam when he was there. (Colonel Lansdale had been assigned to South Vietnam in June 1954. Graham had left four months earlier.) Besides, he didn’t even know the man. Pyle, he added, was a very different character from the gung-ho Colonel Lansdale.

  ‘They confuse The Ugly American with The Quiet American, he said and pleaded jokingly that we should not spoil such a pleasant day discussing The Quiet American. Graham had not forgiven Joseph Mankiewicz for his film version of the book, which Graham declared was a travesty.

  Graham decided against staying up for the bicentennial celebrations and retired early. In the morning he told us he had slept well but had briefly awoken.

  ‘I heard a big bang!’ he said.

  We assured him it must have been fireworks.

  He spoke of his trips to Russia and how he was happy to have seen Kim Philby before he died. Graham spoke of Philby as one would speak of a dear friend. Philby died in his sleep on 11 May 1988 and was buried in Moscow’s Kuntsevo Cemetery. (Much later, Philby’s Russian widow, who said she lived on the rouble equivalent of $53 a month, which the Russian government paid her, put some of Philby’s possessions up for sale at Sotheby’s. Included in the collection, which sold for nearly $50,000, were eleven letters from Graham.)