The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Unfortunately, Greene’s friendship with Alex Korda was nearer to the end than either realized. With his business on the ropes and auditors identifying improprieties, especially in his Italian operation, the producer suffered a heart attack in July 1955 and withdrew for three weeks to a nursing home. That autumn, he sold the Elsewhere and bought a house in Cannes. In November, he learned from his doctors that he could not live long, and on 23 January 1956 died of a massive heart attack.23 Greene, who had two very friendly meetings with Korda just before his death, would later write lovingly of this man and recall his lament for lost hopes: ‘When my friends and I were young in Hungary, we all dreamed of being poets. And what did we become? We became politicians and advertisement men and film producers.’24

  38

  A REFORMED CHARACTER

  Greene spent much of the early summer of 1954 in Anacapri. Then, after Catherine left in mid-June, he went to Florence and stayed with Allegra Sander, the very beautiful French author of Les Hommes: ces demi-dieux, a witty dialogue between two women on their dealings with men; Greene contributed a preface to the English edition, which was illustrated by Mervyn Peake. They visited the memoirist and aesthete Harold Acton, once Greene’s foe at Oxford but now a dear friend, living at the Villa La Pietra, just outside Florence. Acton managed to spill chianti over Sander’s dress.1 She took Greene to the Calcio Storico, the war-like football matches played in historical garb in the Piazza Santa Croce, where they saw a man killed by an exploding cannon. They then went to Siena for the July running of Il Palio, the bareback horse race likewise known for period garb, pageantry, and accidental death. It seems that Catherine remarked on the ‘ambiguity’ of Greene’s connection with Sander, so in one letter he made a point of how she was bringing her boyfriend (and future husband), a Venetian lawyer, with her when they were next to meet in Rome.2 Sander did, however, have enough influence over Greene in those weeks to put him on a regimen of no martinis and just two whiskies before dinner – he remarked with a certain wistfulness that he was ‘a reformed character’.3

  On a whim he went to Haiti that August in the company of the director Peter Brook, his wife the actor Natasha (née Parry), and Truman Capote. Greene was overwhelmed by Capote, whom he liked very much, seeing him as a psychic. He predicted that Greene would marry a younger woman, have another child, live by the sea, begin his best book, and remain sexually active in his eighth decade. How much Capote knew about Greene’s private life is unclear, but he told his fortune in such a way as to touch on all the raw nerves – his frustration about women, a fear of sexual decline, guilt over his children, and a sense of unfulfilled potential as a writer. Doubtless hoping to make her jealous, Greene reported the prognostications to Catherine, claiming that it depressed him as he really wanted to be with her.4

  What Capote did not foresee was that Haiti itself would play a part in Greene’s future. Occupying the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, it had a democratic legacy going back to 1791 when Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves in a successful revolt. The country’s subsequent history included an American occupation from 1915 to 1934 and the notorious massacre in 1937 of twenty thousand Haitians living in the Dominican Republic.5 By the 1950s Haiti was independent and under the relatively benign rule of President Paul Magloire, a former police chief. The island was poor but peaceful and law abiding. It was also experiencing a cultural revival, notably the emergence of a local painting style, of which the outstanding example, the biblical murals in Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité featuring solely black figures, was destroyed in the earthquake of 2010. Haiti was also producing writers, poets, and intellectuals.

  In the years before the emergence of François Duvalier, the dictator known as ‘Papa Doc’, there was also every reason to hope for prosperity based on the tourist trade. After 1957, this physician would transform the island into what Greene dubbed ‘The Nightmare Republic’ through the operations of paramilitaries called the Tontons Macoutes and a distortion of the Vodou religion. Greene would eventually write a novel, The Comedians, with the intention of focusing the world’s gaze on this psychopathic regime.

  In the summer of 1954, Greene travelled about the island mainly in the company of Natasha Brook, while her husband and Capote were trying to work out sets for a musical based on Capote’s short story ‘The House of Flowers’, set in a Port-au-Prince brothel – it would open on Broadway at the end of the year.

  Greene had a lifetime phobia of birds, and it was tested by seeing a cockfight and then a Vodou ceremony in which a participant bit the head off a hen and squeezed blood from its still-moving body. This was followed by an initiation rite, in which a man was carried into the gathering wrapped in a sheet and a hand and a foot held briefly in a fire to the sounds of drums and singing. There was then a possession in which the god of war arrived from Africa and entered the body of a worshipper, who went about the room spitting rum and menacing the crowd with a panga. The possession ended and the person collapsed with a shriek.

  What stood out for Greene was how very much Catholic imagery was involved in the ceremony: a banner of St Jacques, the kissing of crosses and vestments, and water for asperges. The ceremony was authentic, but it was also tailored for tourists;6 even so, he detected something here of what had so impressed him in Mexico and Kenya, a faith on the margins of Catholicism, a spiritual intensity expressed in rituals akin to sacraments. The next day he described the evening in detail for Catherine and wrote at the top: ‘Will you keep this letter in case I need it to refresh my mind?’ He would later incorporate much of that description into a major article on Haiti, and into The Comedians itself.7

  While in Haiti, he met, just in passing, a journalist who would become indispensable to him and to his work in the coming decades, and who would eventually write an important memoir of him. Bernard Diederich was born in New Zealand in 1926. A tall, handsome youth with skill as a boxer, he served in the American merchant marine during the Second World War, afterwards continuing for several years as a sailor in one of the last square-rigged ships in regular service. In 1949, he settled in Port-au-Prince, where he established a newspaper, the Haiti Sun, and served also as a resident correspondent for the New York Times and other news agencies. Once the Duvalier repression began in earnest, his reporting – often without a byline – kept the world aware of conditions within Haiti.

  Diederich watched one of Greene’s best-known tangles with American immigration authorities. The two men had only exchanged a few words in the bar of the El Rancho Hotel before Greene set off for Britain by what would be the most convenient route, changing planes in Puerto Rico, but there he was turned back. He did not have an American visa, and when asked the question, so typical of the McCarthy era, about having belonged to the Communist Party, he gave his usual answer: ‘Yes, for about four weeks at the age of nineteen.’ The startled officer told him to wait for his boss to deal with the matter, so Greene, perhaps foreseeing a bit of fun, sat down contentedly and read some P. G. Wodehouse. After about two hours, the boss appeared and told Greene he would have to go back to Haiti; Greene warned him to expect publicity. The immigration officers did not believe him, so he sent a telegram and got the story out on Reuters, followed a day or two later by a shorter piece on the INS newswire, and soon the British newspapers picked up on it. Those were a bad few days for the McCarran Act.8

  Greene was returned to Port-au-Prince. Bernard Diederich happened to be at Bowen Field airport and witnessed a stand-off between the novelist and the irate Delta Air Lines manager, a white Southerner who was refusing to let him on a plane to Havana for lack of a Cuban visa and insisting that he wait several days for a flight to the British colony of Jamaica. Greene barked, ‘What? I am going on this plane.’ The pilot then got involved, as Diederich recalled: ‘Like a boxing referee, he raised his hand to separate them. We heard the pilot tell the Delta man, “Thank you, I am taking this gentleman on my plane.” ’ When Greene had boarded, the manager turned to the bystanders and kept repeatin
g, ‘I was just trying to help him.’9

  Greene is thought to have made about twelve visits to Cuba over the years. On this occasion, Greene simply skipped immigration formalities and, with the police searching for him, spent two days in what he described to Peter and Natasha Brook as ‘quite the most vicious city’ he had ever been in. He was approached by prostitutes, attended blue films, found pornographic books, and smoked his first marijuana.10

  39

  ACCIDENTS CAN ALWAYS HAPPEN

  The battle of Dien Bien Phu was followed by negotiations over Vietnam at the Geneva Conference in the late spring and early summer of 1954. The participants agreed to a temporary division of the country at the 17th parallel and then democratic elections in 1956. The division actually remained until the final victory of North Vietnam in 1975. Catholics generally opposed the Geneva Accords as most of them lived in territory to be ceded to the Viet Minh. Before the agreement, about eight hundred thousand Catholics lived in the Red River Valley; of those, about half a million left their homes for the south in what became known as the ‘Northern Migration’.1 It was the end of the Catholic enclaves ruled by warrior bishops, and it profoundly altered the south as there were now, as one historian notes, more practising Catholics in Saigon than in Paris or Rome.2

  Graham Greene believed in an independent Vietnam, but not a divided one. Partition was the blunt tool of twentieth-century diplomacy, leaving terrible wounds in Ireland, India, Pakistan, and Korea. He felt that those who proposed it for Indochina had little understanding of the human cost involved.3 On the other hand, the French could not keep fighting, and abandoning the country to the Viet Minh was still unthinkable.

  The leader who emerged in the south was indeed a Catholic, but Greene disapproved of him. Ngo Dinh Diem was the son of an imperial mandarin and brother of the reactionary Archbishop of Hué. A fervent Catholic with Confucian sympathies, he had been regarded for about a decade as a potential leader, but he had refused various proposals as they did not involve real independence for the country. In June 1954, he became prime minister, and in the following year, having rigged the referendum that ended the reign of Bao Dai, made himself president of the new republic. He rejected the Geneva Accords and cancelled the elections scheduled for 1956, which Ho Chi Minh would have won. A complicated figure, Diem has been condemned for corruption, authoritarianism, and repression of Buddhists. He trusted almost no one outside his family, giving another brother, the scholarly Ngo Dinh Nhu, control of the security services. After widespread protests, including Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were killed in 1963 in a coup d’état authorized by an ill-briefed John F. Kennedy.

  Greene arrived in Saigon on 14 February 1955. Early in his visit he saw a good deal of Colonel Leroy, who showed him two camps of migrants or ‘déracinés’. One morning he woke to see from his hotel window a ship full of evacuees from the north, and thought of the assurance they had been given, ‘Here is freedom to work’, and wrote in his journal ‘what work?’ When he saw lorries queueing to transfer the new arrivals, he added, ‘Happy the very poor who have such a little way to fall.’ In the face of all this suffering, he was struck by the remark of an Indian member of the International Commission overseeing the implementation of the Geneva Accords: ‘You in the West never realize the power for sacrifice in the East. There is no possibility of a Gandhi in the West – or of a Ho Chi Minh.’4

  Greene learned that some priests had told their parishioners God had gone south and they should follow Him. Certainly, the Americans wanted as many anti-communists as possible to move south, and the American expert in subversion Edward Lansdale was responsible for the distribution of leaflets on the whereabouts of God and the Blessed Virgin.5 The Vietnamese church was divided over whether the migration should have been encouraged, and the bishops of Bui Chu and Phat Diem were criticized for leaving their dioceses. Greene heard of two Dominican friars who, despite belonging to an anti-colonial order, had died in captivity, and he was worried about the fate of his friend Father Willichs, who had heard his confession in the bell tower during the assault on Phat Diem three years before.6

  Greene himself was in some danger. Colonel Leroy sent word that he must not go outside the city, and, especially, he must turn down any invitation from General Tran Van Soai of the Hoa Hao, who was offended by a reference to himself in one of Greene’s articles. The Hoa Hao now had a dossier on Greene, and as Leroy put it, ‘Accidents can always happen.’ Greene thought of how reality was following the plot of his unfinished novel.7

  He was invited to the Cabinet Office for what turned out to be a reception in honour of himself and Father Georges Naidenoff, SJ, an ecclesiastical journalist. Here he met Diem, his brother Nhu, and the flamboyant Madame Nhu, who served as the country’s first lady since Diem was unmarried – later very unpopular, she struck Greene as ‘lovely’, though he did not take to the brothers. Greene got directly to the point and asked Diem about General Thé’s bombings – Greene believed that the Americans had helped Thé mount the attack on the Continental Hotel in Saigon in January 1952, which he made a central event in his novel. Diem merely ‘laughed & continued to laugh for a long time’.8 That month he was under pressure to bring Thé and other generals into his government as the Americans wanted, or to face them in battle as the generals themselves seemed to want.9 He was not going to talk to Greene about this.

  The novelist dined at Nhu’s house and witnessed a sharp exchange between Diem and the American General Joseph Lawton Collins, who had recently negotiated an agreement with the French to take over the training of Vietnamese forces. Although not as well known as his nephew Michael Collins, who flew the lunar module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, ‘Lightning Joe’ did his best to prevent a religious war within South Vietnam. He reported back favourably to Washington on the prospects of the new republic but followed the French line in counselling against support for Diem, in favour of some more conciliatory figure who would share power.10

  The conversation grew hot. Diem declared, ‘We are an independent country.’ Collins returned, ‘Thanks to American aid.’ And Diem concluded, ‘So much the worse.’11 While this was another instance of a foreigner trying to dictate to the Vietnamese, Greene had a surprising sympathy for Collins – a sometime Catholic, the general admitted to embarrassment at a recent visit to Vietnam by the ubiquitous Cardinal Spellman, whose episcopal warmongering would one day win him a rebuke from the Vatican.12 On this visit, Spellman had brandished a large cheque for the relief of refugees and brought out tens of thousands of Catholics at public events – his performance drawing attention to the exclusively Catholic character of Diem’s regime at the very moment it should have been open to broad representation of religious groups.13

  At this dinner, there was also discussion of General Thé’s role – he had accepted a large bribe, but if he did not like the government Diem put together, he was prepared to fight against it as a ‘maquis’.14

  Greene and Leroy were among the guests at a dinner at the house of Tran Van Huu, who had been head of government under Bao Dai. Opposing Diem, he soon went into exile and came to favour the north.15 At this dinner, Greene was struck by the general anti-Americanism and contempt for Diem.16 He also met on more than one occasion the former minister of economics, Tran Van Van, who maintained that it was essential to bring together the various religious groups and create a solid army. This man, too, would eventually go into public opposition to Diem, who had him arrested in 1961.17

  At about the time of Greene’s visit, Diem discontinued subsidies that had been paid to the religious groups as allies in the fight against the Viet Minh and instead bribed individual generals, among them Thé. He also had a confrontation with the Binh Xuyen; a criminal gang based in Cholon, on the west side of the Saigon River, they specialized in gambling and prostitution, and had purchased control of the local Sûreté from Bao Dai as a kind of franchise. This stand-off broke out into a full-scale battl
e in the streets of Saigon in April, killing five hundred civilians and leaving twenty thousand homeless. General Thé joined in the fight against the Binh Xuyen, and his conflict of loyalties was resolved when he was killed by a sniper’s bullet. The battle was almost pointless, except to raise Diem’s profile in the United States as a leader of courage and rectitude, with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson proclaiming him ‘the Churchill of Asia’.18

  Greene wished to visit Singapore, but found that his request for a re-entry permit was just sitting on Diem’s desk – it was a sign of the prime minister’s paranoia that he personally issued visas and travel permits. An application for a permit to go north was also held up.19 For much of his time in Saigon, Greene was obliged to cool his heels between meetings, so apart from photographing refugees, he got to work on ‘The Potting Shed’, the play he had begun in the early summer of 1953.20 He was bothered by how few letters Catherine wrote and commented tellingly in his journal, ‘If only one could be free of this affair and its continual frustrations’, and yet felt better about it when an affectionate letter arrived. He briefly reduced his drinking, but increased his consumption of opium, tallying it up at the end of his stay at 144 pipes over a period of thirty-five days.21

  He met almost daily with Fergus Dempster, an entertaining character from the Elder Dempster shipping family; a former head of station in London, ‘Fergie’ succeeded Maurice Oldfield as Head of Security Intelligence Far East in 1953.22 It is difficult to know what they were doing, but Greene’s visit to Vietnam had a purpose apart from journalism. On 4 March, Fergie hand-delivered a letter from Trevor Wilson, who had had many meetings with Ho Chi Minh,23 and four days later Greene decided to go north. Diem had finally approved his visa.24