The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Across the Dominican border, Diederich had learned of Greene’s visit to Haiti from Jolicoeur’s column. He had not actually seen the novelist in about seven years, and was surprised to get a visit from him. Greene appeared at the airport with little luggage, but he was carrying a painting by the Haitian artist Philippe-Auguste, which he had purchased with his winnings from the nearly deserted casino. That picture of a religious procession illustrated his article, ‘The Nightmare Republic’, for the Sunday Telegraph, and indeed he treasured it for the rest of his life. He recounted for Diederich what had happened while he was in Haiti, and spoke of his frustration at not seeing the border. Diederich proposed a journey there which they took in January 1965. For years afterwards, Greene dreamt about the terrors of Haiti. As he put it to Diederich on this occasion, ‘I thought I was doomed to stay . . . I felt something was going to happen. I was so sure of it.’44

  57

  STATUES AND PIGEONS

  ‘Graham Greene’s new play at the Haymarket is possibly the worst play by a reputable dramatist that I have ever seen. I cannot think why H. M. Tennent and Donald Albery wanted to put it on, why Sir Ralph Richardson and Roland Culver were prepared to appear in it, why Peter Wood wanted to direct it or why Mr Greene ever let it loose outside his study. The story is banal, the development inept, the characterisation is perfunctory and the observations about God (the play is about God) are more excruciatingly naïve than I would have thought possible this side of the Arian heresy. The play is called Carving a Statue . . . ’1

  That was one way of putting it. It is the story of a very bad sculptor who has spent fifteen years carving a mammoth statue of God. He sacrifices to his meagre talent all human intimacy and warmth – ignoring his son and debauching the boy’s girlfriend. For the most part he just hangs in the air from a harness, worrying about his statue. Greene meant the play to be funny – another farce – even though the jokes were so grim and subtle as to escape notice. His sculptor was conceived as a modern version of Benjamin Robert Haydon, who specialized in grandiose historical and religious subjects, such as his 12′ 6″ × 15′ rendering of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem – it required a 600-pound frame and now hangs in a seminary in Ohio. Haydon eventually killed himself.2

  Begun in Mexico while he waited for a long-delayed flight to Cuba, Greene worked on the play through the autumn and had a draft completed by 13 December 1963,3 after which he made a two-week journey to report for the Sunday Times on the formerly Portuguese territory of Goa, a Catholic enclave annexed by India in 1961. On his return, he made some improvements and waited to see if a producer was interested. Binkie Beaumont of H. M. Tennent read the script by 12 March 1963 and decided to put it into production.4 Greene and Beaumont initially hoped that John Gielgud would direct Paul Scofield as the sculptor. Neither was available, so Peter Wood directed Ralph Richardson, with the part of the boy played by Dennis Waterman.

  As the rehearsals progressed that summer, Greene and Richardson disagreed about the play, as they had disagreed about The Complaisant Lover. Richardson thought Carving a Statue was about the nature of God, while Greene thought it should be played for laughs. Sensing in it something of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, Richardson did not see any irony in the profusion of overblown symbols of Father, Son, and Blessed Virgin. It opened in Brighton and the local theatre critics tore it apart. Greene immediately wrote a letter to Richardson, essentially a rant into his Dictaphone, accusing the actor of laziness, obstinacy, and the ‘vanity of an ageing “star” ’.5 Richardson himself could be bloody-minded: he had recently punched Alec Guinness in the jaw without obvious provocation during the filming of Doctor Zhivago.6 He stuck with his interpretation of the sculptor’s part, and when the play opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 17 September 1964, most reviewers dismissed it as wordy, portentous, and tiresome. It closed at the end of October. Although they made peace for the sake of the play, Greene and Richardson never worked together again.

  If the play proved a ‘nightmare’,7 Greene was confident about his new novel. The writing took off in April 1964, and at that time he gave it the title ‘Les Comédiens’ – other working titles were ‘The Dissemblers’ and ‘A Man of Extremes’;8 he finally settled on The Comedians. Just as the crushing reviews of the play came in, he was able to report to Marie Biche that the novel, approaching fifty thousand words, was about half finished.9

  It was, however, difficult for him to undertake further research for the novel. Now a known enemy of the regime in Haiti, he could no longer go there, so he decided instead to visit the Dominican Republic. He spent Christmas with Caroline in Montreal and then went on to New York. His flight to Santo Domingo on 1 January 1965 made a stop in Port-au-Prince, which caused him some unease10 since there was a remote chance that the Tontons Macoutes would pull him off the plane and exact their revenge for what he had said in ‘The Nightmare Republic’. Nothing happened, and he was met in Santo Domingo by Diederich, who now assumed a key role for Greene; as he has described in his memoir of the novelist, for the next twenty-six years he served as Greene’s guide to Central America.

  Diederich’s life had changed. Having lost his newspaper, he could no longer report from within Haiti, though he had sources there and continued to write for American news agencies.11 He sympathized with the rebel bands training in the Dominican Republic, preparing for forays into Haiti, so gave what supplies he could, including an expensive handgun, to one group called the Kamoken, led by Fred Baptiste, a former schoolmaster from Jacmel, and his brother Renel. Diederich took Greene to their training camp in a disused insane asylum, which had recently been inhabited by goats. In an adjoining pasture was a herd of zebras once owned by the dictator Trujillo. Fred Baptiste was desperate for weapons and supplies, and hoped that Greene could help obtain them. All the novelist could do was leave a small cash donation, which was spent on the purchase of some chickens. A rebel band modelled on this one makes a gallant attack on the Tontons Macoutes at the end of The Comedians. Greene remained in touch with the Baptiste brothers for several years and continued to seek news of them after they were captured in 1970 and taken to Fort Dimanche. Eventually, he issued a public appeal on their behalf,12 sponsored by Amnesty International and composed by the journalist Greg Chamberlain, only to learn a little later that both brothers had died of tuberculosis in prison, and that by the end Fred had gone insane.13

  The main purpose of Greene’s visit in January 1965 was to see the long, dangerous border between the two countries, which generally followed the track of rivers or wound among mountains. Over two days, they travelled in Diederich’s chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle along with Jean-Claude Bajeux, an exiled priest and activist whose family had recently disappeared at the hands of the Tontons Macoutes; this heartsore man provided the model for the priest who, in the novel, preaches against indifference at the funeral of Jones and the other rebels, taking as his text the saying of Thomas the Doubter: ‘Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him.’

  Travelling from the north, their first important stop was at the frontier bridge over the Rio Dajabón, known as the Massacre River after a seventeenth-century bloodbath. Greene and Diederich went out towards the yellow line at the centre of the bridge, snapping photographs, but were warned by Dominican soldiers that Haitians hidden on the other side had their weapons trained on them. There had been a significant skirmish here in September 1963, when a band of rebels retreating from their attack on a barracks came under heavy fire as they crossed back into Dominican territory. The place had an even uglier history. Along this river in 1937, soldiers under orders from Trujillo had killed what some have estimated as up to twenty thousand Haitians; they were rounded up and required to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley, ‘perejil’, and if they had the wrong accent and were black they were killed.

  In the middle part of the journey, they drove on the neglected International Road, a place where some of Papa Doc’s most violent henchmen operated, and where the Volkswagen was the sole target in
the landscape. At several points, Greene thought he had spotted Tontons Macoutes, but he was wrong, and one of his sightings turned out to be no more than a guinea hen. At Las Matas de Fanfan, they went to a house of American Redemptorists, the order that once specialized in Hell sermons. Greene wanted to avoid theological discussion with such men, so it was agreed that he be introduced as ‘Mr White’. It didn’t work. He was instantly recognized, either from a photograph on a book jacket or because word of his visit had reached the priests on the ecclesiastical grapevine, which Greene often compared to an intelligence service. The priests greeted them warmly but had no room for them, so they went to a nearby hotel, where they were obliged by a Trujillo-era regulation to specify their skin colour in order to check in. Greene was outraged, so wrote ‘pink’ on the card. Diederich followed suit with ‘black’ and Bajeux with ‘purple’.

  Their journey then took them along tracks in the mountains, where the car was in frequent danger of sliding off precipices. Diederich recalls that Greene grew very affable as the trip went on, though unhelpful as he ignored requests to get out of the car whenever it needed to be lightened to get past a particularly rough patch.

  At the southern end of the border, near Pedernales, Diederich had a supposed friend who managed a bauxite facility for Alcoa and who had often invited him to visit. However, when they got to the gates, the man tried at first to get rid of them, before grudgingly allowing them in. He found them some dry sandwiches, and when Greene enquired about whisky he grimly provided each with a single shot. Greene got his revenge by portraying him as the miserable Schuyler Wilson, who refuses to give the exile Brown a job.

  Greene went back to Europe and had a draft of a novel just about finished by the end of April 1965, when a violent coup took place in the Dominican Republic. Forces loyal to the deposed president Juan Bosch, a socialist, sought to restore him to office. President Lyndon Johnson sent in thousands of Marines to protect American citizens and property, and to support the junta opposed to Bosch. After much killing, the conservative Joaquín Balaguer took power with Johnson’s blessing. Greene judged that the Americans wanted to preserve the Dominican Republic as a place from which Cuban exiles could conduct raids like ‘pin-pricks’ when larger operations against Castro were impossible.14 He had planned his novel to have a peaceful last chapter set in the Dominican Republican, but had to reshape his ending in May to account for the violence.15

  Greene did not often create major characters who were wholly admirable – Dr Colin in A Burnt-Out Case is a rare example – but he did so again in The Comedians. The Marxist Dr Magiot, a cardiologist and patriot, becomes a father figure to the hotel owner Brown, whose adult life has been a succession of scams, and he encourages him to make a new commitment. Greene later told Diederich that the character was based on Camille Lhérisson, Haiti’s most distinguished physician, who had been educated at McGill and Harvard. He served, briefly, as a cabinet minister during the Magloire administration and later as a representative to UNESCO. He was also a philosopher and had once hosted a conference in Haiti, which attracted the pre-eminent Catholic philosopher of the time, Jacques Maritain, who then encouraged Greene to meet Lhérisson on one of his visits to Haiti in the 1950s. Greene admired his bearing, dignity, and intelligence. According to Diederich, there were some things that he did not understand about Lhérisson – he was not, as he thought, a ‘noir’, but belonged to the mixed-race elite of Haiti, something he prided himself on, and his views were right wing.16 Lhérisson died at sixty-two, as an exile in New York on 31 December 1965,17 just before the novel was released. Had he lived, he would doubtless have been annoyed at what Greene’s imagination had made of him.

  For the first time in his career, Greene, in The Comedians, had portrayed the intelligentsia of a formerly colonial society. The existence of such groups is implicit in The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana, but they are marginal. In this book, Greene figured out how to make them central to the story – not only is Magiot a man of learning, but the young rebel Philipot is a poet, and the book is replete with sadness at how the days (and nights) of Duvalier have crushed a Haitian renaissance. As Philipot remarks, ‘Our novelists are published in Paris – and now they live there too.’18 Again, Greene faced the ethical and aesthetic challenge that lies behind A Burnt-Out Case. If he wrote in the character of Magiot or Philipot, he would be out of his depth, and indeed guilty of what is now called appropriation of voice. He would have to begin with what he knew.

  The book opens with four white characters, who are presented as little more than masks: Brown, Jones, and the two Smiths in a ship called the Medea. The narrator, Brown, is a crook – he has been involved in forging art. Returning to Haiti after a visit to New York, he thinks of little but his affair with Martha, the wife of a diplomat, and his failing hotel, where a former cabinet minister, the uncle of the rebel leader, has killed himself: ‘ . . . the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief.’19 As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the troubles of the white people simply don’t matter in comparison to the oppression all around them. To make this point, Greene again uses the technique of a play within a play. Even the title of the book points to this structural element: the French word comédien has a broader reference than its English cognate and means an actor:20 to become authentic, one must risk involvement. Brown thinks of his mother’s lover Marcel who hangs himself once she has died, ‘ . . . perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity.’21

  One of the main characters, Jones, is an amiable con man, and Greene afterwards maintained that he was based on the financial adviser Tom Roe, something that would have required him to have very early misgivings about the man.22 The piggery business in Fife collapsed in November 1964; Greene told Francis that he feared his savings had been wiped out, but Roe sent him a soothing letter that briefly relieved his worries.23 The book was half finished by then. A draft of the novel was completed in May,24 and Roe’s arrest did not occur until July. The character of Jones must have existed before Greene knew the whole truth about Roe; however, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that while writing the second half of the book he feared he was dealing with a thief.

  Although Greene hoped that his book would injure the regime, he was under no illusion that it would topple a dictator. Indeed, one theme in the book is whether art can ever bring about political change, as so many of the rebels in the book begin as poets and artists. In the first paragraph, Brown speaks of statues raised in London to politicians who stood for free trade or perhaps the Ashanti War, while to the pigeons none of it makes any difference. Brown considers what memorial can be raised to Jones and the rebels. He quotes a phrase from the Odes of Horace, ‘Exegi monumentum’ – translated, the whole sentence would be ‘I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze.’

  At the end of the story, Brown becomes involved in the struggle, not as a soldier, but as an undertaker – that is, an agent of memory. Auden famously wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’.25 For Greene, however, remembrance is a political act: the revolutionary work of this novel is to remember the obscure dead and name truthfully what killed them.

  58

  THE NEW LIFE

  ‘Today I have been cleaning drawers, destroying letters, preparing for the new life . . . So many letters have shown me how good & sweet & patient people have been to me. If only I’d been as good to other people.’1 So wrote Graham Greene to Yvonne Cloetta on 6 November 1965. He had made a firm decision to become a resident of France, where he was already spending most of his time. His move was motivated by a desire to be near to her, by exasperation with the British tax regime, and by worries about his health. Other things contributed to his willingness to leave England, including the death from cancer of his much-loved ‘daily’, Mrs Cordery, which Greene felt keenly; she made breakfast for him and
he was attached to her company.

  He held a farewell dinner for the Sutros, the Reinhardts, and his secretary Josephine Reid at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair. It was a melancholy evening, and while he was away from the table Reid broke down in tears and left, saying ‘Tell [him] I’ll be at the station tomorrow morning.’2

  Greene’s residency in France took effect from 1 January 1966, just as he was being named a Companion of Honour in the New Year Honours List. He had turned down a CBE in 1956,3 but this more significant honour he accepted. In a peculiar irony, the distinction was being conferred by a country which, for tax reasons, he was not supposed to put his foot in for at least a year. His visit to Buckingham Palace on 11 March 1966 to be invested with the insignia was an exception, as even the Inland Revenue knew better than to tangle with the Queen.

  In France, Greene went first to his flat in Paris, but then spent much of the following months at the Hôtel de la Mer in Antibes,4 as Yvonne lived near by in Juan-les-Pins. The affair had assumed something like permanence. In 1964, there had been a crisis in Yvonne’s marriage and she considered breaking with the often-absent Jacques, and at the time Graham wrote a letter to Jacques explaining the situation between himself and Yvonne, but it is not known whether he ever sent it. She was worried about the effect of a separation on her two daughters, so Greene told her he wanted her to live with him but only if she could do so without regrets.5 It never came to that and the marriage continued; however, Jacques seems to have accepted Graham’s role in Yvonne’s life and the two men occasionally socialized together.