The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  70

  STORMING THE PALACE

  ‘If shit was worth money the poor would be born without arses,’1 said Chuchu in August 1978. In his patched-up single-engine Cessna he was flying arms to leftist rebels in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and his gun-running would inspire the conclusion of Greene’s last novel, The Captain and the Enemy. Meanwhile, Torrijos, having won a plebiscite in favour of the treaty in his own country, had cooperated with Jimmy Carter to see it ratified in Washington. It squeaked through the Senate in April, but legislation needed for its implementation was delayed. To promote the treaty, Torrijos had allowed for the return of political exiles, among them the former president Arnulfo Arias, and the re-establishment of political parties. He also received a parade of about fifty American senators and listened to their lectures on how to run a country.2 He doubtless enjoyed the irony of watching them puff cigars with his name on the label – they were a gift from Fidel Castro.

  Graham Greene arrived in Panama for his third visit on 19 August 1978 and would stay for two weeks. He hoped to interview Arias for Time, but the old politician, who was giving speeches comparing Torrijos to Satan, ignored the invitation.3 Greene spent his first evening with Chuchu and Diederich drinking Planter’s punch. Chuchu was worried: he thought the General was drifting from a quiet sympathy with the radical left to a form of social democracy. Greene teased him a little4 – whatever he may have said in certain extreme moments, his own preference was for social democracy; he had looked for its emergence in Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and Chile, and now hoped that Panama, and indeed the whole of Central America, might evolve towards that elusive ideal. Chuchu, the Marxist, wanted politics with more teeth.

  The next day Greene and Diederich flew in Chuchu’s Cessna to the General’s house at Farallon on the Pacific coast. They found him fighting off a fever, but otherwise relaxed. Lying in a hammock, rocking it with one leg, he spoke of his desire to be done with public life; the work on the treaty had tired him. He thought he should set up his own political party and use it to perpetuate his policies, while he himself could retire: ‘What I need is a house, rum and a girl.’5 He was not one to boss his guests around, but on this occasion he did. He believed, correctly, that the civil war in Nicaragua was about to heat up. The rebels had been trying to meet him, and he was keeping them at a distance, since any public sign of his involvement there could derail the legislation for implementing the treaty. He believed the rebels were likely to ask Graham Greene to come on campaign with them in the mountains. The General forbade him to do so, as he did not want him to become a ‘propaganda martyr’.6

  The invitation did come, from Father Ernesto Cardenal. Greene was not at all impressed by the Trappist monk and poet turned revolutionary, whom he met that night at dinner and again at a party the next day. With his flowing white hair, beard, and beret, Cardenal struck Greene as a ‘foolish old priest’ and the very ‘caricature’ of a revolutionary.7 His sense of ‘old’ was off the mark – Cardenal was just fifty-three. According to Diederich, Greene thought little of the Sandinista leadership upon first acquaintance, but gradually warmed to them.8 He did come to respect Cardenal, and took his side when he fell foul of the Vatican: in a visit to Nicaragua in 1983, Pope John Paul II publicly wagged his finger at the kneeling Cardenal, who was by then the Minister of Culture. Greene wrote that the pope was behaving as a politician rather than a priest, precisely the thing for which he was rebuking Cardenal.9 The pope suspended Cardenal’s faculties as a priest, and those of others, over their refusal to resign from the government. His suspension remained in place until Francis I lifted it in February 2019, just a year before his death at the age of ninety-five.10

  The party on 21 August 1978 was held at the house of Ramiro Contreras, the brother of the original Commander ‘Cero’, and it was attended by some leading Sandinistas. If Greene did not initially respect Cardenal, he was impressed by another Nicaraguan, German Pomares Ordoñez – indeed, the party was in honour of his birthday. Sizing him up, Greene remarked that he would trust this man to take him to Nicaragua. A tough, stolid fighter recently released by Honduran authorities at the request of Torrijos, Pomares said that it was not enough to depose Anastasio Somoza if his system remained in place. He believed that the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) must achieve a revolution or win a great victory. Even as he was speaking, such a thing was in the works.11

  When it happened the next day, Graham Greene was looking into pirates. As a child, he had been wild about Long John Silver and Henry Morgan, and throughout his adult life he had tried to walk one plank after another. On this occasion, he went off briefly with Diederich and Chuchu in search of Sir Francis Drake, who had died of dysentery in 1596 after his failure to capture Portobelo, and was buried at sea in full armour inside a lead coffin, further weighted with round-shot so the Spanish would never find his body. A bemused Torrijos provided the requisite helicopter but could make no sense of a grown man going on a quest for ‘El Draque’.

  Had he lived long enough, Greene would have been ecstatic to see the eventual discovery of two of Drake’s scuttled ships in waters off Panama.12 The novelist’s own search took him to Nombre de Dios on the Atlantic side, where the now-overgrown Camino Real or Royal Road across the isthmus had ended and where mules carrying Inca gold shipped from Peru had once trudged. Without the aid of scuba gear or sonar, Greene was relying on old poems and a little research to guide him; when they reached what he supposed was a spot not far from the submerged coffin, he announced to Chuchu and Diederich, in an uncharacteristic expression, that he was feeling mystical ‘vibes’, but the pilots then discovered that they had misread their map and deposited the searchers in entirely the wrong place, so alas the vibes were contradicted. It was in the end a failed search, but a happy one, to which Planter’s punch made all the difference.13 This bit of skylarking might not merit retelling, except that imagery of pirates and of mules transporting gold in Panama is at the heart of The Captain and the Enemy. The little plane running guns to Nicaragua is even called ‘one of the mules’.14

  While Greene was having a siesta after this search, Diederich received a call from his editor telling him to go straight to Managua. Leaving Greene asleep, he went off to cover a huge hostage-taking: the day before (22 August 1978) twenty-four FSLN fighters, under a new Commander Cero, Edén Pastora, had seized the National Palace, which housed the Congress and many government offices, and taken fifteen hundred hostages, including forty-nine deputies. Anastasio Somoza typically did not work at this location, preferring a nearby bunker, so he was not among the captives; however, it was a disaster for him. The guerrillas obtained the release of fifty-nine political prisoners, as well as a cash ransom, and their ‘War Communiqué Number One’, which took 105 minutes to read aloud, was broadcast half a dozen times and published in newspapers.15 A general strike followed, with local uprisings throughout the country. Somoza turned aircraft and tanks on rebellious towns and cities, killing about two thousand people, mostly civilians, by the end of September.16

  Chuchu celebrated the news from Managua by getting drunk, but in so doing cost Greene an extraordinary opportunity. Torrijos had told them to fly to Managua and help evacuate Pastora, his fighters, the freed political prisoners, and some remaining hostages. Chuchu got the arrangements wrong and they missed the flight. The two spent a miserable day drinking rum, but soon the General, himself in a mood to rejoice, sent for them. At a military base Greene met some of those who had flown from Managua, including Edén Pastora, a complicated figure who later turned against the Sandinistas but was eventually reconciled to them, and Tomás Borge, who went on to become the hard-nosed Interior Minister in the Sandinista government.17

  Torrijos now had a job for Greene and Chuchu. He proposed that they go, as his emissaries, north to Belize, formerly British Honduras, which had a Caribbean coast and was neighboured by Guatemala and Mexico. Its population was just 140,000. The British had long accepted that it should be fully independent, bu
t Guatemala wanted to seize it and had, on occasion, massed its forces on the frontier, requiring the British to reinforce its garrison. The previous year, the Foreign Office had botched negotiations with Guatemala by indicating an openness to hand over land, a move likely to encourage a comparable claim by Mexico for its own piece of Belize. The Guatemalans were also demanding control of the territory’s economy, foreign affairs, and military.

  George Price, the premier of Belize and a friend of Torrijos, had conducted a strong international campaign for Belize to be free of Britain and safe from Guatemala, and he especially wanted the British garrison to be switched for a broadly constituted Commonwealth force or one from Latin America. The military regime in Guatemala enjoyed no international support for its claims, and was condemned for its human rights record:18 political murders, disappearances, and torture were commonplace. Just three months before Greene’s visit to the region, Nekchi indigenous people in the Guatemalan town of Panzos had been protesting the loss of their land to oil and nickel interests when soldiers opened fire and killed about 113 men, women, children, and babies.19 Belize had every reason to be afraid of the regime in Guatemala.

  Greene found himself ‘charmed’ by Belize City, where houses stood on posts seven feet high, and all around was mangrove swamp. The city had been battered by a hurricane in 1961 and was always threatened by the sea: ‘Perhaps the charm comes from the temporary, of the precarious, of living on the edge of destruction’. He could understand the interest Torrijos had in this vulnerable place, which belonged, as the General himself did, to ‘a world of confrontation with superior powers, of the dangers and uncertainties of what the next day would bring’.20 This too was Greeneland.

  At first, Greene thought George Price all too ingratiating, almost ‘servile’, but then he realized that here was a truly humble man. Educated by Jesuits, he had tried to become a priest, but then his father died and he had to support his family. He remained celibate and was a daily communicant, and, as Diederich recalled, was so frugal with public funds that he would not take taxis but always went on the bus.21 He had read Greene’s works and once sent him a letter about a short story – Greene could not remember this letter but was glad to learn that he had responded. The two spoke of the theologians Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Küng, and about the works of Thomas Mann.

  Price took them in an old black Land Rover to the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich, where the atheist Chuchu hedged his bets and spent some time calling to his ancestors – unsuccessfully, as it turned out. They drove on to the frontier, where Price cheerfully walked into Guatemalan territory and talked to customs officials as old friends. On the way back, he gave lifts to those on foot, and when he waved to people Greene thought he saw in the gesture a priest’s blessing.22

  Of course, not everybody loved George Price. He was a democratic socialist, and his conservative opponents wanted the British simply to stay in Belize. A report appeared in the opposition press about ‘ “the so-called writer called Green” [sic] who had been sent by the Communist Torrijos to see his fellow-Communist Price for reasons which were unknown and certainly sinister’.23 There was not a great deal Greene could do for Price. As discussions dragged on concerning the final status of the colony, in August 1980 he wrote a letter to The Times arguing against territorial concessions and defending Price from the accusation that he was a communist.24 It took another year, but Belize did win its independence, and Price invited Greene in ‘gratitude’ to attend the national ceremonies on 21 September 1981. Greene was ‘touched and honoured’ by the invitation, but by then he was so involved in a private war against the mafia in Nice he could not make the journey.25

  In that summer of 1978, Greene and Chuchu carried out another important errand for Torrijos, this time in Costa Rica, which, like Panama, had given discreet support to Nicaraguan rebels. Chuchu himself had flown weapons to locations along the border. On this occasion, he was to meet two Sandinista leaders, a man and a woman, at a café in the capital, San José. Greene made small talk with the woman, whom he remembered meeting at the pigeon house the year before. This was the poet Rosario Murillo, who would go on to become vice-president of Nicaragua. At another table, Chuchu did business with ‘a tall, dark, serious man’ who was not identified to Greene; he later learned that this was Murillo’s future husband, Daniel Ortega, who would become the dominant figure in Nicaraguan politics for over forty years.26 The couple certainly seemed heroic in the 1970s and 80s, leaders in a rebellion that disposed of a dictator who did not hesitate to rain shells and rockets onto villages.

  Through the closing months of 1978, Bernard Diederich’s life was constantly in danger as he documented atrocities in Nicaragua. At fifty-two, he was now a veteran war reporter, and, as he told Greene, he had seen never seen anything to match the carnage of Nicaragua.27 He strongly approved of the Sandinista cause. And yet, in 2019, a ninety-three-year-old Diederich, by then in the last months of his life, would remark, ‘We are all disappointed, terribly sad’; there was ‘no excuse’ for the conduct of Ortega and Murillo, who were ‘just power hungry’.28

  Ortega and Murillo were clinging to power much as Anastasio Somoza had once done: by sheer repression. In 1994, Ernesto Cardenal broke with them as dictators; in a Spanish pun on theft, he said they were not running a revolution but a ‘robo-lucion’.29 Things would get much worse. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that in suppressing protests beginning on 18 April 2018, the regime had been guilty of 325 deaths, amounting to a ‘crime against humanity’.30 Many of those protesting against Ortega and Murillo had once been their staunch supporters31 – the couple had abandoned the ideals of the old movement. In Diederich’s more pointed phrase, they had ‘gone to hell’.32

  At the time, Greene looked upon the Sandinistas, quite reasonably, as a force for democracy and economic fairness, and he believed that their struggle could loosen America’s grip on the region. But he would have had to change his thinking as time passed. He had done so with respect to Cuba once he fully understood how opponents of the regime, religious outsiders, and homosexuals were being abused. Likewise, he would have been distressed by the conduct of former friends in Nicaragua. However, he was intellectually prepared for such things. He had once spoken of his own duty in ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’, a lecture given in Hamburg in 1969: ‘ . . . the writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change.’33

  71

  THE BOMB PARTY

  There was something about the Christmas crackers. It was 1978, and Greene was eating Christmas dinner with Caroline and her sons in Jongny, the Swiss village where she now lived. It was then, he said, that the idea for Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party came to him.1 Dr Fischer, an immensely wealthy manufacturer of toothpaste, holds dinners at which he tries to see how much humiliation people not quite as rich as himself will bear to get an expensive present from him; at one dinner he makes his guests choke down cold porridge. At his last, he goes much further and devises a game comparable to Russian roulette involving Christmas crackers: five contain large cheques, one is said to contain a bomb, and they must be drawn out of a bran tub. Will his guests play the game?

  Seeing the Christmas crackers on Caroline’s table probably reminded Greene of something from childhood reading. William Le Queux’s novel Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England became a bestseller in 1909 by claiming that the Germans had planted an army of spies in England, and the book was popular for years afterwards. In its last chapter, German agents attempt to kill two patriotic characters with exploding Christmas crackers.2 He had certainly read Le Queux as he alludes to him in The Ministry of Fear.

  Greene’s book is not a thriller – it is a fantasy in some ways reminiscent of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Greene is not writing about ghosts, but he is evoking an atmosphere of evil and the book has supernatural overtones, with Dr Fischer often compared to God or to Satan. He is testing out how
much suffering a certain kind of person will bear for a reward, and the exercise has parallels with what the Christian God is thought to do. The narrator is Alfred Jones, a translator for a Swiss chocolate manufacturer. The chocolate causes tooth decay, which Fischer’s toothpaste counteracts, an ironic parallel to sin and grace. Jones marries Fischer’s estranged daughter and gets drawn into his cruel dinners, which resemble hateful sacraments. The daughter, Anna-Luise, is killed in a skiing accident, and Jones longs for his own death; indeed, he throws off Fischer’s last experiment somewhat by seeking the explosive cracker for himself. When Fischer takes his own life, Jones is left to envy his courage, though he allows that Fischer now has no more significance than a dead dog.

  If Doctor Fischer of Geneva takes up, in a grim allegory, the ideas of The Honorary Consul, it focuses only on the darkness of God, what Father Rivas called the ‘night-side’, and offers little hope of evolution. In this respect, the book is extraordinarily bitter. However, there is another element here. Jones has lost his much-loved wife and has struck up a friendship with a man named Steiner, who once fell in love with her mother, Fischer’s wife, now also dead. Steiner hates Fischer for his treatment of himself and of the woman, with whom he only listened to music: ‘We were never really lovers, but he made innocence dirty. Now I want to get near enough to him to spit in God Almighty’s face.’ The book is a study of grief, as Jones puts it: ‘I saw the continuous straight falling of the snow as though the world had ceased revolving and lay becalmed at the centre of a blizzard.’3

  This novel has an inescapable personal context. Greene’s relationship with Catherine Walston had made impossible any lasting relationship with another woman in the 1950s, and it was certainly an intolerable complication for Anita Björk. When he took up with Yvonne Cloetta, he made the necessary decision, however slowly, to disengage from Catherine. She remained married to Harry and pursued other relationships, but came to regard Graham’s distance, his infrequent, dictated letters, his avoidance of her, as a betrayal.