The Seeds of Fiction (2 page)

Graham walks into Haiti, 1965 Fr Jean-Claude Bajeux at the Haitian border, 1965

Graham and Fr Jean-Claude Bajeux with Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River, 1965

The Hotel Brisas Massacre de Mariav de Rodriguez in the town of Restauración, Dominican Republic

Graham and Fr Jean-Claude Bajeux on the Bridge at Dajabón over the Massacre River, 1965

Graham photographs Haiti from no man's land, 1965

Bernard Diederich changes a tyre on his Volkswagen, 1965

The cover of
Graham Greene Démasqué,
Papa Doc's case against Graham following publication of
The Comedians

Poster for the 1967 film adaptation of
The Comedians

The film of
The Comedians
is finally shown in Haiti in 1986

General Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian leader, in the countryside with his people

Torrijos in Panama City

Graham and Torrijos getting to know one another on Contadora Island, Panama, in 1976

Graham and Bernard Diederich with rum punches on Contadora Island, 1976

Graham on the Panama Canal train, 1976

Graham at Cristóbal railway station, Panama, 1976

Graham fumbles with his camera, Cristóbal railway station, 1976

Graham and Bernard Diederich in the grounds of the Hotel George Wasington, Colon, Panama, 1976

Graham at the Panama Canal with Chuchu, 1978

Graham at Torrijos's house at Farallon, Panama, 1978

Graham and Chuchu searching for evidence of Sir Francis Drake at Portobelo, Panama, 1978

Graham resting in an Indian village, Panama, 1978

Graham and Chuchu flying to Torrijos's house at Farallon, 1978

Graham and Chuchu in a market in Panama City, 1980, waiting to meet Salvadoran guerrilla Salvador Cayetano Carpio to help arrange the release of the kidnapped South African ambassador Archibald Gardner Dunn

Graham is honoured by the Panamanian President Ricardo de la Espriella, 1983

Graham recieves the Order of Rubén Darío in Nicaragua, 1987

Bernard Diederich with Aubelin Jolicoeur, the model for the character of Petit Pierre in
The Comedians,
Port-au-Prince, 1986

A painting of Baby Doc in the toilet at Graham's Antibes apartment

Graham with his pen and midday martini, Antibes, 1989

Graham with Bernard Diederich the last time they met, 1989

Graham and Yvonne Cloetta in Antibes

Bernard Diederich, Yvonne Cloetta and Max Reinhardt at Graham's memorial service, Westminster Abbey, London, 1991

Yvonne Cloetta at Graham's grave, Vevey, Switzerland

Jean-Claude Bajeux lecturing on Graham's work, Port-au-Prince, 1995

Bernard Diederich giving a presentation during the Graham Greene International Festival, Berkhamsted School, UK, 2001

Bernard Diederich was already a legend when I joined the staff of
Time
magazine in 1982. In those days, some writers — those seasoned, fearless foreign correspondents such as Bernie — actually travelled the globe covering the news, while the rest of us (bookish neophytes like myself) sat in little offices in Mid-town Manhattan and drew on our expert colleagues' reports to produce the compressed pieces that appeared in the magazine.
Time
's roving band of reporters were themselves the stuff of many a wild rumour, some of them former spies, others the lovers of princesses and all of them responsible for traversing the world at a time when the magazine was more or less the globe's deining news source.

Even by
Time
standards, though, Bernie stood out. He looked like Hemingway, I was told, and knew more about Haiti than any foreigner alive. He had some of Hemingway's glamour in his life, too, having run away from home to join a four-master in his teens and then started a newspaper in Haiti, before being sent to prison by ‘Papa Doc' Duvalier. In my early years at the magazine Bernie was constantly sending dispatches from Nicaragua and El Salvador, both in the middle of bitter civil wars then; when Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983 Bernie, already in his fifties, was the one correspondent who somehow commandeered a boat to take him to the island where the action was taking place. I was deputed to condense and rewrite his vivid eyewitness account, as was the unbudging custom then, until our top editor saw Bernie's version and said, ‘Run every word just the way he had it!'

Apart from all this, Bernie was celebrated as the trusted friend of Graham Greene, a man not known for his love of
Time
magazine (he included mischievous digs in at least three of his major novels) and a writer clearly suspicious of journalists, whose errors he loved to enumerate. Anyone reading
The Quiet American
or many other of Greene's works will note that the only characters who are always treated unsympathetically in them are journalists — a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that Greene was a rigorous and precise observer himself and, having witnessed the news everywhere from Cuba to Vietnam, had little patience for those correspondents too lazy or ill-informed to do justice to it.

In spite of all that, however, there was Bernie, invoked with warmth and respect in Greene's book on Panama. Greene often referred to him as his source and guide through the thickets of Central America and Haiti. They'd met
thirty years before, I gathered, and after that Bernie had earned his way into that select, very small band of Greene companions that all the rest of us dreamed of and envied. For the many who regarded Greene as perhaps the shrewdest and most soulful chronicler of the world's conflicts in the years between 1950 and 1980, the man who was Greene's guide had something of the air of a writer's John the Baptist.

I never met Greene, though, like anyone who travels, I felt he caught the sensation of being a foreigner alone, in a treacherous turmoil, as he caught the particulars of Port-au-Prince, Hanoi, Asunción and Havana, as well as anyone I'd read. Again and again, setting foot in the Hotel Oloffson or walking through Saigon's streets after midnight, I felt Greene shadowing me almost as if I were his creation; and again and again, I read books by Paul Theroux and John Banville, by Gloria Emerson and Alan Judd, that were so haunted by Greene that I could well understand why
Time,
in its obituary of him in 1991, had written, ‘No serious writer of the century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination.'

When I began to write about Greene, I turned to only two people at first: his niece Louise Dennys and his famous travelling companion (much lauded by Louise) Bernie Diederich. One stormy night in 1995, just before the events described at the end of this book, I met Bernie near his home in Coral Gables, and he gave me a perfect illustration of why Greene had found him perfect company: he was friendly, relaxed, full of professional details and enormous fun, as he shared his adventures, with or without Greene, over many decades. Later, when I wrote a whole book about Greene, the only three writers I consulted were Paul Theroux and Michael Mewshaw, both of whom had been taken up by Greene as young protégés of a kind, and Bernie. As he described to me Greene's ‘long stride', the evenings they'd spent in Panama and Antibes, how loyal and kind a friend Greene had been, I could see how the loyalty and kindness ran in both directions. Greene did not open himself up to many — and he liked to keep his own counsel, I suspect — but in Bernie he found someone whose courage he could look up to and whose practical on-the-ground, unideological wisdom he could trust.

For me Bernie Diederich is the closest I'll ever get to Graham Greene and the perfect introduction to the brand of close, undeluded, adventurous reportage that made Greene the trench-coated hero of so many. And what moves me, too — and what comes across so well in these pages — is that, unlike many others, Bernie never cashed in on his friendship with the famous author or took cheap shots at him after his death. He barely seems even to have quarrelled with a man who had a gift for picking ights even with those closest to him, although he never denies that there were moments when he was taken aback, even slightly disappointed, by his friend.

What he gives us instead is an unusually vivid, intimate, often exciting account of Greene on the road. We feel the writer's celebrated impatience in these pages, his keen-eyed curiosity, and we witness, as if we were sitting in the back of Bernie's beaten-up VW, the wild ups and downs of Greene's moods. We can hear his inimitable cadences, see the tears of laughter in his eyes as things take a tragic-comic turn, register how the great lover of paradox was now consulting his horoscope in the papers and now complaining that the papers never got anything right. Greene trusted Bernie, you can tell, not just because he was such good and informative company but because he would turn his professional eye on everywhere he knew and give an evocative and knowledgeable description of it, without agenda or presumptuous theory.

Bernie Diederich was celebrated among us at
Time
as the man who had worked at a casino, served in the war and married a legendary Haitian beauty before raising one son who became a seasoned photojournalist and another who became a writer. But it wasn't the drama of his life that made him a cherished correspondent so much as the accuracy and clarity of his reporting. I'm reminded of this every time I watch Greene here pulling out his tiny Minox camera or describing how he loves the Ritz in Piccadilly because everything goes wrong there. And for those of us who've felt Greene lead us into the most essential questions of good and bad, there's something deeply haunting about hearing him say he doesn't believe in hell as he and Bernie bump along the Haitian border (with a priest) or coming to visible life at the prospect of an ambush and sudden danger.

Yvonne Cloetta, Greene's companion for his last thirty-two years, gave us in her memoir an enduring description of the private man, confiding his fears and beliefs to a lover; the priest Leopoldo Duran has shown us Greene in his later years, tooling around Spain with his clerical friend in a spirit of fun and theological enquiry. Bernie Diederich gives us here the final and perhaps most important piece of the puzzle, an indelible portrait of the novelist at work, taking everything in, treating the dark streets as his confessional, intuitively reading those who cross his path even as they vie to become characters in the next Graham Greene novel. As Diederich points out, Greene could combine, almost in the same breath, the ‘boyish exuberance' of the lifelong adventurer and the watchful, penetrating gaze of a man who was taken in by very little.

When I put down the pages you hold in your hand I felt that I had myself travelled with the man who lives on in so many of us and felt the warmth of his fond, but always unsparing, glance.

Pico Iyer
Author of
The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me
2012

This story about Graham Greene begins in the high tops of the
Pamir.
The vessel's arrangement of sails and ropes would have made perfect sense to Drake or to Nelson, but its hull and its four masts were made of steel — the ship belonged to two ages. One of its sailors was Bernard Diederich, a sixteen-year-old New Zealander who had quit school and family to sail across the Pacific in the majestic barque.

Diederich went on to serve the rest of the Second World War aboard an armed American tanker fuelling the Pacific war machine. The young sailor came ashore in more ports than I can imagine and saw for himself what Greene called ‘the dangerous edge of things' — outposts of the modern age where greed and cruelty made no effort to hide themselves. Diederich was himself a mixture of old-fashioned virtues — courage, endurance and a sense of justice — all of them toughened by the demands of his life at sea. In the years that lay ahead his work would put him in the position of Conrad's Marlow — reporting on things seen in ‘the heart of darkness'.

In 1949 Diederich decided to make his home in Haiti where he established his own newspaper, the
Haiti Sun,
and worked as a resident correspondent for the
New York Times
and other news agencies. In those days Haiti was free of crime and promised to become a paradise for tourists. The country had memories of freedom going back to the revolt of 1791 when Toussaint L'Ouverture led slaves to overthrow their colonial masters. Despite an American occupation from 1915 to 1934, Haiti was a democracy in the 1950s. As a newsman covering the visit of a celebrity, Diederich met Greene briefly in 1954 and then became much closer to him on a second visit in 1956 when Greene brought with him his mistress Catherine Walston, the inspiration for Sarah in
The End of the Affair.

That was the last of the good years in Haiti. In 1957 François ‘Papa Doc' Duvalier, a quiet and mannerly physician, took power and began to transform the country on psychopathic principles. He promoted a myth of terror based on elements of the Voodoo religion. Diederich tells us he became known as the
zombificateur,
the zombie-maker. His henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, robbed, beat, tortured, abducted or killed thousands of his real and supposed opponents. The rest of the world paid little attention to events in this obscure
country, and the United States was disinclined to act for fear that Duvalier might be replaced by another Castro. It was impossible for his victims to regard Papa Doc as a ‘lesser evil'.

By 1963 the butchery in Haiti became widely known, largely owing to Diederich's reporting. The regime decided that he, too, was an enemy. He was arrested and locked in solitary confinement while it was decided whether to kill him. He was cut off from his Haitian wife and young son — both of them now likely targets for the Tontons Macoutes. (This can be spelt several ways. In
The Comedians
Greene writes Tontons Macoute; I prefer Macoutes for the plural.)

His printing plant, his office and all his files were destroyed. In the end he was bundled on to an aircraft and expelled from the country. His wife, moving adroitly, was able to join him in the Dominican Republic. From there, he continued his reporting on the massacres.