The Seeds of Fiction (20 page)

Father Bajeux, our melancholy travelling companion during the three-day border trip, enters Graham's novel as the Haitian refugee-priest who says Mass at the Franciscan church in Santo Domingo. Father Bajeux and I had told Graham about the Mass said by Bajeux on 27 April 1964 in memory of those killed during the bloody repression in Haiti the year before. After Mass the Kamoken had posed for their photograph together outside the church. Towards the end of
The Comedians
Philipot leads his dishevelled troops from the lunatic asylum to attend another Mass, this one for Joseph, limping no more from Concasseur's blows, and for Jones, ‘whose beliefs were not known' but who ‘was included out of courtesy'. Besides the guerrilla survivors there are Brown,
Martha and her family. In the sermon the priest, a liberationist, condemns the indifference of the Browns of the world as evil. Graham's description fits Bajeux: ‘a young man of Philipot's age with the light skin of a métis'.

Thus Graham was continually questioning faith, ideology and human behaviour. Shortly after
The Comedians
was published the Roman Catholic Church fell into a state of ferment, especially in Latin America, and 1968 was the year of the Second Vatican Council. The age-old image of the implacable, intolerant and inflexible Catholic Church was being buffeted by the winds of social change. The bishops of Latin America had met in Medellín, Colombia, and promised to sever the Church's centuries-long alliance with the region's military and entrenched élites. Graham was well aware of these events and was devoted to Pope John XXIII, the most popular pontiff in the century.

Graham had written in his foreword:

A word about the characters of
The Comedians.
I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume — I know it from experience — that an ‘I' is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant's wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don't wish to add to my chameleon-nature characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth and an education by the Jesuits. Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene … It is often forgotten that, even in the case of a novel laid in England, the story, when it contains more than ten characters, would lack verisimilitude if at least one of them were not a Catholic. Ignorance of this fact of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a provincial air.

I' is not the only imaginary character: none of the others, from such minor players as the British chargé to the principals, has ever existed. A physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote — they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases.

Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are not invented … The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur; the interrupted funeral is drawn from fact; many a Joseph limps the streets of Port-au-Prince after his spell of torture, and, though I have never met the young Philipot, I have met guerrillas as courageous and as ill-trained in that former lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo. Only in Santo Domingo have things changed since I began this book — for the worse.

The few Haitians privileged to read the book were eager to identify the players. I myself was increasingly persuaded that Brown, the principal character and narrator, was a composite, blending together slight resemblances to several real-life individuals, including the Hotel Oloffson's American operator at the time of Graham's 1963 visit. This Caribbean entrepreneur appeared blithely uncommitted as far as Papa Doc's dictatorship was concerned and seemed to care only about the effects of media reports on the country's tourism and specifically his clientele. And, in spite of Graham's sweeping disclaimer, other characters in the book brought to mind certain actual people and settings. ‘Major' Jones is reminiscent of many wheeler-dealers who were attracted to Haiti by the dictatorship's need for guns. Mr and Mrs Smith, the elderly vegetarians, evoked a similarly idealistic but naïve American couple who were the only other guests besides Graham and the Italian casino operator at the Hotel Oloffson in August 1963.

Henri Philipot closely resembled Fred Baptiste, the commander of the little guerrilla band that invaded Haiti from the Dominican Republic as poorly armed as any guerrilla group ever was. Years later Graham confirmed to me that Fred Baptiste and Hector Riobe, another young Haitian who fought the regime, had inspired the young idealist Philipot. Graham also revealed that the individual he had in mind when he created Captain Concasseur was the intimidating officer who stared at Graham during his long hours in 1963 waiting in the Caserne François Duvalier, the Port-au-Prince police headquarters, for a permit to travel to the south of Haiti.

Graham used the graveyard he found on his 1963 trip to south Haiti as the stage for the dramatic scene in
The Comedians
when the two main characters, Jones and Brown, ‘come alive'.

‘You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniacal butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier,' Graham wrote, describing the Grand Hotel Oloffson as the Trianon.

Our border trip along the Dominican—Haitian frontier was not wasted as source material. The last chapter of
The Comedians
draws heavily upon it. Graham's description of the border was remarkably accurate: ‘I was glad enough when we came in sight at dusk, from our grey eroded mountain range where nothing grew, of the deep Dominican forest. You could see all the twists of the frontier by the contrast between our bare rocks and their vegetation. It was the same mountain range, but the trees never crossed into the poor dry land of Haiti.' The vaunted international border road he described as ‘a grand name for a track little better than the Great Southern Highway to Aux Cayes'. And he later observes, the road ‘was more suitable for mules and cows'.

The mean manager of the Alcoa bauxite operation at Cabo Rojo, Pat Hughson, bore more than a slight resemblance to the book's Mr Schuyler
Wilson, ‘a large fat man with an anonymous face shaved as smooth as marble'. Brown's arrival at a mining site in the Dominican Republic after having fled Haiti recalls our arrival seeking a drink and a bed; he describes the scene faithfully if not a little colourfully.

In his introduction to the US edition of
The Comedians,
published in 1966, Graham also noted, ‘The best I could do in January 1965 was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border — the scene of my last chapter — in the company of two exiles from Haiti. At least, without Doctor Duvalier's leave, we were able to pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier future.'

Few Haitians living abroad read
The Comedians
for its literary value. They were interested in its political content. It was the opposite for the reviewers. Literary critics and pundits were more interested in
The Comedians
in terms of its literary merit. Much to his mirth, they forever dissected his books in microscopic detail — perhaps because of Graham's eclectic intellectualism — and because this was his first book in five years it received even closer scrutiny.
‘The Comedians,'
Graham himself later wrote, ‘is the only one of my books which I began with the intention of expressing a point of view and in order to fight — to fight the horror of Papa Doc's dictatorship.' He dragged the enigmatic Dr François Duvalier from the shadows into the floodlights of the world stage.

There were few Haitian exiles around to share my copy of
The Comedians
since, by the time it appeared, most had been forced to flee Santo Domingo because right-wing death squads had them in their gun sights. It was not until the following year that I caught up with Father Bajeux and was able to discuss the book with him. Bajeux was by then working with the Rev. Ivan Illich, who headed a liberal think tank called CIDOC (the Centro Intercultural de Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Father Bajeux had just published an all-encompassing document entitled
Un Cri pour Haiti (A Cry for Haiti)
in which he analysed the political and economic situation under Duvalierism and called for drastic change. He was still struggling with his personal God.

The Comedians
enjoyed wide press coverage. Photographs that I had taken of Graham on the bridge over the Massacre River at Dajabón, using his little Minox camera, were published in both
Time
and
Life
magazines. (By then I was a full-time correspondent for both sister publications.)

When I finally closed my copy of the book and handed it to my wife I thought this would be the end of our story and the end of Graham's Haiti period. As he did following his Indochina, South America and Mexico periods, he would now move on to another place and another book. It was a little sad. Graham's aim in Haiti was nearly perfect. His pen had proved to be a powerful sword against Duvalier. Although it did not decapitate Papa Doc — who
managed to retain power for the rest of his life — the book was equivalent to winning a major battle against his evil tyranny.

While Graham and I were later rarely at odds on any topic, we always disagreed about Jolicoeur. He was convinced that Jolicoeur was a government informer, a spy. To me, Aubelin, like so many Haitians, was simply a brash survivor. I had known him since the early days following his arrival from Jacmel and in 1952 had made him ‘Personality of the Week' in my newspaper. As a social columnist, one of the first of that journalistic genre in Haiti, he wrote a column for my newspaper. If anything, he was simply over-zealous and adjective-driven.

Graham, I learned later and unbeknownst to him, was under tight Tonton Macoute and police surveillance night and day throughout his 1963 stay. He was not aware that the street people, hangers-on and drivers around him were either Macoutes or police agents with orders to monitor his every move.

Back in Haiti, iron censorship enforced by harsh penalties, possible imprisonment or even death kept
The Comedians
from entering the country. Haitians knew only too well that to be caught with any document or book that was unfavourable to Duvalier was suicidal. Customs inspectors were trained to weed out any literature that could be deemed to impugn Papa Doc. They examined books and even private papers carried by passengers arriving in Haiti. One man was especially assigned at the Port-au-Prince airport to censor foreign newspapers and magazines; scissors unabashedly in hand, he would clip out on the spot any mention of Haiti. Years later, after the Duvalier dynasty collapsed, the censor identified himself to me upon my return via the Port-au-Prince airport, declaring with shameless guile, ‘I used to enjoy your stories' (referring to those bylined from elsewhere). It was one of the more bizarre compliments of my journalistic career.

Gradually, however, Haitians learned through their
telejiol
(grapevine), and from other sources, about a book called
The Comedians
written by a famous English writer. They immediately presumed that they were the comedians, and it is not unusual to hear a Haitian say, even today, ‘Graham Greene was right. We are
comediens —
actors!' This point of view was not without some logic. For all their earthiness, they exhibited many of the shoulder-shrugging characteristics of the uncommitted, but their masks were often more in keeping with the escapism of carnival, as they endeavoured to shut out reality and survive. Petit Pierre was not alone in his desire simply to stay alive.

The survivors of Papa Doc's death chamber reasoned that they might be safe so long as they did not provoke the beast. As an old Creole saying goes,
‘Tout bête genin mode
(All cornered beasts bite). Graham had provoked the beast; now we waited for Papa Doc to bite.

One can see that Graham Greene and his accomplices managed to get off cheap, because on a simple order from President Duvalier he [Greene] could have been shot down like a wretch in any corner of the universe.

—
Le Nouveau Monde,
Papa Doc's newspaper

In January 1966 the poet Gérard Daumec, one of Duvalier's top publicists and literary advisers, returned from London with a copy of the British edition of
The Comedians.
Papa Doc was not always receptive to bad news, so Daumec later explained to me that he had handed the book to Duvalier saying, ‘We need not be concerned about this book, it is a
salopre
(a piece of shit). Duvalier, Daumec recounted, chuckled when he saw the book's title. For several days it reposed on Papa Doc's desk, next to his Bible and loaded Magnum revolver. It was the only known copy of
The Comedians
in Haiti. Years later his son Jean-Claude Duvalier described his father to me, saying, ‘Papi was a good actor, a comedian.'

Papa Doc's English was limited and not sufficient to comprehend the novel fully. He didn't bring up the subject of the book publicly until one day when he allowed himself to be interviewed on camera by a European television crew visiting Haiti. During the interview Duvalier dismissed
The Comedians
as having ‘no literary merit whatsoever'. Daumec recalled long afterwards that he thought that would be the end of it. But it was only the beginning.

Later Duvalier asked Daumec about ‘Mister Gween', as Papa Doc pronounced Graham's name in his nasal whine. Daumec explained that ‘Mister Gween' was a Catholic writer of considerable repute. Papa Doc, Daumec said, became visibly upset.
The Comedians
was particularly disconcerting to Duvalier because 1966 was the year he had decided to change his image. He had officially pronounced the end of what he termed the initial ‘explosive' phase of his ‘revolution' and had begun to patch up his relations with the Vatican. In his paranoid mind Papa Doc was convinced that
The Comedians
was part of a wider conspiracy to sabotage his negotiations with Rome.