The Seeds of Fiction (22 page)

Because of various misfortunes that plagued the set, many members of the film crew began to suspect that Duvalier had laid a Voodoo curse on them. In his autobiography,
Blessings in Disguise,
Alec Guinness relates:

There was an ugly rumour that Papa Doc, who bitterly resented Greene's account of his country and its politics, had sent a Voodoo priest to Dahomey to disrupt the film. Apparently Voodoo spells cannot travel over water and have to be operated close at hand. All great nonsense, I
am sure, but, whether the rumour was true or not, on the first day of filming one of the unit stumbled on the beach, possibly from a heart attack, and drowned in a foot of water before anyone could assist him. Several people complained of difficulty in breathing, suffering from acute headaches and deep depression; one or two had to be sent home.

There were also real-world concerns. In his book
Rich: The Life of Richard Burton
Melvyn Bragg recounts that because the book of
The Comedians
had upset many people the threat of kidnapping hung over the Burtons through their connection with the film. The family were receiving a number of kidnapping alarms a week, and their children all had individually assigned guards accompanying them when away from their home in Gstaad or school.

By September 1966 the Dominican Republic's civil war and US intervention had ended. Following the truce and elections, the long-time Trujillo bureaucrat, Joaquín Balaguer, a seasoned, crafty politician, was back in power, and Washington was appeased. The Haitian exiles in the Dominican Republic, including their leader Fred Baptiste and his brother Renel, scattered as if to the wind. They were no longer welcome, partly because they had fought on the side of the Constitutionalists. In retaliation they had become targets of La Banda, right-wing death squads. Balaguer also re-established diplomatic relations with Papa Doc. The Dominican Republic was no longer hospitable territory for anti-Duvalier exiles.
Time
magazine transferred me to its Mexico City bureau, so again my family, and I also started a new life in a new land.

In a letter from Paris, dated 4 May 1968, Graham wrote, ‘I feel a little sad about having shot my bolt as far as Haiti is concerned, and wish I could find another arrow in my quiver.' Despite intensive research into Graham's background, the team at Duvalier's Foreign Ministry had learned relatively little about the real-life Mr Greene. Yet even Graham admired the amount of work that went into producing what would become Papa Doc's official exposé of Graham's ‘flawed character'.

In Haiti, as in any nation where politics are personal and partisan, character assassinations of writers were as old as the publishing business. Nevertheless an attack in the form of a slick government-printed booklet, as was produced on Duvalier's orders against Graham, was unprecedented even in Haiti. This was no ordinary government protest. It was an official highly orchestrated effort to discredit an internationally renowned author. Styled as an official Haitian Foreign Ministry bulletin, the 92-page document was devoted entirely to denouncing Graham Greene and the dark conspiratorial forces that allegedly motivated him. It was a classic example of the paranoid's complaint — ‘It's all a plot against me' — while cheering the achievements of Dr Duvalier and his ‘revolution'. The main text consisted of ten essays. The authors, who were duly
credited, were all staff members of the Foreign Ministry, with several drawn from the protocol section. Father Bajeux has referred to them as Papa Doc's ‘intellectual Macoutes'. The broadside's purple prose was interspersed with gripping photographs reflecting Papa Doc's paranoid narcissism — the President-for-Life himself, the Dr François Duvalier International Airport, the Dr François Duvalier Police Headquarters, the Dr François Duvalier Tax Office. There were pictures of the still-uncompleted Duvalierville, which Graham had described in
The Comedians
as a ‘wilderness of cement'.

A memorandum dispatched by Foreign Minister René Chalmers to all Haitian chiefs of diplomatic missions abroad, and to all foreign diplomatic missions in Haiti, left no doubt as to the seriousness of purpose of the government bulletin. Dated 15 January 1968, the book-length memorandum announced that it was being distributed to ‘call attention to the film
The Comedians
staged by the Metro Goldwin [sic] Mayer, the theme of which is inspired by Graham Greene's novel of the same name'.The document, printed in French and English, warned:

The frankly hostile character of this film in which the Republic of Haiti, its government and its Chief are criticized, the acrimonious tone of each sequence in which the most unlikely facts are supposedly true to life, the very price paid for staging of the film permit one to infer that Graham Greene's novel and the film drawn from it are part of a vast plan tending to prepare international public opinion for an action that might be carried out on a larger scale against the Republic of Haiti, the last episode of which could be an invasion of our territory with all its detrimental incidences
[sic].

Therefore, this Chancellery is inclined to believe that the shooting of this film and its showing in different countries constitute an act of indirect aggression against the Republic of Haiti. This is why it would appreciate it if the Chiefs of the Diplomatic Missions of Haiti accredited in foreign countries would lodge protests in the name of the Haitian Government, with the Chancelleries of the countries to which they are accredited, against the showing of this film that is considered an act of indirect aggression against the Republic of Haiti, and consequently likely to weaken the traditional bonds of friendship existing between those countries and Haiti.

Lucien Montas, who headed the cultural department of the Foreign Ministry (while doubling as a journalist for the local daily
Nouvelliste),
was instructed by Chalmers to write the foreword. He called Graham ‘the prey to a thousand complexes and obsessions' and went on to declare that Graham's ‘nightmarish
images in his frenzied imagination, together with a pessimistic vision of the world', were a ‘reflection of an unbalanced and proudly perverted self'.

The essays were entitled, in order: ‘Graham Greene's Biographical Panorama'; ‘Graham Greene's Swindle'; ‘Could Graham Greene Be an Advocate of the Theory of Existence of Superior Races?'; ‘Does Graham Greene Know the History of Haiti?'; ‘Achievements of the Haitian Government'; ‘Graham Greene, or the Scaring Machine';
‘The Comedians:
A Commissioned Work'; ‘Graham Greene's Contemner of [sic, evidently meaning ‘Contempt for'] the Negro Race'; ‘The Political Philosophy of the Government of His Excellency Dr François Duvalier'; ‘Aren't Graham Greene's Novel,
The Comedians
and Peter Greenville's
[sic]
Film an Episode of the International Plot Against the Haitian Government?'

Yves Massillon, a protocol officer at the Haitian Foreign Ministry, wrote two of the essays. In the first, entitled ‘Graham Greene's Biographical Panorama', Massillon alleged that Graham, after a ‘morbid adolescence', became a ‘young Communist stool pigeon'. After a wasted youth, Massillon further alleged, Graham launched

an all-out drive for money in 1938. At long last, the war! The war and the opportunity to get rich! He is a secret agent in Africa under cover of a writer. But this pseudo-writer, spotted in Indo-China and Havana after the war, is shadowed wherever he is. Yet, he goes on with his activity of novelist—secret agent and writes a commissioned novel,
The Comedians,
about the Republic of Haiti where he stayed less than fifteen days.

Warming to his subject, Massillon declaimed:

Will Graham Greene ever stop his many repudiations, ‘stool-pigeoning' and spying activities; his malignant attacks, lies, and belated apologies? Will he ever stop contributing his talent to purposes unworthy of a true writer? That is the question. Considering the man's career, we can't expect anything good from him. A [religious] conversion may have some value only in respect to its motivations, significance, and results. Graham Greene's didn't bring about any amelioration which could have made him study the problems of the Haitian people with more open-mindedness with a view to finding the root causes of a revolution which — like all revolutions — had its excesses, these excesses which we think are nothing as compared with what goes on elsewhere. But Graham Greene did not understand at all the Haitian revolutionary reality, this reality that would have ended up in plain anarchy had it not been for an eminently intelligent control by the Chief of the nation, Physician,
Ethnologist and Sociologist, Dr François Duvalier. Greene is fretful because of the reserved attitude of a friendly Big Power [presumably an allusion to the United States] which has more than once stumbled against the complexity of our problems. Such reticence should have taught Greene a lesson. When one does not understand, either he asks for information or he shuts up.

Another contributor concluded his disquisition, ‘Graham Greene's Swindle', by decrying what he termed Graham's physical description of Haiti:

The rusty colors of our crops deprived of water, the barrenness of our hillsides ravaged by erosion, misery, disease, illiteracy, and even the infirmity of our poor are more in keeping with the pessimistic vision of a Graham Greene or a Mr Brown in his novel than an unbiased consideration of under-development which is not specific to Haiti.

A fourth jeremiad branded Graham a ‘tormented racist' on the ‘payroll' of leading racists of the day. Another contributor proclaimed, ‘Graham Greene thought he was going to destroy Haiti's prestige; he may now bite his lips, gnaw his thumbs; sooner or later, he will have to rid his sickly mind of the despicable comedians of his own kind.' Still another diatribe asserted without elaboration, ‘Former torturer Graham Greene is annoyed no end upon finding that Haiti is the chosen land for social justice in this world of hatred and violence.'

Massillon, in his second blast at Graham, expanded on the theme that he was a secret agent at work to defame hapless Haiti. Massillon charged that Graham's putative connection with the British Secret Service had just been brought to light in Moscow by Harold ‘Kim' Philby who, while himself a British Secret Service officer, was also a Soviet agent. Indeed, Massillon pointed out that in the Latin American edition of
Time,
in the issue of 29 December 1967, on
page 20
under the heading ‘Espionage' one can read the following: ‘Between the caviar and cognac, Philby managed to sandwich in a few new fascinating revelations about his past activities. He had worked, he claimed, with such unheralded British spies as novelist Graham Greene … and the late Ian Fleming.' Crowed Massillon: ‘Thus it is that the present is better understood through a study of the past; however, one must have a thorough knowledge of the past to understand why the novel
The Comedians
was written. Why millions were spent in the making of the film and why none other than Graham Greene was called upon for the work.'

The principle thrust of the Haitian Foreign Ministry broadside was that both the book and the film were part of some vast amorphous plot against
Haiti. The expelled British Ambassador G.T. Corley-Smith was brought into the purported conspiracy, accused by Massillon of ‘insolent dealings'. Another essayist accused Graham of fostering ‘psychological preparation for a frantic counter-revolution'.

In a hyperbolic wrap-up, Clément Vincent of Duvalier's protocol staff declared:

Once more the countries using Graham Greene and Peter Greenville
[sic]
as a cover-up have committed the crime of indirect aggression against the Black Republic which is only guilty of pride and dignity. Obviously Graham Greene and Peter Greenville are only puppets in a tragic-comic show put up by some well-known countries against Haiti which still faces some of the most strenuous hardships in its existence as a free and independent nation, after having fought unaided against the slavery system for three centuries and a half, broken its fetters, proclaimed its independence in the face of an astonished world 164 years ago, and paid with the blood of its people for the place it occupies among civilized nations.

We will not be caught off guard. Our knowledge of the fighting tactics of our opponents supports our beliefs that Graham Greene's novel
The Comedians
as well as Peter Greenville's movie inspired by the said novel constitute a prelude to some action that may be carried out on a large scale against our country. This unprecedented performance in the art of disparagement can be nothing else than the first step toward a bolder plan against Haiti.

If Duvalier thought his publishing offensive would intimidate Graham, he was sadly in error. Graham, although usually reserved and modest, revelled openly in the verbal assault coming from a tyrant such as Papa Doc. The whole charade appealed to Graham's contrarian sense of humour, so he mischievously promoted the attack on his character. As an ingenious practical joker, Graham exploited Papa Doc's canards to startle others. With Graham himself acting as a publicist for Duvalier's bizarre broadside — spreading word among friends and interviewers about the ‘remarkable document' — it quickly became a collector's item.

The first I heard of Duvalier's literary assault was in a letter from Graham, dated 20 February 1969, which I received in Mexico City. He could hardly conceal his excitement and mirth. ‘Have you seen his book about me in French and English called
Graham Greene Démasqué (Finally Unmasked)?.
If you haven't seen it get somebody to ask for it from the embassy in Mexico City. It's a treasure.' In a letter to me two months later, Graham again recommended
that I get a copy of the booklet before it disappeared. Still clearly elated, he wrote, ‘Papa Doc honoured me.'

Despite my efforts, I could never find a copy in Mexico. The Haitian embassy there said it didn't have any. It was only years later, after the Duvalier dynasty collapsed in 1986, that I finally managed to locate one in the archives of the Foreign Ministry in Port-au-Prince. (The Foreign Ministry collapsed into rubble along with its archives in the January 2010 earthquake.)