The Seeds of Fiction (23 page)

In an op-ed article in the
Sunday Telegraph
on Sunday 3 December 1976, entitled ‘Black Humour in Haiti', Graham commented:

If I had known the way the President regarded me, my fears would have seemed more rational.
The Comedians,
I am glad to say, touched him on the raw. He even attacked it personally in an interview he gave in
Le Matin,
a paper in Port-au-Prince — the only review I have ever received from a Chief of State.
‘Le livre n'est pas bien écrit. Comme l'œuvre d'un écrivain et d'un journaliste, le livre n'a aucune valeur.'
[‘The book is not well written. As the work of a writer and journalist it possesses no value whatsoever.']

Was it possible I disturbed his dreams as he had disturbed mine? For five long years after my visit, his Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an elaborate and elegant brochure, illustrated, on glossy paper, dealing with my case. A lot of research had gone into its preparation, with many quotations drawn from the introductions I had written for a French edition of my books. Printed in French and English and entitled
Graham Greene Démasqué (Finally Exposed),
it included a rather biased sketch of my career. This expensive work was distributed to the Press through the Haitian Embassies in Europe, but distribution ceased abruptly when the President found the result was not the one he desired.

Graham even quoted from the booklet in which he said he was called ‘A liar, a cretin, a stool pigeon … unbalanced, sadistic, perverted … a perfect ignoramus', accused of ‘lying to his heart's content' and of being ‘the shame of proud and noble England … a spy … a drug addict… a torturer'. ‘The last epithet has always a little puzzled me,' Graham concluded. ‘I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier, but a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.'

On 9 October 1968 I had received a brown envelope addressed in Graham's small script. In it was a transcript of a British television programme,
Twenty-Four Hours,
which had a hilarious field day with the ‘official counter-blast from Duvalier against Greene's last novel,
The Comedians'.
The commentator
ends by noting, ‘All in all it's the kind of accolade he [Greene] may well prize even more highly than his Companionship of Honour, his Honorary Doctorate and the other bits and pieces he's collected since he began writing forty years ago. By the way,' the commentator added in a final dig at Papa Doc's literary
chef d'œuvre,
‘there's one misspelling the Haitians missed. On
page 33
of their glossy book they call President Harry Truman President Hairy Truman.'

Naturally Graham was not about to retreat or apologize for
The Comedians.
For him the Haitian government's published ‘bulletin' and its essays proved only that he had bloodied Papa Doc with the pen, if not the sword, and he was even optimistic — overly optimistic, it turned out — about Papa Doc's political demise. Graham ended a letter to me dated 6 January 1970 with the words, ‘Let's hope that before the end of the year we can all meet again in Port-au-Prince!' It didn't happen — but not because he was anything like his uninvolved character, Brown. Papa Doc hung on to power until his death from natural causes in 1971 .

Alan Whicker of Yorkshire Television interviewed Papa Doc in 1968 while riding in the presidential limousine. He asked Duvalier what he thought of Graham Greene's
The Comedians.
Duvalier is seen touching his right temple with his index finger while responding, ‘He is crazy, he is a poor man mentally … he didn't say the truth about Haiti, because maybe they say he was out of money, he got money from people in Haiti or from political exiles.'

The MGM Distribution and Production Company, along with its owner— partner Maximilian/Trianon, released the film version of
The Comedians
in late 1967. The producer and director was Peter Glenville, with a screenplay by Graham. It was the first film made of a Graham Greene book in seven years, since the 1960 release of
Our Man in Havana.
Whether
The Comedians
was a good or bad film from a critic's perspective, its star cast ensured that millions would see this feature production around the world. It would establish Papa Doc and his Tontons Macoutes once and for all as men of evil.

When I finally had an opportunity to see the film, while on assignment in San Diego, I found it extremely painful to watch. The reason Graham had written the script, the last he would write, he later told me, was to make sure that his arrow hit its mark, portraying the terror of the Duvalier years. To achieve maximum effect he had dropped the early part of the book, in which
The Comedians
are introduced sailing aboard the
Medea
to Haiti. He had also changed the ending. At the end of the movie, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) looks down from the Miami-bound plane and laments, ‘Poor Haiti.' And the film makes it resoundingly clear that Papa Doc's dictatorship and his Tontons Macoutes are responsible for turning this once beautiful country into ‘poor Haiti'.

The film opens with young voices singing praise to ‘Duvalier, President-for-Life,
creator of the New Haiti, supreme leader of the nation, idol of the masses and spiritual leader of the nation'. While Papa Doc himself is portrayed only fleetingly, walking inside the Palace followed by two nurses, signs and references to him abound. Duvalier's image and his red-and-black flag are plastered everywhere — on a billboard, even in a brothel. The atmosphere of terror is established near the beginning of the film as the camera pans along a row of photographs of grotesque corpses, all marked with a large red ‘X' indicating that the victims have been eliminated. Captain Concasseur is seen tracing another red-pencilled ‘X' across the photo of yet another victim. The Macoutes are real enough in their dark glasses and fedoras. Overlooking the nightmarish panorama, exuding its own haunting Charles Addams-like decadence, the replica of the Grand Hotel Oloffson was almost perfect.

Dr Magiot (who in the book is shot) has his throat cut by the Tontons Macoutes, collapsing dead on top of a patient on whom he is operating. The scene sent a communal shudder through the audience in which I was seated. There were reports of Haitian women, exiled in New York, fainting while viewing the film and being carried out of the cinema and others screaming and yelling when they saw the captured guerrillas Drouin and Numa being executed. The film was far too realistic for many expatriate Haitians, especially those who had lost relatives in the real world of Papa Doc's Haiti.

Time
magazine gave
The Comedians
a column-and-a-half movie review on 3 November 1967 entitled, ‘Hell in Haiti'. Noting that the film ran for two hours and forty minutes, the
Time
critic commented:

The Comedians
has everything but economy. The director, Peter Glenville, has tarried with a story that might have been twice as good at half the length. Unlike the novel, in which Greene's obsessive concern with mankind's spiritual underworld is subdued, his scenario seems as overtly moralistic as a passion play … [However,] French Photographer Henri Decae's location shots offer a remarkable re-creation of a land where images of Voodoo gods and the Virgin Mary are worshipped at the same rituals. The cast of supporting villains and victims — led by Peter Ustinov — is uniformly excellent. As a fading beauty with a Germán accent, [Elizabeth] Taylor is reasonably effective, but [Richard] Burton, playing an exhausted anti-hero in the same style as his memorable
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,
seems to have stepped from the pages of the novel. Ironically, the film's most stirring moments are not its overheated love scenes but the brief encounter between Burton and Guinness. In one, Guinness, a short day's journey from death, recounts his wasted life of lies in a graveyard retreat. Priest-like, Burton answers the tortured confessions with a symbolic absolution. At such moments
of transcendent drama — and there are enough to make it worthwhile —
The Comedians
is easily forgiven its other sins.

Similarly typical of the mixed reviews was John Russell Taylor's assessment in
The Times
on 18 January 1968: ‘It is just loaded with production values. Unfortunately, loaded is the operative word. Under there somewhere is perhaps quite an interesting little film trying to get out, but if so, it is smothered at birth.'

Graham, of course, had his own after-the-fact critique. He told Gene D. Phillips in a 1969 interview published in the
Catholic World:

My biggest problem when adapting one of my novels for the screen is that the kind of book I write, from the single point of view of one character, cannot be done the same way on the screen. You cannot look through the eyes of one character in a film. The novel (The
Comedians)
was told from Brown's point of view. Brown remains the character who is on the screen more than any of the others. His comments on others are often there. But we still do not see others completely from his point of view as we do in the novel.

As noted, Graham had changed the film's ending from that of the book. ‘Brown is a beachcomber-type character. He has been washed up on the beach of Haiti,' Graham explained in the
Catholic World
interview.

He is a person who could not be better than he is, although he would like to be. At the end of the novel, which is black comedy, he becomes an undertaker: he is just being washed up on another shore. In the film the ending is different but the point is the same. Brown is forced to join the guerrillas in the hills because he cannot return to Port-au-Prince. He does not want to go and he has no experience in guerrilla warfare, but he makes the best of the situation.

Discussing the film in a letter to me, Graham said he had hoped to have the film shot in black and white, feeling that colour gave it a phoney look. However, as a long-time film critic himself who was quite familiar with the industry, he acknowledged that the major film studios of the time wouldn't support a black-and-white film. One of the reasons, he said, was television sales; colour television had arrived on the scene only a few years earlier. He thought black and white would have made it a better film, more of
cinéma verite.

The most common criticism of the book and the film among Haitian intellectuals who were able to read the novel and view the film overseas was
that the love story took up too much time, which is against the tradition of Haitian fiction, where politics reigns supreme. Moreover, many non-Duvalierist Haitians resented the scenes in the movie in which Brown addresses a band of anti-Duvalier insurgents.

Brown has finally been persuaded by the young Philipot to join the guerrillas in the hills after Captain Concasseur kills Major Jones and is in turn killed by the guerrillas. Forced at last to make a commitment, Brown says, ‘I'm cornered', and the young artist—guerrilla says, ‘My men are waiting … For some reason they believe that white men are the only true experts in killing.'

With Philipot and barman Joseph, Brown climbs the mountain and joins the assembled insurgents, who stand in ranks armed with a motley assortment of weapons including gardening tools and even a tin insecticide sprayer. Of the latter weapon Brown asks Philipot, ‘What is this supposed to be?'

‘The closest we could come to liquid fire,' Philipot responds. ‘It's full of petrol. Don't discourage them.'

Then, standing before the ragtag band of rebels, Brown launches into his speech — in English (which none of them understands): ‘Tomorrow we attack the Tontons Macoutes. We are crazy fools. You don't know how to fight. I don't know how to fight. We are going to get the Tontons, we, with a handful of shotguns, machetes and a garden spray, a hotel keeper, a painter, a barman and you. You stupid bastards, the rabble of the cockpits and the slums, my ragged regiment!'

Some Haitians felt Brown's oration was unjust and humiliating. They saw it as a manifestation of the white foreigners' superiority complex. They saw it as an insult to the Kamoken. But Brown's soliloquy was closer to the truth than many Haitians would admit: a none-too-exaggerated caricature of the anti-Duvalier insurgents — brave, untrained, mostly unarmed and, as Brown himself exemplified, badly led.

The Comedians
was not a particularly successful film in terms of mass audience appeal, despite it being a Graham Greene adaptation with a star cast. In his book
Blessings in Disguise
Alec Guinness wrote that he was impressed by Richard Burton's ‘generosity as an actor', noting, ‘He gave himself and his talent in the most unselfish way I have ever encountered in a great star.'

Papa Doc's guile was not to be underestimated. A few weeks after the film was released, Guinness recounts, he and his wife received an invitation from Haiti ‘to spend Christmas in Haiti' as Papa Doc's guest, so that ‘we could see for ourselves what the country was
really
like. I had a notion that if we were rash enough to accept we might end up as zombies, turning spits in the kitchen of some Haitian palace; so we declined, with flowery politeness.'

Nevertheless there was one footnote that doubtless gave Papa Doc a moment of glee. Four weeks after the movie opened in cinemas around the
world, on Christmas Day 1967, President Soglo of Dahomey was booted out of office by his subordinates. As Soglo flew off to Paris to join the three other ex-presidents of Dahomey living in exile, several mundane explanations were cited for his overthrow, among them Soglo's tough austerity programme which had included reducing the salaries of civil servants and even turning off their air-conditioning. However, there were those who suspected a darker cause — the long arm of Papa Doc and his powers of Voodoo, in retaliation for the filming of
The Comedians
in Dahomey. Jokingly, even Graham said he felt that Voodoo should receive some credit for Soglo's downfall.