The Seeds of Fiction (51 page)

Meanwhile in Haiti, in spite of a night of terror designed to keep voters away from the polls, determined citizens turned out in droves on the morning of 29 November 1987 to cast their ballots; it was the first time they had exercised that right. So ruthless were the Haitian army and its Macoute thugs in attempting to abort the voting that men and women at one polling station were gunned down and hacked to death as they waited patiently to cast their ballots. My son, Jean-Bernard, who was working as a photographer for
Time,
was wounded in the hand while escaping the site of the massacre. A Dominican cameraman was shot dead beside him. For a harrowing time Jean-Bernard had been reported killed. He appeared a while later and was airlifted out of Haiti with a wounded ABC News camera crew.

In March 1988 Jean-Bernard went to cover events in Panama. I put him in contact with Chuchu, who greeted him warmly and drove him in his dinky Russian-made Lada Gigoli to the modest Vera Cruz Hotel in downtown Panama City. Jean-Bernard said he noted a sadness about Chuchu, as if time had passed him by. He was still the extrovert, playing his part as a living Greene character whom the media sought out for interviews, but politically he was non-committal. He did not appear to have any influence or
entree
with Noriega or his newly designed Panama Defence Force (PDF) high command.

While Jean-Bernard travelled around Panama photographing Noriega as he faced off against the Bush administration, Chuchu kept his distance. At the end of March, when the DINA — Noriega's secret police — chased the opposition Civilistas into Panama City's Marriott Hotel and began beating up journalists, Jean-Bernard ran to the aid of a sound man being battered by DINA agents. He was arrested, stripped of his cameras and packed off to a soccer stadium where the detained were placed in makeshift cells, fingerprinted and photographed before they were finally released. The members of the media who had been arrested were told their equipment would be returned to the hotel. It never was. Even Noriega couldn't return it. His secret agents had already reaped a tidy profit from selling the expensive equipment. Jean-Bernard called Chuchu to tell him what had happened, but Chuchu just hung up the phone. His political involvement, Jean-Bernard concluded, was over.

Graham had stated in a letter in April:

Chuchu has still been ringing up at intervals and claims that he is in no danger. Noriega has now become a patriot in his eyes and I must admit that if I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism I prefer the drug dealer. I never much cared for him but Omar at least would have appreciated the way he is hanging on … I don't feel much like returning to Panama at the moment. It would be so easy for the CIA to bump me off and blame it on Noriega, and vice
versa, though I doubt if Noriega would do it. I seem to spend a lot of my time now going to and fro to Russia. I have been there four times in the last two years and we are probably going again towards the end of May. Yvonne and I had a very agreeable trip to Siberia. Tomsk, which for some reason is closed to foreigners, proved unclosed to us, and it's a most beautiful city. I never liked to ask why it was closed to foreigners. Of course I would always be delighted to see your son. If possible let him give me not too long a notice because I find it very difficult to plan very far ahead.

Graham had given a quote to the author of a book on Haiti, but the book turned out to contain regrettable inaccuracies. ‘I am not up-to-date in the affairs of Haiti,' he wrote to me, ‘but I hadn't realized how inaccurate the account was.' He rang up the American publisher to ask him to withdraw the quote, to no avail. ‘It seems I have been made a fool of, but it was impossible for me to judge that moment.
Tant pis.
I shall now put it [the book] in the wastepaper basket.'

Elisabeth Dennys, Graham's sister who had arranged his wartime job with SIS and who for many years had typed his manuscripts and correspondence, had suffered a stroke. Her daughter Amanda took over the task of typing his mail. (He was working on the ending of another manuscript that had been around for almost a decade.) Elisabeth's illness affected Graham a great deal.

‘Thank you so much and so does Yvonne for your good wishes. I admire your courage in staying on in Haiti,' he wrote to me on 10 December 1988 from Antibes.

I am afraid I wouldn't have the courage to return, all the more so because the picture you sent me must have enraged the Tonton. [It was a story I had reported on post-Duvalier Haiti.] It is a pity that you will have missed Gorbachev after all in Cuba. I have an enormous admiration for him and also considerable fear for his fate. I have now been three times to Russia — no, five times — in the last three years including Georgia, the Ukraine and Siberia. After 25 years' absence the changes were even more startling for me. I am afraid Noriega has been disappointed at my failure to turn up! I don't like the man and I have been resisting all the more as I have been travelling too much during the last year or two. I celebrated my 84th birthday at a party in Moscow when I had to blow out 84 candles! All the same I suspect I shall make the effort and go to Panama and Nicaragua sometime in the coming year. I hope it may coincide with your visit. When you see Daniel Ortega do give him my very warm regards. It would be
delightful if you did come here with your son the photographer. You would be most welcome.

Then, on 16 May 1989 he wrote:

I would love to see you again after all this time and I don't feel inclined at the moment to go to Panama. I have just been seeing Daniel Ortega in London — a very cordial meeting. I am afraid the end of May and beginning of June is not good for me. I am hoping to get away at that period to work in Capri and won't be back until late June. July would be a safer month as far as I am concerned.

In fact, although he did not mention it until we met again later that year in Antibes, Graham had taken a nasty fall in his favourite London hotel. He got tangled in a rug at the Ritz, fell and broke several ribs. Despite the pain, he had gone forth and introduced Daniel Ortega at a meeting in London.

It was also around this time that a Haitian publisher decided to publish
The Comedians
and asked for my help in obtaining the French-language rights for Haiti. ‘It would be amusing to be published in Haiti,' Graham wrote back in his characteristically understated style.

Jean-Bernard and I joined Graham and Yvonne in Antibes to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Republic. The following day — Bastille Day — we joined what seemed like the entire French Riviera at a celebration in Juan-les-Pins. Graham appeared spry — he had recovered well from his fall — and was in high spirits when we arrived. His flat in Antibes looked the same as when I had visited four years earlier, except for a picturesque addition to the bathroom. Hanging on the wall and facing the toilet bowl was a large framed poster depicting Jean-Claude Duvalier in drag. He was resplendent in a red-lace dress with high-heel shoes, pointing a pistol to his head in the act of suicide.

‘You sent it to me after Duvalier's overthrow,' Graham said.

‘No,' I said. ‘It was the Haitian artist.'

The apartment had been burgled twice, but the intruders had taken little of importance. In fact, aside from his books there
was
little of importance. Obviously the burglars were not artistically inclined as a small sculpture of
The Warrior
by Henry Moore was still on the glass-top coffee table. But even more surprising was the fact that the thieves had left a gold nugget that Graham kept in a drawer.

Graham relaxed in his rattan armchair facing the glass doors. He discussed Professor Norman Sherry's first volume of his biography, which had only recently been published. I confessed I hadn't yet read it.

‘It's far too long,' Graham said bluntly. He said he was displeased and embarrassed by the biographer's examination of his personal life from 1904 to 1939. (My mind went back to our train ride across Panama when Graham had divulged that he was considering Sherry to be his biographer.) Almost in mid-sentence, Graham glanced at his watch; it was noon. ‘Let's have a drink. What will you have?' he said. Then the phone rang. ‘Blasted telephone. Where are my glasses?' Why he required glasses to answer the telephone was never clear to me. He found them and answered. It was Yvonne. She could join us for lunch. A few minutes later, vodka bottle in hand, he prepared the habitual midday martini and resumed his critique. ‘Sherry has only reached the Second World War. Is there really any need to publish letters to one's wife in their entirety?' (Returning from Graham's funeral in Switzerland, Sherry defended the biography: ‘My God, but there were more than 2,000 of those letters,' he told me.)

‘I must say I much prefer the Victorian biography,' Graham went on. He got up, went to his book-lined shelves, took out a slim dark-covered volume and demonstrated its lightness in his hands. It was, he said, little more than a hundred pages. He then replaced it on the shelf without bothering to tell us what the book was or who wrote it.

I actually empathized with his biographer. How could Graham Greene's life be squeezed into a hundred pages? He had lived too many adventures. Moreover, precisely because he had guarded his privacy so jealously he had opened his life to much speculation.

To change the subject I congratulated him on finally publishing the manuscript he had carried around with him for fifteen years,
The Captain and the Enemy.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I am rather glad to get rid of it. A dream helped me in the end … It's probably my last.'

‘I seriously doubt it,' I said.

He laughed and explained that the old manuscript had originally been entitled
Getting to Know the General,
and then after Omar's death he had given that title to the memoir instead.

The first part of
The Captain and the Enemy
is vintage Greene fiction built around his unhappy days at school in Berkhamsted where his father was headmaster and a brother head prefect. There were bullies, ferocious games and lots of prunes. Through the years he had often referred to this period of his life as an unhappy time. In the book, the narrator, a boy called Victor, is kidnapped by a peculiar Captain who says he won him in a game of backgammon. The last part of the book is contemporary Greene and contemporary Central America. I was fascinated, I told him, by the book's ending in which the Captain, with a plane full of explosives, attempts to crash and blow up Somoza,
a kamikaze-type suicide run during which he manages to hurt no one but only kill himself.

The story reminded me how at precisely 1.00 a.m. on Thursday 21 June 1979 a low-flying aircraft flew so low over the safe house I was sharing with Alan Riding of the
New York Times
and Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post
in Managua that we thought it might crash into our backyard. The plane came from the direction of Somoza's bunker and dropped nine concussion grenades miles off target, wounding a woman. The bombing had a psychological effect as the Sandinistas had warned that they intended to bomb Somoza's bunker and the InterContinental Hotel because it was filled with Somoza's rubber-stamp parliamentarians and assorted hangers-on. (Torrijos had also sent the US Intelligence Service in Panama into a panic one night when he ordered Venezuelan bombers to bomb Somoza's bunker. The Venezuelan aircraft had been flown to Panama and stationed there as part of an effort to pressure Somoza to quit. The bombers, it was later discovered, had no bombs.)

At the end of
The Captain and the Enemy
the narrator says, ‘With the Captain dead what is the point of continuing it [writing]? I realize more than ever that I am no writer. A real writer's ambition doesn't die with his main character …' The last lines of the book, which was to be, as Graham predicted, his final novel, are intriguing: ‘“I'm on my own now,” Victor says, before throwing what he has written into the wastepaper basket. “The line means Fini. I'm on my own now and I am following my own mules to find my own future.”‘

Graham had dedicated the book to Yvonne: ‘For Y with all the memories we share of nearly thirty years.'

We talked of his thin manuscript about dreams, which lay on his work table. When I mentioned a nightmare I'd had in which Graham and I fell into a deep precipice in my Volkswagen during our trip along the Dominican— Haitian border more than twenty years ago, he said, ‘I had quite forgotten that incident.'

It wasn't one of his own nightmares, but since he had made a habit of compiling his nightmares over the years, putting them down on paper, he could enthusiastically commiserate about other people's. He quickly warmed to the subject, went to his table and opened a folder with a thin sheaf of pages. It was the beginning of the manuscript. ‘I've already decided on a title:
A World of My Own.
Oh yes, I have included my Papa Doc nightmare,' he said and conceded that Duvalier had inflicted on him what the author termed his longest-running personal nightmare — a transatlantic one, like a successful play.

Yvonne eventually published
A World of My Own
a year after Graham's death. The book is a strange, fascinating kaleidoscope, yet it opens a window
into Graham's subconscious. The dreams he related also amount to a revealing postscript to his adventurous career in what, in his book, he terms the real-life ‘Common World', laying bare many of the fears — and pleasures — which he experienced but which, reticent as he tended to be about himself, he rarely discussed.

With his pixie sense of humour, he begins
A World of My Own
with an introduction in which he points out that this is one book for which he can be neither sued nor prosecuted, since his dreams are a world ‘shared with no one else. There are no witnesses … The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me …'

It is well that such is the case because many of his dreams, were they to be presented as fact, would appear potentially actionable. For example, in one sequence Graham takes a country walk with the writer Ford Madox Ford. They are in a field with a large bull and a young bull. Graham retreats to the road but, looking back, notes that the young bull has mounted on Ford's shoulders. Ford doesn't seem disturbed.