Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
In October 1944 he wrote in his diary in Yugoslavia, ‘My forty-first birthday and the glummest I have had for eleven years … It has been a good year – a daughter born, a book written, a narrow escape from death. I pray God that next year I am at my own home, at my own work, and at peace.’ Peace he was not granted – only a long despair which he passed off with the lighter word, boredom.
The other day I was rereading James’s The Bostonians and I came on Verena’s description of the principal character, Basil Ransom. Evelyn came immediately to mind.
‘Brought up, as she had been, to admire new ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr Ransom’s, so much bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she didn’t know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr Ransom didn’t seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she thought it right to say about almost anyone.’
Henry James never analyses what is behind Ransom, and I doubt whether Evelyn Waugh’s diaries help us to understand Waugh. What is certain is that when they were published they gave an opportunity for many writers of smaller talent to denigrate a man whom they would have feared to criticise when he was alive to answer them.
5
A decade is not neatly ruled off, and my desire to escape London and a writer’s enclosed life continued into the 1960s, and was reawoken by an article I read on Papa Doc’s Haiti. My first two visits to Haiti in the fifties had been happy enough. That was the time of President Magloire, there was extreme poverty, but there were many tourists and some of the money they brought was allowed to trickle down the social scale. The luxury hotel, El Rancho, in Piétonville, where I stayed when I was in Port-au-Prince, was always full, too full. The Mayor of Miami came over for one night with a horde of boisterous followers and screaming girls, and there were wild scenes in the swimming pool till the not-so-early hours. I met Haitian poets and painters and novelists, and one man I liked above all who was the model for Doctor Magiot in The Comedians, a novel I never dreamed then that I would come to write. He was a doctor and a philosopher – but not a Communist. For a time he had been Minister of Health, but he found his hands too tied, so he resigned (something which it would have been very dangerous to do under Doctor Duvalier). Every other year he visited Europe to attend philosophical congresses. He was a very big man and very black, of great dignity and with an old-world courtesy. He was to die in exile – more fortunately than Doctor Magiot? Who can tell? It was during that period I attended the voodoo ceremony I describe in the novel. For those with the means there was complete freedom to travel through the country. I went twice to Cap Haïtien, I visited Jérémie, the scene of a cruel massacre the year of my last arrival in Haiti, No need to wait for hours in the police station to get a pass to leave Port-au-Prince.
Inspired by the article I came to Haiti for the last time in 1963. It was the most critical year of Papa Doc’s rule and perhaps the cruellest. There were two dozen guerrillas fighting in the north (I met what were left of them a year later lodged in what had been an old lunatic asylum in Santo Domingo). They were the excuse for the barricades all round the capital manned by ragged militiamen. Impossible to drive to and from one’s hotel without being searched twice for arms. Papa Doc, while remaining in American eyes a bastion against Communism in the Caribbean, had shown his power by quarrelling with the West. Barbot, the founder of the Tontons Macoute, had been shot to pieces in a suburb of Port-au-Prince, and snapshots of his body decorated the walls of the police station – he had been in touch with the American marines who were there to guard the Embassy and to help with the military aid programme. The young son of the American commander was kidnapped by the Tontons and rescued, at the last moment as he was being dragged into the palace, by Duvalier’s son who attended the same lycée. After that incident the marines were withdrawn, the American Ambassador left, the British Ambassador was expelled, Duvalier was excommunicated and the Nuncio stayed in Rome. The South American embassies were crowded with refugees, including the Chief of Staff and most officers above the rank of major. The Tontons pursued refugees into the Santo Domingo Embassy and President Bosch mobilised tanks on the frontier less than a day’s march from Port-au-Prince. It was a dark city in which I arrived that summer, and though the curfew had been raised no one ventured abroad after dark. I little thought then that Papa Doc would survive to die a natural death years later, that an American ambassador, suitably named Benson Timmons III, would be kept waiting for hours at the palace before being harangued by the Doctor, and that Nelson Rockefeller would appear on the balcony before the Port-au-Prince mob to shake Duvalier’s hand and to hand him a personal letter from the President of the United States.
This time I didn’t stay at El Rancho, but I went up the hill once to revisit it. There were no guests in the hotel, only a clerk, and the swimming pool was empty. In my hotel, the Oloffson (I call it the Trianon in The Comedians), there were three guests besides myself – the Italian manager of the casino and an old American artist and his wife – a gentle couple whom I cannot deny bore some resemblance to Mr and Mrs Smith of the novel. He wanted to teach the use of the silk screen to Haitian artists, so that they could earn a better living by selling reproductions of their paintings in the States. He had been encouraged to come by the Haitian Consul-General in New York who had promised to send all the necessary material for his teaching after him, but the weeks had passed and nothing had arrived, and no one in the Government displayed any interest at all in a project which would not line his own pocket. One night the three of us braved the dark to visit the brothel I have described as Mére Catherine’s. There were no customers except a couple of Tontons Macoute. ‘Mr Smith’ began to draw the girls who had been dancing together decorously and decoratively, and they gathered round his chair like excited schoolchildren, while the Tontons glared through their dark glasses at this strange spectacle of a fearless happiness and an innocence they couldn’t understand.
Every day ‘Petit Pierre’ would appear for a drink and once he brought with him the Mayor of Port-au-Prince who took me to see the dilapidated and abandoned buildings of the new city of Duvalierville where only the cockfight theatre had been finished. I soon realised it was ‘Petit Pierre’s’ job to see what I wanted and report what I was about.
What I wanted most was to get away from the stifling nightmare city where a few weeks after I left all the schoolchildren were forced to attend the execution of two captured guerrillas in the cemetery, a scene repeated every night for a week on the local television. But to get permission to go anywhere outside the city was not so easy – even to leave the country an exit visa had to be procured. Finally I had an interview with the Foreign Minister himself. Mr Chalmers was about to leave for New York to attend the Assembly of the United Nations and to make a protest that American arms had been found in the hands of the guerrillas (a not unlikely claim since the Haitian army had been furnished with arms by the United States and all their senior officers were dead or in exile or shut in the foreign embassies). Mr Chalmers refused to allow me to go north to Cap Haïtien ‘for my own safety’, but reluctantly gave his consent to my visiting Aux Cayes in the south, where I wanted to spend the night with some Canadian missionaries. Even with his consent I had to pass hours in the police station, sitting under the snapshots of dead Barbot. The police station faced the white palace of the President. No pedestrians passed the palace – it was thought dangerous to walk under those blank windows through which Baron Samedi, the haunter of graveyards, might be peering down: even taxi-drivers would avoid that side of the square. Look
The trip to Aux Cayes by ‘the Great Southern Highway’ was under 180 kilometres, but it was to take me, as I had been warned, more than eight hours, for the road hardly existed half an hour outside the capital. The night before I left I slept little for fear of what might happen. I was under no illusions about my friendly driver – he was certainly an informer of the Tontons, and it seemed to my mind only too easy for a convenient accident to be arranged on that rough route or a yet more convenient murder which could be blamed on the guerrillas, a few of whom were operating in the south. Papa Doc would not be concerned about scandal – there were no tourists to frighten away.
Fear in those weeks must have penetrated deep into my unconscious: Haiti really was the bad dream of the newspaper headlines, and when the time came to leave and I waited at the airport for my Delta plane, I wasn’t happy to feel pressed secretively into my hand a letter addressed to a former presidential candidate, an exile in Santo Domingo. Was I to be tricked by an agent provocateur at the last minute? No wonder that for years afterwards Port-au-Prince featured in my dreams. I would be back there incognito, afraid to be spotted.
If I had known the way the President regarded me my fears would have seemed even more rational. The Comedians, I am glad to say, touched him on the raw. He attacked it personally in an interview he gave in Le Matin, the paper he owned 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’oeuvre d’un écrivain et d’un journaliste, le livre n’a aucune valeur.’
Was it possible that 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. ‘A liar, a crétin, a stool-pigeon … unbalanced, sadistic, perverted … a perfect ignoramus … lying to his heart’s content … the shame of proud and noble England … a spy … a drug addict … a torturer.’ (The last epithet has always a little puzzled me.)
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.
Chapter Nine
1
During the forty years which had passed since I published my first novel I had occasionally written a short story. The short story as a form bothered me when I first began to write and a little bored me. I knew too much about the story before I began to write – and then all the days of work were unrelieved by any surprise. In the far longer work of the novel there were periods of great weariness, but at any moment the unexpected might happen – a minor character would suddenly take control and dictate his words and actions. Somewhere near the beginning, for no reason I knew, I would insert an incident which seemed entirely irrelevant, and sixty thousand words later, with a sense of excitement, I would realise why it was there – the narrative had been working all that time outside my conscious control. But in the short story I knew everything before I began to write – or so I thought.
I was reminded of the kind of essays we were taught to write at school – you were told to make first a diagram which showed the development of the argument, rather as later a film producer would sometimes talk to me of the necessity of ‘establishing’ this or that and the imaginary value of ‘continuity’. When school was safely behind me I began to write ‘essays’ again. I learned to trust the divagations of the mind. If you let the reins loose the horse will find its way home. The shape was something which grew of itself inside the essay, during the revision – you didn’t have to think it out beforehand.
In the case of the short story I was equally misled. It was only the surface of the story which I knew as I began to write – the surprises might not be so far-reaching as in a novel but they were there all the same. They came in the unexpected shaping of a sentence, in a sudden reflection, in an unforeseen flash of dialogue; they came like cool drinks to a parched mouth.
Now I realise that since the beginning I have really been all the time a writer of short stories – they are not the ‘scraps’ I called them in the prefatory note to my first volume of short stories. ‘The End of the Party’ was written in 1929, the year of my first printed novel, and strangely enough, during the period when I was writing my second and third novels, I wrote a short story, ‘I Spy’, which has the qualities which all my first novels so disastrously lack – simplicity of language, the sense of life as it is lived. It is no great thing – ‘I Spy’ – but how, if I were able to write a short story of even that modest truth, could I have been so bent on self-destruction with the total unrealities of The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall?
Yet, though I am content with many of these stories (I believe I have never written anything better than ‘The Destructors’, ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’, ‘Under the Garden’, ‘Cheap in August’) I remain in this field a novelist who has happened to write short stories, just as there are certain short-story writers (Maupassant and Victor Pritchett come to mind) who have happened to write novels. This is not a superficial distinction or even a technical distinction, as between an artist who paints in oil or water-colour; it is certainly not a distinction in value. It is a distinction between two different ways of life.
With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed – he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov’s story, ‘The Lady with the Dog’. It is the consciousness of that failure which makes the revision of the novel seem endless – the author is trying in vain to adapt the story to his changed personality – as though it were something he had begun in childhood and was finishing now in old age. There are moments of despair when he begins perhaps the fifth revision of Part One, and he sees the multitude of the new corrections. How can he help feeling, ‘This will never end. I shall never get this passage right’? What he ought to be saying is, ‘I shall never again be the same man I was when I wrote this months and months ago.’ No wonder that under these conditions a novelist often makes a bad husband or an unstable lover. There is something in his character of the actor who continues to play Othello when he is off the stage, but he is an actor who has lived far too many parts during far too many long runs. He is encrusted with characters. A black taxi-driver in the Caribbean once told me of a body which he had seen lifted from the sea. He said, ‘You couldn’t tell it was a man’s body because of all the lampreys which came up with it.’ A horrible image, but it is one which suits the novelist well.
And so the short story for the novelist is often yet another form of escape – escape from having to live with a character for years on end, picking up his jealousies, his meanness, his dishonest tricks of thought, his betrayals. The reader may well complain of the unpleasantness of the character, but lucky reader! he has only had to spend a few days in his company. Sometimes in Flaubert’s letters you can see him becoming Madame Bovary, developing in himself her destructive passion.
My stories therefore can be regarded as a collection of escapes from the novelist’s world – even, if you like, of escapa
A story which came to me in sleep appears in the collection called A Sense of Reality. It is the tale of a leper patient in Sweden who returns to plead for private treatment with an old medical professor who has condemned him to the publicity of a leper hospital and he finds the doctor’s house transformed into a gambling casino for the night to please a senile general. I can still clearly see, as I saw them in sleep, the hired musicians tumbling out of the taxis with their cumbrous instruments. Was I the leper? I think not. I think I was the professor, bemused by the transformation of his house and seeing his patient’s face peer in at him from the garden outside.
Dreams, perhaps because I was psychoanalysed as a boy, have always had great importance when I write. The genesis of my novel It’s a Battlefield was a dream, and The Honorary Consul began too with a dream. Sometimes identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own. That happened to me when I was writing A Burnt-Out Case. The symbols, the memories, the associations of that dream belonged so clearly to my character Querry that next morning I could put the dream without change into the novel, where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross. I imagine all authors have found the same aid from the unconscious. The unconscious collaborates in all our work: it is a nègre we keep in the cellar to aid us. When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day’s work before sleep and leave the nègre to labour in my place. When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious – perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten.