Our Man In Havana (2 page)

‘Eighteen different kinds of Scotch … including Black Label. And I haven’t counted the Bourbons. It’s a wonderful sight. Wonderful,’ he repeated, lowering his voice with respect. ‘Have you ever seen so many whiskies?’

‘As a matter of fact I have. I collect miniatures and I have ninety-nine at home’.

And this collection is about to be enhanced by the man with whom Wormold already has a bond, another lonely loser named Dr Hasselbacher who divides his time between a few remaining patients and the rival Wonder Bar:

‘There is always time for a Scotch.’ It was obvious from the way he pronounced Scotch that Dr Hasselbacher had already had time for a great many … He took from his pocket two miniature bottles of whisky: one was Lord Calvert, the other Old Taylor. ‘Have you got them? he asked with anxiety.

‘I’ve got the Calvert, but not the Taylor. It was kind of you to remember my collection, Hasselbacher.’ It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

This touching and abject allusion to Bishop Berkeley’s famous question is followed immediately by a playful and half-drunken ontological interlude, this time in the Seville-Biltmore bar where Dr Hasselbacher, flown with Scotch, imagines that he has already won the next day’s lottery and is awash in dollars. Addressing a stray American who doubts him, he says:

‘I have won them as certainly as you exist, my almost unseen friend. You would not exist if I didn’t believe you existed, nor would those dollars. I believe, therefore you are.’

‘What do you mean I wouldn’t exist?’

‘You exist only in my thoughts, my friend. If I left this room …’

‘You’re nuts.’

‘Prove you exist, then.’

‘What do you mean, prove? Of course I exist. I’ve got a first-class business in real estate: a wife and a couple of kids in Miami: I flew here this morning by Delta: I’m drinking this Scotch, aren’t I?’ The voice contained a hint of tears.

From Berkeley to Descartes in a few paragraphs: Greene’s theological-philosophical subtext is always available to him. (‘Like Milly, Dr Hasselbacher had faith. He was controlled by numbers as she was by saints.’) And interestingly, the innocent and faithful Hasselbacher offers the annoyed American the alternative existence of ‘a Secret Service agent’ – the very career upon which Wormold is, all unaware, about to embark.

Before we leave this scene, we may notice that the American is like all the other Americans in the novel – banal and bourgeois and self-pitying. (He doesn’t even consider claiming the words ‘I think’ as proof of his existence: the real-estate business comes first.) Most of the Yanks are tourist cameos, worried about the wave of violence that is afflicting the island and tending to congregate in yet another bar at the Hotel Nacional. Their days of treating Havana as a vacation and business backyard are about to be over, ‘for the President’s regime was creaking dangerously towards its end.’

Our Man in Havana
was published on 6 October 1958. On New Year’s Day 1959 Fidel Castro’s luxuriantly bearded guerrillas emerged from the
sierras
and the villages and captured the city. As with his setting of
The Quiet American
– in Vietnam just before the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu – or with his decision to locate
The Comedians
in the midnight of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti, Greene seemed to have an almost spooky prescience when it came to the suppurating political slums on the periphery of America’s Cold War empire. In 1958 – the year that
Dr No
was first published – Ian Fleming had not yet captured the world’s attention, from his own Caribbean home, with a British agent who carried a number as well as a gun (and a licence to use it). Nor had humanity learned to associate Cuba with missiles, and with the possibility of thermonuclear annihilation. And Greene in any case was having fun, with his unarmed ‘agent 59200/5’, and his wholly-invented missile-sites based on vacuum-cleaner blueprints.

Moreover, the eclipse of British power after the Suez catastrophe of 1956 had not then quite become self-evident. ‘I think we’ve got the Caribbean sewn up now, sir,’ Hawthorne tells ‘The Chief’ on his return to London. This black-monocled clubman and thwarted fiction-writer – a distinctly non ‘M’-like creation – also invents agents in his own mind, and is thus intrigued to learn more about ‘our man in Havana’:

‘Doesn’t run after women, I hope?’

‘Oh, nothing of that sort, sir. His wife left him. Went off with an American.’

‘I suppose he’s not anti-American? Havana’s not the place for any prejudice like that. We have to work with them – only up to a point, of course.’

(‘The Chief’ – which was also the staff nickname given to Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s
Scoop
– is fond of this ‘up to a point’ mantra, which he inflicts on Hawthorne rather than, as with Lord Copper’s underling Salter, having it practiced on him.) His character occupies only a few brief scenes but is nonetheless one of the most finished and polished portrayals in the entire book. Like Lord Copper, too, he is easy to delude or, as was said of President Coolidge, ‘once bamboozled, impossible to unbamboozle’. Greene’s own wartime relationship with British Intelligence, and his lifelong comradeship with its most famous traitor Kim Philby, evidently conditioned him to view ‘the Service’ as a place of collapsing scenery and low comedy, populated by a cast of jaded misfits. Thus he presents Wormold’s fraud and dishonesty in a sympathetic light: the mandarins of MI6 are eager to deceive themselves, and to be deceived, and they get no more than what they ask for.

I forget who it was who once updated the old moral couplet: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive’ by adding the lines:

But when we’ve practiced quite a while

How vastly we improve our style!

That later version (which was entitled ‘A Word of Encouragement’) could have been composed with Wormold in mind.
Facilis descensus Averno
! How easily he takes to the world of padded expenses, false reports, and fabricated salaries for non-existent staffers. But for Greene, the world of farce always has its bitter limitations. The inoffensive Dr Hasselbacher is drawn into the net of Wormold’s fantasy and suffers ruin and humiliation as a consequence. Now Wormold feels himself becoming coarsened:

Shut in his car Wormold felt guilt nibbling around him like a mouse in a prison-cell. Perhaps soon the two of them would grow accustomed to each other and guilt would come to eat out of his hand … There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

That this last insight had been dearly bought by Greene, from his boyhood onward, there can be no doubt. Its counterpart and corollary – ‘Sometimes it seems easier to run the risk of death than ridicule’ – does not make its appearance until much nearer to the culmination of the story.

From the name of the ‘Atomic Pile’ vacuum-cleaner to the shock-effect produced on ‘The Chief’ by the outlines so deftly and falsely sketched by Wormold, Greene also indulges the lighter side of ‘schoolboy’ humor:

‘Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.’

‘Is that desirable, sir?’

‘Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.’

This could almost have come from a Peter Sellers script of the same epoch, and will inevitably remind some of today’s readers of more recent fiascos associated with paranoia about weapons of mass destruction. However, there is nothing flippant or innocent about Captain Segura. In the figure of this torturer and mutilator and sex-maniac, evidently appropriated from the dictator Batista’s dreaded ‘enforcer’ Captain Ventura, Greene offers a foretaste of the ‘death squads’, with their dark glasses and special unmarked automobiles, who were to terrorize Latin America and horrify the world in the succeeding decades. Once again, this character is not on stage very often or for very long, but he furnishes another well-etched and highly memorable ‘miniature’. It would not, perhaps, be correct to see in him an instance of the banality of evil. His evil is too overt and too ingrained for that. But he does have a way of turning up in banal or even jovial settings, reminding me of what Greene wrote about the skill of John Buchan as a thriller-writer: his ability to summon the spectre of death right up against the railings of the leafy and relaxing park. It is over a routine game of ‘checkers’ – accompanied this time by daiquiris rather than Scotch – that Segura casually mentions his belief in the ‘torturable’ and ‘non-torturable’ classes. Wormold affects shock and may even feel it: at any rate he reacts as if he was a stuffy Englishman who is quite new and unused to native customs:

‘I didn’t know there were class distinctions in torture.’

‘Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement … Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.’

Greene is here showing us a third-rate Grand Inquisitor, in a church gone bad, who no longer applies the rack or the thumbscrew out of any exalted conviction. (Indeed, we later learn that Segura has been hoarding money in case he has to make a sudden opportunistic dash for Miami.) So perhaps banality and evil are not as much separated as all that …

In the novel, Greene makes his creation Wormold behave in a manner that is absurdly out of character. (It is plainly outside the bounds of credibility, given his aching feelings for his vulnerable daughter, that he would permit her to continue an association with a policeman whose cigarette-case is upholstered with human skin.) However, Wormold himself proves to be a man who can confect fictional personalities more or less at will. Having initially invented them in order to bluff his superiors, he finds that they have taken on an existence of their own:

It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness – he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action … Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge … There were moments when Wormold thought it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

However, this second ontological interlude – if I may so phrase it – comes to an abrupt end when the universe of rugged reality decides to claim Wormold for its own. His flesh-and-blood assistant Beatrice is a woman of unsettling keen intuition. ‘You talk like a novelist,’ she observes – while still bamboozled – when he muses on the fate of one of his ‘agents’. ‘You’ve been writing his elegy like a bad novelist preparing an effect,’ she adds, in a line that is altogether too improbable and self-referential. It is she, who has been cheerfully paying part of the price of Wormold’s irresponsibility, who signals the very harsh new tone and turn of events at just the moment when he himself is under pressure and about to ‘revert’ to sheer puerility and denial. (To be exact, he is playing with a children’s cereal box after breakfast.) ‘I don’t want you murdered,’ she sternly announces. ‘You see,
you are real
. You aren’t
Boy’s Own Paper
’ (italics mine). It is the palpable womanhood of Beatrice, combined with the increasing and alarming grown-upness of his beloved Milly, that compels Wormold to play the ‘real man’ at last. In earlier and easier and happier scenes, the big weapons have been conjured from his imagination, and the small-bore weapon has been a soda-siphon in a hotel garden, aimed playfully at Captain Segura but easily laughed off with the excuse that it was directed at a ‘Dimpled Haig’ Scotch. On that occasion, Captain Segura had resorted to an abrupt vernacular obscenity (all the indecent expressions in this novel are rendered in Spanish) and ‘squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.’ Greene’s gift for the sinister implication, and for the recurring analogy to booze, is further illustrated by the sentence: ‘You could not estimate his danger from his size any more than you could a hard drink.’ And it is clear that the silly splash from the soda-siphon has by no means diluted the Captain, or his venom. But by the time Segura takes off his gun-belt and lays it to one side, in preparation for the climactic whisky-dominated game of checkers (or ‘draughts’ if you prefer) it is as plain as the old maxim of Chekhov that a gun once displayed in plain sight will not be re-holstered until it has been fired in anger. The ‘Wormold’, in other words, has turned. The meek little shopkeeper is ready to commit murder. This is to be death
from
a salesman.

His thirst to kill is supplied by a hideous, stuttering, impotent double-agent named (Greene takes a full revenge on his cruel boarding-school nemesis) Carter. If this odious and parodic Englishman had not offered Wormold poisoned Scotch at the dreary and joyless business banquet into which he is lured and enticed (and at which different flasks and blends are continually offered and contrasted), and if the innocuous Dr Hasselbacher had not been subsequently slain for trying to warn Wormold off, and if the whole callousness and cynicism of the spy-racket had not begun to sicken Wormold well beyond the point of disgust, I think that Greene meant us to understand that his salesman might yet have remained passive, and preferred to stay in the camp of the victim. But what Wormold is forced to realize is that he is in just as much danger from his ‘own’ side. How quickly the tepid appeals to patriotism and Britishness and Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare
, proffered so smoothly by Hawthorne at their first meetings, mutate into their sordid opposite. It’s not unlike the blue movie that he and Beatrice find themselves viewing while sheltering in one of Havana’s celebrated nightclubs:

There was an odd intimacy between them as they watched together this blueprint of love. Similar movements of the body had once meant more to them than anything else the world had to offer. The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.

And so Wormold, determined to vindicate friendship and love over treachery and murder, finds it surprisingly obvious to discover what he must do. In three sentences that might almost define the world we know as ‘Greeneland’: