The Seeds of Fiction (19 page)

On a visit with the Smiths to see the Cabinet minister who has replaced the unfortunate Dr Philipot, Brown observes, ‘Above his head hung the portrait of Papa Doc — the portrait of Baron Samedi. Clothed in the heavy black tail-suit of graveyards, he peered out at us through the thick lenses of his spectacles with myopic and expressionless eyes. He was rumoured sometimes to watch
personally the slow death of a Tonton victim. The eyes would not change. Presumably his interest in the death was medical.'

The dictatorship is exemplified by Captain Concasseur, who took pleasure ‘in breaking limbs' and ‘missed nothing through those dark glasses'. It was he who mutilated and emasculated Joseph, Brown's servant at the hotel. Typical of the regime's entrepreneurial insanity is the construction of an ice-skating rink in the mountains at Kenscoff, overlooking Port-au-Prince. (This was actually a short-lived project undertaken by a businessman connected to the Duvalier regime during that time.)

Except for the unworldly Smiths, who are oblivious to their murderous surroundings, the cynical, uncommitted foreigners see themselves only as players in a cosmic bad joke. Life to Brown is a form of dark comedy with the actors and actresses — comedians all — directed by the Almighty. Brown's world therefore lacks any profound purpose. Even so, the comedians' superficial environment is so totally dwarfed by the frightening enormity of Papa Doc's Kafkaesque darkness enveloping them that they appear laughably trivial and insignificant. ‘We are only the sub-plot affording a little light relief,' Brown tells Martha, commenting on Dr Philipot's suicide. ‘We belong to the world of comedy and not to tragedy,' he tells her on another occasion. He has no moral moorings and is not even able to sustain his romance with Martha. Their affair is growing cold, and besides being married she is the daughter of an executed Nazi war criminal. She mentions her harsh father, the Germán, to Brown who says, ‘Cruelty's like a searchlight. It sweeps from one spot to another. We only escape it for a time.' And elsewhere he observes, ‘Haiti was not an exception in a sane world: it was a small slice of everyday taken at random. Baron Samedi walked in all our graveyards.' Later when he calls on the British
chargé d'affaires
to help the imprisoned ‘Major' Jones, whose deal is dead, Brown says he ‘felt a little like the player king rebuked by Hamlet for exaggerating his part'. He is unaffected even by the death of his mother, Maggie Brown, a brave, worldly woman — Madame la Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers. She leaves him the hotel, and he treats Marcel, her Haitian lover, as just another member of the cast of the theatre of farce. Before she dies, the Comtesse says to Marcel, ‘I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape.' But Marcel cannot escape. He is no comedian; he cares. Filled with grief, he, too, commits suicide in the hotel. Suicide, Brown worries, is bad for business. On the other hand, there is no business.

It is the book's Haitian characters who try to inject some transcendental life into the comedians like Brown, who is the equivalent of a Haitian zombie in that his moral and spiritual decay has been caused by a loss of faith — in God — that makes him resemble the walking dead.

The towering figure of commitment is the Haitian physician Dr Magiot.
The antithesis of Papa Doc, Magiot is a Marxist but one attuned to the more gentle, bourgeois Victorian age in which Marx himself lived — a time when Marxism had a human face. Like the Hotel Trianon, Magiot is almost a relic from a bygone era. He helps bring about Brown's slow regeneration. Brown first encounters Magiot crouched over the body of the ex-Social Welfare Minister ‘in the shadow cast by my torch like a sorcerer exorcising death', and gradually succumbs to his influence as a sort of father confessor.

Graham, through a letter of introduction from the French Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, met the Haitian physician Dr Camille Lherisson, a big man with an even bigger ego who had been Minister of Health in the Magloire government for a brief time. He was Graham's opposite. Graham shunned the public spotlight, while Lherisson bathed in it. The high-profile physician had been one of the first Haitian doctors to be sent abroad by the Rockefeller Foundation. Under Rockefeller auspices he received a scholarship and undertook his postgraduate work in biology at McGill University, Montreal. (The Rockefeller Foundation had granted scholarships to a number of Haitian doctors to specialize in various medical fields abroad. Dr François ‘Papa Doc' Duvalier studied public health at the University of Michigan for a semester on a Rockefeller scholarship. There he learned a great deal about racial discrimination in the United States, if not about democratic values. Indeed, because of colour prejudice in the United States, most Haitians granted foreign scholarships had earlier been sent to Canada.)

Engaging and physically impressive, ‘Bibi', as Lherisson was known to his friends, was attending physician to some of Haiti's oldest families. He was a devoted doctor who had saved lives but who had become increasingly egocentric with age. He had finely chiselled features and could be described either as a dark mulatto or a light-coloured
griffe
(one of the many shades of colour between mulatto and black). Apart from a wandering eye, philosophy was another of his passions. He spoke English well and made a deep impression on Graham, who had difficulties with any language but his own. Lherisson's moment of fame, at least locally, had come during the last six days of September 1944 when, as president of La Société Haïtienne d'Etudes Scientifiques (the Haitian Society of Scientific Studies) he organized an international conference on philosophy. It was an extraordinary event for Haiti, made more so by the fact that it was held while the Second World War still raged. In retrospect it might appear that Haiti had priorities other than a five-day discussion on Kant and the anti-intellectual mysticism of Luther, ‘Object of Sensible Intuition According to Kant' and ‘Object of Physics-Mathematics' by Eugene Babin. Lherisson himself spoke on the philosophy of mathematics. The star of the event was the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whom Lherisson introduced as
‘notre cher et grand ami'
(our beloved good friend). It was Jacques
Maritain who Graham said had helped him publish his first book in France,
The Man Within,
and who had suggested he meet Dr Lherisson.

As things turned out, Lherisson became the model for Dr Magiot in
The Comedians.
This choice of a model was a shock to me. There were numerous Haitians who could have been the model for Dr Magiot. It was not until August 1980 that Graham told me who the inspiration was. He told me this as he and I waited for Panamanian strongman General Omar Torrijos's personal jet to take us to Managua, Nicaragua. Graham lamented the demise of the late Hotel Oloffson bartender Caesar and his famous rum punches. His musing took him back many years. ‘Did you know Dr Camille Lherrison?' he asked. ‘I had him in mind when I created the character of Dr Magiot in
The Comedians.'
Of all the heroic figures I believed were possible models for Dr Magiot, Lherrison had never crossed my mind. Up to that moment Graham's powers of observation and judgement had seemed extraordinary to me; now I was not so sure. I was shattered. All I could say in getting over my astonishment was that Graham had got Dr Lherrison's colour wrong.

‘He was black,' Graham said, his lips puckered up, seeming to hold back his words, as he usually did whenever he spoke with force and conviction.

Lherrison was a right-wing mulatto. He was an elitist doctor. He couldn't be the black Marxist Magiot. ‘It is a good thing Lherrison's dead,' I said. ‘This conversion of colour and ideology would have killed him.'

‘But he was black,' Graham insisted, looking at me as if I was the one who was colour-blind. When I didn't say anything more, he insisted. ‘He was very dark, black!'

Unknown to even his mulatto friends, Lherrison had entered Graham's narrative as a
noir.
They would consider it the ultimate irony, given the colour caste system in Haiti, for a man as pompous as Lherisson to be turned by an author who despised pomposity into a ‘tall elderly negro with a Roman face blackened by the soot of cities and with hair dusted by stone'.

Graham could see that I was upset about his choice of a model for Dr Magiot, so later he sent me a copy of an article he had written four years earlier for the
Sunday Telegraph
magazine in which he had identified Lherrison not by name but by colour in the following effusive terms:

A 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 found his hands too tied, so he resigned (something which would have been very dangerous to do under 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 old-world courtesy. He was to die in exile, more fortunately than Doctor Magiot. Who can tell?

The Comedians
leaves no doubt that Graham is firmly on the side of the oppressed. US foreign policy is astutely criticized by Dr Magiot, who predicts that Papa Doc will keep his ‘window open towards the east until the Americans give arms to him again'. Magiot notes that the fear of another Cuba, a second communist state at its back door, is reason enough for the United States to forgive Papa Doc his sins. ‘There will be no Cuba and no Bay of Pigs here,' says Dr Magiot.

Police Captain Concasseur says, ‘We are the true bastion against Communists. No Castro can succeed here. We have a loyal peasantry.'

While the
blan
comedians are self-centred and only half-alive, the Haitians they meet at least exhibit purpose. A young poet, Henri Philipot, nephew of the dead minister, decides along with Dr Magiot to take up arms against Papa Doc. Together they have commitment enough to spare, and they try to breathe some spiritual life into the comedians. But overcoming Brown's cynicism about life is not easy. The Smiths' vegetarian scheme also withers. They, too, get caught up in the violence and corruption of Papa Doc's Haiti, but at least they care about something. As they sail off to neighbouring Santo Domingo, Brown concludes that they are not comedians after all.

Pineda, the cuckolded Latin American ambassador, likewise mirrors the book's title: ‘Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars. Help yourself at the bar. My Scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.'

Henri Philipot, the would-be guerrilla, replies to the Ambassador, ‘He [Papa Doc] is real. Horror is always real.'

The Ambassador rejoins, ‘We mustn't complain too much of being comedians — it's an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed — that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.'

In his way Graham pays just tribute to the role of Haiti's folk religion, Voodoo. ‘Certainly I am not against Voodoo,' Dr Magiot tells Mrs Smith. ‘How lonely my people would be with Papa Doc as the only power in the land.' Voodoo, Magiot says, ‘is the right therapy for Haitians'.

And it is Voodoo (Graham, who attended a Voodoo ceremony in 1954 gets it right) that the young poet Philipot turns for help when all else fails him. ‘The gods of Dahomey may be what we need,' he concludes.

Of Philipot, Brown notes, ‘Governments had failed him, I had failed him, Jones had failed him — he had no Bren gun; he was here, listening to the drums, waiting, for strength, for courage, for a decision.' Voodoo did not fail him. Brown
attends the Voodoo ceremony above Kenscoff, high in the mountains, and the description of the service is remarkably well done for an author who had attended only one Voodoo ceremony in his life — and that more than seven years earlier.

In a letter to Catherine dated 30 August 1954, from El Rancho Hotel, Graham scribbled down his impressions of the Voodoo ceremony he had attended the night before, which had ‘lasted until 3 in the morning'. The letter, reproduced in
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
edited by Richard Greene, is headed with a request to Catherine: ‘Will you keep this letter in case I need it to refresh my mind?' In fact, the rite Graham described in his letter was typical of the ceremonies that catered to the tourist trade.

The importance that Haitians attach to sanctifying the dead came through in
The Comedians.
Haitians worship their ancestors. (A body-snatching by Duvalier's police recounted in
The Comedians
is based on an event following Duvalier's 1957 election when a kidnapping took place during the funeral procession of ex-candidate Clément Jumelle.)

‘Major' Jones, the charming cheat and boastful liar who is pursued by Captain Concasseur, tries to escape dressed as a Haitian woman and takes asylum with Ambassador Pineda. Jones is finally conned by a jealous Brown, who believes he is having an affair with Martha. This is a chance to put his phoney wartime experiences to use. Undergoing a spiritual transformation and shedding his comedian's mantle, Jones dies a hero's death with poet Philipot's guerrilla band. As the guerrillas withdraw from Haiti across the border into the Dominican Republic — our 1965 trip along the Dominican— Haitian border served Graham well in this last chapter of the book — Philipot, carrying the corpse of the torture victim Joseph, reports that Jones has vowed to keep Papa Doc's pursuing soldiers at bay until the others have had time to reach the border road. Philipot and his guerrillas are interned in an abandoned lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo, not unlike the Haitian guerrilla camp that Graham and I visited in 1965. Brown, himself now not so remote, concedes that he would like to erect a stone where Jones died. ‘I shall get the British Ambassador, perhaps a member of the Royal Family.'