That night Graham behaved in a way that was completely out of character. He began acting, mimicking Papa Doc’s Foreign Minister. I had known him to be reserved, direct, quiet. I had never seen him this animated. He displayed a wonderful sense of mimicry.
‘No interview is possible,’ he said, playing the part of Haitian Foreign Minister René Chalmers. ‘I regret, Monsieur Greene, the President is not receiving the foreign press at this time.’ He nailed the accent perfectly. ‘You know Chalmers,’ he laughed. ‘He’s this huge frog-like man who sits behind his desk at the end of a long, narrow room and closes his eyes as he speaks.’ Then he went on mimicking the minister. ‘Ah, Monsieur Greene, it is not possible at this time to travel to the north. It is for your own safety, you understand. If safety considerations are to be taken into account every time a journalist covers a story, there would be no coverage whatsoever.’ Coverage, we both knew, was precisely what Duvalier didn’t want.
Chalmers claimed there were no longer rebels in the north and that Graham would do better to travel to Les Cayes in the south. ‘As I left,’ Graham explained, ‘his aide told me Chalmers was very busy preparing a protest to the United Nations General Assembly because the exiled former Chief of Staff, General Leon Cantave, had led an invasion in the north with American arms.’
But even with the Foreign Minister’s official blessing, Graham still had to obtain a laissez-passer (official pass) to travel south from Port-au-Prince. Roadblocks were everywhere. To get his laissez-passer he was instructed to go to the police headquarters at the new Caserne François Duvalier, opposite the National Palace. The long wait, Graham recalled, was a goldmine. It gave him a close-up look at Duvalier’s repressive machine. He sat there for hours watching character after character, including a police officer who stared at him through large mirrored sunglasses. Graham was not sure of the man’s name, but he could have been any of a number of Macoute officers. They had all taken to wearing dark glasses to appear tough and sinister. From his description, though, it sounded like Colonel Franck Romain, a hot-tempered officer who later became police chief and mayor of Port-au-Prince.
Graham said the stench at the station was so intense it was like sitting inside a urinal. On one of the walls, beside a large official portrait of Duvalier, were pictures of the bullet-riddled corpses of former spy chief and creator of the Tontons Macoutes Clément Barbot and his brother Harry. Both men had been killed four weeks earlier, ending a two-month war with Papa Doc. They were flushed out of a hut on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince and cornered in a sugar-cane field where they were killed by Duvalier’s security forces. Afterwards a photographer was brought in to capture the bloody corpses on film.
Beyond the close-up look at the Macoutes and police, his experience at the police was fictionalized in The Comedians in the scene when Brown goes to get a pass to travel south. ‘A pass to Aux Cayes cost so many hours of waiting, that was all, in the smell of the zoo, under the snapshots of the dead rebels, in the steam of the stove-like day.’
On his 1963 visit Graham stayed at the Grand Hotel Oloffson. But the Haiti he encountered bore little resemblance to the land that charmed him seven years earlier when he visited Catherine Walston. Roger and Laura Coster, the former managers of the Oloffson, were long gone. Sensing that politics were going to kill tourism, Roger sold his lease on the hotel in 1960 and decamped to the US Virgin Islands where he went into business with New York restaurateur Vincent Sardi. Al Seitz, an American who had come to Port-au-Prince to help run La Belle Creole department store, now ran the Oloffson. Seitz hired a Macoute for protection. It was the thing to do for many of those who could afford it. Seitz disliked newsmen; he bemoaned their stories as overblown, frightening the tourists away.
When I met Graham in 1956 he was staying at the upmarket El Rancho Hotel with Walston. I tried to convince them to move to the Oloffson, but Graham said he was a guest of Albert Silvera, the owner of El Rancho, and didn’t want to hurt his feelings by moving to another hotel. But after I took them to the old gingerbread-style palace overlooking Port-au-Prince and introduced them to Coster, they needed no more encouragement. They left El Rancho and spent their last two days in Haiti at the Oloffson where Graham discovered the little barman, Caesar, who made the word’s best rum punches.
When I first arrived in the country in 1949 I lived in the Oloffson, but after a month I surrendered my room to the termites, certain the place would soon turn to sawdust. The old gingerbread structure, built in 1887 as a villa for the son of Haitian President Tirésias Simon Sam, possessed incredible charm. It was a three-storey wooden structure built on to the side of the hill with two turrets at the end of the façade. The main floor of the hotel had a huge mahogany bar and a long, wide veranda which served as an elevated dining-room. Eight tall doors led into the hotel, the back wall of which was the exposed stone of the mountain. From the top floors one could see the treetops, rusty metal roofs and the bay of Port-au-Prince in the distance and until the devastating 2010 earthquake the three white domes of the National Palace.
The suite Graham and Catherine occupied became the Graham Greene Suite. Neighbouring suites were also named, hung with ornate painted nameplates of other poets and writers and famous guests who had slept there, among them the actor John Gielgud, director Peter Glenville and Anne Bancroft.
Graham introduces readers to the Hotel Trianon in The Comedians:
The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the eighteenth-century manner nor luxurious in the twentieth-century fashion. With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the New Yorker. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales. I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that it had found no purchaser.
On his trip in 1963 Graham found the rambling old hotel virtually empty. He said there were only three other guests: the Italian manager of the International Casino and an elderly American couple who had taken up extended residence at the hotel. He considered they were somewhat naïve but sincere people trying to help Haitian artists learn the silk-screen process so they could reproduce their paintings and increase their income. He thought the couple’s endeavour was a noble one, if not terribly credible. Their effort ultimately came to halt because the Haitian Consul-General in New York failed to keep his promise to cut the red tape in Haiti and facilitate the import of raw material and to have the appropriate government ministry give the couple permission to work in Haiti. They were completely ignored by Duvalier’s officials. This scenario at the Oloffson closely resembles the scene Graham created at the Trianon with only Brown and Mr and Mrs Smith staying at the hotel.
This time around Graham did not stay in the suite that had been named after him. Instead, he lodged at the little cottage in the grounds in front of the main hotel building known as the James Jones cottage. The author of From Here to Eternity had spent his honeymoon there after marrying Gloria Mosolino, a one-time stand-in for actresses Marilyn Monroe and Eva Marie Saint.
Although he was a guest at the Oloffson, in the afternoons when government offices closed and the Oloffson became too eerie Graham dropped by the Sans Souci Hotel to relax and take notes under the big caimite tree next to the pool at the back of the hotel. The manager of the Sans Souci could be trusted as he was no pro-Duvalier.The place offered peace and quiet and gave Graham a chance to discuss the political story with foreign correspondents of the daily press.
One night Graham and the Oloffson’s three guests went to observe brothel life at Chez Georgina, off Carrefour Road just south of town. The place had a lovely garden set off by royal palms and an abundance of hibiscus. The only other patrons were a couple of Tontons Macoutes who stared at the group through their dark glasses. The elderly American man, an artis
t, began sketching the Haitian prostitutes who were dancing together. When the dance was over the girls went over and looked at what the blan was doing and burst into giggles. The Macoutes were not amused.
When Graham finally secured a laissez-passer he hired a driver and rode south from the capital. It took them eight hours to reach the town of Les Cayes, 125 miles away. Graham said there wasn’t much conversation, which gave him plenty of time to think. He was sure the driver was a Macoute. He would later write, ‘Fear in those weeks must have penetrated deep into my unconscious: Haiti really was the bad dream of the newspaper headlines.’
In southern Haiti it is customary to bury the dead in elaborate tombs in the family lakou (compound). But there are also cemeteries. As Graham passed St-Louis-du-Sud he came upon the magnificent old cemetery that rests on a hill. The weathered and strangely built tombs impressed him enough that he used them for a dramatic scene near the end of The Comedians when Brown and Jones are driving towards Les Cayes and their car breaks down. Brown describes the cemetery. ‘It was like a city built by dwarfs, street after street of tiny houses, some nearly big enough to hold ourselves, some too small for a newborn child, all of the same grey stone, from which the plaster had longed flaked.’
Graham learned that fear permeated rural Haiti. Les Cayes had been the main bastion of support for Duvalier’s opponent Senator Louis Déjoie during the 1957 election. Those who supported Déjoie paid dearly. Now, anyone who had a laissez-passer was treated with suspicion as a Duvalierist or a supporter of Papa Doc. The following day, when Graham returned to Port-au-Prince, the capital was filled with roadblocks. The Macoutes were constantly on the prowl.
On Sunday afternoon Jolicoeur and Al Seitz took Graham to the little Magic Ciné cinema on Rue de Centre to watch Our Man in Havana. When the lights went on at the end of the film Jolicoeur stood and introduced Graham to the audience as the man who wrote the book on which it was based. The bemused Haitians gave Graham a rousing round of applause.
On another occasion Jolicoeur introduced Graham to Antoine Herard, a long-time Duvalierist and an habitué of the Oloffson. Herard was the owner of Radio Port-au-Prince and a well-known announcer on the station. He invited Graham to visit the regime’s showplace, Duvalierville, a vaunted new town constructed on Papa Doc’s orders twenty miles north of the capital. Duvalierville, a concrete monstrosity, had replaced the pretty little village of Cabaret. This trip was significant in that it helped Graham illustrate the corruption of the regime, taking up over five pages in The Comedians when Brown and Mr Smith drive to Duvalierville with the Minister and a Macoute.
‘I’ve got it all right here,’ Graham said and handed me the green cloth-covered book of Victorian detective stories he carried on his trip. The detective book was only a cover. Inside were blank notebook pages where he wrote in a tiny, nearly microscopic script, making it impossible for anyone other than him to read.
Graham’s article on Duvalier’s Haiti was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 29 September 1963, with the headline ‘Nightmare Republic’. It was a bleak and terrifying picture of people living under a ‘strange curse’. He portrayed Papa Doc as Voodoo’s Baron Samedi, a spectre in top hat and tails who haunts the cemeteries smoking a cigar and wearing dark glasses.
In his article Graham classified the Duvalier regime as among the worst in history. He wrote:
There have been many reigns of terror in the course of history. Sometimes they have been prompted by a warped idealism like Robespierre’s, sometimes they have been directed fanatically against a class or a race and supported by some twisted philosophy; surely never has terror had so bare and ignoble an object as here — the protection of a few tough men’s pockets, the pockets … leaders of the Tontons Macoutes, of the police and of the Presidential Guard — and in the centre of the ring, of course, in his black evening suit, his heavy glasses, his halting walk and halting speech, the cruel and absurd Doctor.
He went on to describe the situation and his own experiences, including the searches at roadblocks in the city and how it took two days at the police station, where the ‘portrait of the Doctor is flanked by snapshots of the machine-gunned bodies of Barbot and his companions, to gain a two-day permit for the south. The north, because of the raids from the Dominican Republic, was forbidden altogether.’ He added, ‘All trade which does not offer a rake-off is at a standstill. A whole nation can die of starvation so long as the Doctor’s non-fiscal account is safe.’ He noted how the British Ambassador was expelled ‘because he protested at the levies which the Tontons Macoutes were exacting illegally from all businessmen. An arbitrary figure was named and if the sum was not forthcoming the man would be beaten up in his home by the Tontons Macoutes, during the hours of darkness.’
He also mentioned his visit to Duvalierville.
The Doctor has obviously read accounts of Brasilia and in the absurd little tourist houses with roofs like wind-wrecked butterflies one can detect Brasilia’s influence. There is no beach, and the town, if it is ever finished, is supposed to house 2,000 peasants in little one-roomed houses, so that it is difficult to see why any tourist should stay there. The only building finished in Duvalierville is the cock-fighting stadium. In the meantime the peasants’ homes have been destroyed and they have been driven from the area to live with relatives. Many people believe that the town, if finished, will become a Tonton garrison.
As with most major constructions in Haiti, since the emperor (King) Christophe built his fantastic citadel on a mountain-top, the cement used is cruelty and injustice. Labour on the project is controlled by the Tontons Macoutes. One young labourer was taken off his job because a Tonton wanted it for another. The labourer tried to appeal to him, ‘Please I am hungry. I have no work,’ and the Tonton promptly shot him through the head, the cheek and the body. He now survives in Port-au-Prince, paralysed.
Refugees in Santo Domingo, like the Cubans in Miami, are divided among themselves. The last presidential candidate, Louis Déjoie, plays a vain, loquacious role in the restaurants of Santo Domingo while he denounces the few men who cross the border to fight. Intervention by the Dominican forces is out of the question. Haitians remember Trujillo’s slaughter of unarmed Haitian labourers at the frontier-river now called Massacre, and the Haitian pride cannot be exaggerated; it is a quality noble and absurd and comforting for the persecutors. Even a man released from the torture chamber under the palace who had been beaten almost to the point of death would not admit that he had been touched. The great-great-grandchild of slaves is never beaten. (A whip hangs on the central pillar of every Voodoo temple as a reminder of the past.)
Santo Domingo is fifty minutes from Port-au-Prince by air, but the distance separating the two places must be judged not in miles but in centuries … neither business nor politics has any relevance in Haiti. Haiti produces painters, poets, heroes — and in that spiritual region it is natural to find a devil too.
He ended his article: ‘The electric sign which winks out every night across the public garden has a certain truth. Je suis le drapeau Haitien, un et indivisible. (I am the Haitian flag, one and indivisible.) François Duvalier.’
One of the foreign newsmen staying at the Sans Souci Hotel was Richard Eder of the New York Times, who wrote an article about Graham. The piece was published on 18 August with the headline ‘Graham Greene, in Haiti, talks of Double Trouble’. Although the article focused mostly on a gun-runner and thief who had been posing as Graham Greene, it also mentioned that Graham was in Haiti and thinking of writing an entertainment (the name Graham gave to his less serious fiction). Eder wrote, ‘If the entertainment is written, it will begin with a hotel proprietor returning from abroad and finding his hotel has only two guests. Mr Greene is staying at the Hotel Oloffson, which has only three guests.’
I had kept a copy of the article and handed it to Graham. He looked it over and smiled. ‘Yes, he is a decent fellow,’ Graham said about Eder. ‘I had him over at the Oloffson for drinks one night. I didn’t know he
was going to write this. I must say, he did a remarkable job.’
It was the only time I had seen him pleased with reporting on himself. But what excited me about the article was the possibility that he might write a novel set in Haiti. I knew enough not to intrude. I was in awe of Graham and wanted to help him as well as I could and certainly learn from him. He offered no further comment on the matter, and I didn’t ask. Still, he did not deny what Eder had written in the article. It gave me hope that he might write about Haiti.
After dinner we sat on the patio. It was a hot, humid night with no breeze. Slowly the conversation began to shift back and forth from Haiti to Indochina. He and Max Clos began discussing their time covering the French war in Indochina. Talk turned to The Quiet American, and Graham confessed he had modelled the American newsman Granger on Larry Allen of the Associated Press. Graham and Max began telling Larry Allen stories, about how he had covered the war and even been decorated by the French. The stories were not complimentary. Graham confessed that the press conference portrayed in The Quiet American — in which Granger bullies the briefing officers into revealing French casualties, only to ‘stare around with oafish triumph’ at his colleagues — actually happened.
While the book’s narrator is Fowler, a cynical old-time English political reporter who wants to remain above the fray and uninvolved, the quiet American Pyle is his opposite — youthful, naïve and out to save Vietnam from Communism. Graham said that, unlike the recognizable Granger, there was no Pyle. The best he could do, he said, was to create a composite of various Americans he had met in Saigon.
In describing his craftsmanship, Graham said he usually transposed real-life individuals into fictional characters. Sometimes he took bits and pieces of different real-life characters and moulded them into the people he needed to play the various roles he had set out for them or they for him.
The Seeds of Fiction Page 3