The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  The US intervention finally ended, and President Johnson gave his approval for the seasoned conservative Dominican politician, Joaquín Balaguer, to take power. The Dominican Republic would no longer compete for headlines with Vietnam.

  Graham had certainly been right — grim things had happened in the wake of his departure.

  8 | THE COMEDIANS

  In a letter dated 20 December 1965 Graham finally broke the news. He preceded it by alluding to the Dominican upheaval. ‘I was afraid that something might have happened to one of you during the revolution — a revolution which alas I could not attend!’ Then, sounding slightly sheepish, at the end of the letter he announced, ‘I’ve got a novel about Haiti coming out at the end of January, of which I am sending you a copy in the hope that it may arrive. I’m sure you will find a great many errors there, but perhaps you will be amused by the last chapter, which reflects our visit to the bauxite works. Forgive the errors for the sake of the intention.’

  In the midst of the Dominican civil war, in spite of the erratic postal service, The Comedians arrived at our home. It was a thrilling moment, mixed with apprehension. This book, I hoped, would affect Haiti’s future or at least Papa Doc’s tyranny. The pen could indeed be mightier than the sword. I felt that much depended on the little parcel I held in my hand that afternoon. I examined its careful wrapping and waited a moment before tearing open the package and showing it to my wife. The book’s cover was several shades of green. The brief blurb on the inside jacket flap said it was Greene’s first novel in five years and noted that ‘Like one of its predecessors, The Quiet American, it is a story about the committed and uncommitted.’ Graham opened the book in the form of a letter, both as a salute to his old publisher, A.S. Frere, and as a way of establishing its geographical location. ‘Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier’s rule are not invented,’ he wrote, ‘the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night.’ The UK edition had been published by the Bodley Head of London. In his tiny script Graham had written: ‘For Bernard — hoping you will not find this too much of a travesty — with love, from Graham. Christmas 1965.’

  Unconsciously I lifted the book to feel its weight, as if it were a precious metal. Then I sat down, forgot about deadlines and news reports and devoured The Comedians. I didn’t sleep that night. Graham had given us a novel in which fiction was reality. There had been no need to worry. He had protected everyone concerned. There was not one breach of confidence. I was reassured he was honourable and compassionate. He had given the poor people of Haiti something Papa Doc had deprived them of: a voice. The horrors of the Papa Doc dictatorship and its gratuitous brutality were there. Graham had managed to capture, in this imaginary love story, the 1963—4 climate of Duvalier’s terror and its surrealism. Only those who had lived through that terror could appreciate the accuracy with which he painted it. The dark comedy left me depressed, and for several nights after rereading the book I suffered painful flashbacks of my last years in Haiti.

  The comedians of the book’s title are not the Haitians but the blans (whites), a term synonymous in Haiti with foreigners — whom Graham introduces sailing to Haiti aboard the Medea, a Dutch ship named after the jealous sorceress of legend. Their names are as vacuous as their moral philosophies — Brown, Jones and Smith. However, Jesuit-educated Brown is well read, citing Wordsworth and Baudelaire, and he reads Henry James’s ‘The Great Good Place’ at the Trianon — Port-au-Prince’s gingerbread landmark, clearly patterned after the venerable Grand Hotel Oloffson — during a long Sunday afternoon.

  But comedy in The Comedians is of the bitter kind, about dark human emotions. There are no belly laughs, just a deep sadness at watching a country sink into a living hell because of the cruel and capricious contempt for human life of its despotic leader and his sadistic Tontons Macoutes. Papa Doc does not make a personal appearance in the book, but his presence permeates the air like some awesome, terrifying vulture. Graham achieves this by portraying Duvalier as the Voodoo god Baron Samedi, guardian of the dead. As such, he casts a demonic shadow that darkens all.

  Graham uses a first-person narrative. Brown, the book’s anti-hero and main protagonist, was left by his worldly mother to be raised by Jesuits. He even contemplated becoming a priest at one stage but lost his faith and became a cynical, jaded, middle-aged beachcomber-type. He refers to God ‘as an authoritative practical joker’. Determinedly uncommitted, Brown wants to remain uninvolved in any social or political cause (which was so true of many foreigners and effete Haitians living under the dictatorship). But Brown’s cynicism does not prevent him from knowing what is going on around him. He returns to Haiti unable to sell his hotel, which his well-travelled mother has ended up with in Port-au-Prince.

  Aboard the Medea there is also ‘Major’ Jones, who is sailing under false pretences. He is a con man in the British genre, at times a charming cad but a pathetic figure none the less. He boasts of having battled the Japanese in Burma during the Second World War when in fact — as he confesses to Brown in a Haitian cemetery towards the end of the book — he was an actor performing far behind the front lines (which reminds me of Noël Coward). In Haiti Jones has high hopes of striking it rich by making a lucrative arms deal with corrupt government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, as the winds blow, so do the officials; Jones’s letter of introduction is to an official whose current address is the national prison.

  The only committed members of the group of seafarers travelling to Port-au-Prince are Mr and Mrs Smith, a noble-minded but naïve and elderly American couple who have not the slightest idea of what Haiti is like under Papa Doc’s dictatorship. As evangelical vegetarians (he was the presidential candidate on the US Vegetarian Party ticket) the Smiths absurdly seek to set up a vegetarian centre in Haiti that they hope will ‘one day remove acidity and passion from the Haitian character’. Still, they are likeable, and Graham shows that there are good Americans as well as quiet ones.

  From the moment the blans descend the gangplank in Port-au-Prince, they move deep into the terrifying darkness of Papa Doc’s regime and his eerie hell on earth. (Graham told me more than once after his 1963 visit that he had never elsewhere confronted the type and extent of evil that pervaded Papa Doc’s Haiti. The place, Graham said, reeked of malevolence — a malevolent dictator, a malevolent secret police and a malevolent system.) Upon disembarking Brown is given an effusive greeting by the ubiquitous Petit Pierre, the most recognizable character in the book after the all-pervasive Papa Doc. Because Petit Pierre seems to have escaped being beaten up or worse, he is suspected of having connections with the Tontons Macoutes. But Brown questions whether it is true because ‘there were occasionally passages in his gossip-column that showed an odd satirical courage — perhaps he depended on the police not to read between the lines’. It is also true that in a dictatorship any survivors are suspect. In his portrait of Petit Pierre Graham adds that he was ‘always gay. It was as though he had tossed a coin to decide between the only two possible attitudes in Port-au-Prince, the rational and the irrational, misery or gaiety; Papa Doc’s head had fallen earthwards and he had plumped for the gaiety of despair.’

  Brown heads off in the country’s customary nightly black-out to the eerily majestic Hotel Trianon only to find a corpse in the hotel’s pool, which has no water. The body is that of Doctor Philipot, Papa Doc’s Secretary of State for Social Welfare, who has chosen suicide at Brown’s mother’s hotel, slashing both his wrists and his throat, rather than face death at the hands of the regime’s terror specialists, the Tontons Macoutes. Although Brown is unmoved by this distasteful discovery, the incident eventually draws him into Haiti’s drama and even affects his sex life. While making love to Martha, the wife of a South American ambassador, Brown sees in his mind’s eye Doctor Philipot’s corpse again and is rendered impotent.

  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.’