The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  He went to the Congo on a six-month fellowship towards the end of his medical studies, in 1951–2: ‘There, I studied with Dr Hemerijckx, one of the greatest figures of leprosy in the forties and fifties, a widower – he had lost his wife on the spot during the very first years after his arrival, in the twenties. A hybrid of Schweitzer and Father Damien, so to speak, living in the complete bush, he was in charge of organizing the ambulatory treatment of leprosy in the remote villages of central Congo. Nurses distributing the new drugs, often travelling on bicycles, paths permitting. Hence the story of “yours truly” on bicycle.’11

  Lechat returned to Belgium to finish his training, and in 1953 went to the Congo again for the first of a series of three-year terms. By 1958, accompanied by his wife, the artist Édith Dasnoy, he was running a leprosy clinic in the village of Iyonda in the province of Équateur in the north-west of the country. About 15 kilometres from the provincial capital of Coquilhatville (now Mbandaka), it was off the beaten track, but not utterly isolated. There he had the care of many patients and began the research he would continue in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins University as he became the world’s pre-eminent expert on the disease, and then pursued a distinguished career as an epidemiologist in Louvain. When it was proposed to him in an interview for this book that he had ‘worked like a dog’ at Iyonda, this self-effacing man was induced finally to express wonder: ‘how did I succeed to spare time to do research in Iyonda with 1200 patients on my [hands]’.12

  Lechat was not keen to have the novelist visit the leproserie, fearing that his presence might unsettle his own relations, as a government employee, with the priests and nuns with whom he worked. It might also further expose his vulnerable patients to the world’s curiosity, as if they were ‘giraffes’.13 Since the leproserie was a ‘show piece’ for the modern treatment of the disease, there had been other visitors, including an eminent ornithologist, a doctor, a saxophonist, a diplomat, the manager of a travelling circus, and an official from the American State Department.14 Lechat extended a very qualified welcome to Greene, but sent him a list of two dozen other leproseries that might be more suited to his purpose. However, he noted that Iyonda was situated in the area Conrad described in Heart of Darkness,15 and that detail may have ensured that he would choose Lechat’s leproserie.

  As part of his journey to Havana in October 1958, Greene met in New York, at Lechat’s suggestion, Frederick Franck, an oral surgeon and artist who had visited Iyonda in 1958. Subsequently known as an authority on Buddhism, Franck worked with Albert Schweitzer and wrote a book about him, which Greene reviewed warmly. Greene went to two exhibitions of his drawings and was surprised by how very good they were, and later wrote an introduction to his African Sketchbook. After talking with Franck, he felt sure that Iyonda was the right place for him to learn about leprosy.16

  Even though there were still demands on his time from the productions of Our Man in Havana and The Complaisant Lover, Greene needed to spend not less than five or six weeks in the Congo, which was then approaching independence. He was not there as a political or military reporter on this occasion, but the context is important as just ahead lay the Congo Crisis of 1960–65. The Belgian approach to decolonization was gradual, to say the least, and they did essentially nothing to prepare the Congo for what turned out to be an abrupt change in government followed by a five-year bloodbath.

  The Belgians did not want to let go of their colony – it was worth too much. In the Second World War, the exiled leaders of occupied Belgium had made heavy demands on the territory, including a Kurtz-like requirement of up to 120 days per year of forced labour from rural workers. The colony contributed large supplies of copper, tin, lumber, rubber, even uranium to the war effort, while about forty thousand Congolese fought for the Allies, some serving in Africa and some in Europe. In contrast to British and French practice, which would see a white officer court-martialled for striking an African soldier, floggings were an almost daily occurrence in the Congo regiments. Returning from the war, many veterans had no patience with European claims of racial superiority. Moreover, as Belgians working in the colony had themselves gone to war, many Congolese took over skilled jobs and administrative positions, creating a new upwardly mobile class known as évolués.17

  The 1950s, especially the early years, were a time of prosperity in the Congo, but with the benefits going mainly to the white settlers and to Belgium itself. There was, nonetheless, an expansion of infrastructure, with roads, electrical generators, hospitals, and clinics springing up throughout the colony. The Congo had a high rate of literacy, but university education was extremely restricted, and at the time of independence there was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor, engineer, or economist – a void that would have terrible consequences when it came time to govern the country.18

  Still, in the 1950s supporters of independence found ways to inform themselves of the changes occurring throughout the world. Many belonged to political clubs, and others engaged in galvanizing discussions at the Brussels Expo and the Accra All-African People’s Conference, both in 1958. An array of new parties emerged, the largest being the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) led by Patrice Lamumba, later the country’s first prime minister – this party favoured immediate independence and a unitary state. The Alliance des Bakango (ABAKO), led by Joseph Kasavubu, who became the country’s first president, had its roots in the Bakango ethnic group and was less radical in its demands. Among the emerging leaders was Joseph Désiré Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), who served as head of the military in the new government.19

  Independence came on 30 June 1960. In the ensuing administrative vacuum, there was a mutiny in the army, a mass departure of Belgian civilians, a military invasion by Belgium, an intervention by the UN, and large-scale secessions. Over the objections of Kasavubu, Lamumba looked to the Soviet Union for assistance in controlling the country, a decision that brought the new republic into the front line of the Cold War. Barely six months after independence, Mobutu, with American approval, arranged for the execution of his former friend Lamumba. Until 1965, a civil war was fought along ideological and ethnic lines, with the Americans and Soviets backing certain groups as proxies. Already the dominant figure in the country, Mobutu made an outright seizure of power in 1965 and ruled as a repressive and corrupt dictator until 1997.20

  Greene made his arrangements to visit the leproseries in late 1958, when these events could not possibly have been foreseen, and yet even before he reached the Congo the situation was changing. On 4 January 1959, just as Greene was getting the good news that he did not have cancer, the white mayor of Léopoldville cancelled a large political meeting organized by ABAKO. Thousands of frustrated supporters turned on the police, looted shops and businesses owned by whites, and attacked government institutions, as well as missionary churches and schools. The police shot many rioters, and after four days there were not less than forty-seven Congolese dead and 330 injured. Forty-nine Europeans were injured but none killed. On 13 January, King Baudouin released a recorded address, played throughout the colony, in which he assured the Congolese that within a reasonable time they would have independence. The announcement caused great excitement, and even though some violence continued, this was understood as a breakthrough.21 It was a moment of hope.

  Nonetheless, when Greene arrived in Léopoldville on 31 January 1959 he found the city still on a war footing. The streets were patrolled by tanks, lorries, and soldiers moving in single file – much as he had seen in Vietnam. A series of journalists came to Greene’s hotel room, assuming he was there to report on the riots.22

  As in Mexico, where he paid little attention to the nationalization of the oil industry and focused on the abrogation of religious rights, Greene was in the Congo to learn about leprosy. Having already written extensively about forced labour in Liberia and about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, he would continue to investigate African politics, as for example in his treatment of apartheid in The Human Factor. At the time, there were abo
ut a hundred thousand people in the Congo suffering from the disease,23 almost all of them condemned to misery, destitution, and segregation. The disease was a perfectly legitimate focus for research, even if there was something close to a revolution going on at the same time.

  On 2 February 1959 Greene went to Coquilhatville, where Lechat picked him up and took him to Iyonda. A village of small brick houses arranged in avenues bordered by mango trees on the edge of the equatorial forest, it was home to just over a thousand people with the disease. Greene was given a room in the priests’ house, with just a few sticks of furniture and a container of brownish water. Once alone, he had sudden misgivings: ‘Why was I here?’ It was not a question to which he had much of an answer. He was, as usual, in flight from the disappointments of his personal life. He was also following an obscure hunch that he could write a book that involved leprosy: ‘All I know about the story is a man “who turns up” . . . the place where he emerges into my semi-consciousness is a leper station, many hundred miles up the Congo.’24

  Semi-consciousness is one thing, experience is another. Having come with what was probably a stereotype of ‘the leper’, Greene now watched Lechat at work with his patients – real people with an often devastating disease. Lechat recalled him as particularly observant, making note, for example, of a man with no fingers who became an expert knitter, and people with damaged feet who were given special shoes that some chose to wear only on Sundays.25 A patient named Deo Gratias caught his attention,26 and a character based on him plays an important part in Greene’s novel. He took an interest in medical technology, including a device that could measure the reactions of nerves to one twenty-thousandth of a second, and another that measured the temperature of the skin in twenty places at once, allowing the doctor to prevent the formation of a leprous patch. Indeed, Lechat, and all leprologists, sought to treat the disease at an early stage and so avoid mutilations. Nonetheless, Greene saw some terrible sights, among them numerous cases of tuberculosis, a common cause of death among people with leprosy. There were also cases of elephantiasis: one man whose legs and feet had swollen like tree trunks and another whose testes were the size of footballs.

  After a week at Iyonda, Greene discerned a connection between his imagined character and the patients he was meeting: ‘Leprosy cases whose disease has been arrested and cured only after the loss of fingers or toes are known as burnt-out cases. This is the parallel I have been seeking between my character X and the lepers. Psychologically and morally he has been burnt-out. Is it at that point that the cure is effected? Perhaps the novel should begin not at the leproserie but on the mission boat.’27 Knowledge of these things imposed an ethical and technical challenge for Greene: the novel was to be focused on a physically sound European, whose psychological troubles had some parallels with leprosy but hardly bore comparison with the real thing. Although he often hinted that he was washed up as a writer, his eventual approach to this problem would be surprising and inventive. In the meantime, his visit to the Congo had a different outcome from the one he made to Kenya. He reported on Kenya as journalist, but produced no novel. His visit to the Congo led him to write a novel, but no journalism; towards the end of his time in the leproseries, he told Marie Biche that he would not be writing articles on the Congo as his experience there was ‘too limited & specialised’.28

  Still, he formed views on the political situation. He met the local governor and had a discussion with his adjoint, a man of twenty years’ experience, about the future of the Congo: ‘He spoke with emotion of the gentleness of life in the villages, but he too feels – as I cannot – that the tribal framework must be broken and material incentives be given for that purpose. Doesn’t this lead straight to the gadget world of the States? He spoke of the necessity for a mystique, but is there any mystique in America today, even inside the Catholic church?’29 As in Kenya, Greene felt that the departing colonial power should not meddle with traditional values and social arrangements.

  Greene did his best not to disturb the life of the mission, which was then a place of great activity as a hospital was being erected to replace the four-room dispensary where Lechat did much of his work. The novelist would spend part of his day lying in a disused pirogue (a form of canoe) by the bank of the Congo River, reading there until the heat became too intense. He would usually eat his lunch with the four priests,30 members of a congregation called the Missionaires du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus. Perhaps spoiled by his experience of saintly and bookish Belgian missionaries in Vietnam, Greene did not especially enjoy the company of these men, as their concerns were decidedly practical – they were building a hospital. Like the superior in A Burnt-Out Case, Father Pierre Wijnants smoked cheroots constantly, but he was a quiet man and seemed unlikely at the time to give any such sermon as that which appears in the novel, and was so unworldly as to mistake bidets in a catalogue for footbaths and proposed to order a dozen for the use of the patients.31 Nonetheless, he later proved himself an able archbishop.32

  In the evenings, Greene typically joined the Lechats and their children for dinner, and his manner was reserved but polite. Édith Dasnoy owned an 8mm movie camera, and on 5 March 1959 Père Paul Van Molle made a brief film of Greene. He can be seen dancing with the very whimsical Père Hendrik Vanderslaghmolen (known as Henri or Rik), who then gets on a tricycle belonging to Lechat’s three-year-old son. The film also catches some cheerful footage of Greene dining with the family,33 and although he was doubtless performing for the camera, he does not appear gloomy, let alone as prodigiously grim as his character Querry. Still, he did not reveal much to Lechat about his observations at Iyonda, nor did Lechat question him.34

  His journal does record irritation at would-be authors approaching him either to get tips on writing, or, worse, to give them. Such authors would show up by around five o’clock, supposedly to have a beer. According to a plan worked out with Lechat, whose sense of humour he greatly appreciated, the approach of a car was the signal for the novelist to climb out of a back window of Lechat’s house and vanish into the forest.35 One of these authors, the schoolmaster R. Van den Brandt, first asked Greene for help finding an agent, and the novelist gave him some names; then he asked for a meeting to discuss ‘religion’ as he had lost his faith because of a bankruptcy, but Greene refused to do this, telling him to look to the priests for advice.36 This man was almost certainly the model for the character named Rycker. For a short while, the novelist tried to stay incognito as ‘Mr Graham’, but that did not succeed, and one woman, the much younger wife of a veterinary surgeon, recognized him from the cover of a magazine, as does Marie Rycker in the novel.37

  At Iyonda, Greene was observing a fairly modern leproserie, operated on scientific principles, even if it was very short of resources. He also wanted to learn about old-fashioned leprosy settlements, run on ‘sentimental’ lines, so arranged to travel on the bishop’s steamboat, the Theresita, along the Ruki-Momboyu, a tributary of the Congo. He was given the bishop’s cabin where, in equatorial heat, he slept under a picture of a church surrounded by snow.38 A battered paddle-steamer, the boat itself would not have been out of place in the pages of Huckleberry Finn, except perhaps for the folding altar in the deckhouse.

  Apart from the crew, Greene’s companions were three missionary priests, including Rik Vanderslaghmolen, ‘tall & cadaverous & a joker’,39 who could speak some English. The captain, Père Georges, reminded Greene of an officer of the Foreign Legion and seems to have been easily bored, firing off his rifle at monkeys, a cormorant, an eagle, and a crocodile – at one meal Greene ate a heron the priest had shot and supposed it rabbit.40 The priests’ innocent jokes in Flemish left him a little confused, and he decided that his novel’s hollowed-out character should be surrounded by a humour he cannot participate in, and a sign of his eventual healing is that he ‘perpetrated a joke’.41 He was glad to encounter a young man named Lipscomb, who had served as a military officer in India and was now the manager of a palm oil factory at Flandria; finding th
eir conversation relaxing and intelligent, he visited the Lipscomb family on the journey upriver and then again on his return.42 In the novel, the far less amiable Rycker is made the manager of just such a factory.

  Having sworn off Joseph Conrad since 1932, Greene at last re-read the collection Youth while on the Theresita: ‘The heavy hypnotic style falls around me again, and I am aware of the poverty of my own. Perhaps now I have lived long enough with my poverty to be safe from corruption.’ He was chiefly interested in Heart of Darkness, which he still believed an excellent story though it had its flaws, the language ‘inflated’ and the character of Kurtz not coming to life: ‘It is as if Conrad had taken an episode in his own life and tried to lend it, for the sake of “literature”, a greater significance than it will hold.’ Greene was curious about Conrad’s habit of comparing concrete objects to abstractions and wondered whether he had himself picked it up43 – this is true, though Greene also does the reverse, frequently comparing an abstraction to an unlikely physical object, just flirting with bathos, for an effect that can be startling, amusing, or ironic. It is a stylistic mannerism he shares with W. H. Auden, whom he admired more than any living poet apart from Robert Frost.44

  As the boat passed into more remote territory, along a narrowing and meandering river course, Greene grew melancholic, feeling the pang of his estrangement from Anita, dreaming about Catherine and her lovers, and pondering a brief liaison that had just concluded in Brussels – the woman’s name is blotted out in his journal and replaced with ‘Tony’. She was married to a man serving in Cyprus, and while Greene had some strong feelings for her, he did not want to fall in love. He described the affair as lifting him from the ‘broken backed state’ of his emotions following the loss of Anita.45