Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 03 May 2019
The Comedians by Graham Greene
I can’t remember who originally coined the shorthand term “Greeneland” to denote what the OED describes as “the seedy, politically unstable, and dangerous world” in which the novels of Graham Greene are typically set, but few such phrases capture so much with so little.
Greeneland is as much an atmosphere as a landscape – an instantly recognisable climate of bitter cynicism, fear, betrayal and treachery, of redemption and loss of faith, of fidelity and adultery; a sort of smoky, dimly lit saloon-bar of the soul in which it is always just before afternoon closing, the Scotch glasses are always smudged, and the muttering clientele are already nursing daytime hangovers as they wonder where they might go next in search of an antidote to the corrosive boredom and anxiety that will otherwise consume them. The phrase is so astonishingly evocative that you don’t even need to read Greene in order to conjure up its full horrors.
It must be more than forty years since I last read Greene’s Haiti novel, The Comedians. It is a novel that has always puzzled me a little. It is set in Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti, shortly after Duvalier took power in 1957 and perhaps a little after the attempted coup in 1958 which sought to overthrow him – an archetypal Greeneland.
The novel’s cast of rather faceless, anonymous characters include the narrator, Mr Brown, an accidental hotelier who has returned to Haiti because his failing hotel is the only asset he has; Major Jones, the blustering, almost certainly bogus military man and con-artist; the American Mr Smith, one-time US presidential candidate, and his indomitable wife, deluded evangelists for vegetarianism who hope to found a vegetarian complex in Haiti’s unfinished and already collapsing ‘model city’; the Uruguayan ambassador, Manuel Pineda, and his wife Martha – with whom Brown is having an affair – and their spoilt, overweight son, Angel; and the courageous philosophical-communist Dr Mangiot (Papa Doc distinguishes between “philosophy and propaganda”, he explains: actual communists are brutally exterminated but it is still permissible to read Marx for his philosophical ideas).
These characters lurch from crisis to crisis as Duvalier consolidates power in his nightmarish, heart-of-darkness dictatorship, assisted by a voodoo-fuelled personality cult and the Tontons Macoute, his secret police-cum-paramilitary force of torturers, executioners and enforcers.
But who or what are the comedians of the title?
I had always assumed that this was an ironic reference to Duvalier and his death squads, but on rereading the novel I realise I was mistaken. Greene, with some of his darkest and bitterest humour, uses the term comedians to describe all of the white characters. Papa Doc with his dead-eyed Baron Samedi stare and his legions of swaggering torturers in cheap rumpled suits and dark glasses may be terrifyingly comic, but the real comedians are the white characters, the Europeans and Americans, the lying, dissimulating, compulsive fantasists and swindlers – whether financial swindlers or swindlers in ideas.
I said that Greeneland was as much an atmosphere as a landscape, a place of the imagination. But Greene’s particular hearts of darkness were always rooted in reality. The collapsing French colonial Vietnam of The Quiet American; the morally squalid seaside front and bedsitter-land of Brighton Rock; the brutal anti-clericalism of 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory… Everyone will have a favourite Greeneland that they return to periodically.
In the case of The Comedians, it is interesting to note that it was the source of an altogether real controversy. It was banned – of course – in Haiti, but even Papa Doc was disturbed by the powerful picture the novel paints of Duvalier’s corrupt and murderous dictatorship, and he instructed his Ministry of Foreign Affairs to publish a rebuttal, a pamphlet called Graham Greene Demasqué (Finally Exposed). This described Greene as: “A liar, a cretin, a stool-pigeon…unbalanced, sadistic, perverted…a perfect ignoramus…lying to his heart’s content…the shame of proud and noble England…a spy…a drug addict…a torturer.” Greene apparently said, “The last epithet has always a little puzzled me.” Needless to say, he loved the controversy and said it made him realise that writers are not necessarily as powerless as they usually feel.
The Comedians is not without flaws. Sometimes its characters and their lengthy conversations sound all too much like a crowd of Graham Greenes debating; and here and there the profound moral pessimism of the Greene world-view has him employing similes that rather over-reach themselves. But even so, the book it most closely resembles is The Quiet American – Greene’s undisputed masterpiece, and it is in this context this it deserves to be considered. And as I mentioned earlier, oddly enough it is also at times extremely funny – although one must like one’s humour with a heavy dash of gall and wormwood.
Alun Severn
May 2019
Graham Greene elsewhere on Letterpress:
Graham Greene: ‘The Battle of Britain was won on Benzedrine’ – Telegraph article
‘Exploring Cuba, Guided by Graham Greene’ – Atlas Obscura article