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TO PETER GLENVILLE (TELEGRAM)

The release of the film of The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, drew a noisy complaint from Duvalier’s ambassador to the United States, who described it as ‘A character assassination of an entire nation’ presenting Haiti as a country of ‘Voodoo worshippers and killers’. Its object, he claimed, was ‘disgusting and scaring the American tourist at the beginning of the season. Haiti is one of the most beautiful, peaceful, and safe countries in the Caribbean.’ The producer and director, Peter Glenville, looked to Greene for a response.

[2 November 1967]

Suggest following: The ruler of Haiti, responsible for murder and exile of thousands of his countrymen, is really protesting against his own image in the looking glass. Like the ugly queen in Snow White he will have to destroy all the mirrors. But perhaps someone with a sense of humour drafted the official protest with its reference to ‘one of the most peaceful and safe countries in the Caribbean’ from which even his own family has fled.27I would like to challenge Duvalier to take a fortnight’s holiday in the outside world away from the security of his Tonton.

Love
Graham

1The Comedians (1966).

2 Among the colurful residents of Anacapri was Elisabeth Moor (1885–1975), the ‘Dottoressa’, an eccentric and outspoken Austrian physician. Her practice included many of the ordinary people who sometimes paid for her services with fish. Something of her personality may be found in Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt.

3 Greene had known the producer and director Alberto Cavalcanti since the mid-1930s, when he was an associate of John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit. In 1942 he directed Went the Day Well, a film based on Greene’s story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’. See Adamson, 32–3 and Falk 25–6.

4 Greene’s bibliographers have not recorded such a review. More likely, Greene had been teasing Waugh, as he did occasionally in his novels. For example, in Our Man in Havana, Dr. Hasselbacher refers to the hero of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall: ‘“Now if my friend, Mr. Wormold here, had invented you, you would have been a happier man. He would have given you an Oxford education, a name like Penny-feather …”’ Wormold and Waugh are both storytellers, but the parallel between them collapses as the reader tries to imagine the author of The Loved One selling vacuum cleaners. For his part, Waugh signalled to Greene’s fictional world when Guy Crouchback sailed past Freetown at the same time as Scobie was ‘demolishing partitions in native houses, still conscientiously interfering with neutral shipping’. See Men at Arms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 233.

5 The theatrical producer Hugh Beaumont (1905–72), Managing Director of H. M. Tennent.

6 For an engaging portrait of Diederich, see D. T. Max, ‘The A-List Archive’, New Yorker (11 and 18 June 2007), 68–71.

7 Father Jean-Claude Bajeux, who was working with Haitian refugees. ‘Duvalier had killed his family and he was not talkative on our border trip.’ (Bernard Diederich, e-mail to RG, 29 January 2006.)



8 Information from Peter Winnington.

9 Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini), who had earlier shielded Greene from the Holy Office (see pp. 203–6).

10 Meakers was a now-vanished chain of men’s outfitters in the West End. Their shop at 47 and 48 Piccadilly was on the north side of the street adjacent to the entrance to Albany (information from Bruce Hunter).

11 In 1963 the constitutionalist president of the Dominican Republic was overthrown and replaced by a military-backed civilian Junta. In 1965 there was a rebellion to restore Bosch, but an American intervention in April, involving more than twenty thousand troops, left the government in the hands of Joaquín Balaguer, a close associate of the former dictator Rafael Trujillo. A conservative, he dominated the country’s politics from 1966 until the 1990s. (E-mail from Bernard Diederich to RG, 25 February 2007)

12 Amory, 635. Waugh makes a similar remark to Diana Cooper; see Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, ed. Artemis Cooper (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 324.

13 Companion of Honour, announced in the New Year’s Honours list.

14 Graham is comparing the con-man Jones in The Comedians with the charming swindler Thomas Roe (see p. 256).

15 ‘clod’ in the original seems to be a dictation error.

16The Vendor of Sweets.

17 Macleod’s volume of verse from 1930 was entitled The Ecliptic.

18 While students, Greene and Macleod had long talks in the meadows at Oxford. See p. 255.

19 In 1957 Greene met Haydée Santamaria in Santiago. She was one of two women who had participated in the disastrous attack on the Moncada Army Barracks on 26 July 1953. She was captured and tortured, and she lost her brother and fiancé in the attack. She later ran Casa de las Américas, an artistic institution and publishing house. She committed suicide in 1980. (Ways of Escape, 190; further information from Bernard Diederich.)

20 Carlos Franqui (b. 1921) ran the official newspaper Revolución and was Castro’s chief of propaganda; he went into exile and broke with the regime by 1968. He was the author of The Twelve.

21 Raul Milian (1914–86) and Rene Portocarrero (1912–85) were expressionist artists, and shared a house. Portocarrero wept at Greene’s departure in 1966 (Greene to Michael Richey, 27 January 1986, Georgetown University).

22 Bernard Diederich, Le Prix du sang (2005), 386 and passim.

23 Diederich and Burt, 363–5.

24Ways of Escape, 201.

25 See Ways of Escape, 211–19, and New York Times, 28 September 1967.

26 ‘An Incident in Sinai’, Sunday Telegraph (25 October 1967), incorporated into Ways of Escape, 211–19.

27 Papa Doc’s war on the film of The Comedians followed soon after his scheme to kill Colonel Max Dominique, the husband of his eldest and favourite daughter, Marie-Denise. Her protests combined with those of his own wife, Simone, caused him to relent. The couple were exiled to Spain with his youngest daughter (also named Simone). However, Max was soon condemned to death in absentia; indeed, nineteen officers associated with him had already been shot. Two years later, the family patched things up with Papa Doc publicly embracing Max in a cheerful reunion scene on his return to Haiti. Both sisters were present when Papa Doc died in 1971. (Information from Bernard Diederich.)

 

8
THE HONORARY CONSUL


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