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Graham
Greene on The Comedians:
…In my hotel, the Oloffson
(I call the Trianon in The Comedians), there were
three guests besides myself—the Italian manager of
the casino and an old American artist and his wife —
a gentle couple whom I cannot … The Comedians, I am glad to say, touched him [Papa Doc Duvalier] on the raw. He attacked it personally in an interview he gave in Le Matin, the paper he owned in Port-au-Prince — the only review I have ever received from a Chief of State. "Le livre n'est pas bien ecrit. Comme l'oeuvre d'un ecrivain et d'un journaliste, le livre n'a aucune valeur."
I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier, but a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood. from Ways of Escape, pp.228-230, 232 © Melody Yiu Images and quoted text on this website may be protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. They are presented here for academic interest and personal entertainment. No distribution, reproduction, re-transmission or other rights are given or implied by their appearance. If you have any copyright concerns, please notify me. |
My first two visits to Haiti in the
fifties had been happy enough. That was the time of
President Magloire, there was extreme poverty, but there
were many tourists and some of the money they brought was
allowed to trickle down the social scale…I met
Haitian poets and painters and novelists, and one man I
like 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 he found his hands too tied, so he resigned
(something which it would have been very dangerous to do
under Doctor Duvalier)…He was a very big man and
very black, of great dignity and with an old-world
courtesy. He was to die in exile — more fortunately
than Doctor Magiot? Who can tell? It was during that
period I attended the Voodoo ceremony I describe in the
novel.
deny bore some
resemblance to Mr. and Mrs. Smith of the novel. He wanted
to teach the use of the silk screen to Haitian artists,
so that they could earn a better living by selling
reproductions of their paintings in the States…One
night the three of us braved the dark to visit the
brothel I have described as Mere Catherine's. There were
no customers except a couple of Tontons Macoute.
"Mr. Smith" began to draw the girls who had
been dancing together decorously and decoratively, and
the Tontons glared through their dark glasses at this
strange spectacle of a fearless happiness and an
innocence they couldn't understand.
…for five long years after my visit
his Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an elaborate
and elegant brochure, illustrated on glossy paper,
dealing with my case. A lot of research had gone into its
preparation, with many quotations drawn from the
introductions I had written for a French edition of my
books. Printed in French and English and entitled
"Graham Greene Demasque Finally Exposed," it
included a rather biased sketch of my career. This
expensive work was distributed to the Press through the
Haitian embassies in Europe, but distribution cased
abruptly when the President found the result was not the
one he desired. "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." (The last
epithet has always a little puzzled me.)