Title: Our Man in Havana
Author: Graham Greene
Greene, Graham (1958, 2007). Our Man in Havana. New York: Penguin
LCCN: 2006052794
PR6013.R44 O9 2007
Subjects
Date Updated: January 6, 2017
“Death from a Salesman: Graham Greene’s Bottled Ontology,” Introduction to the book by Christopher Hitchens, Our Man in Havana, pp. ix-xxiv.
‘[In Havana] where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy.’ —Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, 1980
Graham Greene famously subdivided his fictions into ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’ (this present one falling with a slightly suppressed chuckle into the second category) as if to slyly warn his audience that an element of the ludic and the flippant would sometimes be permitted to him and should be forgiven by his readers. If, in his infrequent confessions, he might have mentally reclassified some offenses as venial rather than mortal, something of the same analogy holds throughout his work.
I should like to propose a third, or subcategory: the whisky (as opposed to the nonwhisky) fictions. Alcohol is seldom far from the reach of Greene’s characters, and its influence was clearly some kind of daemon[1] in his work and in his life. A stanza of that witty and beautiful poem ‘On the Circuit,’ written in 1963, registers W. H. Auden’s dread at the thought of lecturing on a booze-free American campus and asks, anxiously and in italics:
Is this my mileau where I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic[2] swig?
Describing a visit to a 1987 conference of “intellectuals” in Moscow in the early Gorbachev years, both Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon were to record Greene making exactly this dive into his bottle-crammed briefcase. “Analeptic” literally means “healing,” and there was no doubt of a buried connection in Greene’s mind between the restorative properties of holy water and the redeeming qualities of raw spirit. In at least three of his literary ventures Greene chose to make the subject a central one. The lost but resigned little fugitive cleric in The Power and the Glory (1940) is actually aching at all times for a shot of brandy, but the Mexican vernacular deems his type “the whisky priest.” The burned-out figures of British intelligence in The Human Factor (1978) seem at times to be engaged in some sort of contest to amass the greatest number of “blend” labels, from J&B to Johnnie Walker, and even to create a new pseudo-scotch by mixing White Label and Johnnie Walker on the grounds that “They’re all blends anyway.”
The view that both sides in the Cold War were an admixture—at best—of each other’s hangover-inducing ingredients was an abiding belief of Graham Greene and is never more on show than in this miniature drama, and drama of miniatures. The action commences in a bar, and almost every subsequent moment in the story is set in a place where alcohol is dominant. To speak generally, if not absolutely, one may say that dependence on booze is a symptom of weakness, and although Jim Wormold (not a name to inspire immediate confidence) does turn out to possess a few latent strengths, he is presented from the first as a feeble man who is both a hostage —to his own poverty and inanition[3] —and who has a hostage: his foal-like sixteen-year-old daughter Milly. This girl, a combination of slight tart and vague Madonna striding through the worldly and corrupt streets of Havana, makes the hapless vacuum-cleaner salesman a prisoner of her childhood, and of his own. How wrenched yet charmed he is, having lost the wife to whom he promised that Milly would be educated as a Catholic, to hear the little girl solemnly praying “Hail Mary, quite contrary.” Yet how oppressed he is by the recollection of his own misery as a schoolboy:
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
(Many is the Greene novel and reminiscence, most conspicuously Brighton Rock, where this trope [a word or expression used in a figurative sense] of sadistic bullying makes its twitchy appearance. The slightly older boy who so relentlessly tortured him in his public-school days—a boy named Lionel Carter, as it happens—has put us eternally and unintentionally in his debt. And let us not forget that, as both tormentor and victim would have been taught: “In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.”)
Evidently resolving—for purposes of the “entertainment”—to not make all this too lugubrious, Green introduces Milly rather as Evelyn Waugh presented the more-ominously named Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited. That good/bad little girl once made a novena for her pet pig, and was mentioned in her convent school report as the naughtiest girl in the memory of the oldest nun. She ended up by volunteering to be a nurse for the forces of General Franco. Milly unknowingly gratifies her father by setting fire to a teasing schoolmate named Thomas Earl Parkman, Junior; shows here class the collected postcards of great aesthetic nudes; and gives artless yet casuistic [specious argument] replies to direct questions from her easily-baffled and highly-impoverished single parent. She also offers novenas in the hope of acquiring a horse, and allows herself to be escorted by the saturnine [of a gloomy or surly disposition] Captain Segura, a man who would have seemed exceptionally sadistic even in the ranks of Franco’s phalanx.
Thus it is made as clear as possible, within a few pages of the opening, that Wormold is living a life of quiet desperation. He cannot go on as he is, but he is set in his ways and wedded to mediocre respectability. This would be dire enough even if—like Henry Pulling in Travels with My Aunt—he was back in suburban Wimbledon. But in exotic Havana, with business going poorly and with a burgeoning daughter to boot, he is additionally expected to keep up appearances as an awkward Englishman abroad. Yet this is precisely what makes him attractive to Hawthorne, the relentlessly incompetent envoy of British Intelligence who decides to sign him up as a subagent and (within limits) “put him in the picture.” To us, Hawthorne seems like yet another English naïf [a naive or inexperienced person] in the tropics, concerned, like any harassed salesman, with giving a pleasing impression to his ultimate boss in London, but to the hunted and needy Wormold he belongs to “the cruel and inexplicable world of childhood,” and it thus feels like no more than natural justice to exploit him and fleece him to the very hilt. The two men do, however, have an initial bond. When they meet in Sloppy Joe’s bar, Hawthorne surveys the range of bottles on offer and says:
‘Eighteen different kinds of Scotch. . .including Black Label. And I haven’t counted the Bourbons. It’s a wonderful sight. Wonderful,’ he repeated, lowering his voice with respect. ‘Have you ever seen so many whiskies?’
‘As a matter of fact I have. I collect miniatures and I have ninety-nine at home.’
And this collection is about to be enhanced by the man with whom Wormold already has a bond, another lonely loser named Dr. Hasselbacher who divides his time between a few remaining patients and the rival Wonder Bar.
‘There is always time for a Scotch.’ It was obvious from the way he pronounced Scotch that Dr. Hasselbacher had already had time for a great many. . . . He took from his pocket two miniature bottles of whisky: one was Lord Calvert, the other Old Taylor. ‘Have you got them?’ he asked with anxiety.
‘I’ve got the Calvert, but not the Taylor. It was kind of you to remember my collection, Hasselbacher.’ It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.
This touching and abject allusion to Bishop BerkeIey’s famous question is followed immediately by a playful and half-drunken ontological interlude, this time in the Seville-Biltmore bar where Dr Hasselbacher, flown with Scotch, imagines that he has already won the next day’s lottery and is awash in dollars. Addressing a stray American who doubts him, he says:
“I have won them as certainly as you exist, my almost unseen friend. You would not exist if l didn’t believe you existed, nor would those dollars. I believe, therefore you are.”
“What do you mean I wouldn’t exist?”
“You exist only in my thoughts, my friend. If I left this room _ . .”
“You’re nuts.”
“Prove you exist, then.”
“What do you mean, prove? Of course I exist. l’ve got a first- class business in real estate: a wife and a couple of kids in Miami: I flew here this morning by Delta: l’m drinking this Scotch, aren’t l?” The voice contained a hint of tears.
From Berkeley to Descartes in a few paragraphs: Greene’s theological-philosophical subtext is always available to him. (“Like Milly, Dr Hasselbacher had faith. He was controlled by numbers as she was by saints.”) And interestingly, the innocent and faithful Hasselbacher offers the annoyed American the al- ternative existence of “a Secret Service agent”—the very career upon which Wormold is, all unaware, about to embark.
Before we leave this scene, we may notice that the American is like all the other Americans in the novel: banal and bourgeois and self-pitying. (He doesn’t even consider claiming the words “I think” as proof of his existence: the real-estate business comes first.) Most of the Yanks are tourist cameos, worried about the wave of violence that is afflicting the island and tending to congregate in yet another bar at the Hotel Nacional. Their days of treating Havana as a vacation and business backyard are about to be over, “for the President’s regime was creaking dangerously towards its end.”
Our Man in Havana was published on October 6, 1958. On New Year’s Day I959 Fidel Castro’s luxuriantly bearded guerrillas emerged from the sierras and the villages and captured the city. As with his setting of The Quiet American—in Vietnam iust before the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu—or with his decision to locate The Comedians in the midnight of “Papa Doc” Duvalier s Haiti, Greene seemed to have an almost spooky prescience when it came to the suppurating political slums on the periphery of America’s Cold War empire. In 1958—the year that Doctor No was first published—lan Fleming, from his own Caribbean home, had not yet captured the world’s attention with a British agent who carried a number as well as a gun (and a license to use it). Nor had humanity learned to associate Cuba with missiles, and with the possibility of thermonuclear annihilation. And Greene in any case was having fun, with his unarmed “Agent 5 9200/ 5,” and his wholly invented missile sites based on vacuum-cleaner blueprints.
Moreover, the eclipse of British power after the Suez catastrophe of 1956 had not quite then become self-evident. “I think we’ve got the Caribbean sewn up now, sir,” Hawthorne tells “The Chief” on his return to London. This black-monocled clubman and thwarted fiction writer—a distinctly non-“M”-like creation-also invents agents in his own mind and is thus intrigued to learn more about “our man in Havana.”
“Doesn’t run after women, I hope?”
“Oh, nothing of that sort sir. His wife left him. Went off with an American.”
“I suppose he’s not anti-American? Havana’s not the place for any prejudice like that. We have to work with them—only up to a point, of course.”
(‘The Chief’—which was also the staff nickname given to Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is fond of this up to a point’ mantra, which he inflicts on Hawthorne rather than, as with Lord Copper’s underling Salter, having it practiced on him.) His character occupies only a few brief scenes but is nonetheless one of the most finished and polished portrayals in the entire book. Like Lord Copper he too, is easy to delude or, as was said of President Coolidge, “once bamboozled, impossible to unbamboozle.” Greene`s own wartime relationship with British Intelligence, and his lifelong comradeship with its most famous traitor Kim Philby, evidently conditioned him to view “the Service” as a place of collapsing scenery and low comedy, populated by a cast of jaded mislits. Thus he presents Wormold’s fraud and dishonesty in a sympathetic light: the mandarins of M16 are eager to deceive themselves, and to be deceived, and they get no more than what they ask for. l forget who it was who once updated the old moral couplet: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive” by adding the lines:
But when we`ve practiced quite a while
How vastly we improve our style!
That later version (which was entitled “A Word of Encouragement”) could have been composed with Wormold in mind. Facilis descensus Averno! How easily he takes to the world of padded expenses, false reports, and fabricated salaries for non-existent staffers. But for Greene, the world of farce always has its bitter limitations. The inoffensive Dr. Hasselhacher is drawn into the net of Wormold’s fantasy and suffers ruin and humiliation as a consequence. Now Wormold feels himself becoming coarsened:
Shut in his car Wormold felt guilt nibbling around him like a mouse in a prison cell. Perhaps soon the two of them would grow accustomed to each other and guilt would come to eat out of his hand ….There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
That this last insight had been dearly bought by Greene, from his boyhood onward, there can be no doubt. Its counter- part and corollary—“Sometimes it seems easier to run the risk of death than ridicule”—does not make its appearance until much nearer to the culmination of the story.
From the name of the “Atomic Pile” vacuum-cleaner to the shock-effect produced on “The Chief” by the outlines so deftly and falsely sketched by Wormold, Greene also indulges in the lighter side of “schoolboy” humor:
“Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.”
“Is that desirable, sir?”
“Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.”
This could almost have come from a Peter Sellers script of the same epoch, and will inevitably remind some of today’s readers of more recent fiascos associated with paranoia about weapons of mass destruction. However, there is nothing flippant or innocent about Captain Segura. In the figure of this torturer and mutilator and sex maniac, evidently appropriated from the dictator Batista’s dreaded “enforcer” Captain Ventura, Greene offers a foretaste of the “death squads,” with their dark glasses and special unmarked automobiles, who were to terrorize Latin America and horrify the world in the succeeding decades. Once again, this character is not on stage very often or for very long, but he furnishes another well-etched and highly memorable “miniature.” It would not, perhaps, be correct to see in him an instance of the banality of evil. His evil is too overt and too ingrained for that. But he does have a way of turning up in banal or even jovial settings, reminding me of what Greene wrote about the skill of John Buchan as a thriller writer: his ability to summon the spectre of death right up against the railings of the leafy and relaxing park. It is over a routine game of “checkers”—accompanied this time by daiquiris rather than Scotch—that Segura casually mentions his belief in the “torturable”and “non-torturable” classes. Wormold affects shock and may even feel it: At any rate be reacts as if he were a stuffy Englishman who is quite new and unused to native customs:
“l didn’t know there were class distinctions in torture.”
“Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would he outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement . . . Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.”
Greene is here showing us a third-rate Grand Inquisitor, in a church gone bad, who no longer applies the rack or the thumb- screw out of any exalted conviction. (Indeed, we later learn that Segura has been hoarding money in case he has to make a sudden opportunistic dash for Miami.) So perhaps banality and evil are not as much separated as all that . . .
ln the novel, Greene makes his creation Wormold behave in a manner that is absurdly out of character. (It is plainly outside the bounds of credibility, given his aching feelings for his vulnerable daughter, that he would permit her to continue an association with a policeman whose cigarette case is upholstered with human skin.) However, Wormold himself proves to be a man who can confect fictional personalities more or less at will. Having initially invented them in order to bluff his superiors, he finds that they have taken on an existence of their own:
It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness—he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action …. Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge …. There were moments when Wormold thought it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.
However, this second ontological interlude—if I may so phrase it—comes to an abrupt end when the universe of rugged reality decides to claim Wormold for its own. His flesh-and-blood assistant Beatrice is a woman of unsettlingly keen intuition. “You talk like a novelist,” she observes—while still bamboozled—when he muses on the fate of one of his “agents.” You’ve been writing his elegy like a bad novelist preparing an effect,” she adds, in a line that is altogether too improbable and self-referential. It is she, who has been cheerfully paying part of the price of Wormold’s irresponsibility, who signals the very harsh new tone and turn of events at just the moment when he himself is under pressure and about to “revert” to sheer puerility and denial. (To be exact, he is playing with a children’s cereal box after breakfast.) “I don’t want you murdered,” she sternly announces. “You see, you are real. You aren’t Boy’s Own Paper” (italics mine) It is the palpable womanhood of Beatrice, combined with the increasing and alarming grownupness of his beloved Milly, that compels Wormold to play the real man at last. In earlier and easier and happier scenes, the big weapons have been conjured from his imagination, and the small-bore weapon has been a soda siphon in a hotel garden, aimed playfully at Captain Segura but easily laughed off with the excuse that it was directed at a “Dimpled Haig” Scotch. 0n that occasion, Captain Segura had resorted to an abrupt vernacular obscenity (all the indecent expressions in this novel are rendered in Spanish) and “squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste splits.” Greene’s gift for the sinister implication,and for the recurring analogy to booze, is further illustrated by the sentence: “You could not estimate his danger from his size any more than you could a hard drink.” And it is clear that the silly splash from the soda siphon has by no means diluted the Captain or his venom. But by the time Segura takes off his gun-belt and lays it to one side, in preparation for the climactic whiskey-dominated game of checkers (or “draughts” if you prefer) it is as plain as the old maxim of Chekhov that a gun once displayed in plain sight will not be reholstered until it has been fired in anger. The “Wormold,” in other words, has turned. The meek little shopkeeper is ready to commit murder. This is to be death from a salesman.
His thirst to kill is supplied by a hideous, stuttering, impotent double-agent named—like Greene’s boyhood tormentor—Carter. If this odious and parodic[4] Englishman had not offered Wormold poisoned scotch at the dreary, joyless business banquet into which he is lured and enticed (and at which different flasks and blends are continually offered and contrasted), and if the innocuous Dr. Hasselbacher had not been subsequently slain for trying to warn Wormold off, and if the whole callousness and cynicism of the spy-racket had not begun to sicken Wormold well beyond the point of disgust, I think that Greene meant us to understand that his salesman might yet have remained passive, and preferred to stay in the camp of the victim. But what Wormold is forced to realize is that he is in just as much danger from his “own” side. How quickly the tepid appeals to patriotism and Britishness and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, proffered so smoothly by Hawthorne at their first meetings, mutate into their sordid opposite. It’s not unlike the blue movie that he and Beatrice find themselves viewing while sheltering in one of Havana’s celebrated nightclubs:
There was an odd intimacy between them as they watched together this blueprint of love. Similar movements of the body had once meant more to them than anything else the world had to offer. The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.
And so Wormold, determined to vindicate friendship and love over treachery and murder, finds it surprisingly easy to discover what he must do. In three sentences that might almost define the world we know as “Greeneland”:
He stood on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before; he had his passport in his hand. “Profession: Spy.” “Characteristic Features: Friendlessness.” “Purpose of Visit: Murder.” No visa was required. His papers were in order.
At such a critical moment, no Greene character would refrain from at least some reflection on faith, however terse and bitter:
Vengeance was unnecessary when you believed in a heaven. But he had no such belief. Mercy and forgiveness were scarcely virtues in a Christian; they came too easily.
Even so, when it comes to the moment of truth-or “reality”—Wormold is almost unable to destroy another human being and has to rationalize his actions even as he is undertaking them. He is thankful that the decision is taken out of his hands by Carter’s vile conduct, and indeed is still rationalizing busily when the shock moment of actual crisis occurs, and the question of will or volition is snatched (unlike the fortunately purloined gun) out of his hands.
This stroke of impulsive decision does not succeed in dispelling the mist of moral ambiguity. Wormold still has to live in the world that he has—with his own lies and practical jokes—helped to make. Once again, a rationale is required of him, and he chooses (as does Beatrice) a version of E. M. Forster’s cele- brated moral calculus. If one had the choice of betraying one’s country or one’s friends, said the author of Howards End and of that momentous phrase “the world of telegrams and anger” one should hope for the courage to betray one’s country. Wormold’s confected cables to London have some of the absurdity of William Boot’s telegrams to Lord Copper’s Daily Beast, but his anger takes a Forsterian form:
“I don’t give a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations …. I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
Many years later, in his rash introduction to Kim Philby’s KGB-vetted autobiography My Silent War, Greene was to write, again with a question mark that asked rather a lot:
He betrayed his country—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?
With or without its “perhaps” this is bound to strike many readers as a bit too glib and convenient (as indeed it is). And how many times, after all, does a choice between country and friends really come up? But, safely back in London, where admittedly there are no torturers or executioners, Wormold and Beatrice discover that their secret employers, too, are immersed in moral ambiguity and expert in the means of manipulating it. In essence, and in return for his silence about the whole fiasco, Wormold is offered a sinecure and an official decoration. In one of the weaker sections of the book, Beatrice then repeats at greater and less probable length everything that Wormold has just declaimed above. In retrospect, we can see that this Greene “entertainment” was in many ways the curtain-raiser for the bleak universe of Le Carré’s George Smiley, and of the shadowland where any appeal to loyalty and the old decencies was little more than a rhetorical prelude to a stab in the back.
The conclusive end of the Cold War, and the implosion of one party to it, now make some of Greene’s own rhetoric seem even more facile. The revolution did indeed come to Cuba, and the Captain Seguras did indeed take themselves off to Miami, and for awhile Greene himself was an honored guest of-and ardent apologist for—the Fidel Castro regime. (His admiring chronicler Norman Sherry gives some disquieting instances in Volume III of his immense biography.) Greene was not, in fact, neutral in the Cold War, nor a sincere practitioner of moral equivalence. He was by inclination a supporter of the “other” side and, above all culturally and politically hostile to the United States. In 1969 he delivered a lecture entitled “The Virtue of Disloyalty” in Hamburg, in which (never mind Lamb’s Tales) he accused Shakespeare himself of having been too patriotic, and too reticent about Catholic dissidents sent to the gibbet. He was delighted when a Soviet cosmonaut took Our Man in Havana into outer space. But his audience and readership were in the “West,” so the “shades of Greene” were adjusted accordingly. And this needful ambivalence was often useful in his novels, since it compelled him to phrase his ethical dilemmas in liberal and individual, rather than Marxist or collective, terms. Having already touched on Greene’s debt to Waugh, and most especially to Brideshead Revisited, I ought to try and return the compliment, even if obliquely. Writing in praise of Brideshead many years after its first publication, Greene said that he had remembered the novel’s beautiful opening chapter—as very long, and was thus astonished to find, upon rereading, that it was as brief as it was. This he certainly intended as a compliment. One should say the same for his own swiftly-drawn but contemptuous portrait of the British ambassador to Cuba, whose appearance in the novel occupies no more than a page and a half. The desiccated and frigid envoy repeatedly insists that he knows nothing of what has been going on, and wishes for nothing more than to remain in this blessed state of unawareness. It is Greene, not the provincial and suburban Wormold, who is able to assemble a whole diplomatic biography from the objets d’art on view while he is being kept waiting by this dignitary:
Wormold thought he could detect a past in Tehran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask—perhaps Monrovia?
In “real” life, Greene was to greatly annoy the British Foreign Office by writing some devastating letters to the press a few weeks after the publication of Our Man in Havana. Announcing a post-revolution cancellation of the sale of weapons to Cuba, the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had claimed that, when the weapons contract had been signed, there had been no evidence of strife. Greene wrote at his withering best:
Any visitor to Cuba could have given Her Majesty’s Government more information about conditions in the island than was apparently supplied by our official representatives: the mutilation and torture practised by leading police officers . . . the killing of hostages.
By one of those right-place-right-time occurrences that swelled his reputation as both journalist and novelist, Greene had stumbled into contact with rebels and lawyers—Armando Hart, Haydee Santamaria, Melba Hernandez—whose names are still totemic in the Cuban revolution and some of whom are admired even by those who later underwent a painful rupture with Castro. Whether it is deliberate or not I cannot say, but Greene’s description of the Havana Seville-Biltmore’s upper rooms as being “built as prison cells round a rectangular balcony” is a near-analogy to the “Panopticon” jail in which Castro was held by Batista on the Isle of Pines after his legendary attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Greene was well ahead of the story, before he fell well behind it. His secular and personal religion, which always stressed “the side of the victim” and which ostensibly forbade him to ”see no evil,” did not safeguard him from letting both his Communism and his Catholicism get in the way of truth telling about the rebel-turned-caudillo[5] as the years went on.
By an irony of his beloved Cuban revolution, which has left the island stranded in time and isolated from many recent currents of history and political economy (with its still-bearded leader now paunchy and grey and the only remaining Latin American head of government always to be seen in a uniform[6]), the city of Havana has been compelled to remain very much as Greene described it.[7] The more flamboyant and amoral nightclubs did undergo a period of eclipse, but the sex trade has rebounded with a vengeance as the regime has become more dependent on tourism than Batista ever was. Communism, though “the highest stage of underdevelopment,” as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once tautly summarized the case—has preserved (some might like to say “spared”) the old harbor-front and its hinterland. Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts at the Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio, the Calle Obispo and the “pock-marked pillars on Avenida de Maceo”; all the little landmarks of Wormold’s life, are still rather seedily there. Nor is this depiction valued only by nostalgic foreigners. Pedro Juan Gutierrez, Cuba’s great chronicler of low-life and the author of Trilogia Sucia de la Habana (The Dirty Trilogy of Havana) has devoted an entire novel to the imaginative reconstruction of Greene’s visit, and entitled it Nuestro GC in Havana (Our GG in Havana). Greene’s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, as in his clever mention of Havana’s “blistering October” are encoded in this book as in no other, and remain redolent and real. In some ways, indeed, the existence of an antique rather than a modern Havana, until the day when the dam breaks and the full tide of Americanization flows in, is part of his literary and political bestowal. As is, of course, the silhouette of the anomic and rumpled and disillusioned Englishman in a torrid zone, nursing a bottle of scotch and musing ineptly on Pascal while caught somewhere between the status of émigré and internal exile. The human condition seen through the bottom of a glass: darkly.
Writing to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956 Greene told her that Our Man in Havana was potentially a “very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote in history.” I feel almost as if I owe an apology for having taken so long to illustrate his elementary point.
[1] For those not so familiar with this term, daemons are good or benevolent nature spirits, beings of the same nature as both mortals and gods, similar to ghosts, chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature or the gods themselves (see Plato’s Symposium). Walter Burkert suggests that unlike the Judeo-Christian use of demon in a strictly malignant sense, “[a] general belief in spirits is not expressed by the term daimon until the 5th century when a doctor asserts that neurotic women and girls can be driven to suicide by imaginary apparitions, ‘evil daimones’. How far this is an expression of widespread popular superstition is not easy to judge… On the basis of Hesiod’s myth, however, what did gain currency was for great and powerful figures to be honoured after death as a daimon…” Daimon is not so much type of quasi-divine being, according to Burkert, but rather a non-personified “peculiar mode” of their activity.
[2] A drug that stimulates the central nervous system
[3] The absence or loss of social, moral, or intellectual vitality or vigor
[4] From parody. a feeble or ridiculous imitation
[5] A Spanish or Latin-American military dictator
[6] Since Castro’s death his brother, Raul, dresses down some, and at least does not wear the iconic cap Fidel wore all the time.
[7] Hitchens adds a footnote: “I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Castro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raul, in August, 2006.”
Intelligence Fiction 