Грэм Грин - The Comedians

Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a book of verse, he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, which he classed as an 'entertainment' in order to distinguish it from more serious work. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and was commissioned to visit Mexico in 1938 and report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, The Power and the Glory.

Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was sent out to Sierra Leone in 1941-3. One of his major post-war novels, The Heart of the Matter, is set in West Africa and is considered by many to be his finest book. This was followed by The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, a story set in Vietnam, Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-Out Case. Many of his novels (including The Comedians) have been filmed, plus two of his short stories, and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. In 1967 he published a collection of short stories under the title: May We Borrow Your Husband? His other publications include The Honorary Consul (1973), Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), a biography, An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (1975: edited), The Human Factor (1978), Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980), J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982) and Monsignor Quixote (1982). He has also published two volumes of autobiography: A Sort of Life (1971), and Ways of Escape (1980).

In all, Graham Greene has written some thirty novels, 'entertainments', plays, children's books, travel books and collections of essays and short stories. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1966.

'… Aspects are withing us,

and who seems

Most kingly is the King.'

Thomas Hardy

To A. S. Frere

Dear Frere,

When you were the head of a great publishing firm I was one of your most devoted authors, and, when you ceased to be a publisher, I, like many other writers on your list, felt it was time to find another home. This is the first novel I have written since then, and I want to offer it to you in memory of more than thirty years of association — a cold word to represent all the advice (which you never expected me to take), all the encouragement (which you never realized I needed), all the affection and fun of the years we shared.

A word about the characters of The Comedians. I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume — I know it from experience — that an 'I' is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant's wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don't wish to add to my chameleon-nature the characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth and an education by the Jesuits. Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene … It is often forgotten that, even in the case of a novel laid in England, the story, when it contains more than ten characters, would lack verisimilitude if at least one of them were not a Catholic. Ignorance of this fact of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a provincial air.

'I' is not the only imaginary character: none of the others, from such minor players as the British chargй to the principals, has ever existed. A physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote — they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases.

Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night. The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur; the interrupted funeral is drawn from fact; many a Joseph limps the streets of Port-au-Prince after his spell of torture, and, though I have never met the young Philipot I have met guerrillas as courageous and as ill-trained in that former lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo. Only in Santo Domingo have things changed since I began this book — for the worse.

Affectionately,

Graham Greene

1

WHEN I think of all the grey memorials erected in London to equestrian generals, the heroes of old colonial wars, and to frock-coated politicians who are even more deeply forgotten, I can find no reason to mock the modest stone that commemorates Jones on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home, though I am not to this day absolutely sure of where, geographically speaking, Jones's home lay. At least he paid for the monument — however unwillingly — with his life, while the generals as a rule came home safe and paid, if at all, with the blood of their men, and as for the politicians — who cares for dead politicians sufficiently to remember with what issues they were identified? Free Trade is less interesting than an Ashanti war, though the London pigeons do not distinguish between the two. Exegi monumentum. Whenever my rather bizarre business takes me north to Monte Cristi and I pass the stone, I feel a certain pride that my action helped to raise it.

There is a point of no return unremarked at the time in most lives. Neither Jones nor I knew of it when it came, although, like the pilots of the old pre-jet air-liners, we should have been trained by the nature of our two careers to better observance. Certainly I was quite unaware of the moment when it receded one sullen August morning on the Atlantic in the wake of the Medea, a cargo-ship of the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company, bound for Haiti and Port-au-Prince from Philadelphia and New York. At that period of my life I still regarded my future seriously — even the future of my empty hotel and of a love-affair which was almost as empty. I was not involved, so far as I could tell, with either Jones or Smith, they were fellow passengers, that was all, and I had no idea of the pompes funиbres they were preparing for me in the parlours of Mr Fernandez. If I had been told I would have laughed, as I laugh now on my better days.

The level of the pink gin in my glass shifted with the movement of the boat, as though the glass were an instrument made to record the shock of the waves, as Mr Smith said firmly in reply to Jones, 'I've never suffered from mal de mer, no sir. It's the effect of acidity. Eating meat gives you acidity, drinking alcohol does the same.' He was one of the Smiths of Wisconsin, but I had thought of him from the very first as the Presidential Candidate because, before I even knew his surname, his wife had so referred to him, as we leant over the rail our first hour at sea. She made a jerking movement with her strong chin as she spoke which seemed to indicate that, if there were another presidential candidate on board, he was not the one she intended. She said, 'I mean my husband there, Mr Smith — he was Presidential Candidate in 1948. He's an idealist. Of course, for that very reason, he stood no chance.' What could we have been talking about to lead her to that statement? We were idly watching the flat grey sea which seemed to lie within the three-mile-limit like an animal passive and ominous in a cage waiting to show what it can do outside. I may have spoken to her of an acquaintance who played the piano and perhaps her mind leapt to Truman's daughter and thus to politics — she was far more politically conscious than her husband. I think she believed that, as a candidate, she would have stood a better chance than he, and, following the pointer of her protruding chin, I could well imagine it possible. Mr Smith, who wore a shabby raincoat turned up to guard his large innocent hairy ears, was pacing the deck behind us, one lock of white hair standing up like a television aerial in the wind, and a travelling-rug carried over his arm. I could imagine him a homespun poet or perhaps the dean of an obscure college, but never a politician. I tried to remember who Truman's opponent had been in that election year — surely it had been Dewey, not Smith, while the wind from the Atlantic took away her next sentence. I thought she said something about vegetables, but the word seemed an unlikely one to me then.