Our Man In Havana Read Free Page A

Scotch at the dreary and 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 obvious 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 celebrated moral calculus. If one had the choice of betraying one’s country or one’s friends, said the author of
Howard’s 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