Our Man In Havana Read Free Page B

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 a while 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 political 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 dessicated 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 greatly to 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