The Seeds of Fiction Read Free

John Banville, by Gloria Emerson and Alan Judd, that were so haunted by Greene that I could well understand why
Time,
in its obituary of him in 1991, had written, ‘No serious writer of the century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination.’
    When I began to write about Greene, I turned to only two people at first: his niece Louise Dennys and his famous travelling companion (much lauded by Louise) Bernie Diederich. One stormy night in 1995, just before the events described at the end of this book, I met Bernie near his home in Coral Gables, and he gave me a perfect illustration of why Greene had found him perfect company: he was friendly, relaxed, full of professional details and enormous fun, as he shared his adventures, with or without Greene, over many decades. Later, when I wrote a whole book about Greene, the only three writers I consulted were Paul Theroux and Michael Mewshaw, both of whom had been taken up by Greene as young protégés of a kind, and Bernie. As he described to me Greene’s ‘long stride’, the evenings they’d spent in Panama and Antibes, how loyal and kind a friend Greene had been, I could see how the loyalty and kindness ran in both directions. Greene did not open himself up to many — and he liked to keep his own counsel, I suspect — but in Bernie he found someone whose courage he could look up to and whose practical on-the-ground, unideological wisdom he could trust.
    For me Bernie Diederich is the closest I’ll ever get to Graham Greene and the perfect introduction to the brand of close, undeluded, adventurous reportage that made Greene the trench-coated hero of so many. And what moves me, too — and what comes across so well in these pages — is that, unlike many others, Bernie never cashed in on his friendship with the famous author or took cheap shots at him after his death. He barely seems even to have quarrelled with a man who had a gift for picking ights even with those closest to him, although he never denies that there were moments when he was taken aback, even slightly disappointed, by his friend.
    What he gives us instead is an unusually vivid, intimate, often exciting account of Greene on the road. We feel the writer’s celebrated impatience in these pages, his keen-eyed curiosity, and we witness, as if we were sitting in the back of Bernie’s beaten-up VW, the wild ups and downs of Greene’s moods. We can hear his inimitable cadences, see the tears of laughter in his eyes as things take a tragic-comic turn, register how the great lover of paradox was now consulting his horoscope in the papers and now complaining that the papers never got anything right. Greene trusted Bernie, you can tell, not just because he was such good and informative company but because he would turn his professional eye on everywhere he knew and give an evocative and knowledgeable description of it, without agenda or presumptuous theory.
    Bernie Diederich was celebrated among us at
Time
as the man who had worked at a casino, served in the war and married a legendary Haitian beauty before raising one son who became a seasoned photojournalist and another who became a writer. But it wasn’t the drama of his life that made him a cherished correspondent so much as the accuracy and clarity of his reporting. I’m reminded of this every time I watch Greene here pulling out his tiny Minox camera or describing how he loves the Ritz in Piccadilly because everything goes wrong there. And for those of us who’ve felt Greene lead us into the most essential questions of good and bad, there’s something deeply haunting about hearing him say he doesn’t believe in hell as he and Bernie bump along the Haitian border (with a priest) or coming to visible life at the prospect of an ambush and sudden danger.
    Yvonne Cloetta, Greene’s companion for his last thirty-two years, gave us in her memoir an enduring description of the