The Seeds of Fiction Read Free Page B

now likely targets for the Tontons Macoutes. (This can be spelt several ways. In
The Comedians
Greene writes Tontons Macoute; I prefer Macoutes for the plural.)
    His printing plant, his office and all his files were destroyed. In the end he was bundled on to an aircraft and expelled from the country. His wife, moving adroitly, was able to join him in the Dominican Republic. From there, he continued his reporting on the massacres.
    In the late summer of 1963 Greene decided he had better see the country again for himself. After a harrowing visit, he went on to the Dominican Republic for further briefing from Diederich, before writing his long article ‘The Nightmare Republic’ for the the
Sunday Telegraph
(22 September 1963). The story Diederich had been telling for six years was now given enormous attention, and while the new Johnson administration dithered world opinion shifted and Duvalier’s Haiti became a pariah state.
    It had been several years since Greene had written a novel — after the publication of A
Burnt-Out Case
in early 1961 Greene feared that he was near the end of his writing career. He wrote some short stories and an unsuccessful play, but Haiti now had a grip on him. In early 1965 Diederich took him on a tour of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including a memorable stop at the training camp of a tiny band of rebels in a disused lunatic asylum. For the first time in his life Greene wrote a novel with a political objective — to destabilize the Duvalier regime. Released in early 1966, and made into a major film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the following year,
The Comedians
was one of his finest novels, and it created exactly the storm of publicity that Greene had hoped for. The world could not turn its eyes from the horror.
    In the years that followed Diederich continued to advise Greene on political developments in Latin America. He eventually engineered Greene’s visits to Panama where the novelist became a trusted friend of General Omar Torrijos, the strongman who was trying to map out a social-democratic future for his country. Greene’s travels with Diederich — by then the Central American correspondent for
Time
magazine — led to close contacts with Daniel Ortega, Tomás Borge, Ernesto Cardenal and other Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as well as with Fidel Castro in Cuba.
    Through all this, his guide and political adviser was Bernard Diederich, whose journalism and books made him, as Greene put it the introduction to Diederich’s own book
Somoza and the Legacy of US Involvement in Central America,
an ‘indispensable’ historian for the region. Bernard Diederich observed the day-to-day movements of one of the century’s great novelists in some of his most important ‘involvements’. Himself a figure of quiet heroism, Diederich understood the broad and terrible context of Greene’s work through these years, and he knew intimately the people who stood just beyond the pages of Greene’s books. No writer is better placed to tell of Graham Greene’s political engagements in the second half of his career — indeed, little of what follows was known to Greene’s official biographer.
    A work of observation and interpretation and, even more, a work of friendship, Bernard Diederich’s political biography of Graham Greene is one of the most important accounts ever written about this author. It is a unique record, and we are lucky to have it.
    Richard Greene
Editor,
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

2012

A map of part of the island of Hispaniola showing the border area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the route of the journey taken by Graham Greene, Bernard Diederich and Fr Jean-Claude Bajeux in 1965 is marked.

PART I
Graham Greene in Haiti

1 | SEEDS OF FICTION
    In Haiti they say life begins long before birth and that death is not an end but a continuation of the same long coil threading