Graham Greene: Our Man In Havana

[Sybarite]

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Another novel (like The Great Gatsby earlier this summer) that I managed to come to without having read any other work by the author or having seen the film version.

James Wormold is a single parent running a vacuum cleaner shop in Havana, Cuba, in the last days of the Batista regime. With trade gradually failing, he desperately needs money to grant his 17-year-old daughter Milly's wishes and ensure that she has a future beyond the island.

Approached by a pushy Englishman called Hawthorne, Wormold finds himself recruited by the British secret service ? "our man in Havana" ? with funds for himself and promises of more for any agents that he himself recruits.

But Wormold has no contacts and no knowledge or interest of what is happening in the country. Finally called upon to start justifying his new income, he starts concocting reports for London.

And that's where the trouble really starts.

Graham Greene himself joined the Secret Intelligence Service (which became MI6) in 1941, and the novel is largely a satire on intelligence services in general and British intelligence in particular.

There's an element of tragedy in the farce ? that of the innocent dying as Wormold's creative reports take on a life of their own ? but there's plenty of humour that leaves one smiling. And ultimately the biggest laugh is the denouement ? how the British intelligence services decide to deal with the knowledge that they've been conned.

It's funny and wry, and it's interesting that, with the benefit of internal experience, Greene seems to view the intelligence services as part of the problem rather than the solution. Very entertaining and with a nice bite to it.

? The idea of invented reports from a spy turned up again in John le Carr?'s 1996 novel The Tailor of Panama, where Harry Pendel wants to keep the money flowing from British intelligence.

 

[fausto]

I read the book ages ago, and it really was a fun read. I do wonder though if Greene really viewed the services as part of the problem or if the problem was the way they were run after WWII. That's what quite a few ex-"spies" had issues with, but I've read the book too long ago to place Greene in one of the two options.

 

[Stewart]

Another novel that I managed to come to without having read any other work by the author...

Yes, Greene is someone who I've been wanting to read for ages but have never even bought a book by. Part of me has always been holding off in the hope that we might get a relaunch of his work in some attractive editions, but Vintage seem intent on uglyfying their range as much as possible at the moment given them tacky red spines and only mentioning the authors' surnames on the cover (i.e. Vintage Greene). But, since Vintage/Random House owns the rights, I don't envisage my preferred option of Penguin winning them from the Greene estate and putting them out as Modern Classics.

But your description of this book reminds me that I have at least read something by Greene. In school, there was an English exam practice paper in which a few pages of Our Man In Havana was used. A passage about a man on a pier with a gun.

 

[Sybarite]

I read the book ages ago, and it really was a fun read. I do wonder though if Greene really viewed the services as part of the problem or if the problem was the way they were run after WWII. That's what quite a few ex-"spies" had issues with, but I've read the book too long ago to place Greene in one of the two options.

I suspect it could be a bit of both. Much of the mayhem in the book is caused because of how other intelligence services (not the British ones) react to what they discover of Wormold and his ring of supposed agents.

They all feed off each other; it's quite incestuous.

Yes, Greene is someone who I've been wanting to read for ages but have never even bought a book by. Part of me has always been holding off in the hope that we might get a relaunch of his work in some attractive editions, but Vintage seem intent on uglyfying their range as much as possible at the moment given them tacky red spines and only mentioning the authors' surnames on the cover (i.e. Vintage Greene). But, since Vintage/Random House owns the rights, I don't envisage my preferred option of Penguin winning them from the Greene estate and putting them out as Modern Classics...

There seems to be a trend toward naff covers and surnames ? similarly, the Agatha Christie Miss Marple books now have "Marple" on the cover, although that was partly for TV tie-in reasons.

Greene was just one of many authors that I keep realising I haven't read yet ? and should make the effort. I'd certainly read more.

It's deceptively light. Looking back now (I finished it late Saturday) I find myself realising just how much of a vicious circle the whole thing is.

 

[Jayaprakash]

>>in the hope that we might get a relaunch of his work in some attractive editions

Try second-hand. I have most of his stuff in the 80s Penguin editions with cover illustrations by Paul Hogarth. Like Ionicus and Wodehouse, I'm not certain why anyone fools around getting new cover art done.

 

[Max Cairnduff]

If I remember correctly, like many Greene's the last sentence of the novel (literally the last sentence) changes it from comedy to tragedy. Greene was rather fond of endings that come as punches to the stomach.

Good review in the opening post though, it is a fun novel and I agree that it's a very fun read.

 

[Svidrigailov]

"Fun read"? Strangely. And to me this novel seemed very sad.

 

[Eric]

What's sad about it? How would Anna Chapman rate it?

 

[Svidrigailov]

Chapman? Hmm, and what attitude Chapman has to this issue?

 

[Liam]

I hope you can see that Eric is gently pulling your leg? I thought Russians were supposed to have a good sense of humor, .

 

[Hamlet]

I was once forced to study Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter for a course, it was very depressing, aged 18 it was almost but not quite "traumatic".

 

[Eric]

Sorry, it was that other book I was thinking of with a similar title, i.e. "Ms Zatuliveter Screws in Gavana", which describes a lyric love affair between Leonid Brezhnev and a sack of seed potatoes disguised as an attractive young woman, narrated by one of Nabokov's more yellow butterflies, its sequel being "Katya in the Wry" about the twisted smile that our heroine develops as she goes on the town and picks up defence experts as a hobby. And fucks 'em.

By the way, the Brits and Yanks don't have spies.

 

[MichaelHW]

In 2007, I wrote this piece and was very pleased with it. It has been sent almost everywhere, but I have not actually had it published in a newspaper. However, it is has been one of my popular articles on several academic sites, booksie.com and a few other sites for amateur writers, and thousands of egg heads have read it. I have softened a little in my views of Bush since I wrote the article. Today, I have concluded that he was simply a president with extremely poor judgement.

"President Bush & The Quiet American
Why did president Bush quote Graham Greene, an author who was labelled a “communist sympathizer” by the US government and kept under surveillance for decades?
The 22 of August 2007, president George W. Bush enters the podium in a convention center in Kansas City. He faced the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a weathered crowd of old soldiers. «I stand before you as a wartime President» he declares before he begins talking about the Vietnam War. «In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’»

Bush’s reference caused much confusion around the United States because the author, Graham Greene, had been kept under surveillance by the CIA because of the publication of the novel. Conservatives in the 1950s disapproved of his analysis of the situation in Vietnam. The protagonist is the British journalist Thomas Fowler who is drawn into a triangular love story battling for the favors of a young Vietnamese girl. His competition is Alden Pyle, a young man with visions for the future of Vietnam, who later turns out to be an intelligence agent directly implicated in a horrible bombing massacre.

According to The New York Times, The Quiet American became a bible for journalists covering the Vietnam war because it predicted and exposed American policies in the country several years before they became generally known. But the Republican right loathed the fact that the hero was an aging British upper class reporter and the villain a young manipulative and naive American.

The villain becomes good
Oddly enough, only a few years passed before the controversial novel was filmed by Hollywood director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was himself a part of the right wing, dubiously connected to the McCarthy movement, which at this period in history was engaged in their communist witch-hunts. During the work with the manuscripts Mankiewicz contacted none other than Edward Lansdale, a CIA operative who now was in charge of American operations in Vietnam. Soon the perception spread that Lansdale was the real life model for the villain in The Quiet American.

In the 1958 movie, the Alden character was thus fittingly played by America’s proudest son, Audie Murhpy, the most decorated soldier in American history at this time. Murphy had made a career in Hollywood. In this heavily altered adaptation, the villain becomes good, a victim of a communist conspiracy. Alden Pyle is in fact no intelligence agent at all in Mankiewicz’s version, but a toy manufacturer who happens to be in Vietnam for humanitarian reasons.

Assaulting the author
When Graham Greene discovered what was about to happen to his novel, he was dumbfounded, but he was unable to stop the project for contractual reasons. “One could almost believe.” Greene stated, “that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and the author.” Later it has become obvious to everyone that the US was present in Vietnam at this time, and that Graham Greene was correct in his portrayal of the situation.

Norman Sherry, who has written an extensive biography on Greene, points out that Greene had left Vietnam before Lansdale arrived in the country. Consequently he cannot be the real life model for the Pyle character. Many years would pass before Hollywood again focused on The Quiet American. The war in Vietnam ended, and slowly but surely the wounds of a bitter period started to heal. A new acceptance of the sufferings of Vietnam veterans was on display in movies such as The Deer Hunter, Rambo and Platoon.

A more truthful adaptation
The Australian Philip Noyce therefore decided to make a new adaptation of the controversial novel. He felt that the time now was ripe for a more accurate adaptation of Greene’s old classic. He cast the veteran actor Michael Caine as the British protagonist, a role for which Caine would become Oscar nominated. The new movie was produced Miramax and was completed in 2001.

Then, in 2001, it happened: the United States experiences a horrible terror attack in New York costing 1000s of lives. Again patriotism was rife, and yet again the desire to defeat your enemies on foreign soil became public policy. Americans now had to form a united front. Miramax panicked. They feared that the film would resurrect the memories of the Vietnam era. “The film can never be released”, Harvey Weinstein, a Miramax executive declared. “My staff says it is unpatriotic.” Michael Caine and Phillip Noyce feverishly lobbied for the release of the movie, but told the press that the film was “as good as dead”. After much persuasion, The Quiet American was released even so, perhaps as a result of the attention that Michael Caine’s excellent performance attracted. Oddly enough the film proved a financial success in the US. This ill-timed triumph showed that American attitudes towards the Vietnam war have changed, and that it was possible to release a considered reflection of foreign policy issues in the wake of 9/11.

In his speech to the veterans of foreign wars in 2007, Bush demonstrated a newly found detachment from the Vietnam era, and he probably attempted to bring an old matter to rest. He may also have tried to undermine that comparison between Vietnam and Iraq that some claim is obvious. But Bush’s reference to Graham Greene still has a false ring to it because most of all the story of The Quiet American, is a story about misuse of art for propaganda purposes and denial of foreign policy objectives.

Michael Henrik Wynn (Historyradio.org)"

 

[MichaelHW]

I have written tons of these short pieces. I call them tabloid versions of literary history. Just to stir up interest. Then people can consult whatever serious source they prefer. I really liked the Noyce movie, though. I thought Caine was perfectly cast, and actually Brendan Fraser too.

 

[MichaelHW]

I have been almost a lifelong fan of green because of his range as a writer. There is fantastic scene at the start of The Comedians. A failed US presidential candidate travels to Haiti to promote vegetarianism. Everyone who knows something knows that people in poorer countries cannot afford meat. It is a huge luxery, and thus promoting vegetarianism in Haiti is in fact absurd. Greene of course knew this, so he is satirical.

I made a radio version of my article.