Our Man In Havana – the dark hilarity of accidental vice and virtue

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

– Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

Graham Greene once entered a ‘Write like Graham Greene’ contest held by New Statesman under the pseudonym N. Wilkinson and came second. While he did not live up to the high bars of the judges at New Statesman, he might be consoled by the fact that his writing is popular and distinct enough to warrant such a competition.

Born in 1904, Graham Greene lived through the most tumultuous age of the modern era. The two-time Nobel nominee worked as a sub-editor at the Times after Oxford, as a film and book critic at the Spectator, travelled across Liberia, visited Mexico as a reporter, and worked in the foreign office for MI6 in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, where he was friends with Kim Philby, the infamous Soviet double agent and one of the Cambridge Five. He also visited African leper colonies and Haiti under the rule of the dictator Duvalier. All the time Greene wrote and published novels, many of which, such as Stamboul Train, The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter, are considered classics of English literature.

A man of experiences in other words. That, allied with a keen and serious acumen (his fellow undergraduate and fellow literary giant Evelyn Waugh said of him that “Greene looked down on us as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.”), are the fingerprints for what would seem to be a grave and solemn author. Though he certainly did write serious novels, Greene famously separated his works into ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’. Our Man in Havana falls into the latter category – though any reader would see the somewhat facetious nature of this categorisation.

Darkly humorous and awash with the sickly-sweet smell of sweat and whisky, the novel is a satire on the fatuousness of the underworld of espionage dispersed with acute reflections on grand themes such as faith, loyalty and love. His lean and unaffected prose style makes it immensely readable but removes nothing from the depth of feelings and humour that Greene is able to muster.

The story revolves around an owner of a decaying vacuum cleaner shop, Jim Wormold. The middle-aged, indecisive and dull owner of this unusual and very Anglo-Saxon surname lives, of all places, in exotic Havana with his young, quasi-religious, Janus-like and burgeoningly beautiful daughter. His wife having left him, the teenage Milly is the source of all his pride and most of his angst, as he rather rudderlessly goes along his routines, quietly worrying but never having any force of character to do anything about his circumstances. His thin and abject ego summed up perhaps by his reflection, when his one friend presented him with a miniature scotch, that ‘it always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.’

Published a year before Castro and his guerrillas captured the city, Wormold, in Batista’s Havana, is told by his only friend Dr Hasselbacher, as he finished his morning daiquiris, that he “should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.” Wormold soon is forced to dream larger than ever as he stumbled into being recruited as a sub-agent in the bathroom of a seedy bar by Hawthorne, a confident and incompetent MI6 operative. For the sake of his daughter, Wormold begun inventing reports and imaginary sub-sub-agents that he recruited to get payments and allowances from London.

It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness – he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. There were moments when Wormold thought it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Part of his deception was to sketch disassembled parts of a vacuum cleaner at a massive scale and report it as a mysterious weapon been built in the mountains. This sends alarm bells ringing in London, especially in the head of The Chief, whose contribution to the self-deception is wonderfully captured:

‘Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.’

‘Is that desirable, sir?’

‘Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.’

The intensity is amplified, just when Wormold’s resolve is fading, with the addition of an attractively eager secretary, Beatrice, sent by MI6 to help Wormold and the realisation that a local military strong man, Captain Segura, known for torturing people, and owning a cigarette case of human skin, is after his daughter. In Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to the Vintage edition, he noted perceptively that

It is the palpable womanhood of Beatrice, combined with the increasing and alarming grown-upness of his beloved Milly, that compels Wormold to play the ‘real man’ at last.

In a world where loyalties and virtues are blurred and faded, this insistence on the purity of love is oddly touching. Echoing perhaps E.M. Forster’s cult of personal relations, Greene had his character exclaim:

‘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?’

Sounding somewhat at odds with the image of the coarsened man of the world, but true to his character and reflects a surprisingly tender if perhaps naïve core. Greene got in trouble years later when he wrote an introduction to Kim Philby’s KGB-vetted autobiography My Silent War. Greene wrote:

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?

Pointing to the ‘glib and convenient’ use of ‘perhaps’ and the ‘question mark that asked rather a lot’, Hitchens asked in turn, ‘how many times, after all, does a choice between country and friends really come up?’ As an old Socialist and one of the many sympathiser of the USSR in the West, the end of the Cold War with the implosion of the East and the subsequent realisation of the brutal true nature of the collapsing sceneries of the ‘Utopia’ across the iron curtain, serve to highlight the facile nature of some of Greene’s rhetoric.

Adding oil to fire for Wormold, fate seemed to have ensnared him by serendipitous circumstances in his own web of lies, so much so that reality begins to encroach on his imagined espionage ring and real people began to be targeted, threatened and killed, including his only friend Dr Hasselbacher, who unwontedly was dragged into his vortex of deceptions. Greene claimed to be an ‘agnostic Christian’ and many Christian themes are contemplated and played with in his novels. When the agnostic Wormold broke the news to his Catholic daughter, he reflected that:

There hadn’t, he realised, been any need to break a death gently, so far as Milly was concerned. All deaths to her were happy deaths. 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.

Wormold’s final gambit was a riveting game of checkers with Captain Segura, using his collection of miniature whiskeys and bourbons. The catch in this wheat vs corn battle is that every piece captured by a player is instantly drunk. The stakes are high and the tension is wrought with masterly strokes of the pen. The gamble pays off somewhat and Wormold, having escaped to London to await his punishment as his ruse is exposed, is given the hilarious final twist by Greene – the powers that be, too embarrassed to reveal their participation in their own idiocy, gave Wormold a sinecure where he is expected to pass on his ‘experiences’ to new recruits and grudgingly promised him a recommendation for an O.B.E. in exchange for his silence.

From the 1959 film - the match of livers, with Alec Guiness as Wormold

The anomic circumstances and humour therewith, the complex characters and the interwoven morals make Our Man in Havana definitely an entertainment but also a novel that, like a good Scotch, leaves a satisfying aftertaste. Despite Greene’s allegiance to the wrong side of history, the inner conflict and ambiguities produced much fine reflections and writing. Auden wrote in his poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats, of the fine poet and fascism-sympathiser:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

One may say the same of Greene.