The Comedians by Graham Greene

First published: 1966

Type of work: Tragicomedy

Time of work: Several weeks in the early 1960’s

Locale: Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Principal Characters:

• Brown, the protagonist and narrator, owner of a hotel in Haiti
• Martha Pineda, his mistress, the wife of a South American ambassador
• Mr. Smith, an American peace and vegetarianism activist
• Mrs. Smith, his wife
• “Major” Jones, a one-time theater manager masquerading as a war hero

The Novel

From the relative safety of the Dominican Republic, Brown recalls the events of his recent past in Haiti. He remembers his return to Port-au-Prince from New York on board the Medea, a Dutch cargo ship. On the passage, he meets the Smiths, an elderly couple from Wisconsin who hope to establish a vegetarian center in Port-au-Prince, and the British “Major” Jones, who drops mysterious hints about his exploits as a jungle fighter in Burma during World War II.

The owner of the Hotel Trianon in the hills above Port-au-Prince, Brown was unsuccessful in finding a buyer for the hotel while he was in New York. At one time, the Trianon had been a prosperous enterprise, but it suffered a decline in fortune with the ascendancy of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the Haitian presidency and the withdrawal of American aid. Ruled by Papa Doc and his secret police, the Tontons Macoute, Haiti is “a country of fear and frustration” in which roadblocks and searches, torture and murder, are commonplace.

Leaving the Medea, Brown passes by the Columbus statue on his way up to the Trianon. Before he left abruptly for New York, the statue had been the place where he would meet his mistress, Martha Pineda, the wife of a South American ambassador. He is surprised this evening to see her Peugeot parked near it. Believing that she is meeting another lover, he is hurt that she would choose that place. He finds her alone, however, in the car. “It’s a better place than most to miss you in,” she tells him. Later that night, Joseph, the Trianon’s maimed bartender, shows his employer the body of Doctor Philipot, dead of self-inflicted wounds, in the swimming pool. The Secretary for Social Welfare and coincidentally the man to whom the Smiths have a letter of introduction, Doctor Philipot had fallen out of favor with Papa Doc. After hiding in the Trianon for four days, with his capture by the Tontons Macoute imminent, he dressed himself “for burial in his neat grey suit” and “cut his wrists first and then his throat to make sure.” Brown summons his friend Doctor Magiot to help him hide the corpse.

Doctor Philipot’s body is discovered several days later. On the road in front of the hotel, Brown and the Smiths, now his guests, witness the first of the bizarre events that significantly contribute to the Smiths’ disillusionment: Captain Concasseur and the Tontons Macoute interrupt Doctor Philipot’s funeral procession and steal the coffin from the grieving widow. When Brown accompanies Mr. Smith and Doctor Philipot’s successor on an official visit to the proposed site of Duvalierville, the great tragedy of the corruption and violence endemic to life in Haiti is objectified for the vegetarian activist in the ruined landscape, leveled by government bulldozers, from which all local inhabitants, save a legless beggar and a justice of the peace, have been driven away. It is not long before the Smiths abandon all hope of establishing their vegetarian project in Haiti and leave for the Dominican Republic.

Following an argument with Martha, Brown visits a local brothel and unexpectedly comes upon Jones. Arrested by the Tontons Macoute immediately upon his arrival in Port-au-Prince, Jones is in the company of Captain Concasseur, not as a prisoner but as “a very important foreigner.” His improved status is a consequence of the Haitian government’s belief that he can help them acquire guns. The authorities soon discover that they have been misled, and Jones flees to Brown, who smuggles him, dressed as a woman, into the Pinedas’ embassy. Yet Jones’s boasts about his heroics as a commando attract the attention of Henri Philipot, the young nephew of the deceased minister, who has abandoned Baudelaire for guns. Philipot wants to enlist Jones in the anti-Duvalier cause as a teacher and leader of the rebels. Jealous of Jones’s proximity to Martha, Brown is only too willing to encourage him in this adventure. Spiriting him out of the embassy, Brown accompanies Jones on the long journey to Les Cayes, in the hinterland, where he is to meet Philipot. On the way, Jones confesses that he has never been a soldier. Brown himself flees Haiti for the Dominican Republic, where he finds work as an undertaker’s assistant. There, he hears of Jones’s death in a clash with Haitian troops.

The Characters

The major characters in The Comedians are developed in terms of their varying degrees of personal and political commitment. The clue to the characterization of Brown can be found in the novel’s title. Brown is a comedian in the French sense of “actor,” and as such, he is another of Graham Greene’s uncommitted protagonist/narrators who take up roles and discard them as if they were masks. The quintessential man alone, Brown has no family, no country, and no real home. Born in Monte Carlo of a British father and a mother of uncertain nationality, Brown is educated at a Jesuit college, where he wins prizes for his Latin composition. For a time, he thinks he has a religious vocation (“As other boys fought with the demon of masturbation, I fought with faith”). Yet after a particularly successful visit to a casino, which is followed less than an hour later by the loss of his virginity in the Hotel de Paris, Brown drops a five-franc roulette token into the collection bag at Mass, an indiscretion which leads to his departure from the Fathers of the Visitation.

The mature Brown is convinced that he has no allegiance and no belief: “The rootless have experienced, like all others, the temptation of sharing the security of a religious creed or a political faith, and for some reason we have turned the temptation down.” His love affair with Martha is characterized by a lack of commitment. He cannot believe that Martha loves him. Tormented by suspicion and jealousy, he often responds to her gentleness with anger and believes that they “were less lovers than fellow-conspirators tied together in the commission of a crime.” Even when Brown, who genuinely despises Papa Doc’s regime, risks his own life to take Jones to the rebels and thereby to play a small role in the anti-Duvalier cause, his political commitment is problematic. By taking such a course of action, he also conveniently rids himself of a supposed rival for Martha’s affections.

Jones, too, is a comedian, although of a lesser order than Brown. Both men are adept at role-playing, and they share an inability to commit themselves to any significant course of personal or political action. Brown recognizes Jones as a kindred spirit: “Those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling, whether to a woman, to a partner, even to our own selves, begin to smell each other out.” “Major” Jones understands nothing of jungle warfare. Yet when finally forced, in real battle and in deadly earnest, to play the commando leader he pretended to be, he does not shrink from it. Although he is compelled by circumstances to act this final role, his self-sacrifice as he holds off the enemy so that Henri Philipot and his band of rebels can escape adds a significant and positive dimension to his character.

The third figure in this triumvirate of ethical postures is Smith. Smith is the spiritual antithesis of Brown, his idealism is the counter to the hotel owner’s cynicism. Yet Brown admires Smith’s ability to dedicate himself to a cause, just as he admires Doctor Magiot’s unflagging faith in Communism. Late in the novel, Brown muses: “We admire the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr. Smiths for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause.” A defeated presidential candidate in the 1948 election won by Harry S. Truman, Smith ran on the issue of vegetarianism. In vegetarianism, he and his wife find not merely a diet but also a philosophy and a universal remedy for all the violence and cruelty in the world: Meat and alcohol cause acidity in the human body, acidity causes passion, and passion is the cause of war. Although an idealist, and perhaps an overly naive one, Smith is not a comic figure. In the morally desolate world of Haiti, Smith and his wife stand out because of the strength of their commitment and compassion. After the failure of their mission in Haiti, Smith comments to Brown, “Perhaps we seem rather comic figures to you.” Brown is sincere when he replies, “Not comic. . . heroic.”

Critical Context

Along with The Quiet American (1955) and Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (1958), The Comedians is part of a cycle of political novels which critics generally agree marks Greene’s second major period of creativity. Arguably Greene’s most political novel, it is the only one of his books which, according to the author, “began with the intention of expressing a point of view and in order to fight—to fight the horror of Papa Doc’s dictatorship.”

The Comedians is one of Greene’s best novels. A measure of its success is the vituperation heaped on Greene by Duvalier himself when the novel appeared. After attacking it furiously in an interview he gave to the morning paper he owned in Port-au-Prince, Duvalier issued an elaborately prepared brochure entitled “Graham Greene Demasque Finally Exposed” and distributed it to the European press through Haitian embassies. In this document, Greene is characterized as “A liar, a cretin, a stool-pigeon. . . unbalanced, sadistic, perverted . . . a perfect ignoramus . . . lying to his heart’s content . . . the shame of proud and noble England... a spy... a drug addict... a torturer.”

In the dedication to The Comedians, Greene says that he has not blackened Duvalier’s rule for dramatic effect. To do so, he suggests, would be impossible. Although it is set in Haiti, Greene’s masterful manipulation of detail translates that region of the world into a symbol of the monstrous degradation of contemporary life. Thinking about Martha’s German father hanged as a war criminal in his own country, Brown reflects that “Haiti was not an exception in a sane world: it was a small slice of everyday taken at random.”

Bibliography

Boardman, Gwenn R. Graham Greene: The Aesthetics of Exploration, 1971.

Falk, Quentin. Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, 1985.

Kulshrestha, J. P. Graham Greene: The Novelist, 1977.

Smith, Grahame. The Achievement of Graham Greene, 1985.

Spurling, John. Graham Greene, 1983.