Graham Greene considered each of his fictional works to be either a “novel” or an “entertainment”. Although he called Our Man in Havana an “entertainment”, a more plotty, less literary effort, it will be referred to here as a “novel”. This novel, then, was published in 1958. “Our” means Britain’s, really the Secret Service’s, and the man is James Wormold, a vacuum salesman conscripted by British intelligence to apprise them of Soviet activities in Cuba. His wife has left and left him a daughter, Milly, who is to be raised Catholic by this lapsed Anglican single dad, and who yearns for a horse and country club membership, well beyond their budget. The entanglement in international espionage is an opportunity to provide for her, and perhaps protect her from a very bad cop, a Captain Segura, who is rumored to use torture. Wormold, code named 59200 stroke 5, is expected to hire subagents (59200 stroke 5 stroke 1, etc,) for reconnaissance. These, he finds out, are easy enough to invent, and use to command a good salary plus fictitious expenses for himself. He sends to London fake reports, and elaborate drawings, supposedly of missile installations, which are really based on new-fangled vacuum cleaners. They send him a secretary, Beatrice, a love interest at first sight, and with her arrival his deceits start to come undone as the fictional and real are confused.
The entertainment to be found in reading Our Man in Havana is suspense, comedy, and the clever interplay of the two. Suspense being a simple matter of not knowing what’s going to happen, however clever that craft might be, one can turn to the comedy and make some distinctions. Much of the comedy in Our Man in Havana is of the sinister and farcical type, as in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall and Scoop are referenced. For example, when Hawthorne, his MI6 handler, tells Wormold that there is to be an attempt on his life:
‘How are they going to poison me?’
‘First things first, old man. One mustn’t forget the economics of warfare. Cuba can’t afford to start making H-bombs, but have they found something equally effective at short range and cheap? That’s the important word — cheap.’
‘Please would you mind telling me how they are going to murder me? You see, it interests me personally.’
But in a conversation between Wormold and Milly on cruelty and unhappiness Greene shows us that he is using a different and non-literary comic model, the sad clown. The epigraph to Our Man in Havana, from George Herbert, had gestured this way: “And the sad man is cock of all his jests”. Wormold’s and Milly’s talk switches from whether she ever pulls his leg, to his ridicule by his friend Dr. Hasselbacher, to school bullies. She asks him what’s worrying him and he has a bit of a reverie. The bully from Wormold’s school with the “damp towel” must have changed, he thinks, and likewise bossy Hawthorne and all his political intrigue must be temporary too. But the clown Wormold has seen at the circus with Milly is permanent, “unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.” He reminds her of the clown, she remembers his act, wherein he walked off a ladder into a bucket of whitewash every night at ten o’ clock, and he tells her that “we should all be clowns”, never learning from experience.
According to Wormold, the right disposition for happiness, peace, etc., would be some combination of innocence and resignation, the tao of the clown. Leaving that aside, we can see that Greene adapted the clown’s physical comedy for his own purposes. This is the whole genre of pratfalls and pies in faces of which the clown forms a part, which is surely funny insofar as those vicissitudes are common to experience outside of the circus. In a novelistic setting it’s a comic effect achieved through precise narration of action, much like stage directions. It’s the smaller and more concrete comedy within the situation, the farce, and the story, but one scale up from verbal comedy, i.e. wordplay, punning, etc.
There is something of a preview of this comic vein in chapter 1, part ii. Wormold meets Hawthorne, still as yet anonymous, at the store. Wormold tries to ward away Hawthorne’s worrisome questions about Milly by demonstrating the snap-action coupling on the “Midget Make-Easy Air-Powered Suction Small Home Cleaner”. He’s too vexed and it doesn’t work, but when Hawthorne tries it, “in it went as smooth as you could wish.” These mechanical problems are to reoccur later; Beatrice clutches a vacuum cleaner component “in case [she] had to hit someone”, and Milly warns her that it has a telescopic tube which might “telescope at the wrong moment.”
In chapter two, Milly comes home loaded with equestrian gear. There’s some character history, from Wormold’s limited paternal perspective, including the time at the convent school when she “set fire to a small boy named Thomas Earl Parkman, junior.” There’s a hubbub as she and a shop assistant get the gear stored in her room, and this is expertly developed towards a disaster:
He went upstairs to their apartment above the store and presently he could hear her superintending in another room the disposal of her purchases. There was a thump, a rattle and a clang of metal. ‘Put it there’, she said, and, ‘No, there.’ Drawers opened and closed. She began to drive nails into the wall. A piece of plaster on his side shot out and fell into the salad; the daily maid had laid a cold lunch.
It’s difficult to explain what makes the passage funny. Greene narrates plainly without exaggeration or the contrivance of whimsical diction. It could be the sudden bringing into being of the salad, and the addendum explaining it as a cold lunch. Perhaps “fell into the salad” was not a strong enough punchline. Greene is juggling character, Milly’s precocious bossiness and decision, with Wormold’s anxiety, and with commotion containing a suggestion of violence.
As Greene was willing to hint, Batista was pretty brutal, and in Havana, humiliations are physical. In the field, agents have to be men of action, while back in London their superiors can speculate over Soviet motives at dinner. Wormold is out late in Santiago, where the cops stop and harass him: “The other policeman with a blow in the back sent him stumbling along the pavement. His hat fell off into the filth of the gutter.” Teresa, an exotic dancer caught up in Wormold’s fictional intrigue turned real peril, is rushed to and fro while “trying to keep a coat closed which hadn’t been designed that way.” At the police station, in full view of Captain Segura, “the coat had fallen open again, perhaps with intention.” In a central episode, Graham both introduces Beatrice and foreshadows the public violence that will feature once Wormold’s friends and fake spies start getting in trouble. Wormold considers hitting the odious Captain Segura with a champagne bottle; Beatrice, not yet introduced, for now called “the girl”, encourages him, realizes he hasn’t the audacity; she uses a soda siphon to spray Segura from behind. “The stream of soda hissed off Captain Segura’s neck and ran down the back of his collar.” This is something like the first shot fired in Our Man in Havana; at the climax of the action, there is to be a gunfight between Wormold and a rare fellow Englishman, Carter, a salesman for a rival vacuum cleaner firm.
That plan to assassinate Wormold mentioned earlier turns into a comedy of errors. It’s a luncheon at the European Traders’ Association, and Wormold, its oldest member, is to give a speech. There’s something of a tradition there, the inebriated speech as set piece in the British comic novel; compare this to Jim Dixon’s talk on “Merrie England” in Lucky Jim, or Gussie Fink-Nottle’s overseeing the prize-giving at the Market Snodsbury Grammer School in Right Ho, Jeeves. It’s the saga with the lunch itself, though, which Greene turns into something like a scene from a silent comedy. This is the clown’s legacy between vaudeville and Greene’s time. The humor is both silly, like an improvised game, and morbid. Wormold refuses whiskey initially, fearing poison, before some funny business with the blue plate special distracts him. He’s been given no carrots, so he passes his plate along to a phony Scottish Mr. McDougall, from whom it’s passed to the Luxembourg Consul. Then “Politeness infected all who had not yet been served,” so the plate is pushed around to Dr. Braun, the president, lately finished with his Morro crab. The head-waiter has to “stalk the plate up the table”, while Wormold grabs another plate from another waiter and announces that “the carrots are excellent”. The flustered head-waiter snatches the suspect dish from Dr. Braun’s place, and “like a verger with the collection he walked up the length of the room towards the service-door.”