The Comedians, published in 1966, was Graham Greene’s nineteenth novel, following A Burnt-Out Case after an unusually long interim of six years. After A Burnt-Out Case Greene felt like one, writing that in his early sixties he “had reached an age when another full-length novel was probably beyond my powers”, but he would deliver another eight, starting out with this excellent and elegiac work. The Comedians is set in Haiti, which Greene visited twice before Doctor Duvalier’s despotic regime began in 1957, and once after. After the third trip, his journalism on Haiti’s situation under Duvalier made a fourth visit impossible, and the publication of The Comedians, with its depiction of corrupt, bumbling statesmanship and cruel secret policing, would earn him a litany of insults from Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Greene did manage a later visit with a couple Haitians to the border with the Dominican Republic, an opportunity to “pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier future.”
The first American edition has on its dust jacket a trio of comedy masks that hang on strings from somewhere above the frame, against a florid sun and a dark jungle. These are explained to represent Mr. Brown, the novel’s narrator, a Mr. Smith, and a “Major” Jones. Brown does comment on the interchangeable blandness of the names. These three meet on the Medea, a cargo ship bound from New York to Port-au-Prince. Brown, a businessman born in Monte Carlo to British parents, is returning to the city to run his hotel, The Trianon, fearing diminished business now that Haiti is no longer charming to tourists. Mr. Smith is an American and a former presidential candidate, a proselytizing vegetarian with a formidable wife and a plan to spread the eating your greens gospel in Haiti. Jones, whether a Major as he claims or just a Mr., is a French looking Englishman with occasionally stilted English that sounds to Brown as if it was learned from Dickens. As they approach Haiti, the captain gets a cable alerting him that the police might be interested in Jones, and he asks Brown to monitor his “fellow Englishman”, but Brown demurs and then feels a new favor for this third man.
They arrive at Port-au-Prince, in a country of “fear and frustration”. Just off the boat Brown meets Petit Pierre, a journalist who “seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter”, and Martha, a former and near future lover. At the hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. Smith are staying in the John Barrymore suite, Brown finds a dead body in the pool. Other deaths follow, and Brown has uneasy interviews with Captain Concasseur (crusher) of the Tonton Macoutes, the secret police force. This tyrant wears dark glasses and a striped bow tie, but doesn’t share Brown’s irreverent humor. He will remind Greene’s more experienced readers of Captain Segura from Our Man in Havana, both silly and menacing, insecure enough that he wants to both be in on his victims’ jokes, and corral them in some self-serving theory: “You have a sense of humour. I appreciate humour. I am in favour of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.” Brown can hardly endorse this view, but he wistfully notes that he and Martha, the wife of an ambassador, “belonged to the world of comedy and not of tragedy”, that they would never die for each other. The comedians have their little roles in something larger: “The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief.” Brown is alert to injustice but hasn’t the conviction to do much about it. The Smiths, though they are made ridiculous by their theories of nutrition and acidity, and by failure, he will call “heroic” with rare sincerity. We can hear in his commendation his weary dislike of his own undeveloped virtues.
Brown is haunted by his Jesuit schooling, but it’s also something he can muster for courage against the nocturnal political killings, and rumors of a Haitian specialty, zombie second acts. These things battle in his mind, but in Haiti conflict is less clear, because absurd compromises and arrangements between interests have been made. As a local doctor explains, “you have to be a Catholic communicant to take part in Voodoo.” The very flexible Jones consorts with Concasseur, so his claim that he and the noble Mr. Smith have anything in common rankles Brown: “What could a saint possibly have in common with a rogue?” Brown recognizes Mrs. Smith too as one of the “enemies of hate”, and when after a little extrajudicial punishment she treats his bleeding gums with mouthwash he speculates that he had been “shriven perhaps by the Listerine.” His faith at times seems to have been a casualty of the 20th century. Just before a bout of intimacy, Martha suggests he might be a prêtre manqué, which he takes badly: “Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.” But the sense of sin is back a sentence later: “I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.”
Things in Haiti are not just scary, but shoddy and nonsensical. Water-pumps go unfinished, and telephones work only intermittently. There are no guests at the hotel, but there are Catholic Voodooists. Police go to Mère Catherine’s, a brothel. Concasseur takes down American-built infrastructure, and plans to bring modernity to the mountain village Kenscoff by building an ice rink. The Secretary of Social Welfare takes Brown and Smith to “Duvalierville”, a future metropolis which for now is some ramshackle buildings that “resembled some of the houses of Brasilia seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” Greene gives the road wreckage around Port-au-Prince a strange and embarrassing beauty: “once I had seen a breakdown van with its crane lying sideways in a ditch—it was like a lifeboat broken on the rocks, a contradiction of nature.” Greene has called Martha and Brown’s love a comedy within a tragedy, but the whole country has a comic aspect. Through Brown we see Haiti’s condition more clearly from around the border with the Dominican Republic. Greene’s images locate a kind of humor in frailty and desolation:
It was the same mountain range, but the trees never crossed into the poor dry land of Haiti. Half way down the slope was a Haitian guard-post—a collection of decrepit huts—and across the way a hundred yards from it was a castellated fort, like something from the Spanish Sahara. A little before dusk we saw the Haitian guards straggle out, leaving not one sentinel behind.