This story about Graham Greene begins in the high tops of the Pamir. The vessel’s arrangement of sails and ropes would have made perfect sense to Drake or to Nelson, but its hull and its four masts were made of steel — the ship belonged to two ages. One of its sailors was Bernard Diederich, a sixteen-year-old New Zealander who had quit school and family to sail across the Pacific in the majestic barque.
Diederich went on to serve the rest of the Second World War aboard an armed American tanker fuelling the Pacific war machine. The young sailor came ashore in more ports than I can imagine and saw for himself what Greene called ‘the dangerous edge of things’ — outposts of the modern age where greed and cruelty made no effort to hide themselves. Diederich was himself a mixture of old-fashioned virtues — courage, endurance and a sense of justice — all of them toughened by the demands of his life at sea. In the years that lay ahead his work would put him in the position of Conrad’s Marlow — reporting on things seen in ‘the heart of darkness’.
In 1949 Diederich decided to make his home in Haiti where he established his own newspaper, the Haiti Sun, and worked as a resident correspondent for the New York Times and other news agencies. In those days Haiti was free of crime and promised to become a paradise for tourists. The country had memories of freedom going back to the revolt of 1791 when Toussaint L’Ouverture led slaves to overthrow their colonial masters. Despite an American occupation from 1915 to 1934, Haiti was a democracy in the 1950s. As a newsman covering the visit of a celebrity, Diederich met Greene briefly in 1954 and then became much closer to him on a second visit in 1956 when Greene brought with him his mistress Catherine Walston, the inspiration for Sarah in The End of the Affair.
That was the last of the good years in Haiti. In 1957 François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a quiet and mannerly physician, took power and began to transform the country on psychopathic principles. He promoted a myth of terror based on elements of the Voodoo religion. Diederich tells us he became known as the zombificateur, the zombie-maker. His henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, robbed, beat, tortured, abducted or killed thousands of his real and supposed opponents. The rest of the world paid little attention to events in this obscure country, and the United States was disinclined to act for fear that Duvalier might be replaced by another Castro. It was impossible for his victims to regard Papa Doc as a ‘lesser evil’.
By 1963 the butchery in Haiti became widely known, largely owing to Diederich’s reporting. The regime decided that he, too, was an enemy. He was arrested and locked in solitary confinement while it was decided whether to kill him. He was cut off from his Haitian wife and young son — both of them now likely targets for the Tontons Macoutes. (This can be spelt several ways. In The Comedians Greene writes Tontons Macoute; I prefer Macoutes for the plural.)
His printing plant, his office and all his files were destroyed. In the end he was bundled on to an aircraft and expelled from the country. His wife, moving adroitly, was able to join him in the Dominican Republic. From there, he continued his reporting on the massacres.
In the late summer of 1963 Greene decided he had better see the country again for himself. After a harrowing visit, he went on to the Dominican Republic for further briefing from Diederich, before writing his long article ‘The Nightmare Republic’ for the the Sunday Telegraph (22 September 1963). The story Diederich had been telling for six years was now given enormous attention, and while the new Johnson administration dithered world opinion shifted and Duvalier’s Haiti became a pariah state.
It had been several years since Greene had written a novel — after the publication of A Burnt-Out Case in early 1961 Greene feared that he was near the end of his writing career. He wrote some short stories and an unsuccessful play, but Haiti now had a grip on him. In early 1965 Diederich took him on a tour of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including a memorable stop at the training camp of a tiny band of rebels in a disused lunatic asylum. For the first time in his life Greene wrote a novel with a political objective — to destabilize the Duvalier regime. Released in early 1966, and made into a major film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the following year, The Comedians was one of his finest novels, and it created exactly the storm of publicity that Greene had hoped for. The world could not turn its eyes from the horror.
In the years that followed Diederich continued to advise Greene on political developments in Latin America. He eventually engineered Greene’s visits to Panama where the novelist became a trusted friend of General Omar Torrijos, the strongman who was trying to map out a social-democratic future for his country. Greene’s travels with Diederich — by then the Central American correspondent for Time magazine — led to close contacts with Daniel Ortega, Tomás Borge, Ernesto Cardenal and other Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as well as with Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Through all this, his guide and political adviser was Bernard Diederich, whose journalism and books made him, as Greene put it the introduction to Diederich’s own book Somoza and the Legacy of US Involvement in Central America, an ‘indispensable’ historian for the region. Bernard Diederich observed the day-to-day movements of one of the century’s great novelists in some of his most important ‘involvements’. Himself a figure of quiet heroism, Diederich understood the broad and terrible context of Greene’s work through these years, and he knew intimately the people who stood just beyond the pages of Greene’s books. No writer is better placed to tell of Graham Greene’s political engagements in the second half of his career — indeed, little of what follows was known to Greene’s official biographer.
A work of observation and interpretation and, even more, a work of friendship, Bernard Diederich’s political biography of Graham Greene is one of the most important accounts ever written about this author. It is a unique record, and we are lucky to have it.
Richard Greene
Editor, Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
2012