‘I have finished my book on Torrijos,’ Graham announced, ‘but I am not sure yet whether I will publish it. After four revisions I am not happy about it. Maybe I will let Chuchu make the final decision.’ But publish he did. Getting to Know the General hit the bookstores in January 1984. At the end of May 1983 Chuchu had descended on Antibes. Graham was happy to see him and wrote:
Chuchu arrived safely and corrected many misspellings of mine. I would have liked you to have seen the book before publication but we are anxious to get it out before the American elections — Chuchu is especially anxious. He likes it better than I do. His character really overshadows Omar in the book and I feel it an uneasy falling between two stools of memoirs and autobiography. However I will follow Chuchu’s advice and publish.
Graham later agreed that the tome was too dispersed, not clearly enough a memoir, an autobiography or a travel book. (Time’s reviewer, J.D. Reed, had asked, ‘How much of this strange biography — travel book, escapist yarn, memoir — is documentary? It is certain that in his 45th book Greene remains a master of contradiction.’)
Following the publication of Getting to Know the General, Graham concluded a letter to me with a comment on the US elections.
I have hope that [US Senator Gary] Hart will beat both Mondale and Reagan. I don’t feel it likely somehow that Reagan will go whole-hog on an invasion of Nicaragua. After all the Pentagon decided that it would need a hundred thousand troops to guard the Canal so I should imagine it would need close to half a million to do anything in Nicaragua.
I begin to feel old and tired so though Chuchu brought me letters from Colonel Díaz, Noriega and [Panamanian President] Espriella who sent me a picture also I doubt whether I shall take off again for Central America. I shall probably go no further than Spain this year.
When I received my copy of Getting to Know the General I realized that Graham was not simply being modest in saying that he was not satisfied with even the fourth version he had written. I thought he had given a faithful and truthful account of his peregrinations in Panama, but much was missing that could have been covered only in a novel. The book could have worked so much better as fiction. General Omar Torrijos was a complicated human being to whom Graham could have done justice only in fictional form. At the end of the book it also became apparent that Chuchu did more than correct spelling mistakes, that Graham had allowed him to exert editorial influence to make his (Chuchu’s) easy view of the Sandinistas appear to be shared by General Torrijos, when it was not. Omar had said more than once that the Sandinistas were ‘neither a model nor a menace’. He confessed that he did not like what he considered the Sandinistas’ dangerous growing dependency on the East when they were in the West.
Getting to Know the General offered a revealing portrait of Graham’s inner thoughts. While being driven by Chuchu into the Panamanian mountains one day, Graham recounts, ‘to me it was like a return back to life after a long sickness — the malignant sickness of a writer’s block. My writing days, I thought, were not over after all.’ With the General’s death
the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir, based on the diaries which I had kept over the last five years, as a tribute to a man whom during that time I had grown to love. But as soon as I had written the first sentence after the title, Getting to Know the General, I realized that it was not only about the General whom I had got to know over those five years … it was also about Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely, and it was this bizarre and beautiful little country, split in two by the Canal and the American Zone, a country which had become, thanks to the General, of great practical importance in the struggle for liberation taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Two outstanding foreign correspondents, the previously mentioned Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post (who had escaped injury during the mortar ambush in Nicaragua) and Alan Riding of the New York Times, were covering Panama and Central America at the time, and both reviewed Getting to Know the General.
DeYoung thought the book should have been a novel rather than the non-fiction account that Graham had written. She noted that Graham had developed a close relationship with Torrijos and had kept a journal that he hoped to turn into a tale tentatively titled On the Way Back, but that all had changed with Torrijos’s death. She wrote:
Some of Greene’s critics, and even fans, say his books are not political enough. For better or for worse, his novels often are considered too entertaining to be profound. But for this reader and fan, the moment when On the Way Back became Getting to Know the General was an unfortunate one. What could have been both good politics and good entertainment as fiction turns out to be a disappointment as real life … Omar Torrijos was a compelling, unique man who combined the Latin American caudillo tradition of military dictatorship with a curious kind of humanism and humanity, a ‘dictator with heart,’ as he used to call himself … By Latin standards, his rule was benign and relatively progressive. He dedicated himself to negotiating the return of US control of the Panama Canal and Canal Zone, and wrestled the long-languishing treaty negotiations to a political victory through will power and clever diplomacy … One longs for the larger-than-life complicated character that Greene could have made of a fictionalized Torrijos; for the sense of place and time, and even political meaning, that the Greene treatment could have evoked of Panama and Central America at a time when national pride and revolution were awakening.
The best passages in the book are those about the process of creating characters and writing fiction, about On the Way Back before it was discarded in favor of a pale paean to the General. Only one small bit of it is preserved here, but it is worth comparing to real life. In Getting to Know the General, Greene describes his arrival for his first meeting with Torrijos. ‘It was a small insignificant suburban house, only made to look out of the ordinary by the number of men in camouflage uniform clustered around the entrance and by a small cement pad at the rear in place of a garden, smaller than a tennis court, on which a helicopter could land.’
Much later in the book, as Greene recounts his efforts back at home in France to begin the subsequently aborted novel, On the Way Back, the scene is transformed. The fictional protagonist, a journalist named Marie-Claire, arrives at the same suburban house to interview the as yet unknown General. ‘She found herself surrounded in the small courtyard of a white suburban villa with half-Indian faces. The men all carried revolvers on their belts and one had a walkie-talkie which he kept pressed closely to his ear as though he were waiting with the intensity of a priest for one of his Indian gods to proclaim something. The men are as strange to me, she thought, as the Indians must have seemed to Columbus five centuries ago. The camouflage of their uniforms was like painted designs on naked skin.’
DeYoung’s fellow foreign correspondent Alan Riding concluded his review in the 4 November 1984 New York Times:
On Greene’s last trip to Panama, in 1983, some of Torrijos’s followers were eager to use him as a symbol that the general’s political ideas were still alive. Greene didn’t mind. ‘I have never hesitated to be “used” in a cause I believe in,’ he noted. And he headed off in a Panamanian Government plane, first to Nicaragua, where he met top Sandinista leaders, and then to Cuba for the same reason, where he greeted Fidel Castro with the words, ‘I am not a messenger. I am the message.’
Greene omits the detailed analysis required to support his case, but it remains valid — the death of Torrijos removed a vital force for moderation from the Central American scene. At his death, he was somewhat disillusioned with both the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro, but he kept his lines open to the left, just as he did to the United States. And his death, Greene concludes, ‘was not only the end of his dream of moderate socialism but perhaps the end of any hope of a reasonable peace in Central America.’ Coming out shortly after Graham Greene’s 80th birthday, Getting to Know the General reassures us that the writer’s dreams and hopes have not died. From a literary point of view, this book is perhaps not among his most memorable — he has conceded he found it difficult to write. But from a human point of view, it is compellingly compassionate.
‘I am glad you found something you liked in The General, Graham wrote to me on 2 January 1984. He was responding to my favourable comment.
I was disappointed in the book myself. It seemed to fall between too many stools, but it was the best I could do. Of course I haven’t seen much of the American press, but I was surprised by the number of good reviews that I did see — including the New York Times, Time itself, and Newsweek, and there were others … I do hope we meet again in not so long a time in Central America or elsewhere.
Graham ended a long letter with ‘Forgive a hasty line, but this bloody 80th birthday is filling all my time and my post box.’
For all his eight decades of life, Graham’s correspondence — and mind — seemed as sharp as ever. He wrote on 29 September 1984:
I am sorry you are out of Central America for the moment, but I suspect after the election you will be well in again. I don’t see any chance of joining you in the Caribbean for our war [a reference to Yvonne’s domestic tribulations] is still continuing and I don’t feel able to get away for any length of time. I have been invited to Bulgaria and to Russia — Bulgaria in October and Russia in the spring — but I am very doubtful of getting to either of them … I went back to Spain for a little more than a week in August but I plan no real travels … Let me know if you come to Paris.
Back in New Zealand my eldest sister, a Catholic nun and a great admirer of Graham Greene, had been diagnosed with cancer and had been given only a few weeks to live. I had made an urgent journey to visit her. On my return to Miami I received a letter from Graham, dated 27 June 1985, saying he was sorry to hear the news.
As one grows older there seem to be many more deaths than births to record. I don’t know exactly what I shall be doing this summer except I hope that I escape from the Côte a bit. The affair [Yvonne’s problems] is still a bit of a bother but not so much as it used to be. Chuchu rings up from time to time and it’s just possible that I might go to Panama and Nicaragua in late July, but I find it difficult to make up my mind. I shall certainly let you know if I do go. Reagan is a real nightmare. Russia and the USA seem to be the same face looking at each other in the same glass and there are times when I certainly prefer the Russian face to the American face similar though they both are. I miss Omar more and more and I haven’t the same confidence in Noriega … Anyway let’s keep in touch.
In his postscript he reported, ‘I was invited to the 6th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution on I think July 19 but it’s a date very difficult for me and I was glad to have an excuse to refuse. If I go to Nicaragua I would much rather go on my own and not with a bunch to make propaganda.’