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405 Bernard Diederich Former Latin America Correspondent Bernard book reviews 405 Bernard Diederich Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene’s Adventures in Haiti and Central America, 1954–1983. London: Peter Owen, 2012. 315 pp. (Cloth us$29.95) Former Latin America correspondent Bernard Diederich’s account of his rela- tionship with Graham Greene and their journeys to Haiti and Central America from the 1950s to the 1980s is a most valuable memoir and resource for those interested in the peripatetic author and the troubled Cold War politics of the region. The renowned twentieth-century British writer gives the now retired journalist the perfect entrée to his specialist subject of Latin America in a book that is neatly divided into two equal parts, firstly dealing with Greene in Haiti and later in Central America. Diederich, a New Zealander by birth, details his first brief encounters with Greene from 1954 onward in Haiti, where the correspondent had set up an English-language weekly newspaper and lived with his Haitian wife. Like many writers and artists, Greene was attracted by the exotic black Caribbean repub- lic, independent since 1804. But Haiti’s relative peace was ruined from 1957 by the autocratic rule of country physician François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who soon ruled the ex-French colony as a repressive dictator, many of his subjects mesmerized by his cultivation of Voodoo. The early part of Diederich’s book gives an overview of Haitian history and is interspersed with travelogue. His newspaper’s anti-Duvalierist stance courts the wrath of the country’s self-appointed president-for-life and his Tontons Macoutes, a murderous plain-clothes militia. Diederich is arrested, imprisoned, and forced into exile in the neighboring Dominican Republic. As he explains, it is for this reason that he subtly encourages Greene to set a new novel in con- temporary Haiti, hoping that it will act as a propaganda tool against the repres- sive regime. Greene, a champion of the underdog and Third World causes, bites. His deportation from Puerto Rico by u.s. immigration authorities in 1954 still rankles, its interlude on the tarmac at Port-au-Prince airport witnessed and described at first-hand by Diederich (pp. 88–89). With his “latent anti- Americanism” (p. 83), and his willingness to act against what he identifies as a Washington-backed regime, Greene readily becomes involved in this new cause. Diederich is the perfect companion for Greene, speaking both Haiti’s patois- French and Spanish, and with a host of local contacts. He does not pry into the writer’s complex and closely-guarded private life, and is more than happy to accompany him along the Haitian-Dominican Republic border in 1965 as Greene undertakes tentative research into a possible new novel. His success in © christopher hull, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-08803044 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:48:44AM via free access 406 book reviews persuading him to write it is significant because the subsequent appearance of The Comedians in 1966 ended a lengthy break from publication. He is also gratified because Greene accurately portrays the macabre nature of the “Papa Doc” dictatorship, and Diederich recognizes some of the composite characters in the novel. Furthermore, its publication gives oppressed Haitians a voice in a Third World cause of which the outside world is largely ignorant. Greene has bloodied Duvalier with his pen, and the Voodoo dictator’s palpable anger is evident in his risible attempt to avenge the writer by publishing a glossy denunciatory official pamphlet. Greene, who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, considered it one of his highest accolades. “Papa Doc” is also incandescent over the release of a cinematographic version of The Comedians (1967), though he only manages to suppress its release in a couple of foreign countries. But the Greene-scripted film is overlong, like some of Diederich’s newspaper quotations, and it does not attract critical acclaim. While Greene first travelled to Haiti of his own accord, Diederich was instru- mental in facilitating his first trip to Central America in the 1970s, commencing a long and direct involvement in the politics of the region. By now Diederich was Time magazine’s bureau chief in Mexico City, and it took him four years of persistence to persuade Greene to travel to the isthmus and meet left-wing Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos in 1976. It was a propitious year to visit, amidst tentative negotiations between u.s. and Panamanian governments over the future of the strategically important Panama Canal. Diederich is rewarded because Torrijos and Greene instantly “hit it off” (p. 172), the general reclining in his hammock and the Briton downing a line of potent rum punches. Greene also warms to his trusted aide, the “eclectic mul- tilingual” ex-Professor of Philosophy Sergeant José Jesús “Chuchu” Martínez (p. 170). All three share a distrust of u.s. foreign policy. Meanwhile, Diederich’s descriptions of Torrijos as a “dictatorial but populist strongman” (p. 164) are reminiscent of Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), instigator of the later Bolivarian Rev- olution in Venezuela. The journalist is on professional home ground, describing the complicated machinations of politics in the small Central American republics of Panama, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. He attests to Greene’s finely-tuned political antenna and his ready powers of assimilation, readily distinguishing between the more and the less trustworthy protagonists in Central American politics. Their rela- tionship is evidently much deeper than that of a regular journalist and writer interacting on a formal basis because Diederich is also Greene’s local fixer, his translator, his advisor on Central American politics, his travel guide, and a trusted friend. It is remarkable that the septuagenarian and later octogenarian writer should make so many long and strenuous journeys to the disturbed region, New West Indian Guide 88 (2014) 309–451 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:48:44AM via free access book reviews 407 before and during the Ronald Reagan presidency that did so much to affect it during the final period of the Cold War. But then, as Diederich explains, Greene longed for adventurous escapes from domesticity, especially if he could thumb his nose at Washington at the same time, even flying to Washington on a Panamanian diplomatic passport for the official signing of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977. We are fortunate that a veteran journalist’s eye and pen have recorded Greene’s lengthy involvement in Latin American politics in such detail. It is an important and enthralling testimony. Christopher Hull Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham Nottingham ng7 2rn, u.k. [email protected] New West Indian Guide 88 (2014) 309–451 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:48:44AM via free access.
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