Destroy all the mirrors...

When the film version of The Comedians was released in 1967 Papa Doc Duvalier embarked on a massive diplomatic trashing of the movie and the author of the original novel.

Greene wrote very observantly to the movie's director: “Like the ugly queen in Snow White, he will have to destroy all the mirrors."

Like many of his kind, the dictator had a jolly good go at this. In France in 1970 a judge ruled that scenes would have to be cut. Duvalier had claimed 10m francs in damages and was awarded just one. But the edits were implemented and for French viewers at least, the movie makes less sense, but that may be just how they like it.

In 1968 Haitian embassies around the world — in a move which reminds me of Alvaro Arzú 's enthusiastic international promotion of a book which suggested the murder of Bishop Gerardi was the end product of a feud between a clique of prickly homosexuals — began issuing a volume entitled Greene Démasqué/Finally Exposed, an essay collection which painted the English novelist as an opium addict, racist, spy, pervert, con-man and torturer. 

 

Greene told a friend that in publishing this book, 'Papa Doc honoured me'.

One of the intriguing things about this novel and film is the way Greene found a way to tell a semi-clandestine story about interesting black characters making use of the mechanism of not-especially-interesting white characters in the foreground. 

 

This film provided an early role for James Earl Jones (Darth) as Dr Magiot, who commented that a Hollywood production would necessarily have tried to portray the Marxist intellectual as a sinister 'bastard'. 

 

Even today, I wonder how the industry would tackle Magiot's position as a member of an aloof, mixed race elite in Haiti. The actor said he believed Hollywood would have made all the young girls mixed race in order to make them more attractive to white audiences, which would have watered down the political significance of skin colour distinction on the island.

Already in the 1960s it seems that Graham Greene could not bring his black characters to the fore without being accused of theft of voice or some sort of cultural appropriation. 

 

This is perhaps a pity, because just ten years previously Colin MacInnes (who also served in British Intelligence during WW2) was writing in the first person as a Nigerian immigrant in London and there is something rather thrilling and positively disconcerting about this, even if it is at times less than 100% successful. 

If you look at the Wikipedia entry for The Comedians the section headed 'Characters' lists only the white ones, which is fabulously ironic if you have an understanding of how the novel was constructed.

Below a passage from City of Spades in which MacInnes 'appropriates' a voice with gay abandon, as one of his protagonists, Johnny Fortune from Lagos, heads into the West End. (Probably also an example of writing that would be impermissible — or at least unpublishable — today.) 

"This Cosmopolitan Dance Hall is the nearest proximity I've seen in London to the gaiety and happiness back home. For the very moment I walked down the carpet stair, I could see, I could hear, I could smell the overflowing joys of all my people far below. And when I first got a spectacle of crowded ballroom, oh, what a sight to make me glad! Everywhere us, with silly little white girls, hopping and skipping fit to die! Africans, West Indians and coloured G.I.s all boxed up together with the cream of this London female rubbish!"

Interestingly these Soho nightspots of the 1950s all featured soft drink-only bars and stayed open through the night.