Our dodgy man in Havana. On a novel of a similar name by Graham Greene.
With a wide plethora of novels under his belt, Greene would split his novels either as actual ‘novels’ or mere ‘entertainments’, with this one falling dangerously close to the former. Novels, we can presume are serious works with philosophical and serious contemplations of humanity — something like The End of the Affair. Entertainments are more digestible, easy and light-hearted. Something that you put on the background like elevator music. Our Man in Havana is known to fall into this category by some degree.
But this is Graham Greene and entertainments, if you’d want to consider it that, is better than what most writers nowadays can churn out as what they call a novel. Sure, Our Man in Havana is sardonic and demands the reader to let go of their understanding of reality the way that Trump demands that Mexicans pay for their own wall on the border. But there is depth to this comedy, as there are streaks of comedy to a Shakespearean tragedy.
Wormold gets called for duty. Havana falls apart.
As a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city with more power outages than Coca Cola bottles, Wormold struggles a bit to make a living: He’s got a sixteen year old daughter, soon to be seventeen and who convinced him to buy a horse from the most violent man in the island; His wife left him for another man and he’s not totally over her; The country is in shambles and there’s talk of revolution. Little did he know that his profile fit perfectly for Hawthorne, who runs espionage cells in the Caribbean.
With life running languidly, and the powers that be needed assurance and reports, Wormold saw an opportunity to fund his daughter’s soon to be expensive equine habit, including an obligatory membership to the country club. It starts off small, slowly, as Wormold searched for phantom recruirs by looking at the list of country club members and selecting a couple, but never intending to get in touch with them.
Soon, the lies are out of control when he conjured up more recruits, speculating a giant construction of a rebel base in the forests and peddling public records into his own confidential records which he then sends off to the mothership. Of course, London swallows this all up. With the situation escalating (it seems), his bosses send a new secretary and technician to help him out, which escalates the lies even more. Plus, he’s made a name for himself with the higher ups and his enemies.
His encounter with Captain Segura, who has a reputation of torturing his captives don’t exactly help his cause. But things get more sinister when his phantom agents, who are based on real people he never interacted with, meet their demise. It’s up to Wormold then, to undo his tangle of lies or to carry these lies all the way through.
Building a house of cards in Havana
Our Man in Havana, with its various metaphysical meanderings, and Wormold being the conjuror of characters of his own mind, mirror the author’s profession and its reliance on creating something out of thin air. Fiction is at the heart of the book, and our relation to fiction in order to shape our realities.
It was not only Wormold who lied first, but Hawthorne who managed to convince The Chief of the new recruit’s credentials. Sure, Hawthorne exaggerated Wormold’s pedigree: he is a mercantile merchant instead of a peddler of vacuum cleaners, his daughter goes to a prestigious Catholic school instead of being haphazardly taught by nuns in a convent; he has direct access to pivotal political figures in the country instead of loosely knowing them as customers.
The Chief bought this all up and added his own justifications for these baseless exaggerations. The Chief found an explanation himself on why Wormold had not previously joined the country club: “A man who has always learned to count the pennies and risk the pounds.” Hawthorne had snapped up his superior when the boss had “taken charge” and actively involved himself in this fiction, instead of passively accepting it.
Wormold, a mediocre man in the wrong industry, found that he had a knack of creating fiction that others around him might swallow whole. In this, he thrived to the point that his reality is embedded into his fiction:
“It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness — he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action.”
The characters that he conjured out of thin air became real victims of his stories in a metaphysical twist. Others, like The Chief spreading his ugly tentacles from London, also built his fiction on top of this shaky foundation. For Beatrice, she became enamoured with the characters themselves and propose new realities for them. For example, she fantasised the compatibility between Raul the drunken pilot and Teresa the exotic dancer.
Wormold himself fostered a secret fear of what the character might be doing while he looks the other way:
“Sometimes he was scared at the way these peope grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn’t care to think.”
Which makes one wonder whether Greene also shares the same concern.
When things came into its natural crisis, Wormold must find a solution to ease off his characters, to remove them under everybody’s noses. When he plotted Raul’s demise, Beatrice reacted in disgust:
“‘You’re looking please with yourself’, Beatrice said. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that you may be sending a man to his death?’ He thought, That is exactly what I plan to do.”
In this case, the fictional character who had been breathed into reality will suffer a death not anymore real than any deaths in the newspaper obituaries. But now that he had instigated a shared fiction, which others have also believed, what right does Wormold have in taking his own character’s lives?
Greene and the necessity of fiction
And in this note, Wormold’s newfound vocation as a conjuror is really no different than Greene’s profession as a writer. Wormold, Beatrice, Captain Segura for the duration of the novel will be as real as your Bumble date that you’d think is going to show up but ended ghosting you anyway. Greene basks in this ironic parallel.
In an episode of self-contemplation, Wormold thought of his wife who left him, and who had not been anymore real than Raul who he created from his imagination:
“Wormold thought of his wife; she was even less real than Raul. She had nothing to do with love and death, only with the Woman’s Home Journal, a diamond engagement-ring, twilight-sleep.”
And just as Greene needed his characters and fiction for his own sustenance, so did Wormold. I’m not speaking of sustenance by salary, but instead that intrinsic natural motivation which feeds men more wholesomely: self-actualisation. Wormold, for a short while, became Walter White screaming “I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS”. This is especially true when in a frenzy of blood he planned to avenge Hasselbacher’s death, somebody who had shown him real affection and care, though he may be of a dubious background. Hasselbacher was that rare true friend for Wormold.
But this discussion of metaphysical realities and fiction brings us closer to Harari’s Sapiens and his focal idea of man’s need for intra-subjective reality. Our ability to create fiction and believe in it is what separates us from other species. Our need for storytelling and to believe in stories is innate. But it does make us question whether this fiction can be transposed into something real, as Beatrice herself pondered on whether being a spy is “real”:
“‘There are lots of other jobs that aren’t real. Designing a new plastic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an M.P., talking to UNESCO conferences. But the money’s real. What happens after work is real. I mean, your daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real.”
But is the money real? In Harari’s intrasubjective reality, money is an intangible fiction that all of us believe which gives us the ability to acquire real things, such as food for our sustenance. Our weakness is to believe in this fiction, yet it is also our strength that we can use stories to further our species. Fiction can be constructive or destructive, depending on how we use it.
And boy we need fiction, we’ve been raised on it and it sustains us, even fools us. Greene recognised this and used Wormold as a proxy to convey this:
“He was glad that she (his daughter Milly) could still accept fairy stories… Hawthorne and his kind were equally credulous, but what they swallowed were nightmares, grotesque stories out of science fiction.”
In an age where the reverberations of fake news can decide the fate of a country on who sits in the White House, we are becoming increasingly gullible, more than willing to accept these nightmares, feeding our own realities that may be otherwise if we think a little bit the other way.
Yet, these nightmares can become very real, as in the case of Castro’s Cuba. At the time of publication, the communists laid low and they only existed in rumours. The metaphysical reality dreamed up by Wormold found a parallel in Greene’s prescient writing: The communists soon took over, those who were in power seeked refuge in Cuba. There is no secret that Greene had known some of these leaders on a first name basis who are not friends of capitalism. Perhaps he had known that it was coming.
The book falters a little when we question Wormold’s decisions and keeping the stakes in mind: surely he would not have let Milly become friends with a captain of the police who keeps a cigarette case made of human skin, nor would he had involved himself in espionage if he keeps his daughter in danger. I question the weakness of Wormold’s motives.
But this is similar to Orwell’s criticism of another of Greene’s creation in Scobie from The Heart of the Matter. Orwell found Scobie to be “incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together.” We can swallow the fiction of The Chief believing every word sent by Wormold, but Wormold’s lack of cohesion as a character is less believable. But this is a small matter for a book which can warp and make you question your own reality.
