Greene, mean and obscene

I finally got a good start on Graham Greene's "Comedians," after several false starts, and promptly finished it. It's a pretty good novel about a couple of dubious ex-patriot Englishmen getting by and getting ahead, at least for a while, in Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti. The horror of the Tonton Macoute, Papa Doc's enforcer army, is mostly off-stage, which I appreciate - I never care for gore - but Greene manages to capture the menace of a gangster state pretty convincingly.



The central character is not as interesting as many other Greene leading men, and in some ways is Greene's all-too-standard hero - a jealous lover with a dubious background, and above all an uncomfortably lapsed Catholic. The hero - the most made-up part of the book - seems mainly an excuse to bring on the secondary characters and the setting, all drawn from Greene's real-life experience of Haiti. These are almost all captivating, from the at-once admirable and ridiculous idealists, the Smiths, who hope to set up a vegetarian center in Port-au-Prince, to the quiet man-of-all-work Joseph, who is transformed at a voodoo ritual into the embodiment of the warrior spirit and gives his life in the rebel cause.

I then took a left turn and immediately read Greene's "Travels with my Aunt," a slightly ribald comedy (the "obscene" in my post title was just an easy rhyme). It does not have the yawning central gap of "The Comedians," but it never quite fulfills the promise of turning Dudley Do-Right into his lecherous, drinking and drugging alter ego. Nevertheless, it is good fun and I found it to be a page-turner - Aunt Augusta's fabulous tales are carried off with great timing and gusto.

"Travels" is also notable for its non-censorious, often celebratory attitude towards various no-nos of its era and our own, from alcohol and drugs to adultery, prostitution and Don Juan-style misogyny in general. It makes a concerted argument against the safe, traditionally ethical life, and carries it off with the simple trick of never having Aunt Augusta pay for any of it - she's never caught, never sent to jail, never beat up or raped, never knocked up (well, almost never - that's the excuse for the book, and at any rate she seems content to have had her sister raise the child), and never, above all, put off or hurt when men sleep around on her and treat her terribly. She likes it. A truth, certainly, for some women, but not the universal and righteous truth much of the counterculture advertised it to be in the late 60s/early 70s, when this book came out (1969).

That aspect of the book hasn't aged well, but the "enlightened" view of criminality it espouses I think still has much currency, and rings quite true for me. I was just talking with my wife, a law student, about a related observation: I don't doubt that many if not most breaches of the law are bad acts, but I don't regard breaking the law as a bad act in-and-of-itself. Victimless crimes, therefore, are no crimes to me.