Over the Border to Haiti

...In one of his rare autobiographical outbursts, in his travel book The Lawless Roads, Greene told of his childhood on an imaginary border: on one side mean, ugly violence, cruelty and evil, on the other the presence of God where "time hung suspended-music lay on the air...

...These arid, dusty flats, these obscene, Voodoo-worshipping Catholics, these sadistic secret policemen hiding behind the anonymous protection of their sunglasses, these pathetic echoes of vanished tropical hedonism all go to form the perfect ironic counterimage to the pragmatic...

...Papa Doc" Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, has taken the place of the usual remote and suffocating Jansenist God...

...What's more, the linking of sex, birth and death is as pretentious and outworn, even when presented in a half-comic light, as those odious beasts that pullulate in Greene's other novels...

...No enchantment here...

...At the close of the book there are hardly any real comedians left, and in any case Greene himself seems to reverse his opinion on the matter, piling a last paradox on the ever-growing heap: "We are the faithless,' Brown muses, "we admire the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr...

...This would not have improved it, but at least the critics would have been spared the necessity of viewing it solemnly within the grim Greene canon...

...Greene's tremendous talent for making a landscape live and breathe like another, even realer, character is stunningly apparent...

...But then almost all of them, from Brown, the style-conscious protagonist-"comedians" live on the surface, so style, of life and manner, takes on a preternatural importance for them-to Jones, the charming English crook and phoney commando, stumble, slip or sidle into the area of commitment, where the comedy being played is at once real and lethal...

...Instead, Greene seems to carry along with him a valise loaded with ready comparisons, images and metaphors, which at opportune moments he dips into and strews about with seeming adroitness...

...Both journalistically and symbolically, the choice of the setting is inspired, for it brilliantly suggests the hollowness and unreality, the demented poverty, that exists under the shadow of America's imperial affluence...

...Smiths, for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause, but through timidity, or through lack of sufficient zeal, we find ourselves the only ones truly committed-committed to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken...

...The hero's masculine pride is at stake...

...For example: "She had drawn up her knees and I was reminded of Doctor Philipot's body under the diving board: Birth, love and death in their positions closely resemble each other...

...No saint has ever required such purity from his followers as Greene has exacted from his novelistic victims...

...As Sean O'Faolain said in a remarkable piece, "Greene is not in the least interested in finding interim or humane solutions to any problem he poses...

...But with his undoubted talents, his seriousness, and his skill one must demand more of him than he seems ready to offer...

...A taste for reality he certainly has, even a gusto-expressed best in this novel in his hilarious portrait of the "innocent" American cranks-but the surrender to experience in all its distinctness and detail still seems beyond him...

...That white bird has flown on its merciful sexual errands in countless modern novels...

...I could continue the familiar catalogue for pages-the crucial point is that an adventure novel should be an adventure for the novelist too...

...The spirit of Restoration comedy that hovers about the moments of relative brightness only helps to stress the surrounding dullness and mechanical novelistic proficiency...

...The modern world is rotten with entertainment," the English philosopher Collingwood intoned...

...Magiot, the Haitian Communist, is the stern man of faith and conviction...

...One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell...

...The cast of characters fits as predictably together, and each of its members is as stock and meaningless without the others, as the cast of almost any grade-B movie...

...anything might happen before it became necessary to join the crowd across the border...

...The white bird, however, harks further back, to his first experience with sex when, a run-away kid from a priests' school, he uses the make-up from a school-boy production of Romeo and Juliet to sneak into the gambling casino, win at roulette, and attract the favors of an older woman...

...Enormous craftsmanlike skill is expended on reworked clich?©s, dialogue that oscillates between blatant Grand Guignol-particularly in the tense exchanges between the terrorist cop, Concasseur, and the indifferent protagonist, Brown-and aphoristic sallies that nail down a scene, an atmosphere or situation with a finality that is all-too-final, in fact deadly and deadening...

...No adventure either...

...In the medieval morality play that Greene was so adept at camouflaging as a contemporary novel, both sin and sainthood made impossible demands on a weak humanity...

...rosy visions of the power "experts...

...Greene's new novel is entertaining only in spots...

...In search of a change of air, understandably fed up with his morose obsessional diet of certain doom and uncertain salvation, Greene has tried to slip across the border into the region where all the rest of us, that is, those who do not try to follow the dictates of an unattainable saintliness, merely go on living...

...It was as though a vengeful archaic spirit had been reincarnated, as though a specifically medieval daemon complete with scourges and plagues, loathsome beasts-the d?©cor of most of Greene's novels has the repulsive fascination of a medieval bestiary, with vultures, rats, and noisome insects as the chief allegoric objects-had been let loose like a fury on the modern world...

...Over the long haul it frazzles out in the usual, depressing, throw-it-away, contemporary sense...

...Brown transports Jones to the partisans, out of sexual jealousy, sure enough, but also at the risk of his life...

...At the beginning, they are all "comedians"-people who live outside the established faiths, either of Catholicism or Communism-hardened egotists concerned only with their immediate goals and appetites...

...Against this fury, the childish innocence prized by Greene appeared a paltry business, so dulled, incompetent and fumbling that one suspected his motives even here: Innocence seemed merely a set-up to provide evil with its melodramatically tragic occasions for triumph...

...The pity of it is that this moment of liberation has caught Greene, esthetically, on the border, when in spirit, or at least in conscious, declared intent, he feels he has already crossed over it...

...Yet even then he had his troubles: "Her fingers had no success, even her lips failed of their office, when into the room suddenly, from the port below the hill, flew a seagull and suddenly I found myself as firm as a man and I took her with such ease and confidence it was as though we had been lovers for a long time...

...Greene has come full circle and almost straight across the border...

...And sin, particularly in the Catholic sphere, is a much more easy-going and permissive affair than Greene, with his crippling melodramatic bent, his almost perverse insistence on corroding evil, was ever willing to admit...

...Greene also feels the need, and at various points in his novel he offers tentative explanations for their inconsequent behavior...

...Unfortunately this sexual encounter is typical of the symbolic overtones of Greene's latest novel, and most typical of all is the fact that the hero would remember Philipot's curled-up position in death while trying to assume a rather different one with his mistress...

...Now he has joined it, in a satirical, mocking mood, to be sure, but also with a genuine acceptance of the shifts and compromises, the pallid redeeming charms, of what he seems to consider "ordinary," uncommitted existence...

...The parabolic significance of the story and its characters is much less certain...

...Nowadays an "entertainment" is highly dispensable, like movies and Kleenex, not a durable product made for hard cultural wear...

...Indeed, without a crucifix over the bed, sex in Greene sounds as banal and boring as in Mailer or John Rechy...

...It was a curiously inverted profession of faith, yet from its traumatic depths Greene created one of the most moving modern novels...

...I found I could do nothing, nothing at all, no white-bird flew in to save my pride...

...It is hard for an old medievalist, a writer steeped in the diabolism that so much of modern writing still cherishes, to get rid of this encumbering baggage and step clear and free across the border...

...It is a humanistic jaunt, and at the start there is a noticeable air of exhilaration, but inevitably it lands him, and us, in a decayed and deserted touristic paradise: Haiti, with its ruined gimcrack fa?§ades and half-finished splendors-American aid has stoppedits "shabby terror," and its fear-crazed dictator holed up paranoiacally in his palace...

...The Power and the Glory...

...And at no time during his long career did he contemplate joining "the crowd across the border" with anything but loathing and disgust...

...There is such a thing, however, as enduring entertainment in books: I've read Stevenson's "Treasure Island" many times and still find it enchanting...

...the leftist American vegetarian cranks, the Smiths, have moved into the spot customarily occupied by an impossibly innocent and unworldly childwoman or priest-innocence is generally a bit mentally deficient in Greene's books-but the rest of the characters seem desperately in need of a parable to illuminate them...

...Doctor Philipot, a minister in Duvalier's government, committed suicide some pages back...

...and Jones, who poses as a major yet never has heard a shot fired in anger, dies heroically fighting with the Haitian rebels...

...WRITERS & WRITING Over the Border to Haiti By Raymond Rosenthal In the old days Graham Greene would have called his latest novel (The Comedians, Viking, 309 pp., $5.95) an "entertainment" and let it go at that...

...He wants situations in which (symbolically) there can be no solutions of a purely human nature...