Close-up look at Graham Greene politics
"As I watched Graham's tall, lean figure make its way through customs, his blue eyes cutting across the airport with a hint of suspicion, I wonder if, indeed, he had the power to change Haiti," Diederich wrote in a new book, 'Seeds of Fiction', Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954-83.
"Could he bring down Duvalier? And, more to the point, would
he write a book about Haiti?" Diederich said. Greene was in the prime of his writing career and had already published another Caribbean novel, "Our Man in Havana," set in Cuba. Greene called Papa Doc a "madman" telling Diederich that he had "never felt such pervasive fear in a country as in Haiti.
"When he picked Greene up at the airport he was visibly shaking, Diederich recalled in an interview. "He had a terrible dread he wasn't going to make it out. "Greene had hidden his notes, written in tiny, almost illegible script, in a hardback Victorian novel. "I don't know why he bothered to hide them because no-one could read his notes," laughed Diederich. For years later Greene still had nightmares about Papa Doc and his dreaded henchmen, the
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