All posts tagged Haiti

Martin Hewitt, Investigator by Arthur Morrison (1894)

Arthur Morrison wrote some 24 stories featuring his charming, affable and calmly logical detective, Martin Hewitt, and his sometime assistant and confidant, the journalist Brett (I don’t think we ever learn his first name). Morrison collected the stories into four book-length volumes. This is the first volume, containing the first seven stories.

They solve at a flash the question I raised in my review of Tales of Mean Streets, which was whether Morrison’s use of elaborate facetiousness, garnished with Biblical locutions and ironically high-falutin’ turns of phrase, was unique to him or part of the wider style of the time.

Because it is completely absent from these detective stories, which are written in a much plainer, simpler, to-the-point style. So the answer appears to be that Morrison used his heavily jocose voice to deal only with his tales from the underworld. The over-elaborate phraseology was part of a strategy of irony – ranging from sarcasm to satire – which controlled and shaped his anger and disgust at his subject matter.

Here is an example of Morrison in underworld mode in an excerpt from his most notorious short story, Lizerunt. I’ve italicised the phrases which I’m talking about, which are facetious in their unnecessary grandiosity.

When Billy Chope married Lizerunt there was a small rejoicing. There was no wedding-party; because it was considered that what there might be to drink would be better in the family. Lizerunt’s father was not, and her mother felt no interest in the affair; not having seen her daughter for a year, and happening, at the time, to have a month’s engagement in respect of a drunk and disorderly. So that there were but three of them; and Billy Chope got exceedingly tipsy early in the day; and in the evening his bride bawled a continual chorus, while his mother, influenced by the unwonted quartern of gin the occasion sanctioned, wept dismally over her boy, who was much too far gone to resent it.

It’s the juxtaposition of would-be posh phraseology such as ‘a month’s engagement’ or ‘the occasion sanctioned’, with the chaotic reality of the drunken, shouting underclass, which creates the effect.

Whereas in the Martin Hewitt stories of decent chaps solving crimes among, on the whole, more decent chaps, the prose is… well, pretty clean and decent, thus:

Those who retain any memory of the great law cases of fifteen or twenty years back will remember, at least, the title of that extraordinary will case, ‘Bartley v. Bartley and others,’ which occupied the Probate Court for some weeks on end, and caused an amount of public interest rarely accorded to any but the cases considered in the other division of the same court. The case itself was noted for the large quantity of remarkable and unusual evidence presented by the plaintiff’s side – evidence that took the other party completely by surprise, and overthrew their case like a house of cards.

Clear and considered, isn’t it? More than that, it is suave and confident. It is upper-class English, the confidently long, well-balanced and well-arranged periods of the urbane professional class. The case ‘was noted for’, generated an interest ‘rarely accorded to…’ – this is the tone of a doctor or lawyer or scholar.

The narrator’s address to ‘those who retain any memory… etc’ evokes his imagined audience, a community of leisured professional men, readers of quality newspapers, followers of public affairs, and mature enough to have been following these affairs for fifteen or twenty years.

These are the opening two sentences of the very first Martin Hewitt story and they conjure up the entire moneyed, professional class within which the fictional detective operates, and for whom the stories are written. If ‘officialese’ is used to counterpoint and mock the grim affairs of the slum-dwellers in Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, here it is used to stroke the rich, and accentuate their finer feelings and pukka decency.

For the clients and locations are (in general) posh, notably Sir James Norris (baronet) whose country house is the setting for The Lenton Croft Robberies, Sir Valentine Quinton, owner of ‘an old country establishment’, Radcot Hall, and a wealthy wife whose jewels are stolen in The Quinton Jewel Affair, Lord Stanways is the wronged owner of The Stanway Cameo, and so on.

And another quality they share with the Holmes stories is that the subject matter – the jewels or things stolen – are often the best in the world – the world-famous x, the renowned y, the famous affair of the z. They are eminent, which a) makes them shine out against the vast majority of police detective work which is, after all, usually among the poor and wretched – and b) has the flattering effect of making the reader feel eminent, too. As if we are all used to hob-nobbing with lords and ladies and top jewellers and art collectors and so on.

The stories offer the pleasure of flattering both the reader’s intelligence (if we can spot the culprit before Hewitt, and certainly before the slow and obtuse Brett) and social standing.

Martin Hewitt and Brett (Hewitt is clean shaven, on the left) illustrated by Sidney Paget

This volume contains:

The Lenton Croft Robberies (published March 1894 in The Strand magazine)
The Loss of Sammy Crockett (April 1894, The Strand)
The Case of Mr Foggatt (May 1894, The Strand)
The Case of the Dixon Torpedo (June 1894, The Strand)
The Quinton Jewel Affair (July 1894, The Strand)
The Stanway Cameo Mystery (July 1894, The Strand)
The Affair of the Tortoise (September 1894, The Strand)

The stories

1. The Lenton Croft Robberies

Lenton Croft is the country seat (near Twyford) of Sir James Norris. Meeting Hewitt at the train station, Sir James outlines the case: three times in the last year, female guests have had valuable jewellery stolen from them. Each time the windows to the room in question were only slightly opened or closed altogether, or people were in a nearby room. Each time a spent match was found just where the jewellery went missing.

Martin is shown around the house in great detail, receives a precise account of each theft, asks questions about all the staff. He stops at the stables to chat to a servant with a dog, rather to Sir James’s impatience, then asks to see the rooms of the servants.

And solves the case. Sir James’s faithful secretary, Vernon Lloyd, keeps a pet parrot. He has trained it to keep quiet by keeping a spent match gripped in its mouth but, once introduced into a room – either through an only slightly-open window or, as on one occasion, hidden in the room when both windows and doors are closed – to find the nearest shiny thing, drop the match, nab the shiny, and wait for his master.

they confront Lloyd and he confesses.

2. The Loss of Sammy Crockett

The key to an important case is held by one ‘Gaffer’ Kentish, owner of the Hare and Hounds pub in the northern town of Padfield, where he is a trainer of athletes who run in the local competitive races. Hewitt travels there and puts up in the pub to get to know Kentish and try to get the facts he needs from him.

The task is made simpler when Kentish’s star runner, Sammy Crockett, goes missing, just before a championship race in which Kentish has bet lots of money. Some mystery is created by the discovery of scraps of paper near the place Crockett was last seen, and the fact that the trail left by his spiked running shoes stops dead yards from a fence, as if the man had flown up into the air – but Hewitt sees beyond these distractions to the heart of the matter, which is that Crockett has been kidnapped by a bookmaker rival of Kentish’s, named Danby, who also happens to be a property developer and has locked Crockett up in one of a little parade of shops he’s building in a new estate.

Hewitt and Kentish’s tough son break into the shop, punch the local tough guarding Crockett, take him back to Kentish’s pub where he is fed, rested, massaged and – proceeds to win the ‘Padfield Annual 135 Yards Handicap’. With the result that Kentish willingly gives Hewitt the information he needed to solve the other, more important case with which the story began.

3. The Case of Mr Foggatt

Brent explains Hewitt’s theory of ‘accumulative probabilities’ i.e. facts which are in themselves trivial can, if rare enough, gain importance as they increase in number. One odd circumstance means nothing: life is full of oddities. Two odd circumstances, combined, begin to suggest things. Three odd things begin to narrow down the range of possibilities, and so on. Thus the accumulation of evidence points you to the solution.

‘Trivialities, pointing in the same direction, became important considerations.’

‘A fat, middle-aged man, named Foggatt’ who has rooms in the same building off the Strand where Hewitt has his offices and Brett his apartment, is found shot dead. Hewitt and Brett had dined at the latter’s club and were enjoying a cigar in his rooms when – bang! They run upstairs and pry open the locked door with a poker. The body is there, by a gun with one shot fired, all the windows closed.

Seven or so weeks after the inquest, Hewitt invites Brett to dinner at Luzatti’s, off Coventry Street. He insists they sit at a particular table, in chairs opposite

a rather fine-looking fellow, with a dark, though very clear skin, but had a hard, angry look of eye, a prominence of cheek-bone, and a squareness of jaw that gave him a rather uninviting aspect.

Hewitt starts talking about bicycle racing and the young fellow can’t help being interested then joining in. When the young man calls for coffee, to Brett’s amazement, Hewitt reaches out and pinches the half-eaten apple off his plate. The man notices but says nothing and, moments later, makes his excuses and leaves.

Hewitt asks the amazed Brett if he can recall the contents of the dead man’s apartment when they broke in? Did he, for example, notice the half-eaten apple on the table? At the time Hewitt took a plaster cast of the teeth marks in the apple. Now he goes home and does the same to this apple. They are identical.

A few days later Hewitt receives a long letter from the young man who signs himself Sidney Mason, explaining that Foggatt ruined his family. A financial genius, he used Mason’s weak father as a front man for all his deals, until they went sour, at which point Mason’s father was sent to prison which he endured for three years, before killing himself. Thereafter Mason was brought up by his mother who struggled with poverty and shame and social stigma, but he never knew the name of the man who had ruined his family.

His father’s old colleagues and good luck helped him to a clerkship in a legal firm, where he more than once bumped into Foggatt without a clue who he was, each time the fat man betraying inexplicable signs of nerves. Finally Mason bumped into Foggatt in that very house, on an errand to someone else, but Foggatt was sweating and turned white. He invited young Mason to his rooms that evening and there, after offers of brandy and cigars, Foggatt offered him £500 to emigrate and start again, say, in South Africa and then began apologising about his father.

At which point the scales dropped from Mason’s eyes and he realised Foggatt was the wretch who blighted his family. So he grabbed the revolver off the mantelpiece and shot the man dead. Hearing steps on the stairs he locked the door on the inside, made for the window, stepped out onto the ledge and closed it, then reached out to a metal gutter just about within reach, pulled himself up and onto the roof and made his escape.

At his first inspection of the room Hewitt had instantly realised the only way of escape was by reaching over to the gutter and pulling yourself up – therefore he was looking for a tall, and very fit man. Several times he had seen Mason around in legal offices and that night at the restaurant, seeing him at a table, had taken a gamble, based on intuition, at engaging him in conversation.

This summary shows you how a Hewitt story follows the detective template – violent crime, apparently unsolveable because of lack of evidence, the canny detective sees evidence and links where nobody else does (the apple), revelation of the culprit’s motivation in a long and sentimental backstory.

But… It still has a big hole, namely the accident that Mason happened to work in the Law trade so that Hewitt saw him around legal offices – and the whopping coincidence that Mason happened to be in the restaurant the night Hewitt and Brett dine there.

4. The Case of the Dixon Torpedo

Morrison starts many of the stories with exactly the kind of general thoughts and reflections upon the nature of crime and detection with which the Holmes stories often begin. Here, there are a couple of paragraphs about the importance of accident and coincidence before we get on with the plot.

One fine day at 1.30, Hewitt has a visitor in his office.

A gaunt, worn-looking man of fifty or so, well, although rather carelessly, dressed, and carrying in his strong, though drawn, face and dullish eyes the look that characterizes the life-long strenuous brain-worker.

It is the inventor and engineer F. Graham Dixon comes to visit Hewitt on a matter of national importance. Dixon has designed a new, much more effective torpedo. Detailed plans of it were stolen from his office this morning. They were there in the drawer of his desk at 10am this morning. His office is locked. He has two assistants, Worsfold and Ritter, who he trusts. Only the postman came to deliver some letters. It is the usual fol-de-rol of highly detailed circumstances which make the theft, on the face of it, impossible and which are in fact designed to highlight the uncanny brilliance of the detective.

I suppose nobody ever did so much devastation in a photographic studio in ten minutes as I managed.

While they’re puzzling over it a ‘Mr Hunter’ arrives asking to meet with Dixon. It is the second time he’s called today, to discuss new technical innovations. His assistant puts the man off, who stalks off in a huff. Suddenly Hewitt is galvanised. To cut a long story short, he had seen ‘Hunter’ place his walking stick in the walking stick and umbrella stand, an odd thing for a casual visitor to do. Hewitt has Dixon get his men out of the way, and retrieves the stick. It turns out to be a hollow tube with a crew top. Inside are the missing plans.

Hewitt tells Dixon to call the more junior of his two assistants in. When faced with a direct accusation of guilt, the man breaks and confesses. Hewitt tells him to write a note to his confederate, ‘Mr Hunter’, telling him to meet him here at the offices, which will be empty, at 6pm.

This is a blind: Hewitt just wants the address, which is a shabby street in Westminster. He goes there, finds from the concierge that Mr Hunter is more generally known as ‘Mirsky’, goes up to his room, inveigles the man into the hall, then jumps into his room, slams and locks the door. Now he investigates at leisure and discovers a dark room set up in a corner and negatives drying of the famous torpedo plans. He exposes all the plates and gathers up all the negatives.

But he discovers something more which is photos of Russian bank notes. Mr Mirsky has been forging Russian roubles and Hewitt links this with recent police reports of forged roubles flooding Russia, allegedly from London. Here is the source. Through a window Mirsky sees Hewitt rummaging through his things and holding the fake rouble prints, a look of terror on his face. He scarpers.

Hewitt returns to Dixon’s office, hands over the negatives, and says it’s up to Dixon what he wants to do with the wretched assistant.

The plan had been simple. After bribing the assistant, Ritter, to take part, Mirsky had observed his walking stick and had a facsimile made with a hollow tube. Ritter had come to work with the fake stick. He had taken the first opportunity to screw the plans up tight and slip them into the fake stick and place it in the stand. Hunter had arrived, placed his stick in the stand, made a fuss about an appointment, then retrieved the hollow stick containing the plans, gone back to his rooms and made the photographs. Then replaced the plans in the hollow stick, returned to Dixon’s offices, made another fuss and switched the sticks again, leaving the hollow one, for Ritter to find a moment to extract the plans from, replace where they should be, all good. They thought the plans would be absent for just a few hours and no-one would notice.

Dixon foiled the plan by asking to see the plans first thing.

Hewitt’s detective work really boils down to noticing Mr ‘Hunter’ put his stick in the stand. The rest follows from that.

The addition of the fact that Hunter-Mirsky was mass producing faked roubles doesn’t really contribute to the solution of the torpedo blueprints. It happens side by side but doesn’t affect the case or its solution. It appears to be clever but (I may be being rather dim about this) I don’t think makes any material contribution to the case.

I’m probably drawing too big a conclusion on the basis of slender evidence, but it seems that it’s a characteristic Hewitt moment in that it gives the appearance of complexity and cleverness, without the substance.

5. The Quinton Jewel Affair

As usual a few preliminary remarks, this time to the effect that Hewitt keeps surprisingly up to date with the ever-changing slang of the criminal underworld, and especially Romany language of gypsies.

Sir Valentine Quinton lives in Radcot Hall with his wealthy wife, who owns a collection of rare jewellery including the famous ruby sent to this country to be sold by the King of Burma, set in gold and bought by Lady Quinton. One fine evening it is all stolen by a true professional.

A week later Hewitt and Brett are just stepping into his offices near the Strand, when they are accosted by an irate Irishman. He’s just been pointed towards Hewitt by a passing copper. The Irishman proceeds to let loose a long, complex tale in a transcription of Irish dialect.

‘Well, I got along to me room, sick an’ sorry enough, an’ doubtsome whether I might get in wid no key. But there was the key in the open door, an’, by this an’ that, all the shtuff in the room – chair, table, bed, an’ all – was shtandin’ on their heads twisty-ways, an’ the bedclothes an’ every thin’ else; such a disgraceful stramash av conglomerated thruck as ye niver dhreamt av. The chist av drawers was lyin’ on uts face, wid all the dhrawers out an’ emptied on the flure. ‘Twas as though an arrmy had been lootin’, sor!’

Whereas I was fairly confident that Morrison caught the accent of working class Londoners in his slum stories, I’ve no idea how much his transcription of Irish peasant speech is accurate or not, but it certainly dominates the first half of the tale.

The gist of the story is that he was on the train from the West, where he’d just arrived from rural Ireland. When the train didn’t stop at a particular station the stranger sitting opposite him said, ‘Drat’, he’d wanted to get out at that stop, and asked Leamy to take the heavy sealed bag he gave him to a certain address in London while he, the speaker, got the first train back to the missed stop.

Leamy dutifully takes the bag to the requested address and hands it over to a fellow named Mr Hollams, was paid for his troubles, then set off to find some lodgings in the big, bad city. And what’s happened since is that he’s been accosted and assaulted every day since – mugged in the street, drugged in a pub, pushed under an underground train (which he survived unscathed) only to find the doctor who attends him going through his pockets and, finally, having his apartment comprehensively turned over.

Now, this reader confidently deduces that the man who gave Leamy the bag was the thief who stole Lady Quinton’s jewellery. And the man Leamy gave the bag to, was the head of the gang. And the fact that he’s been mugged and searched every day since suggests something was missing – the famous ruby! And if it was not in the bag then the original thief must have kept it.

Hewitt and Brett stroll round to the address of this Mr Hollams only to come upon a fight. A figure with a half-torn coat is struggling up the steps from the area, with two others hanging on to him, one brandishing a revolver. As soon as they’re in the street the two antagonists desist and Mr Torn-Coat makes off.

Hewitt recognises him as Sim Wilks, a well-known burglar. They follow him along Buckingham Palace Road where Hewitt amazes Brett by suddenly adopting the posture and speech of a successful rowdy. He claps Sim on the back, insists he knows him, drags him into a pub for a few beers and insists on lending him a few quid since he’s just carried off a good job and is rolling in swag.

It is this scene which justifies Brett’s opening paragraph about Hewitt’s familiarity with thieves’ slang, because he liberally uses it in buttering up a very suspicious Wilks and the text has copious footnotes telling us that ‘cady’ means hat, ‘touch’ means robbery and ‘cannon’ means drunk. During this swaggering drunken piece of acting, Hewitt tips Wilks the nod that the gang at 8 Gold Street (where we’ve just observed Wilks being manhandled by his boss, Hollam) is about to be raided by the coppers. Is that so? says Wilks musingly. Then pleads another engagement and leaves.

The general idea is that Hewitt has planted the notion that Hollam is about to be arrested, so that it’ll be safe to go and get the ruby from the hiding place where he put it after the robbery. There then follows a sort of tense sequence where Hewitt and Brett follow Wilks to Euston, catch the same train as him, get off at the same station, follow him along winding country lanes at a distance and then catch him red-handed in a church graveyard, removing the ruby from its hiding place behind the brick of a table tomb.

Wilks is arrested for theft, Hollam for receiving stolen goods, Lady Quinton has her jewellery restored, and Michael Leamy gets a respectable job as a doorman ‘guarding the door of a well-known London restaurant’.

Reviewing the logical content of the story you see that the crime was virtually solved as soon as Leamy was pointed towards Hewitt and told his story, particularly once he’d named Hollam as the fence. The solution entirely depended, then, on the Irishman happening to have come across Hewitt’s name and deciding to contact him.

The flim-flam about Hewitt’s competence with criminal slang bears some relation to his ability to speak to Wilks in his own argot, but our heroes could quite simply have followed Wilks to the ruby’s hiding place with much the same result. It feels more as if the idea of dialects – Leamy’s Irish and Wilk’s criminal – colours the story, rather than drives or explains it.

6. The Stanway Cameo Mystery

The ‘famous’ Stanway cameo is discovered by one of the fleet of travelling agents who scour Italy for precious relics, and sold on to the eminent art dealer, Mr. Claridge of St. James Street. He sells it to the Marquis of Stanway for five thousand pounds, the Marquis intending to donate such a rare piece to the British Museum. The piece is kept at Claridge’s for cleaning.

One morning Claridge goes into his office to find it gone. The trapdoor to the roof has been forced and the door into his inner room also forced open by a jemmy or crowbar. A few rooftops away the luxury bag which contained it is discovered by the police. Claridge immediately reimburses Lord Stanway the £5,000 he paid for the piece.

Puzzled, Lord Stanway strolls round to Hewitt’s chambers and hires him to solve the crime. Hewitt goes through the motions, studies the layout of Claridge’s offices, interviews his staff, gets Claridge to describe his precise movements the evening before the crime, and so on. A great deal is made of a Mr Woollett, a jealous rival collector, who has rooms whose windows overlook Claridge’s offices. This seems too obviously a red herring, even to a non-detective story reader, like myself.

Long story short, Hewitt has almost immediately realised that Claridge destroyed the cameo himself and faked the burglary. Every detail of the way the trap door and office door were forced rings fake. Crucially there are spots of rain on a dusty old hat on a peg beneath the trapdoor. It had spitted a bit when Claridge was in the office at the end of the day, but was otherwise a fine clear night. Ergo, whoever ‘forced’ the trapdoor did it during the early evening when Claridge was still there. Ergo Claridge did it himself.

Confronted point blank by Hewitt Claridge breaks down and confesses. His motive was that, upon cleaning the cameo, he realised it was one of the best fakes ever made. But if this fact ever got out his reputation as a dealer would be ruined, the value of all his existing stock plummet, he would lose all his clients. He’d spent a long afternoon pondering all the possible consequences (which he explains in detail to Hewitt and the reader) before opting to fake a burglary and dispose of the cameo.

This option, although expensive, got him off the hook and preserved his reputation. Hewitt sits back, points out the flaws in his procedure and lets things stand. No crime has been committed. Nobody is out of pocket except Claridge himself. He’ll let the police do their best and if they find nothing further – so be it.

7. The Affair of the Tortoise

Two characters live in a row of new buildings near the National Gallery. One, a Mr Rameau, is a big, loud, colourful black man, often drunk and argumentative. He drinks, shouts, parties, slides down the bannisters and intimidates the other inhabitants. The other is a small Frenchman Victor Goujon, once a skilled watchmaker who hurt his hand and has fallen on bad times. Rameau intimidates and taunts Goujon. Goujon has a pet tortoise. Rameau plays with it and one day throws it against a wall so hard he cracks the shell. Goujon goes mad with anger and vows to kill the big man.

Goujon gets a job back in France, packs his bags and leaves. Later the same day Rameau is found dead by the maid, with a hatchet wound in his head and a piece of paper on his chest on which is scrawled puni par un vengeur de la tortue – ‘Punished by an avenger of the tortoise.’

The maid goes to fetch the landlord but when they return – the body has gone!!!!

Everyone assumes the culprit was angry little Goujon but Hewitt sets about dismantling this hypothesis, not least by comparing the ragged scrawl the death note is written in with an example of Goujon’s small precise handwriting which has been found by the police. Also, Goujon is too slight to have carried a big dead man anywhere.

Long story short, they’ve all misunderstood the note. La Tortue is the French name of an island off the north coast of Haiti. Rameau is a member of the brutal, corrupt family which ruled Haiti under the psychotic President Domingue. Domingue’s political opponents took shelter on La Tortue where Domingue’s forces tracked them down and all but exterminated them. Then there was a revolution in which Domingue was overthrown. Our victim, César Rameau, was brother to Domingue’s nephew and Chief Minister, Septimus Rameau.

After the coup, he fled to England where he took rooms in a modest house but carried on the brutish behaviour of a member of a corrupt ruling family. One day he was attacked by one of his enemies who, from the message, had survived the La Tortue massacre and devoted his life to tracking him down.

Where did the body go? Hewitt laughs as he presents Inspector Netting with the murderer and remover of the body of César Rameau – César Rameau himself! Yes, he was never killed but stunned!! He awoke after the maid had gone to fetch the landlord, and made his escape down one of the dumb waiters which served the tall narrow house, hid out in a nearby empty house, then, wrapped in a dark coat, got a cabman to drive him to a safe house.

Hewitt had gone out and chatted to the cabmen waiting outside the house, discovered one who had given a ride the night before to a big man wrapped in a dark coat and nursing his arm, and followed the route to discover Rameau terrified and in hiding.

The police never find the attacker. Rameau is now keen to get out of England. Little Goujon who the police had arrested on his way to the coast sues for wrongful arrest. All is settled.

N.B. Racism This story is a gold mine for researchers investigating the myths and stereotypes surrounding black people in 1890s England, and it would be easy to get worked up by Morrison’s ‘racism’ and use of ‘racist stereotypes’, such as that this black man is loud, aggressive and likes wearing colourful clothing. To be precise:

He got uproariously drunk, and screamed and howled in unknown tongues. He fell asleep on the staircase, and ladies were afraid to pass. He bawled rough chaff down the stairs and along the corridors at butcher-boys and messengers, and played on errand-boys brutal practical jokes that ended in police-court summonses. He once had a way of sliding down the balusters, shouting: ‘Ho! ho! ho! yah!’ as he went, but as he was a big, heavy man, and the balusters had been built for different treatment, he had very soon and very firmly been requested to stop it. He had plenty of money, and spent it freely; but it was generally felt that there was too much of the light-hearted savage about him to fit him to live among quiet people.

Well, there’s a whole world of outrage to be mined from the story, if that’s what you like, and anybody who objects to use of the n-word will have a nervous breakdown and might throw away the book in disgust, especially when the inspector and Hewitt agree that black people have abnormally thick skulls – which explains why Rameau survived a blow to the head with an axe!

But what struck me was that, despite the negative characterisation of Rameau, both the police, inspector Netting, Hewitt and the narrator, Brett, all take it for granted that the case is worth investigating. That Rameau’s life was worth the life of any other person in the UK. In fact, his life is worth more than the lives of the poverty-stricken babies and children of the Jago who Morrison was writing about at the same time. They die like rats and no-one laments them. Rameau is given more importance than them.

And then, as the case unfolds, your initial outrage is tempered as you realise that it isn’t a generic description of black men – it is a description of a very particular type, namely the spoilt, violent, untouchable member of the ruling family of a black dictatorship, used to throwing his weight around and intimidating everyone around him, with no consequences. He is the forebear of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier who exerted a reign of terror over Haiti enforced by the terrifying Tontons Macoutes from 1957 to 1986.

It isn’t a generic racist stereotype. It is a specific portrait of a particular kind of person.

It’s fascinating to learn that Haiti had enough of a reputation for violence and corruption as far back as 1894 to be thought a suitable location for the backstory to a popular detective story. This is Hewitt explaining Haiti to Inspector Netting (and the reader):

‘The biggest island of the lot on this map, barring Cuba, is Hayti. You know as well as I do that the western part of that island is peopled by the black republic of Hayti, and that the country is in a degenerate state of almost unexampled savagery, with a ridiculous show of civilization. There are revolutions all the time; the South American republics are peaceful and prosperous compared to Hayti. The state of the country is simply awful – read Sir Spenser St. John’s book on it. President after president of the vilest sort forces his way to power and commits the most horrible and bloodthirsty excesses, murdering his opponents by the hundred and seizing their property for himself and his satellites, who are usually as bad, if not worse, than the president himself. Whole families – men, women, and children – are murdered at the instance of these ruffians, and, as a consequence, the most deadly feuds spring up, and the presidents and their followers are always themselves in danger of reprisals from others.

Compare the continuity of the country’s terrible political culture through to nearly a century later.

Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during [Baby Doc’s] presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle (including a state-sponsored US$ 3 million wedding in 1980) while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere. (Wikipedia article about Jean-Claude Duvalier)

Thoughts about Martin Hewitt

Well, the obvious result of reading these seven stories is to make you appreciate the style and panache of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Morrison has come up with plausible enough crimes and obfuscates and confuses them enough to give his detective (and the reader) pleasurable mazes of puzzles and red herrings to work through in trying to solve the crimes.

From Conan Doyle Morrison has copied:

the idea of the dim sidekick and amanuensis
the idea that each story begins with a preliminary explanation of this or that other aspect of Hewitt’s character and technique
the idea that the ordinary detectives from Scotland Yard (named in the stories as Inspector Netting and Inspector Plummer) are decent chaps who just lack Hewitt’s brilliant insight (‘Well, Mr. Hewitt,’ Nettings said, ‘this case has certainly been a shocking beating for me. I must have been as blind as a bat when I started on it.’)
the rhetorical tricks which Conan Doyle’s uses to boost his fictional character, repeating phrases like ‘this case was the most famous of the eminent detectives many successes’ or, in the case of the Stanway Cameo, that it was always held against the great detective that no culprit was ever found (although we, the readers, know the real reason for this)
the notion that there is a vast casebook of stories which Brett could be telling, and that he selects this or that case an example of this or that quality in Hewitt’s character or working practice

In other words, he copies Sherlock Holmes to death.

But all this copying tends to highlight the way that the Holmes stories are, in a sense, only the backdrop against which is set the world-straddling character of the detective himself – lean and aquiline, unexpectedly violent when he needs to be, otherwise playing his out-of-tune violin while a little high on cocaine and complaining that crime these days is so boring, there’s nothing to challenge his great intellect – in every way Holmes is a complex and compelling character.

Compared to this colourful creation, Martin Hewitt (even the name is bland and boring) is made of cardboard, and the narrator of the stories, Brett, is little more than a cipher.

Reviews of other fiction of the 1890s

Joseph Conrad

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Nada the Lily (1892)

Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
The Sign of the Four (1890)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)

In all of human experience there was no precedent for such a campaign. (p.97)

Executive summary

The abolition of slavery took place in two parts:

abolishing the slave trade (1807)
abolishing slavery itself (1834)

1. Abolishing the slave trade

After a whole century when anybody suggesting that African slavery be banned would have been considered a mad eccentric, the issue suddenly exploded into public consciousness in the years 1788 to 1793 when there was an extraordinary eruption of pamphlets, articles, petitions from every town and city in Britain, plays and polemics and debates in parliament, calling for the abolition of the slave trade.

It suddenly became the topic of the day and Hochschild is able to quote diarists and letter writers saying how heartily sick they are of every single dinner party or coffee house conversation being about nothing but abolitionism.

And then, just as the cause of abolition had become so unstoppable that it seemed poised to succeed in Parliament, the French Revolution broke out which led to two major events which set back the cause of abolition by a decade:

The outbreak of the largest slave rebellion anywhere, in the French sugar colony of St Domingue, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in November 1791. This is a long story, in which both the French and the British sent armies which were eventually defeated or, more accurately, abandoned the war in the face of deaths from tropical sickness and the slaves’ successful guerrilla tactics. But reports of the brutality on both sides of the conflict had undermined the image which abolitionists tried to foster, of slaves as helpless, saintly victims.
The French revolutionaries executed Louis XVI in January 1793 and declared war on Britain in February 1793. War always halts reforms. A nationwide outburst of patriotism was accompanied by repressive laws banning seditious writings and political meetings. Abolitionism became ‘tainted’ by association with some of the wilder English Jacobins, who included it in general calls to overthrow the monarchy, the House of Lords, please for universal male suffrage and so on.

The movement which might have led to the end of the slave trade in just four or five years from its inception in 1788, because of the interruption of the French revolutionary wars, ended up taking nearer to 20 years.

The movement’s representative in parliament, the short, correct and conservative MP William Wilberforce, introduced an abolition bill into each new sitting of parliament from 1788 onwards, but they were always swamped by the pressing urgency of measures to deal with the war and the eruption of other crises throughout the British Empire.

It was only after the Peace of Amiens of 1802 led to a pause in the war with France, that the abolitionists were able to rally. Although war with France resumed in 1803, a new burst of campaigningy led to the final abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It became forbidden for British ships to carry slaves. Soon the Royal Navy was instructed to stop all ships carrying slaves of whatever nation, and confiscate them.

2. Abolishing slavery

There was then a long lull as Britain focused its energies on defeating Napoleon, first in 1814, then all over again in 1815 after he escaped from St Helena. The period 1815 to 1820 was characterised by immense social unrest in Britain caused by the mass unemployment of huge numbers of men who’d been serving in the army and navy simply being dumped back on the market, and also the social disruption of the industrial revolution.

The government responded with a whole series of repressive measures. Paul Foot’s biography of the poet Percy Shelley is a surprisingly thorough account of the repressive laws enacted during this period, as well as a doleful record of the many working class activists who were arrested, convicted, hanged or shipped off to the new penal colony in Australia.

It was only in the 1820s with a new government in place, with better harvests damping down rural protest, with working people finding more work, that the sense of crisis eased, and a new wave of young abolitionists took up the struggle, this time to abolish slavery altogether.

In 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in London, its members including Joseph Sturge, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Henry Brougham, Thomas Fowell Buxton with the women Elizabeth Heyrick, Mary Lloyd, Jane Smeal, Elizabeth Pease, and Anne Knight.

The most interesting aspect of the story, in Hochschild’s telling, is that most of the running of this second phase was made by the women. William Wilberforce was still there in Parliament. Thomas Clarkson was still the great collector of facts and information. The Quaker networks provided the basis of publicity and campaigning. But they all took a cautious, gradualist approach. By contrast, a number of the women and women’s groups pressed for immediate abolition. Most notable was Elizabeth Heyrick.

Elizabeth Heyrick Wikipedia article

During the 1790s the first generation of abolitionists had organised a sugar boycott i.e. they stopped buying and using sugar. Heyrick went one further and went to grocers shops asking them not to stock it at all.

Again the cause became entangled with a much bigger issue – in the 1790s it had been the French Revolution, in the late 1820s it was the titanic struggle to pass the Reform Act of 1832 to reform Britain’s ludicrously out-of-date electoral system.

Abolitionists realised this was their cause too, and put their energy into this struggle, and it was only after a reformed parliament had been elected in 1833, that direct campaigning for abolition continued and almost immediately was a success.

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire BUT even then, it was in two phases: as of 1834 only slaves below the age of six were freed, all adult slaves had to continue working for their masters as ‘apprentices’.

Full and complete abolition – i.e. full and complete emancipation of all British slaves – had to wait until midnight on 1 August 1838. Hochschild amply describes the celebrations.

Bury the Chains

This is a long, detailed, very readable and profoundly moving account of the movement to abolish slavery in Britain.

Some of Hochschild’s most interesting points are made in the introduction, namely:

In the 1780s, when the abolition movement got going, not just African slaves but maybe as many as three quarters of the world’s population was unfree.
The abolition movement was the first mass civil society movement, not the product of a particular class or particular special interest group or trade – it joined all classes, all genders, all ages and all occupations across all the regions of Britain (‘Something new and subversive was making its first appearance: the systematic mobilisation of public opinion across the class spectrum.’ p.138)
It was the first such campaign in human history that was not motivated by self-interest; none of the campaigners stood to gain anything and they, and the British population as a whole, stood to lose out economically – but nonetheless the righteousness of the cause outweighed self-interest.
The abolition movement invented, or brought to perfection, a whole range of campaigning tactics which are still used around the world.

An unfree world

The first stirrings of the abolitionist movement occurred during the American War of Independence (1775-1783), around 1780. This is where Hochschild begins his narrative (although some strands require stepping back a bit in time to explain the background and development of slavery, and of specific elements in the story, such as a brief history of the Quakers.)

Anyway, I found it riveting that the first few pages are devoted to explaining that most human beings in the world at that age, in 1780, were not free.

When native Americans fought each other they often took captives prisoner as slaves. The Aztec and Inca empires had seized conquered peoples as slaves. Then the Spanish turned the entire population into peons to work for their European masters. But slavery was widespread in African kingdoms, too, and existed long before the Europeans touched the coast in the late 1400s.

For centuries before that there had been a) a slave trade taking African slaves north to serve in Muslim countries of the Mediterranean, and particularly to the heart of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, and b) victorious African rulers routinely enslaved their defeated enemies.

The condition of slavery, selling of slaves, slave trails and slave entrepots were established well before the Europeans arrived.

The enormous landmass of Russia was characterised by serfhood where illiterate peasants were tied to land, and bought and sold along with it. In most of the rest of Europe illiterate peasants were similarly virtually the property of their lords and masters. In India and other parts of Asia, tens of millions of people were in outright slavery (‘tens of millions’, p.2), while tens of millions more lived in a form of debt bondage which tied them to specific owners.

Hochschild doesn’t mention China, but millions of Chinese peasants lived in various forms of servitude.

Even in the most ‘civilised’ parts of Western Europe and north America, there was a deeply engrained social hierarchy, by which everyone deferred to those above them, and the aristocracy and landowners could use, whip, beat, punish and abuse their servants and staff, almost at will.

It is chastening, sobering, terrifying to read Hochschild’s convincing account of how most people for most of the past, have not been free. Count your blessings.

18th century violence

Not only were most people either not-free, or lower down the pecking order of deferentiality, but the 18th century world was one of quite staggering brutality. When you don’t know much you sort of think that the disgusting brutality meted out to slaves was uniquely bestial. But violence of every sort existed quite freely far beyond the slave world. Ordinary men and women could be punished for simple misdemeanours with public whipping or even the death penalty. As James Walvin’s book on slavery highlights, and as Hochschild repeats, deaths among the crew members of slave ships were, proportionately higher than deaths among the slaves.

And then there was the British tradition of press-ganging. Any halfway fit man walking the streets of London, Portsmouth, Bristol and any other major port city was liable to be bought drinks till he was legless, or simply seized by the notorious press gangs, carted off to serve on a slave or Royal Navy ship, for years at a time, with no legal redress.

Alan Taylor, in American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, describes some atrocity happening in the 1700s and ironically remarks, ‘all this took place in the supposed “Age of Enlightenment”‘.

But the whole point of the Age of the Enlightenment is that it was a movement to try and reform a fundamentally brutal, backward, obscurantist and reactionary society. It was light amid darkness, profound darkness. Of course the Age of Enlightenment was often brutal; that’s precisely what the relatively small number of philosophers, thinkers, poets, writers, artists and enlightened citizens were struggling against.

Execrable Human Traffick, or The Affectionate Slaves by George Morland (1789), according to Hochschild, the first painting depicting the slave trade

The Quakers

This makes Britain’s 20,000 Quakers stand out all the more remarkably from all the other social and belief systems of the Western world. For the Quakers believed that all people are equal – and put their belief into practice. They didn’t use any linguistic forms of deference, refused to say Mr or Sir or Your worship, insisted on only saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ since these were the non-deferential versions. They refused to fight in wars. They refused to take vows to any monarch or magistrate. They insisted their only allegiance was to God the Creator of All. (p.107)

And they believed not only that all men, but that all people are equal. Thus, with ramrod logic, Quakers were the only one of the countless religious denominations anywhere in the New World who spoke out against slavery in the 18th century. They refused to own slaves. If they came into possession of slaves through land deals, they promptly liberated their slaves and, in some cases, Hochschild says, paid them compensation.

Compare and contrast with the Church of England which not only failed in its duty to speak out against slavery, but was itself a large owner of slaves through various companies and committees, notably the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

Among other properties the Church owned the Codrington estate, the second largest slave estate on Jamaica. On the governing board of the Society for the Propagation etc, and therefore aware of their slave profits, were the Regius Professors of Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

All slaves working for the Society had the word SOCIETY branded into their chests with a red hot iron. Disgusting, eh?

It was Quakers who, in 1783, set up the first committee to lobby for the end of slavery. They got nowhere because they were ignored as cranks. It was only when Anglican luminaries came on board that the powers that be were inclined to listen. The most important was the Divinity student Thomas Clarkson, who, at the age of 25, underwent what amounted to a religious conversion, deciding to devote his life to the abolitionist cause.

Still, it was symptomatic that when a new committee for abolition was formed in 1787, nine of the twelve members were Quakers.

Thomas Clarkson

For Hochschild the central character of the entire story is Thomas Clarkson, 6 feet tall, red haired, who was converted to the evils of slavery aged 25 and became an indefatigable campaigner and investigator.

It was the investigations that mattered. In London, Bristol and Liverpool Clarkson spent months befriending slave ship captains, crews and merchants (where possible – many became firm enemies; on more than one occasion Clarkson’s life was threatened). He visited all the main posts gathering eye witness accounts of the brutality of the trade.

Using figures freely available from the authorities of the slave ports, Clarkson assembled statistics showing the appalling loss of life among the white crews of slave ships. As a proportion, more white sailors died on a slave journey, than slaves.

His aim was to refute one of the central the pro-slavery arguments, that the crews of slave ships provided a kind of rough apprenticeship for the Royal Navy. On the contrary, Thompson proved that most slave ship crews were press ganged, desperate to flee the ships, and only kept in place by punishments every bit as savage as those meted out to the slaves. He assembled copious testimony testifying to the way white sailors were flogged, sometimes to death, put in chains, tied to the deck or thrown into tiny spaces belowships, and died like flies on these long voyages.

Clarkson aimed to assemble the broadest possible case, showing that the slave trade degraded and brutalised everyone who came in touch with it. When he came across ship’s chandlers in Bristol or Liverpool openly selling chains, shackles and thumbscrews – implements of torture – he bought them as exhibits to show on his lecture tours, he sent accounts of them to the Times and to Parliament.

All this testimony and equipment, all the statistics existed and were publicly available, but nobody had ever set out to assemble all the evidence, to buy and display the implements of torture, to assemble all the statistic, to do the basic investigative groundwork which could then be recycled into articles, pamphlets, books and speeches.

Clarkson and colleagues listed the negative arguments against slavery, but also tried to formulate arguments emphasising the positive results that would stem from ending it.

One of these was the attempt to prove that free trade with African nations and peoples would yield larger profits than slavery; that the slave trade was not only morally reprehensible, degrading, lethal to ships crews, but that it was preventing the development of more profitable free trade with African countries.

To prove his point, on his visits to the slave ports, Clarkson came across products from Africa and began collecting them into what became known as ‘Clarkson’s box’. These included carved ivory and woven cloth, along with produce such as beeswax, palm oil and peppers.

Clarkson could see the craftsmanship and skill that went to produce many of the items and used them to refute the notion that blacks were savages, little more than animals. Quite clearly they were not, they were craftsmen and women of great skill. The idea that such imaginative and talented designers and craftsmen could be kidnapped and enslaved was horrifying.

Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society (1795) by Josiah Wedgwood and William Hackwood

Campaign tactics

How did the abolitionists achieve all this?

It’s a long story which first of all requires a good sense of the nature of British society in the 1770s and 1780s, which is why it takes a book to tell how various strands of social, religious and moral thought came together.

But Hochschild also points out how the abolitionists pioneered campaigning techniques which have endured to this day:

posters
pamphlets
lecture tours
investigative journalism designed to stir people to action
books and book tours
mass petitions
targeting individual MPs
lobbying parliament
organising boycotts of sugar

Hochschild devotes a couple of pages to the origin of one of the most powerful icons of the movement and what he calls ‘one of the most widely reproduced political graphics of all time’.

The chairman of an abolitionist branch Clarkson had set up in Plymouth sent Clarkson a diagram of the slave ship Brooks which he had come across at the owners’ offices. It showed the optimal way to cram the ship full of African slaves. Clarkson seized on the diagram’s importance and worked with the committee’s publisher and designer to expand and fine tune it.

Diagram of the slave ship Brooks (1814 version)

The slave packing diagram quickly began appearing in newspapers, magazines, books and pamphlets. The abolitionists and thousands of other supporters around the country hung it on their walls as a constant reminder. To this day it has the power to harrow and shock.

Morality trumped self interest

The British decision to abolish slavery was taken against the economic interest of Britain.

Not only this, but many communities and economic sectors which stood to be specifically damaged by the decision, nonetheless supported abolition. Towns whose wealth was based on slave imports nonethless produced lengthy petitions against slavery. It was, therefore, a decision taken on moral and religious principles, and these trumped economic self interest.

Scholars estimate that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the British people 1.8 per cent of their annual national income over more than a century, many times the percentage most wealthy countries today give in foreign aid. (p.5)

Why 1788?

Hochschild lists the precursors, describes the events leading up to the formation of the abolition committee and gives accounts of the personal conversions to anti-slavery of key personnel. But it might still have remained an eccentric fringe group. Why did the cause suddenly catch fire, and become a country-wide phenomenon in 1788-89?

In 1780, if you had suggested banning slavery, everyone would have thought you were mad. Nobody discussed it, it didn’t appear in newspapers, magazines, parliamentary debates or coffee house conversations.

By 1788 Britain was aflood with a tsunami of anti-slavery propaganda. Petitions flooded Parliament as never before, thirteen thousand signed one in Glasgow, 20,000 one in Manchester; books and pamphlets flooded from the press, lectures and sermons were given about it, newspaper and magazine articles poured forth – it was everywhere, the burning topic of conversation, it was like the Brexit of its day.

But why? Why did the campaign to abolish slavery spread like wildfire and unite all classes, regions, towns and cities so suddenly? And why in Britain and Britain only? After all, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland and Sweden all owned colonies in north or south America which employed large numbers of slaves. There was no movement to abolish slavery in any of those six other European nations. Why not?

Hochschild gives a list of secondary causes, before he unleashes what he thinks is the prime and main cause (pp. 213-225).

The secondary causes amount to a thorough profile of British late-eighteenth century society and indicators of it economic, technological, social and political advancement beyond all its European neighbours.

massive investment in well-kept toll roads which made widespread travel easier in Britain than anywhere else in Europe
the world’s best postal service
more newspapers than any other country, and more provincial newspapers which passed on developments and debates in the capital to the remotest provinces
the coffeehouse, a British institution in every city and town, which had up to date copies of all the magazines and newspapers, and where news and issues of the day could be debated
more than half the population of Britain was literate because Protestantism insists that each individual can read the Bible in their own language
libraries in every town and city, with over a hundred in London alone
well over a thousand bookstores, which often offered hsopitality while you sat and read
no censorship; anyone could set up a printing press and publish what they liked compare with, for example, the 178 censors who censored everything written in France before it was published
debating societies which became widespread during the 1770s

So although fewer than 5% of the population could vote, an extraordinary number of people knew what was being debated and discussed by parliament, read and understood the issues of the day, and created a ‘public opinion’ which couldn’t be ignored by the country’s rulers.

The rule of law. Unlike most continental nations, Britain had age-old common law which had been continually influenced and modified by trial by a jury. Obviously the law was weighted towards the rich, towards aristocrats and landowners. But in theory at least, a labourer could take a lord to court and win. After the Somerset case of 1772, the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp helped a number of slaves take their masters to court – and won.

These are all mighty fine aspects of British society circa 1790, but none of these by themselves amount to a sufficient cause.

The primary cause, Hochschild thinks, is the uniquely British institution of press-ganging.

He gives four or five pages describing in some detail the mind-blowing examples of the powers of the press gang to kidnap any man whatsoever between about 14 and 40 and whisk them off to a life of brutally hard work and vicious discipline aboard the Royal Navy’s vast fleet.

Grooms could be kidnapped at the altar, in front of bride, vicar and congregation, and whisked off. Some gangs were so large they fought pitched battles with customs officials or soldiers. The pages he devotes to press-ganging are quite an eye-opener.

But his point is that many Britons had experienced, or knew of, a form of slavery themselves; knew an institution whereby perfectly free young men could be kidnapped and sold into a life little better than slavery, subject to appallingly brutal punishments, with a fair certainty of death from disease, rotten food or combat.

Alongside all its positive aspects, British society also contained this brutal institution – and it had led over the decades to a widespread sense of grievance and resentment. It was this feeling (among others) which the abolitionists were able to tap into.

Personally, I find this theory a bit far-fetched. I would have thought there were several other social trends which Hochschild mentions elsewhere but not in his list of causes, which were far more important than press-ganging.

Chief among these would be the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, which led to the rise of non-conformist sects, chief among them the Methodists. This movement converted people rich and poor to the belief that society at large only paid lip service to Christian values, and that individuals really had to experience the grace of God for themselves to be born again into a purer, more devout, more moral Christian life.

It was to these newly awakened consciences that much abolitionist propaganda appealed, and it is notable that non-conformists – building on the heroic work of the Quakers – were at the forefront of disseminating and spreading the movement.

Fascinating and eminently readable though his book is, I don’t think Hochschild quite drills down into the immense spirituality and religiosity of the era, and how that influenced every thought and feeling of millions and millions of Brits.

Summary

This is an absolutely vast subject, because the campaign, in total, stretched across fifty years, and was hugely affected by two great historical events: the French Revolution and the twenty years war it led to; and then the immense struggle to pass the 1832 Reform Act – not to mention acknowledging the huge social changes caused by the industrial revolution which was trundling along in the background throughout the period.

Vast as it is, this really brilliant book probably comes as close to doing the subject matter justice as one volume can.

Despite the horror of much of the content, Bury the Chains manages somehow to be a humane and uplifting story, because it shows how evil can be conquered, and it shows how even when a wicked system or institution is in place, millions and millions of good-hearted people can rise above their own self interest to organise and work for its overthrow. And succeed.

The British are often damned for perfecting the Atlantic slave trade and making vast fortunes from it. But they should also be praised for rising up in their millions and forcing their government to change its policies and then to spend a lot of money policing the seas to try and eradicate this truly evil trade.

Related reviews

Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)

Without the slaves there would have been no sugar and without sugar there would have been no national addiction to coffee and, later, to tea. (p.4)

I bought Walvin’s book 20 years ago, read it and found it as unsatisfactory then as I do now. He uses a thematic approach to grouping the material in order to loosely follow the slave experience. Thus the opening chapters describe the ways slaves were seized in Africa – in war or expressly for slavery – marched to the coast, he describes the coastal slaving forts, the Atlantic crossing, the slave auctions in America or the Caribbean, and then life and death on the different types of plantation.

It’s a valid enough approach, but the downside is it is very bitty. It creates a kind of magpie effect, picking out dazzling facts and incidents from Barbados in 1723 or Georgia in 1805 or Jamaica in 1671, fragmenting your understanding.

Not only is there little sense of chronological development and change, but some of the incidents he chooses are in reverse chronological order, so that the chapter about slave rebellions opens with the massive slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s, treating it at some length. But a) to do so he has to bend his own rules since Haiti – then called Saint Domingue – was a French colony and everywhere else Walvin restricts himself strictly to British colonies.

And b) he then works backwards from the Haiti revolt, to describe far earlier uprisings from the 1600s onwards, for example the Stono uprising in South Carolina in 1739, or jumps forward to uprisings near the end of the period – Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, 1831, or the 1822 Charleston uprising, and then back to Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, then forward to the Baptist Uprising on Jamaica in 1831.

It all ends up being quite confusing. Much more sensible would have been to try and show what the slaves cumulatively learned about organising uprisings, and what the authorities learned about suppressing them.

Walvin repeatedly refers to the differences between plantation culture in the West Indies and on the American mainland, but never makes them as clear as Alan Taylor does in his outstanding book American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (sugar grew best in the West Indies, tobacco in the Chespeake Bay area (Virginia, Georgia) and Europe-style agriculture from New York north into New England).

It was entirely these agricultural and climatic facts which gave rise to the intensive slave labour of huge sugar plantations in the Indies, to large but not-quite-so-vast tobacco slave plantations in the South, and to the relatively slave-free, family-run farms of the middle and northern states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England).

Most irritating of all, Walvin has a fondness for rhetorical questions, which often just seem lame. It’s as if a historian of the Holocaust kept stopping every few pages to sigh, ‘But where are the memorials to all the Jews that died at Belsen?’ or ‘How can we imagine the feelings of the Jews of Jewish mothers as they carried their babies into the gas chambers?’

The facts are quite horrifying enough. They don’t need lachrymose embellishments, such as:

When Lord Mansfield died, in March 1793, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey… But where are the memorials to those thousands whose lives were touched by the career of England’s Chief Justice? (p.22)

But how many watery miles would always remain between the slaves he had sold in Antigua and their loved ones in Africa? (p.43)

Nuggets

Nonetheless, the book does have loads of nuggets of information tucked away in it, and I thought I’d extract and list ones which stood out for me, as an aide-memoire:

Drinks The new fashionable drinks of the late 1600s and early 1700s – coffee, tea and chocolate – are all naturally bitter. They need sweetener. Sugar. Grown by slaves. What a stunning fact that a product from China (later imported into India and Ceylon), sweetened by tea from the West Indies, grown by slaves imported from Africa, became an addiction in cold northern Europe.

Puddings During the 18th century the British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar: hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, creams, charlottes and bettys, trifles and fools, syllabubs and tansys, junkets and ices, milk pudding, suet pudding, custards and cakes, and rice pudding (rice grown by slaves in Georgia and Carolina, sugar grown by slaves in the Indies).

Somerset v Stewart (1772) Slavery had never been authorized by statute in England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield decided that it was also unsupported in common law. Lord Mansfield tried to narrowly limit his judgment to the issue of whether a person, regardless of being a slave, could be removed from England against their will, and said they could not. Nonetheless the case ‘aroused enormous interest and political controversy’ (p.305) and became one of the most significant milestones in the abolitionist campaign.

Mansfield had in his own household a black slave, Elizabeth Dido, born to a slave woman captured aboard a Spanish ship by a British pirate, who got her pregnant and passed the baby on to his relative Mansfield, who brought her up.

In his will Mansfield specified that Dido be freed and given an annuity for life.

The Zong case (1781) The Zong was a Liverpool-based slave ship. In September 1780 it departed the coast of Africa for Jamaica with 470 slaves on board. 60 Africans and seven crew had died from disease on the crossing when, on November 29, Captain Luke Collingwood called a meeting of his officers to decide whether to throw the sick Africans overboard in order to preserve the others and save drinking water. 131 slaves were thrown overboard. The owners of the Zong, Gregson, claimed the loss of their slaves (£30 each) from their insurers, Gilbert. The insurers refused to pay. The case was taken to court and provoked a storm of outrage. Another milestone towards abolition.

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

John Newton John Newton, later in life an ardent abolitionist and author of the hymn Amazing Grace was, early in life, captain of a slave ship and responsible for punishing and reprimanding uppity slaves. He used thumbscrews.

The Middle Passage It surprised me that, as a proportion, more of the white crews died in the Atlantic crossing, than the slaves. I have seen the diagrams of the slaves packed tight below decks hundreds of times, and they have been recycled in numerous works of art as symbols of unprecedented suffering. Who knew, that as a proportion, more whites died than blacks!

All Souls Barbados was the most densely planted and cultivated sugar island in the West Indies. The largest slave owner was Christopher Codrington. It was his land which funded the establishment of the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford. It comes as no surprise to learn that in our politically sensitive times, the College is setting up a scholarship to help West Indian students.

Oxford college to launch scholarship in attempt to address slavery legacy

West Indian output Between the 1660s and the abolition of slavery, the African population of the West Indian sugar islands rose to 1 million. During that period over 10 million tonnes of sugar were produced.

Task work Slaves were set tasks and, once these were complete, were free to tend their own gardens, practice artisan skills and so on. In fact, one of the biggest learnings from Walvin is that many slaves had a surprising amount of freedom and agency.

Many were trained in a very wide range of skills, from artisan work such as coopers, carpenters and smiths, to work gang overseers, to book keepers and accountants, while off to one side of field work was an entire hierarchy of domestic servants from lowliest char to senior butler and household supervisor.

I thought the chapter about ‘runaways’ would be about desperate conspiracies to break shackles, get through the barbed wire fence and escape – but this is completely wrong. It turns out many, many slaves had jobs which naturally took them far afield, taking all kinds of goods to local markets, fetching and carrying from towns or neighbouring plantations, and even operating boats and ships to carry plantation produce down river to collection centres and big towns.

Slaves were much more mobile than we might imagine. (p.165)

Some slaves’ jobs required them to be absent from the plantation for weeks on end, and so it turns out that the definition of ‘runaway’ is ragged round the edges. Many slaves didn’t ‘run away’ so much as stay away longer than a job warranted – for all kinds of human reasons, because they had a sweetheart to visit, or distant spouses and children they’d been separated from, to gamble and get drunk.

Free blacks Similarly, it is startling to have it brought home how many free Africans lived in the slave areas, specially of the Deep South. They also sailed the seas as free sailors, alongside white sailors, ending up in ports wherever European ships anchored – which is to say, right round the world.

Striking that Olaudah Equiano, who left a detailed account of his life, worked aboard a British ship which made an expedition to the Arctic in 1773!

If there is one really pervasive message to Walvin’s book, it is the counter-intuitive one that slaves – captured, enslaved Africans and their descendants – were emphatically not passive helpless victims, but adapted to their appalling new circumstances, spread into all walks of life available, acquired skills, saved up and earned their freedom, set up businesses and schools, and sailed the seven seas alongside their European one-time captors.

As Walvin puts it, everywhere historians look, they see:

the growth of an independent slave culture, linked to the world of plantation slavery but operating and thriving at an economically autonomous level. (p.115)

The black African element not only underpinned the wealth of the British Empire in the 1700s, but was everywhere visible in that empire.

It was news to me that there was a black drummer in the Scottish court in 1507, that Henry VII and Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter, that Elizabeth I had black musicians and dancers. At a celebration ball in London in 1764 all the musicians were black.

Black servants were highly fashionable among the 18th century aristocracy. And not just aristocrats. Samuel Johnson’s much-loved manservant Francis Barber was black, and Johnson not only made him his heir but left him most of his important papers.

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with a black servant by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Death in the Indies The majority of slaves were imported into the West Indies where they dropped like flies, because of poor food, appalling conditions, and being worked to death by the brutal requirements of sugar production. Fewer slaves were imported onto the American continent, but more of them survived because working tobacco was relatively less onerous, food and conditions were better, and, above all, disease was less lethal.

Music Apparently, it’s racist to say that Africans have a special feel for music and rhythm – but the testimony of slave owners and visitors to plantations is full of evidence for the slaves’ fondness for music of all sorts, from chanted and sung words alone, to the accompaniment of instruments made from whatever came to hand, through to full proficiency on European instruments like the violin.

Christianity I’ve met no end of progressives, especially feminists, who think that Christianity’s influence was and is and can only ever be a terrible, calamitous thing. In some respects this may be true, but Walvin has a chapter ramming home the fact that it was the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, and the spread of Protestant missionaries throughout the slave colonies, the conversion of many slaves to Christianity, and then the widespread dissemination of Christian anti-slavery pamphlets, sermons and so on, from the 1770s onwards – which played a huge role in creating widespread public and political support for abolition.

The role of Christianity in freeing the slaves was ‘seismic’ (p.194).

Phases of abolition Anyone familiar with the subject knows this, but it’s worth emphasising that abolition came in waves.

In the 1780s there were attempts to rein in what were becoming the well-publicised excesses of plantation owners in the colonies. Parliament passed laws restricting the types of punishment (for example, the number of lashes) they could dole out.

Phase one was the campaign from the end of the American War of Independence (1783) to abolition in 1807. This first abolition was the abolition of the slave trading by ship. From 1807 no British ship was allowed to carry slaves. Parliament and the campaigners expected that this would result in an improvement in the conditions of slaves in the West Indies, and they set up a demographic register to monitor change.

In the event, the evidence came in that it improved nothing. The condition of slaves in the Indies remained as miserable as ever. Abolitionism was put on hold during the Wars with France. When these ended in 1815, there was a period of intense political repression in Britain. But this slackened in the 1820s and a new generation called for further reform, and not just of slavery.

The new post-war generation chafed against the domination of the landed gentry under the old voting franchise. The industrialists of the north chafed against having no political power to match their new wealth. Apologists for capitalism insisted that Free Trade was the great panacea which would drive the British economy and so campaigned against trade tariffs. Christian missionaries provided a ceaseless supply of literature describing the appalling conditions and sufferings of the ongoing slave colonies.

This was the second wave of abolitionism, led by a new generation, which called for the abolition of slavery on moral, Christian, but also economic and political grounds. Free market economists insisted that slavery distorted markets, businesses and wages, thus hampering the growth of British trade and prosperity.

It was only after the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, and a new ‘reformed’ Parliament assembled, that a laws was finally passed to abolish the condition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

On 1 August 1834 all slaves under 6 were freed. Adults became ‘apprentices’ and were still forced to work for their owners for 40 hours a week, for nothing, for a period of 6 years. Some islands decided tojust get on and free all their slaves.

Many of the colonies had reacted to the unrelenting pressure from the church and the mother country against slavery, by steadily releasing slaves already, especially if they were old, ill or unable to work. Slavery was always first and foremost an economic consideration.

Full abolition only came at midnight on 31 July 1838. Freed slaves across the West Indies held marches and parades, made speeches, attended church, decked their houses and towns with flags and bunting.

The British enforced the slave trade Having seen the light, the British became enthusiastic opponents of the slave trade wherever it remained. It became a standing order of the Royal Navy to confiscate slave ships. Between 1820 and 1870 the Royal Navy seized 1,600 slave ships on the Atlantic and freed 150,000 slaves, especially heading to Cuba and Brazil.

American slavery But we no longer had jurisdiction over the United States. By 1860 there were some 4 million slaves in the USA, far more than had been liberated from the British colonies in the 1830s.

Their struggle for liberation, and the epic civil war it prompted, is another story.

The Comedians by Graham Greene (1966)

She laughed and held me still and kissed me. I responded as well as I could, but the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Dr Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief. (p.57)

The Comedians is Greene’s longest novel (287 pages in the Penguin edition) and among his most enjoyable. The tone is equable, the style concise and expressive, the text relatively unblemished by the Catholic despair and bucket theology of his other novels, and there is a steady flow of deft descriptions and urbane ironies which, although they intertwine with some gruesome scenes, on the whole keep a slight smile permanently hovering on the reader’s lips.

Plot

It’s narrated in the first person by a middle-aged Englishman, Brown, the owner of a hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He’s been in the States for three months and the novel opens with him aboard a tramp steamer puffing to Haiti, accompanied by a handful of other guests: Mr and Mrs Smith the American evangelists for vegetarianism; the loud and probably fake Englishman ‘Major’ Jones; a travelling pharmaceutical salesman; and a mournful black man named Mr Fernandez. Brown, Smith and Jones – the narrator comments on the comic unlikelihood of these notorious aliases appearing together, and that sets the tone…

As soon as he arrives in Port-au-Prince, Brown re-enters the adulterous relationship with Martha, wife of a South American ambassador. And he returns to the hotel, the Trianon, which he had built up into a 5-star operation and compulsory stop on every well-heeled tourist’s itinerary – until, that is, Papa Doc’s reign of terror destroyed the tourist trade, until his staff were roughed up by the thuggish Tontons Macoute, until he himself abandoned it to flee to the States a few months earlier.

Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes

Dr Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier was elected president of Haiti in 1957 on a populist and black nationalist platform. After a coup attempt against him in 1959 he sacked senior Army staff and created an alternative police-cum-militia, the terrifyingly ill-disciplined, cruel and sadistic Tonton Macoute. They routinely raped and beat to death anyone who got in their way. As he got older Papa Doc went mad. He turned against the head of the Tontons who went on the run. When Papa Doc was told the fugitive Tonton had turned himself into a black dog, Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti be put to death. Duvalier ordered the head of an executed rebel to be packed in ice and brought to him so he could commune with the dead man’s spirit. Peep holes were carved into the walls of the interrogation chambers, through which Duvalier personally observed Haitian detainees being tortured and submerged in baths of sulphuric acid.

Haiti under this grotesque regime is the macabre setting of the novel. It is not so much a country as a nightmare come to life, a place of perpetual fear.

Comedians

Despite – or because of – all this, the central idea of the novel is that we are all comedians on the great stage of life. In very appealing chapters the narrator tells us about his early life being educated at a Catholic boarding school in Monte Carlo. He had a flair for theatre and it was while made-up for a play that he absconded to gamble in the famous Casino and drew the attention of a middle-aged woman who seduced him and took his virginity. When the Fathers discovered it all, he was expelled. His mother was a great self-dramatist and liar, who routinely changed her name and image and had sent him away to school to free herself for her numerous roles. On the rare occasions he sees her leading up to her death, she is permanently on stage.

I knew very little of her, but enough to recognise an accomplished comedian. (p.76)

So he is an actor, from a line of actors, inclined to think we are all just passing players caught up in the great farce of Life. This theme was strongly present in Greene’s previous novel, A Burnt-Out Case, which descended, at its climax, into absurd farce; here the theme is brought home repeatedly as we witness various characters acting out roles on the grim stage of Papa Doc’s theatre of the absurd. And commenting on it.

‘I remember looking at him one night on the boat from America – it was after the ship’s concert – and wondering, are you and I both comedians?’ (p.133)

‘They can say that of most of us. Wasn’t I a comedian with my verses smelling of Les Fleurs du Mal, published in hand-made paper at my own expense?’ (p.133)

The ambassador said, ‘Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars. Help yourself at the bar. My Scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.’ (p.134)

The ambassador said, ‘We mustn’t complain too much about being comedians – it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians.’ (p.134)

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Martha said in English as though she were addressing me directly, ‘I’m no comedian.’ (p.134)

There was not a false note in her voice; she was perfectly at ease, and I thought of her anger when we talked of comedians, although now she proved to be the best comedian of us all. (p.140)

Adultery

I’ve recently read novels by Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Len Deighton, Peter O’Donnell and Adam Hall, and the novels by Greene are the only ones which feature adultery – not only feature it, but make it a central strand of the plot. I mentioned to my son that the plot of the novel I’m reading is about a middle-aged man having an affair which makes him unhappy, and he said, ‘Not another Graham Greene?’ Quite.

It is his signature tune. Adultery – miserable adultery – is the motor of The Heart of The Matter, The End of the Affair, The Unquiet American and A Burnt-Out Case. From Norman Sherry’s exhaustive biography of Greene we learn that miserable adultery was the almost permanent condition of his private life after about 1940. And so here, in this novel, there are numerous scenes where the lovers (Brown the narrator and Martha, the ambassador’s wife) meet and torment each other with recriminations, guilt, or shabby sex. And the narrator generously shares with us his many insights into the wretched nature of affairs – though thankfully not nearly as intensely, or so drenched in the Catholic guilt, as those which overflow The Heart of The Matter and The End of The Affair.

If a husband is notoriously blind to infidelity, I suppose a lover has the opposite fault – he sees it everywhere. (p.48)

Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. (p.49)

This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last. (p.49)

Sooner or later one always feels the need of a weapon against a mistress. (p.130)

Maybe Greene acquired a reputation for being cosmopolitan, a sophisticate, a man of the world, because a) he travelled widely, and confidently set his novels in a fascinating variety of countries b) he emigrated and lived in the south of France, then Switzerland c) but maybe most of all because he displayed what was then, in the late 50s and 60s, a Continental openness about sex and adultery.

In which case the pose has dated. There is something not liberating but coercive about his continual assumption that adultery is the common condition of all marriages, that infidelity is inevitable.

The Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringes of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries. (p.59)

Brown’s affair with Martha dominates this long novel. It provides a central spine to a text which also includes observations about political dissidents and comic sub-plots about Mr and Mrs Smith, the American vegetarians, and the misadventures of the mysterious ‘major’ Jones. The affair is brought under the aegis of the central conceit that we are all ‘comedians’ by being routinely presented as farcical – Brown and the ambassador’s wife drive all round the city trying to find somewhere safe and discreet to have sex and are continually interrupted, by her son, by the Americans, by the Tontons.

It is nonetheless lowering that a great writer can devote such a large percentage of his pages to describing pretty much the same the kind of squalid, hopeless, miserably unhappy affairs which made such a wreck of his own life.

Everything was just as before. After ten minutes we had made love, and after half an hour we had begun to quarrel. (p.50)

Sex

From the start of his career Greene was unsqueamish about / very interested in, writing about sex. I was surprised by the reference in one of the 1930s novels to young couples masturbating each other under the protection of raincoats on park benches or deckchairs. Or by the crudeness of a phrase in The End of The Affair where Bendrix describes his feeling when he is with Sarah, with her ‘or in her’. Or him casually referring to her crying out at orgasm. Same here. It is 1966 and London is swinging but there is no joy whatsoever in Greene’s description of a black woman getting down on her knees, her head on the ground, pulling up her skirts to be taken by a Tonton thug. Or the queue at Mère Catherine’s brothel. Or the protagonist Brown screwing the ambassador’s wife in the cramped back seat of her Peugeot.

Once I had looked out of my window at two in the morning. There was a great yellow moon and a girl was making love in the pool. She had her breasts pressed against the side and I couldn’t see the man behind her. She didn’t notice me watching her; she didn’t notice anything. (p.51)

Some of the younger writers emerging in the 1960s seem to have enjoyed sex. Not Greene, for whom it is a pitiful physical urge, to be sated with illiterate whores in the stable-like brothel or in cramped rooms above a Syrian grocer’s shop.

Hamit watched me, ironic and comprehending. I remembered the stains we had left on his sheets, and I wondered whether he had changed them himself. He knew as many intimate things as a prostitute’s dog. (p.134)

Depth and description

Tedious though the affair with a married woman which forms a major thread of the novel may be, there is much pleasure to be gained from the rest of the book: in his account of his boyhood, of his escapades at the Monte Carlo Casino, how he was thrown out of the Catholic seminary and then made his way in the world, first bluffing his way through a variety of kitchen jobs then selling bogus art for the gullible to invest in. It is a rich, interesting and amusing backstory.

Similarly, his distant relationship with his grande dame of a faking mother is urbane and entertaining, as his brief acquaintance with his mother’s young black lover, Marcel, is urbane and upsetting (Marcel hangs himself after the narrator’s mother dies – it is a first, I think, for a Greene narrator to have to admit that someone else is more despairing and unhappy than he is). Away from the boring affair, the protagonist’s character is one of the most imaginative and filled-in of any Greene hero.

The detailed infilling of his biography is matched by the depth and thoroughness of Greene’s depiction of Papa Doc’s terrifying Haiti: the electricity failing, the demoralising poverty, the appalling physical disfigurements of the beggars, the casual beatings-up or rapes, the pomposity of the smoothly lying Ministers, the trip to the ruins of the new capital, Duvalierville, being built high up and pointlessly in the dry mountains, the dark sunglasses of the moody and violent Tontons.

As travelogue, capturing the grim atmosphere of a weird time and place, the novel is a triumph.

Greene the lecturer

A regrettable but central element in Greene’s style is the wish to lecture and pontificate. His novels are full of would-be quotes and ‘insights’ into human nature, which are nearly crisp enough to adorn a teenage t-shirt or a coffee mug in the office kitchen. They sound good, they have a plausible rhetoric of wisdom but, in my opinion, evaporate as soon as you reflect on them.

Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods. (p21)

Cruelty’s like a searchlight. It sweeps from one spot to another. We only escape it for a time. (p.162)

I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased… And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity. (p.253)

What the manic-depressive Greene means by this last phrase is that suicide is a proof of sincerity. The Norman Sherry biography shows that he was obsessed with suicide and on various occasions threatened to kill himself unless his mistresses did what he wanted. The whining tone of the jealous lover comes to the fore in the last 50 pages of the novel when the narrator becomes irrationally consumed with jealousy, suspecting his mistress is sleeping with the con-man Jones who he has helped find political asylum in the embassy.

This drives the dénouement of the novel: the conman ‘Major’ Jones is caught out trying to hoodwink the régime, and comes to Brown’s hotel for asylum. Brown drives him down to the boat they arrived on and there is a comic scene when the Tontons arrive, Jones hides, and the captain in his nightgown has to face up to them. When the captain refuses to let him stay on board, Brown has to smuggle him off the boat again and has the bright idea of driving him to his mistress’s embassy.

Not only is Jones made welcome there, but he becomes the life and the soul of the party, becoming friends with the ambassador, his little boy, and even Brown’s mistress. –Earlier in the novel one of the former guests at Brown’s hotel, disgusted by the régime, says he is heading into the hills to set up an armed resistance. The narrator makes it perfectly clear he thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time which can only end badly. The so-called resistance are one more set of comedians, jokers on a gruesome stage.

Now Brown conceives the rather nasty idea of taking ‘Major’ Jones at his own word (he’s always bragging about his heroics in the War) and smuggling him up to the resistance in the hills – thus conveniently removing him from the embassy and from what his silly jealousy imagines to be the arms of his mistress.

The journey itself involves lying to the Tontons, who have already beaten him up once – and capture would lead to a bad beating or worse. The rendezvous with the resistance is arranged for an isolated cemetery, among the voodoo gravestones – a gruesomely atmospheric setting – but, inevitably, goes wrong.

Unusually for Greene – and an indication of the just-about comic intention of the novel – the major protagonist does not die (unlike the key figures in Heart of The Matter, The Third Man, End of The Affair, The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out Case). Instead, although the Tontons do intercept them, the scene cuts suddenly and unexpectedly to the Dominican Republic across the border a few weeks later. Turns out the resistance saved him and Jones and then smuggled them across the border. The nine-day journey was quite an ordeal – twenty-five years earlier Greene might have described it in excruciating detail rather in the style of The Power and The Glory, which amounts to a 200-page-long gruelling journey.

But instead, we jump to the lightly comic scenes of Brown safe and sound in the Dominican republic where he has the good fortune to bump into Mr Smith the American evangelist for vegetarianism and even his mistress, whose ambassador husband has been expelled from Haiti. After desultory end-of-the-affair conversations with the mistress, the kindly American fixes him up with a job as assistant to the monosyllabic funeral director we first met on the ferry to Haiti, in the opening pages, and that’s that.

Everything: Papa Doc’s Haiti with its absurd new capital built of concrete; Brown’s dreams of running the best hotel in the Caribbean; his affair; Jones’s lies about his military record; the resistance (12 men and three rusty machine guns)’s fantasies about overthrowing the regime. All bitter farce. We are all comedians.

Verbal felicities

The text is a rich interweaving of themes and ideas, some of which (the local description) I prefer to others (the preaching, the adultery). But the thing I really enjoy about Greene is the small verbal affects which crop up throughout the text. Greene is no Chandler, he is not a flashy stylist. Most of his prose is limpid, clear and uncoloured. Concisely effective, occasionally clumsy. But that makes the metaphors and similes, the moments of colour, when they do occur, all the more vivid. A lot of the pleasure of the novel comes from the sharp asides, ironic touches and deft comparisons it displays on almost every page.

[Petit Pierre] giggled up at me, standing on his pointed toe-caps, for he was a tiny figure of a man. He was just as I remembered him, hilarious. Even the time of day was humorous to him. He had the quick movements of a monkey, and he seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter. (p.44)

A man in a torn shirt and a grey pair of trousers and an old soft hat which someone must have discarded in a dustbin came trailing his rifle by its muzzle to the door. (p.47)

‘I have known your mother many years. I have a great respect…’ He gave me the kind of bow with which a Roman emperor might have brought an audience to an end. He was in no way condescending. He knew his exact value. (p.69)

We quarreled. I told her [her son] was a spoilt child, and she admitted it, but when I said that he spied on her, she was angry, and when I said he was getting as fat as his father, she tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist and she accused me of striking her. Then we laughed nervously, but the quarrel simmered on, like stock for tomorrow’s soup. (p.91)

The sun was almost vertically above us now: splinters of light darted here and there from the glass of the hearse and the bright brass-work of the coffin. The driver turned off his engine and we could hear the sudden silence extending a long long way to where a dog whined on the fringes of the capital. (p.122)

The Duponts were sitting on the verandah with the little boy, and all three were eating vanilla ices with chocolate sauce. Their top hats stood beside them like expensive ash-trays. (p.126)

‘Good-night.’ I put a false friendly hand on his head and ruffled his tough dry hair. My hand smelt afterwards like a mouse. (p.137)

On my right were a line of wooden huts in little fenced saucers of earth where a few palm trees grew and slithers of water gleamed between, like scrap-iron on a dump. An occasional candle burned over a small group bowed above their rum like mourners over a coffin. (p.141)

He handed the revolver to the second officer. ‘You will give it him,’ he said, ‘at the foot of the gangway.’ He turned his back and left the officer’s black hand floating in mid-air like a catfish in an aquarium. (p.216)

For me, this is what a writer should do – not the quotable quotes about love and faith and sin and despair – nor the rather heavy-handed deployment of a dominant theme (we are all comedians on the great stage of life) – but this, the skilful deployment of language to uplift reality and illuminate the reading mind. It is in these apt and expert turns of phrase that Greene, for me, is truly religious, taking the water of mundane life and transforming it into the wine of literature.

The movie

Greene, who had seen about a dozen of his novels turned into movies by this stage, and who famously wrote the screenplay for the classic film The Third Man, himself adapted this novel for the big screen. Directed by Peter Glenville and starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Ustinov and Alec Guinness, it should have been brilliant – but it looks rather bad, and can’t have been helped by the bloated running time of two-and-a-half hours.

Greene’s books

The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
~~The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)~~
~~Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)~~
Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.

1 Comment

by Simon on January 20, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Novel

Tagged 1966, Graham Greene, Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier, The Comedians, Tonton Macoute

Posted by Simon on January 20, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/the-comedians-graham-greene/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Haiti

Martin Hewitt, Investigator by Arthur Morrison (1894)

The stories

1. The Lenton Croft Robberies

2. The Loss of Sammy Crockett

3. The Case of Mr Foggatt

4. The Case of the Dixon Torpedo

5. The Quinton Jewel Affair

6. The Stanway Cameo Mystery

7. The Affair of the Tortoise

Thoughts about Martin Hewitt

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Reviews of other fiction of the 1890s

Joseph Conrad

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

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Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)

Executive summary

1. Abolishing the slave trade

2. Abolishing slavery

Bury the Chains

An unfree world

18th century violence

The Quakers

Thomas Clarkson

Campaign tactics

Morality trumped self interest

Why 1788?

Summary

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Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)

Nuggets

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The Comedians by Graham Greene (1966)

Plot

Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes

Comedians

Adultery

Sex

Depth and description

Greene the lecturer

Verbal felicities

The movie

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Greene’s books

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