Review: Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

by
Graham Greene

Published 1958

Sane men surround

You, old family friends

They say the earth is round –

My madness offends.

An orange has pips, they say,

And an apple has rind.

I say that night is day

And I've no axe to grind.

Please don't believe. . .

I say that winter's May 

And I've no axe to grind.    

  

 

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene

 

BEFORE I BEGIN — (1) as always, I shall spoil as I please, so watch out, & (2) as these past few days, I have been dealing with the flu, so please forgive me if this review is like something a character by Gogol would write in his diary. Thank you.

My only previous exposure to Graham Greene was his short story, "The Destructors", and in cinema form, when my dad and I watched Brighton Rock (1948), Our Man in Havana (1959), and The Comedians (1967) on various movie nights. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (1945-46/58), have also featured – we always find something interesting! Brighton Rock (1938) was the book I'd hoped to find at my local library, but they didn't have it, so it was off to Cuba for me!

Played impeccably by Alec Guinness in the film, Jim Wormold is an English vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, where he lives with his daughter Milly. Her proper name is Seraphina, her mother (from whom Wormold is estranged) being Catholic and wishing her to be named after a saint. Said wife charged Wormold with raising Milly within the faith, though he is nothing in particular. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, later in life calling himself a "Catholic agnostic" (so says Wikipedia). This somewhat complicated relationship with religion fits in rather well as far as I can see. There is a theme in the book of wanting to see – beyond the sleazy veneer of Havana, what on earth's going on, photographs of the "constructions" even. Greene's semi-Existentialist agno-Catholicism prevents any exact spiritual revelations, but does provide us with two alternative tints to look at life through, in an almost-sweet passage of cynicism:

The bells were ringing in Santo Christo, and the doves rose from the roof in the golden evening and circled away over the lottery shops of O'Reilly Street and the banks of Obispo; little boys and girls, almost as indistinguishable in sex as birds streamed out from the School of the Holy Innocents in their black and white uniforms, carrying their little black satchels. Their age divided them from the adult world of 59200 and their credulity was of a different quality. He thought with tenderness, Milly will be home soon. He was glad that she could still accept fairy stories: a virgin who bore a child, pictures that wept or spoke words of love in the dark. Hawthorne and his kind were equally credulous, but what they swallowed were nightmares, grotesque stories out of science fiction.

PART II, CHAPTER III

Though fancy is all religion is put down as, there is an atmosphere of it being not so bad when you look at what everything else is like. Catholic agnostic – indeed.

59200 and Hawthorne are one and the same, the secret service agent who recruits Wormold to be 'their man in Havana', turning him into 59200/5. Wormold is instructed to make similar recruitments and send in "reports" via the utilization of a book code, using Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare as the book. Wormold is as lost and confused as you or I would be (assuming . . . but then you could be anybody, how would I know?) but decides to follow through with it in his own way in order to build up some savings for Milly.

Greene was, I get the impression, a quite well read man. Obviously, using Shakespeare as a plot-point throughout would smack of such a thing, so no gold star for me in that direction. What really makes me say so was his little reference to Evelyn Waugh's 1928 novel Decline and Fall. Wormold's only friend, Dr. Hasselbacher, of whom Hawthorne and Co. are suspicious, is here drunk and speaking to an American in a hotel bar about how the man is only in existence because he (Hasselbacher) thought him up.

"Now if my friend, Mr. Wormold here, had invented you, you would have been a happier man. He would have given you an Oxford education, a name like Pennyfeather. . ."

Paul Pennyfeather is the main character in Decline and Fall, which chronicles his not-so happy adventures in Wales after being chucked out of Oxford due to the unscrupulous exploits of the notorious Bollinger Club.

On the surface an hilarious scene, the idea of thinking people into existence becomes a sinister part of the novel later.

The Shakespeare was a lot of fun, and while my presently to be mentioned rabbit-trailing stopped short at actually reading Lamb's, I did pull it up on Project Gutenberg and search for each quote as it came up so I would know from what play it came. Here they are, neatly and chronologically jotted down for your intellectual stimulation and literary benefit:

PART II, CH. I: "Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon," he read, "met with an end proportionable to her deserts."

— Pericles

PART II, CH. I: "May that which follows be happy"

— Pericles

PART II, CH. III: "But I will draw the curtain and show the picture. Is it not well done?"

— Twelfth Night

PART III, CH. III: "He presented Polydore and Cadwal to the king, telling him they were his two lost sons, Guiderius and Arviragus."

— Cymbeline

My reason for aligning each quote with its play of origin was to see how they corresponded with the actions of the novel at the time they were mentioned. I am unfamiliar with the plots of Pericles and Cymbeline. The only plays mentioned which I have read were Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing. The latter I count because I believe it is intentional that the name of Wormold's snappy and sensible secret service secretary, with whom he falls in love, is Beatrice. As You Like It is alluded to by Milly, who says that the Tropicana club is "like the Forest of Arden".

This book isn't the only instance of Shakespearean homage to which I have been treated this year; the title of Thank Heaven Fasting (1932), by E. M. Delafield, is taken from Shake's play As You Like It, when Rosalind says:

But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees

And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love,

For I must tell you friendly in your ear,

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets.

As You Like It, William Shakespeare

Act III, Scene V

I have Thomas Hardy to thank for bringing me to this realization, as Elizabeth Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge quotes part of it to herself whilst staring longingly out of the window at a Scottish man. I don't mention this just as personal trivia, but because Thank Heaven Fasting and Our Man in Havana tally up to two books I've read that feature Frans Hals' 1624 painting (The) Laughing Cavalier.

In Thank Heaven Fasting, Monica, our lead, puts the work up in her room during a time when she feels an independence brewing in herself (as I remember). Monica wants to be different, more; she rebels; it ends disastrously, in her case. She puts this painting up on the wall. In Our Man in Havana, Dr. Hasselbacher has the painting hanging above his sofa. Wormold notices this as he is leaving Hasselbacher's flat, which has been wrecked during an anonymous investigation of the doctor by 'them'. The following from a blogpost by Singulart helped me to think about the symbolism of the piece.

As we stand before The Laughing Cavalier, it’s not just a painting; it’s a time capsule that offers a deeper understanding of Hals’ artistic philosophy. His departure from the stiffness of traditional portraiture wasn’t just a rebellion; it was an embrace of life’s vitality. The cavalier’s infectious laughter becomes a symbol, inviting viewers to look beyond the canvas and connect with the living, breathing world captured within.

Hals’ genius lay in his ability to transcend the limitations of a static portrait. He wasn’t merely documenting appearances; he was telling stories, capturing fleeting moments, and freezing them in time. The cavalier’s mischievous smile isn’t just a quirk—it’s an invitation to share in the joy of the moment, to be a part of the narrative unfolding in that painted world. 

Whether Greene's inclusion of the painting is sarcastic, ironic, satirical, or honest is something I'm not sure I'm sure of. The iridescently intellectual note I made tells me to think about the Cavalier in relation to – I quote – 'the be a clown stuff'. This refers to an early scene where Wormold says to Milly that "We should all be clowns". He pulls faces at himself in the mirror to try to make himself laugh, and wonders if people sometimes pull his leg. 

The difficulties of being in the secret service without knowing how to be in it, and the plan made and executed in order to obtain its perks, were comedic gold. I can imagine Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps in this posish. But despite the Wodehousian premise, Our Man in Havana is not really a lighthearted book. Deception and betrayal is the order of the day, along with a few daiquiris, and a character can't walk down the street without our being given a description of the pimps with their postcards and the beautiful women lounging out of seedy windows, and someone offering to find the character "a girl". That is not nice. But it is not intended to be.

"And the sad man is cock of all his jests." – George Herbert

This melancholic quote opens the book, and brings us back a little to the Laughing Cavalier, and what that represents.

. . . Dr. Hasselbacher was on his knees under the Laughing Cavalier, sweeping below the sofa. Shut in his car Wormold felt guilt nibbling around him like a mouse in a prison-cell. Perhaps soon the two of them would grow accustomed to each other and guilt would come to eat out of his hand. People similar to himself had done this, men who allowed themselves to be recruited while sitting in lavatories, who opened hotel doors with other men's keys and received instruction in secret ink and in novel uses for Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

PART II, CHAPTER III

This paragraph comes just before the one I quoted earlier ("The bells were ringing in Santo Christo, . . ."), by the way. I don't really know what to make of all this. That's probably the flu. At the close of the book Greene writes that Beatrice realizes the one problem for her and Wormold's future: that he will never be quite mad enough. This alludes to the little song I included at the top that Greene wrote, and which creeps up regularly throughout the story.

Perhaps what's being said is that we need to get outside of everything, to laugh at it, to let go/in some madness, in order to see the deeply ordered chaos. Dr. Hasselbacher is a sad man, and he is the victim of the "joke" that Wormold ponders. Hasselbacher works his own schemes, makes his own plays for security – his own "jests", if you will – and ends up almost repulsively pitiful. When things begin to come crashing down around Wormold's head, he thinks of Beatrice, who is quite a grounding force in his world.

He wanted to protest that nothing made sense, that Raul didn't exist, and Teresa didn't exist, and then he thought of how she would pack up and go away and it would all be like a story without a purpose.

"A story without a purpose" immediately reminded me of "like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart" – that's another quote I got second-hand, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It's from Hamlet, spoken by Claudius to Laertes. Another line that made me think of Shakespeare, and which has some relevance in regard to this outsider's view of the world, was from Beatrice:

"The world is modelled after the popular magazines nowadays."

It reminded me of "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players / &c, &c" and "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing". "All the world's a stage" is perhaps more fitting, as the whole speech has something of Our Man. . . to it, mayhap due to a semi-nihilistic quality in both. Shakespeare has a general prevalence throughout the novel, and fiction & reality, plays within plays, have too. For instance, Hawthorne says in Part V, Chapter II, that "we know the plot, but we don't know the plotters, except their symbols".

Another effect of Greene's reading life, the last line of the 1766 poem An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog, by Oliver Goldsmith, was quoted in Part V, Chapter III, upon an unfortunate Dachshund's averting the course of an assassination attempt. Here is the whole last verse:

But soon a wonder came to light

That showed the rogues they lied,—

The man recovered of the bite,

The dog it was that died!   

 

Having a great affection for the book Alice in Wonderland, I at this juncture found the nearest rabbit trail and plunged down it – it was very easy, and I shall give you the instructions: make a search of the internet using the phrase "the dog it was that died", and along with the source material you should find a thriller, an E. C. R. Lorac mystery, and a play by Tom Stoppard. As regards the thriller: good for it, I hope it has fun doing its thing, but it and I have different interests, and as a consequence our paths shall never cross. As regards Lorac: I'm intrigued. As regards Stoppard's play: it was great fun, and also featured confused spies, which was quite a coincidence (Or was it?). I read it online in a collection, which in order to count on Goodreads I read the whole of. In keeping with my established lagomorph-ian attitude towards reading, I read Sophocles' Philoctetes before reading Stoppard's Neutral Ground, which I recommend doing if the Reader does wish to peruse the volume. So that was an unexpected treat!

Back to the book in hand . . .

While I did want to share what I've been reading (which is, it seems, anything and everything except what's on my Classics Club List!!) I also mentioned the "Elegy" quote to share some of Greene's humor. Our Man in Havana, while sometimes uncomfortable and with some unnecessary elements, does have good bits, and the good is very good ("Please, would you mind telling me how they are going to murder me? You see, it interests me personally."). The book has that air of flippant devastation and solitude so common in 20th Century classics, and in keeping with it I thought I'd let you feast your eyes on another wash of pink as we close off:

PURVIS: No. I said to him, look, I said, can you just remind me – what is the essential thing we're supposed to be in it for? – the ideological nub of the matter? Is it power to the workers; is it the means of production, distribution and exchange; is it each according to his needs; is it the expropriation of the expropriators? Know what he said? Historical inevitability! Historical inevitability! You're joking, I said. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. No, you'll have to do better than that. Something can't be good just because it's inevitable. It may be good and it may be inevitable, but that's no reason, it may be rotten and inevitable. He couldn't see it. So I left.

The Dog It Was That Died, Tom Stoppard, 1982

SCENE III

Our Man in Havana was generally enjoyable, and I remember liking the film quite a bit. I recommend The Dog It Was That Died. I want to read more Graham Greene in the future. And that, for the most part, is that!

*  *  *  *  *  *

In news sur moi, I am doing the wonderful Tea and Ink Society's 2025 Reading Challenge. The category for March was A Classic About Immigrants or Pioneers, for which I considered counting Dracula (1897), somewhat cheekily, but am now considering Our Man in Havana. Elsie is very forgiving about not quite keeping time with the year and the books one is reading for the challenge, so I think it would be fine. You see? I'm procrastinating on everything, not just my reviews and CC books. Equal distribution.

It must be the influence of . . . . . . .

H. G. WELLS!

I am currently reading The Time Machine, #23 on my List!  Ha!  I shall prevail!

*  *  *  *  *  *

Would you buy an Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner? Why or why not?