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Graham Greene on Our
Man in Havana:
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| Working under Kim Philby in the Secret Service, Greene was responsible for keeping track of German agents in Portugal. He became aware of a German agent who offered to develop a spy ring in England for the Nazis. This man gave detailed reports on British defence without ever leaving Lisbon -- with the help of a map, a Blue Guide to England, some military books, and a good imagination. | In the meanwhile I had visited Havana several times in the early fifties…Suddenly it struck me that here in this extraordinary city, where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy. The shadows in 1938 of the war to come had been too dark for comedy; the reader could feel no sympathy for a man who was cheating his country in Hitler's day for the sake of an extravagant wife. | |
| But in fantastic
Havana, among the absurdities of the Cold War (for who
can accept the survival of Western capitalism as a great
cause?) there was a situation allowably comic, all the
more if I changed the wife into a daughter.
from Ways of Escape, pp.206, 214 © Melody Yiu Images and quoted text on this website may be protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. They are presented here for academic interest and personal entertainment. No distribution, reproduction, re-transmission or other rights are given or implied by their appearance. If you have any copyright concerns, please notify me. |
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The first version written in the
forties was an outline on a single sheet of paper. The
story was laid in 1938, in 
..The
British agent Wormold in Our Man in Havana has no
origin that I can recognize, but the elegant Hawthorne
owes a little, in his more imaginative flights, to an
officer in the same Service who was at one time my chief.
C’s black monocle too was not imaginary, though his
fashion of cooking from his bed by telephone belongs to
his famous predecessor Admiral Sinclair.