Escape. The word echoes around Graham Greene’s library. It’s there in the title of his 1980 autobiography, Ways of Escape. Nearly all his characters are in some way trying to escape something. Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman who becomes a spy in Our Man in Havana does so to escape financial problems. Fowler, the cynical reporter in The Quiet American wishes to escape his marriage. Holly Martins needs to escape his association with Harry Lime, an old friend turned black marketeer in The Third Man. Perhaps the reason Greene is the best writer to explore during a worldwide pandemic when we’re all looking for escape, is because he shows that with enough imagination (and bad faith) it’s possible to get away from anything, even death and murder. And he does so against a backdrop of exotic settings around the world.
1. Cuba: Our Man in Havana (1958)
Set in pre-Castro Cuba, this novel tells the story of a vacuum-cleaner salesman who becomes an unwitting spy and has to invent intelligence information to give his handlers. It’s a funny, farcical book. But Greene, an anti-colonialist, is careful to skewer the British Secret Service rather than Cuba in its new revolutionary state. His enduring affection for Havana comes through in the writing. Here’s his ode to the Avenida de Maceo or the Malecón, up there with the Champs Elysées as one of the world’s greatest boulevards, stretching for kilometres along the shore, peopled by fishermen, lovers, and musicians.
. . . they walked back along the landward side of the Avenida de Maceo . . . the rollers came in from the Atlantic and smashed over the sea-wall. The spray drove across the road, over four traffic-lanes, and beat like rain under the pock-marked pillars where they walked. The clouds came racing from the east, and he felt himself to be part of the slow erosion of Havana.
. . . The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks… the shutters of a night club were varnished in the bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea.
This could be a description of parts of Havana today, although the city is fast being restored to an almost Disney-clean version of itself.
On an incline overlooking the Avenida de Maceo looms the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, a monolithic Art Deco icon of recent Cuban history, once frequented by other icons like Churchill, Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. It hosted a notorious 1946 meeting of US mafiosos and mobsters. Its lush and elegant gardens were dug out by Castro’s men, and used as an artillery station aimed directly at Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Our Man, Wormold is almost poisoned there by enemy agents. Greene describes Wormold making ‘his way through the lounge of the Nacional Hotel between show-cases of Italian shoes and Danish ashtrays and Swedish glass and mauve British woolies.’
Today, the same strange sense of a slightly stifling showcase persists in the Nacional, although it’s a functioning hotel. Its casino is a museum-piece, as are the military tunnels. News cuttings of old are framed among dark mahogany furnishings, beneath columned arcades, high-ceilings and red-tiled floors. It’s a must-see, but perhaps it would feel more alive if local people and not just tourists could afford the monthly-salary cost of a room.
2. Vietnam: The Quiet American (1955)
Any visit to Vietnam as part of a Quiet American pilgrimage should of course start in the Ho Chi Minh City street now known as Dong Khoi. For Greene fans, the former colonial street name, Rue Catinat, will be synonymous with the seedy atmosphere of Greene’s Saigon and the cynicism of Tom Fowler – a jaded journalist who spends his time smoking opium pipes in the apartment he shares (on and off) with his beautiful Phuong.
While Ho Chi Minh City today might not be the seamy, indolent place Greene describes, it has its own chaos and contrasts. It is not hard to imagine Greene coming and going, wandering along Rue Catinat from the Saigon River and his room in the Hotel Majestic to look for just the right abode for his protagonist. He would find it just one block down on the corner of Dong Khoi and Ngo Duc Ke, where a street market collides with Domino’s Pizza and Burger King outlets. Fowler’s apartment building was originally a hotel, became rented rooms in the forties, and is now the Grand Hotel again, its cupola and stained-glass windows fully restored, ivy crawling up the balconies on the courtyard side.
The terrace of the Continental further along Dong Khoi is where Fowler drinks each afternoon while locals play Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un. The hotel’s street-level seating has gone but the rattan furniture in the bar allows you to picture yourself in a linen suit and panama hat, the click and clatter of dice not far away. The Continental is also where Fowler’s nemesis, the eponymous quiet American called Pyle, first claps eyes on Phuong and falls in love.
Opposite the Continental the Givral Cafe used to be, now sadly replaced by the Union Square Shopping Mall: Greene drew on the Givral for the milk bar where Phuong meets her friends late every morning. Both the Continental and the Givral are situated on Lam So’n Square – the site of the horrific and impassively-described bombing that causes Fowler to make up his mind about what must happen to those who plan such atrocities.
3. Vienna: The Third Man
Our final Greene-inspired trip must be to Vienna, where The Third Man was set and filmed. Greene wrote both novella and screenplay, and Orson Welles starred as the American author Holly Martins who travels to Austria where his friend Harry Lime is supposed to offer him a job. On arrival, Martins finds Lime has been killed by a car and there’s a mystery surrounding the men who were seen carrying his body out of the road. Often cited as one of the greatest noir films of all time, The Third Man preserves fascinating footage of post-war Vienna, when much of the city was rubble and it was a four-way carve-up between the Americans, the Soviets, the British and the French.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes takes place on the Wiener Riesenrad – a nearly 65-metre-high Ferris wheel at the entrance to the Prater amusement park in Leopoldstadt. Built by English engineers in 1897, it was one of the earliest Ferris wheels and by 1920 it had become the tallest, after rivals in Chicago, London and Paris were demolished. It remained the world’s tallest Ferris wheel until 1985, when it was finally beaten by Japan’s Technostar.
Today you can still ride the Riesenrad, in one of fifteen little red tram-like gondolas (originally there were 30 but the wheel was damaged in the Second World War and only fifteen were reinstated). You can also see the sweeping baroque staircase, belonging in the film to the International Police Station, inside the magnificent Palais Auersperg, a hub of European musical, political and social history.
Afternoon tea must surely be taken at the legendary Hotel Sacher, the post-war headquarters of the British Military Police where Graham Greene propped up the bar while writing. A white stucco confectionary of a building, it is famous for its Sachertorte – an apricot and chocolate cake invented by the hotel founder’s father.
Unfortunately the Reichsbrücke Suspension Bridge, which loaned the film such wonderful geometric noir shadows and high angle shots, is no more. It collapsed in 1976, killing one person. But you can visit the site of the Café Mozart, which appears to have been filmed in the middle of the Neuer Markt. In some shots you can just glimpse where the Donner Brunnen fountain should be, covered by wood to protect it from the elements. You’ll be able to see the fountain and its statues again under better circumstances once the pedestrianisation of the square is finished in 2022.
