Moral Imagination in Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”

Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel “Our Man in Havana” as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance.

“The moral imagination is… man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” –Russell Kirk

In his book The Catholic Writer Today, Dana Gioia examines the religious character of the celebrated “Catholic fiction” of the mid-20^th century. He writes, “Surprisingly little Catholic imaginative literature is explicitly religious… Most of it touches on religious themes indirectly while addressing other subjects—not sacred topics but profane ones…. What makes the writing Catholic is that the treatment of these subjects is permeated with a particular worldview.” It’s a question, in other words, of exploiting the moral imagination in the most vivid light. This Christian and Catholic worldview “does not require a sacred subject to express its sense of divine immanence… The religious insights usually emerge naturally out of depictions of worldly existence.”

These words could be aptly applied to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), a novel he classified as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. Set in Havana on the eve of the communist revolution, the story centers on James Wormold, an English expatriate who has sold vacuum cleaners in the Cuban capital for fifteen years. When a man from the British Secret Service comes by to recruit him to be a spy, Wormold jumps at the chance as it means extra income for his faltering business and a better future for his teenage daughter, Milly.

Religion might at first seem incidental, mere filigree in this spy satire. Its function is a good deal more important, however. Early on, we are told that while Wormold is a nonbeliever, his daughter is a practicing Catholic. Wormold’s wife, who recently walked out on him, wanted Milly brought up in the faith and thus, Greene says, “left a Catholic on his hands.” Although difficult, demanding, and at times exasperating, Milly is the apple of her father’s eye and becomes his central motivating factor.

Greene has great fun with his characterization of Milly, with Catholic jokes calculated to raise a smile from his coreligionists (a sample: Milly tells her father that he doesn’t need to become a Catholic because he is “invincibly ignorant”). Milly’s fervent though immature faith—she uses her praying of novenas as a tool to get a horse—also suggests the duality of human nature as aspiring to heaven but mired in imperfections and ignorance. To add to Wormold’s strain, he must steer Milly away from Captain Segura, a brutal local police chief who has romantic designs on her.

Wormold himself is a classic “little man” of the modern age, a deracinated and alienated individual who is in Havana only because his company sent him there. Milly’s Catholicism makes her more at one with the Cuban environment than he could ever be and gives her a sense of meaning and purpose that he lacks. Yet change is brewing in Cuba and, with hindsight, we know that it will only a short while before the communists take over. One of the factors giving impetus to the plot is Wormold’s desire to make enough money to move with Milly back to England, where they can live their lives in peace.

Not having the first clue about spying, Wormold—or 59200/5, as he is now known—proceeds to fabricate all his spy reports to the Secret Service, using Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeareas secret code. He combs newspapers and a country club directory for names to use as his “agents” and sends them on fictional missions to gather enemy information. Wormold’s paychecks roll in, and all is well—until suddenly the namesakes of his “agents” start being attacked by mysterious operatives in Havana, and Wormold’s fictions start surreally coming to life. As Wormold’s deceptions spin out of control, he embarks on a mad, comical chase to right his wrongs before more people are harmed. Ironically, Wormold, who up till now had faked his spy activities, is now involved in a real mission to save innocent lives.

Wormold is assisted in this mission by Beatrice, a secretary sent by the head office of the Secret Service. Her affinity with Dante’s beloved is no accident, as she is Wormold’s salvation from the chaos he has created. In helping Wormold mend the mess that he has made, Beatrice also becomes the story’s love interest. Milly and Beatrice are both the recipients of Wormold’s self-sacrificial acts as he puts his life on the line tracking down people and making narrow escapes.

As Wormold’s best friend, a German doctor, hands him his own copy of Lamb’s Talesto complete the coded messages, he utters the suggestive line: “Here is the Lamb.” Ecce agnus Dei. Wormold prepares to go out and fight the final battle that may end his life (accompanied, Greene seems to imply, by the Christ in whom he does not believe). While Tales from Shakespeare is used to produce code—thus obscurity and confusion—the true Lamb, Christ, decodes and thus clarifies our existence.

In the climactic scene, Wormold takes it upon himself to hunt down and kill the spy who had been sent to murder him, but at the final moment finds—to his infinite relief—that he has “no vocation for violence.”

Dana Gioia writes that Catholic fiction, contrary to what a secular reader might expect, “tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.” This is true of Our Man in Havana, which jostles us through brothels and nightclubs and striptease houses, conveying the dinginess of a decaying city side-by-side with the sanctity of the Church. The comic juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane points up the duality of human nature in the most visceral way possible.

Wormold and Beatrice come to rebel against the utilitarian pragmatism with which they have been treated by their remote controllers in the Secret Service. Protesting the increasing collectivism and uniformity of modern society, Wormold says, “If I love or hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.” The novel points up the cruelty and absurdity of a world in which human beings are reduced to code names or index cards in a file—a world so impersonal and clueless that when Wormold draws a picture of one of his vacuum cleaners and sends it in, the head office is convinced it is the blueprints of an enemy weapon. Greene lampoons the scientism of the modern age by applying its jargon to something as banal as the new model of vacuum cleaner—the “Atomic Pile”—that Wormold is tasked with selling in his shop.

Against this, Greene exalts the personal, the familial and familiar. Defending Wormold’s actions in front of the Secret Service, Beatrice declares her credo: “I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.” While on his spy mission, Wormold had been warned by his doctor friend that secret agents “strike at what you love.” At the end, having worked so hard to defend those closest to him, Wormold and Beatrice are united in love and a new family is formed with Milly.

These elements were somewhat diluted in the 1959 movie starring Alec Guinness, as well-made and entertaining as it is. To see them in full force, one must read the novel, where no time or genre constraints hamper Greene in unfolding his themes. Our Man in Havana is a crackling demonstration of how Christian topics can work themselves into an ostensibly secular and madcap “entertainment,” just as grace works its way into our sordid world.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.