First, Do No Harm

Haiti invites the extremes in suffering, endurance, criminality and sometimes even saintliness. Dr. Larimer Mellon and his wife, Gwen, who founded the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, represent an extreme of passion linked with virtue.

In middle age, inspired by Dr. Schweitzer, Mellon, a scion of a billionaire family, enrolled in medical school while Gwen trained as a medical researcher and hospital administrator. When I met them in Port-au-Prince in 1954, I thought them infected with a mixture of Quixotic do-goodism and dilettante seekology. I was wrong. Though almost every foreign venture in Haiti fails, they succeeded, and Barry Paris’ book, “Song of Haiti,” tells why.

Young Mellon had literary dreams, publishing a precious little volume at 19. His family favored nurturing the family fortune and expected Larry to be a banker, an industrialist or, at the very least, a secretary of the Treasury, as his great-uncle Andrew was. Noblesse oblige did not include struggling to become a doctor in his 40s. Certainly he wasn’t supposed to create the best hospital in the woebegone black nation of Haiti, practicing medicine there until his death. His wife Gwen, nurse and administrator, was a full partner in carrying forward an enduring miracle of intelligent regard.

Often, conscience-stricken members of the American gentry choose to give money or energy to good causes. Gwen and Larry Mellon gave ferociously of both, plus intelligence and dogged persistence in a grief-filled enterprise, despite all the frustrations of the unforgiving Haitian universe. Theirs was not a colonial indulgence, although Albert Schweitzer was known for his superior attitude toward the suffering Africans he treated. (“My savages,” he called them, perhaps fondly.) And unlike Mother Teresa, the Mellons were driven by the love of humanity, not a concept of holiness. (On her foray into Haiti, Mother Teresa turned off the hot water in her hospice for the dying because not everyone in Haiti had hot water.) Some notions of help to Haiti seem to consist of flying an airplane marked with the word “Love” over the starving people below, then dropping a cheeseburger with all the fixin’s, followed by a package of breath mints.

The Mellons’ example inspired enduring consequences. A brilliant Haitian graduate of Harvard Medical School visited the hospital and stayed for years. This is unusual behavior in Haiti, where the educated elite tends to look out for itself alone, with an occasional kindness to the servants. Other Haitians volunteered. Even Larry’s racist brother contributed money. By refusing to get involved in the chaos of Haitian politics, the hospital endured, respected even by the mad dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc.”

For an otherworldly couple, the Mellons managed to be this-worldly canny about survival. Strict in adherence to apolitical healing, they retained their dignity.

They sacrificed anyone, doctor or helper, who endangered their mission. For example, a friend, the Episcopal bishop--an energetic religious leader, one of the founders of the Haitian art renaissance, who happened also to be gay--needed to be jilted because the Catholic bishop refused to associate himself with him. During my years in Haiti, I met Larry and Gwen Mellon with the Episcopal bishop at the house of a woman who was a friend of theirs. But if friendship required sacrifice, the sacrifice was made. Noblesse oblige sometimes obliges radical surgery.

Paris, who has written books about movie stars, doesn’t confuse the Mellons with Tony Curtis or Greta Garbo, previous subjects, but occasionally his tone weakens, as when he writes of the “rollicking good time” of speaking Creole or describes Gwen as “the proverbial woman behind the man.” He gives a sober report on the hospital, the turmoil that surrounded it and the synergy of these life partners: Larimer, former rancher and OSS agent, and Gwen, elegant divorcee and former horsewoman. Their lives present a mystery of choosing virtue.

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Some volunteers brought comedy with them. An English nurse thought that asking “Where’s the pool?” often enough and loudly enough would enable her to find a place to swim. Finally someone brought her a chicken. (French for “chicken”: poule.) On one of my stays in Haiti, during a time of famine, an American from Berkeley noticed a peasant woman preparing rice and beans for her children and instructed me, “Tell her she’s overdoing the carbo loading.”

The book includes a few jarring inaccuracies for those who know Haiti. For example, a journalist and man-about-the-tourists, Aubelin Jolicoeur, who likes to say that Barry Goldwater named him “Mister Haiti,” was a supporter of the Duvalier kleptocracy, not a serious critic. There are also touches of reverence-for-life hagiography: Larry on the beach, playing his oboe; Gwen “gently” stepping around a leak in the drain. And such fan notes as: There was “no such thing as a stranger in the Mellon home.”

But the essence of his account is deeply moving. Early on, Mellon wrote to Schweitzer, “There is still a long road ahead before I become the man I hope to be.” He never lost his youthful sense of the road still to travel. He insisted on dying in Haiti and did so after 35 years of joyful work in a tragic land. Gwen Mellon, a very old party now, is still on their road and at their discipline in the Artibonite Valley of Haiti.