From a view to a death

George Gale

The Quiet American Graham Greene Collected edition Vol II, with new introduction (Heinemann and Bodley Head £2.25).

When Graham Greene went down from Oxford in the mid-'twenties he joined the staff of the Times, and although his years on that paper (1926-30) and later as literary editor of The:Spectator (1940-1) have been the only staff jobs he has had as a journalist, he has kept his hand in at his first trade. So did Hemingway, in many respects Greene's American equivalent. In his new Introduction to The Quiet American his most politically influential book, Greene writes:

It was quite by chance that I fell in love withIndo-China; nothing was further from my thoughts on my first visit than that I would one day set a novel there.

I had been commissioned by Life to write an article on the guerilla war in Malaya, and I had spent three months in the autumn and winter of 1951 trying to cover the ground, staying with besieged rubber planters, with the railwaymen struggling against floods and derailments, with Gurkhas in Pahang operating in the jungle. An old friend of the war years, Trevor Wilson, was then our consul in Hanoi, where another war had long been in progress almost ignored by the British Press, which took their reports from Reuter's, or in the case of The Times from Paris, So I stopped off in Vietnam to see my friend, without any idea that all my winters would be spent there for several years to come. I had found Malaya, apart from the Emergency, as dull as a beautiful woman can sometimes be ... But in Indo-China I drained a magic potion, a loving-cup which 1 have shared since with many retired colonels and officers of the Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.

He also tells us that " There is more direct rapportage in The Quiet American than in any _other novel I have written." Fowler, the "I" of the novel, is an English journalist. Within the novel several incidents described actually happened to Greene — "The press conference is not the only example of direct reporting. I was in the divebomber (the. pilot had broken an order of General de Lattre by taking me) attacking the Viet Minh post and I was on the patrol of the Foreign Legion paras outside Phat-Diem. I still retain the sharp image of the dead child crouched in the ditch beside his dead mother. The very neatness of their bullet wounds made their death more disturbing than the indiscriminate massacre in the canals ' around. "Much of what Fowler, Greene's "I," observes was actually observed by Greene; and a good deal of what Fowler did— not only going out on patrols and flying in dive-bombers and attending press conferences, but also experiencing the delights of opium-smoking, for example — was done by Greene. In his introduction the novelist quo

tes passages from the journal he kept at the time in Saigon and Hanoi and many of these ' real ' passages are echoed, almost word for word, in the novel. The introduction ends with Greene in Saigon on February 9, 1954: "After dinner at the Arc en Ciel, to the fumerie opposite the Casino above the school. I had only five pipes, but the night was very dopey." He dreams, has a nightmare, and the passage, together with the formal introduction, ends "Then I woke." Immediately, the novel begins: "After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat ..."

Graham Greene is thus going out of his way to cause us to infer that, far more than we might have otherwise and hitherto ex

. pected, he the novelist and Fowler the jour nalist-protagonist are bound together. This is not to argue that Fowler is a self-portrait. nor that the plot is exactly how it really happened. It is, however, to conclude reasonably, I think, that there is a much closer relationship between the novelist and his "I" in The Quiet American than is usual. The novel itself was written between March 1952 and June 1955, and this unusually long period suggests that its writing, or its organisation, did not come particularly easily to its author.

Re-reading the novel itself, I am immediately struck by its powerful evocations. I started visiting Saigon as a reporter (to use Fowler's preferred usage) after Greene's last visit and indeed after I first read the novel, Greene had become a celebrity in Saigon; the hotel where he stayed, the spots where he was said to have drank were pointed out. Rue Catinat had become Tu-do street. The French had gone. Each time I went, there were more Americans and noisier Americans, until at the end there were no Americans in uniform in central Saigon because there were too many of them in the rest of the country. Now there are no Americans in uniform in Vietnam; and no Frenchmen. The war still goes on. I do not suppose Saigon changes much, either. Some names are different, but what Greene saw and felt on his first visit to Saigon in 1951 would not be much different now, over twenty years later: "The spell was first cast, I think, by the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers, by the pewter evening light on flat paddy-fields, where the water-buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow primeval gait, the French perfumeries in the rue Catina, the Chinese gambling houses in Cholon, above all by that feeling of exhileration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket ... " This is what Greene now recalls, not what he noted at the time. The girls are not tall. He forgets the spelling of the main street. But the evocation is right, and still, too, the diagnosis is accurate. I mean not only the exhilaration for those with return tickets; but also the knowledge that this, in the last resort, is no more a place for the Americans than it was for the French.

It is astonishing that The Quiet American has become the best book on the Americans in Vietnam, considering that the Americans were only beginning to trickle into Vietnam at the time when the book was written and set. Pyle, the quiet young American arrives filled With innocence, political enthusiasm, surprising skill in getting around and a determination to help the Vietnamese to help themselves. Fowler makes friends with him but discovers that Pyle is supplying material for a 'third force.' neither ex-colonial and Francophil nor communist Viet-minh, which with American assistance, will make south-east Asia safe for democracy. Pyle's plastic is made into bombs. A bomb is exploded inSaigon's main square. Fowler starts off as an observer, and ends up by arranging for the Communists to kill Pyle: from a view to a death. The subsidiary plot involves jealousy and propriety Pyle, before his death, has managed to take Fowler's Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, away from Fowler by promising to marry her, Fowler's deceptions of Phuong fail, but she returns to him only after Pyle's murder. At the end, as if to suggest that the murder may not have been necessary on these grounds, Fowler receives a message from his wife, who has thus far refused him a divorce, changing her mind. Fowler is free to marry Phuong. The novel ends:

I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the Continental, with his eye on the soda

. fountain across the way. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wish there existed someone to whom I could say that 1 was sorry.

This is not a strong so much as a happy ending; although the suggestions contained in the Introduction make me wonder whether the novel, in one respect, was Greene's way of

saying that he was sorry for something or other. Be this as it may, the novel itself remains an illuminatingly prophetic work. Greene could not have known that from the first American advisers, and keen young CIA boys like Pyle, and their dangerous idealism, would develop the hideous full-scale American involvement of the last decade. Yet it is all there. It was there. It was all there in the beginning, when the French were doing the fighting. Greene has Fowler say "' My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred thetitle of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action — even an opinion is a kind of action" and, on another occasion, "perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief; butl am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers." And for novelists also, we might add, for as far as their characters are concerned they are God. Fowler ends up by acting all right, lying, shooting, conspiring to murder. Greene makes him think to himself, "how much you pride yourself on being cregage, the reporter, not the leader-writer, and what a mess you make behind the scenes. The other kind of war is more innocent than this. One does less damage with a mortar."

This is not true, nevertheless, although it is true that no man, not even a reporter, can avoid action entirely, Pyle did nore damage than Fowler; and it is a measure of the stature of this novel, and of Greene, that despite the dragging into action of Fowler and despite his act of treachery — and despite the self-indulgent gush of the novel's and Fowler's (and Greene's?) last sentence — we accept the necessity for the killing of the quiet American; and for his character assassination, too.