APRIL 2017 EDITION IS DEDICATED TO THE AFTERMATH OF THE FALL OF SAIGON'S 40TH ANNIVERSARY (APRIL 30 1975), IN THE FORM OF A COMPARATIVE LITERARY REVIEW: GRAHAM GREENE'S THE QUIET AMERICAN VERSUS THE TRAGEDIES OF VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE

SOURCE:  https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-quiet.html

March 11, 1956

In Our Time No Man Is a Neutral

By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS

THE QUIET AMERICAN By Graham Greene

raham Greene's new book is quite different from anything he has written before. It is a political novel -- or parable -- about the war in Indochina, employing its characters less as individuals than as representatives of their nations or political factions. Easily, with long-practiced and even astonishing skill, speaking with the voice of a British reporter who is forced, despite himself, toward political action and commitment, Greene tells a complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue, bombing and murder. Into it is mixed the rivalry of two white men for a Vietnamese girl. These elements are all subordinate to the political thesis which they dramatize and which is stated baldly and explicitly throughout the book.

As the title suggests, America is the principal concern. The thesis is quite simply that America is a crassly materialistic and "innocent" nation with no understanding of other peoples. When her representatives intervene in other countries' affairs it causes only suffering. America should leave Asians to work out their own destinies, even when this means the victory of communism.

In Greene's previous novels, geographic and social backgrounds have been used with great skill to make the foreground action more dramatic, but social or national issues have never been argued for their own sake. In "The Quiet American" the effect of circumstances is specifically ideological and political. Everything that the British reporter, Fowler, sees of the war, of the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, drives him out of his "uninvolvedness" toward a decision. Above all, he is moved by his hatred of the Americans. "I was tired of the whole pack of them, with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their wide cars and their not quite latest guns." The sensual Fowler, incidentally, seems to have been tired of everything, including himself.

In this novel, as in Greene's earlier "entertainment," "This Gun for Hire," a murderous outrage occurs, intended to affect the war's course. A badly timed bombing in the public square of Saigon, planned to disrupt a parade, instead kills mostly women and children. Fowler sets to work to discover the author of this outrage and finds it to be an American, Pyle, whom he already knows as a love rival. Intending to marry her, Pyle has taken Fowler's mistress, Phuong, away from him, but has tried to do it in as candid and decent fashion as possible.

Pyle is an idealistic young United States official with gangly legs, a crew cut and a "wide campus gaze." He is the son of a famous professor who lives on Chestnut Street in Boston. There is nothing self-interested in his motives for the villainy which Greene has concocted for his role. He is working for the O.S.S. "or whatever his gang are called," and is convinced that in intriguing with the dissident General Tho he is moving effectively to create a "Third Force" against both the French Colonials and the Communists. Fowler sees the Third Force as a merely political abstraction Pyle got out of books. "He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and lecturers made a fool of him."

"Innocence," Fowler says, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them." The elimination of liberals and social democrats always comes first, of course, in the Communists' program for political seizure of power. The symbolic act toward which Fowler is driven by the events of the book is the elimination of the American, with the aid of Vietnam Communist agents. There is nothing personal about this, as far as Fowler's conscious mind is aware, for Pyle had saved his life during a brilliantly described night of violence and suffering on the road outside Saigon.

If much of the description of Indochina at war is written with Greene's great technical skill and imagination, his caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean Paul Sartre. He is not ashamed as an artist to content himself with the picture of America made so familiar by French neutralism; the picture of a civilization composed exclusively of chewing gum, napalm bombs, deodorants, Congressional witch-hunts, celery wrapped in cellophane, and a naive belief in one's own superior virtue.

Even in this indictment the book is inconsistent. As a non-implicated man who really understands the East, Fowler scorns American liberals for trying to introduce into Asia their textbook notions of democracy and freedom. "I have been in India, Pyle," Fowler says, "and I know the harm liberals do." At the same time, sounding very much a liberal, he accuses the Americans of selfish opportunism, of letting the French do the dying while they clean up commercially. Emotionally and usually Fowler describes the war as a meaningless slaughter of women and children, as if no enemy existed, and yet he is in touch with this enemy, the Communist Vietminh, and expects it, because of its superior understanding and organization, to win the war.

Admiring American girls for their bodies, Fowler insists to himself that they could not possibly be capable of "untidy passion." He has contempt for their bright vacuousness; yet Phuong, the comely Vietnamese, the only person in the world who means anything in his life, shows few qualities beyond self-interested compliance. She prepares his opium pipes and allows herself to be made love to at his convenience. She says nothing of interest, takes her rewards in bright-colored scarfs, and pores over picture books of the royal family.

What will annoy Americans most in this book is the easy way Fowler is permitted to triumph in his debates with the Americans. The priests whom Greene makes argue so tersely and effectively with the skeptics at the conclusions of "The Power and the Glory" and "The End of the Affair" did not have so easily their own way. When Americans are condemned for letting others do their dying for them no one speaks of Korea. Fowler says that only the Communist respects and understands the peasant. "He'll sit in his hut and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he'll give up an hour a day to teaching him -- it doesn't matter what, he's being treated like a man, like someone of value." Pyle, the American, does not remind Fowler of the thousands of individuals who make desperate escapes from Communist countries every week in order to life as humans. He only replies uneasily, "You don't mean half what you are saying." There is no real debate in the book, because no experienced and intelligent anti-Communist is represented there. Greene must feel either that such men do not exist or that they do not serve his present purposes.

It would be wrong, of course, to wish to argue, if these custom-made characters were merely characters and merely speaking for themselves. Fowler, however, is often quoting almost verbatim from articles which Graham Greene wrote about Indochina for The London Times last spring. He had visited the Communist territories and been much impressed by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. When these articles were published in this country they caused an especially strong reaction in the Catholic press. Greene had regretted that the Catholic Bishops with their people had withdrawn from Communist territory. "The church has not ceased to exist in Poland." He criticized the Catholic Church for identifying itself with American "militarism" and with the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the southern Vietnamese Premier, "a patriot ruined by the West." Subsequently Greene has visited Warsaw for private talks with Polish Catholic leaders.

When "The Quiet American" is read against the background of these articles, it can be seen to be more profoundly related to Greene's earlier religious novels than its polemic character at first suggested. In those novels God is reached only through anguish because religion is always paradoxical in its demands. Rationalists are forced to accept the crassest of miracles. In believers, love and pity often war with the chance of salvation. God is most God when His earthly Kingdom is weakest, and His mercy sometimes looks like punishment.

When Graham Greene grants primary justice to the Communist cause in Asia, and finds insupportable its resistance under the leadership of America, he raises inevitably this question: Has he reconciled himself to the thesis that history or God now demands of the church and of Western civilization a more terrible surrender than any required of the tormented characters in his fiction?

Mr. Davis is chairman of the English Department at Smith.


Source:  https://charliebritten.wordpress.com/tag/uyen-nicole-duong/

by Charlie Britten

TWO REVIEWS AT ONCE

‘The Quiet American’ by Graham Greene and ‘Postcards from Nam’ by Uyen Nicole Duong.

I’m posting these two reviews together because my time over the past few weeks, while I was reading these two books, has been taken up writing my Christian story for AlfieDog.  They shall probably be the last on Vietnam that I shall tackle for a while.  I am considering writing my own story about the Vietnam War (what the Vietnamese call the ‘American War’) and both these two and ‘The Girl in the Picture’ (two posts ago) provided valuable background detail.

Set at the very end of French colonial period (1954), ‘The Quiet American’ concerns Thomas Fowler, a British journalist covering The War.  A dope smoker and a cynic, he is determined not to take sides or ‘get involved’ at all – except with the beautiful Saigonese girl, Phuong – his surname was apt in a very Dickensian way.  ‘The Quiet American’ featured the typical Greene scenario, man abroad in remote colonies with the usual Roman Catholic wife who wouldn’t divorce him.  The non-noisy Yankee himself, Alden Pyle, is, on the other hand, naive, in the Far East for the first time, but quite sure that all Indochina’s problems can resolved by a ‘Third Force’, something he has read about in books by York Harding but never experienced.   Interestingly, this novel is named for someone who is not the main character, even though it is written in the first person (Fowler’s).

Greene wrote in an understated style which doesn’t get in the way of the storyline.  The novel is unhurried, occasionally rambling, allowing ample room for character development, although I think we get the picture on Fowler and Pyle quiet early on, then have to suffer it being repeated… er… repeatedly.  Phuong is more complicated, apparently sweet and innocent, but managed by an older sister who is determined to marry her off to a wealthy westerner.  She moves between Fowler, then Pyle, then Fowler again, doing and saying whatever she thinks will please them, all the time calculating which of them is the better prospect.  The saying ‘Marriage is not above love, you know’ comes to mind.

‘The Quiet American’ is a valuable primary source (because Greene spent some time in Vietnam), not least because it was published in 1955 and thereby not written under the shadow of the USA’s defeat.  It confirmed what I suspected – contrary to the message presented in every Vietnamese museum – that there was some accommodation between the French colonialists and the native Vietnamese, many of whom made the effort to learn French, as well as bringing to life some of the grander hotels and government buildings which I saw in Saigon.  Pity Greene didn’t like the cathedral – I quite liked it.

‘Postcards From Nam’ is not what I imagined from its title.  In case you were wondering, I had in mind an American soldier writing home, possibly to his girlfriend.  I also bore in mind that a sign reading ‘Nam’ in Vietnam usually indicated mens’ toilets, whereas the ‘Viets’ were one of the many ethnic groups inhabiting that particular narrow strip of the Pacific coast.  The word however has another meaning, that of a nation, and it can also, as in the case of this story, be a boy’s name.  The novel is about a first generation immigrant from Saigon, who is now a successful lawyer in America.  For years, she has received (what I considered to be) creepy post cards, postmarked in Thailand, from somebody called ‘Nam’.  However, neither the author, nor the main character, take on board the fact that she is being stalked and – even more unbelievable – neither Mimi nor her mother can remember that Nam was their neighbour in Saigon, even though the mother is contact with his parents who have moved to California.  The story digresses frequently, from the current day to a few years ago, back to Vietnam in the 1960s when Mimi was a small child, then back to some point in her life in the United States.

What this work does address very effectively is the appalling suffering of the Vietnamese people after the Americans left and the Communist Viet Minh government took over.  Every Vietnamese we spoke to – even our very PC guide in Hanoi – made the point that life became much worse at this time.  What this book is not short on is vivid and horrific detail, for instance, of the maternity hospital in Saigon, where mothers laboured in a corridor in filth.  The written style was often clunky, but did include some amazing vivid descriptive passages, such as ‘My eyes, throat, and skin were cracking, and liquid was sucked out of me, and I was ready to die like a dehydrated, crumbled leaf, losing its stem, forever departing from its tree, tumbling down, down, down until it could fall no father, onto a damp ground where it gradually disappeared into the earth.  Back to its roots.’  Unfortunately, the ending of the story is ambiguous and inconclusive.

Well, Dear Reader, do I recommend these two novels?  Yes and no.  Graham Greene is Graham Greene and, although ‘The Quiet American’ was competent, I wonder if his publisher didn’t howl, “Really, Graham, we’ve done Catholic wives before.  Many times.  And the colonies.”   ‘Postcards from Nam’, on the other hand, is strong stuff, not for the faint-hearted, but significant for tackling issues which we in the west were only dimly aware of at the time and have now largely forgotten.