The Quiet American by Graham Greene
No spoilers; 208 pages; a prophetic novel, considered amongst the best ever written, set during the first Indochina War.
I share things I’ve enjoyed on Sundays, and I publish an essay, story, or book review (no spoilers) on Wednesdays. This is a book review of The Quiet American.
I only vaguely recognized the name Graham Greene when I picked up The Quiet American, and, even now, I’m not sure if I had ever heard it at all or if the lofty alliteration, so fitting for an English novelist, tricked me into imagining I had. Of course my confession, like all admissions of ignorance, is as devoid of pride as it is full of confusion: Greene wrote twenty-four novels that were turned into more than fifteen films; sold over twenty million books; has appeared on multiple top one-hundred lists; reigned as England’s best-selling author in Europe; and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize thrice. Why do I never hear about him?
Since the answer could not be popularity or skill, I originally suspected that it had to do with some dullness of personality—a wilting academic bend, for example—until I read his biography: he played Russian Roulette as adolescent; he worked as a MI6 spy in Sierra Leone during the Second World War; he was a notorious womanizer amenable to the idea of a prostitute; he was as much of a rummy as the Lost Generation boys with the added touch of an opium addiction; and he spent much of his life traveling to distant dangerous regions:
He went to West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone), Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. He spent years, on and off, in Central America. And he saw what the locals saw; at times, he experienced what they did. Bullets whizzed past his head. In Malaya, he had to have leeches pried off his neck. In Liberia, he was warned that he might contract any of a large number of diseases… Unwilling to miss the Mau Mau rebellion, Graham Greene spent four weeks in Kenya. In Congo, he stayed at a leper colony, where he saw a man with thighs like tree trunks, and one with testes the size of footballs.
Now, after reading about his travels and the cosmic testicles he bore witness to, I have a different theory as to the silence: Greene’s multitude of cash-printers disqualified him from the literary scale of Joyce, Tolstoy, Proust, and the like. Even though he tried to separate these works—what he dubbed “entertainments”—from the “novels” he thought would define his reputation, he failed to balance this act as successfully as others.
In the arts, unlike other industries, it is easy to lose face by making money; thus, writers take measures to prevent the degradation of their brands as they compromise to earn. Faulkner, a fan of Greene’s, publicly described his own Sanctuary as “a cheap idea” that was “deliberately conceived to make money”; but the novel is conspicuously serious, far more than many of Greene’s “entertainments,” to the extent that scholars doubt his self-categorization. Fitzgerald, out of the same necessity, pumped out hundreds of rudimentary short stories, but his reputation is preserved by the high-brow novels he wrote, not the shorts that have disappeared into the bowels of time. If Fitzgerald had canonized his ephemeral works, as Greene did, perhaps we would think of him less favorably, just as Hemingway did when they first met:
I thought he [F. Scott Fitzgerald] wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before but I never thought of him as a serious writer. He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into saleable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.
This misclassification of Greene, if it indeed exists outside of my perception, is tragic because he mastered all of writing’s elements as he showcases in The Quiet American. The book zips along an engaging plot that follows three main characters—Fowler (the narrator), Pyle, and Phuong—through the First Indochina War, and, because of its limited length, only consists of carefully selected revelatory scenes. Greene uses this canvas to compare and contrast each cast member’s ideologies while interlacing his meticulous observations with pithy philosophy, dry humor, and engaging dialogue. For his final achievement, since this isn’t enough, he successfully predicts the US invasion of Vietnam, along with its subsequent failure, that took place roughly a decade after the book was published.
Greene could write prophetically because he spent time in Vietnam as a war correspondent, a four-year experience that blurs the distinction between fiction and actuality on every page, reminiscent of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Greene really did see the grotesque horrors he vividly depicts; he really did smoke the omnipresent pipes; and he really did have a conversation with an American about a “third force,” an idea that shows up directly in the book:
‘York,’ Pyle said, ‘wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force.’ Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Gatinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice- fields under a flat late sun: the fishers’ fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.
Pyle—the young, inexperienced, idealistic American—embodies the nation and its “virtues” that lead to its disastrous failure in Vietnam. He proves his intelligence through his eloquence and education; he demonstrates his heroism during his “adventures” with Fowler on the battlefield; and he conveys his unwavering commitment to certain principles while courting Phoung. All of these qualities, however, have a dark side: his intellect isolates him from an empathetic understanding of the Vietnamese; his bravery is derided, not celebrated, by Fowler; and his fervent belief in American philosophies blind him from observing the resultant explosions in reality.
This depiction of Pyle and, thus, the nation he represents, is nuanced. Most people either consider the United States’ invasion of Vietnam as malevolent and avaricious or benevolent and optimistic, but the truth, as it tends to do, lies somewhere in-between: perhaps hope and an undying belief in freedom drove American actions in Vietnam as much as power and incorrect theories did. Pyle is certainly not a simplistic force of evil, though he is hapless or misguided or both, and he really does want to help Vietnam:
He said, ‘You know, I think it was seeing all those girls in that house. They were so pretty. Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted to protect her’
However, he does not have adequate regard for the damage he inflicts on the innocent:
He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance… But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw-driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?
The Quiet American is not the anti-American book that writers in the fifties declared it, but an objective analysis of the nation’s creed that time proved accurate. Fowler tells the reader this explicitly, mentioning on ten separate occasions that he is a reporter striving to withhold his opinions. This commitment to observation prevents Fowler from declaring that his diametrically-opposed laissez-faire philosophy is better than Pyle’s. To the contrary, he makes himself out to be unabashedly selfish, especially as it relates to Phuong, and continuously mentions that he does not need to think of her interests as she will manage those herself:
Suddenly, I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, ‘I don’t care about her interests. I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than, than… look after her damned interests… If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good…’ the crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.
Although Greene predicts America’s failure through Pyle’s death, he does not, in another sense, resolve the symbolic love triangle (Fowler and his isolationism; Pyle and his American exceptionalism; Phuong and her weak Vietnamese position in the middle). Even as the woman, the symbol of a nation, moves between them, we never know who she is better off with, a deliberate haziness that points to the complexity of the world: maybe there is a parallel universe, just a few degrees off, where Pyle dramatically enhances her life. Greene, through his subtlety, makes it impossible for us to neatly categorize any of the characters or all of their ideas as good or bad, right or wrong; instead, he forces us to contend with the granular nuance of real, living beings.
The Quiet American’s assiduousness and impartiality, its open-minded broad discussion, so far from the slanted stories that the media eats off of, is the novel’s crowning achievement. Greene kicks the reader’s mind out of its tribal attachments and into the space a doctor inhabits when diagnosing a disease, giving each of us access to a new gear of understanding. This ability, in our mad modern world, may help us comprehend and, hopefully, repair it.
Thanks for reading! Next Wednesday (8/23), I’ll publish a post on the effects of social media on imagination; the following week (8/30), I’ll review Of Human Bondage, August’s selection for the book club; then it will be a short story (9/6); then a review of Bright Lights, Big City (9/13).