Best Intentions: An Appreciation of Graham Greene | World Affairs Journal Best Intentions: An Appreciation of Graham Greene The Quiet American Graham Greene (London: Heinemann, 1955) In Washington, where the honorific “historic” ornaments every speech, appointment, conclave, and legislative initiative however trivial, those who earn their living purporting to explain “what it all means” have a limitless supply of material. Small wonder that the senatorial defection of an unprincipled hack from one party to the other qualifies as Big News, while the nomination of an associate justice to a seat on the Supreme Court becomes equivalent in significance to the Normandy invasion. To suggest that this rampant narcissism induces a distorted, not to say warped, view of reality is to understate the case. Rebutting this presumption of Washington’s supreme importance requires a constant effort. Students of U.S. foreign policy might feel some obligation to sample the cascade of pretentiously titled tomes produced by movers and shakers situated In the Stream of History or At the Center of the Storm who claim to have engineered or participated in or at least witnessed events of enduring significance.

Yet a steady diet of such excretions results in the need to cleanse the palate and flush the mind of accumulated toxins. To assist in that effort, Americans are fortunate in being able to draw on a rich homegrown tradition of observers who have devoted themselves to puncturing Washington’s conceit and delighting in its folly, a tradition running from Mark Twain all the way down to Garry Trudeau and Jon Stewart. For a less comic approach that stands beyond the confines of the American tradition, there is Graham Greene’s prophetic novel The Quiet American. Appearing in 1955, Greene’s fictional narrative became within a decade must-reading for those seeking to understand how the United States blundered so badly in Vietnam. For those today seeking to understand how the United States blundered so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Quiet American remains an essential text. Greene has little interest in Washington or in those who genuflect before the White House as the cathedral of supreme power.

To locate the nub of the matter he looks elsewhere, to the grimy world where functionaries labor to translate Washington’s high-sounding clichés into actual policy, with the consequences borne by ordinary people who never fly on Air Force One or appear on the Sunday morning talk shows. In this case, the setting is Saigon, near the end of the first Indochina War. French efforts to suppress the Viet Minh insurgency and retain their empire in the Far East are failing. The United States, although nominally supporting France, is actually positioning itself to supplant its ally as the region’s dominant outside power. Within a decade, of course, this effort will yield a second Indochina War and ultimately a second Western defeat. Greene’s protagonist is Thomas Fowler, a God-haunted, burned-out British journalist, who in late middle age has fled to the East in the wake of a failed love affair that had wrecked his marriage. From Saigon, he half-heartedly covers the war, mostly by passing along press releases issued by French military spokesmen. Steadfastly refusing to take sides, he stands apart and simply reports. In Saigon, he has taken up with the beautiful and much younger Phuong.

Whether Fowler loves Phuong—whether he is capable of love—is difficult to say. Yet he needs Phuong desperately, for sex and companionship, to prepare his opium pipes each evening, above all as someone whose presence keeps at bay Fowler’s fear of facing alone the terrors of old age. In return Phuong wants only one thing: a guarantee of security, which implies marriage. Yet this Fowler cannot deliver: he remains formally wed and his wife, back in England, is a Catholic whose conscience will not permit her to dissolve their union. Into this relationship comes Alden Pyle, a young American newly assigned as an economic attaché with the U.S. mission. Pyle is polite, modest, and boyish. “With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze,” Greene writes, “he seemed incapable of harm.” Yet appearance and manner are deceiving. Pyle’s nominal assignment is a tissue-thin cover; he is actually a CIA agent (although the agency is never identified as such). To stem the Communist tide threatening to inundate Southeast Asia, the agency wants to conjure up an indigenous democratic alternative to French colonialism. Pyle’s job is to devise this Third Way.

As he undertakes this task, Pyle draws inspiration from a journalist named York Harding, a sort of proto–Thomas Friedman who parachutes into various trouble spots and then in best-selling books serves up glib recipes for advancing the cause of liberty. In Pyle’s estimation, the challenge he faces does not appear all that difficult. York Harding provides the answer: “you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.” “Impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance,” Pyle embodies all that Fowler (and Greene) can’t stand about Americans: too much money, too much confidence, and too little self-awareness. Cruising the streets of Saigon in oversized Buicks, air conditioning everything in sight (to Fowler’s dismay, even the U.S. legation’s lavatories), passing out cigarettes as if they exist in infinite supply, and quoting York Harding, zealots like Pyle proceed on the assumption that American know-how backed by American values can make short work of even the most perplexing difficulties. Born and raised a Unitarian, Pyle takes God’s existence as a given, his faith reinforcing his conviction that America’s purposes necessarily reflect God’s will.

As eager and as earnest as he is naive, Pyle first cultivates Fowler as a source of information, but soon falls in love with Phuong. Professing his intention to do the right thing by everyone, Pyle promises Phuong that which Fowler cannot: he will make her his bride, taking her back home to New England to live happily ever after. When Phuong accepts, Pyle compensates Fowler with apologies and assurances of his own everlasting friendship and respect. When not conspiring to steal Fowler’s girl, Pyle is conspiring to devise the Third Way, his efforts to find the right leader centering on a shadowy figure known as General Thé. As with the U.S. officials who in our own day fell under the spell of Ahmed Chalabi, Pyle has persuaded himself that General Thé’s aims and America’s aims align neatly. As was the case with Chalabi, this turns out to be a massive misjudgment. Positioning General Thé as the anointed successor to the French requires first demonstrating the powerlessness of the colonial regime. This effort finds expression in a campaign of terror orchestrated by Thé, using plastic explosives covertly provided by Pyle, but to be blamed on the Communists.

Pyle purports to believe that the campaign will concentrate on military targets. In fact, Thé organizes a savage attack on civilians in the center of Saigon, which Fowler and Pyle witness. Momentarily taken aback by the bloody consequences of his handiwork—his shoes are spattered with human remains—Pyle quickly recovers and assures Fowler that the victims of the bombing had “died for democracy.” Their deaths were a “pity,” he tells Fowler, “but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.” Pyle’s own sense of righteousness survives the incident intact. He knows he meant well. That knowledge obviates any need to take responsibility or to make amends. In his own mind, he remains blameless. Fowler’s own determination to avoid taking sides does not survive this episode. In his innocence, Pyle has become like “a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” even as he contaminates everything he touches. The ease with which Pyle rationalizes and then dismisses the results of his own recklessness persuades Fowler that detachment has become untenable. So the observer becomes a participant.

To prevent the American from committing further mayhem, Fowler initiates his own conspiracy, arranging for Pyle’s assassination by the Viet Minh—an outcome by no means disagreeable to the French. Once Pyle has been dispatched, Phuong returns to Fowler’s bed, this time to stay—in an unexpected act of generosity, Fowler’s wife has decided after all to grant him a divorce. So the novel ends with a tormented Fowler reflecting that even though (or perhaps because) Pyle’s death had put his own life right, “I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.” In the twentieth-century English-speaking world, Greene ranks alongside Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Evelyn Waugh among the small number of writers addressing explicitly Catholic themes who might qualify for the accolade “great.” Yet Greene’s relationship with Catholicism—with God, for that matter—was profoundly ambivalent and riddled with contradictions. He cheated on his wife, cheated constantly on his several mistresses, and during his restless travels frequented prostitutes. Fealty and self-denial did not figure in his makeup. He was not a nice human being. Yet Greene’s intimate familiarity with sin combined with considerable gifts as a writer to produce works of profound insight.

The Quiet American, deriving its energy from Greene’s scabrous anti-Americanism, offers one example. The novel stands in relation to Cold War America as Uncle Tom’s Cabin stands in relation to the antebellum South: it expresses its author’s ill-disguised loathing for the subject he depicts. Yet one need not share Greene’s animus toward the United States to appreciate his achievement. Indeed, Americans above all should be grateful to Greene since they—should they choose to do so—can benefit most directly from that achievement. Is Pyle as naive as he appears? Are his professions of high ideals real or contrived? Does he take seriously the verities offered by York Harding in books like The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West? Or does he merely appropriate them to lend a veneer of respectability to a ruthless enterprise? When Pyle prattles on about freedom and democracy, does he mean what he says? Or is it just so much cant? Although Greene poses these questions—which by implication apply not only to Pyle but to the nation and the cause that Pyle serves—he refrains from offering explicit answers. Indeed, Greene suggests that the answers may not really matter.

“Innocence,” he writes, “is a kind of insanity.” When it comes to the exercise of power, the idealist intent on doing God’s work is likely to wreak as much havoc as the cynic who rejects God’s very existence. Those who credit themselves with acting at the behest of the purest motives are hardly less likely to perpetrate evil than those who dismiss ideals as sheer poppycock. Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly. Whether feigned or real, therefore, innocence poses a problem.

Good intentions informed by the simplistic belief that the world can be fixed and things set right only succeed in killing people. Back in Washington, those who dream up such policies somehow manage to evade accountability. Discredited policymakers depart with clear consciences, en route to a visiting chair at Georgetown or a cushy billet in some think tank. There is no blood on their hands, the dirty work having been contracted out to soldiers, whose compensation, writes Greene, “includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope” and who upon returning home from battle may find their sense of personal culpability more difficult to shake. America means well: on this point the vast majority of Americans will permit no dissent. We differ from all other great powers in history. Our leaders differ as well. To those who formulate U.S. policy, ideals really do matter. As President Obama insisted in his Cairo speech, anyone depicting the United States as a “self-interested empire” is way off base. When U.S. policy goes awry, therefore, the culprit might be bad luck, bad planning, or bad tactics, but American motives lie beyond reproach.

Thus, the reassuring take on the Iraq War, now emerging as the conventional wisdom, is that—however mismanaged the war may have been early on—the “surge” engineered by General David Petraeus has redeemed the enterprise: a conclusion doubly welcome in that it obviates any need to revisit questions about the war’s purpose and justification, while meshing nicely with the Obama administration’s inclination simply to have done with Iraq and move on. The implications of trivializing Iraq are already evident in the debate regarding “Af--Pak”: the overriding concern becomes one of finding the general best able to apply to Obama’s war the “lessons” taken from Bush’s war. That such an approach should find favor in Washington would not have surprised Graham Greene. Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made. Yet America’s benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way—or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington’s bidding became sources of embarrassment.

Vietnam once laid waste to Washington’s claim of innocence, until Ronald Reagan helped restore that claim. Every indication suggests that American innocence will survive Iraq as well, this time with Barack Obama as chief enabler helping to sanitize or erase all that we do not wish to remember. A people famous for their self-professed religiosity won’t even bother to look for someone to whom they can express contrition. Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. OG Image: Graham Greene and 'The Quiet American' | by Richard West | The New York Review of Books May 16, 1991 Issue When I first made a TV film about Vietnam, in 1969, the director asked me to quote from Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American; I did, and later one of the TV critics wrote that I saw the country with a second-hand imagination. Certainly I had read the book when it first came out in 1955, and on reading it once more in Saigon in 1990, perhaps for the sixth or seventh time, I found I admired it more than ever.

Just for that reason I ask myself whether the TV critic had not been right, and I see Vietnam through Greene-tinted spectacles. The question is hard to answer, since the principal character in the book is an English reporter, Thomas Fowler, whose working life in the 1950s is much like mine was to be in the following two decades. He is entranced by the country and to some extent by its people. He takes neither side in the war and detests ideology. He watches with fascination the different ways that France and the United States confront the advance of communism. And although Greene was writing about the early Fifties, when France alone was fighting the war, The Quiet American came to be seen as a prophecy of the US involvement. Indeed by the time of his death this month at the age of eighty-six, Greene had become a kind of Grand Old Man of the left, and The Quiet American stood as his anti-imperialist masterpiece. The character of the title, Alden Pyle, is said to be based on the CIA agent Colonel Edward Lansdale, who wanted to save democracy with the “psychological warfare” methods that he had studied during his peacetime career as an advertising executive.

He had helped to subdue a revolt in the Philippines, afterward going to South Vietnam to assist the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Two American authors, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, glorified Lansdale in another Fifties novel, The Ugly American, where he appears as Colonel Edwin Hillandale, who wins hearts and minds by playing the mouth organ. The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, arrives in Vietnam full of the theories of an absurd pundit, York Harding, author of The Advance of Red China. The Englishman Fowler teases Pyle and derides his hope of building a third force between communism and French colonialism. Then Pyle falls in love with Fowler’s girl, Phuong, and wins her away with the promise of marriage and life in the United States. Fowler is told by the Communists that Pyle is a secret agent engaged in importing plastic for bombs to use in a terror campaign on behalf of a “third force” general, which culminates in a vast explosion in front of the Continental Hotel. The incident is based on an actual bombing outrage which killed dozens of people. Fowler agrees to set up Pyle to be killed by the Communists.

The French policeman, Inspector Vigot, thinks but cannot prove that Fowler ordered the killing from sexual jealousy. … Movie and book review: The Quiet American — The Spark #695 The Quiet American Jan 20, 2003 The Quiet American is a movie made by Australian director Phillip Noyce, based on the 1955 novel of the same title by British author Graham Greene. The movie was to be released in the fall of 2001, but after 9/11 it was held back by the distributors under the pretext that it dealt with a "sensitive" subject, that is, terrorism – except that, the terrorist in this story is an American, working for the U.S. government. The two main characters of The Quiet American are an aging British journalist and a young American he meets in Viet Nam in the early 1950s. The story develops around both the friendship of these two men and their rivalry over a young Vietnamese woman. The background of the story, however, quickly takes over. In those years, Viet Nam is still under French colonial rule.

Vietnamese nationalists, organized under the Viet Minh (short for 'League for the Independence of Viet Nam' in Vietnamese), are waging war to kick the French colonialists out, and they are close to achieving this goal. We learn that the U.S. is also involved, supplying arms and money for the French war effort. Alden Pyle, the American, introduces himself as an economic aid worker. But Thomas Fowler, the journalist and narrator of the story, soon notices that Pyle's involvement in Viet Nam is of a different nature. He is often seen around the associates of General The, a Vietnamese who has declared himself a "Third Force" against both the French and Viet Minh. General The is a terrorist: his preferred methods are random bombings in crowded areas of the city and massacres of civilians in the countryside. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Pyle, who is really a CIA agent, is the link between General The and the U.S. government, which finances and advises this terrorist. The involvement of the U.S. government in other countries' affairs in the 1950s is today well-documented.

In Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954, for example, the CIA played a key role in overthrowing democratically elected governments. In those years, the U.S. was also involved in a major war in Korea and, as The Quiet American shows, was getting ready to take over from the French the role of Viet Nam's imperialist master. When the French finally pulled out in 1955, the U.S. set up a dictatorship in South Viet Nam, which then paved the way for sending in U.S. troops in the 1960s. In other words, the U.S. in the early 1950s was already deeply engaged in its new role as the main imperialist power in the world, trying to contain the mobilization of popular masses around the globe by direct intervention as well as by supporting colonialists, terrorists and repressive dictatorships. If, after 9/11, this movie was found "too sensitive" for release by the corporations, it's because the U.S. has never quit playing this role during the half century since.

In an introduction to his novel, Graham Greene says that General The, who actually existed, was assassinated in the early 1950s. Thus he remained an obscure figure in history – unlike another U.S.-sponsored terrorist, who started his career in relative obscurity in remote Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden. Search this Site The Disquieting Resonance of 'The Quiet American' : NPR The Disquieting Resonance of 'The Quiet American' Embed Embed The Disquieting Resonance of 'The Quiet American' The Disquieting Resonance of 'The Quiet American' Embed Embed Heard on All Things Considered Pico Iyer Pico Iyer is the author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He lives with a longtime Japanese sweetheart and Graham Greene in rural Japan, with no bicycle, no car, no cell phone, no World Wide Web and no TV he can understand. He does, however, play ping-pong every day. Pico Iyer; Derek Shapton hide caption toggle caption Pico Iyer Commemorates the Centennial of Graham Greene's Birth Oct.

6, 2004 An American comes into a foreign place full of ideas of democracy and how he will teach an ancient culture a better — in fact, an American — way of doing things. An Englishman awaits him there, protecting himself against such foolishness by claiming to care about nothing at all. And between them shimmers a young local woman who seems ready to listen to either suitor, and certain to get the better of both. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, was written in 1955 and set in Vietnam, then the site of a rising local insurgency against French colonial rule. In its brilliant braiding together of a political and a romantic tangle, its characters serve as emblems of the American, European and Asian way, and yet ache and tremble as ordinary human beings do. It also is a typically Greenian prophecy of what would happen 10 years later when U.S. troops would arrive, determined to teach a rich and complex place the latest theories of Harvard Square. Lyrical, enchanted descriptions of rice paddies, languorous opium dens and even slightly sinister Buddhist political groups are a lantered backdrop to a tale of irony and betrayal.

Article continues after sponsorship But that's not why I keep reading and rereading The Quiet American, like many of Greene's books, and have it always with me in my carry-on, a private bible. Certainly it's true that if you walk through modern Saigon, as I have done, you can see Greene's romantic triangle playing out in every other hotel. And if you think about Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere, you see the outline of the same story. What touches me in the book, though, is something even deeper and more personal. The novel asks every one of us what we want from a foreign place, and what we are planning to do with it. It points out that innocence and idealism can claim as many lives as the opposite, fearful cynicism. And it reminds me that the world is much larger than our ideas of it, and how the Vietnamese woman at the book's center, Phuong, will always remain outside a foreigner's grasp. It even brings all the pieces of my own background — Asian, English, American — into the same puzzle.

You must read The Quiet American, I tell my friends, because it explains our past, in Southeast Asia, trains light on our present in many places, and perhaps foreshadows our future if we don't take heed. It spins a heartrending romance and tale of friendship against a backdrop of murder, all the while unfolding a scary political parable. And most of all, it refuses the easy answer: The unquiet Englishman isn't as tough as he seems, and the blundering American not quite so terrible — or so innocent. Both of them are just the people we might be at different stages of our lives. The Quiet American, in fact, becomes most haunting and profound if you think of it just as a dialogue between one side of Greene — or yourself — and the other. The old in their wisdom, as he writes elsewhere, sometimes envy the folly of the young. You Must Read This is produced and edited by Ellen Silva.

Excerpt: 'The Quiet American' April 21, 20084:41 PM ET Graham Greene Part One I After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, 'I'll be with you at latest by ten,' and when midnight struck I couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing: it was February and I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw driver pedalled slowly by towards the riverfront and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street. Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation, but surely in that case he would have telephoned to the restaurant — he was very meticulous about small courtesies. I turned to go indoors when I saw a girl waiting in the next doorway. I couldn't see her face, only the white silk trousers and the long flowered robe, but I knew her for all that. She had so often waited for me to come home at just this place and hour.

'Phuong,' I said — which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes. I knew before she had time to tell me that she was waiting for Pyle too. 'He isn't here.' 'Je sais. Je t'ai vu seul à la fenêtre.' 'You may as well wait upstairs.' I said. 'He will be coming soon.' 'I can wait here.' 'Better not. The police might pick you up.' She followed me upstairs. I thought of several ironic and unpleasant jests I might make, but neither herEnglish nor her French would have been good enough for her to understand the irony, and, strange to say, I had no desire to hurt her or even to hurt myself. When we reached the landing all the old women turned their heads, and as soon as we had passed their voices rose and fell as though they were singing together. 'What are they talking about?' 'They think I have come home.' Inside my room the tree I had set up weeks ago for the Chinese New Year had shed most of its yellow blossoms. They had fallen between the keys of my typewriter. I picked them out. 'Tu es troublé,' Phuong said. 'It's unlike him.

He's such a punctual man.' I took off my tie and my shoes and lay down on the bed. Phuong lit the gas stove and began to boil the water for tea. It might have been six months ago. 'He says you are going away soon now,' she said. 'Perhaps.' 'He is very fond of you.' 'Thank him for nothing,' I said. I saw that she was doing her hair differently, allowing it to fall black and straight over her shoulders. I remembered that Pyle had once criticized the elaborate hairdressing which she thought became the daughter of a mandarin. I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest. 'He will not be long,' she said as though I needed comfort for his absence. I wondered what they talked about together. Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years. Democracy was another subject of his — he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.

Phuong on the other hand was wonderfully ignorant; if Hitler had come into the conversation she would have interrupted to ask who he was. The explanation would be all the more difficult because she had never met a German or a Pole and had only the vaguest knowledge of European geography, though about Princess Margaret of course she knew more than I. I heard her put a tray down on the end of the bed. 'Is he still in love with you, Phuong?' To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow. There had been a time when I thought none of their voices sang like Phuong's. I put out my hand and touched her arm — their bones too were as fragile as a bird's. 'Is he, Phuong?' She laughed and I heard her strike a match. 'In love?' — perhaps it was one of the phrases she didn't understand. 'May I make your pipe?' she asked. When I opened my eyes she had lit the lamp and the tray was already prepared. The lamplight made her skin the colour of dark amber as she bent over the flame with a frown of concentration, heating the small paste of opium, twirling her needle.

'Does Pyle still not smoke?' I asked her. 'No.' 'You ought to make him or he won't come back.' It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover. Now she was kneading the little ball of hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl and I could smell the opium. There is no smell like it. Beside the bed my alarm-clock showed twelvetwenty, but already my tension was over. Pyle had diminished. The lamp lit her face as she tended the long pipe, bent over it with the serious attention she might have given to a child. I was fond of my pipe: more than two feet of straight bamboo, ivory at either end. Two-thirds of the way down was the bowl, like a convolvulus reversed, the convex margin polished and darkened by the frequent kneading of the opium. Now with a flick of the wrist she plunged the needle into the tiny cavity, released the opium and reversed the bowl over the flame, holding the pipe steady for me.

The bead of opium bubbled gently and smoothly as I inhaled. The practised inhaler can draw a whole pipe down in one breath, but I always had to take several pulls. Then I lay back, with my neck on the leather pillow, while she prepared the second pipe. I said, 'You know, really, it's as clear as daylight. Pyle knows I smoke a few pipes before bed, and he doesn't want to disturb me. He'll be round in the morning.' In went the needle and I took my second pipe. As I laid it down, I said, 'Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.' I took a sip of tea and held my hand in the pit of her arm. 'When you left me,' I said, 'it was lucky I had this to fall back on. There's a good house in the rue d'Ormay. What a fuss we Europeans make about nothing. You shouldn't live with a man who doesn't smoke, Phuong.' 'But he's going to marry me,' she said.

'Soon now.' 'Of course, that's another matter.' 'Shall I make your pipe again?' 'Yes.' I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her. Of course it would be agreeable to feel her thigh beside me in the bed — she always slept on her back, and when I woke in the morning I could start the day with a pipe, instead of with my own company. 'Pyle won't come now,' I said. 'Stay here, Phuong.' She held the pipe out to me and shook her head. By the time I had drawn the opium in, her presence or absence mattered very little. 'Why is Pyle not here?' she asked. 'How do I know?' I said. 'Did he go to see General Thé?' 'I wouldn't know.' 'He told me if he could not have dinner with you, he wouldn't come here.' 'Don't worry. He'll come. Make me another pipe.' When she bent over the flame the poem of Baudelaire's came into my mind: 'Mon enfant, ma soeur . .

.' How did it go on? Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble. Out on the waterfront slept the ships, 'dont l'humeur est vagabonde.' I thought that if I smelt her skin it would have the faintest fragrance of opium, and her colour was that of the small flame. I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home. 'I wish I were Pyle,' I said aloud, but the pain was limited and bearable — the opium saw to that. Somebody knocked on the door. 'Pyle,' she said. 'No. It's not his knock.' Somebody knocked again impatiently. She got quickly up, shaking the yellow tree so that it showered its petals again over my typewriter. The door opened. 'Monsieur Fowlair,' a voice commanded. 'I'm Fowler,' I said. I was not going to get up for a policeman — I could see his khaki shorts without lifting my head. He explained in almost unintelligible Vietnamese French that I was needed immediately — at once — rapidly — at the Sureté.

'At the French Sureté or the Vietnamese?' 'The French.' In his mouth the word sounded like 'Françung.' 'What about?' He didn't know: it was his orders to fetch me. 'Toi aussi,' he said to Phuong. 'Say vous when you speak to a lady,' I told him. 'How did you know she was here?' He only repeated that they were his orders. 'I'll come in the morning.' 'Sur le chung,' he said, a little, neat, obstinate figure. There wasn't any point in arguing, so I got up and put on my tie and shoes. Here the police had the last word: they could withdraw my order of circulation: they could have me barred from Press Conferences: they could even, if they chose, refuse me an exit permit. These were the open legal methods, but legality was not essential in a country at war. I knew a man who had suddenly and inexplicably lost his cook — he had traced him to the Vietnamese Sureté, but the officers there assured him that he had been released after questioning. His family never saw him again.

Perhaps he had joined the Communists; perhaps he had been enlisted in one of the private armies which flourished round Saigon — the Hoa-Haos or the Caodaists or General Thé. Perhaps he was in a French prison. Perhaps he was happily making money out of girls in Cholon, the Chinese suburb. Perhaps his heart had given way when they questioned him. I said, 'I'm not going to walk. You'll have to pay for a trishaw.' One had to keep one's dignity. That was why I refused a cigarette from the French officer at the Sureté. After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question — what do they want from me? I had met Vigot before several times at parties — I had noticed him because he appeared incongruously in love with his wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde. Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy heat, wearing a green eyeshade, and he had a volume of Pascal open on his desk to while away the time.

When I refused to allow him to question Phuong without me he gave way at once, with a single sigh that might have represented his weariness with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human condition. He said in English, 'I'm so sorry I had to ask you to come.' 'I wasn't asked. I was ordered.' 'Oh, these native police — they don't understand.' His eyes were on a page of Les Pensées as though he were still absorbed in those sad arguments. 'I wanted to ask you a few questions — about Pyle.' 'You had better ask him the questions.' He turned to Phuong and interrogated her sharply in French. 'How long have you lived with Monsieur Pyle?' 'A month — I don't know,' she said. 'How much has he paid you?' 'You've no right to ask her that,' I said. 'She's not for sale.' 'She used to live with you, didn't she?' he asked abruptly. 'For two years.' 'I'm a correspondent who's supposed to report your war — when you let him. Don't ask me to contribute to your scandal sheet as well.' 'What do you know about Pyle?

Please answer my questions, Monsieur Fowler. I don't want to ask them. But this is serious. Please believe me it is very serious.' 'I'm not an informer. You know all I can tell you about Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission, nationality American.' 'You sound like a friend of his,' Vigot said, looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman came in with three cups of black coffee. 'Or would you rather have tea?' Vigot asked. 'I am a friend,' I said. 'Why not? I shall be going home one day, won't I? I can't take her with me. She'll be all right with him. It's a reasonable arrangement. And he's going to marry her, he says. He might, you know. He's a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,' I summed him precisely up as I might have said, 'a blue lizard,' 'a white elephant.' Vigot said, 'Yes.' He seemed to be looking for words on his desk with which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done.

'A very quiet American.' He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack and I watched Phuong. Opium makes you quick-witted — perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important. Phuong, I thought, had not caught his tone, melancholy and final, and her English was very bad. While she sat there on the hard office-chair, she was still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot taking those two facts in. 'How did you meet him first?' Vigot asked me. Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm. The tables on the street were most of them full. 'Do you mind?' he had asked with serious courtesy. 'My name's Pyle.

I'm new here,' and he had folded himself around a chair and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up into the hard noon glare. "Was that a grenade?' he asked with excitement and hope. 'Most likely the exhaust of a car,' I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets so quickly one's own youth: once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news. But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper — so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon: they never made the European press. Up the street came the lovely flat figures — the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh. I watched them with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions for ever. 'They are lovely, aren't they?' I said over my beer, and Pyle cast them a cursory glance as they went up the rue Catinat. 'Oh, sure,' he said indifferently: he was a serious type. 'The Minister's very concerned about these grenades.

It would be very awkward, he says, if there was an incident — with one of us, I mean.' 'With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would be serious. Congress wouldn't like it.' Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn't even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined — I learnt that very soon — to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve. 'Is he in the mortuary?' I asked Vigot. 'How did you know he was dead?' It was a foolish policeman's question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition. The Quiet American by Graham Greene - A Review - YouTube The Quiet American by Graham Greene - A Review Want to watch this again later?

Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Nov 4, 2013 Graham Greene's 1955 novel, "The Quiet American," has been adapted to film twice, first in 1958 and again in 2002. The story follows Fowler, a British journalist, Phuong, his Vietnamese mistress, and Pyle, an American attache to the Economic Mission. The love triangle between the three represents the conflicting interests of the old colonial powers and American regarding Vietnam. The book uses the literary device of flashback to portray Fowler eventually losing his acceptance of Pyle's naïveté, which in turn forces Fowler to finally take a side. Greene's novel demonstrates excellent foresight of the impending Vietnam War.

To purchase your own copy, go here: Like my Facebook page: Category In Our Time No Man Is a Neutral 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.

The quiet American (eBook, 1955) [WorldCat.org] The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at Title: The quiet American Author: Graham Greene Publisher: London ; Melbourne ; Toronto : William Heinemann Ltd., 1955. OCLC:609530471 The ReCaptcha terms you entered were incorrect. Please try to match the 2 words shown in the window, or try the audio version.

Question: Who wrote the 1955 novel "The Quiet American"?
Answer: Graham Greene