The Quiet American by Graham Greene Essay - 1637 Words The Quiet American a Political Warning by Graham Greene Essay ...2013 The Quiet American: A political warning by Graham Greene The Quiet American by Graham Greene is a novel that depicts a love triangle between a British journalist, an American secret agent and a Vietnamese girl in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It came out in the mid fifties when the American government was not directly involved in the War.... 1371 Words | 4 Pages The theme of war in the novel "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene Essay ...﻿The theme of war. The novel ‘The Quiet American’ written by Graham Greene is the war novel. Saigon, 1952, is a beautiful, exotic, and mysterious city caught in the grips of the Vietnamese war of liberation from the French colonial powers. The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War... 522 Words | 1 Pages "The Quiet American", by Graham Greene Fowler and Pyle, comparative synopsis.

Essay ...Throughout the novel "The Quiet American", authored by Graham Greene, a conflict of identity is seen to occur within the narrator and protagonist, Fowler. Due to the complexity of his character, Fowler as a narrator provides a valued yet sometimes flawed insight into the turmoil of his mind. This turmoil is none better displayed through his indecisive nature about whether or not he is similar to Pyle, the naive, inexperienced, and... 1606 Words | 4 Pages the quiet american Essay ...﻿Introduction of the Novel Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1955. The book is a novel based on Greene's experience traveling and reporting on the war which the Vietnam were waging against the French colonial army in Vietnam in the early 1950's. (Donaghy,1983) The Quiet American Summary Vietnam is only understood by living there, it is very beautiful until something happens that you might have... 1751 Words | 7 Pages Quiet American Essay ...The Quiet American: Choose a novel which explores in an effective way a theme which is important to you. A novel of which explores a certain theme, the abusive corruption of American power is Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”.

Greene’s novel is set in the French colony, Vietnam, which is soon to be lost to the Communists. His narration and description of characters such as Alden Pyle the titular... 1075 Words | 3 Pages Essay about Quiet American ...The Quiet American is an anti-war novel by British author Graham Greene, first published in United Kingdom in 1955 and in the United States in 1956. It was adapted into films in 1958 and 2002. The book draws on Greene's experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951-1954. He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American in October 1951 while driving back to Saigon... 1702 Words | 5 Pages The Quiet American Essay ...The Quiet American is a novel that captures a period of time in a country that is consumed by a war, a war with deep foreign involvement. In amongst all of the political and social unrest within the country is Thomas Fowler, a British journalist. Throughout the novel we see Fowler's interactions with the country in which he resides, Vietnam, symbolised by his mistress Phuong.

His distaste with the American presence within the country is also... 932 Words | 3 Pages The Quiet American Essay ...The Quiet American In The Quiet American Grahm Green writes of a complex love triangle taking place in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He chooses Thomas Fowler as the protagonist to tell the story from a biased point of view. From the beginning, Fowler proclaims that he is objective. As the story progresses he is eventually gives into the desire to take action and get involved. It is not until after this climax that Fowler finally... 1080 Words | 3 Pages 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.

IN THE MIDST OF WARS: GRAHAM GREENE’S THE QUIET AMERICAN | Last Bender Posted by jonfrankel on Jul 18, 2012 in Books , The Vietnam Project | 0 comments IN THE MIDST OF WARS: GRAHAM GREENE’S THE QUIET AMERICAN IN THE MIDST OF WARS: GRAHAM GREENE’S THE QUIET AMERICAN By Benedict J. Kerkvliet Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a love triangle and murder mystery set in Vietnam in the 1950’s, as French power collapses and Americans are dribbling in to shore up the colonial enterprise. Thomas Fowler is a cynical, misogynistic English journalist living with Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who prepares his opium pipe and in his words, opens her legs for him. It’s not a bad existence. His devout wife, whom he does not love, is in England. Fowler believes in nothing, not even his own pursuit of pleasure. He is a selfish, dissipated and intelligent man who is not even looking for a reason to live. Phuong would like to be married. For Phuong the relationship is one of necessity, not convenience.

Into this arrangement comes Pyle, attached to the American economic mission. Pyle falls in love with Phuong and wants to marry her, to rescue her as he would like to rescue her country. The novel begins with Pyle’s murder and is told in flashbacks. Greene is an extraordinary novelist and his prose, always subtle and effortless, quietly unfolds the mystery of the love triangle and murder. Pyle and Fowler hold each other in mutual contempt and each misreads the other in critical ways. Pyle assumes there is some sort of honor and dignity in Fowler that don’t really exist, at least not in the form he assumes, and Fowler misjudges Pyle badly, mistaking his enthusiasm and idealism for innocence. What emerges is that Fowler actually does in some sense love Phuong, but his real emotional attachment is to Vietnam itself and a sense of justice, which emerges gradually. Like Rick in Casablanca, Fowler takes a side, but it isn’t with the French or the Americans. As an Englishman Fowler has a jaded view of the ‘mission civilisatrice’. The French in the novel–the policeman Vigot, and a bomber pilot–are men who fight for nothing other than duty and survival.

The Americans are loud, naïve idiots. And then there are the Vietnamese. Phuong and her sister represent them here, and we don’t know them well, other than their opportunism and practicality. There is a Vietminh operative who contacts Fowler, but he is Chinese and lives in Cholon. The political situation is described in great detail, and it is hopeless. There are the Vietminh, whom we never meet, apart from their work: a canal clogged with ambushed bodies, a missile attack on an outpost by a rice paddy, a hand grenade tossed into a restaurant. The country is riven by factions, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects, gangsters in Cholon. Pyle’s solution to this, derived from a Harvard text, is to find a ‘third way’, a ruler for the country not associated with French Colonialism or Communism. A nationalist who can unite the sects. Someone friendly to American business. He believes the head of the Cao Dai, General The, to be this man. But Pyle doesn’t understand the ‘treachery’ of General The. Vietnam is no place for idealists.

When I discussed The Quiet American with the woman who gave me the book I remarked on how many of the details we associate with the American phase of the war are here: napalm, free fire zones, gunning down civilians in sampans, bombing raids, assassins who fade into the rice paddies. She said it showed how prescient Greene was. A good novelist should see more than he or she knows I guess, but what Greene really was was an astute observer. Because all of these things were actually happening and there was no reason not to know this. It is often asserted by policy makers and people in the press that it only became obvious after the Tet Offensive of 1968 that the war was a lost cause. But in 1965 David Halberstam was reporting this for the New York Times, a paper that everyone read at the time. He simply asked officers on the ground what was happening. Certainly anti-war activists knew the reality of the war long before 1968. The idea that the hopelessness and cruelty of the war, its utter pointlessness, only became apparent after February 1968 is preposterous. It was in evidence before it even started.

Because this was true of the French war, which preceded the American war. Greene was reporting on what he saw. It is sometimes said that the model for Pyle was Edward Lansdale, but as Robert Stone points out in his excellent introduction, Lansdale arrived in Vietnam as the book went to press. Lansdale isn’t really like Pyle, he’s more like Don Draper. Lansdale was an American advertizing executive turned military intelligence officer who advocated fighting insurgencies using the methods of the insurgents themselves. He saw an insurgency as a political conflict. If the Communists are honest, do not steal from the peasants and promise land reform, then those fighting them had to promise and deliver the same things. Honest elections of reformist politicians, land reform and then the selective and ruthless use of violence in support of those objectives would defeat an insurgency. His lab was the Philippines, during the Huk rebellion that followed World War 2. Lansdale identified a reformist leader, Magsaysay, and encouraged him and others to run in elections that were perceived to be honest. They instituted a land reform that relocated peasants from overcrowded areas of Luzon to the island of Mindanao, where they were given land and water buffalo.

In Lansdale’s version of events he was largely successful. The Huk rebellion ended and there was no Communist take over of the Philippines. The only problem is that Magsaysay was killed in a plane crash. We know the story after that: Ferdinand Marcos eventually came to power. The country was and remained a crony capitalist kleptocracy. A different and more detailed view of the Huk rebellion can be found in Benedict J. Kerkvliet’s excellent study The Huk Rebellion: a study of peasant revolt in the Philippines. This book gives the necessary historical context for what was actually a decades long peasant struggle. The second half of Lansdale’s book, In the Midst of Wars, unfolds in Vietnam, where he is sent to advise Diem. Lansdale published In the Midst of Wars in 1971, when America was losing the war and trying to get out. It is hard not to think that he intended it as an ‘I told you so’ story. Diem is the opposite of Magsaysay in almost every way. He is inflexible, a Confucian authoritarian who represents a narrow slice of Vietnamese society.

He was a nationalist, but fed directly into the two main narratives of the Communists, who opposed both colonialism and traditional Vietnamese culture. If Diem was free of the taint of French collaboration he was in thick with the Americans, and was a northern Catholic. He was the ‘third way’ sought by Pyle. It ended in a van, with a bullet in the back of the head of each of the Ngo brothers. As it turns out Lansdale’s approach was never used in Vietnam. It was used in Iraq, to ‘defeat’ the Al Qaida insurgency, but I find the so called success of that strategy a little suspect given that it was used after a nihilistic civil war had ethnically cleansed much of the country and consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. There is a long history of modern Vietnamese anti-colonialism that extends into the 19th century. It is, other than the American phase of the Vietnam Wars, the most widely documented aspect of Vietnamese history in English.

Start with David Marr’s three books: Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 ; Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 ; Vietnam, 1945: the Quest for Power . Greene was a shrewd observer and brilliant novelist. The Quiet American is a good story beautifully told. What makes it great is that an astute observer in the 1950s didn’t foresee but saw the horror, in human and individual terms, of the propensity of large nations to destroy small ones in the pursuit of wealth, under the delusion of ideologies. Post a Reply 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. Graham Greene’s Vietnam – The Quiet American | Literary Traveler Graham Greene’s Vietnam – The Quiet American Posted on March 1, 1999 By Literary Traveler The Quiet American by Graham Greene ought to be required reading for anyone planning a visit to Vietnam. For more than forty years, this prophetic portrait of the failing days of French colonial rule has been alternately praised and reviled by critics, but still stands as the definitive, though fictionalized account of the terrible confrontation between moral dissipation and dangerous naivete that plagued this tropical nation for so many decades. Vietnam has come a long way from those troubled times.’ The Quiet American by Graham Greene ought to be required reading for anyone planning a visit to Vietnam.

For more than forty years, this prophetic portrait of the failing days of French colonial rule has been alternately praised and reviled by critics, but still stands as the definitive, though fictionalized account of the terrible confrontation between moral dissipation and dangerous naivete that plagued this tropical nation for so many decades. Vietnam has come a long way from those troubled times. Since Graham Greene’s death in 1991 a plethora of biographies has emerged, each stressing the real world sources for much of what the author wrote, and each including old photographs of the places where he lived and drank and caroused. Given the intervening twenty years of war and twenty more of political isolation, it would come as no surprise to find that none of Greene’s old haunts in Vietnam are still standing. But not only are they still there, many of them have been restored to better than mint condition. Indeed, Vietnam today is full of astonishing contrasts to the opium-soaked, decadent world of Greene’s novel, and the irony of some of these contrasts can only be deliberate. Taking yourself on a Graham Greene tour of Ho Chi Minh City, you should begin in the Rue Catinat, now called Dong Khoi.

Though the name has changed, the street is impossible to miss. Where it reaches the Saigon River, the street is prominently marked by Catinat Fashions, an upmarket haberdasher housed in a beautifully restored French Colonial building and finished in cream stucco to match the even more sumptuously restored Majestic Hotel across the street. Greene stayed at the Majestic, preferring it to the Continental, the more popular journalist hangout, also on the Rue Catinat a few blocks inland. Built in 1928, the Majestic Hotel offered opulence much closer to the life Greene enjoyed as a wealthy and famous novelist than to the seedy back-alley rooms inhabited by Tom Fowler, Greene”s protagonist in The Quiet American. Perhaps Greene liked the Majestic because here he was somewhat insulated from the dangers of the street. In the cozy central courtyard, lounging around the pool he could easily have imagined being in Nice or St. Tropez, and Greene was a born again Frenchman. The Majestic’s roof bar has a fine view both up and down the river where you can contemplate the strange flavors of Vietnam”s cultural melange from a safe height.

Below, sampans share the waterway with high speed hydrofoils. After dark, above the dark tangle of bamboo scaffolding and corrugated iron shanties on the opposite bank, giant neon billboards advertising Heinekin, Phillips and AIWA seem to hang suspended. Icons of the re-instated corporate pantheon. Even more incongruous is the mariachi band on the Majestic”s open roof-deck wearing sombreros and black suits and playing Mexican swing for the tourists. Greene lived in at least two places on the Rue Catinat and chose a third as the model for Fowler’s apartment in The Quiet American. He didn’t need to go far to find Fowler’s place. It is on the next corner in from the Majestic. A picture in Norman Sherry”s biography The Life of Graham Greene shows this building in pretty sorry shape, but now it is The Grand Hotel, a spotless edifice, more cream stucco and white marble punctuated with dark mahogany counters and liveried attendants. A little farther up the Rue Catinat is the Palais Cafe, where Fowler played quatre cent vingt-et-un with lieutenant Vigot of the Surete.

This bar too has been renovated, but it is somewhat darker and livelier at night than the sedate hotels down the street. Greene also stayed for a time in an apartment a little farther up the Rue Catinat, at number 109. This building is now a modest hotel called the Mondial. Last on this leg of the Greene tour is the Continental Hotel, for decades a gathering place for foreign journalists and a hotbed of political intrigue. The Continental was restored somewhat earlier than the other hotels on the Rue Catinat. It has a slightly more traditional Vietnamese feel than the distinctly French-influenced Majestic and Grand (The Continental is half the price). There is no outdoor bar at the Continental anymore, but indoors, crouched behind a Bombay Sapphire martini on the rattan furniture of the lobby bar, it is not difficult to imagine the author coming in to meet friends before dinner, or Fowler making an assignation with Pyle, the American secret agent. Venturing farther afield, the contrasts between Vietnam then and nowbecome even more striking.

For example, in The Quiet American Greene refers to a place he calls “The House of 500 Girls.” It was actually known as The Parc au Buffles by the French and was a three-sided complex catering to the darker side of old Saigon. That was then. Now in the center building where the casino used to be is an arts education center. Off to the left where there were once rooms for smoking opium is now a roller skating rink, Chuck Berry music blaring, hundreds of little wheels rumbling over wooden floors and young people still in school uniforms laughing with glee as they swirl around and around. On the right, replacing the brothel, is a ballet academy. The Dakow bridge, where in The Quiet American Pyle gets murdered by the resistance for his misdeeds, is being replaced. The old bridge is already gone, though the new one is not yet constructed. Nearby another larger construction project is underway. The shanties that once lined the estuary approaching the Dakow bridge have been removed and in their place will be a concrete seawall promenade with grass and shade trees.

Although the squalid canals of the old city are still very photogenic, even the people who live on them consider them an eyesore, and energetic programs are rapidly relocating their inhabitants to new housing projects in the south and cleaning up the water. Many other buildings that Greene mentions are also still standing and easy to find. The central post office, the cathedral, the Banque Indo Chine (now the National Bank of Vietnam) and more are all still in beautiful condition and within walking distance of the Dong Khoi, the Rue Catinat. Right now is a magical time in Vietnam. The crime rate is way down; prosperity is up and the whole nation seems to have its attention turned outward toward the rest of the world, poised to learn and to grow. Be advised though, the first American fast food franchise opened in Ho Chi Minh City in January of 1998. If you want to see Vietnam while its new charm is still fresh, now is the time. More on the Web The Quiet American Summary | GradeSaver The Quiet American Summary Buy Study Guide The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene that is set in Vietnam in the early 1950s.

The story takes place in the midst of the conflict between the Viet Minh and the South Vietnamese, who are supported by the French. The novel is narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Fowler , a British war journalist who has been living in Saigon for an extended period of time. He refuses to engage in the conflict or to form opinions - he instead prefers to simply report the facts. Fowler frequently disagrees with a young American named Alden Pyle , who works for the Economic Aid Mission. The novel begins with Pyle's death, but the circumstances of his murder are unknown until the novel's final chapter. Vigot , a French policeman, initially suspects Fowler in Pyle's demise, but he adamantly denies the charge. From there, the novel goes into a series of flashbacks that illustrate the erratic history between Pyle and Fowler. Soon after Pyle's arrival in Saigon, he falls in love with Phuong , Fowler's Vietnamese lover. Pyle decides that he wants to woo Phuong away from Fowler, who cannot marry her because he has a wife at home in London.

Their love triangle has many twists and turns, but the climax of the novel occurs when Fowler finds out that Pyle is involved in deadly espionage with the hopes of establishing the guerrilla General Thé as an American-backed Third Force in the war. Pyle believes that the death of Vietnamese civilians is necessary to further the cause of "democracy," but Fowler is disgusted by Pyle's overly simplified point of view. The narrative unfolds in a non-linear fashion, allowing Greene to build up the suspense surrounding the question that forms the novel's core: Did Thomas Fowler have anything to do with the death of Alden Pyle? In the final chapter of The Quiet American, Fowler finally reveals - to the reader, not to any of the other characters - that he assisted a Communist leader in assassinating Pyle after finding out that Pyle was involved in the bombing of a public square. "The Quiet American", by Graham Greene Fowler and Pyle, comparative synopsis. Essay - 1606 Words The Quiet American by Graham Greene Essay ...Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American, is more than a political statement about whether or not America or any other country for that matter should become involved in the affairs of another country; Greene makes the question human and personal.

The novel can be read as a political and moral reflection on the opening stages of the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia. Therefore, Greene’s novel becomes a commentary on the... 1637 Words | 4 Pages The Quiet American a Political Warning by Graham Greene Essay ...2013 The Quiet American: A political warning by Graham Greene The Quiet American by Graham Greene is a novel that depicts a love triangle between a British journalist, an American secret agent and a Vietnamese girl in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It came out in the mid fifties when the American government was not directly involved in the War.... 1371 Words | 4 Pages Conflict Graham Greene and Pyle Essay ...Ideas of ‘The Quiet American’ Shades of grey No one is completely innocent of inflicting harm on another. “I told myself again I was innocent”. Indeed it is the innocent who Fowler sees as more capable of hurting others of their ignorance, “They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved”. Greene uses many symbols to this demonstrate these shades. Light being one, and the...

545 Words | 2 Pages The theme of war in the novel "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene Essay ...﻿The theme of war. The novel ‘The Quiet American’ written by Graham Greene is the war novel. Saigon, 1952, is a beautiful, exotic, and mysterious city caught in the grips of the Vietnamese war of liberation from the French colonial powers. The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War... 522 Words | 1 Pages Essay on The Quiet American Alden Pyle ...THE QUIET AMERICAN ‘Alden Pyle is dangerous, but he does not deserve his ultimate fate.’ Do you agree? In ‘The Quiet American’, the Alden Pyle character is exceedingly patriotic to America and somewhat unrealistic in all that he does throughout the film. Pyle seems to be naive in thinking that he will be able to save an entire country, Vietnam, which at the time was embroiled in an...

599 Words | 2 Pages the quiet american Essay ...﻿Introduction of the Novel Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1955. The book is a novel based on Greene's experience traveling and reporting on the war which the Vietnam were waging against the French colonial army in Vietnam in the early 1950's. (Donaghy,1983) The Quiet American Summary Vietnam is only understood by living there, it is very beautiful until something happens that you might have... 1751 Words | 7 Pages Quiet American Essay ...The Quiet American: Choose a novel which explores in an effective way a theme which is important to you. A novel of which explores a certain theme, the abusive corruption of American power is Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”. Greene’s novel is set in the French colony, Vietnam, which is soon to be lost to the Communists. His narration and description of characters such as Alden Pyle the... 1075 Words | 3 Pages Essay about Quiet American ...The Quiet American is an anti-war novel by British author Graham Greene, first published in United Kingdom in 1955 and in the United States in 1956.

It was adapted into films in 1958 and 2002. The book draws on Greene's experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951-1954. He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American in October 1951 while driving back to Saigon... 1702 Words | 5 Pages A haunting portrait of US-backed terror in 1950s Vietnam - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) A haunting portrait of US-backed terror in 1950s Vietnam The Quiet American, directed by Phillip Noyce, adapted from the novel by Graham Greene By Richard Phillips 17 December 2002 The Quiet American, directed by Phillip Noyce and currently screening in the US and Britain, is a thoughtful and haunting depiction of the bloody role played by US intelligence agents and their local operatives in the dying years of French colonial rule in Vietnam. Adapted from Graham Greene’s celebrated 1955 novel, it is a timely reminder of how US-sponsored terrorism prepared the ground for America’s military intervention in Vietnam.

Set in Saigon in 1952, as the Vietnamese national liberation forces are delivering major blows against the French colonial rulers, the movie unfolds within the framework of a complex love story and murder mystery. It opens with the discovery of a young US aid worker’s body in the river. The American, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), has been murdered. French colonial police contact Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), a British correspondent for the London Times, to identify the body. Fowler is a hard-bitten, world-weary journalist and an opium addict who was a friend and later rival of Pyle. The story moves into an extended flashback as Fowler recounts his first contact with Pyle several months earlier and the personal and political events that brought them together and transformed them into enemies. The fresh-faced Pyle, who has just arrived in Saigon, befriends Fowler, asking the knowledgeable but cynical journalist for advice and information about the country. Fowler explains that he has “no opinion” on the unfolding war against French rule but is a passive observer. Pyle claims that America is not a colonial power, like the French and the British, but that it wants to bring democracy to Vietnam.

Soon after, Fowler introduces Pyle to Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), his Vietnamese live-in mistress. Pyle is mesmerised by the beautiful young girl. Meanwhile, Fowler receives a telegram from the Times, instructing him to return to London. Not wanting to leave Phuong or return to his failed marriage in Britain, he decides to travel north to the war zone and start filing stories to extend his stay in Vietnam. Travelling with the French forces to Phat Diem, Fowler happens upon Pyle in this dangerous territory. Their strange encounter is forgotten after they discover a bloody massacre of local villagers. The French commander and Pyle claim the communist-led Vietminh (fore-runners of the Viet Cong) must have committed the atrocity, but Fowler is unconvinced. Later that night, Pyle confesses that he has fallen in love with Phuong and that he travelled north to tell Fowler face-to-face that he plans to ask her to marry him on his return to Saigon. Phuong rejects Pyle’s proposal, but over the next weeks, under pressure from her ambitious sister who regards the American as a better catch, decides to move in with Pyle.

The embittered journalist, who somehow hopes to stave off old age via his relationship with Phuong, begins to discover more about Pyle and other shadowy figures involved in the aid program. The young American is a member of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency, which is providing political and economic aid to General Thé, a local warlord, and other right-wing elements. This “Third Force”, which is fighting the French and the Vietminh, is being cultivated by the US to take control of Vietnam and bolster US interests in Indo-China. Fowler, who realises that he can no longer remain indifferent to these machinations, discovers that chemicals supplied through the US medical aid program can be used for explosives—a suspicion tragically confirmed when two car bombs are detonated in the middle of Saigon. The terrorist attack, which kills scores of innocent people and is witnessed by Fowler, is falsely attributed to the communists. Fowler—having been told by Hinh (Tzi Ma), his personal assistant and a communist sympathiser that “sooner or later one has to take sides if one is to remain human”—decides to confront Pyle.

Pyle attempts to justify the terror attack by declaring that the French are incapable of defeating the communists and in war “you have to use whatever tools you can”. The blast, he continues, will generate US Congressional support in Vietnam for the “war against communism”. Horrified by this response, Fowler decides to assist those plotting Pyle’s death. The Quiet American ends with the journalist renewing his relationship with Phuong. A series of Times reports written by Fowler are superimposed on the screen, tracing the final French defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the US military buildup to full-scale war under President John F. Kennedy in the mid-1960s. Noyce’s film has much to recommend it. The cast is strong with intelligent performances by Caine and Fraser. While Caine, now 69 years old, occasionally strains to bridge the five-decade age gap with Do Thi Hai Yen, this is not a serious problem. In fact Caine, who seems to have been born to play the jaded, slightly melancholic Times correspondent, puts in one of the best performances of his long career.

Nineteen-year-old Do Thi Hai Yen is excellent as Phuong, as are the rest of the Vietnamese actors. Phuong is clearly a symbol for the colonial exploitation of Vietnam. Her languid explanation to Pyle about the fate of Vietnamese girls—promised marriage by foreigners but left stranded, unable to either regain their place at home or to begin a new life in another country—is particularly moving. Thankfully, Noyce seems to have held his cinematographer, the often-pretentious Christopher Doyle, in check. The resultant images are restrained but strikingly effective. They beautifully complement a superb soundtrack. The Quiet American is not a groundbreaking work, but Noyce’s measured approach and his fidelity to the spirit of Greene’s extraordinarily prescient story, give the movie an emotional and political power that will resonate with thoughtful audiences. Importantly, The Quiet American will encourage a new generation to reexamine the history of US intervention in Indo-China and begin to draw connections between the CIA-backed terrorists in Vietnam and the secret operations conducted by US forces and their allies over the past 40 years in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere.

As the Saigon bomb blast echoes through the cinema and Pyle explains that a “third force” is needed to “save Vietnam”, one is reminded that it was not so long ago that the Reagan administration provided technical and financial support to figures such as Osama bin Laden, hailing them as “freedom fighters” in the war against the USSR in Afghanistan. Political censorship and US spying on Greene While The Quiet American is currently screening in Britain and has had a limited release in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Academy Award nominations, the film would still be “in the vaults” if principal producer Miramax had had its way. Completed more than a year ago in mid-2001, Miramax executives decided to shelve the movie following the September 11 terrorist attack on the US. Seizing on negative “audience test” responses after the World Trade Center attack, Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein declared that Noyce’s film could not be released because staff and friends had said it was “unpatriotic” and that “America has to be cohesive and band together”. Noyce was told privately that his film was “as good as dead” and would never get a release.

After several months and some behind-the-scenes agitation by Caine and Noyce, with support from a few US film critics who demanded it be released, Miramax agreed to screen the movie at the Toronto Film Festival. Only after it was critically acclaimed at the festival did the US producer finally agree to give the film a limited US release. While Noyce and Caine were eventually able to break through this outrageous act of political censorship, the difficulties they encountered is similar to the response to Greene’s book when it was first released in the 1950s. At that time Greene was denounced as “anti-American” by many leading US critics who deliberately distorted or ignored the story’s unambiguous condemnation of US covert operations in Vietnam. A New York Times review in 1956 suggested it was full of “custom-made characters” and regretted the absence of an “experienced and intelligent anti-Communist” in the story. Two years later, Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed a Hollywood movie of the book staring Michael Redgrave and former US war hero Audie Murphy.

Mankiewicz twisted the story to present Pyle as an innocent but courageous fighter for democracy and dedicated his film to the US-backed South Vietnamese puppet regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Mankiewicz consulted the infamous US military counter-insurgency expert Edward G. Lansdale on the script and told the press that “anti-Americanism” and “Communist footsie-ism” was “loose in the world”. Lansdale, who helped establish “third force” proxies in the Philippines and Vietnam in the 1940s and 50s and was a senior US advisor to Diem, was one of the models for Pyle in Greene’s book. Greene condemned Mankiewicz’s movie as a “propaganda film for America” and defended his book, explaining that rather than his characters being contrived or “custom-made” there was “more direct rapportage in The Quiet American than in any other novel” he had written. He described Mankiewicz’s distortions as “treachery” and commented that the film appeared to have been “deliberately made to attack the book and the author”.

One of Britain’s most popular 20th century writers—a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, film critic and journalist—Greene continued to expose and condemn the involvement of the US in Vietnam during the 50s and 60s. He also supported various anti-imperialist movements, regularly denounced US-backed death squads in Latin America, and maintained friendly relations with a number of Latin American leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Chile’s Salvador Allende and the Panamanian military populist General Omar Torrijos. In a November 1964 letter to the London Daily Telegraph commenting on the torture of Viet-Cong prisoners by South Vietnamese troops, Greene wrote: “The strange new feature about the photographs of torture appearing in the British and American Press, is that they have been taken with the approval of the torturers and are published over captions that contain no hint of condemnation. They might have come out of a book on insect life. ‘The white ant takes certain measures against the red after a successful foray.’ “But these, after all, are not ants but men. The long, slow slide into barbarism of the western world seems to have quickened.

For these photographs are of torturers belonging to an army which could not exist without American aid and counsel. Does this mean that the American authorities sanction torture as a means of interrogation?” US intelligence regarded Greene as “dangerous”. He was defined as a “communist sympathiser” and for a time barred entry to the US, despite the fact that he vetoed publication of his novels and short stories in the Soviet Union for many years in protest over the Stalinist political repression in Eastern Europe and the USSR. According to documents obtained last week by Britain’s Guardian newspaper under Freedom of Information, Greene was under constant surveillance by US intelligence agencies from the 1950s until his death in 1991. US officials, according to the newspaper, “went to extraordinary lengths” to spy on Greene, reading his mail when he was temporarily refused entry to the US, and gathering reports by US diplomats and other shadowy figures on his travels, particularly in Latin America, and international public appearances. While Phillip Noyce and Michael Caine probably did not anticipate the opposition from Miramax, it is important that they campaigned for the release of The Quiet American.

Hopefully their efforts and the movie itself will encourage filmmakers and writers to dramatise other stories the political establishment does not want told. This would be a fitting tribute to the spirit of Greene’s book and his often-neglected comment that “the writer ought to be a bit of grit in the state machine”.

Question: In which country is Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" set?
Answer: Vietnam