I have been taking my holidays on the Rue Catinat in Saigon, seventy-three years ago. It is perhaps the ideal vacation for the selfish person which so many of us are when we think nobody is looking. The end of colonial age, in someone else’s empire, is also the perfect place from which to look down on the defeat and retreat of something we once enjoyed but have now renounced.
Anyway, here I am once more. I lean out of my first-floor window at dusk, when something like coolness eases the damp heat of the dangerous, brassy day. I watch the lovely Vietnamese women glide by below, on their way to various immoral occupations, as the cycle-rickshaws whirr past and the rapid blue dusk falls over all, but especially over the nearby forbidden zone of Cholon, where mysterious explosions reverberate. Outside my door, next to the communal urinoir, the old ladies chatter. Are they perhaps discussing my love life with a beautiful young Vietnamese, a teenage boy’s dream of romance, which the poverty and political weakness of the locals makes possible?
Perhaps. It is almost time to file my latest terse, grudging dispatch to London, where those dusty old fools at The Times care little about Indo-China. Perhaps they will soon learn to do so. Perhaps not. This is 1952. I am separated from my office by thousands of miles. A telephone call is an impossibility. All conversations must be conducted through expensive cables, in a sort of code of brief, contorted words which must be translated into proper English, or by letters which take weeks to arrive.
At any minute, my beautiful Annamite mistress, daughter of a mandarin, will appear and begin to numb my mind and body with repeated doses of opium. Then perhaps it will be time for dinner in the French style at the Vieux Moulin, if I still care after all that opium. All around, the French empire is dying, elegantly and stylishly, but also certainly. How sad, but also how inevitable and how typically French.
And it was so easy to get here. No tedious journey was necessary, no airport security, no sweaty hunt for suitable accommodation. It has all been done for me. I just needed to search along a familiar shelf and find the well-worn book I have owned since I was a schoolboy (his stiff, pretentious handwriting can be seen on the flyleaf). There are few more refreshing escapes from the reasonably predictable normality of daily life than to return to Graham Greene’s Quiet American. It is a sour tale, made palatable by lovely writing. It must be nearly sixty years since I first read it. Each time, I enjoy it more. It seems to grow thicker and heavier between its covers with each re-reading.
Why? It is rather nasty. The chief character, Thomas Fowler, is what used to be called a “Four-Letter Man,” when civilized English people avoided using certain rude, brief words rather more than they do now. He reminds the reader that Graham Greene once said to his Roman Catholic wife Vivien (when she found love letters from his mistress) that what made him a bad husband was precisely what made him a good writer. The self-interested remark, like so much of Greene, is too vain and polished to be quite real. What if Vivien had said to him “I’d rather have a good husband who was a bad writer”? He would not have liked it.
Fowler is ungrateful. He has not just betrayed his wife. He is not just lying to his mistress about her future, concealing his office’s desire to recall him from London and his deserted wife’s refusal of a divorce. He is a traitor to his friend, the “Quiet American” Alden Pyle, who has recently saved his life. He is a shameless exploiter of his mistress, the beautiful and generous Phuong, who is also, though he is so left-wing that he would never admit it, his servant. The story revolves around his decision to connive at the murder of Pyle, mostly out of sexual jealousy but excused (in his mind) by political righteousness. It is squalid and unpleasant, but oh, how it seizes the mind. Do I long each time for a better outcome? Well, I have a choice. There are two first-rate films of the book, and they end quite differently.
In all, there are three Quiet Americans, one book and two films. At the end of each, all these Americans become “a very quiet American,” as the sardonic French police detective, Inspector Vigot, tactfully puts it. That is to say they wind up in the refrigerator of the Saigon police morgue. You need to know that Vigot is a policeman designed by Graham Greene, not a normal straightforward cop, but a melancholy, troubled man with religious sensitivities. He is cruelly cuckolded by his beautiful blonde wife, drinks Vermouth mixed with Cassis, and plays dice. He also reads Blaise Pascal while on duty. All Greene’s Frenchmen are like this, immersed in Montaigne or Lamartine.
The name of the book in France is Un Americain bien tranquille, which seems to me to emphasize the quietness a bit more than the English title does. It comes rather close to calling the work A Dead American, for death is certainly suggested by bien tranquille. In some ways the book really ought to have been written in French and published in Paris, preferably on the Left Bank. The restaurants and hotels of Saigon have French names, as do the streets. The jungle battles which the seedy, opium-shrivelled Fowler observes are fought by the French Army. Many French readers would also appreciate its resentful scorn for the United States, that clumsy newcomer to the role of great power. Greene’s original story is so crudely anti-American that the fair-minded reader (well, this one, anyway) is tempted to rally to the side of Uncle Sam, and even take to drinking Coca Cola in protest. The quiet American, Alden Pyle, is both a naïve, gullible idealist and a mysteriously competent and brave figure apparently working for what we would nowadays call a non-governmental organization.
His main crime against Fowler is to first charm and then steal the delightful Phuong, who eventually consents to be stolen, since Fowler cannot offer her the married security she hopes for as her youth fades and a horrible future lies in wait amid the rackety bars of Saigon. Pyle steals her with a great deal of decency, warning Fowler that he wants to do so, emphasizing that he would not do such a thing if the pair were married, and then doing so very straightforwardly. Pyle also reveals himself as brave and resourceful after he and Fowler are caught in a Communist ambush. As they cower together in a paddy-field, up their to necks in water, while guerrillas shoot inaccurately at them, Fowler claims, not wholly credibly, that he does not want Pyle to save his life. Then again, maybe he does mean his assertion that he would not have saved Pyle’s life if the opportunity had arisen. Is their relationship perhaps a metaphor for the unequal Anglo-American alliance and pseudo-friendship which has for so long irritated Englishmen of Fowler’s sort so much?
Pyle is actually a C.I.A. agent, supplying explosives to a wayward (if not actually mad) Vietnamese general in the hope of creating a “third force” between the colonial French and the Communists. The more recent 2002 film in which Michael Caine plays Fowler sticks more closely to Greene’s book, but Caine, while a pleasure to watch, cannot really play Fowler, a wholly different type of Englishman from him. The second film is good, but not in my view as good as the 1958 mangled propaganda version. How strange to have Graham Greene’s work improved on by the C.I.A., who undoubtedly stuck their noses into the script: the director Joseph Mankiewicz actually hired the C.I.A. man Edward Lansdale as a consultant.
The extraordinary thing about the second of the three Quiet Americans, Mankiewicz’s film, is that while it is political bilge, it is dramatically far more satisfying. We all now know, as we did not in 1958, that America’s role in Vietnam was doomed and destructive. I have been through several stages of thought, from a teenage protestor yelling rudely about L.B.J. outside the U.S. Embassy in London to reconstructed conservative trying to make excuses for the conflict, to weary, unwilling acceptance that the yelling teenager had the right of it after all.
But we also know that American involvement was partly idealistic, like Pyle, and that the Vietnamese Communists were among the most ruthless and cruel of their kind. Mankiewicz’s film stars the ingenuous but convincing real-life war hero Audie Murphy, more used to playing cowboys. Because he is so American, Murphy is really pretty good as Pyle, especially matched against the handsome, amoral, weary Michael Redgrave, who wonderfully embodies English upper-middle class contempt for the American prosperity he secretly envies and for the U.S.’s tactless generosity to poorer lands. At one point, Pyle offers Fowler his whole cigarette packet, to which the Englishman retorts, “I asked for a cigarette, not for economic aid.” Later, Pyle teases him by offering him “a cigarette.”
Mankiewicz’s plot takes Greene’s story and turns it upside down. Greene was furious when this version was made, because his rather hysterical anti-American story was treated as a deluded fantasy. Fowler thinks he is exposing a wicked American plot to smuggle plastic explosives to an anti-Communist general. In fact, he has been fooled by Communist agents into believing this. The plot is theirs. They deceive him partly because he is a naïve anti-American, partly because he is embittered by Pyle stealing his girlfriend, and partly because his French is not very good, and he disastrously has misunderstood the meaning of the word plastique. (Educated Englishmen always overrate their ability to speak French and are wounded when found out). How Greene must have loathed this, not to mention the respectful mention of the American “Third Force” puppet President Ngo Dinh Diem, which is tacked on at the end of the credits.
In Mankiewicz’s film, Fowler signals to Pyle’s murderers that their victim will soon be within their reach. As he does so he reads a passage from Othello in which Iago says:
Though I perchance am vicious in my guess,
As, I confess, it is my nature’s plague
To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy
Shapes faults that are not . . .
Pyle, supposedly ignorant of such things, instantly recognizes the passage, but Fowler sneers at him anyway. The quotation is very well-fitted to his act of jealous betrayal, based upon “faults that are not.” It is far, far better-suited to the scene than the peculiar passage from Arthur Hugh Clough’s bitter verse “How Pleasant it is to Have Money” which Fowler reads in the book. He also loses his girlfriend forever, despite persuading his Anglo-Catholic wife to divorce him (presumably a proper Catholic would not have given way). The final set-piece conversation between him and Inspector Vigot (beautifully played by Claude Dauphin), leaves him full of embarrassment and shame. In the end, shown up for a fool and a betrayer he is, rejected by his Vietnamese mistress as an unreliable liar, and detected as an accessory to murder, but let off prosecution, he wails (as he does at the end of the book) that he wishes he had someone to apologize to. Inspector Vigot mischievously offers to drive him to the Roman Catholic Cathedral, surely a rather good joke by Mankiewicz, at the expense of Greene, and his endless prosing about Catholic moral dilemmas.
And now I am safely home from the dirty, dangerous nights of Saigon. But I am sure I shall be back there again soon.
