I finally got around to reading Graham Greene's early Vietnam-era novel, The Quiet American, and wrote a newspaper column about "the sad fact that it remains as relevant in the age of terrorism and Iraq as it was a half-century ago...Greene saw our misunderstanding of the region into which we were preparing to barge as a guarantee of disaster."

The Quiet American goes to Baghdad

by Edward Cone
News & Record
7-15-07

Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" is one of those famous books that I never quite got around to reading. Having finally dispatched it this summer, I claim no fresh insight into the novel's meaning and message beyond the sad fact that it remains as relevant in the age of terrorism and Iraq as it was a half-century ago.

"The Quiet American" is set in Vietnam during the early 1950s, in the waning years of French colonialism. Greene began writing it before the epic siege of Dien Bien Phu and published it in 1955, just after that decisive French defeat, when the United States was still years away from large-scale involvement in the region. But Greene saw clearly that we were on our way to Southeast Asia in force and also that we could not prevail in a war we did not understand.

With remarkable prescience, the writer has one of his characters, a French bomber pilot named Trouin, voice the hard truth: "You know better than I do that we can't win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St Cyr [the French military academy] every year.... But we are professionals; we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years."

And Greene understood a central fact of the war that America had not yet entered, which some Americans still don't grasp more than three decades after our inglorious retreat: The grand geopolitical strategy we presumed to be behind the fighting was much less important to the home team than it was to us. Already, by 1955, Greene knew that many Vietnamese were motivated not by communism or anticommunism but by the desire to throw off the colonial yoke. And he knew that situation was untenable, even as the Americans first tried to use a local warlord's army to influence the course of events.

As Fowler, the world-weary British journalist who serves as Greene's narrator and alter-ego, says to the idealistic American agent, Pyle: "You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested."

"They don't want Communism," Pyle replies.

"They want enough rice," Fowler says. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want."

Greene saw our misunderstanding of the region into which we were preparing to barge as a guarantee of disaster. In one of the book's most famous scenes, Fowler talks to a French detective about Pyle's death. "They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lectures made a fool of him."

It's chilling to read those words four years into our current war in Iraq and to realize that we entered this war, too, without fully considering the complexities of the situation. Then, as now, our best intentions were not enough to keep us from blundering into a bloody mess in a faraway place. The news from Iraq, day after day, recalls the scene after Pyle's warlord ally carries out a bombing attack on civilians in a Saigon square, leaving Fowler to contemplate a mother holding her mutilated baby in her lap. "A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate," he thinks. "How many dead colonels justify a child's or a trishaw driver's death when you are building a national democratic front?"

Greene did not anticipate a happy ending. Fowler, the jaded voice of post-imperial Britain, recognizes in the Americans similar traits to the mother country -- and foresees similar disasters for the lands they conquer and eventually leave behind. "We go and invade the country; the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren't colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience... We shall do the same thing here. Encourage them and leave them with a little equipment..."

"The Quiet American" is a work of fiction that speaks truth. It should be required reading in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Too bad that hasn't been the case for the last five decades.

© News & Record 2007

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, [email protected]) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

Comments

[mc]

if you want to read something truly hair raising- read Robert McNamara's "The vietnam war: a retrospect" (the title might be slightly different than that).

[Cunningham]

Interesting editorial about a book worth revisiting. In the 2002 movie version, Pyle is not so innocent, which accords more with the evidence from the Pentagon Papers (e.g. the US gov never believed in the domino theory - it was about corporate hegemony; the US had saboteurs in Vietnam before Dien Bien Phu, etc.).
Another one for the prescience file: Malcolm X said in his famous 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" that "The white man can never win another war on the ground."

[Steve Flynn]

Powerful and meaningful column. Well done. I rarely mull over columns: but this one I certainly did.

[andy gould]

excellent column. excellent analogy.

[Bubba]

"'The Quiet American' is a work of fiction that speaks truth. It should be required reading in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Too bad that hasn't been the case for the last five decades."

Not quite, Ed

There's a good chance that Greene and this work had a hidden purpose beyond the lefty agenda and anti-American sentiment that they appeared to profess.

Excerpts regarding the politics involved:

"In his review of the book in the May 1956 issue of Commentary, Philip Rahv seconded Arnold's perception that the book is essentially detective fiction, and Noyce's movie makes this even clearer, with a closeup of the telltale dogpaw print in cement, etc. Consequently, Rahv didn't think it was worthwhile to get worked up about the political posturing in the book.

Diana Trilling responded to Rahv's review in the July 1956 issue by calling the book an example of the kind of neutralism in world affairs that often masked pro-Communism. Rahv answered that it was only a book, and that the opinions of Fowler, the first-person narrator, couldn't be directly attributed to Greene.

But if, like Rahv, you think the book is second-rate as a literary matter, then how are you to understand the political payload, which is delivered all the more cleanly?"

....but there's also this:

"Shelden's description of Greene's presence in Prague during the revolution of 1948, which Greene dishonestly claimed came about by chance, makes Greene sound less like Fowler and more like Pyle using his health relief mission for a cover: 'He could pretend to be a harmless author, not a spy, and could easily be forgiven for wandering the streets in search of local colour or of some curious literary connection which only he could appreciate. And there were publishers who wanted to see him, writers who wanted to discuss their works with him, admiring Catholics who wanted him to sign books. With so many reasonable excuses available, he could go almost anywhere and talk his way out of a tight spot.'

Greene doesn't come off as much more successful than Pyle, either, and far less idealistic, though he managed not to get himself killed over a girl. The overall assessment of his spying work is that he was 'amateurish but useful,' a 'dilettante,' and certainly interested in having his expenses paid after being flown all over the world.

As another SIS officer stated: 'Despite the money he makes out of making the great British public worry about its soul, he is extremely mercenary.'"

Given this information, the value you ascribe to "The Quiet American" is questionable, at best.

[Danny Wright]

Bubba, you cite an article from December, 2003 as your main rebuttal to Ed's point that the Vietnamese setting of "The Quiet American" has great similarity to the circumstances surrounding our entry into / presence in Iraq. Perhaps you could come up with a more relevant, recent article (one that takes into account, say, the past 3-4 years) that refutes this instead of simply finding a review that critiques Greene's biases.

The grand logic behind both US efforts is pretty much the same -- try to change another part of the world to serve our own interests without having much of a clue as to how local circumstances will affect the effort and outcome.

That is what Ed was speaking to, I believe.

[Bubba]

"That is what Ed was speaking to, I believe."

In that case, it would have been better said if he had used something other than "The Quiet American" as an example, based on the information provided above.

Any way you would care to analyze it, Greene's work is propaganda.

[Ed Cone]

Messenger-shooting is one of Bubba's hobbies. Arguing with him is a waste of pixels.

The messenger in this case was a major literary figure who published an eerily accurate and prescient view of the situation in Vietnam, with obvious implications unto and beyond the present day.

Going after Greene does nothing to change those facts.

[Fred Gregory]

Today in a post, on the NY Times and a Hamas terrorist Scott Johnson evokes memories of Sydney Schanberg's 1975 column on the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, "Indochina Without Americans:For Most, a better life" which was cited by Gabriel Schoenfeld in Was Kessinger Right ?

Certainly worth discussing along Green's book.

And of course there is the prescient Larry Johnson , ex-CIA expert who wrote a piece in the NY Times July 10, 2001 " The Declining Terorist Threat" , who like Schanberg got it wrong.

[Bubba]

"Going after Greene does nothing to change those facts."

In other words, you have nothing that validates your poor choice of an example to make your partisan point.

Good work, Ed.

We've come to expect that sort of thing from you.

[clara]

The Quiet American analogy: Vietnam= step into French colonialism quagmire, Iraq = step into British colonilism quaqmire.