Liberal consciences
Richard West
The English journalist is briefing Pyle, the Quiet American. in Vietnam 25 year ago.
I began, while he watched me intently like a prize pupil, by explaining the situation in the north, in Tonkin, where the French in those days were hanging on to the delta of the Red River, which contained Hanoi and the only northern port, Haiphong. Here most of the rice was grown, and when the harvest was ready the annual battle of the rice always began. 'That's the north', I said, 'The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don't come to help the Vietminh.'
Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American between March 1952 and June 1955, during which period France lost North Vietnam to the Communists and left the South to the Nationalists under Diem. Even 25 years ago the Vietnamese had been fighting as long as anyone could remember, against the French, the Japanese, the British, the French once more; French Governments in Paris had fallen because of Vietnam as long ago as 1 885 and as recently as 1954, on both occasions because of defeats by the northern border, where Vietnam is now fighting China. The Contintental Hotel, where Fowler first meets Pyle, began as a French military mess in the 1850s; in the 1930s it was a haunt of the French journalists sent to cover the first communist uprising; it stayed a haunt of the journalists up till May 1975 when it became once more a military mess, this time for the " North Vietnamese army.
About ten years ago, when I was making a TV 'film in a Mekong Delta village, the director asked me to quote from The Quiet American, which I did, causing one of the critics to say that I saw the country with second-hand imagination. The truth is that we did all see Vietnam through the eyes of Greene, because he had got the place and its politics so exactly right.
For one thing The Quiet American is a very good book about journalists, although possibly Greene was a little unfair to the Americans of our fraternity. And Greene, unlike almost every other foreigner who has written about Vietnam, actually loved the place and the people. This is expressed in the rapture of the protagonist, lying besides his Annamite mistress and thinking 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 besides the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home'. Yes, there was more to Vietnam than journalism.
Because so many of Greene's novels are set in tropical, nasty places — the Congo, Sierra Leone and southern Mexico — some people imagine that Vietnam too was part of his hellish geography. Quite the contrary, it was, in spite of the endless war, a place of sensuous beauty, peopled by French and Vietnamese, two races that he admired.
The Quiet American can be enjoyed as a very affecting story of love and murder in an exotic setting (with echoes of Conrad's Victory, except that here the Heyst figure fights for and wins his woman). It is at the same time a very political book, though not of course a party tract. Because it is set in Vietnam and its villain is an American, this book is too easily seen as a forerunner of all the liberal-left-wing opposition to what became an American war, but this misses the point of why Greene feared and disliked the Quiet American, so ready to use murder and terror for his ideas.
It is Pyle not Fowler whose head is bursting with liberal-left-wing passion. In fact Fowler, like Greene himself at the time, was inclined to side with the French. Taxed by Pyle for his support of French colonialism, Fowler replies: 'Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourers — all right. I'm against him. He hasn't been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France I expect he'd beat his wife. I've seen a priest so poor he hasn't a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup — a wooden platter. I don't believe in God and yet I'm for that priest. Why don't you call that colonialism?
But Pyle has learned his politics from an absurd pundit called York Harding, and 'York says it's often the good administrators who make it hard to change a bad system'. To this Fowler replies in a memorable and prophetic speech: 'Anyway the French are dying every day — that's not a mental concept . . . They aren't leading these people on with halflies like your politicians — and ours. I've been in India, Pyle and I know the harm liberals do. We haven't a liberal party any more — liberalism's infected all the other 'The Quiet American' is published in the Collected Edition of Graham Greene (Heinemann& Bodley Head £3.50) and in paperback (Penguin 90p).
This is the first in an occasional series which will look afresh at formerly published books. parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience. I'd rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. 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.'
It was liberal Americans such as Pyle who later did most damage in Vietnam. They got into the war, like Pyle, to build a Third Force and establish democracy. They got out of the war because it offended the• liberal conscience, leaving their friends to massacre or re-education camps. Pyle, planting his bomb outside the Continental, was forerunner or Lyndon Johnson, who rained millions of bombs all over IndoChina; still with the best intentions. It was the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson who said, on invading Mexico that it was 'our duty to teach these people [the latin Americans] to elect good governments'.
In the course of that long discussion, at night in a watch-tower near Tay Ninh (an area that was attacked last year by Cambodia), Pyle and Fowler also debate what came to be known as the Domino Theory. Even Graham Greene could not predict that the Domino Theory would apply not to Siam, Malaya or Indonesia but northward to China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Ironically, York Harding's principal book, much quoted by Pyle, was called The Advance of Red China, a title much more appropriate now to Vietnam than it was in the 1950s. And are not the modern, real-life Pyles and York Hardings actually egging on Red China, their new-found ally, against the rival Communist states? Graham Greene is regarded now as a man of the Left: perhaps he would so regard himself; but his politics, as they come across in the novels, are not really definable in such terms. Unlike so many other writers of his age he did not get mixed up in the Spanish Civil War, going instead to Mexico to report on the persecution there of the Church. He has spent much time in Africa without becoming enthusiastic for black selfgovernment. He was interested in Vietnam when most of the outside world was more concerned with Korea. He has admired the left-wing dictator Castro and also the right-wing or non-political ruler of Panama, who has in common with Castro, an antipathy to the United States. While flirting alternately, or even the same time, with politics of the Left and Right, Graham Greene has not wavered in his dislike of liberalism, especially American liberalism. And who can say he was not right, at least in the The Quiet American, his most political book?
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