"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

When the first important novel in English about Vietnam was written, Greene’s The Quiet American, the United States had not yet arrived there in force. The novel’s setting is Saigon in the final years of French colonial rule in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu. Internal evidence suggests that the events of the novel take place in 1951-1952, since at one point the narrator, Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent, observes that any news he might report will go unnoticed because everyone now wants to read about the Korean War.23 There is also a reference in the text to “de Lattre” (114), that is, Commanding General Jean de Lattre Tassigny, who died of cancer in January 1952, after a trip to the US to plead for an increase of American aid.24

At this point in time, the Americans were not yet militarily involved but were giving the French material aid, including arms, to prosecute the colonial war. Fowler at one point watches American bombers being unloaded on the docks (the US began subsidizing the French military effort in 1950).25 Characters in the novel are constantly aware that large areas of the country, even the other side of the river in Saigon, are controlled by the Vietminh, whose clandestine organization seems to have ubiquitous eyes and ears, as well as closed mouths. With reference to the Viet Minh agent whom Fowler meets, for example, “everybody here knew all about Mr Muoi, but the police had no key which would unlock their confidence” (142).

It has been assumed by most commentators that Landsdale was the model for Greene’s title character, the operative Alden Pyle—notably, Charles Currey, in his biography: Edward Landsdale: The Unquiet American (1988).26 Charles J. Gaspar’s entry on the novel in the Vietnam Encyclopedia, on the other hand, argues that Pyle is a composite figure, blending Landsdale with Leo Hochstetter, a member of the American legation in Saigon.27 Judith Adamson, in her critical study of Greene, argues that the real-life model for Pyle was an American attached to an economic aid mission (perhaps Hochstetter, although he is not named), who once shared a room with Greene and lectured him on the necessity of creating a “third force” in Vietnam that he thought might be led by the self-styled General Thé, as actually occurs in the novel.28 Greene himself comments on this encounter in his memoir Ways of Escape (1980). He assumed that the man in question worked for the CIA but noted that his “companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story—he was a man of more intelligence and less innocence.”29

The long-running, back-and-forth controversy over a positive identification of Landsdale as Pyle is perhaps best illustrated by John Clark Pratt, who, in an early commentary on Vietnam War fiction, wrote that Pyle was “unmistakably modelled on Landsdale,” who was also the model for “a major character” in at least two other novels.30 In a footnote, Pratt added that “Landsdale believes he was the model,” because in 1983, he told Pratt (who was, like Landsdale, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Air-Force) that he thought he was the model, noting that both he and Pyle owned dogs. In the Introduction (1996) to his critical edition of Greene’s novel, however, Pratt evidently changed his mind, pointing out that the historical context of the novel, the years 1951-1952, predates Landsdale’s actual arrival in Vietnam: one month (incognito) in June 1953, and then the two years that he headed the SMM in 1954-56.31

Greene, for his part, always denied that he knew Landsdale personally, commenting in an interview for the British Sunday Telegraph (in 1975) that he had “never had the misfortune to meet” him.32 Of course, Greene would not have to have actually met Landsdale in order to use him as a fictional model, only to have heard of him, but it is not altogether certain that the two men—despite Greene’s denial—did not meet. Pratt cites a letter apparently addressed to himself in which Landsdale mentions that the French hated the Cao Daist General Thé (who goes by his real name in the novel), for having had the popular French General Chanson killed: “I was his [Thé’s] American friend and the French used to mock me about him in the presence of Greene.”33 In an interview with his biographer, Charles Currey, Landsdale mentions at least one episode when such a thing happened, recalling that a group of French officers, with Greene among them, booed him at the Continental Hotel. And yet, as Pratt observes, even this evidence is suspect, because Landsdale did not actually meet Thé until 1954, by which time Greene had left Vietnam and was already at work on the novel.34

If the Landsdale-Pyle mystery will never be completely solved, it is likely that its origins have arisen, as Pratt suggests, from the legendary character of Landsdale’s “exploits in the Philippines and Vietnam after World War II [which] have provided not only historians but also journalists, novelists and filmmakers with material for their countless stories and myths.”35 That is to say, Landsdale’s exploits, not the man himself, may have served as any number of fictional models. Pratt, finally, neatly sums up both the inconclusiveness of the factual evidence and its ultimate insignificance when he comments that “given the outcome of the American presence in Vietnam, perhaps Landsdale should have been the model after all,”36 a recognition of Landsdale’s mythical, even metonymical presence in Vietnam for the Americans who came later. Decades after its publication, The Quiet American has continued to astonish readers with its prophetic vision of the disruptive American presence in Vietnam, which would only gradually be recorded in fiction and non-fiction by American writers. The “prescience” of the novel, as much as its artistry, has accordingly been celebrated by critics.37

The principal narrative voice and the moral conscience of the novel is Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English correspondent, who is rather burned out from personal disappointments in his past. Fowler has left his ex-wife, his lover, and England for the east, where he finds contentment in Saigon with his beautiful young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, and the nightly opium pipes that she prepares for him. Disenchanted rather than cynical, Fowler is a basically decent man who feels at home in the country (he frequently explains the “situation” there to foreign visitors), but he chooses to think of himself as an uninvolved, apolitical observer of the war, a mere “reporter.” He has no desire for an imminent promotion to an editorship in England, where he might have to produce “opinion,” and to leave Vietnam. ‘“I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed” (27). His eventual involvement becomes the moral and political crux of the novel.

Fowler befriends the newcomer Alden Pyle, an earnest son of a professor from strait-laced Boston, apparently eager, naïve, and idealistic, a young man of good intentions but little understanding. “With his gangly legs and crew-cut and wide campus gaze, he seemed incapable of harm” (16), Fowler observes. Pyle’s All-American boyishness seems out of place in the Euro-Asiatic culture of Saigon, once known as the “Paris of the Orient.” Rather, he “belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch and the chicken sandwiches on the Merchant limited” (19). Although Pyle insists in his polite, well-meaning manner that he has learned a lot from Fowler, Fowler perceives that Pyle has his own priorities, moral and political, which no contrary knowledge may be allowed to disturb: “I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East,” Fowler complains, “which he had known for as many months as I had years” (10). Nor is Pyle, who seems to think in grand abstractions, much of a listener. “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…to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world” (17). Even after some harrowing experiences in the country, Pyle remains “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance” (162).

Pyle’s manner and appearance, however, are deceptive. He pretends to work for a medical mission but is actually a CIA operative in charge of covert operations, and therefore far less innocent than Fowler imagines. The title of the novel, in one sense, refers to Pyle’s need for secrecy. Phuong is the first one to call him a “quiet American,” although evidently in a literal sense. With Pyle’s lack of French and her lack of English, he is unable to talk to her, but this quietness takes on a more sinister aspect when the reader later discovers that Pyle speaks fluent Vietnamese. Fowler personally likes Pyle for his quiet, respectful manner, so different from his loud and boorish compatriots, like the correspondent Granger, who gets stumbling drunk in public and sees any Vietnamese woman as “a piece of tail.” A more sympathetic character, Vigot, the French policeman who reads Pascal, says of Pyle after his death that he was “a very quiet American,” with the implication that his reserve was tactical rather than personal. With Fowler, however, Pyle is tediously loquacious, especially when expounding his political theories. He will become “quiet” only when terminally silenced by the Viet Minh, with the collaboration of Fowler himself.

Commentators have noted that Pyle and Fowler thematically represent the classic dichotomy of innocence and experience. The two men immediately find themselves in competition for the affection of the lovely Phuong, who is guided (“managed” is perhaps a more appropriate word) by her older sister, who, in the face of an uncertain future, wants her to have the financial security of a stable relationship with a foreigner. Before she met Fowler, Phuong worked as a hostess in a respectable dance-hall, and the threat of eventually slipping down into the desperate prostitution of the House of Five-Hundred Women, which survives on the trade of French soldiers, is a possibility that Pyle recognizes, and he claims that he wants to protect her. Angry at Pyle’s presumption, Fowler tells him that Phuong needs no protection because he is aware that her serene behavior does not quite disguise a hard-headed approach to her future prospects, including leaving him for Pyle. Her name, which means “Phoenix,” suggests that she will survive.

The problem for Fowler is that he can offer Phuong real affection and conversation (they speak French together) but only temporary security. Because his English wife will not grant him a divorce and because he may be recalled to England by his newspaper, a future with Phuong is doubly uncertain. Pyle, who falls in love with Phuong at first sight and is championed by the scheming older sister, thinks he can provide what Fowler lacks: youth, marriage, children, and a safe and stable future in the US. Because of the supposed language difficulty, however, his courtship of the lady comically depends on his rival. In his boy-scout-like ethical code, he feels that he must make his suit in a thoroughly above-board fashion, doing nothing behind Fowler’s back, which even includes asking Fowler to translate when he asks Phuong to leave Fowler for himself. Pyle’s first name, Alden, may be an allusion to—but a reversal of—the go-between role of John Alden, the favorite of the lady to whom he must plead the case for Miles Standish, in Longfellow’s narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).

Beyond the love triangle, the three main characters may also be read as representations of their respective cultures.38 Phuong, an oriental sexual fantasy for western white men (she is beautiful, quiet, and unobtrusive—“One always spoke of her like that in the third person as if she were not there” (44)—as well as sensual and pliant), I would suggest that she also represents the Vietnamese prize for competing western political projects. Fowler, in this reading, would be European colonialism, which wants to maintain possession. In one of their many arguments over the correct behavior of foreign powers in Vietnam, Fowler defends the French on the basis that they are “dying every day” in their colonial war, which at least removes empty abstractions from their policy: “I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it” (94), Fowler says, sounding like the French characters in Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever. He tells Pyle about the harm that the British did to their allies in Burma with “phony liberalism” and the concern for maintaining a good conscience. In a dialogue that suggests Phuong’s symbolic role, Pyle says he has Phuong’s own “best interests” at heart, which irritates Fowler with its egotism and naiveté: “I don’t care about her interests…I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than…look after her damned interests…If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone” (58). The Old World colonialist only wishes to use Phuong—the country and its resources—for his own benefit. The New World moralist wants to save her from herself.

Pyle would then represent the United States, newest player in the Indochina game for control over a small, obscure country, which will be blown out of proportion in the following quarter of a century into a major center of world conflict. He is inspired and guided by the writings of one York Harding, the author of several earnest works of political analysis, with titles like The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy, and The Role of the West. Pyle believes fervently in the “Third Force” that Harding champions: a national party or popular group that is neither colonialist nor Communist and that will be willing to fight the Viet Minh to ensure an American-style democracy in a united Vietnam. Harding’s character may be based on a professor of political science at Michigan State, Wesley Fischel, a friend of Diem and Landsdale, who proposed in books and articles political and economic strategies for the “modernization” (i.e. Americanization) of Vietnam in order to combat Communist influence there. One of his widely read articles, with an oxymoronic title, “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule,” was seriously discussed in academic journals.39

The intellectual Harding and his young disciple Pyle, now in the field in Southeast Asia to implement the master’s theories, base their plans of action on the Domino Theory, the belief that the fall of Indochina to Communism would bring about the immediate collapse of other neighboring nations. The theory is alluded to in a reference that shows that the argument was hardly new in the Fifties and that there were already skeptics about its relevance. In an argument with Pyle about what the Vietnamese people really want, Fowler claims that they only want food, peace, and no white men around telling them what to do. Pyle, the idealist, insists that what they do not want is Communism:

“If Indo-China goes…”

“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?” (93).

After the “loss” of China to Mao’s Communists in 1949, US policymakers were determined to prevent any further such losses in the global competition for dominance. Dulles, it will be recalled from the Introduction, was convinced that Ho was “an instrument of international Communism,” even though the Vietnamese revolution, contrary to continued American belief, was a genuine nationalist movement not controlled by either Moscow or Beijing.40 Where Pyle, and by implication the Americans, go wrong is in the assumption that while the French in Vietnam had failed by trying to perpetuate colonialism, Americans would succeed in providing a Third Force, “a viable, non-Communist alternative to the Vietminh.”41 What Fowler comes to believe may be summed up by Frances FitzGerald:

What was not so well appreciated by the Americans as by the French who had fought the war was that the new Vietnamese government [of Ho Chi Minh] had a stronger claim to legitimacy than did most governments in Southeast Asia, for it was the government that had mobilized the entire population, both urban elites and rural peasantry, to fight the war of national liberation.42

In the novel, the unlikely local candidate for implementing this alternative Third Force is the renegade General Thé, former Chief of Staff for the Cao Dai sect, which has taken to the hills. As Fowler tells Pyle, General Thé is “only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy” (156). Thé is what is now called a terrorist: his men bomb a café during the daytime in the center of Saigon. The bomb kills over fifty people, including a number of women and children, who are always present in town at that particular time of day. This act of terrorist provocation was actually planned by Pyle, who, as agent provocateur, intends to put the blame on the Communists in order to discredit them. Fowler has by now become sickened by all the violence he has witnessed in the war: “I know myself and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually” (113). The three final adverbs are to the point, for it is Fowler’s antipathy to senseless killing and his pity for the victims of acts that he has personally witnessed that make him morally different from Pyle, who is indifferent to his victims because they are simply abstractions that have got in the way of his master plan. When he sees their blood on his shoes, he cannot even recognize it for what it is:

“Blood, I said, ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’”

He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister” (161).

Pyle can only express regret that the explosion was not postponed once the scheduled parade was called off, at which Fowler remonstrates:

Do you expect General Thé to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s Press. You’ve put General Thé on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe” (162).

Pyle confesses that he has not dismissed Thé as number one American protégé even after this incident, but has only reprimanded him for his mistake in not postponing the bombing. “If he came to power with our help, we could rely on him” (174), Pyle explains, implying that the important thing is Thé’s anti-Communist stance, not his heinous acts. For Pyle, the plan takes precedence over the imperfect individuals chosen to execute it, just as the difficult and unpopular Diem would be regarded as the only hope for US planners a few years later. Outraged by Pyle’s part in the bombing and his inability to feel any moral responsibility, Fowler makes his existentialist choice to embrace commitment, reversing his earlier conviction of the need to stay uninvolved. Somewhat reluctantly, since his choice amounts to the betrayal of a friend, he agrees to set up Pyle for execution. “Sooner or later,” his contact Muoi reminds him, “one has to take sides if one is to remain human” (172)—an echo, although from the opposite side of the ideological fence, of the advice given Fowler by the French pilot, Captain Trouin.