Читать книгу "There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War - Tom Burns - Страница 13

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.

Greene shows that such choices are never morally simple, as seen by the several ironies that evolve from Fowler’s decision and its consequences. Fowler must betray Pyle, who once saved his life, and he is motivated to do so by a sense of decency and a desire to prevent more violence. In a further irony, just as Fowler is about to lose everything, his life dramatically improves, as if he were being rewarded for his act: he is allowed by his newspaper to stay in Vietnam to cover the news now that Vietnam has heated up, and he can marry Phuong now that his wife has changed her mind and granted him a divorce.

As a narrative, this well-crafted novel has also been read as a detective story, a kind of fiction that is said to have attracted the author because it was concerned with “pursuing and ferreting out the truth” in an otherwise dubious moral universe.43 There are some of the usual conventions of crime fiction: a mystery surrounding a murder, the search for the truth, even a French police inspector, Vigot, who claims he is not Maigret.44 The reader learns that Pyle is dead at the beginning of the novel, which creates curiosity to discover what happened and “whodunit,” and there are also the required twists and turns in the plot, as well as a complex chronology, before the mystery is solved. In this case, the pursuit of the killer requires the detective-narrator (Fowler) to tell the story in retrospect, without ferreting out the truth in the classic sense of crime fiction, since it turns out that he is also the “killer.” While a full confession to Vigot (as the conventions demand) is withheld, Fowler is able to reconstruct his story at the end for himself and the reader. Despite these apparent conventions, reading the novel as a crime fiction turns out to be not very illuminating, because Pyle’s murder is not revenge, one of the familiar motives of murder-mysteries, and Fowler is not a fugitive from the law but from his own disturbed knowledge.45

As a character, Alden Pyle is an aggregation of some negative qualities that Greene evidently thinks are wrong with American culture. One presumed national trait is Pyle’s lack of any sense of irony, which often makes for comic misunderstandings between him and the ironic Fowler. Another is his preference for mythical history. Talking to Fowler about his first dog, “Prince,” Pyle tells him that he named the creature after the Black Prince,

“You know, the fellow who…”

“Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“The history books gloss it over” (72).

In the context of the climactic bombing episode, this allusion makes a moral as well as an historical point.

Another trait, Pyle’s political naiveté (he is hardly “innocent,” as often described by critics), leads him to place his hope in the Cao Dai sect, even though Fowler warns him that the French do not trust its followers. Pyle’s reply, that a “man becomes trustworthy when you trust him,” makes Fowler think that the reply itself “sounded like a Caodaist maxim.” Greene evidently intends for his novel to expose the dangers of so-called “American innocence” and the national preference for myth over history. Successful intervention in a foreign civil war depends on knowledge, as opposed to mere “intelligence.” The lack of knowledge, “innocence” (to quote Fowler) “becomes a kind of insanity” (162). In this reading, Greene’s novel is more an indictment of cultural ignorance and political shortsightedness that often results in dangerous national policies than simply a negative portrait of a well-meaning but misguided individual.

Accordingly, upon publication of his novel, Greene was widely accused of being anti-American. In one hysterical editorial, for example, the middle-brow magazine The Saturday Evening Post, characterized the novel as “Hate-America Propaganda.” Even the respected journalist A.J. Liebling, reviewing the novel in the highbrow magazine The New Yorker took Greene to task for America-bashing.46 Greene was accused by a number of people of believing that “America is the symbol of all that has gone wrong: materialism, godlessness, adult innocence, neutrality.”47 And yet Greene, whose anti-Americanism was political, need not be confused with his character Fowler, who finds certain aspects of American mainstream culture vacuous, a critique that, in any case, American writers and cultural critics—Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, to name the most distinguished—have been making about their country since the nineteenth century.

Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love would, of course, include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to hell with everybody (62).

The petulance here is Fowler’s, but that final sentence, with its suggestion of an independent foreign policy whose moral certainties disregarded the opinion of the rest of the world, was precisely how the US proceeded when it became involved in Vietnam.48 It should also be noted that Fowler is aware of his anti-American sentiments and their connection with his jealousy of his rival. In talking to Phuong, he confesses:

I began—almost unconsciously—to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends, who were ready enough to share my antipathies (138-139).

In another episode, however, Fowler’s anti-American antipathy is ill-conceived. At a Press Conference in Hanoi, “a too beautiful” French colonel is briefing the correspondents, weaving “his web of evasion,” but the loutish American correspondent Granger persists in asking why the colonel refuses to give out the number of French casualties: “Is the colonel seriously telling us…that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?” (63). Granger presses his questions and the colonel gradually loses his patience even to the point of accusing the Americans of not sending more material aid (which was the gist of General de Lattre’s complaint to Truman and Acheson when he visited the US shortly before his death). Fowler is critical of Granger’s “bullying voice” and behavior as inappropriate and aggressive, believing that Granger resented the colonel for not looking like “a man’s man,” as if the colonel’s beauty and the correspondent’s vulgarity are more relevant than their arguments. Granger’s personality aside, a more critical and aggressive American press corps early in the war might well have made it more embarrassing for US officials to weave their own web of evasion.

John Pratt argues that accusations of Greene’s anti-Americanism must be tempered by the favorable critical comment on the novel in a number of American periodicals.49 In the decade following publication, the novel was widely read and accepted by the American public, which by that time had a more realistic understanding of the American commitment. A more serious accusation was a factual one: the attack on Greene’s novel for being defamatory, specifically with respect to American responsibility for the explosion in the center of Saigon, in which (the historian Robert D. Schulzinger claims) the US was never proven to be involved.50 By way of reply, Greene, in his introduction to the 1973 edition of the novel, cites several hushed up incidents that implicate American Foreign Service personnel in terrorist acts.51

One of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Byron’s Don Juan (1819-24), every line of which is relevant to the American presence in Vietnam:

This is the patent age of new inventions

For killing bodies and for saving souls,

All propagated with the best intentions.

For new inventions, read dependence on technological weaponry; for saving souls, read “winning hearts and minds”; for best intentions, read “containment.” The novel is prescient at several points. Fowler’s description of what the French were up against in the north sounds very much like what the Americans would encounter in the south: “A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress” (23). Civilian casualties and the omissions and false reports of the press, which kept the American public in ignorance about the real progress of the war later on, are also a part of the conflict represented in the novel. At one point, Granger candidly admits what reporting the war in northern Vietnam is like, a routine in which perceptions are carefully controlled by the French military:

I fly to Hanoi airport. They give us a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then we have a Press Conference and a colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at. Then we file our cables with the censor. Then we have drinks.” (34)

Fowler, on an unauthorized journey to Phat Diem in the north, realizes the impossibility of writing about the results of a guerrilla attack on the city, which he can see for himself: “Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories” (47). The expectation of contact is similarly frustrating. As Fowler waits anxiously for an attack to begin, two shots are fired and he thinks “this is it,” but the victims turn out to be only a woman and her six year old son: “’Malchance,’ the lieutenant said” (52).

Another important aspect, not only of the Vietnam War but of any war, is how the novel shows that the “truth” about what actually happens depends upon who controls the interpretation. When Fowler asks the French lieutenant in command of the Foreign Legion unit to which he attaches himself how much longer the battle will last, the lieutenant replies: “This is just a diversion. If we can hold out with no more help than we got two days ago, it is, one may say, a victory” (54).

The journey Fowler takes, which is unauthorized and therefore the first important departure from his stance as an uninvolved reporter, wakes him up to the reality of the military situation as well as its human costs. When the soldiers have to cross the canal, it is so clogged with the bodies of people who had been caught in a crossfire that the punt becomes stuck. Fowler’s description is revealingly non-journalistic: “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and as anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy” (50-51).

These experiences gradually undermine Fowler’s resolve to remain aloof, and yet he is aware that the moral indignation that has moved him to act against Pyle has personal, legal, and political implications—he will have to dissimulate with Vigot, whom he likes, and aid the Viet Minh, whom he does not know. Because of this moral dilemma, political readings have generally been less important in the vast critical literature that has accumulated around the novel than might be expected. According to Jim Neilson, a Marxist critic who analyzed the critical reception of The Quiet American over several decades, readings of the novel have moved “from a defense against charges that Greene was anti-American and a focus on existential and Christian themes to a recognition of Greene’s prescience and an interest in his race and gender constructions.”52 All these thematic emphases, according to Neilson, have obscured the political meanings. It is to be expected that criticism of a major writer’s fiction would try to make connections among his various works—hence, the obsessive critical concern with existentialist choice and the dark side of Greene’s moral universe—but Neilson is surely right to be impatient with the critical insistence on such readings in the post-Vietnam climate, where the political (and moral) issues of American intervention are so relevant.

One notorious political reading was the first film adaptation by Joseph Mankiewicz (1958), filmed in Saigon, which altered certain details, as well as the ending of the novel, to make the story more suitable to Cold War sensibilities. For example, when Fowler reads the book before his window—the signal to go ahead with Pyle’s murder—he reads a passage from Othello (rather than Kipling, as in the novel), to suggest that his motive is jealous revenge rather than moral indignation at Pyle’s political activity. And at the end of the film, Vigot proves to Fowler that Pyle was innocent of the bombing; it was really perpetrated by the Communists.53

Greene was unsurprisingly angry at this willful distortion, as were the British reviewers of the film, but Mankiewicz offered no apologies, even claiming that Fowler was one of those “ice-blooded intellectuals…whose intellectuality is really just a mask for completely irrational passion,”54 which makes nonsense not only of the character but of his moral dilemma in the novel. The distortion of the novel’s politics is not confined to conservative interpretations, according to Neilson, who complains that even liberal political readings of the novel “have continued to read American foreign policy as well-intentioned,”55 which is most likely due to the liberal politics of most literary critics. In Neilson’s Marxist reading, American policy in Vietnam was not the result of well-intentioned but misguided innocence (as he claims even Greene seemed to think), but “a logical and necessary means of maintaining capitalist hegemony.”56 Neilson cites Haim Gordon’s book on Greene to support an interpretation in which The Quiet American can be seen as exposing the horrors perpetrated by the US government “in its greed and lust for power,” and how these horrors have been “instigated, supported, and covered up by the western powers.”57 What seems clear, in any event, is that as long as the Vietnam War inspires the writing of fictional works and provokes both literary and political debate, Greene’s seminal novel will be at the center of these discussions.