“That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

As if this book were not brilliant enough for its multi-layered plot and meaningful, carefully written prose, it was also a harbinger of the disaster awaiting the United State's involvement in Vietnam. If policy makers would have read this book and realized that they were consulting an oracle, many unnecessary deaths would have been avoided; many lives would have never been shattered, and the billions of dollars spent trying to destroy a mythical idea could have been spent advancing humanity in numerous more productive ways.

Instead of being lauded as a cautionary tale, the book was declared anti-American.

Alden Pyle, not the typical blustering, pushy American abroad but a rather quiet American, was in Vietnam. He wasn’t there to learn about the culture. He was there to figure out the best way to impose his Western point of view on a country in turmoil. He had been fully indoctrinated into the idea of American Exceptionalism. This was a strength because believing in oneself and a cause is essential to achieving success, but it was also a weakness because it potentially keeps an American from recognizing what has gone wrong for others will also go wrong for them. It also keeps an American from seeing the value in a foreign culture and that the concepts of others of what makes a wonderful life may be completely different from what Americans are being led to believe is an exceptional way of life.

Alden Pyle, in other words, was a very dangerous man.

Thomas Fowler was a world weary British journalist, addicted to opium, and living with a 20 year old Vietnamese woman named Phuong. There were some reverential descriptions by Fowler about his relationship with opium and Phuong dutifully serving him his pipe in a manner reminiscent of Japanese tea ceremonies. ”It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover. Now she was kneading the little ball of hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl and I could smell the opium. There is no smell like it.”

Fowler had found a simple way of life that made him way happier than I think he ever expected to be. He had a job that he understood. He had a reasonably nice apartment. He had a beautiful girlfriend who provided him with the comfort of companionship and sexual gratification. He didn’t need anything more than this.

With the arrival of Pyle, this nirvana existence was suddenly in jeopardy. Pyle became enamored with Phuong. Fowler had a dilemma which Pyle soon exploited in his quest to “save” Phuong from the lecherous clutches of this old world colonizer. I hadn’t really thought about it until this reading, but Pyle’s need to save Phuong was symbolic of the American belief that Europe was corrupt and only America could guide the world forward. Fowler was British and the French colonized Vietnam, but the Brits were the largest, “most successful” colonizers the world had ever seen.

Come with me little girl. I am pure of heart.

Fowler’s dilemma was a serious disadvantage, given that he was already married to a devoted Catholic woman back in England who did not want to divorce him. Fowler’s poignant letters to his wife to try and change her mind were revealing about his true feelings about Phuong. The reader might wonder if losing Phuong was just an inconvenience or he really did love her. ”Perhaps you will believe when I tell you that to lose her will be, for me, the beginning of death.” Fowler’s years of marriage had left he and his wife scarred and battered. A mere prick by one to the other would now bleed as heavily as a mortal wound.

Pyle was irritatingly trying to play fair in the tug of war over Phuong. Fowler had no such illusions about playing fair. He definitely subscribed to the adage, “All is fair in love and war.” This is Vietnam in the midst of a long struggle and love is always more poignant against the backdrop of war. Phuong’s more practical sister wanted her to go with Pyle because he was free to marry her. I kept thinking to myself as this love triangle unfolded that the one person whom we really didn’t know her feelings was Phuong. Fowler at several points accused Pyle of treating Phuong like a child, which was true. To Pyle, she was a mere child who must be saved from her circumstances. He was the white knight and sitting so high on his horse that one might wonder if he really wanted her or simply wanted her away from Fowler. The American Imperialist knew best. Out with the old and in with the new.

How far would Fowler go to win this battle with Pyle? By the end of the book, you will see.

The frustrating thing for Fowler was that he liked Pyle, and Pyle, despite his misgivings about Fowler, liked him as well. It is so much easier when our adversaries are asshats with few redeeming qualities. We can feel vindicated in our all consuming loathing of them. Under different circumstances, Fowler and Pyle might have been lifelong friends, but there were other things percolating that would keep them from being friends. What exactly was Pyle up to in Vietnam? And what did he mean about all this blathering about creating a third force? Fowler, in the course of his job, would have crippled the budding friendship by eventually revealing the truth, so alas, there really was no chance for Pyle and Fowler to walk off into the sunset together, conversing about the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Still I would want to ask Pyle, out of all the beautiful women in all of Vietnam, you had to pick mine?

So you can read this book at whatever depth you chose and still find it to be one of the best books you’ve ever read. I do believe this is my third read, and I made new connections and observations that I hadn’t with the previous two reads. It is such a powerful story for such a short book, proving that epic tales don’t have to come in whale size packages.

I want to thank my friend Lisa Lieberman for prompting this latest reading of The Quiet American. Her new book The Glass Forest is a tribute to Graham Greene’s novel. I have been wanting to reread The Quiet American for some time now, and her book release was the perfect excuse.

Lisa is giving away a free ebook of her first book, All the Wrong Places for the month of November as a lead up to the release of The Glass Forest on December 10th. Don’t miss out! Click this link to get your free book! All the Wrong Places Free eBook You must discover for yourself why I call her the Queen of the Hollywood Noir.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

'What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.' (p155) The crux of the story the crux of the entire sad history of nations trying to remake Southeast Asia in a Western image.

As I read The Quiet American, I felt myself sliding down a slippery path to a very messy era I remember all too well. I was 12 in 1960 so I was a teen as the build up of the American turn in Viet Nam occurred. Reading the comments of the French pilot, Captain Trouin, Fowler's thoughts on Pyle's "naive" but oh so intentional involvement, the story of General Thé. All these brought back memories of the nightly news, Walter Cronkite, Huntley & Brinkley. Of course we, the public, didn't know everything back then. It was long before the 24/7 news cycle. But the news and, particularly the photography, brought the attention of Americans to the war in a way the government would have preferred to prevent.

Earlier in the novel, Fowler the older reporter says of Pyle:


That was my first instinct---to protect him. It never
occurred to me that there was greater need to protect
myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when
we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it:
innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell,
wandering the world, meaning no harm. (p 29)


But there are other innocents involved too. As he thinks about his bid to get a divorce from his wife, who is back in England, Fowler reflects: I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. (p 110)

Are these two innocents to be equated? Does Greene intend that? I can't do that though the English language provides the same word for these two people in very different situations.

This was my first reading of The Quiet American and I found myself reliving some of those days around the TV in the mid 60s as we watched the news reports coming in from Viet Nam. Greene certainly did know that world and all the players. And he wrote this before major American involvement. It felt like I was hearing some of the same 1960s arguments on the page, indeed some of the same ones used today for exporting "democracy" around the world, whether they want it or not for, after all, "we" know what is best. Greene was a prescient writer who was able to see the future in the present and the past.

By the last page, I felt I was in an ethical morass. There were/are no winners here.

An excellent portrait in black and grey of the human nature, against the backdrop of Indochina
“With a roundway ticket courage becomes and intellectual excercise”

I was never very much interested in Vietnam but this book pulled me into Indochina just after the Second World War.

The book opens with the death of Pyle, a young idealistic American (“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”).
Thomas Fowler, the narrator and a British journalist on the run from his past, is asked to identify him by the authorities, that clearly think he is involved in some manner with the murder. Soon we discover why Fowler is seen by the authorities as a suspect: Phuong, the girlfriend of Fowler became the lover of Pyle. We dive into their past relationship and witness how Pyle develops himself from an infatuated and awkward friend of Fowler to a hero who ends up saving his life.
Even his relationship with Phuong is rooted in Pyle thinking he can offer her a better life than the older and still married Fowler, who is on the surface quite frank that he only wants to hang on to the relationship with Phuong because it is convenient and to save him from a lonely old age, but saint like Pyle has an other, darker side. For instance he says:
“They were only war victims, he said. It’s unfortunate, but you can’t always hit the mark. Anyway, they died for a just cause.”

A struggle between cynical realism and idealism, in respect to both the durability of relationships and the possibility to build a democracy in a foreign land, is fought out between Fowler on the one hand and Pyle on the other.

The French are losing grip on the situation in Indochina (the French soldiers all seem mighty reflective and prescient in this respect) and America is preparing to step up and back nationalistic elements. The implications of the war are gruesomely described in a combination of boring waiting and sudden bursts of violence and death, and the book picks up in speed from there. The atmosphere of French Vietnam is nicely characterised by Greene, with opium, beautiful girls and warm nights. Shadow games to bloodily destabilise the colonial power and combat the communists sit uneasy with the values Pyle seemingly espouses.

In the end Fowler can no longer be a bystander and makes a choice to engage with one of the parties to the bigger conflict playing out within Vietnam. The quality of the story is so high that his choice feels justified and right, much more than any other possible outcome. Greene successfully created morally gray and fascinating characters in Fowler and Pyle and even manages to give small side character Granger in the final pages of the book real depth and emotion. There is a bittersweet kind of happy end, and an elegant return to the first chapter, but I would not like to be in Fowler shoes and have felt his angst for the heavy decision he needed to make.

4.5 ⚖️ ⚖️ ⚖️ ⚖️ ⚖️
For certain when you turn the pages of a Graham Greene novel it’s like peeling an onion and once cut into, stimulation of your reader ducts is triggered.
This is a murder mystery with heavy substance as Greens’s themes and motifs of innocence, detachment, morality, and religion play out through the pages which keep you pondering long after finishing.

Protagonist Fowler thinks he has no bias, believes he has taken no side in the issues confronting him as a reporter in early 1950s Vietnam. He’s about to learn the hardest way what Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed:
"There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.”
His quiet American friend Pyle believes he is on the side with the solution and which we know, many more Americans will come to embrace with loud and disastrous consequences.
Fowler is no doubt modeled after Greene himself and his experiences as a war correspondent in French Indochina from 1951–1954. He was Orwellian in his foreshadowing of how future policies and events would play out.
I thought I had read this previously but must be mistaken. Though I did read a couple of his books in my 20s, the story and events depicted here would have made a memorable impact I’m sure. Rounded up out of respect for a truly gifted writer.

Wonderful book.

A love triangle between British journalist Thomas Fowler, American CIA agent Alden Pyle, and Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman plays out with a backdrop of the last days of French colonialism in Vietnam and the early days of the American involvement in the war.

Fowler is the novel’s narrator and chief protagonist, and his telling of the story moves back and forth in time. The novel indicates how the Americans would fare in Vietnam - the idealistic Pyle cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese, who obtain their revenge.

Greene was a war correspondent in French Indochina 1951–1954 and was apparently inspired to write the novel in October 1951 when driving back to Saigon from Ben Tre province.

The Vietnam War is an era that is all too real for me. If you lived through it, you will probably agree that, as a people, we never understood what we were doing, why we were there, or who we were “saving”. The French had already tried to remake Vietnam into a Western style democracy, and had failed entirely. This book takes place just at the passing of the baton--France has not quite given up, and America is beginning to think they have the solution.

That is the scene, but this book, as with all of Greene’s writings, is about more than its setting, it is about people. Fowler, Pyles and Phuong are representations of the three elements that are trying to mix in Vietnam, and they are as unable to do it as individuals as they were as nations. Neither of these men understands Phuong. I was struck that she was not a real or whole person to either of them and their “love” for her was as selfish as love could ever be. She, on the other hand, appears to accept them as they are, without trying overly much to understand them. I think she would tell you that they are too foreign to understand--and there is the rub, they are the foreigners, she is at home.

During one of their discussions, Fowler tells Pyle of the Vietnamese citizens: "They want enough rice,' I said, '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." Fowler has been at this game long enough to understand that what the outsiders want for Vietnam is not necessarily a reflection of what the Vietnamese themselves wish for. But, while he waivers in his view from moment to moment, even he seems to see the Vietnamese as too simple and childlike to make their own choices.

Pyle is never bothered with this struggle to see them as anything other than children, however. As the romantic imperialist, he is the guy who has all the solutions if these misguided people would just step out of his way and leave him in charge. Of course, he is deluded.

"I was to see many times that look of pain and disappointment touch his eyes and mouth when reality didn't match the romantic ideas he cherished, or when someone he loved or admired dropped below the impossible standard he had set."

The essential question raised by Greene might be how much do we count? As individuals? Do some count more than others? Should one decide the fate of many? Can you witness destruction and not become involved?

Near the end of the book, Fowler asks, "How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?"

Sadly, I don’t think we have answered that question yet.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

I assume that everyone for once in own life had to face such a moment that, though convinced about doing the right thing, felt nevertheless poorly and uncomfortably. How is it possible, we asked then, we acted righteously so why such bad feeling, such turbulence in our mind? We did a good choice so why this bile that fills our mouths? Why that need to rationalize our deeds? There was no other way, we say. But really? And this is a feeling Graham Greene leaves me with almost every time. Something that still bothers and troubles me and pours cold water over me, my whole self - confidence and well-being.

Because no matter how much we abide by our principles and sense of morality we constantly collide with the concept of the lesser evil and the common good, in short with situations that allow us or even encourage to justify our actions or omissions. And so is Thomas Fowler, somewhat cynical English reporter, for years residing in the East, whose life motto is to be not engaged . But is it really possibly to live without being involved? Thomas seems to care only for a few things in his life: willing body of young mistress in his bed and some pipes of opium to detach himself not only from the outside world, the whole thing takes place in the fifties during French-Vietnamese war, but also from own conscience. And one day in this more or less organized world enters the title quiet American, young and naïve impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance Alden Pyle, with his head stuffed with bookish knowledge and mouth packed with platitude on democracy and justice. He comes with his sense of mission to save the world and by the way of course falls in love with Fowler’s mistress.

One could say that it is a banal situation only wrapped up in exotic costume and cast in some unusual scenery to add some spice. You couldn't be more wrong since this collision of East with West, old with new, that clash between youth and maturity, experience and naivety Greene played masterfully. And in the end neither youthful idealism of Pyle nor disillusioned stoicism of Fowler allows anyone to remain nonaligned. There is always that moment one must espouse whose side we are on. Because in fact, no matter how much we turn our eyes and try to stay neutral, even though we choose our own side, it is always a pure act of being irretrievably engaged.

Let me start by saying: this book lives up to every good thing I've ever read about it, on pretty much every scale I might judge it by. And in less than 200 pages.

Greene's writing is phenomenal. A genius gift for combining observations about the intensely personal and the broadly political. For exploring the chasm between innocence and cynicism. To look into your soul and become comfortable with what you find there.

On innocence:
“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

On introspection:
“There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself...”

On world politics:
“They don't believe in anything either. 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."
"They want enough rice," I said. "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."

And in the background of all of is the jaw-dropping awareness of how intensely right was Greene's assessment of the situation in Vietnam in the mid-1950's, and how stupidly blind the American government was. The French debacle at Dien Bien Phu (about which Greene also wrote, and from a very close perspective) was actually happening in the same time period as this book. That should have been such an incredibly clear signal to the Americans to stay out of the area, and yet their righteousness prevented them from doing so.

Would that this book had been required reading for all of the American decision makers in the 50's, 60's and 70's. It could have saved the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans - and over 3 million others. And the readers would have enjoyed a stellar literary experience.

Greene intertwines two mirror image triangular relationships in early 1950’s Viet Nam. The fictional plot is centered on a real event, a car bombing in a busy downtown Saigon square in January 1952. The French Sûreté blamed the rogue nationalist Colonel Thế. The American mission blamed the Viet Minh. Greene was a war correspondent based in Saigon at the time and many scenes in the book are drawn from things he witnessed. He started writing the book in March 1952.

Greene’s first triangle is personal. The young impetuous American Alden Pyle falls in love with Phuong, the beautiful Vietnamese mistress of English reporter Thomas Fowler. The second triangle is national. Headstrong CIA Agent, Alden Pyle, leads an American attempt to establish a third force led by Colonel Thế against both the French and the Viet Minh. The same values and motives underlie both situations.

The first side of the triangles is the self-indulgent Thomas Fowler. Fowler is in love with Phuong but keeps her as his mistress since he is married although separated from his wife in England. He has a cynical view of the war, the desires of the Vietnamese people and of Phuong, who he uses just as Viet Nam is used by its European master. Fowler sees no morality on any side, the French, the Viet Minh or the American. His motto is just let it be, interference just adds to the death and injured toll and accomplishes nothing. His views are those of the colonial rulers who see their empires collapsing and take refuge in their smugness and legacy of privilege.

The second side of the triangles is the impulsive Alden Pyle, who offers to marry Phuong and take her away from the decadent Fowler and chaotic Viet Nam to his home in Boston where he believes she will thrive as a middle class housewife. Also for the purest of motives he hopes to launch a third force in the war to do away with both the evil communists and the colonial puppet government and bring democracy to the Vietnamese. Pyle is portrayed as too simple to see Phuong’s true nature - that she would not fit in conventional New England. Similarly he is shown as too simple to understand the complexities of the Vietnamese people and the war - that American style democracy would not work in their culture.

The third side of the triangles is Phuong, but we only get Fowler’s jaded picture. Just as Greene portrays his idea of a prototypical American (albeit very fitting as events turned out) so he gives us his conception of a prototypical Asian woman who never reveals her true self - mysterious and alluring, always accommodating, but underneath clever and pragmatic. Fowler needs Phuong to light his opium pipes and take care of him as he grows old, just as England and France need the colonies to support them as they decline. He sees Phuong as someone interested solely in security. Young and handsome or old and paunchy does not matter, only who will provide for her and be reliable.

Greene’s book tells us as much about Greene, as it does about Viet Nam, its people and the war. He was in MI6 during WWII, reporting to his friend secret Soviet agent Kim Philby. Some French officials suspected Greene was employed by MI6 while in Viet Nam, which he denied. He reported on the war for The Times and Le Figaro from 1951 -1954. Greene loved his time in Viet Nam and clearly patterned Fowler after himself. Greene particularly liked the restaurants, the nightlife, the opium, and the prostitutes. Oxford educated, aloof and self-absorbed, he reflects the British Empire’s administrative class alarm at upstart America’s interference in world affairs previously dominated by European powers. Fowler’s view of Phuong and by extension the Vietnamese represents Greene’s colonialist image of the Asian. Greene was right about America’s simplicity in getting involved in the Indochina war. However, his characterization of Phuong and the oriental is also simplistic - and racist as well. In spite of Greene’s presumptiveness and classist views, The Quiet American is well worth reading. Greene is a skillful writer giving us fine prose, a cleverly constructed plot and a vivid sense of an exotic time and place he knew well.

An interesting aside is the plot change in the 1958 Joseph Mankiewicz movie made to assuage politically powerful pro Diem activist groups in the US. Diem had strong support from the likes of Henry Luce and Cardinal Spellman. In the novel Greene had the American (Alden Pyle) arrange the bombing to help create a third force. American diplomats Greene knew were discussing a third force strategy at the time the novel was written. Mankiewicz instead made the English reporter, Fowler, a communist dupe who helps the communists plan the bombing. Needless to say Greene was very upset by the switch which completely changed the novel’s message calling it “a propaganda film for America”. The 2002 remake is more faithful to the novel’s plot. While Greene later recanted his support for the French, he never changed his opinion of America or America’s responsibility for the 1952 bombing.

“I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, ‘Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.’ That was my first instinct – to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we should be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm…”
-tGraham Greene, The Quiet American


Even if it had no lasting literary merit, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American would have its place in the canon of prophetic novels. At the time it was published in 1955, Vietnam had only recently emerged from the First Indochina War, which had ended France’s long colonial rule. Following the 1954 Geneva Conference, the country had been partitioned between North and South, with elections scheduled for 1956.

Those elections were in the future when this book hit the shelves, as was the flood of American military advisors into South Vietnam, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Tet Offensive, the escape from Saigon, and the long black wall in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, Greene writes with a certain acute prescience about the general direction in which events were headed, especially with regard to the heightened involvement of the United States.

To be clear, The Quiet American’s elements of prophecy can be overstated. But it is to Greene’s credit that this feels like it was written in the late 1960s and early 70s, when all the mistakes were being made, instead of at an inflection point when all the mistakes might have been avoided.

Thankfully, for anyone picking up this slim novel, The Quiet American has plenty of literary merit. It is an allegorical work, the tale of a love triangle in which two foreign men vying for the affections of a Vietnamese woman comes to stand for much bigger things.

***

As with many allegories, there is a simplicity to the proceedings. There are only three major characters. The first is Thomas Fowler, the crusty, jaded British journalist who feels so archetypically familiar that if he was a pair of clothes, he would be your favorite sweatpants. Fowler narrates the novel in the first-person, though his version of events can sometimes be unreliable, and he does not really have the self-reflection to meditate on the irony of a man from Great Britain delivering pointed lectures on colonialism and imperialism.

Alden Pyle takes second billing in this drama. He is the titular American, an undercover CIA officer who – in a few more years – would have fit perfectly into John Kennedy’s New Frontier, one of “the best and the brightest,” a brilliant Harvard grad almost overflowing with pet ideas and grand theories, along with the idealism to believe that the proper application of those ideas and theories could solve just about any problem.

(According to legend, Pyle is based on General Edward Landsdale, a real-life proponent of guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency who showed up at many of the battlefields that littered the margins of the Cold War. This appears to be a misconception).

Caught in between Fowler and Pyle is Phuong, a beautiful young woman defined by her pragmatism. She’s with Fowler at the beginning of the novel, because he provides security and stability. She later shows a willingness to jettison Fowler for Pyle, for those same reasons. Perhaps it’s the fact that this saga is relayed from only Fowler’s perspective, or perhaps it’s because Phuong is both a person and a symbol, but I found her a bit underwritten.

***

Unsurprisingly, Fowler and Pyle’s relationship is tense. There is a certain admiration on Fowler’s part, but as a man who detests ideology, he comes to despise Pyle’s belief that there is a “Third Way” between Communism and colonialism. Fowler has some keen points as to why Pyle’s notions won’t work, but his observations are clouded by the fact that he is also upset that Pyle is crowding in on his girlfriend. The opacity of Fowler’s intentions are in keeping with the moral quagmire that is often a theme – and reality – of Vietnam-set stories.

Any plot summary in a novel this brisk threatens to give away too much. Suffice to say, the pacing is quick, the story beats are precisely timed, and the writing is just top-shelf. For instance, there is a great little scene of Fowler describing the failure of his marriage to a woman back in England:

Her pain struck at my pain: we were back at the old routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible to love without injury - fidelity isn't enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.

This is something of a throwaway moment, ancillary to the central plot, yet Greene imbues it with meaning.

***

The Quiet American’s reputation has only grown with time. As the United States waded ever deeper into an unpopular and devastating war, Greene’s book came to be seen as a masterpiece of anti-imperialism. Indeed, the very title has become a shorthand for a certain brand of American who is arrogantly unable to foresee the unintended consequences of his purportedly-good intentions.

It is quite possible that Greene has been given a bit too much credit for predicting the events to come. It is also debatable whether Pyle and his idealism is really a good stand-in for Vietnam-Era America. That is to say, there is a lot of evidence showing that the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, and its stubbornness in refusing to leave, was driven by factors other than a good faith belief that a radical paradigm change was likely.

The thing is, The Quiet American doesn’t need to have divination heaped on its somewhat slender shoulders to be worth your time. It takes the elements of a potboiler and polishes them with marvelous prose, a sharply realized setting, and memorably drawn characters, all this coming to a quick boil in a murky, ethically flexible environment where everyone’s motives are open to question.

RIPENESS IS ALL.
John Keats

The other day it occurred to me that this jarringly complex book was a wry attempt on Graham Greene’s part to defrock the dreaded americanos of The Power and Glory with an ironic image - the gregarious, wellmeaning, crewcut volunteers of that brave invention, the Peace Corps.

Greene was always so perplexed by the bizarre and continually morphing forms of violent behaviour in the world - and stymied by the fact that so many of the cleared paths open to it are paved by bystanders’ like Pyle’s innocent good intentions - that he became more and more obsessively predisposed to a sort of truculent silence, a retreat into his own less than virtuous anodynes.

He agreed wholeheartedly, at a rather morbid distance from orthodoxy, with T.S. Eliot’s image of the beleaguered and battered Word of God at the non-retaliative heart of existence:

We would see a sign!
The Word within the world
Unable to speak a word
Swaddled in darkness.
Signs are taken for wonders!
Against the Word
The unstilled world still whirled
About the Centre of the Silent Word.

The image of the crucifixion is central to the Catholic imagination, and Greene was imbued with it too.

So, drugged and dropped-out in his down-for-the-count habits, like the principal character of this novel - who is a world-weary opportunist - he distances the innocence of Pyle in much the same way as John Keats stylistically distances his own too-Personal experiences through the romance of literate and storied rhyme.

To Greene, Pyle is an overripe Aspie. Pyle's scent is overrripe - because he is innocent, enthusiastic, and hopelessly naive in the eyes of the smirking foot soldiers. I know that feeling, old Aspie that I am.

So does Greene, but he evades that damning appelation. And so did Keats: he evades it by distancing, Anthony Burgess' jaundiced view of him notwithstanding.

For Keats’ discovery of the literary device of distancing - you can see it in the mythical sense of chivalrous historicity imparted to a rather unworthily mundane act, in his St Agnes’ Eve - gave him a methodology to “glean (a collection of poetic images, jostling for their release from) his teeming brain;” AND as well to provide him with a catharsis of his own nagging sins in ‘confessional' writing.

So too, Greene ‘distances’ his own perverse personas in the manic phases of his bipolar disorder, AND gives voice to his personal mistrust of the US presence in Vietnam in one fell swoop: by creating the Quiet American, Pyle.

My third-year uni prof said distancing came to the foreground with the lyrical images of Wordsworth, notably in his ennobling segue from the sight of a young peasant girl working in the fields into a meditative digression into a timeless and and spaceless apotheosis of her lyricism, in The Solitary Reaper.

It’s a long, grim sludge for us, though, from the wheat fields of pastoral England to the napalmed black jungle of Vietnam.

The Quiet American is likewise, for Greene, the distancing of his own sordid presence amid the horrific American aporia of innocent intentions gone so abominably wrong, and the making of Pyle into a universal symbol as well as a fractured piece of himself as a great writer.

Mishaps dog the young Pyle in Vietnam.

As they did his country after a Quiet America entered its jungles.

For the young America had indeed entered Quietly into French Indochina - but would leave it injured and aged.

But the damaging self-inflicted wounds of its bungled innocence would prove long lasting.

Un triangolo circolare.

Da un lato il vecchio colonialismo francese, al cui mondo appartiene in un certo senso, pure essendo inglese eppure essendo emotivamente solo uno spettatore, anche Thomas Fowler, dall'altra gli esportatori di democrazia del Nuovo Mondo dei quali Pyle è l'impersonificazione vivente, al vertice la silenziosa e bella Phoung.
In mezzo l'Indocina, non ancora Vietnam, al crepuscolo del dominio occidentale, all'alba di un nuovo scenario politico, sospesa tra colonialismo e comunismo, in cerca, forse, di quella Terza Forza che gli Stati Uniti incoraggiano e anelano trovare.
Se non fosse questo il contesto, sarebbe il solito triangolo d'amore, anche se di 'solito', in questa storia in cui i sensi traditi sono quelli di Fowler, reporter inglese piuttosto âgée, spettatore disincantato di quanto avviene sotto i suoi occhi sia di uomo innamorato di Phuong, giovane vietnamita che la sorella vuole a tutti i costi sistemare con un matrimonio, che l'inglese non può offrirle, nonostante lei e Fowler vivano insieme già da tempo, che quelli del giornalista, capace di districarsi e muoversi nell'ombra in situazioni equivoche e pericolose e fiutarne l'odore anche se stordito e distratto dal suo dolore privato, anche se di 'solito', dicevo, non c'è proprio nulla.
Pyle sembra essere l'uomo giusto per tutti: per Phuong, per l'Indocina, forse anche per Fowler.
Solo un triangolo, quindi, eppure una volta giunti alla fine, alla fine del cerchio che si percorre attraverso il percorso mentale per il quale Fowler ci guida, attraversando notti fumose di oppio umide e fangose, ci si accorge che senza quel triangolo, forse, nulla di quanto succede in quei giorni in cui misteriose esplosione devastano Saigon seminando sangue e morte e terrore, sarebbe mai accaduto.

Pensai a Phuong proprio a causa della sua completa assenza da quel luogo. È sempre così: quando si fugge da un deserto, il silenzio ci urla nelle orecchie.