The Quiet American, Innocence at large

Cultures across the world find innocence an endearing aspect of personality. This is innocence in its meaning of ‘freedom from guile or cunning,’ a synonym for simplicity. But Innocence is also a euphemism for foolish naivety.  Graham Greene says in his 1956 novel The Quiet American that in life one needs to be as much wary of innocence as of duplicity.

I read the book more than two decades ago. I found in the character of the protagonist, a most skillful portrait of innocence ever drawn in literature. Over the years, details of the plot vanished from memory, but the poignance, the humour, and the tragedy of Alden Pyle remained and rose occasionally, whenever I came across similar themes in my readings.

I read the book again, a few days back. My opinion that this is one of Greene’s finest was reaffirmed.

Greene was war-correspondent of The Times, based in Vietnam in 1951-1954. He drew extensively on his experiences to lend verisimilitude to his story. The 1956 novel, it is alleged, was conceived in October 1951. Greene was driving back to Saigon from a province accompanied by an American aid worker who lectured him on ‘third force in Vietnam.’

Book is widely acclaimed as a prescient war novel. I found the story multi-themed. It is a story of love unfolding in a war-ravaged country. It is also a tragic story of a middle-aged man, who has run away from a failed marriage under the guise of work. Afraid of the solitude that lies ahead, he finds love in a foreign land which appears to offer him a chimeric relief from the loneliness of old age. He is enough of a realist to know that his circumstances will not let him nurture this attachment for long. Narration of the innocent idealism of the protagonist which brings much destruction, is braided with other themes. Book is also a finely conceived murder mystery; alike Greene’s many other stories.

 

Thomas Fowler is the narrator, one of the three main characters in the story – others being Alden Pyle, the undercover CIA agent and Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese live-in lover.

Fowler, a foreign correspondent of an English paper, is based in Saigon. He has reported Vietnam war for two years.

French are fighting a losing war in Vietnam, trying to defend a doomed colonialism. Fowler has no illusions about the misery that war is wreaking on the country. He disinterestedly reports the war, refusing to take sides. He even desists, as he likes to believe, from arriving at an opinion: ‘It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder. I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.’

Fowler’s estranged wife is back home in England. Though he recognises that his philandering ways and dishonesty have caused his wife much pain and irreparably soured their relations, he suffers the ensuing dreariness in his life that is devoid of love.

Greene intertwines human drama – love of an ageing western man, caught in a miserable marriage, for a young Asian girl, her impending betrayal, and man’s deceits and lies to preserve her love – with the war narrative.

Fowler fills the void in his life with Phuong’s company. Phuong’s shrewd and calculating elder sister wants her to marry the best candidate among the expats, a marriage that will bring them money and status. She dispassionately weighs the merits and failing of each. Fowler knows his poor chances: his advanced years, his inability to marry Phuong because of his marriage, and his modest means. His catholic wife refuses to divorce him, and he fears the day he will have to return to England without Phuong: ‘From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever’.

Greene expertly depicts the pathos in this tender relation of a jaded, cynical, middle-aged man. In occasional, short sentences he describes how Phuong brings love in Fowler’s mundane life: ‘she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest. … To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow. … I put out my hand and touched her arm – their bones too were as fragile as a bird’s.’

Pyle is the Quiet American, a dreamy idealist, who sees the world through the concepts he has imbibed from people he considers expert in worldly matters. He has clear notions as to what is good and what bad. He refuses to believe the reality that does not agree with the image he has conjured of it. In Pyle, Greene has created one of the most interesting characters in literature. Here he describes Pyle’s credulous nature: ‘He never saw any thing he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. … 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’.

Pyle’s actual job is to support a third force in Vietnam, neither colonialism nor communism, that America thinks is the solution to its present predicament. Pyle has been in Vietnam only for few days, but he knows what is good for its people. He has read, and is devoted to, an American political thinker, York Harding. Harding has no real experience of Southeast Asia, but has authored many books on it like The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy, The Role of the West. Fowler is appalled by Pyle’s brash and dumb self-assuredness: ‘Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years. Democracy was another subject of his—he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.’

Greene gives Phuong a stereotypical character, dull and belittling: a beautiful, hare-brained, oriental girl. She is the young lover who prepares Fowler’s opium pipes when he wants to smoke, lets him make love to her when he desires, and finds joys in collecting silk scarves, seeing pictures of English monarchy in magazines, and watching sentimental movies. Greene, through Fowler, even denies her deep emotions of love: ‘They love in return for kindness, security, the presents you give them – they hate you for a blow or an injustice’.

 

Book begins when French police arrive at Fowler’s home to investigate Pyle’s murder.

Story unfolds as Fowler narrates his time in Vietnam since he met Pyle. Pyle had torpedoed in the tenuously calm life of Fowler a few months back. Allegedly, he is in Vietnam to work in the economic-aid division of American embassy. He befriends Fowler and seeks his help to understand the country better. Fowler’s cynical realism about the country does not penetrate Pyle’s idealism generated by York Harding.

Fowler once visits Phat Diem to witness a war. Pyle comes to see him here, amid the dangerous fight, to tell him that he is in love with Phuong, since the time he met her first. On being asked why couldn’t he wait till Fowler got back to Saigon, he answers that Fowler might have been killed at Phat Diem and then it would have been dishonourable for him to marry Phuong.

Fowler sees his world come crashing down. Pyle is unfazed. He cannot help being in love with Phuong and hates that she had to be Fowler’s girlfriend. He feels that the only course now is for them both to meet Phuong together and seek her choice: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused’. Fowler knows he is no match to Pyle as a prospective companion: Pyle can offer her marriage, children she loves, respectable life, youthful body, and a comfortable life. He is annoyed at this turn of fate and Pyle’s intrusion in his life. But Pyle insists on calling Fowler his best friend in Vietnam and thinks he is behaving extremely dignified: ‘There was a quality of implacable in Pyle. He had determined I was behaving well and I had to behave well. … He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance’.

Greene conceives many fascinating scenes with Fowler and Pyle. These are replete with witty, humorous, and easy-flowing dialogues.

Pyle and Fowler meet up again in a war zone. They are stranded in a guard-tower on a night, and discuss topics ranging from religion to sexual encounters. Tower is attacked by Viet Minh. Fowler breaks his ankle while running away and Pyle saves his life. Fowler witnesses Pyle’s nonchalance to danger and observes that ‘he was incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving pain he might cause others’.

Pyle’s naivete about world, his cockiness about what is right, his insistence to behave honourably, even in the most inclement situations, his belief that the world is as he has read in his books, and his steadfastness to follow these ideas verbatim, lends his character a peculiar aloofness, and a piquant innocence. Fowler feels that Pyle did not have to be in this warring country, but rather ‘he belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sand witches on the Merchant Limited’.

Fowler is witness to a series of bomb blasts in Saigon that kill many innocent bystanders. His contacts in the Viet Minh show him evidence that Pyle may be involved in these. Pyle has been courting Col The, a renegade commander, whom he wants to groom as the leader of his third force.

Fowler begins to doubt if it is possible to remain neutral for long in a war. He now feels that ‘sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human’.

He confronts Pyle and tries to reason with him that attempting to change the socio-political fabric of a country, of whom one knows nothing and where one is a stranger, can only lead to disaster. Pyle appears blasé and seems to convey that deaths of few uninvolved citizens are inconsequential when wars are being fought to carve a new future of a country.

Fowler is dumbfounded by this impregnable gullibility of Pyle. He tells Pyle, ‘I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.’  It occurs to him that ‘there was greater need to protect’ oneself from innocence, and though ‘Innocence always calls mutely for protection…we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it’. He wonders if ‘innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wondering the world, meaning no harm’.

Book ends with the scene that opened it. French police inspector Vigot, who reads Pascal in idle time at his office, comes to Fowler’s room, allegedly for a chat. He is closing the file on Pyle’s death for lack of any strong evidence. But he is perplexed by some facts he has unravelled during the investigations. Greene now, carefully unspools the mystery behind Pyle’s death, that he has only alluded to earlier.

Greene describes the life and work of foreign correspondents in Vietnam with derision, marked perspicacity, and a suave humour: ‘Periodically, after an engagement had been tidily finished and the casualties removed from the scene, they [expat reporters] would be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four hours’ flight away, addressed by the Commander-in-Chief [of French army], lodged for one night in a Press Camp where they boasted that the barman was the best in Indo-China, flown over the late battlefield at a height of 3,000 feet (the limit of a heavy machine-gun’s range) and then delivered safely and noisily back, like a school-treat, to the Continental Hotel in Saigon.’

There are short, alluring descriptions of the beautiful country: ‘The gold of the rice fields under  flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a life-time washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.’

And meticulous, brief sketches of even the minor characters: ‘He looked at me with the indifference gaze of a smoker: the sunken cheeks, the baby wrists, the arms of a small girl – many years and many pipes had been needed to whittle him down to these dimensions.’

 

Greene had foreseen the imminent dangers in American policy of imposing a political system, conceived in a foreign country, on an alien population with different culture and value system. America’s wars for democracy continue to this day, with equally devastating consequences. Afghanistan and Iraq were the latest victims of America’s gratuitous interference in other countries’ internal affairs of which America had no clue.

Greene was much feted by critics for his acute foresight. His prediction that American policies in Vietnam would be disastrous for both countries came to pass in a few years after the book was published.

American critics castigated Greene for disparaging American world-view in the book. Review of the book in New York Times correctly summed up the political message in the book: ‘The thesis is quite simply that America is a crassly materialistic and "innocent" nation with no understanding of other peoples. When her representatives intervene in other countries' affairs it causes only suffering. America should leave Asians to work out their own destinies, even when this means the victory of communism.’ And then lambasted him for harbouring such puerile notions and creating card-board characters cast in this image. Critic’s ire spilled over and he heaped opprobrium on Greene’s previous books too.

Greene did ridicule this American view. It is not unreasonable that his immaculately composed novel should rile an American patriot endlessly.

 

I never read The Quiet American only as a war novel which makes an astute political statement. I found in it a sublime commentary on human condition, love gurgling in the bosom of a dry-as-a-bone middle-aged cynic, a fascinating picture of innocence, and of course, the pointless horrors of wars. All these elements are inextricably mixed in the theme. I cannot discern what theme is in background and what in fore. As I close the book, a quiet satisfaction and a deep joy suffuse the mind, having experienced, once again, an exquisite work of creation.