Vietnam, 1952-55. Thomas Fowler is a cynical and weary middle-aged English journalist living in Saigon, reporting on uprisings against the French colonial grip. Into his life comes Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title. His attitudes are bookish and moral and clear-cut. In Pyle’s world there are no shadows. But Vietnam is all gray. He falls for Phuong, the young woman who keeps company with Fowler. He wants to save her, to elevate her from her life in Saigon. Because he is young, when he offers to marry her, Phuong sees better prospects, and agrees. Fowler, who depends on her, strives to recapture the equilibrium of the indifferent – Pyle has got under his skin. Fowler would marry her himself, except that his estranged wife in London refuses to divorce him.
The plot is not the point. Pyle is murdered, and Fowler has his own reasons for being involved. Besides an undercurrent of rivalry, Fowler loathes Pyle’s methods, the young American’s clear conscience while he busies himself building up the Third Force which will usher in Democracy over the heads of the Communists and dictators. A bomb going off in a crowded square at the hour when the place is most crowded with women and children is simply an error of timing – the parade in which a few colonels would be blown up, was called off. Fowler is there, seeing the young mother holding her dead baby, the trishaw driver whose legs were blown off. Pyle arrives, complaining of the blood on his shoes and shrugging off maiming and death as an ancillary cost of his great cause.
Greene developed a degree of cynicism over a career spent in places where his privileges as a white Englishman set him apart – alienate him – without grounding him in faith nor honesty. He regards himself as a fraud, and thus recognizes it in those around him. Greene is thereby able to present us both Thomas Fowler, who stands in for his own views, and Alden Pyle, who despite his strait-laced awkwardness, eschewing booze and prostitutes, wields death as the tool put into his hands by those who sent him to Vietnam. He does not apologize: he believes in it, just as American officers would say a decade later, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
When Fowler makes a trip north and rides along on a French bombing run, he witnesses the pilot making a “vertical raid” in which he dives the plane thousands of feet, strafing and bombing as he goes, repeats the maneuver a dozen times, then as they return to the airstrip, blows a sampan out of the water because his instructions are to shoot anything on the river. That evening at an opium house, he addresses Fowler’s appalled reaction:
“You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night… But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.”
Where the film versions fall short is in their inability to convey Greene’s masterful writing. Here is Fowler’s first impression of Pyle, in a café in Saigon: “Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. 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 – I learnt that very soon – to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.”
Greene tells the story in reverse: almost the first thing we learn is that Pyle has been found murdered where he should not have ventured. Perhaps this is the novelist’s riposte to Pyle’s certainty – to start with his death, then explore what little of his life he spends in Vietnam, showing us what he might have learned and ultimately does not. Meanwhile, Fowler, his foil, tries to open the young idealist’s eyes. Fowler can’t hate him for taking Phuong – the Englishman already knows too much about impermanence – and can’t love him for saving his life during a Viet Minh attack in a rice paddy – he would have preferred just to die. But when Pyle accepts that the road to Democracy is necessarily paved with the innocent dead, that Fowler cannot ignore. Greene’s warning booms down the decades – have we learned anything? Can we? The Quiet American is as timely today as when it was written nearly seventy years ago.
