In June 1951, British novelist Graham Greene was cruising round the Mediterranean in a luxury yacht, the guest of movie producer Alexander Korda. By mid-month they had reached Greek waters.
“Last night we spent in Epidaurus Bay & went up to the Greek theatre for a concert,” Greene wrote to his American lover Catherine Walston. “First, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (which I liked perhaps because a faint idea for an Indochina novel stirred).”
Earlier that year, Greene had visited Indochina — the French colonial fusion of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia — to observe the war between France and Ho Chi Minh’s communist-led Vietminh nationalists, then in its fifth year. In Vietnam, the cockpit of the conflict, something unexpected happened to him: “I fell in love,” he later confessed, not with a person but a country.
Three more visits followed before The Quiet American, his Mozart-stirred, Vietnam-set novel, was published in Britain in December 1955 and in the United States early in 1956. Seventy years on, The Quiet American remains one of the most profound literary renderings of the politics of war ever written.
The novel not only provides a searing critique of US policy in Asia in the early Cold War but a pointer (prophetic at the time, uncanny in retrospect) to how the French war threatened to make a successor American war inevitable. Linking fiction and fact was the naivety and arrogance of US policymakers, first detected by Greene in the French period before being amplified to even greater tragic effect when America claimed Vietnam as its own battlefield.
A decade before President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) began bombing North Vietnam and dispatching hundreds of thousands of troops to South Vietnam, Greene could be found speaking truth to superpower. Within the parameters of his fictional tale, he warned of the dangers and consequences of America’s real-life bulldozing anti-communism in Asia and condemned US historical and cultural ignorance of…
Auteur: Kevin Ruane
