"The Quiet American" Still Fascinates

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Friday, January 30, 2003
On Film and in Print, 'The Quiet American' Still
Fascinates
By MARTIN F. NOLAN

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29 — On the frontispiece of "The
Quiet American," Graham Greene quotes another
well-traveled skeptic, Lord Byron: "This is the patent
age of new inventions/ For killing bodies, and for
saving souls,/ All propagated with the best
intentions." 

In novels, screenplays and short stories, Greene
chronicled the end of empire. Scorning those who stood
in history's way, he did not spare heroes, patriots or
the naïve. "God save us always from the innocent and
the good," Fowler, the jaded correspondent who
narrates "The Quiet American," says .... After critics
called Greene anti-American, Hollywood distorted "The
Quiet American" in 1958 with a heroically happy
ending. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Miramax postponed
the second film version until Sir Michael Caine, who
portrays Fowler, became persuasively unquiet.... 

The book endures, having served as a journalistic
guidebook, a prophecy and even a tourist icon. Banned
in Vietnam in the 1950's, "The Quiet American " is now
sold at kiosks in Ho Chi Minh City as a symbol of
local color, like "Moby Dick" on Nantucket or "Cannery
Row" in Monterey. The book heavily influenced
correspondents who covered the American war in the
1960's.... 

[...]

By the 1960's, the book had become "the equivalent of
what Napoleon suggested: a marshal's baton in every
corporal's knapsack," recalls David Greenway, who
covered the Vietnam War for Time and The Washington
Post. "Every reporter had one. Many carried 'The Quiet
American' and 'Scoop' by Evelyn Waugh." 

The British press bracketed Greene and Waugh as
"Catholic novelists" because both wrote morality-play
novels, but while Waugh celebrated military exploits,
Greene, who served in British intelligence during
World War II, did not. In 1956, American critics
failed to salute "The Quiet American" when it was
published in the United States.

[...]

In 1952, the year Greene writes about, some 300
Americans were in Vietnam. Fowler mocks policies that
would later send hundreds of thousands of G.I.'s into
the jungles and protesters onto American streets. "If
Indochina goes ——" argues the American, an undercover
government agent named Alden Pyle.

Fowler interrupts him: "I know that record. Siam goes.
Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does `go' mean? If I
believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my
future harp against your golden crown that in 500
years there may be no New York or London, but they'll
be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying
their produce to market on long poles, wearing their
pointed hats." 

[...]

Greene, who died at 86 in 1991, has been translated
onto the screen more than any 20th-century writer. His
closest rival is Rudyard Kipling....

[...]

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed and wrote the
screenplay for the 1958 movie of the novel, later
called it "the very bad film I made during a very
unhappy time in my life." But Jean-Luc Godard called
it the best movie of 1958.... 

The current version is not anti-American, Sir Michael
insists, but "anti the 300 to 400 people who started
America's entry into the Vietnam War." Sir Michael
describes himself as "the most pro-American foreigner
there is." ...

Greene's characters, in their staggering search for
redemption, often stockpile sin. While Fowler wallows
in opium, booze and brothels, he is uninterested in
nationalism, imperialism or Communism. For Greene, God
and guilt always trump politics and its affectations.

[...]

Fowler tells Pyle, "I wish sometimes you had a few bad
motives, you might understand a little more about
human beings." Greene occasionally wandered toward
good intentions himself. In 1953, he told Waugh that
he wanted to "write about politics and not always
about God." Waugh waspishly replied: "I wouldn't give
up writing about God at this stage if I was you. It
would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway
through the Wooster series."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/30/books/30GREE.html

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