"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

journalist A.J. Liebling, reviewing the novel in the highbrow magazine The New Yorker took Greene to task for America-bashing.46 Greene was accused by a number of people of believing that “America is the symbol of all that has gone wrong: materialism, godlessness, adult innocence, neutrality.”47 And yet Greene, whose anti-Americanism was political, need not be confused with his character Fowler, who finds certain aspects of American mainstream culture vacuous, a critique that, in any case, American writers and cultural critics—Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, to name the most distinguished—have been making about their country since the nineteenth century.

      Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love would, of course, include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to hell with everybody (62).

The petulance here is Fowler’s, but that final sentence, with its suggestion of an independent foreign policy whose moral certainties disregarded the opinion of the rest of the world, was precisely how the US proceeded when it became involved in Vietnam.48 It should also be noted that Fowler is aware of his anti-American sentiments and their connection with his jealousy of his rival. In talking to Phuong, he confesses:

      I began—almost unconsciously—to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends, who were ready enough to share my antipathies (138-139).

      In another episode, however, Fowler’s anti-American antipathy is ill-conceived. At a Press Conference in Hanoi, “a too beautiful” French colonel is briefing the correspondents, weaving “his web of evasion,” but the loutish American correspondent Granger persists in asking why the colonel refuses to give out the number of French casualties: “Is the colonel seriously telling us…that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?” (63). Granger presses his questions and the colonel gradually loses his patience even to the point of accusing the Americans of not sending more material aid (which was the gist of General de Lattre’s complaint to Truman and Acheson when he visited the US shortly before his death). Fowler is critical of Granger’s “bullying voice” and behavior as inappropriate and aggressive, believing that Granger resented the colonel for not looking like “a man’s man,” as if the colonel’s beauty and the correspondent’s vulgarity are more relevant than their arguments. Granger’s personality aside, a more critical and aggressive American press corps early in the war might well have made it more embarrassing for US officials to weave their own web of evasion.

John Pratt argues that accusations of Greene’s anti-Americanism must be tempered by the favorable critical comment on the novel in a number of American periodicals.49 In the decade following publication, the novel was widely read and accepted by the American public, which by that time had a more realistic understanding of the American commitment. A more serious accusation was a factual one: the attack on Greene’s novel for being defamatory, specifically with respect to American responsibility for the explosion in the center of Saigon, in which (the historian Robert D. Schulzinger claims) the US was never proven to be involved.50 By way of reply, Greene, in his introduction to the 1973 edition of the novel, cites several hushed up incidents that implicate American Foreign Service personnel in terrorist acts.51

      One of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Byron’s Don Juan (1819-24), every line of which is relevant to the American presence in Vietnam:

      This is the patent age of new inventions

      For killing bodies and for saving souls,

      All propagated with the best intentions.

      For new inventions, read dependence on technological weaponry; for saving souls, read “winning hearts and minds”; for best intentions, read “containment.” The novel is prescient at several points. Fowler’s description of what the French were up against in the north sounds very much like what the Americans would encounter in the south: “A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress” (23). Civilian casualties and the omissions and false reports of the press, which kept the American public in ignorance about the real progress of the war later on, are also a part of the conflict represented in the novel. At one point, Granger candidly admits what reporting the war in northern Vietnam is like, a routine in which perceptions are carefully controlled by the French military:

      I fly to Hanoi airport. They give us a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then we have a Press Conference and a colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at. Then we file our cables with the censor. Then we have drinks.” (34)

      Fowler, on an unauthorized journey to Phat Diem in the north, realizes the impossibility of writing about the results of a guerrilla attack on the city, which he can see for himself: “Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories” (47). The expectation of contact is similarly frustrating. As Fowler waits anxiously for an attack to begin, two shots are fired and he thinks “this is it,” but the victims turn out to be only a woman and her six year old son: “’Malchance,’ the lieutenant said” (52).

      Another important aspect, not only of the Vietnam War but of any war, is how the novel shows that the “truth” about what actually happens depends upon who controls the interpretation. When Fowler asks the French lieutenant in command of the Foreign Legion unit to which he attaches himself how much longer the battle will last, the lieutenant replies: “This is just a diversion. If we can hold out with no more help than we got two days ago, it is, one may say, a victory” (54).

      The journey Fowler takes, which is unauthorized and therefore the first important departure from his stance as an uninvolved reporter, wakes him up to the reality of the military situation as well as its human costs. When the soldiers have to cross the canal, it is so clogged with the bodies of people who had been caught in a crossfire that the punt becomes stuck. Fowler’s description is revealingly non-journalistic: “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and as anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy” (50-51).

These experiences gradually undermine Fowler’s resolve to remain aloof, and yet he is aware that the moral indignation that has moved him to act against Pyle has personal, legal, and political implications—he will have to dissimulate with Vigot, whom he likes, and aid the Viet Minh, whom he does not know. Because of this moral dilemma, political readings have generally been less important in the vast critical literature that has accumulated around the novel than might be expected. According to Jim Neilson, a Marxist critic who analyzed the critical reception of The Quiet American over several decades, readings of the novel have moved “from a defense against charges that Greene was anti-American and a focus on existential and Christian themes to a recognition of Greene’s prescience and an interest in his race and gender constructions.”52 All these thematic emphases, according to Neilson, have obscured the political meanings. It is to be expected that criticism of a major writer’s fiction would try to make connections