The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  The Majestic stands on the banks of the Saigon river (the river smells when you get too close, and you get too close if you live there as Greene did). In Greene’s day it had an enormous bar; it still had in 1993, but the jazz pianist, who used to play the latest Parisian hits, has gone. Now, as then, ships are at anchor in front of the hotel, though two of them are tourist attractions – the tourists being chiefly Australian, not American or French.

  The once gracious rue Catinat, the street where Fowler and the beautiful Phuong lived and loved in The Quiet American, with its plane trees shading out the hot afternoon sun, is treeless now: the pavements cracked and heavily pock-marked. But Saigon in the 1950s was in the midst of war. In the downtown area civilians and military would congregate: the Majestic hotel was at one end of the rue Catinat, the Continental Palace hotel at the other, with no more than 300 yards between the two. The street was known as ‘Radio Catinat’ because war gossip flourished in the French cafés. There were chairs in the streets, civilians and soldiers relaxing over café au lait and croissants; minute bars where soldiers and sailors sat drinking cognac and Dubonnet. There was the aroma of French bread and the maisons de coiffeur, where the French women went to have their hair washed, combed and set – hopeless in a climate so humid. In the Place de Pagneau de Behaine by the great red-brick cathedral (which Greene found ugly), Vietnamese nuns, black robed, padded softly by. It seemed a peaceful world.

  *

  The Saigon river is only a few hundred yards wide and the countryside on the opposite shore was, in Greene’s day, controlled by the Vietminh, enemy country. Looking from the Majestic balcony, you can see launches plying back and forth. From the roof, beyond the riding lights of the ships, in the early 1950s you might have seen tracer bullets shooting across the sky, or the bombing of a village and its fiery end. ‘One trishaw driver pedalled slowly by towards the river-front and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes,’ wrote Greene in the first paragraph of The Quiet American.19 Unloading took place at night to disguise the fact that the military supplies were American – American insignia were quickly stripped from the planes and replaced with French.

  Life in the streets of Saigon remains much the same: families work from their little shops from dawn to dusk; carpenters chip away at sailing junks; tailors turn out a made-to-measure suit in twenty-four hours; Saigon’s beggars place their specially made crutches and their amputated arms or legs in your direct line of vision in the hope of money for another day’s existence.

  There was always fear of sudden attack by the Vietminh in the city. When Greene arrived it was thought that 15 per cent of the local Vietnamese were secret Vietminh supporters and activists – a ready-made fifth column (later the enemy within would increase three-fold). Saigon lived with the nightly terror of bomb explosions or grenade assaults – the assassin a mere boy on a bicycle cycling fast. One such killing took place at noon: there were two victims (one white, the other brown) and soon in the heat the flies began to circle the bodies. Seymour Topping, who knew Greene, recalled his first night in Saigon after booking into the Continental Palace hotel with his wife:

  We’d checked into the hotel after a long flight and had just sat down on the huge bed under a ceiling fan barely stirring the air, when a shattering explosion ripped the square under our windows. We rushed to look … A score of cyclo drivers who pedalled the bicycles (pushing the rickshaws ahead of them) were streaking away from the café in all directions. One of the cyclo drivers had thrown the plastic bomb. The cyclo drivers took off in all directions to divert the police. Thus the one that had actually thrown the bomb wouldn’t get caught. French soldiers and sailors, dead and wounded, lay amid overturned tables and shattered glass inside the café. Outside on the sidewalk terrace, where they’d been sitting sipping drinks, a badly wounded soldier gripping his groin stumbled into the street.20

  In response to the French resurgence, the Vietminh were escalating their terrorist campaign. De Lattre realised this would increase civilian deaths, but he was determined to shake up the police and judiciary. He had ‘“thrown out” the judge of the military tribunal who had been handing down acquittals for fear of Vietminh reprisals’,21 but the fear of the judges was entirely understandable. In response to the charge by Nguyen Van Tam, head of the Vietnamese Süreté, that he gave easy acquittals, one judge said: ‘I have nine children. Who will feed them if the Vietminh kill me because of my sentences?’22

  Saigon was an informers’ paradise. Tam, known as the Tiger of Cailay, was as ruthless as the Vietminh in meting out justice. When he discovered that his trusted secretary belonged to the Vietminh, he acted with extreme dispatch, executing him that evening. Vietminh agents were often summarily executed, their dead bodies left with a notice which read, ‘X is a communist murderer executed for his crimes.’ Those agents Tam didn’t have killed he passed over to the French military courts – he had no faith in the Vietnamese courts.23

  C. L. Sulzberger reported in the New York Times that almost daily some individual on the ‘death list’ of the Vietminh was murdered ‘by a chosen executioner who vanishes into a crowd past unarmed policemen. Hand grenades are rolled down movie aisles or pitched into unsuspecting groups of innocents.’ And Sulzberger gave a comic example of how people were reacting under the strain: ‘Early this month when retiring Premier Nguyen Phan Long and his successor Tran Van Huu were speaking at Saigon’s Town Hall a champagne cork popped and everyone ducked instinctively.’24

  Top military personnel were targeted for assassination. On 31 July 1951 General Chanson, a right-hand man of de Lattre’s, was killed by a 25-year-old member of a suicide battalion who ran suddenly towards him and the local provincial governor. A grenade exploded, killing all three.

  Abandoned corpses were often found and the killing never ceased. Greene himself recalled the case of a local girl who became a human bomb. She blew herself up, taking with her a party of sailors from a warship anchored in the Saigon river. Edmund Gullion recalled unexpectedly witnessing the assassination of the head of the French Sûreté on 28 April 1950:

  It was in the morning but I hadn’t come from my flat, and I walked by the square and I saw Bazin [the head of the Sûreté] just about to get into his car, and he was carrying this leather folder. And in front of him was another car parked with some Vietnamese in it. As he started to get into it, this other Vietnamese jumped out of the parked car right in front of him, holding an enormous revolver in two hands, the way they do in American movies now, two-handed, and pumped shots into his belly. I was right across the street from him, a narrow street, and I ducked behind a barber’s chair [in the open]. Then the assassin got into the car and drove away. The irony of it was that they were expecting some kind of ceremony and there was a French squad rehearsing for it, and I remember seeing this fellow go right past them – and he was never found.25

  Just before his death Bazin had told a French journalist: ‘Every day the Vietminh radio says, “Bazin, you are going to die.”’ He knew that his killers had already arrived in Saigon. He had hoped that he would get them before they got him.

  *

  Prostitutes still work the street near the cathedral and the Palace Norodom in Cholon, but in Greene’s day the district was populated by little opium dens and brothels, often housed together so you could move from one to another. The life of Cholon goes on all night, a chaos of noise and light. There is a tremendous sense of life; numberless Chinese live cheek by jowl. Greene went there to the whorehouses and to the opium dens; to the Palais de Jade and the Arc-en-Ciel for Chinese food and taxi girls. Here any eroticism could be catered for, everything could be bought or sold.

  An American friend, John Getz, who worked for the American legation and had been given the task of looking after Greene by Edmund Gullion took Greene to his first opium den (because Greene asked him to), although Seymour Topping also claimed that privilege.

  Greene dated his first opium experience as 31 October 1951 in
a letter to his mother: ‘had my first opium soirée (I rather liked it) and so back here [Hanoi] feeling quite recovered. The trouble however at present is that everything is pretty quiet & the French take far too much trouble about one’s personal security. Everybody is afraid of getting into a row if anything should happen – rather cramping.’26 After taking opium he had a dream in which religion and sex were inextricably linked.

  Going back in time to the year AD 1, Greene was living not far from Bethlehem and decided to walk to a small town to visit a brothel. He had with him a gold coin with which to pay the girl he chose. As he approached the town he saw a strange sight: a group of men in Eastern clothes bowing and offering gifts to a blank wall. Greene stood quite a while watching the strange scene and then something, he could not say what, impelled him to throw his coin at the wall and turn away. Time moved rapidly forward and he found himself lying on his bed reading in the New Testament about some Eastern kings coming to a stable in Bethlehem. He then realised that this was what he had seen. Greene’s first thought was: ‘Well, I went to Bethlehem to give that gold coin to a woman and it seems that I did in fact give it to a woman, even though all I saw was a blank wall.’27

  This was the beginning of Greene’s passion for opium. He never let it get out of hand, but as with alcohol he used opium to control his depression. In the detailed account in Ways of Escape, Greene indicated that his first experience occurred when he was taken to a small apartment in a back street by a French official: ‘I could smell the opium as I came up the stairs. It was like the first sight of a beautiful woman with whom one realizes that a relationship is possible: somebody whose memory will not be dimmed by a night’s sleep.’28

  Realising that Greene was a débutant, the madame insisted that he have only four pipes. This ensured that his first experience would not be spoilt by nausea from over-smoking. The atmosphere appealed to him:

  The ambiance won my heart at once – the hard couch, the leather pillow like a brick – these stand for a certain austerity, the athleticism of pleasure, while the small lamp glowing on the face of the pipe-maker, as he kneads his little ball of brown gum over the flame until it bubbles and alters shape like a dream, the dimmed lights, the little chaste cups of unsweetened green tea, these stand for the luxe et volupté.29

  Each pipe, from the moment the needle plunges the little ball home and the bowl is reversed over the flame, lasts no more than a quarter of a minute – the practised inhaler drawing a whole pipeful into the lungs in one inhalation. After two pipes Greene would feel drowsy, after four his mind would feel alert and calm – fear and unhappiness only dim memories.

  The effect of the opium was curious. Greene would normally have been shy at exhibiting his inadequacy in speaking French. However, on this occasion, he found himself reciting to his companion Baudelaire’s poem of escape, ‘Invitation au Voyage’. When he got home he experienced for the first time the ‘delightful “white night” of opium’:

  One lies relaxed and wakeful, not wanting sleep. We dread wakefulness when our thoughts are disturbed, but in this state one is calm – it would be wrong even to say that one is happy – happiness disturbs the pulse. And then suddenly without warning one sleeps. Never has one slept so deeply a whole night-long sleep, and then waking and the luminous dial of the clock showing that twenty minutes of so-called real time have gone by. Again the calm lying awake, again the deep brief all-night sleep.30

  Once after smoking Greene went to bed at 1.30 a.m. He rose at 4 to catch a bomber to Hanoi, but in those few hours had slept all tiredness away.31 Opium became a ‘wonderful substitute for the unimportant act of sex’:

  Working differently, as it does, on a man and a woman, it is not a substitute for love, and it has broken many marriages, but for the traveller who does not want the unimportant act (to give his gold piece in a brothel) it is a wonderful pacifier. I remember smoking once in a brothel in Saigon … I was restless with the long absence from someone I loved [Catherine], and when I came into the backroom and saw the sprawl of the lovely and graceful [girl] on the big couch I prepared to surrender to the unimportant … I asked my companion for two pipes. After that, I thought, I will go upstairs, and as she lay with her head in my lap I looked forward to the release in after two more pipes. But when I had smoked four, I no longer desired her, though she had lost no grace or beauty, I wanted only to smoke yet further pipes and then to lie down on my own bed alone and enjoy the white night.32

  The preparation of the pipe, the way the lamp shines on the face of the pipemaker, Greene’s desire to quote Baudelaire, the diminishing effect smoking had on his sex drive, are all reflected in the first few pages of The Quiet American:

  Now she [Phuong] was kneading the little ball of hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl and I could smell the opium. There is no smell like it. Beside the bed my alarm-clock showed twelve-twenty, but already my tension was over. Pyle had diminished. The lamp lit her face as she tended the long pipe, bent over it with the serious attention she might have given to a child. I was fond of my pipe: more than two feet of straight bamboo, ivory at either end. Two-thirds of the way down was the bowl, like a convolvulus reversed, the convex margin polished and darkened by the frequent kneading of the opium. Now with a flick of the wrist she plunged the needle into the tiny cavity, released the opium and reversed the bowl over the flame, holding the pipe steady for me. The bead of opium bubbled gently and smoothly as I inhaled.33

  Fowler takes a second pipe. They talk about Pyle, about his willingness to marry Phuong, which successfully takes Phuong from Fowler. She asks if he’ll have a third pipe and he accepts:

  I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her … ‘Pyle won’t come now,’ I said. ‘Stay here, Phuong.’ She held the pipe out to me and shook her head. By the time I had drawn the opium in, her presence or absence mattered very little …

  ‘Don’t worry. He’ll come. Make me another pipe.’ When she bent over the flame the poem of Baudelaire’s came into my mind: ‘Mon enfant, ma sœur …’fn1, 34

  Once in Hanoi and aware of the unfriendliness and sadness of that capital city (in contrast nothing quenches the spirit of Saigon) on the edge of battle, Greene and Trevor Wilson took a girl to the hotel from an opium house. Greene felt that Catherine had lost interest in him and their long affair was over: ‘She would only undress in the dark, and in bed she twittered like a bird on the pillow.’ Because of the opium, Greene had little desire. They had tossed up to see who should have the girl first, but Greene was unable to perform. At 2.30 in the morning he took her down to poor Wilson, still waiting, but the opium had affected him adversely too. Greene ended his journal entry: ‘She was friendly, she was home, and I have lost here the sense of home.’35

  When Seymour Topping, ‘Top’, mentioned that he and his wife Audrey had tried opium, ‘[Greene] was anxious to go and we couldn’t resist his desire’:

  We found the best opium den in Hanoi. There was a man, a tall black man from US military, he knew about it. The four of us went and I think the black fellow was the one who knew where to go. Anyway, all I remember is going down alleys, in a maze of alleys and having secret raps at the door and everything’s full of intrigue and adventure, and we go into this place and all the women are floating around in white gossamer gowns and there were like double decker bunks and everybody laid down and the women prepared the opium for us. We took our shoes off … like the Japanese. There were French and Vietnamese there. We were the only foreigners but they welcomed us in. So we were the first people to ‘corrupt’ Greene [laughing]. We didn’t mean to. We saw he wanted it for the adventure. He wanted to know what it’s like to go to an opium den in Hanoi and we wanted to know too. So we went in and it was just, you know, the atmosphere was perfect, perfect atmosphere. And they lay down and they all rolled up in little black balls. We had long pipes. I was on the opposite bed to Graham Greene. He seeme
d to go right into it as if he’d been there all his life. And we had five pipes. We each had five pipes and by the end of three I was levitating. We were also flaking around and enjoying ourselves and Greene was not really asking any questions or anything. He was just there observing. His pale blue eyes lit up as he absorbed detail which later went into The Quiet American. So when it was over, we went back to the hotel where we were all staying and we sat up and talked all night. And Top was telling Graham how to write novels [laughter] and he was telling Top how to write newspapers [more laughter].36

  If his journal mentions brothels and opium dens, his dreams at night were often about Catherine. He was desperate and angry, feeling that he had lost her:

  November 2 [1951]: At night woke sadly quarreling with C. & carried on awake like early last year.

  November 4: In how many odd churches in strange places has one prayed the same prayer [that Catherine would marry him]. The depression of having nothing to look forward to … I could be happy these weeks [in Vietnam] if there was a future like there always has been. Cafryn very bad.

  November 5: Awful dream of C. & woke in the night angry & quarrelling. Oddly enough erotic dream of D[orothy Glover] but full of regret because her sex smell was not C’s … Dreams of C. but not bad only sad dreams this time.

  He was desperately unhappy about Catherine and trying to anaesthetise himself with drink and opium.

  *

  In many ways Greene’s The Quiet American is based on his own personal observations and is, more than any other novel, direct reportage. Many of his experiences find their way directly into the novel and what can be discovered about the people he came to know illustrates his creative process.

  During Greene’s January 1951 visit to Vietnam he journeyed to the battleground in the Catholic enclave of Phat Diem, a coastal port near Hanoi on the fertile Red River delta, which is known as the rice bowl of Vietnam. He flew in a plane lent by General de Lattre with Trevor Wilson. His initial impressions of Phat Diem, of its prince bishop and a Belgian priest they met were not complimentary: