* * *
fn1 Catholicism had come with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Phat Diem is still a land of churches, which loom out of the rice fields. Greene observed that in a land of pagodas, suddenly, upon reaching Phat Diem, you felt you were back in Europe, in the Netherlands – the straight canals running off to the sea and in every village a church as big as a cathedral.15
fn2 At one point not mentioned in the novel, but in his journal, in the furore Greene accidentally lost contact with the French legionnaires and found himself stumbling between the parachutists and the Vietminh in some fear.
27
A Quiet American
Over there, over there …
The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
– GEORGE M. COHAN
IN WAYS OF Escape Greene stressed that his characters in The Quiet American came from his unconscious: ‘The exception was Granger, the American newspaper correspondent. The press conference in Hanoi where he figures was recorded almost word for word in my journal at that time.’1 Greene’s journal entries are cryptic but provide him with the material to enlarge upon later: ‘Dec. 14 [1951] Friday. Lunch with Kulti, Graham Jenkins & Allen of A.P. Drank all afternoon with W. & A. at Tavern Royale. Then to Press Conf. Goussot’s evasive gestures, pretty boy approach. Allen’s harsh rudeness. W. & A. complain that their messages are always held up by censor till the Fr. correspondents have put through theirs.’ He developed this in The Quiet American:
Granger … was there. A young and too beautiful French colonel presided. He spoke in French and a junior officer translated …
The interpreter said, ‘The colonel tells you that the enemy has suffered a sharp defeat and severe losses – the equivalent of one complete battalion. The last detachment are now making their way back across the Red River on improvised rafts. They are shelled all the time by the Air Force.’ The colonel ran his hand through his elegant yellow hair and, flourishing his pointer, danced his way down the long maps on the wall. An American correspondent asked, ‘What are the French losses?’
The colonel answers with patient ambiguity.
‘The colonel says our losses have not been heavy. The exact number is not yet known …’
‘Is the colonel seriously telling us,’ Granger said, ‘that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?’ …
‘The colonel says the enemy forces are being overrun. It is possible to count the dead behind the firing-line, but while the battle is still in progress you cannot expect figures from the advancing French units.’
‘It’s not what we expect,’ Granger said, ‘it’s what the Etat Major knows or not. Are you seriously telling us that platoons do not report their casualties as they happen by walkie-talkie?’
The colonel’s temper was beginning to fray. If only … he had … told us firmly that he knew the figures but wouldn’t say. After all it was their war, not ours. We had no God-given right to information. We didn’t have to fight Left-Wing deputies in Paris as well as the troops of Ho Chi Minh between the Red and the Black Rivers. We were not dying.
The colonel suddenly snapped out the information that French casualties had been in a proportion of one to three, then turned his back on us, to stare furiously at his map. These were his men who were dead, his fellow officers, belonging to the same class at St Cyr – not numerals as they were to Granger. Granger said, ‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ and stared round with oafish triumph at his fellows …2
The bullying American correspondent existed and was well known in his own right. He was Larry Allen, once called ‘the most shot-at United States foreign correspondent’. Like his fictional counterpart, Allen was delighted to touch the colonel (whose name was Gousset) on the raw.
When Greene met him in 1951, Allen was forty-three. He was a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-driving person who, in drink, could be outrageous. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Second World War nine years earlier. He was honoured for his ability to be where the action was thickest (a characteristic he shared with Greene), and for the fullness of his written accounts. During the war in Europe he was often to be found at sea and was on the aircraft carrier Illustrious when it miraculously survived a seven-hour attack by fifty Stukas and torpedo planes. As a journalist he was a stormy petrel, always getting into trouble wherever he was. Or so it seemed; but by the time he reached Vietnam he had got through most of his career and was no longer seeking danger. The contrast between his reputation and his current activities was made clear by Greene. Granger himself described how he worked as a correspondent:
They give us a car to Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show us the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then they 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 … Then we catch the plane back.
The American attaché in the novel praises Granger and a famous article of his: ‘What did you call it? Highway to Hell – that was worthy of the Pulitzer. You know the story I mean – the man with his head blown off kneeling in the ditch, and the other you saw walking in a dream …’ Granger answers:
‘Do you think I’d really go near their stinking highway? Stephen Crane could describe a war without seeing one. Why shouldn’t I? It’s only a damned colonial war anyway. Get me another drink. And then let’s go and find a girl. You’ve got a piece of tail. I want a piece of tail too.’3
‘By the time he had reached Vietnam,’ Seymour Topping sadly related, ‘Allen had lost his heroic qualities, had been drinking too much and was rather obese and sloppy in manner, in his personal demeanour and in his work as well. He was not a reliable reporter of the Indo-China experience. He lacked integrity. He looked like a larger version of the film actor Peter Lorre. Big bags under his eyes.’4
Howard Simpson’s description of Allen, in his account of his own time in Vietnam, coincides with Greene’s fictional portrayal: ‘While other journalists were rushing from province to province seeking action, Allen put his stories together with a few telephone calls and discreet inquiries over a few drinks at the Hotel Metropole [Hanoi] or the Café Normandie. When he did venture into the field, his sources had already assured him the displacement would be worthwhile.’5
We meet the journalist Granger when he arrives, drunkenly and unceremoniously, at the Continental. Fowler, Pyle, and the American economic adviser Joe are drinking on the terrace as two trishaw drivers come pedalling furiously down the rue Catinat and draw up in a photo-finish outside the hotel. In the first is Granger, who begins to argue with his driver about the fare. ‘“Here,” he said, “take it or leave it,” and flung five times the correct amount into the street for the man to stoop for.’6 Drunk as he is, Granger makes ugly passes at Fowler’s girlfriend, the beautiful Phuong. When it becomes apparent that she is unobtainable, the journalist brings the conversation to an end: ‘“Break it up,” Granger was shouting. “Can’t waste the whole night here. I’m off to the House of Five Hundred Girls.”’7
It is possible that Allen, Granger’s model, did go with Greene to the House of Five Hundred Girls (actually the House of Four Hundred Girls). Greene, writing of a corrupt Minister in the Vietnamese Government, mentioned how, having closed the Grand Monde, the gambling centre of Cholon, he sacrificed a great deal of his income: ‘to recoup himself [he] opened a great new brothel like a shabby garden city, little houses set among shrubs and flower beds, neon lighted so that the faces of girls and flowers have the appearance of unhealthy sweets’.8 A number of commentators mention it: it was called Le Parc aux Buffles (pen for buffalo) and so known as the Bull Ring. A better-class brothel for officers was in the same complex.
Four days after his arrival, Greene described his visit in his journal:
Then to other ranks brothel. After hours. The huge courtyard with the girls sitting in groups. The li
ttle lighted rooms. Strolled around. Enormous bonhomie. The Fr. police post inside the brothel. The girl stretched across two pairs of knees. The white elegant crossed legs under the light. Price asked 30 pesetas – 8/6d. Then directed to officer’s brothel. Much less attractive place, though better girls. To go inside would have made getting out difficult. Price 300 pesetas.9
It must have been one of the world’s largest emporia for the sale of flesh – all those cubicles forming a square around the open courtyard. Greene visited it with two companions, one of whom described it later:
It was the soldiers’ brothel. The soldiers who went there were like animals and the girls came for money and certainly had to earn it. Outside the iron gate stood a soldier with a sub-machine gun. We tried to persuade Graham not to go in. The guard warned him not to do so either. When Graham went in, the girls pounced on him and Graham came out with his shirt sleeve torn off and his arm bleeding.10
Greene transferred his unexpected manhandling to the loud-mouthed Granger:
When I reached the House of the Five Hundred Girls, Pyle and Granger had gone inside …
It was the hour of rest in the immense courtyard which lay open to the sky … The curtains were undrawn in the little cubicles around the square – one tired girl lay alone on a bed with her ankles crossed. There was trouble in Cholon and the troops were confined to quarters and there was no work to be done: the Sunday of the body. Only a knot of fighting, scrabbling, shouting girls showed me where custom was still alive … I caught sight of Granger flushed and triumphant; it was as though he took this demonstration as a tribute to his manhood. One girl had her arm through Pyle’s and was trying to tug him gently out of the ring … I … called to him, ‘Pyle, over here.’
He looked at me over their heads and said ‘It’s terrible. Terrible.’ … It occurred to me that he was quite possibly a virgin.
‘Come along, Pyle,’ I said. ‘Leave them to Granger …’
I got hold of Pyle’s sleeve and dragged him out, with the girl hanging on to his arm like a hooked fish.11
What Greene didn’t reflect was the sentimental side of Allen: ‘I remember sitting in a night club one night and they played “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”,’ said Audrey Topping. ‘I looked over at Larry and there were big tears rolling down his cheeks. He was rather fat and repulsive.’12 But there is a scene late in the novel where Granger first criticises the Englishman Fowler: ‘[Granger] made a feeble attempt to mock my accent. “You all talk like poufs. You’re so damned superior. You think you know everything.”’ This is followed by Granger unburdening himself; he’d had a cable from his wife that his eight-year-old son had polio.13 Even though he doesn’t believe in God, Granger tells Fowler that he’d prayed: ‘I thought maybe if God wanted a life he could take mine.’14
*
Larry Allen was not the only historical person to find his way into The Quiet American. When the quiet American, Pyle, asks Fowler, an old hand in Indo-China, about conditions in Vietnam, Fowler talks about the Cao Dai: ‘And … there’s General Thé. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists’,15 the thought being that the true nationalist must fight both the French and the communists. Caodaist Chief of Staff Colonel Trinh Minh Thé is the bandit in The Quiet American with whom Pyle as a CIA agent has secret contacts.
In the cables sent from the American legation in Saigon to Washington there are a number of references to the original Colonel Thé (a self-styled general) – Greene seems to have used him in the novel without adding or subtracting anything. Colonel Thé’s mutiny took place on 7 June 1951, though it wasn’t reported in the New York Times until 14 June. Donald Heath, the American ambassador, reported it to the Secretary of State and mentioned that the authorities (since there had been no leaks to the press) were keeping it dark:
Tran Van An reports that 2500 Caodaists, led by Chief of Staff Col. Trinh Minh Thé, left Tay Ninh on June 7 taking with them 300 rifles and 60 auto rifles, as protest against policy of Huu Govt. These troops, which include ‘Best Caodaist cadres’ are said to have crossed border into Cambodia and are awaiting developments … Pope Pham Cong Tac is alleged to have stated that, ‘Thé shld have consulted me before his departure, but had I known why he was leaving, I wld not (rpt not) have stopped him.’
If this development, which has not (rpt not) been mentioned in local press, is true, Leg[ation] considers it rather alarming. Thé has reputation of being real brains of Caodaist mil org and his defection, even had it not been accompanied by that org followers, wld have been itself an unfortunate incident.16
Thé acted swiftly to create uneasiness in the Vietnamese Government and the French. He sent a letter to all chiefs of diplomatic and consular missions explaining the reason for his action: that the French, instead of co-operating with Vietnamese nationalists to combat communism, were on the contrary trying to divide and weaken nationalists with a view to returning a colonial regime to power. The following extract gives some idea of Thé’s style:
We openly proclaim our non-cooperation with the French, who have evil intention of enslaving us, and appeal to all peoples of French Union who are fighting under the French flag to wake up and stop this wanton shedding of blood in our time. We appeal earnestly to democratic peoples throughout the world, who are fighting to overthrow communism and camouflaged colonialism, to help us in this struggle to re-establish peace and human justice.17
An account of the Cao Dai appears in a secret enclosure sent to Washington from the legation in Saigon. It assured Washington that although a number of dissident Caodaists were collaborating with the insurgent Vietminh, the movement’s spiritual leadership and its numerous communities supported the present political arrangement in the country:
The Cao Dai Pope at Tay Ninh, known as the ‘Radiant Sun of the South’ is perhaps the most significant spiritual leader of the movement today … The Tay Ninh organization which has cooperated closely with the present Government maintains the most important Cao Dai armed forces, numbering about 15,000 troops in varying stages of training and equipment.18
The account goes on to say that the religious principle of Caodaism attempted to synthesise the world’s great religions: its ethical principles were largely Confucian, its inspiration spiritualist, its ritual Buddhist, its hierarchic organisation Catholic. Greene made a number of visits to the Cao Dai and found them, of all of France’s allies, the most amazing:
At the entrance to the fantastic, technicolour cathedral are hung the portraits of three minor saints of the Caodaist religion: Dr Sun Yat Sen, Trang Trinh, a primitive Vietnamese poet, and Victor Hugo, attired in the uniform of a member of the Academie Française with a halo round his tricorn hat. In the nave of the cathedral, in the full Asiatic splendour of a Walt Disney fantasy, pastel dragons coil about the columns and pulpit; from every stained-glass window a great eye of God follows one, an enormous serpent forms the papal throne and high up under the arches are the effigies of three major saints: Buddha, Confucius, and Christ displaying his Sacred Heart.
The saints, Victor Hugo in particular, still address the faithful through the medium of a pencil and a basket covered by a kind of movable ouija board …19
Greene came away convinced this ‘world’ religion was bogus (he puts this in The Quiet American), and with the image of a chain-smoking pope discoursing hour after hour on Atlantis and the common origin of all religions. Founded in 1926, the Cao Dai were pacifist, yet they supported an army of 20,000 men, using a primitive arsenal to guard against an eventual stoppage of French arms – mortars fabricated from old exhaust pipes.
The Caodaists made no attempt to recapture Colonel Thé, although according to The Quiet American he had kidnapped a cardinal. However, it was rumoured that he had done this with the pope’s connivance. Greene was reflecting the rumours about Thé circulating during 1951. On Greene’s last visit to Tay Ninh in 1954, he was told secretly that a meeting with Colonel Thé could be arr
anged in the Holy See itself. As Greene said, ‘The eye of God watched the Caodaists from every window, but sharp human eyes were also very much required.’20 He refused to meet Colonel Thé, although Thé was the master-mind behind ruthless and little justified events in Saigon, which were duplicated in the novel.
Thé had started life as a ferryman. He hated graft, but nevertheless had a capacity for ruthless action, coupled with an uncontrolled hysteria. Well organised, he set himself up as the leader of the self-styled National Resistance Front.21 The Americans were in contact with him, which is the source for Greene’s dislike of the Americans in Vietnam, symbolised by Pyle.
Through a nephew, the political delegate Le Van Hoach, Colonel Thé made a request for US aid for medicines under the economic aid programme.22 But the US ambassador, Donald Heath, strongly pro-French, added to one telegram: ‘Of course I do not (rpt not) believe we can or shld undertake any policy excursion of this sort apart from Vets. govt. and French command …’
Thé was a difficult enemy to have and troubled even de Lattre. He interested Greene critically because his equal hatred of the French and the communists provided a catalysing agent, in The Quiet American. Without him there would be no tragedy.23
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 51