The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)
Page 52
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Where were the central figures in The Quiet American drawn from: Fowler, the cynical English newspaper reporter, Phuong, the Vietnamese girl, and Pyle, the quiet American (as opposed to Granger, the ugly American)? Greene was quite certain about their origin: ‘So the subject of The Quiet American came to me, during that talk of a “third force” on the road through the delta and my characters quickly followed, all but one of them [Granger] from the unconscious.’24
While he was writing The Quiet American, Greene was still fighting for Catherine, and some of his problems between Vivien, Catherine and himself are reflected in the novel. While in Hong Kong, Greene received a letter from Vivien’s friend Stella Weaver which deeply disturbed him. Stella was very concerned because on the night of Saturday, 22 December 1951 a man had broken into Vivien’s house and attacked her in the bathroom.
He probably thought she was alone in the house as she very often is. But Lucy and Francis, having arrived the day before, were there. Lucy was in bed and asleep. Wakened by Vivien’s screams, she rushed out of her room into the bathroom, seized hold of the man, and he fled.25
Vivien was unharmed except for a bruise and a cut on the lip. She was, however, ‘terribly shaken and shocked and frightened’, and still very upset. The Weavers had ‘been anxious about her for some time. She is desperately unhappy and lonely.’26
On receipt of Stella’s letter, Greene wrote at once to Catherine on 16 January 1952:
I’ve written and telegraphed to Vivien, but what can I do? I’ve told her that I’ll sell their house and get her a larger flat wherever she likes, and I’ve told her frankly that it’s no good my saying that I’ll come back and stay with her, because I’m still in love with another woman and I could never stay the course. I feel desperate and hopeless, but not so depressed and hopeless as poor Vivien. I do seem to muck up everyone I love.
In a postscript comes a plaintive cry of his need for Catherine and for the wretched (but inevitable) way he had treated Vivien:
O, how I’m in need of your voice. I can’t again go through another six months like this. And then, I think, poor Vivien has had four years. It’s her hope that makes her miserable. If only we could have been like the other lovers who go away together and marry again, she would have been better off. Perhaps if I’d let her divorce me she’d been better off.
In The Quiet American Fowler is somewhat desperate because his girlfriend Phuong is being courted openly by the American Pyle. Fowler writes to his wife Helen in England asking for a divorce, and because he had always been truthful to her he does not try to put himself in the best light. This was extraordinarily true of Greene: it was the truth that mattered, not whether the events cast him in a good light – they often didn’t.
The letter Greene wrote to Vivien has now disappeared, but it seems likely that Fowler’s letter to Helen is based on it. As he indicated to Catherine, it was full of sympathy, but without any hope of a reconciliation. In order further to diminish that hope, he may have suggested they should at last divorce – certainly it was on his mind (‘Perhaps if I’d let her divorce me …’). His thinking must have been that his long affair was at a dead end, and that these terrible six-month separations (initiated by Catherine) made any future life with her doubtful. Perhaps he now felt that a divorce would clear the air – at least he would not then be guilty of continuous adultery.
Fowler’s letter to Helen in The Quiet American seems to invoke from her the decision he does not want – for Helen to say no to him in spite of the fact that he greatly fears the loss of Phuong. The letter is a revelation of Greene’s character as well as Fowler’s. How easily Greene could have had Fowler put the right gloss upon his activities in the Far East, but Fowler does not, as Greene also would not have done:
Dear Helen, I am coming back to England to take a job of foreign editor. You can imagine I am not very happy about it. England is to me the scene of my failure. I had intended our marriage to last … To this day I’m not certain what went wrong (I know we both tried), but I think it was my temper. I know how cruel and bad my temper can be … You have been very generous to me, and you have never reproached me once since our separation. Would you be even more generous? I know that before we married you warned me there could never be a divorce. I accepted the risk and I’ve nothing to complain of. At the same time I’m asking for one now.
… I could wrap this up and make it sound more honourable and more dignified by pretending it was for someone else’s sake. But it isn’t, and we always used to tell each other the truth. It’s for my sake and only mine. I love someone very much … but I know I’m not essential to her [how true this seemed to be in Catherine’s case] … It’s stupid of me to tell you this. I’m putting a reply into your mouth. But because I’ve been truthful so far, perhaps you’ll believe me when I tell you that to lose her will be, for me, the beginning of death.27
I asked Greene if he had asked his wife for a divorce some years after his separation. He told me that he had. When I asked Vivien, she admitted he had but thought it was no more than a telephone conversation. Greene had a passion for getting the details of any event correct, so it seems likely that he wrote to Vivien about it just as Fowler wrote to Helen. If Greene did write to Vivien she would have responded by letter, as is her practice. Helen’s response to Fowler’s letter seems to be the kind of letter Vivien could have written. Vivien was greatly hurt by losing her husband to another woman and her wound seems never to have healed entirely. Helen’s letter is subtle yet pained:
I am not surprised to get your letter and to know that you were not alone. You are not a man, are you? to remain alone for very long. You pick up women like your coat picks up dust. Perhaps I would feel more sympathy with your case if I didn’t feel that you would find consolation very easily when you return to London. I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, but what gives me pause and prevents me cabling you a simple No is the thought of the poor girl. We are apt to be more involved than you are.28
In the novel, Greene writes of Helen’s ‘sexual wounds … remaining’ over the years. Fowler, through not choosing his words with skill, has set them bleeding again and so does not blame her for seeking out his scars in return. The character of Anne referred to below parallels Catherine, and the enforced six-month separation from Catherine (assuming Vivien commented upon it) might have looked as if he had left her:
I’ve always believed you loved Anne more than the rest of us until you packed up and went. Now you seem to be planning to leave another woman because I can tell from your letter that you don’t really expect a ‘favourable’ reply … What would you do if I cabled ‘Yes’? Would you actually marry her? (I have to write ‘her’ – you don’t tell me her name.) Perhaps you would. I suppose like the rest of us you are getting old and don’t like living alone. I feel very lonely myself sometimes. I gather Anne has found another companion … But you left her in time.29
Helen points out how difficult it would be for Phuong to live in London and then writes: ‘Marriage doesn’t prevent you leaving a woman … It only delays the process.’ Greene comments through Fowler:
Her pain struck at my pain: we were back at the old routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough. I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.30
Helen questions whether going against her deepest convictions and saying yes would be good for Fowler and then sinks him with unanswerable logic: ‘You say it will be the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used exactly that phrase to me – I could show you the letter, I have
it still.’31 Helen’s final answer to Fowler’s request is what Vivien’s rebuttal might have been, and the passage echoes Vivien’s faith as a Catholic:
You say that we’ve always tried to tell the truth to each other, but, Thomas, your truth is always so temporary. What’s the good of arguing with you, or trying to make you see reason? It’s easier to act as my faith tells me to act … and simply to write: I don’t believe in divorce: my religion forbids it, and so the answer, Thomas, is no.
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Was there a source for Phuong herself? Greene borrowed her house and name from the girlfriend of René Berval (editor of France-Asie in Saigon) and the flat they lived in (actually 104 rue Catinat). In his dedication to René and Phuong, Greene wrote: ‘I have quite shamelessly borrowed the location of your flat to house one of my characters, and your name, Phuong, for the convenience of readers because it is simple, beautiful and easy to pronounce.’ But Phuong, who is such a convincing presence in the novel, had a more real existence than the dedication implies.
When I asked Greene whether Phuong ‘Berval’ was the basis for the beautiful Phuong in the novel, he replied:
Phuong [Berval] was not really very attractive to my mind and the girl is meant to be attractive in the book. I mean René’s girlfriend was much less attractive than most Vietnamese girls.
During a previous interview he had told me about two sisters who seemed reminiscent of the two sisters in the novel, one of whom is Phuong:
Oh, the mistress of the manager of the Majestic offering her younger sister. Yes. She was very attractive, the younger sister. I’ve got a photograph of her in the party I went to almost as soon as I arrived, the first in the Chinese quarter in 1951 … There’s a bit of Chinese blood in her which goes quite nicely because the Chinese give a little bit of weight to the body as it were. On the other hand they don’t like the Chinese suffer from duck’s disease, you know, a bottom that falls down near the ground. And it’s quite a good mixture. But her elder sister was becoming almost ugly … the younger one might have become so in time.32
The manager of the Majestic, who was also the owner, was a Corsican called Mathieu Franchini. He was very influential in Saigon, and had married into a Vietnamese family. Franchini was a ‘fixer’ and must have been a source of information for Greene. Greene’s diaries prove that they often drank together at both the Continental Palace and the Majestic.
In a sense Greene had no luck with the original for ‘Phuong’; for one thing he met her on the last full day of his first visit to Saigon. On Sunday, 4 February 1951 he was very tired and missed Mass. He had coffee with Elaine, ‘wife of absent journalist’ (who was to become Hugh Greene’s wife), met the Toppings, had dry martinis with them and took them to lunch at the Vieux Moulin. After a siesta, he went to ‘terrible reception by Alliance Française’. ‘Anna, the ugly Chinese journalist’, he writes in his journal, ‘had brought her beautiful sister, but hemmed in with Lycée teachers.’33 This sister became Phuong in The Quiet American.
He had seen her eight days earlier. He wrote in his journal: ‘Intended to have early night but in Majestic bar picked up by manager to join his party – Chinese woman journalist, French doctor & pretty Ammanite wife. To Grand Monde. Journalist’s two sisters – one with Thailand chargé d’affaires & one ravingly beautiful. V. disturbing.’34
René Berval, who knew the Mathieu sisters, helped Greene to meet them again. Back in Europe, Greene wrote to René on 4 May, wanting to know when the next main offensive by the Vietminh would take place so that his return could coincide with it. He ended his letter with a reference to the sisters: ‘Do give my love to Anna and say that I am looking forward to seeing her and her sister again.’
Nothing happened during his second visit to Saigon, but on his third he commented in his journal:
Jan. 21. Monday. [1952]
Drink with René Berval. Lunch with Graham Jenkins … Saw Pierre & Moret [French Sûreté, the model for the Pascal-reading policeman Vigot in The Quiet American]. Dinner with Mathieus. Anna & the beautiful sister who turns out to be the air hostess. Anna’s vigilant eye on matrimony. 7 bicycle grenades today in the town.
In the novel Phuong’s sister, Miss Hei, tries to ensnare Pyle into marriage with Phuong: ‘I had seen her first, dancing past my table at the Grand Monde in a white ball-dress, eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who had been determined on a good European marriage.’ Meeting the sister for the first time, Pyle says of Phuong:
‘She is very pretty sister …’
‘She is the most beautiful girl in Saigon,’ Miss Hei said, as though correcting him.35
Pyle answers that he can well believe it and Fowler says, ‘It’s time we ordered dinner. Even the most beautiful girl in Saigon must eat.’36
Greene left a record of meeting ‘the most beautiful girl in Saigon’. In a letter dated 8 November to his mother, the year not mentioned, but most probably 1951, he wrote:
I spent three rather social but nice days [in Saigon] but then flew up here [Hanoi]. It’s a very tiring flight of about four hours. I had to be at the airport at 5 a.m. very hot & pouring with sweat (which was sad because a very pretty little half caste Air France girl came & sat beside me at the bar).37
28
Innocence Abroad
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
– THOMAS CAMPBELL
‘INNOCENCE’, SAYS FOWLER, speaking of Pyle, ‘is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.’ Alden Pyle, the very honest American, has fallen in love with Fowler’s girl, but in his good-mannered way feels he must tell Fowler before approaching her. Pyle travels alone, taking the risk of being shot at by a naval patrol or a French plane or having his throat cut by the Vietminh – and all because honour compels him to tell Fowler that he’s in love with his girlfriend. He finds Fowler in the middle of the war at Phat Diem, spending the night at the French officers’ mess. Having told him, Pyle asks his advice about Phuong, but misunderstands Fowler’s nature as he misunderstands Phuong’s:
‘I wouldn’t trust my advice if I were you. I’m biased. I want to keep her.’
‘Oh, but I know you’re straight, absolutely straight, and we both have her interests at heart.’
Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, ‘I don’t care that for her interests. You can have her interest. I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than, than … look after her damned interests.’
He said, ‘Oh,’ in a weak voice, in the dark.
I went on, ‘If it’s only her interest you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good …’ The crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.1
There is no evidence in his journals that during his numerous visits to Vietnam Greene met anyone remotely like Pyle, though he met most of the Americans in Saigon – in 1951 there were very few of them. He built Pyle’s character up from a number of diverse elements.
When Greene first went to Saigon he heard of a British air attaché who was living with a Vietnamese girl in Saigon, made her pregnant and then was called back home. Hearsay has it that the attaché went home to his wife and children and paid his pregnant girlfriend 300 dollars before leaving. There is a passage in the novel where Pyle becomes angry over Fowler’s ‘dirty cracks’ and asks: ‘What can you offer her? … A couple of hundred dollars when you leave for England, or will you pass her on with the furniture?’2 A young American then working in the American aid mission called Jim Flood decided (with a Pyle-like sense of injustice) that the air attaché’s offer was not enough; the Vietnamese girl needed protection, so he married her in Saigon. Tom Peck, in the consular passport department, was Flood’s best man at the wedding. Ambassador Donald Heath came to the reception for Flood (a junior member of his staff) and his bride. The story of Jim Flood’s marriage was the gossip of the rue Catinat and Greene had heard it.
This looks like clever bantering, but it may well be that Liebling had accidentally hit on some of the truth. To begin with Pyle is a little like Greene as a young boy, naïve, unmalicious, shy, a virgin. (He is also a caricature of Greene when he first fell in love.) Greene’s earlier innocence is being criticised by the older, more experienced Greene, seeing himself as Pyle sees Fowler – ‘a man of middle age with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight … less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent’. The notion of creating a character who was fundamentally naïve would also have appealed to Greene because he saw a way of symbolising a too-young nation, ignorant of colonial responsibility and hating colonies because, long ago, it had been one.
Pyle looks upon Phuong as a perfect lady, not as a taxi girl now living with an older Englishman with little chance of marriage. It is Pyle, watching a troupe of female impersonators perform (‘in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon’), who is embarrassed: ‘I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. “Fowler,” he said, “Let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her.”’3