Greene Hell of Indo-China

THE QUIET AMERICAN (249 pp.)--Graham Greene--Viking ($3.50).

At first glance, Graham Greene seems to have changed his theme. His recent novels--The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair--were religious dramas about the human soul struggling amid gin-or-tea trivialities between salvation and damnation. In his latest novel, he writes of individuals who stand for worlds and nations--the U.S., Britain, Asia--struggling amid blood-and-opium enormities between relative degrees of misrule. Yet in a sense, the heart of the matter is still the same. Whatever uncozy corner Greene chooses for his settings, whether West Africa, Mexico, Indo-China or England, the climate is always adultery and guilt. And the source of drama is always the fact that the damned cannot surely be told from the saved, that both are often driven side by side to the brink of hell.

Bertrand Russell, Britain's most astute rationalist, once wrote an essay called "The Harm that Good Men Do." In this book, that is also the theme of Roman Catholic Convert Greene. He saw the French debacle in Indo-China as correspondent for LIFE and the London Sunday Times. Out of Saigon, he wrote of the doomed Vietnamese, the touchy, defeatist French and their absurd allies like the Caodist "Pope," who had female cardinals and canonized Victor Hugo. Most significantly, he wrote in his diary: "Is there any solution here the West can offer? But the bar tonight was loud with innocent American voices, and that was the worst disquiet . . ."

Now, in The Quiet American, he has translated his journalist's impressions into one of his novelistic moral conundrums. The attempt of the U.S. to find what he calls a "Third Force" between French colonialism and military Communism, is personified in Alden Pyle, member of a U.S. economic mission. He is the "quiet American"--a Harvard man, young, innocent, good, humorless, a Unitarian. He speaks in the hortatory Emily Post style which all British novelists since Max Beerbohm seem to think is the native speech of proper Bostonians. He eats "Vit-Health" sandwich-spread that his mother sends him. He is courageous and dedicated, but his eager virtue turns into fumbling crime. His idealistic dabbling in Indo-Chinese politics--he furnishes a plastic bomb to a local faction--becomes real blood on his shoes. "I must get a shine before I see the Minister," says Pyle, after his bomb explodes, killing the wrong people.

Crusader & Dog. Against this figure Greene pits a tired, cynical neutralist, a British newspaperman named Thomas Fowler. He is a man of the past but with no faith in it. Back home are a dissatisfied High Church wife, debt, a dull desk--in short, the Graham Greene country of mildew, cabbage water, frayed cuffs, bad dentistry and unmade beds and all the other seedy physical metaphors for "weeping multitudes [who] droop in a hundred ABC's."

In Indo-China, though, Fowler has Phuong, an ex-taxi dancer, "the most beautiful girl in Saigon," coiled on his bed "like a dog on a crusader's tomb," who lights one of his four opium pipes a day. He knows many things from Greene's moral chapbook: that "pride [can be] like a skin disease," that the passion for truth means nothing in the East--it is "an Occidental passion like the passion for alcohol." He sneers at the innocence that made a crusader of Pyle--and knows that his own knowledge has made a sad dog of himself.

An Irish Stew. The manner in which Fowler and Pyle are brought into moral contest is a masterpiece of Greene narrative technique. The lovely Phuong's morally neutral body is the apparent issue between them. Only slowly the reader comes to understand that the background is also a morality play. There are the sad, wry French, each year losing a class of Saint-Cyr in a war in which they have lost hope, and the most loutish collection of war correspondents since Evelyn Waugh assembled Shumble, Corker, Pigge and Wenlock Jakes to cover the invasion of Ethiopia. There are the dead who fill the canals through the paddies like "an Irish stew containing too much meat." Greene makes his point that the public-spirited innocence of a Pyle and the morally dead wisdom of a Fowler are both irrelevant to the martyrs and zealots fighting from village to village.

Greene is saying with Yeats of the world conflict: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Yet in the end, the cynic Fowler mourns the American--and perhaps himself: "I wish there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry."

The phenomenon of U.S. good will has baffled, beguiled and infuriated many minds; it is one of the great facts of the 20th century. It is doubtful whether Author Greene understands this fact, though his tortured sensibilities can touch on it and make it into first-rate fiction. But Greene would have written a far better book if his anti-Americanism* had not led him to the absurd extremity of suggesting that ice cream sodas are the opium of the people--as, to people like Fowler, who prefer opium, they possibly are. Whatever theologians make of his morals or critics of his prose, the Kremlin alone might pretend to believe that American Government officials abroad are prone to fool around with bombs--though even Krokodil might boggle at his suggestion that American air conditioning will cause sterility.

* A possible contributing factor: in transit from Haiti to London, Greene told immigration officials in Puerto Rico that he had been a member of the Communist Party, which automatically barred him from the U.S. under the McCarran Act. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Greene had joined the university branch as "a prank" in a students' attempt to subvert the subversives.

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