The Quiet American

At 07:28 PM 10/31/2005 -0800, you wrote:

At the risk of being discredited by everyone who is scholarly and has much

research experience on Vietnam, which I cannot claim to share, when American

friends ask me what "only one" book they should read about Vietnam, I

recommend Anthony Grey's Saigon. That's not history, admittedly --

contemporary only since about 1939, but at least for that period up to 1975

it's one of the most readable, fascinating, engaging books I've ever read

about Vietnam, and it seems to be historically accurate. It's a novel which

intertwines real people (Ngo Dinh Diem, Emperor Bao Dai, Ho Chi Minh, Vo

Nguyen Giap) with fictional but believable characters (including U.S.

Embassy personnel, U.S. and Saigon military leadership, etc.) and it conveys

the complexity of the dynamics and the major players in the war, on all

sides, as well as the culture of Vietnam and the tapestry of the rural

countryside.

It is not a history of Vietnam -- going back to Le Loi and Ly Thai To and

other kinds and emperors -- and I'm not suggesting this book as a substitute

for a comprehensive history. However, for the period of the past half

century or more, prior to 1975, I think this book is an excellent bedtime

read for anyone interested in understanding something of Vietnam.

I would welcome corrections from anyone who disagrees.

CHUCK SEARCY

Country Representative

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) / Vietnam Enterprise Group (VEG)

From: David Marr

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 3:32 AM

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Ambassadors understanding countries

Here's what I wrote about Anthony Grey's novel 13 years ago:

The author of `The Chinese assassin' (1979) and `The Bulgarian

exclusive'(1976) applies his blockbuster formula to Vietnam. Blissfully

ignoring the laws of probability, Grey has his hero Joseph Sherman take part

in, or at least witness, almost every significant event in Vietnam over half

a century, from 1925 to 1975. While Grey obviously researched the period

extensively, which shows up in the attention to detail about people, places

and things, his generalizations remain deeply flawed, and his insistence on

putting an American at the middle of events repeatedly skews historical

cause and effect. The great novel about Vietnam has yet to be written.

As for a single history book on Vietnam, I've been approached on several

occasions, but find it much more fun to be at the coal face, looking at

archive dossiers, period newspapers and monographs and memoirs, then trying

to put together something meaningful about a limited period of time.

Besides, a younger scholar could address contemporary reader interests more

effectively under one cover.

David Marr

Dear List

Without wishing to offend anyone's sensibilities and referring to nobody

in particular, I recall the main character of Graham Greene's classic,

Pyle, as a one book - one author type of person.

Greene's gentle poking fun of Pyle's unwavering sense of loyalty to his

author - York Harding is worth reading again.

Du

The late Professor Ralph Smith who lectured in Vietnamese History at SOAS (School of Oriental & African Studies, London University) objected angrily to being quoted as a source for Anthony Grey's novel Saigon. He regarded the book as a gross distortion of what actually happened.

Judy Stowe

On the other hand, Patrick Honey, former Lecturer in Vietnamese language at SOAS, spoke with great pride at having been the source for Graham Greene's Quiet American.

Judith

Judith A. N. Henchy, MLS, Ph.D.

I definitely agree with Duc. I am teaching a course this term on "Vietnamese and Thai Society through Literature" and am using Greene for the section on the American period (I am also showing the class the film "The Ugly American" which was filmed in Thailand in 1963). I find that Greene presents better than any other fiction writer I know of (and this very much includes Grey) the ambiguity that characterized the American encounter with Vietnam. The book does not, of course, create rounded characters for any Vietnamese, but I am assigning other works by Vietnamese for that purpose.

Biff (Charles Keyes)

Between Grey and Greene, I'd think my choice would be Greene, Judy.

As Faulkner said, between grief and nothing....

Duc

Hi Judith, Of course the late Paddy Honey, whom I knew well, boasted about taking Graham Greene to Phat Diem just as he often bragged about his many other contacts.But have you read the memoires of Raoul Salan where he says Graham Greene was one British spy too many. Try finding out about this in the British National Archives & you will come up against a brick wall unless our new Freedom of Information Act really works.

Judy Stowe

From: "Ed Miller" <Edward.G.Miller@Dartmouth.EDU>

To: "'Vietnam Studies Group'" <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 2:15 PM

Subject: RE: [Vsg] Ambassadors understanding countries

Dear Judith and Judy:

Of all the folks who have claimed to be the real-life inspiration for Alden

Pyle--and they are legion--Honey strikes me as the *least* likely candidate.

First, he wasn't American! Second, he was almost unique among Anglophone

Vietnam experts in the early 1950s in that he spoke Vietnamese--a skill

which Pyle conspicuously lacked. Third, Honey was also unusual in that he

had prior experience in Indochina, having accompanied General Gracey in

1945--again, a feature that was completely at odds with Pyle's greenhorn

personna. I don't doubt that Honey was in Phat Diem when Greene was there,

but that doesn't make him either Quiet or American.

Ed Miller

Ed,

Wasn't Pyle modeled on Ed Landsdale? Perhaps it was Paddy Honey who told me that, just to throw me off the scent! Paddy, or the Paddy of his own stories, was the one who not only took Greene to Phat Diem but introduced him to the historical characters of the moment and to the political intrigues of the "third force" -- presumably a romantic notion that appealed to Honey. Judy's suggestion is certainly an intriguing one. Perhaps I will make a holiday detour out to Kew myself!

On the issue of speaking Vietnamese, which Honey certainly did, albeit with a bit of an Irish brogue, I was interested to see that in the film version of the Quiet American Pyle revealed at the Saigon car bomb scene that he did know the language. I've often pondered over the meaning of that erroneous detail.

jh

Judith A. N. Henchy, MLS, Ph.D.

Head, Southeast Asia Section and Special Assistant to the Director of University

Dear Judith and Ed

In Philip Noyce's film adadptation, Pylke was portarayed as fluent in Vietnamese (Fowler recalls seeing Pyle shouting orders and speaking to the policeman in Vietnamese immediately after the blast), but I don't remember that in the book.

Perhaps Noyce wanted to portray Pyle as not so innocent?

But then again, like Greene said, Innocence is a kind of insanity.

From Bill Charney

As Ed Miller comments, Alden Pyle was indeed a composite figure; Greene himself writes in the autobiographical Ways of Escape that all of the characters in the Quiet American, save the American newspaper correspondent Granger, were products of “the unconscious.” This being said, as Pyle goes, there was one American that I have always supposed Greene took as a template. He was an archetypical “Third Forcer,” and in Vietnam from 1950-1952, Greene’s era. Robert Blum arrived in Vietnam in 1950 to head the Economic Cooperation Administration mission to the Bao Dai’s Associated State of Vietnam. The ECA, established in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan in Europe, and the first in an alphabet soup of US aid agencies (ECA, TCA, MSA, ICA, and finally by 1961, USAID), also set-up missions in Asia countries were the US military or US interests were engaged. These aid missions were called STEMs—Special Technical and Economic Missions—and Blum headed the Saigon office.

Because Congress intentionally organized the ECA outside of the State Department, a tension existed between the so-called “liberals” in ECA, and the old-line diplomats at State. During the early post-Elysee period, this tension translated into the disagreements between the “nation-builders” in the economic aid mission and the more staid officials in the US embassy/legation itself. For example, records show that Donald Heath, the US ambassador to the succession of Vietnamese governments during this period, worked to balance US policies that sought to craft a legitimate anti-communist Vietnamese regime, with the broader US interest in keeping the French military in the war and satisfying Paris’ security concerns in western Europe. Blum, on the other hand, was decidedly less sensitive to French feelings and seized every opportunity to work around the French and the sclerotic colonial bureaucracy. Blum’s actions infuriated the French commander in Indochina at the time, General Jean de Lattre, to the extent that de Lattre tagged Blum “the most dangerous man in Indochina,” and was partly responsible for Blum’s eventual recall in early 1952. It is clear in the book that Greene picked up on this growing Franco-American friction.

The fact that Greene styled Pyle as an ECA-type, I think is revealing. It suggests that Greene discerned that Blum and his cohorts represented a new type of American motivated by, in de Lattre’s words, a certain “missionary zeal.” I have found no evidence that explicitly links Greene with Blum, but Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry describes a trip by Greene in early 1952 to visit Colonel Leroy at Bentre. Greene was accompanied during the journey by an American in the economic aid mission who lectured the author incessantly on “the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam.’” (Volume 2, p. 417) Sherry deduces that the American was in fact Blum’s second-in-command and information officer, Leo Hochstetter. So while Alden Pyle is only a largely synthetic literary figure, and a hyperbolic one at that, I think that Greene’s recognition of this relatively new configuration in US foreign policy—the crusading nation-builder—speaks volumes to Greene’s ability to observe and dissemble the contemporaneous. Not to belabor Greene’s often celebrated prescience, his clear-sightedness did allow him to see the malignancy, and danger, in this new strand of liberal and uniquely American imperialism. He was a sophisticated observer.

Interestingly as well, Sherry mentions that in 1951 there were only 38 Americans working for the ECA and the US military assistance group in Vietnam. While I am not sure of his source for this, if true, this considerably narrows Greene’s pool of likely models.

In 1965, Blum recorded the following thoughts; there are clear echoes of Pyle. This excerpt ended up in the Pentagon Papers (see http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent5.htm): “We wanted to capture the nationalist movement from the Communists by encouraging the national aspirations of the local populations and increasing popular support of their governments. We knew that the French were unpopular, that the war that had been going on since 1946 was not only a nationalist revolt against them but was an example of the awakening self-consciousness of the peoples of Asia who were trying to break loose from domination by the Western world…[Despite] French sensitivity at seeing any increase of American influence, we know they would look with suspicion upon the development of direct American relations with local administrations and peoples. Nevertheless, we were determined that our aid program would not be used as a means of forcing co-ordination upon unwilling governments, and we were equally determined that our emphasis would be on types of aid that would appeal to the masses of the population and not on aid that, while economically more sophisticated, would be less readily understood. Ours was a political program that worked with the people and it would obviously have lost most of its effectiveness if it had been reduced to a role of French-protected anonymity.”

For anyone interested, there are several well-researched chapters in the second volume of Sherry’s biography that examine Greene’s tenure in Vietnam. Two sources I have come across that touch on Blum’s involvement are:

William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam war: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part I, 1945-1961 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam, 1946-1966 (New York : Harper & Row, 1966).

Bill Charney