The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Fowler asks Pyle when he fell in love with Phuong and he admits that it was while he was dancing with her at the Chalet, with Fowler watching: ‘it was seeing all those girls in that house [of prostitution]. They were so pretty. Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted to protect her.’4 When Fowler lies to Pyle, saying that rumours that he’s being called back to London for a promotion are untrue, Pyle again speaks like an Englishman or rather like an English schoolboy: ‘You’d play straight with me, Thomas, wouldn’t you?’ Fowler examines Pyle’s question: ‘Are you playing straight?’ and says that it belongs to a psychological world of great simplicity, ‘where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u as it’s spelt on old tombstones, and you meant what your father meant by the same words’.5 Of course, and why not? Pyle is straight out of a good quality public school – in essence he is English.

  It may well be that Greene had an actual Englishman in mind, at least in the initial stages of creating Pyle’s character. He had met an Englishman in Malacca who was a good but naïve man, and who had, as Pyle has, an obsession with a taxi dancer. He died because he completely misjudged his girlfriend’s character.

  In Malacca, on 10 December 1950, a month before his first visit to Saigon, Greene went to the City Park Dance Hall where there were attractive Chinese taxi dancers. Here he met a young Englishman called Jollye (written in his journal as Jolly). Greene described Jollye as a young man ‘who was crackers about Macao, dreamed of going back and living there (the earthly paradise), could talk of nothing else. We met in the City Park Dance place and he had a Chinese girl with him whom he fondly believed was a virgin, “see her home every night: can’t touch her”. He had extraordinary clear, wild blue eyes and loved the Chinese.’6 When Greene returned to Malacca with his brother Hugh for Christmas, he went back to the same dance hall and saw Jollye’s girl: ‘she was taxiing [being hired out for dancing] and I was afraid of seeing him because I couldn’t remember his name for introductions. I described him to our companion [Cunningham-Brown, who met Greene at the Residency in Malacca, and later told me that Greene ‘was burnt up inside by Catholicism, fighting against his desires which he failed to understand’]. He said, “Oh, that was Jolly.” Jolly I know as the name of a young man who was shot a week ago. I had noticed his tiny absurd car and had said to Noel Ross, “That would be good for an ambush,” but they put five bullets in him very accurately in spite of the tiny car. It was oddly sad being afraid to meet him and seeing his “virginal” Chinese girl taxiing and then finding he wasn’t here or back in Macao or anywhere at all. He was a young Resettlement Officer. He had told his Chinese taxi girl where he was going next day and the information was passed down the line to the terrorists.’ So Jollye died and Pyle died, each killed by a communist assassin: Jollye was reported by his girlfriend to the communists; Pyle by his friend Fowler.

  Jollye’s British public school character remains in Pyle – when did an American, even from Boston, speak the following lines? Fowler and Pyle are in the officers’ quarters at Phat Diem and Pyle has just declared to Fowler that he’s fallen in love with Phuong:

  He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I had to tell you – I’ve fallen in love with Phuong.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was so unexpected and serious. I said, ‘Couldn’t you have waited till I go back? I shall be in Saigon next week.’

  ‘You might have been killed,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have been honourable. And then I don’t know if I could have stayed away from Phuong all that time.’

  ‘You mean you have stayed away?’

  ‘Of course. You don’t think I’ll tell her without you knowing?’7

  Pyle is abiding by a well-established British code: you have to be fair; you cannot in love or war take unfair advantage of your opponent. Not until Fowler breaks the recognised code between them by lying to Pyle – saying his English wife will divorce him, thus allowing him to marry Phuong – does Pyle fight aggressively for Phuong’s hand in marriage.

  Everything about Pyle suggests the product of a good English background – good family, good training, the true type of English gentleman. He is complicated by his sense of fair play, by his sensitivity and the idealism of extreme youth; he is really an imperishable British product. He tries on the personal plane to act honourably, to treat friendship as important and to save a friend’s life when the occasion demands. How far Fowler has fallen from these standards of gentlemanly behaviour becomes clear when, after Pyle has saved his life, he responds: ‘If it had been you, I’d have left you.’8

  Another candidate as source for Pyle is an American, Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had at that time a tremendous reputation for his work in Intelligence. Moreover, he himself thought that Greene had used his background to create Pyle. It’s rare to find a book on Vietnam which doesn’t automatically accept that Greene used Lansdale as his source, the latest to do so being Howard Simpson’s Tiger in the Barbed Wire: ‘Lansdale, who became the model for the lead character in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American’.9 Lansdale’s biographer, Cecil Currey, had no doubts that Lansdale was Greene’s source:

  One of [The Quiet American’s] two focal characters was Alden Pyle, patterned after Lansdale and other Americans Greene observed in Vietnam, and thus Greene became the first author to caricature Lansdale’s real-life exploits. Greene did not like what he knew of them and he made this fact very clear in this text. He described Pyle as a young man with … a crewcut, and an earnest, ‘unused’ face. Pyle had been sent to Vietnam by his government, ostensibly as a member of the ‘American Economic Mission,’ but that assignment was only a cover for his real role as a CIA agent. His orders called for him to create a political force in Vietnam that could resist a communist takeover after the French departed. His duties included funneling money and explosives to a warlord general.10

  Currey then quotes Lansdale’s recollection of the one occasion he and Greene crossed paths. It was 1954 and Lansdale had been invited to dine at the Continental Palace hotel with Peg and Tillman Durdin, a husband-and-wife team of American correspondents who had just returned from an interview with Ho Chi Minh (which Lansdale had helped to prepare them for).

  When Lansdale arrived, he saw a large group of French officers at the sidewalk terrace and Greene sitting with them. Later, as he and the Durdins were leaving, Greene said something in French to his companions and the men began booing Lansdale. The Durdins knew Greene, and Peg stuck out her tongue at him, turned and gave Lansdale a hug and a kiss, and said, ‘But we love him!’ For some reason Greene banged the table at which he sat. Lansdale smirked and thought, ‘I’m going to get written up some place as a dirty dog.’ He later commented, ‘I had the feeling that Greene was anti-American.’ The rancorous feeling between the two men was mutual. Greene called the widespread notion that Lansdale provided the basic model for Pyle a ‘myth’ and observed that he ‘never had the misfortune to meet’ Lansdale, whom he ‘would never have chosen … to represent the danger of innocence’.11

  ‘Graham Greene once told someone’, Lansdale commented, ‘that he definitely did not have me in mind when he created the character Alden Pyle. I sure hope not … On the other hand, Pyle was close to Trinh Minh Thé, the guerrilla leader, and also had a dog who went with him everywhere – and I was the only American close to Trinh Minh The and my poodle Pierre went everywhere with me.’12

  Lansdale was certainly one of America’s best-known CIA operatives, not in itself a quality to be praised in a spy, but by the time Greene and he encountered one another, Greene had almost completed The Quiet American. Lansdale went to Vietnam after the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 and Greene began writing The Quiet American as early as March 1952, completing it in June 1955. The first draft was completed earlier however, which precludes the possibility of Lansdale influencing the novel. As for Lansdale’s dog, which he thought Greene had used, the one Greene had in mind was René Berval’s big black dog.

  The idea for
The Quiet American came to Greene when driving back to Saigon after spending the night with Colonel Leroy, who was in charge of Bentre province:

  Less than a year ago [Greene wrote in 1952] when we had toured together [Leroy’s] watery kingdom, it was in an armoured boat with guns trained on the bank, but now as night fell we moved gently along the rivers in an unarmed barge furnished, not with guns, but with gramophones and dancing girls. [Leroy] had built at Bentre a lake with a pagoda in imitation of one at Hanoi, the night was full of strange cries from the zoo he had started for his people, and we dined on the island in the lake and the colonel poured brandy down the throats of the girls to make the party go and played the Harry Lime theme of The Third Man on a gramophone in my honour.

  I shared a room that night with an American attached to an economic aid mission – the members were assumed by the French, probably correctly, to belong to the CIA. My companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story – he was a man of greater intelligence and of less innocence, but he lectured me all the long drive back to Saigon on the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam’. I had never before come so close to the great American dream which was to bedevil affairs in the East as it was to do in Algeria.13

  When Pyle quotes a journalist called York Harding – ‘York wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force’ – he seems naïve but in fact was voicing an underlying facet of American policy. The Americans were looking for an incorruptible, purely nationalist Vietnamese leader who could unite the Vietnamese people and provide an alternative to the communist Vietminh:

  ‘I heard [Pyle] talking the other day at a party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen …

  ‘He was talking about the old colonial powers – England and France, and how you two couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in now with clean hands …

  ‘Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Vietminh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism – national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.’14

  There is a real possibility that what the unnamed American said on the long drive back to Saigon is reflected in this paragraph, but Greene must have heard the argument from a number of sources. The date of this visit to Bentre excludes the possibility that the source was Colonel Lansdale.

  In interviewing various consular officials and CIA agents in Washington and elsewhere who operated in Vietnam during Greene’s years there, I asked if they had visited Colonel Leroy in Bentre. Those who had were possible candidates for the original of Pyle, or at least for his views. Some half a dozen had visited Bentre, some as Colonel Leroy’s guests – but they had not been there with Greene and had not given him a taste on the way back to Saigon of the ‘American Dream’.

  Greene had a small snapshot in his possession and on the reverse he had identified the people in it. Leroy was in the middle, and on his left was someone Greene identified as Q.A. In interview Greene could remember no more about him than he’d written in Ways of Escape – even his name escaped him but he thought it was Teutonic.

  Various US legation people looked at the photograph and finally Paul Springer recognised Q.A. as Leo Hochstetter. Hochstetter had died, but his wife was alive; a letter also exists which Greene wrote to Hochstetter at the American legation in Saigon, dated 17 April 1952:

  My dear Leo, It may amuse you to have this souvenir of our day and night with Colonel LeRoy and perhaps you would pass on one of the two copies to him. I certainly look as if I am going through a melancholy mood. I often look back with nostalgia to Saigon and wish an opportunity would arise of revisiting the place.

  Hochstetter worked under Robert Blum, head of an economic aid mission and a friend of Edmund Gullion. They both had strong views on the need for a third force, views which Hochstetter supported. ‘Leo was colourful, loquacious,’ said Tom Peck, ‘with opinions on everything that came along … Everyone else in ECA [the mission] in Vietnam seemed to have a specialty that bore directly on Vietnam’s economic needs that the US might be able to help with. But Leo had no such qualifications that I can recall. My guess is that he wanted to do something to help his country and got the job through political pull of some kind.’15 Paul Springer recalled that Hochstetter was number two in the economic aid mission. He was short and pudgy and of dissolute appearance: ‘street smart’ defined him best. He was loquacious and irreverent.16 John Getz agreed that Hochstetter ‘talked constantly, and loved to play the clown at a party, singing comic songs and delivering witty lines that he appreciated more than anyone else. He was public affairs director for the economic aid mission.’17

  Mrs Hochstetter said that her husband liked Greene:

  coming home from seeing Colonel Leroy apparently they’d been insulting each other all the way back in the car. They were both suffering from horrible hangovers and he called Leo ‘Cock’ and Leo described him as half-cocked and full of unanswered questions. That Greene was doing great harm by being a communist fellow-traveller. But they ended up a mutual admiration society, more or less.18

  There were fundamental differences between Pyle and Leo Hochstetter. Pyle was gentle, modest and quiet, Hochstetter was powerfully gregarious; by using the talkative, versatile Leo Hochstetter as one source for Pyle, with his simplistic moral standards, Greene was probably playing a private practical joke. However, only he knew who his source was and only he could appreciate the joke, but that would be enough for him.

  Pyle often speaks with a naïveté which is not justified, but Greene is stressing not only Pyle’s inexperience in Indo-China but the dangers of innocence in a complex and difficult society like Vietnam. In 1951 there were no more than thirty-eight Americans in the ECA and in the MAAG (the military aid organisation), but over the years the numbers increased greatly. And though there were intelligent operatives, they were young and without question profoundly exhilarated by the fact that they were in Indo-China and standing up to communism. It was a heady time for them all.

  Nancy Baker, the young wife of Charles Baker, who was among other things consular security officer at the legation in Saigon, gives an authentic description of how it was for those American consular and aid officers arriving in Saigon for the first time – for what Pyle would have felt:

  The town is gradually being taken over by the Americans, what with visiting military missions, medical missions, etc. There is absolutely no more room at the [Continental Palace] hotel to take care of a stray pigeon. And mostly before lunch or before dinner, you’ll find a good percentage interspersed in the crowd at the hotel’s café and sidewalk café.19

  Saigon never ceases to amaze us with its paved streets lined with trees, its water system, its substantial-looking buildings and villas, its monstrous cathedral, its parks … That they have not yet disintegrated into dust when each step in the process of doing anything around here is done so slipshod, so carelessly, is a monument to the French and their blood, sweat, tears, and lost tempers. But they have to leave and in the meantime they hate us as economic imperialists who are going to stab them in the back by feathering our nests when they get out. While, surprisingly, the Vietnamese have received us most cordially but with restraint and wonder. They respect power and money, and the US has both, and they are willing to believe in the good will of the US, but not quite.20

  By linking the young naïve Pyle to the murderous activities of Colonel Thé, Greene could attack American naïveté in dealing with a bandit whom they saw as a third force leader. In his New Yorker review of The Quiet American, A. J. Liebling charged that Greene ‘apparently resented passing on world leadership to the Americans’. The ill will was understandable. It was ‘part of the ritual of handing over’, but there was a difference ‘between calling your over-successful offshoot a silly ass and accusing him of murder
’. Is it Liebling who is being naïve here?

  29

  Death in rue Catinat

  Go and try to disprove death,

  death will disprove you.

  – TURGENEV

  ON 5 JANUARY 1952 the New York Times reported that General de Lattre had been operated on in Paris: ‘Neither the nature of his illness nor of the operation has been disclosed.’ By 11 January the heroic soldier was dead; it was a time of mourning in Vietnam, as a letter sent home by Nancy Baker shows:

  For about 4 weeks the latter part of January and the first of February, the local French and Vietnamese officials and the Diplomatic Corps were in mourning for the death of de Lattre. Not that I was in agreement for that long length of time of mourning, we still had a very enjoyable time staying home in the evenings, reading, or have small dinners.1

  With de Lattre gone, hope died that the French could win the war in Vietnam. The United States and France held opposed views on the country’s future, and if the US State Department did not press France hard this was only because it felt that France might throw in the towel, to stem the loss of its best sons. There were real divisions in the American legation in Saigon also. On the one hand Ambassador Heath was a genuine supporter of the French leadership symbolised by de Lattre. Edmund Gullion thought the French were wrong and that they were not serious about independence. He and Robert Blum were strongly against the survival of colonialism and in favour of building up a nationalist army. They both advocated ways of winning the war which the French authorities found unacceptable.