The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  With a Viet Minh assault anticipated, Greene was taken by car to see the improved defences at Haiphong. He had a French commissioner as escort, who showed him what the French wanted him to see. On All Saints’ Day (1 November), he went in a destroyer to an uninhabited island where soldiers were buried and then found himself playing confessor to a naval chaplain, who poured out his moral and spiritual troubles. It was the sort of thing Greene hated, as he felt he had nothing to give these ‘victims of religion’.25 By 10 November, he was travelling with American medical aid workers – an experience that he later worked into the novel: Pyle is supposedly treating the bacterial eye disease trachoma. Greene met the young Dr Warren Winkelstein, an epidemiologist with the United States Public Health Service, who was doing precisely that.26 Greene photographed ‘Wink’s’ team in the field and exchanged letters with him.27 Although Pyle’s medical work is a cover for political and military activity, Dr Winkelstein was an admirable character, who went on in later years to prove in a pioneering study that unprotected sex between men led to the transmission of HIV and AIDS.28

  Slipping his leash, Greene found a pilot willing to disobey orders and take him for a couple of days of dive-bombing – Greene was allowed to fly, but only on horizontal missions above the range of enemy fire. They flew out in a B-26, which the pilots called a ‘prostitute’ as with its short wings it lacked a ‘visible means of support’.29 With just room enough in the cockpit for the pilot, the navigator, and the long-legged novelist, they began with a series of fourteen dives from 9000 to 3000 feet.30 The plane was sent out again, and dropping to 200 feet above the Red River, targeted a sampan. Greene wrote about this sortie in The Quiet American: ‘Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home . . . There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey – we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.’31

  Greene’s difficulties with the French came to a head on 18 November 1951. At lunch de Lattre asked ‘le pauvre Graham Greene’ to return for a cocktail party that evening. The general was off on his travels again, but word had got around that he would not be coming back. There was an air of discouragement, and by now senior officers felt free to criticize him, even to an Englishman. With the much-decorated General Raoul Salan and two others making a show of not listening, de Lattre asked, ‘And now, Graham Greene, why are you here?’ Greene gave the obvious answer that he was writing an article for Life magazine, so de Lattre asked him point-blank whether he was in the Secret Service and associated with Trevor Wilson.32 Nonplussed, Greene offered another unconvincing denial, and was left feeling he had not spoken up enough for Wilson.

  After a meal in which Greene was observed disapprovingly by the general’s wife, the bereaved mother of one soldier and the soon-to-be widow of another, he asked the general if they could meet in private. When everyone had left after midnight, he explained his work again, including the amount he was being paid by Life, and the general responded with what sounds like regret for a friendship lost, though Greene saw it as ‘grandiloquence’: ‘I have told the Sûreté, Graham Greene is my friend. I do not believe what you say about him. Then they come again and tell me you have been here or here and I say, I do not believe. Graham Greene is my friend. And then again they come . . . ’ They shook hands warmly, but the general’s doubts returned immediately; Greene claimed it was over an innocent but unsigned telegram he received from Marie Biche. The next day the general remarked that he knew Greene must be a spy: ‘Who would come to this war for four hundred dollars?’ His English was weak, and he had ‘mislaid a zero’.33

  One of those dominant, charismatic men who so often fascinated Greene, the sixty-two-year-old Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was at the end. Having fallen ill during his visit to the Vatican, he delayed treatment for bone cancer because of his obligations in Indochina. Le roi Jean went home to two operations, and died at a nursing home in Paris on 11 January. Despite his reported anti-Catholicism, he received the last rites of the church.34 He was posthumously named Marshal of France and, following a state funeral, buried beside his son in the Vendée.35

  ‘My friendship with Trevor has mucked things up for me here completely. The French imagine all kinds of sinister motives, & very politely all doors are closed. I shall probably go back to Saigon in a few days, visit Angkor & then leave the blasted country. But as one was really looking for a bullet, it’s unsatisfactory.’36 So Greene wrote to Catherine. He had had enough of Wilson’s project, but the damage to his reputation had already been done.

  And yet in the months since his first visit, Greene had thought a good deal about Phat Diem, and it had grown in significance for him. In the last week of November he made his return, from the north by jeep, ‘heaving along at evening between the uncountable churches by the canal sides, the fresh green of the new rice shoots washed in a flat gold light as the sun sank, a landscape like Holland . . . It was then I had the delight of the half remembered, the half forgotten. To return to a place is always happier than a first visit, and though the bishop in the months past had lost his private army (all except the band) it was a contented town, war had reached the outposts but had passed on again out of earshot . . . ’37

  No place in Greeneland is truly safe or content. On about 13 December 1951 he heard a rumour in Hanoi that Phat Diem had been overrun by the Viet Minh.38 The new Commander-in-Chief Raoul Salan allowed Greene, whom he liked, to go where he pleased without the Sûreté and gave him specific permission to go to Nam Dinh, a city on the Red River. Once he got there, he made his way thirty kilometres south to his real destination of Phat Diem. He arrived in a landing craft in the company of Lieutenant Roger Vandenberghe, a highly decorated killer with ‘animal face and dangling hangman’s hands’, who in June had been entrusted with the recovery of Bernard de Lattre’s body; his Tigres Noirs commandos, extremely violent ex-Viet Minh who typically operated in disguise behind enemy lines, mutinied about a month later and killed him.39

  The nightmare that Greene came across in Phat Diem – including a mother and child dead in a ditch – is described in the opening paragraphs of this book. He was a journalist at a small but very ugly battle that the French did not want the world to know about, so with an offer of him spending a day with the navy they persuaded him to board a boat back upriver to Nam Dinh, where his escort simply abandoned him. But he had seen what he had seen.

  At Christmas, Greene left Vietnam for a few weeks in Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaya, mostly in the company of Wilson, who finally boarded a ship for Naples. Greene returned to Saigon by about 20 January 1952, and went on to interview the Emperor Bao Dai on the 24th, but the emperor had almost nothing to say.40 Almost a year after his first visit, Greene returned at the beginning of February to the small Catholic stronghold at Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta. By now, Colonel Leroy had built a lake with a pagoda, modelled on the ancient one in Hanoi, and opened a zoo for the entertainment of local people. On Greene’s earlier visit, he and Leroy had travelled about in an armoured gunboat. This time they went on a barge with dancing girls and a gramophone playing, among other things, the Harry Lime theme.

  Greene’s travelling companion was the American journalist Leo Hochstetter,41 then serving as press spokesmen for the Special Technical and Economic Mission. Believed to represent the CIA, this outfit was dispensing about $23,500,000 per year in aid. The French feared that it was encouraging extreme nationalism (conceivably in the person of the future president Ngo Dinh Diem), and de Lattre had offered its head, Robert Blum, an academic from Yale, a backhanded compliment: ‘Mr Blum, you are the most dangerous man in Indochina.’42 Greene
listened to Hochstetter’s harangue on the necessity for a ‘third force’, and although he had decided some months before to write a novel set in Indochina, he now realized that it could be written specifically about American meddling. He later said that The Quiet American had its origins in this conversation.43 Greene denied that Hochstetter was the model for the idealistic Pyle, and various efforts to see that character as a portrait of someone present in Vietnam, such as the cold warrior Edward Lansdale, have proved unconvincing.44 Although Greene did once say, perhaps jokingly, to the novelist Mike Mewshaw that the character was based on an American diplomat whose wife he had seduced, Pyle, for the most part, is a product of Greene’s imagination.

  Greene went the next day to interview Pham Cong Tac, the chain-smoking pope of the Caodai, at the Holy See at Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border, north-west of Saigon. Although the religion has endured, Greene could not take it seriously except in its military aspect. He regarded it as something close to a cartoon, with its iconography drawn discordantly from half a dozen different traditions, mingling, for example, a papal throne and the tail of a dragon.45

  During the Second World War, the French had imprisoned this pope in Madagascar because of his links to the Japanese. After the war, the group, though opposed to communism, was briefly aligned with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, so the French attacked their headquarters, killing some of their leaders and torturing others, until they agreed in 1946 to switch their allegiance to the French and in exchange their pope was allowed to return to the country.46 By early 1952, General de Lattre had given great offence to the Cao Dai by demanding that their twenty thousand-strong army be absorbed into that of the Associated State of Vietnam; two months after Greene’s visit they finally broke with the French, while continuing to oppose the communists.47

  Perhaps with Hochstetter’s voice ringing in his ears, Greene wanted to know about a rogue Caodai named Trinh Minh Thé, a colonel in the French army who deserted in June 1951. He took two thousand men with him, declared himself a brigadier-general, and was responsible for the assassination of a young French general and the planting of bombs in Saigon.48 This was not Greene’s idea of a third force, but he suspected that for the Americans the shadowy Thé represented the future of Vietnam. He would be made responsible for the bomb blast in the centre of Saigon that is a key event in The Quiet American.

  *

  During these months in Vietnam, Greene was happiest when smoking opium, the pleasure of which he initially described as ‘intellectual’ – whatever that meant.49 He had his first pipes in Haiphong around the beginning of November: he was brought to a fumerie in a back street, where the madame spotted him as a ‘debutante’. He lay down on a hard couch and watched the pipe-maker in the light of a tiny lamp kneading the brown gum into a ball and plunging it on a needle into the flame, where it bubbled and its smoke rose into the pipe’s inverted cup. With a little experience, he would learn to take all the smoke in one breath. Sleepy after two pipes, his fourth left him calm and alert, and his perpetual anxieties became like memories. Despite his ‘execrable’ French, he felt free to recite a poem by Baudelaire. Going back to his room, he experienced for the first time the ‘white night’ of opium, lying awake, watchful and untroubled before going into a deep sleep seeming to last all night but in fact only twenty minutes, then returning to the first state, repeating the process over and over.50

  He wrote of his new pleasure to Catherine, who worried that he might get addicted, though she too would eventually try it. Greene insisted that he limited himself to five pipes, only once exceeding that number, while a true addict required a hundred per day.51 On one occasion, having smoked his five, he had a dream about a man at the Nativity who could not see anything. The Magi presented their gifts to what seemed an emptiness. The shepherds listened to what seemed no sound. The man had a gold coin with which he planned to pay a prostitute, but he followed the example of the Magi and presented it to what appeared to be a vacancy. Long afterwards, this man, who becomes Greene himself, tells the story but cannot remember whether he gave the money to the Blessed Virgin or to a prostitute, ‘ “but it doesn’t really matter,” he says’.52 This dream oddly anticipates the conclusion of Greene’s late novel Monsignor Quixote where, just before his death, the old priest says Mass without actual bread and wine, consecrating a vacancy. Greene found it easiest to believe when in the company of fervent Catholics – Vivien, Catherine, his priest friends, or for that matter the indigenous people in Mexico. Deprived of their witness, he inclined to doubt, though he continued to make the gestures of worship, sometimes to what seemed an emptiness, until the end of his life.

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  VISAS

  Just before he left Vietnam, Greene had a skirmish with American consular officials obstructing his plans to visit California and New York in February 1952. The McCarran Act of 1950, passed over Harry Truman’s veto, attempted to keep people who had been communists or fascists out of the country. In the belief that it would be a useful example of the absurdity of such measures, Greene had disclosed to a sympathetic American diplomat in Brussels that while at Oxford he had been a member of the Communist Party for a period. He then repeated the disclosure to a Time magazine reporter, and a ‘plastic curtain fell’. To enter the country he required the special permission of the Attorney General, a process taking three weeks, and his visits were limited to four weeks.1

  He was being stonewalled by consular officials in the Far East, so he arranged for the New York Times to run a front-page story on his difficulties on 2 February. Two days later his visa was approved,2 though with prohibitions on political activity and speeches. For the rest of the decade, Greene’s efforts to get into the United States were similarly obstructed, but he enjoyed fighting back in the press and causing embarrassment to the American government – although he was acting on principle, it became for him a hobby, just as an habitual protestor might join any march.

  Greene arrived in Los Angeles on 13 February 19523 for meetings with the producer David Lewis, to whom he sold the rights in The End of the Affair for $50,000 – a very indifferent film starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson was released in 1955.4 While in Los Angeles, Greene went out for drinks with Charlie Chaplin.5 Having once advocated American friendship with the Soviet Union, Chaplin was being watched by the FBI. Greene did not like what he was hearing about blacklists in the film industry, and would soon make common cause with Chaplin over the McCarran Act. In the midst of a tax dispute, Chaplin, who had never become an American citizen, went to London in September for the premiere of Limelight, with plans to remain in Europe for six months. While still at sea, he learned that the Attorney General was refusing him re-entry to the United States because of his communist associations.

  Greene wrote a robust public letter to Chaplin, published in the New Statesman,6 describing him as the finest of all screen artists, savaging Senator Joseph McCarthy, and upbraiding the American Catholic church, including Cardinal Spellman, for encouraging a persecution of the sort Catholics themselves had suffered in the past. Chaplin did not go back to the United States, settling instead in Switzerland, where Greene visited him. Their friendship was close, and Greene had a hand in Chaplin’s 1964 bestseller My Autobiography, both as editor of the manuscript and as a director of the Bodley Head, which published it.7

  From California, Greene went to New York mainly for a rapprochement with Catherine, but he was also hankering for another brawl with the American government, so held a news conference at the offices of Viking Press on 19 February, in which he lamented the role of the ‘informer’ in American life. Senator McCarthy, he said, had induced a ‘reign of terror’ in the film industry: ‘if a man said yes, he had been a member of the communist party, he is expected to give the names of his friends in the party’. He said that he was indeed apprehensive of the effects of international communism, but also of the ‘second effects whipped up by your own countrymen’. With an actor’s timing, he hesitated, smiled, and added, ‘You ma
y be prepared to take on Stalin, but not McCarthyism.’8

  Still in a pugilistic frame of mind, Greene proceeded to a reception at the Roosevelt Hotel, where he was given the Catholic Literary Award for The End of the Affair. After a short speech from the president of Hunter College on his achievements as a Catholic writer, Greene responded drily, ‘I think of myself as an author who happens to be a Catholic. I think that by order of the Attorney General of the United States [my talk] will be even shorter.’ Greene had managed to turn a non-speech into a news story.9 It was a trick he would use for the rest of his life, frequently teasing journalists with his refusals to be interviewed, and they would then, often enough, write about this reclusive author and his silences.

  Back in London, Greene wrote up an impressive article about Indochina that was a poor fit for the magazine that had commissioned it. The publisher of Time and Life was Henry Luce, whose wife, the playwright and politician Clare Boothe Luce, was a recent convert to Catholicism. The magazines’ interest in Greene had mainly to do with his standing as a Catholic author, and Time had, of course, lavished a cover story on The End of the Affair. However, the Luces were also Republicans and cold warriors, and that set the editorial tone.

  Since his time in Malaya, Greene had grown doubtful about the wars in south-east Asia. He opened his article on Indochina with a summary of what President Eisenhower would soon call the ‘falling domino’ effect, referring to the vulnerability of Tonkin, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong to the menace of communism. Greene wrote: ‘This is the simple truth: war can sometimes appear to be simple.’ He then described how ‘simple’ matters seemed when he watched the fighting from the bell tower in Phat Diem, but this simplicity was an ‘illusion’. Not always sensitive to other people’s ironies, Christopher Hitchens in an essay published in 2005 misread Greene’s statements here as somehow endorsing the domino theory,10 when he was clearly rejecting it.