Re-Reading “The Quiet American” After Living in Vietnam

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Every great literary city exists twice. There is the city itself—the place of traffic, weather, rent, construction sites, bad coffee, office workers, students, lovers, people trying to get home before the rain—and then there’s the city literature that assembles around it: the first metropolis built brick-by-brick, the second sentence-by-sentence. Dublin is encrusted by the everyman Irish mythology of James Joyce’s Ulysses. St. Petersburg can never escape the violence of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. A Moveable Feast is often the expat writer’s first roadmap to Paris. We travel to encounter new geographies, only to discover we’ve been searching for books.

For English-language readers, there is no novel more closely associated with Vietnam than Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Before one has crossed the street in Ho Chi Minh City, before one has grown accustomed to the astonishing choreography of motorbikes, Greene has already begun whispering in the background. Graham Greene’s Saigon precedes the city itself.

I first arrived in Saigon in the autumn of 2015, fresh off a year in Korea, beginning a career as an English teacher. For a full year I steeped in Saigon’s heat, travelling from district to district on a motorbike, and writing all I could in my time off. By the end of the year, I’d built a strong career foundation in Vietnam, and I’ve remained ever since—though I’ve moved North, and teach at a university in Hanoi today, Although the city has officially been known as Ho Chi Minh City (H.C.M.C.) since its takeover by the Communist government after the fall of Saigon in 1975, I retain the older name throughout this essay because it is the city Greene knew, the city his novel inhabits, and the one that still persists in literature, memory, and everyday speech with the most affection by locals. One year is not a long time to fall in love with a city, but it is long enough to feel the shock of leaving it. Readers considering a move to Vietnam (where it costs roughly $800–1,000 a month to live comfortably, leaving far more time for writing than life back home) would do well to begin in Saigon before moving north. Only then does the contrast fully reveal itself: Northern Vietnam is far greyer than the South; the burden of governance is something felt—it infects everything—and it is Hanoi’s hard-earned beauty.

The South is the Vietnam foreigners visit most often and fall in love with: where Saigon is outward-looking, entrepreneurial, and eager to charm, the North is where the machinery of the dictatorship is most visible. Life in Hanoi is more dutiful, more restrained, and more conscious of ideology and authority. Like both Fowler and his foil Pyle in the novel, I was also leaving behind a woman I’d loved—a Southerner whose parents and grandparents had worked with the French and American imperialists—and who would most likely be more restricted from building the same opportunities and quality of life for herself in the capital. My memory of the city and the heartbreak became inseparable, but this was also more than the mourning of a relationship: as well as the breakup, I’d lost the first version of Vietnam that had first captivated me. One year in Saigon may not sound like much, but a decade in Vietnam is a very, very long time.

Arriving in Vietnam carrying The Quiet American is like showing up at a liberal arts campus with a copy of Infinite Jest under your arm. Greene’s Saigon is a city of French cafés and fading colonial hotels; cigarette smoke; foreign journalists; news correspondents; and the ambiance of empire surrendering to historical change. Whatever else the city had become by the time of my arrival, it was no Cold War remnant.

Fragments of The Quiet American are everywhere in Saigon but what Greene captured was primarily an atmosphere, or moral climate.

This is one reason The Quiet American has aged so well. It is often described as a political novel, and rightly so, but the politics are rarely so explicit. Political developments reach the reader obliquely, rather, through crowded rooms, conversation overheard between officials, and the weary reflections of drunken men who have watched history pass before them for years without ever being able to alter its course.

When our narrator-protagonist Thomas Fowler—an aging British correspondent—learns that Alden Pyle has been murdered, the novel’s inciting incident, his immediate response is numbness, or a kind of fatigue—and Fowler accordingly narrates with the detachment of someone for whom death has become just another professional inconvenience.

When Greene writes that “a writer should be like a spy,” the implication is that details should accumulate before conclusions, and that the novelist must watch first and only judge later, if at all. This is where it is possible to see how the English author’s early journalism helped shape his narrative voice. Indeed, the “neutrality” of The Quiet American is what distinguishes it from almost every other “Novel of Vietnam” written since. It is an extraordinary feat that Greene’s sentences possess the economy of reportage, on the one hand, while also, somehow, retaining the narrative complexity of great fiction.

It is also one of the greatest achievements of postwar literature that Greene’s prose causes us to mistake Fowler’s intelligence for credible wisdom. We read Fowler as he presents himself. He is cultivated and worldly, ironic and dangerous, sexually experienced, and politically skeptical. He is the kind of narrator readers are bound to trust intuitively, though Greene spends the rest of the novel testing and gradually exposing how fragile his authority really is.

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Rather than telling us what to think, Greene, in The Quiet American, instead places Fowler beside the young Alden Pyle and waits, allowing their dialogue (spoken and unspoken) to do the work for him. Pyle is younger—still “green” to Vietnam and its expatriates. He is earnest and well-read, and also disastrously convinced of his ideology. Greene’s early description of Pyle—“[there was] never a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”—is so effective because it captures a recurring type. Every generation produces its own Alden Pyles: intelligent, compassionate young men (typically recent liberal arts graduates) whose confidence in theory quite simply outruns their understanding of reality on the ground.

From here, it is tempting to read Fowler as Pyle’s corrective—and indeed many readers do. Such a reading suggests that Pyle represents innocence where Fowler represents knowledge, and the lore surrounding the novel’s political reputation to this day largely hinges on this opposition; there is truth in the contrast, but it is hardly the whole story.

“Sooner or later,” Fowler insists, “one has to take sides. Repeatedly expressing that he wishes to remain detached from politics, Fowler seems to believe that observation itself can become a way of life, but Greene knows better. The peculiar seduction of journalism as an “occupation in observation,” for Fowler, is that it permits the belief that seeing somehow exempts one from acting. We encounter the predicament across Greene’s body of work—from the police officer Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, to the spy Maurice Castle in The Human Factor, to the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory. Greene’s work centers around men who make their living looking closely into the lives of others while attempting to preserve a certain emotional detachment until the distance between observer and observed collapses.

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When I first arrived in Saigon, I measured the streets of Saigon against Greene’s descriptions; I sat and read in cafés as if still listening for the conversations between Fowler and Pyle; perhaps part of the delusion is unavoidable. When we visit faraway places, we believe we are encountering a place directly, but we rarely do. We arrive carrying novels, films, photographs, and inherited political narratives; but a new country negotiates with us before presenting itself on its own terms.

Life overseas has a way of quietly altering our relationship to books. By the time I’d moved from Saigon to Hanoi in 2018, The Quiet American had become something quite different for me. My life had acquired a rhythm unimaginable to me on first landing in Saigon. I taught at universities and learned enough Vietnamese to go on dates and get invited to the good parties; and eventually I got married and became a father. Over the same period of time, Vietnam ceased being an object for observation and became just another stage upon which ordinary life unfolded. Thus, returned to Greene with different questions: the first time I read The Quiet American, I wanted to know whether Greene understood Vietnam; the second time, I wanted to know whether he understood expatriates.

There is a peculiar confidence that accompanies expatriate life: one arrives as a student of the country, eager to learn, and all-too-painfully aware of one’s own ignorance. If one is willing to learn the language and history, one becomes something of a “foreign expert”: friends begin asking for explanations, locals stop you on the streets, and before long, one discovers oneself speaking with an authority that would have seemed absurd upon first landing. On the other hand, the more one’s knowledge expands, the more one realizes everything that remains inaccessible. It’s an apprenticeship that never truly ends.

Accordingly, even as Fowler speaks with the easy assurance of someone who believes his experience has liberated him from illusion, Greene constantly demonstrates the limits of his perception. He understands politics better than Pyle, but he understands neither Phuong—his Saigonese mistress—nor, finally, himself and his place within the ongoing conflict in Vietnam with anything like the same clarity.

Greene invites us to inhabit Fowler’s perspective and then gradually exposes his blind spots:

Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

What we see Fowler questioning here is whether understanding itself is ever complete: between husband and wife, parent and child, between a foreign correspondent and the country in which he lives. The irony is that Fowler treats it as a general truth about human relationships when his own greatest misunderstanding is epistemic. In short, Fowler mistakes experience for understanding.

I am not persuaded that Greene’s novel “explains” Vietnam; I am convinced, however, by Greene’s exposure of the expat’s temptation to believe he has.

Looking back on the years first in Saigon, then later in Hanoi, I realise how many Vietnams I have inhabited. The landmarks have become ordinary, street-side cafés have become just another place to answer emails or meet colleagues after work. Graham Greene’s Saigon is no longer the city existing chiefly on the streets outside, but it persists in the habits of mind with which I had learned to walk those streets. The novel is a crucial part of any Westerner’s apprenticeship to Vietnam.

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Of course, The Quiet American offers a necessarily partial account of Vietnam, as every foreigner’s portrait must be. Likewise, no book can preserve a country because no country remains intact—as such—for very long. Cities change too quickly for novels to hold them still: governments fall, revolutions succeed revolutions, streets are renamed, and the political certainties of one generation become hardened, and the centuries pass, long after the writers who once inhabited and described them have left us

What great travel novels preserve instead are habits of perception. Ulysses no longer gives us Joyce’s Dublin, nor A Moveable Feast Hemingway’s Paris, nor Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg—but we continue reading because they preserve a particular consciousness, moving through a particular place and time, and at a particular moment in history.

Great books survive because they preserve the possibility of being read differently by the same person. I first came to The Quiet American expecting it to help explain Vietnam; nearly a decade later, I realized Greene had been preparing me for the stranger I would eventually become there. What The Quiet American still teaches is that every attempt to understand another place ultimately arrives at an attempt to understand ourselves.