Literature Lessons

Graham Greene did not write a book about how "America bumbled into Vietnam."

The fact that so many Americans read The Quiet American as a book about how America bumbled into Vietnam indicates just how deeply the myth of good intentions is ingrained in our national psyche.

The fact that Phillip Noyce, director of the 2003 film remake of The Quiet American, thinks that Alden Pyle was "a dunderhead" and a "caricature" is the root of his movie's failure.

When Alden Pyle arrives in Vietnam, he certainly seems naive. He has a foolish affection for a pseudoscientific political tract on what we now call "promoting democracy." He is comically large in a country of small people. He is ostensibly bemused by our narrator Fowler's louche, cynical, almost nihilistic manner. He is charmingly provincial about women. He is contemptuous of the French and heedless of the dilemmas of colonial administration. He is not--he'd tell you--interested in colonialism anyway. All in all a portrait, well-played, of a Yankee ninny with a half-baked Freedom Agenda and a penchant for getting people hurt without actually intending it.

So what's he doing in the aftermath of a catastrophe directing people in fluent Vietnamese?

Fortunately for literature, Greene, an author whom I increasingly believe to be greater even than Conrad, didn't carry biases about the redemptive qualities of the West's good intentions. Even in his outwardly comic works--Our Man in Havana, for instance--the comedy is a thin mask for a more substantial horror. In TQA, Pyle is occasionally played for yucks, and his half-baked political convictions are genuine mockery of America's half-baked politics, but Pyle is no bumbling moron. No Quixote. No Candide. Alden Pyle is a character played by Alden Pyle, the latter of whom is a cold, bloody figure willing to put bombs in a marketplace in service of his theories. He is an intelligence agent who lies. He doesn't end up dead because he's dumb. He ends up dead because he is a soldier in a war.

He's a soldier in a war that Greene saw the Americans pursuing in 1953.

It wasn't a war that was bumbled into. It wasn't an accidental war. There is no such thing as an accidental war. It wasn't the result of good intentions gone awry, of bad intelligence, of decent convictions that simply exceeded the operational capacity of the military. It was a calculated policy, enacted over the course of decades with callousness and deception, in the service of an ideology no less deluded, brutal, inhuman, and flawed than the colonial French that preceded it or the native Communism that followed. Actually, it was more deluded, more brutal, more inhuman, and more deeply flawed.

Whatever it was, it was not an accident.