Loud Ideals, Quiet Consequences

Longtime readers might recognize these words. I had intended to reshape them—as I sometimes do, foolishly, with old work. But for this brief review of a Graham Greene novel, I’d be perfectly content to have written it today.

Plitvice Lakes, Croatia 2016

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Look closely and you might recognize this passage from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American:

I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, ‘Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.’ That was my first instinct—to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it.

Of course this recognition isn’t necessarily specific, this is the recognition of character—I have met Pyle, and I am certain that you, too, have met Pyle. He is the character who struts with purpose into every room, a bit too earnest, a bit too dedicated, always talking yet never listening, not once letting his ignorance block his certainty, not once letting his failures affect his confidence. Long before we meet any particular Pyle, we already know him, and we also know that when he turns his gaze toward us, the judgement will be harsh.

I was to see many times that look of pain and disappointment touch his eyes and mouth when reality didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished, or when someone he loved or admired dropped below the impossible standard he had set.

Because Pyle’s standards are always unattainable, he will forever have grand plans for the world, and the world will forever disappoint him with its failures. It is true that a world without dreamers like Pyle, without all the romantics and idealists and visionaries, would be a lesser world, but that doesn’t deny the necessity of keeping at least one eye on those dreamers, especially those with a tendency to muck up everything they touch.

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In Greene’s The Quiet American, Pyle is a young American in Vietnam, the year is 1955, and he has plans for the country. We can consider him an intelligence officer, ready to fund and arm and support the groups he deems worthy. The plans are specific to the context of a specific country at a specific time although the temperament that drives Pyle’s certainty isn’t specific at all. Shift the context, scramble a few variables, and out comes Pyle with a new grand project. Rereading the novel gave Zadie Smith the perfectly reasonable reaction of reinforcing her “fear of all the Pyles around the world.” Even though the world is complex and dynamic and anything but predictable, there will always be a temperament that never quite matures, that will always believe in the solution they thought of just this morning, despite their almost uncanny ability to make every situation worse.

So readers can’t help but recognize Pyle, though Greene manages to avoid turning his character into a mere comic portrayal. And that’s mostly because he’s described through the lens of Thomas Fowler, a cynical English journalist—which might be a tautology—who narrates the novel. To see Pyle with the distance of Fowler’s narration helps steady the absurdity that is Pyle’s naivety. Fowler can’t comprehend how Pyle manages to combine recklessness, hubris, and gullibility, and neither can the reader.

A third character, Phuong, is both a literal and metaphoric link between Fowler and Pyle; she is reserved and remote and mostly a mystery. A faulty but commonplace criticism describes this inconspicuous female character as a creative failure, but her remoteness is actually quite telling. Having the Vietnamese Phuong absent while Fowler and Pyle argue isn’t a failure by Greene. And having the English Fowler observe the American Pyle isn’t incidental either, especially in this novel, and for this conflict. America is big enough that absolutely everything said about the country is at least somewhat true, so a distant lens, such as from Fowler, can occasionally offer the most clarity.

‘You can rule me out,’ I said. ‘I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

It is both maddening and profoundly depressing to have one of the most nuanced and instructive novels about the Vietnam War arrive nearly a decade before most memories of the war even begin. Yet Greene wasn’t a prophet. Nor was his 1955 novel mere journalism. It was, instead, a novel where the roots of a particular mentality are unearthed and then extrapolated outward, with a conclusion that’s logical and inescapable for anyone not named Pyle.

‘I hope to God you know when you are doing there. Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are.’ He looked puzzled and suspicious. ‘I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle.’

Perhaps there is a revealing aspect to how most people understand the origins of the Vietnam War today. If they happen to think about the beginning at all, they’re usually about one decade and nearly three American Presidents off the mark, unable to discuss anything at all about French involvement, unwilling to understand how decisions and conflicts in the 40s and 50s influenced and directed and redounded onto later decisions, yet they are, simultaneously, ready for Pyle-like solutions, primed to lecture about the right lessons, even though they’ve opened their history books at Chapter Four.

What makes The Quiet American such a memorable novel isn’t its depiction of this particular time—which brings the exasperation of reading both tragic and avoidable scenes. It is the depiction of a specific character, the person who is primed for good yet blind to the bad they’re sure to cause. Any decent group of, well, twenty people will contain at least one Pyle. And we can’t really blame that person for their idealism, or for their search toward romantic solutions. Perhaps that temperament is a necessary component to an unjust world and a necessary response against apathy. We must admire it, then we must blame ourselves for how we will always, again and again and again, indulge it.

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Greene does brush away any facile talk of ‘dominos’ in his novel, with the character of Fowler completely unwilling to entertain any intellectual theory—in his journalistic mind a “real background” about Vietnam results from walking real streets and seeing real lives, rather than from the simple application of a theory created by distant bureaucrats. Eventually, Fowler realizes that all the highfalutin theories about statecraft in Pyle’s head leave the young idealist “with the caution of a hero in a boy’s adventure-story, proud of his caution like a Scout’s badge and quite unaware of the absurdity and the improbability of his adventure.”

But perhaps the novel’s quick dismissal of domino theory was a slight misstep by Greene—a slight failure of creation in 1955. Fowler tosses out the theory without sensing how Pyle’s reckless choices might themselves, in fact, nudge those domino blocks, with each decision a little worse, with each blunder a little larger. It is certainly a forgivable misstep, as the true implications were so horrendous. The entire novel points to the extrapolations of character, to how decisions have reverberations, with Pyle following a feckless and arrogant path, his purported desire to help triggering nothing but harm. Yet it was certainly difficult to conceive that the danger from characters like Pyle was greater than anyone could have imagined, and that maybe the domino theory was quite sound and actually almost precisely true in reverse—with credulous and foolish choices in 1955 a factor in arranging all of those dominos to fall in the other direction.