An Innocent Abroad:
BELL, DANIEL
An Innocent Abroad A Forest of Tigers. By Robert Shaplen. Knopf. 373 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Daniel Bell Labor Editor, "Fortune"; editor, "The New American Right" Robert Shaplen has attempted...
...In the Twenties, only a handful of Americans went abroad, and then only to Europe...
...By simply showing themselves to the people, those who seek a "third way" would find courage...
...a political solution for a situation so inextrically linked to dozens of other political questions...
...The end is prefigured...
...this is already written off as lost...
...As against the novel about politics, the political novel is also a political act...
...Tran Phan Dong, a Vietnam doctor who had defected from the Vietminh when the hard Chinese political officers assumed control of Ho's army, and now, hunted by Remy and Cau, seeks anxious refuge among the Americans in Saigon...
...It is a reflection, perhaps, of the changing definition of tragedy, a change which arises out of the stumbling entry of the American onto the Asiatic scene and the political novel which laments this...
...But if we have never felt, other than vicariously, the forceful challenge and bitter disillusionment of radical values, there was, bred in the Twenties, an indigenous American type--the revolutionary naif abroad, a John Reed, a Vincent Sheean...
...But is this Tolstoyanism (what else is it...
...A political novel is parochial...
...The French, it is clear, have no solution...
...In the older definitions of tragedy, a man was tripped by his hubris, his pride...
...Tran is the thread which ties the characters together, and each person defines himself ultimately in relation to him...
...The author, to invoke involvement, has to create an atmosphere or recreate some vivid clash of ideas and personalities which can provide the necessary catharsis attendant on the tragedy...
...the details, from the startling burst of the grenade thrown into a crowded cafe to the motes of dust hanging lazily in the mid-day heat, provide a movie-like feel of time and place...
...Remy cannot believe in his idealism...
...but Communism itself, in its appeal, is one variant of a wider challenge: the demand of colored peoples for social and political equality with the power and privilege of the West...
...Here, his innocence is the cause of his downfall...
...The immediate political problem of the East is the threat of Communism...
...Aware of the forces with which they have to contend, they live trapped in a world of inherited political malaises: behind them the world-weary bureaucrats and cynical colons, before them the implacable faces of rising subject peoples...
...They are not revolutionists or romantic outsiders, although traces of both are in their make-up...
...Adam, angry but helpless, seeks some answer, but he does not know where to find it...
...We may have lost in the Orient simply because we were too late...
...there can be little doubt about the final outcome...
...In the last decade, hordes of Americans have overflowed the world...
...Even at the height of the radical challenge, there was still a basic, albeit somewhat frayed, consensus about American life...
...The political novel as a genre is also tragic...
...Adam, too obstreperous for the Minister, is assigned elsewhere...
...And many more...
...The hero is defeated...
...He wants to go to the indefinite country, the area southwest of Saigon, where allegiances are still in the balance...
...He has been expelled...
...if the characters ultimately personify types, their individual physiognomies leave sharp impressions upon us...
...As the American Minister remarks, when Adam presses him to intervene politically, American action might have the antagonistic effect of precipitating French withdrawal from NATO in Europe...
...In the end, Adam is tired...
...They reflect a new iniperium, living in special preserves, recapitulating through the PXs and commissaries the provincialism of the lives they led back home...
...The closest approximation to the political novel was the writing of Richard Wright, and later Ralph Ellison, for the angry alienation of the Negro, while not directly political, was a violent wrench from that unspoken consensus...
...To them, the world was not alien, but exotic...
...Americans have not written political novels because few have been deeply involved in a revolutionary situation or felt the heavy weight of a stratified society on their shoulders...
...Similarly, the dilemmas of Tran and Adam Patch carry a special poignancy, perhaps, only for those of a generation that had carried its innocence abroad...
...The Americans are supplying economic aid and some military advice, but fear to intervene lest they irritate the French...
...and, as a result, their maturer awakenings were colored not by a bitter-almond despair but by a bitter-sweet nostalgia for the past...
...Its experiences are not intelligible, certainly emotionally, to all readers...
...he only knows that there must be some third path between the corruption of the French puppets and the fanaticism of the north...
...Politics is not only a question of moral solutions (who can object to Tran's hope...
...The superb character sketches carry the novel, but the ideas falter...
...as W. H. Frohock tells us in his study of Man's Fate, is modeled on Chou En-lai), or an Italian conservative to understand the agonies of Silone's Pietro Spina (who is, quite obviously, Silone himself...
...It is of these Americans, and their travails, that Shaplen writes: it is with them that he identifies...
...He is not even an outsider...
...The heart of the novel is Trail's search for a cause in which to believe...
...There is Remy, the ubiquitous French political officer, who holds most of the strings of action...
...and this fact, which Shaplen's novel points to but does not explicate, is the heart of the matter...
...The writing is sharp and crisp...
...all they can do is fight a delaying action...
...editor, "The New American Right" Robert Shaplen has attempted something difficult for an American--to write a political novel...
...They plunged into the turbulence of revolutionary politics with a romantic exuberance...
...it would be difficult for a Kuomintang man, say, to identify with the dilemmas of Malraux's Kyo Gisors (who...
...Shaplen has succeeded beautifully in presenting the atmosphere of Saigon...
...The complicated plot moves with the pace of a thriller, and...
...Genevieve, the Eurasian, an agent of both Remy and Cau, who fears the love she may have for Adam...
...The forces against him are too great...
...The indefinite time is 1950-1951, when the armies of Ho Chi Minh are pressing down from the north...
...His protagonist is Adam Patch, an American consul at Saigon...
...Nominally...
...What have we learned...
...It is this which is the ultimate meaning of Shaplen's brilliant and evocative novel: Beyond the waters is a forest of tigers...
...One can demonstrate to an Indian or Indonesian intellectual the intellectual fallacies of Marxism or the psychological transparencies of nationalism, but (as Stuart Hampshire noted in a recent article) all such arguments founder on the hurt of a sensitive and cultured individual who has been tutoye--patronized--all his life...
...It deals with one particular theme, revolution, and with a special generation, the rootless intellectual as adventurer...
...The proletarian novels of the Thirties were feeble because they could not express a genuine experience...
...But for all their yearning for commitment, they were inevitably outsiders...
...Like the historical novel, the political novel has a major flaw...
...The source of the Asian revolution is not nationalism or Communism per se (these are its vehicles), but resentment...
...Adam sees in Tran his solution, but in so doing becomes a threat to the French...
...but of correct timing...
...The political climax comes with Trail's efforts to persuade the Americans that their only hope is to "go to the people" in the jungle...
...The political novel, as we know it, is not an American genre...
...Cau--and the political officer from the north who hunts him—can only regard him as a renegade...
...Vietnam is ruled by the Vietnamese, but French colonialism still pulls the strings...
...Cau, the dedicated Anna-mite terrorist, who is more purely l'homme de ressentiment than devout Communist...
...The world is no longer exotic...
...Tran does not want to go to the Ho country...
...And yet there are some who are acutely aware of political discontents, because they have broken out of these enclosures and have talked to the people...
...Tran is assassinated...
...the American worker was simply not the proletarian that the European usage of the word implied...
...They are a new naif--the American idealist as Government administrator abroad...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 10
