Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels by Graham Greene, David Karp Describe American Political Innocence Although Graham Greene makes a distinction between his thrillers-"entertainments" he...
...Karp understands that Communist tactics deliberately entangle even the relatively innocent in a web of concealment and deceit...
...The quiet American is Alden Pyle...
...It is Fowler who applies the epithet: "I summed him precisely up, as I might have said, 'A blue lizard,' 'A white elephant.'") Pyle is ostensibly in Saigon for the Economic Aid Mission, but he also has duties of a cloak-and-dagger sort...
...Yet, Fowler likes him in a way, and the relationship between them takes a strange shape when Pyle, on the one hand, saves Fowler's life and, on the other, steals his mistress...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels by Graham Greene, David Karp Describe American Political Innocence Although Graham Greene makes a distinction between his thrillers-"entertainments" he calls them -and his serious novels, the critics have pointed out that all his books are very much of a piece...
...In The Day of the Monkey, Karp wrote with unusual discernment and balance about some of the problems of colonial administration in Africa...
...you might understand a little more about human beings...
...Then Burney comes back into the story...
...But the first thing Burney tells Vircassian is that the committee has got to be purged of Communists and fellow-travelers, that it must go into the fight with clean hands...
...He has considerable sympathy, it appears, for the Vietminh, not as Communists but as fighters against exploitation, but at the same time he respects and is sorry for the Frenchmen involved in what seems to him inevitably a losing struggle...
...In All Honorable Men, he has come close to achieving the same kind of success with an urgent domestic problem and then botched the job in the concluding chapters...
...This is the point at which others of Greene's characters have been converted to religion...
...And if Karp hasn't Greene's polish, he has a considerable fertility in the creation of character, and he keeps his story moving...
...Like every liberal," he goes on, "I've deplored the hysteria of loyalty investigations, but the falsity of the principle never before hit me the way it has now...
...What he doesn't realize-and Karp doesn't seem to, either-is that he is affirming the principle he has just denounced as false, the principle out of which all loyalty investigations grow...
...The United States is now a great power, with interests in every part of the world, and innocence, in Greene's mind, is a quality inappropriate to the role its citizens have to play...
...Inevitably, the Communists and their sympathizers flock to the committee...
...Other people even closer to Burney come under fire, and the reactionaries have a field day...
...that is, he has recognized that there are positions in which Communists are a danger...
...David Karp's All Honorable Men (Knopf, $3.95) is also a novel about politics, but domestic rather than foreign...
...It is a mark of Dr...
...The chief backer of the Institute is a businessman...
...Vircassian does not like them, but be stubbornly refuses to get rid of them...
...there can be endless discussion concerning the methods by which Communists are to be kept out or put out of sensitive positions...
...Ness is not subversive, but he is vulnerable, for he has a daughter who has been a Communist and the private agency hired by Van Ord to investigate the case soon has dug up plenty of dirt about her...
...Since his knowledge of Indo-China is chiefly derived from the work of a crusading journalist who once spent a few weeks in Saigon, it may be imagined that he is not taken very seriously by Fowler...
...Greene would never be guilty of a mistake of this kind...
...Burney is a very sophisticated man...
...There can be arguments as to where Communists are dangerous and how dangerous they are...
...Vincent Locke, who is closely advised by a retired Army man, General Van Ord...
...His new novel, The Quiet American (Viking, $3.50), is as exciting as The Third Man or The Ministry of Fear, but it is and is intended to be deadly serious...
...Its hero is Milo Burney, who in his middle fifties has held high positions in both Government and education...
...This, of course, does not excuse either governments or individuals from the responsibility for attempting to determine degrees of guilt and innocence, but it does make it difficult for even fair-minded persons to be just, while it makes it easy for unscrupulous persons to do a lot of harm...
...The speech leads to his being asked to head a new foundation, the Institute for American Studies, which is being created to develop just such enlightened conservatism as be has been talking about...
...It is because of his liberalism that considerable interest has been aroused by a speech he has delivered, a speech in which he has appealed for an intelligent conservatism...
...In the meantime, in addition to exploring the characters of the two men and the relationship between them, Greene has given us several fine scenes of jungle warfare and has expressed his views on the Indo-Chinese situation...
...All Honorable Men offers a many-sided appraisal of the situation...
...By comparison with Graham Greene's Alden Pyle, Dr...
...If I believed in your God and another life," Fowler tells Pyle, "I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats...
...Gerald Sykes, who touched upon a similar theme in a book with a similar title, The Nice American, suggested that at least a few Americans were growing up...
...It doesn't unless you actually have your nose rubbed in it...
...Since, however, Greene does not demand that the reader accept the validity of this conclusion, as he did in The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, the novel stands on its own feet, without the support of dogma...
...but there is still something of the innocent about him...
...He says to Pyle, "I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives...
...To go on with the story, Ness hires as his lawyer a man named Victor Vircassian, who spends much of his time in defending alleged Communists, and now the reader's interest shifts from Burney to Vircassian...
...Although the story is told in the first person, with the narrator holding back no information that he could legitimately be expected to supply, the denouement comes as a stunning surprise...
...As we meet him, he is head of the Rutledge Foundation, a man with a great reputation both as an administrator and as a spokesman for liberalism...
...But one can see plainly enough the lesson Greene and his co-believers would draw from Fowler's predicament-the emptiness of a life without faith...
...Karp seems to share, is a blemish on a novel that in oilier respects displays a high degree of political awareness...
...Locke, an ambitious woman, is active on the governing board, as is her nephew, a young playwright named Macy Sutton...
...He is an innocent abroad, the latest in a long line of such innocents to be found in both Britain and American fiction...
...But of course he does become involved, first by way of Phuong, whom he would marry if his English wife would give him a divorce, and then by way of his opposition to the political game Pyle is playing...
...Karp could learn a good deal about structure from Greene, and in many ways All Honorable Men seems a little amateurish in comparison with The Quiet American...
...like its predecessors, One and The Day of the Monkey, it displays a vigorous intelligence...
...Some of Burney's subordinates warn him that these are dreadful people, but he persists in believing that he ran deal with them, and three of his devoted assistants follow him to the Institute...
...He has learned, he says, that the Lockes and the Van Ords are vicious, cruel, dangerous people, and is determined to fight them and their kind...
...The confusion, which, as I have suggested...
...But is he, as Greene wants us to suppose, representative...
...But so, I am afraid, do a great many contemporary novels...
...The hand of the master is clearly revealed in the structure of the novel, which rises to a magnificent climax...
...Unlike Felix Jackson's So Help Me God and various other novels concerned with loyalty investigations...
...Of course, he is right...
...Fowler is the more interesting character, but Pyle is the center of the story...
...Burney is bored with his duties as head of a respectable, stabilized foundation...
...How does one know...
...And that applies to your country, too...
...It surprises his associates, and it puzzles the reader, too, but Karp works hard to explain the motivation...
...and he rather fancies the chance to play God...
...The Quiet American is typical Graham Greene, and it is Greene at his best...
...Fowler is not...
...And the fact is that Pyle, with his good intentions and his ignorance and his simple-minded notions, manages to do a lot of harm...
...The scene is Indo-China at the height of the fighting...
...Burney's lily-white liberalism blinds him both to the possibility that men he likes may have concealed from him facts that can be used against them and him and to the certainty that the Lockes and the Van Ords will make the most of any advantage they can win...
...but the reality of the danger cannot be denied...
...That Pyle is utterly convincing in terms of the book seems to me beyond argument...
...It is his third novel, and...
...Burney's acceptance of the offer is what gets the novel going...
...The narrator is Thomas Fowler, a disillusioned British journalist, who has a Vietnamese mistress, Phuong...
...Moreover, though it differs from The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair in having a political rather than a religious theme, the altitudes that were explicit in those books are implied in this one...
...he regards the offer as a challenge to his liberal principles...
...Fowler says of Pyle, "God save us always from the innocent and the good...
...Trouble develops promptly when a question arises concerning the loyalty of an appointee, Joseph Ness, and Burney urges him to make a fight...
...Nor is Graham Greene content to rest with this tour de force, for there are, in the closing pages, two more turns of the screw that drive home the meaning of the novel...
...Fowler is a typical Greene character, worldly wise, gently cynical, a man who prides himself on not being "engage...
...We discover in the first chapter that Pyle is dead, but it is only at the end that we learn how and why he died...
...But, alas, daily headlines indicate that maturity is not the rule among those who shape and execute our foreign policy...
...After Ness has committed suicide, Vircassian sets up a committee to clear the dead man's reputation...
...Burney's growing wisdom that he realizes this in practice, even though it seems a pity that he remains so confused about principles...
...But times have changed since the days of Mark Twain and Henry James, and even since the days of the expatriates...
...After resigning from the Institute, he joins Vircassian's committee...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 11
