I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam – that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.
Beginning in 1951, Graham Greene traveled through Vietnam, from Saigon to Hanoi, on assignment to write for the London Times. As would his main character in The Quiet American – Thomas Fowler is the aging British reporter stationed in Saigon to cover the French-Vietnamese war. He vows to remain objective and, initially, does nothing more than repeat press releases from the French.
The hotel in Hanoi where Greene wrote parts of the The Quiet American while covering the war
When Greene met a young man from a U.S. economic aid mission whose members were believed to be part of the CIA and who spoke about the need to spread democracy, he found the character that would become known as The Quiet American. Alden Pyle is Harvard-educated, idealistic in intentions, but Machiavellian in ethics. He talks of replacing French colonialism and Communism with a “Third Force.”
And when the real-life General Minh Thé, a mercenary-for-hire working covertly for the CIA, set off a series of bombs in January of 1952 that were meant to direct blame to the Communists, Greene found his story.
War relics on the streets of Saigon
The Quiet American takes us through the landscape of Vietnam – from a French bombing operation near Lai Chau and a religious festival attacked by the Vietminh in Phat Diem to a visit with the Cao Dai in Tay Ninh where the real-life General Thé had built his army. But most of the book takes place on what was once Rue Catinat (modern-day Dong Khoi), in a city everyone still calls Saigon despite its renaming to Ho Chi Minh after the surrender of South Vietnam in 1975. The street, Rue Catinat, was named after a ship that docked at Danang in 1858. It marked the beginning of French occupation.
Graham Greene’s Saigon starts at the bank west of the river, across from the Hotel Majestic, going the entire length of Rue Catinat to the Notre Dame Cathedral. The hotel and the cathedral both still stand today with their original names. Hotel Majestic was built on 1 Rue Catinat in 1925. Greene sometimes stayed here where he could see military supplies being unloaded from American planes, at night and in secret. Today, the rooftop bar still offers the same soaring views of the river.
Mekong River
It was a hostess at the Majestic Bar that Greene claimed was the inspiration for Phuong, Fowler’s-turned-Pyle’s beautiful lover in the book. Though she was actually named after the girlfriend of an acquaintance of Greene’s. And there was yet another woman Greene was rumored to have had an affair with in Saigon (as Fowler does) who may have been the true inspiration for Phuong. Next door to Hotel Majestic is Maxim’s, opened the same year as the hotel. It was Greene’s favorite restaurant.
Maxim’s
Across the street at 108 Rue Catinat was the Grand Hotel de Saigon. It was inaugurated in 1930, then converted into apartments later on. It is in one of these apartments that Fowler lives. In the book, many scenes and conversations take place in a “room over the Rue Catinat.” Recently, it was converted once again and reopened as the Grand Hotel. Further up the street on 109 Rue Catinat was the apartment Greene lived in in real life. It would become the Mondial Hotel and now Hotel Catina, where I stayed as I wrote this. And I could see across the street the once-apartment of the real-life Phuong, which is now a Sheraton.
Hotel Catina
But the center of The Quiet American is found at 132 Rue Catinat. Built in 1880, The Continental was the first hotel in Saigon. It still stands today, complete with the corner room Greene stayed in and the outdoor terrace where, in the book, Fowler starts his evening ritual with a beer every day at 6pm. It was called Radio Catinat for the hosts of foreign correspondents who stayed there, and the terrace was nicknamed the “Continental Shelf” because they believed it was safer from hand grenades. This was both in real life and in the book.
The Continental
In The Quiet American, it is here that Fowler first meets Pyle and Pyle first sees Phuong. In real life, it is also from where Greene witnessed General Thé’s bomb detonate on Place Garnier (modern-day Lam Son Square), killing civilians. In the book, Fowler describes the incident in almost autobiographical details.
Theater terrace overlooking Place Garnier, across from The Continental
From the Continental, Fowler (and I imagine Greene himself) takes his daily walks up Rue Catinat. He describes how “the hideous pink cathedral blocked the way.” Built just 3 years after the Continental, Notre Dame was covered with red bricks imported from Marseilles. Today the walls have become even more faded, but it is still full for Sunday mass.
Notre Dame Cathedral
On the way to the cathedral, at 164 Rue Catinat, was the infamous French police station, “Bot Catinat,” where inmates were tortured in the basement cells before being transferred to the central prison. Again, this was both in real life and in the book. In the beginning of The Quiet American, Inspector Vigot summons Fowler here for questioning after Pyle’s death. Fowler describes “the dreary wall of the Sûreté” and talks of the disappearances of prisoners held there.
Bot Catinat
Today, the same building is used by the Department of Culture and Tourism. And all along the streets of Saigon are shops and cafes, similar to the ones Fowler (and Greene) would walk by every day. But gone are the vibrant fortune-tellers he describes in the book. They have been replaced by sidewalk vendors selling copies of The Quiet American in several languages among other souvenirs.
And it isn’t just these remnants of Graham Greene’s Saigon that has made it such a lasting story. The Quiet American is so much more haunting in its prophecy. Greene had so accurately predicted what would happen when a third-force democracy is forced on other nations. A year after the book was written, the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, took power and his violent regime further divided the country and propelled it to chaos.
Colonial architecture in modern-day Vietnam
So then came the ill-fated Vietnam War. This book was the foretelling of the failures of a foreign policy driven by ideology rather than diplomacy. It was Greene’s anti-war epic before the full-scale war that actually came. I was 15 when I first read the book, and the politics were over my head then. They still are, but it was this complexity that taught me something I continue to learn from literature and travel to this day – that every country’s history is long and difficult. You can defeat a country but not an ideology. And you can’t make the entire world and all the people in it fit into just one.
The Quiet American would be Greene’s most famous book for having become true and in other places even repeating the prophecy. He had meant for it to only be a warning. But even he could not have predicted the casualties of that war or the destruction it would bring to a country he loved.
The Hai Van Pass separates north and south Vietnam
Over 3 million people died – 2 million civilians, 1.25 million Vietnamese soldiers from both sides, and 57,000 Americans. When Fowler muses at the end of the book, I imagine it’s really Greene himself saying,
I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the Continental, with his eye on the soda-fountain across the way. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.
Terrace café at The Continental
