Debriefed by Dreams: Michael Herr

Abstract

‘He had always understood what was going to happen there, and in that small and quiet novel, told us nearly everything.’ Thus Gloria Emerson, in her account of a recent interview with Graham Greene,¹ reiterates a view of The Quiet American which has generally prevailed since the novel’s American publication in 1956. With the passage of time, and the fading in the United States of initial criticism of The Quiet American as anti-American² — and with the passage of the American war in Vietnam through phases prophetically implied in Greene’s portrayal of Alden Pyle — the novel has become an established point of reference for those interested in problems of literary response to the war. As a set of defining images, if not of elaborated arguments, it has entered the ‘record’ of an unquiet American era, not necessarily terminated by American withdrawal in 1975. Along with Greene’s dispatches from the period 1952–5, or rather as the moral and aesthetic distillation of these reports from Indochina, The Quiet American is as likely to be cited as ‘evidence’ by historians and reporters as to be lauded as exemplary by literary critics.

hardly stories at all but sounds and gestures packed with so much urgency that they became more dramatic than a novel …

Dispatches