alan marshall
movements, and with a little underhand weaponry thrown in as and when—the
moderncloak-and-dagger of exploding cigars. The empire of the free world would
be secured not in the name of empire, naturally, but of democracy—which by the
1950s had become another word for anti-communism. Greene also foresaw that
things would not be quiet for long. Vietnam would blow up right across American
television screens: ‘An event as ordinary|As a President.|A plume of smoke, visible
at a distance|In which people burn’.^1
This essay takes Greene’s novel as offering a framework for looking at how some
British poets responded to this change in the balance of power and at the crisis of
identity, as it has been characterized, that Britain underwent as a result of it. I will
begin by trying to establish one or two points of contrast with some contemporary
American poets. Here too I want to use Greene’s novel, and to draw on certain
binaries, certain conventional contrasts, and even national stereotypes, at the risk of
over-simplification, which is what Greene himselfappears to have risked, in order,
hopefully, to get at deeper patterns and truths. For Greene’s novel is also an essay
in the messy continuance and development of Henry James’s famed international
theme, its passage from innocence to experience, and the strange persistence of
British insularity at the frontiers of colonial violence.
As it happens,The Quiet Americanis also, among other things, a book about
poetry: about the kind of poetry one reads and the kind of people who read it. In
the first few pages alone, the narrator has quoted Baudelaire; the quiet American
is reported to have said that he does not like poetry, is discovered nonetheless to
have a selection of American poetry on his shelves, and there are references to
Shakespeare, Augustan verse, and a Vietnamese accountant who loves Wordsworth.
More importantly, however, Greene raises explicitly the question of the kind of
language a writer is to use in respect of the condition the world was in just ten years
after the triumph of 1945—where war is over and yet ongoing, where it is ‘Cold’
but overheated, and where politics are, simultaneously, post-colonial and imperial.
Through its protagonist, a reporter, the novel asks whether it is possible to use plain
language, to speak directly and not obliquely, to be in earnest and not ironical,
sincere and not deceitful—in a word, whether Wordsworth’s notion of poetry as a
man speaking to men still holds up.
One model of plain-speaking, direct, straightforward language that the novel
examines is ‘reportage’: ‘My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I
preferred the title of reporter,’ the English narrator Fowler tells us. ‘I wrote what I
saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.’^2 Leave aside the rather
too obvious question about where poetry stands in relation to this axiom (is it
another way of sitting on the fence, not getting involved, expressing no opinion, and
(^1) George Oppen, ‘Of Being Numerous’ (1968), inNew Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New
York: New Directions, 2002), 173.
(^2) Graham Greene,The Quiet American(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974; 1st pub. 1955), 28.