Ways of Escape

  I shared a room that night with an American attached to an economic aid mission – the members were assumed by the French, probably correctly, to belong to the CIA. My companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story – he was a man of greater intelligence and of less innocence, but he lectured me all the long drive back to Saigon on the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam’. I had never before come so close to the great American dream which was to bedevil affairs in the East as it was to do in Algeria.

  The only leader discernible for the ‘third force’ was the self-styled General Thé. At the time of my first visit to the Caodaists he had been a colonel in the army of the Caodaist Pope – a force of twenty thousand men which theoretically fought on the French side. They had their own munitions factory in the Holy See at Tay Ninh; they supplemented what small arms they could squeeze out of the French with mortars made from the exhaust pipes of old cars. An ingenious people – it was difficult not to suspect their type of ingenuity in the bicycle bombs which went off in Saigon the following year. The time-bombs were concealed in plastic containers made in the shape of bicycle pumps and the bicycles were left in the parks outside the ministries and propped against walls … A bicycle arouses no attention in Saigon. It is as much a bicycle city as Copenhagen.

  Between my two visits General Thé (he had promoted himself) had deserted from the Caodaist army with a few hundred men and was now installed on the Holy Mountain, outside Tay Ninh. He had declared war on both the French and the Communists. When my novel was eventually noticed in the New Yorker the reviewer condemned me for accusing my ‘best friends’ (the Americans) of murder since I had attributed to them the responsibility for the great explosion – far worse than the trivial bicycle bombs – in the main square of Saigon when many people lost their lives. But what are the facts, of which the reviewer needless to say was ignorant? The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the title ‘The work of Ho Chi Minh’, although General Thé had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own. Who had supplied the material to a bandit who was fighting French, Caodaists and Communists?

  There was certainly evidence of contacts between the American services and General Thé. A jeep with the bodies of two American women was found by a French rubber planter on the route to the sacred mountain – presumably they had been killed by the Viet Minh, but what were they doing on the plantation? The bodies were promptly collected by the American Embassy, and nothing more was heard of the incident. Not a word appeared in the Press. An American consul was arrested late at night on the bridge to Dakow (where Pyle in my novel lost his life) carrying plastic bombs in his car. Again the incident was hushed up for diplomatic reasons.

  So the subject of The Quiet American came to me, during that talk of a ‘third force’ on the road through the delta, and my characters quickly followed, all but one of them from the unconscious. The exception was Granger, the American newspaper correspondent. The press conference in Hanoi where he figures was recorded almost word for word in my journal at the time.

  Perhaps there is more direct reportage in The Quiet American than in any other novel I have written. I had determined to employ again the experience I had gained with The End of the Affair in the use of the first person and the time-shift, and my choice of a journalist as the ‘I’ seemed to me to justify the use of reportage. The press conference is not the only example of direct reporting. I was in the dive-bomber (the pilot had broken an order of General de Lattre by taking me) which attacked the Viet Minh post and I was on the patrol of the Foreign Legion paras outside Phat Diem. I still retain the sharp image of the dead child couched in the ditch beside his dead mother. The very neatness of their bullet wounds made their death more disturbing than the indiscriminate massacre in the canals around.

  I went back to Indo-China for the fourth and last time in 1955 after the defeat of the French in the north, and with some difficulty I reached Hanoi – a sad city, abandoned by the French, where I drank the last bottle of beer left in the café which I used to frequent with Monsieur Dupont. I was feeling ill and tired and depressed. I sympathised with the victors, but I sympathised with the French too. The French classics were yet on view in a small secondhand bookshop which Monsieur Dupont had rifled a few years back, but a hundred years of French civilisation had fled with the Catholic peasants to the south. The Metropole Hotel where I used to stay was in the hands of the International Commission. Viet Minh sentries stood outside the building where de Lattre had made his promise, ‘I leave you my wife as a symbol that France will never, never …’

  Day after day passed while I tried to bully my way into the presence of Ho Chi Minh. It was the period of the crachin and my spirits sank with the thin day-long drizzle of warm rain. I told my contacts I could wait no longer – tomorrow I would return to what was left of French territory in the north. I don’t know why my blackmail succeeded, but I was summoned suddenly to take tea with Ho Chi Minh, and now I felt too ill for the meeting. There was only one thing to be done. I went back to an old Chinese chemist’s shop in the rue des Voiles which I had visited the year before. The owner, it was said, was ‘the Happiest Man in the World’. There I was able to smoke a few pipes of opium while the mah-jong pieces rattled like gravel on a beach. I had a passionate desire for the impossible – a bottle of Eno’s. A messenger was despatched and before the pipes were finished I received the impossible. I had drunk the last bottle of beer in Hanoi. Was this the last bottle of Eno’s? Anyway the Eno’s and the pipes took away the sickness and the inertia and gave me the energy to meet Ho Chi Minh at tea.

  Of those four winters which I passed in Indo-China opium has left the happiest memory, and as it played an important part in the life of Fowler, my character in The Quiet American, I add a few memories from my journal concerning it, for I am reluctant to leave Indo-China for ever with only a novel to remember it by.

  December 31, 1953. Saigon

  One of the interests of far places is ‘the friend of friends’: some quality has attracted somebody you know, will it also attract yourself? This evening such a one came to see me, a naval doctor. After a whisky in my room, I drove round Saigon with him, on the back of his motorcycle, to a couple of opium fumeries. The first was a cheap one, on the first floor over a tiny school where pupils were prepared for ‘le certificat et le brevet’. The proprietor was smoking himself: a malade imaginaire dehydrated by his sixty pipes a day. A young girl asleep, and a young boy. Opium should not be for the young, but as the Chinese believe for the middle-aged and the old. Pipes here cost 10 piastres each (say 2s). Then we went on to a more elegant establishment—Chez Pola. Here one reserves the room and can bring a companion. A great Chinese umbrella over the big circular bed. A bookshelf full of books beside the bed – it was odd to find two of my own novels in fumerie: Le Ministère de la Peur, and Rocher de Brighton. I wrote a dédicace in each of them. Here the pipes cost 30 piastres.

  My experience of opium began in October 1951 when I was in Haiphong on the way to the Baie d’Along. A French official took me after dinner to a small apartment in a back street – I could smell the opium as I came up the stairs. It was like the first sight of a beautiful woman with whom one realises that a relationship is possible: somebody whose memory will not be dimmed by a night’s sleep.

  The madame decided that as I was a débutant I must have only four pipes, and so I am grateful to her that my first experience was delightful and not spoiled by the nausea of over-smoking. The ambiance won my heart at once – the hard couch, the leather pillow like a brick – these stand for a certain austerity, the athleticism of pleasure, while the small lamp glowing on the face of the pipe-maker, as he kneads his little ball of brown gum over the flame until it bubbles and
alters shape like a dream, the dimmed lights, the little chaste cups of unsweetened green tea, these stand for the ‘luxe et volupté’.

  Each pipe from the moment the needle plunges the little ball home and the bowl is reversed over the flame lasts no more than a quarter of a minute – the true inhaler can draw a whole pipeful into his lungs in one long inhalation. After two pipes I felt a certain drowsiness, after four my mind felt alert and calm – unhappiness and fear of the future became like something dimly remembered which I had thought important once. I, who feel shy at exhibiting the grossness of my French, found myself reciting a poem of Baudelaire to my companion, that beautiful poem of escape, Invitation au Voyage. When I got home that night I experienced for the first time the white night of opium. One lies relaxed and wakeful, not wanting sleep. We dread wakefulness when our thoughts are disturbed, but in this state one is calm – it would be wrong even to say that one is happy – happiness disturbs the pulse. And then suddenly without warning one sleeps. Never has one slept so deeply a whole night-long sleep, and then the waking and the luminous dial of the clock showing that twenty minutes of so-called real time have gone by. Again the calm lying awake, again the deep brief all-night sleep. Once in Saigon after smoking I went to bed at 1.30 and had to rise again at 4.00 to catch a bomber to Hanoi, but in those less-than-three hours I slept all tiredness away.

  Not that night, but many nights later, I had a curiously vivid dream. One does not dream as a rule after smoking, though sometimes one wakes with panic terror; one dreams, they say, during disintoxication, like de Quincey, when the mind and the body are at war. I dreamed that in some intellectual discussion I made the remark, ‘It would have been interesting if at the birth of Our Lord there had been present someone who saw nothing at all,’ and then, in the way that dreams have, I was that man. The shepherds were kneeling in prayer, the Wise Men were offering their gifts (I can still see in memory the shoulder and red-brown robe of one of them – the Ethiopian), but they were praying to, offering gifts to, nothing – a blank wall. I was puzzled and disturbed. I thought, ‘If they are offering to nothing, they know what they are about, so I will offer to nothing too,’ and putting my hand in my pocket I found a gold piece with which I had intended to buy myself a woman in Bethlehem. Years later I was reading one of the gospels and recognised the scene at which I had been an onlooker. ‘So they were offering their gifts to the mother of God,’ I thought. ‘Well, I brought that gold piece to Bethlehem to give to a woman, and it seems I gave it to a woman after all.’

  January 10, 1954. Hanoi

  With French friends to the Chinese quarter of Hanoi. We called first for our Chinese friend living over his warehouse of dried medicines from Hong Kong – bales and bales and bales of brittle quackery. The family were all gathered in one upper room with the dog and the cat – husband and wife, daughters, grandparents, cousins. After a cup of tea we paid a visit to a relative – variously known as Serpent Head and the Happiest Man in the World. All these Chinese houses have little frontage, but run back a long way from the street. The Happiest Man in the World sat there between the narrow walls like a tunnel, in thin pyjamas – he never troubled to dress. He was rich and he had inherited the business from his father before it was necessary for him to work and when his sons were already old enough to do the work for him. He was like a piece of dried medicine himself, skeletonised by opium. In the background the mah-jong players built their walls, demolished, reshuffled. They didn’t even have to look at the pieces they drew, they could tell the design by a touch of the finger. The game made a noise like a stormy tide turning the shingle on a beach. I smoked two pipes as an apéritif, and after dinner at the New Pagoda returned and smoked five more.

  January 11, 1954. Hanoi

  Dinner with French friends and afterwards smoked six pipes. Gunfire and the heavy sound of helicopters low over the roofs bringing the wounded from – somewhere. The nearer you are to war, the less you know what is happening. The daily paper in Hanoi prints less than the daily paper in Saigon, and that prints less than the papers in Paris. The noise of the helicopters had an odd effect on opium smoking. It drowned the soft bubble of the wax over the flame, and because the pipe was silent, the opium seemed to lose a great deal of its perfume, in the way that a cigarette loses taste in the open air.

  January 12,1954. Vientiane

  Up early to catch a military plane to Vientiane, the administrative capital of Laos. The plane was a freighter with no seats. I sat on a packing case and was glad to arrive.

  After lunch I made a rapid tour of Vientiane. Apart from one pagoda and the long sands of the Mekong river, it is an uninteresting town consisting only of two real streets, one European restaurant, a club, the usual grubby market where apart from food there is only the debris of civilisation – withered tubes of toothpaste, shop-soiled soaps, pots and pans from the Bon Marché. Fishes were small and expensive and covered with flies. There were little packets of dyed sweets and sickly cakes made out of rice coloured mauve and pink. The fortune-maker of Vientiane was a man with a small site let out as a bicycle park – hundreds of bicycles at 2 piastres a time (say 20 centimes). When he had paid for his concession he was likely to make 600 piastres a day profit (say 6,000 francs). But in Eastern countries there are always wheels within wheels, and it was probable that the concessionaire was only the ghost for one of the princes.

  Sometimes one wonders why one bothers to travel, to come eight thousand miles to find only Vientiane at the end of the road, and yet there is a curious satisfaction later, when one reads in England the war communiqués and the familiar names start from the page – Nam Dinh, Vientiane, Luang Prabang – looking so important temporarily on a newspaper page as though part of history, to remember them in terms of mauve rice cakes, the rat crossing the restaurant floor as it did tonight until it was chased away behind the bar. Places in history, one learns, are not so important.

  After dinner to the house of Mr X, a Eurasian and a habitual smoker. Thinned by his pipes, with bony wrists and ankles and the arms of a small boy, Mr X was a charming and melancholy companion. He spoke beautifully clear French, peering down at his needle through steel-rimmed spectacles. His house was a hovel too small for him to find room for his wife and child whom he had left in Phnom Penh. There was nothing to do in the evening – the cinema showed only the oldest films, and there was really nothing to do all day either, but wait outside the government office where he was employed on small errands. A palm tree was his bookcase and he would slip his book or his newspaper into the crevices of the trunk when summoned into the house. Once I needed some wrapping paper and he went to the palm tree to see whether he had any saved. His opium was excellent, pure Laos opium, and he prepared the pipes admirably. Soon his French employers would be packing up in Laos, he would go to France, he would have no more opium – all the ease of life would vanish but he was incapable of considering the future. His sad amused Asiatic face peered down at the pipe while his bony fingers kneaded and warmed the brown seed of contentment, and he spoke musically and precisely like a don on the types and years of opium – the opium of Laos, Yunan, Szechuan, Istanbul, Benares – ah, Benares, that was a kind to remember over the years.1

  January 13, 1954

  On again to Luang Prabang. Where Vientiane has two streets Luang Prabang has one, some shops, a tiny modest royal palace (the King is as poor as the state) and opposite the palace a steep hill crowned by a pagoda which contains – so it is believed – the giant footprint of Buddha. Little side streets run down to the Mekong, here full of water. There is a sense of trees, temples, small quiet homes, river and peace. One can see the whole town in half an hour’s walk, and one could live here, one feels, for weeks, working, walking, sleeping, if the Viet Minh were not on their way down from the mountains. We determined, tomorrow before returning, to take a boat up the Mekong to the grotto and the statue of Buddha which protects Luang Prabang from her enemies. There is more atmosphere of prayer in a pagoda than in most churches. The f
eatures of Buddha cannot be sentimentalised like the features of Christ, there are no hideous pictures on the wall, no stations of the Cross, no straining after unfelt agonies. I found myself praying to Buddha as always when I enter a pagoda, for now surely he is among our saints and his intercession will be as powerful as the Little Flower’s – perhaps more powerful here among a race akin to his own.

  After dinner I was very tired, but five pipes of inferior opium – bitter with dross – smoked in a chauffeur’s house made me feel fresh again. It was a house on piles and at the end of the long narrow veranda, screened from the dark and the mosquitoes, a small son knelt at a table doing his lessons while his mother squatted beside him. The soft recitation of his lesson accompanied the murmur and the bubble of the pipe.

  January 16, 1954. Saigon

  Laos remained careless Laos till the end. I was worried by the late arrival of the car and only just caught the plane which left the airfield at 7.00 in the dark. Two stops on the way to Saigon. I got in about 12.30. Why is it that Saigon is always so good to come back to? I remember on my first journey to Africa, when I walked across Liberia, I used to dream of the delights of a hot bath, a good meal, a comfortable bed. I wanted to go straight from the African hut with the rats running down the wall at night to some luxury hotel in Europe and enjoy the contrast. In fact one never satisfactorily found the contrast – either in Liberia or later in Mexico. Civilisation was always broken to one slowly: the trader’s establishment at Grand Bassa was a great deal better than the jungle, the Consulate at Monrovia was better than the tradesman’s house, the cargo boat was an approach to civilisation, by the time one reached England the contrast had been completely lost. Here in Indo-China one does capture the contrast: Vientiane is a century away from Saigon.