The Quiet American's Errand Into the Wilderness

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THE QUIET AMERICAN'S ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

by

Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg

Presented to the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors

Harvard College Cambridge, Massachusetts

March 1, 2004

TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE........................................................................................................................................................ 3 AMERICA'S PURITAN MISSION............................................................................................................... 8

TYPOLOGICAL EXEGESIS AND HOLLYWOOD'S PURITAN MOMENT___________________ 13 GRAHAM GREENE, ODD MAN OUT___________________________________________________ 26

REDACTION AND REPRESENTATION IN 1958 . ................................................................................. 33 TYPOLOGY APPLIED: RESOLVING LANSDALE_____________________________ TYPOLOGY TODAY_________________________________________________________________ 56 ILLUSTRATIONS____________________________________________________________________ 60 BIBLIOGRAPHY_____________________________________________________________________ 65

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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even tAe dgad will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. —Walter Benjamin*

Myth may clothe history as fiction, but it persuades in proportion to its capacity to help people act in history. —Sac van Bercovitch^

Preface The vocabulary of the Vietnam War, like most American political and historical

rhetoric, contains a pervasive theological character. In the notorious statement of one

officer that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it," one might hear a perverse

echo of the Christian paradox that "whoever gains his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it."^ From the purposeful notion of saving a country from godless Communism to the simple history of military words like "mission," the language

of America's Vietnam experience brims with religious meanings—mostly of a specifically Christian nature—that reflect both intentional and unintended parallels

between Biblical narrative and historical fact. Such religious language persisted long after the war itself ended; indeed the seemingly cosmic nature of America's failure there served to enhance the religious quality of memory as the War was described

retrospectively with regret, bitterness, and irony as a misguided "Cold War Crusade,'** an Apocalypse Now which shook America's "faith" in its leadership. In the same vein,

modem descriptions of Graham Greene's 1955 novel admonishing of the dangers of * Walter Benjamin, ///Mnn'nahan^. Trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255. Sacvan Bercovitch, 7%g American Jeremiad (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978), ix. Matt. 10:39. 4 Michael Hunt, Lyndon To/in^on War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 128. 3

American intervention in Southeast Asia,

American, consistently rely on the

religious adjective of praise, "prophetic." That a moment of crisis should be conceived and remembered in religious terms

cannot be surprising in a nation founded by religious dissidents and now regarded as one of the most religious on earth/ Every American president has appealed to religion in his inaugural addresses through some mention of God, and political actions in America

usually require moral, not to say religious, legitimization in order to gain public approval/ This is particularly true of American internationalism, which began in earnest

under the guidance of Woodrow Wilson—a preacher's son who stated, in defending his entry into World War I, that "America was bom to exemplify that devotion to the

elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scriptures"?—and which found its most potent expression when Ronald Reagan proclaimed the United States to be locked in geopolitical battle with an "Evil Empire."

These figures of speech are not merely a summation of religious impulses amounting to a vague overtone in American political culture. As Robert Bellah persuasively argues, they are in fact hallmarks of a distinct and indigenous American

civil religion, as old as the American state itself and essentially Christian, if not specifically denominational, in character. "Alongside of and rather clearly differentiated

from the churches," he writes, there has long existed an "elaborate and well-

The assertion that America is the most religious nation on earth is by nature unprovable, but frequent repetition of this statement in the media is itself evidence that many Americans, at least, consider it to be so. See Robert Bellah's "Civil Religion in America," 96: 1 (1969), 1-26. Bellah uses the inaugurals of different presidents as evidence while applying Rousseau's notion of "civil religion" to American public discourse. ? Ronald Steel, "The Missionary," Agw fork Review o/'Rook-s* 20 Nov. 2003: 27. 4

institutionalized civil religion in America" which enjoins that, as Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, "God's work must truly be our own."^ Moreover, while Bellah does

not concentrate on the influence of Puritanism, it is clear that that first American mindset

was not merely a first stage in American religion, but a founding doctrine of religion and history which influences political behavior and analysis to this day, particularly when it comes to international intervention. The situation of Vietnam in the 1950s is unique in this regard. It is, in retrospect,

the prologue to tragedy for America—a part of the first foreign experience to call

American dominance into uncertainty, at a stage when there was no suspicion that this mission would puncture America's then-ironclad record of success in war. The notion

about to be tested, that of Americans' mission to improve the world around them, is a familiar one; such evangelism has undergirded American doctrines from Manifest

Destiny to the War on Terror, whether the content of their gospel be Christian civilization or liberal democracy. Less familiar, though, is the Puritan origin of this mission,

stemming from a sense that sacred history was a continuous narrative from the Bible to the present day, and that America had a saving role in that history. That vision of history,

brought to North America by the Puritans and developed in New England, resulted in a

kind of unity within early colonial scholarship, which regarded literature (best embodied in scripture), history (best told in and with respect to scripture), and theology (based on a

literal understanding of scripture) on effectively the same terms. As new interpretations

led to a separation of these critical fields, the sense of mission remained, bearing in its

manifestations some traces of the outlook which had inspired it.

s Bellah, 1;4. 5

This persistent Puritan worldview, which usually affects the American mission as

a tacit subtext, rises to the surface in the case of the novel and two films that bear the title

?%e Quiet American. I say "the case" because it is in the history surrounding the British novel and its two American filmic re-iterations—rather than simply the novel itself—that a Puritan understanding of the relationship between text and reality is manifest. This

understanding, embodied in the New England Puritan version of an exegetical/critical framework called typology, served to entangle history and literature as Americans dealt with Greene's work, and it can serve in turn to critically disentangle the complex

American response. The purpose of this paper is to expose the typological influence as it appears in this extraordinary set of works—extraordinary because they represent a common text, constructed in the first instance by a foreigner at a very early stage of the

Vietnam conflict, and then re-interpreted by Americans during and after that

conflict—and then to identify adjustments both to the theory of typology and to our

understanding of Vietnam memory that must be made in light of typology's 20"*-century recurrence. The first section will briefly discuss the acknowledged relationship between

Puritanism and the history of American foreign policy, the second will explain typology and describe the patterns of its influence on the 2002 film rendition of 7%e Quiet American, and the third will show how and why those patterns are conspicuously absent from Greene's original version. In the fourth, we will consider the example of a 1958

film of 7%e Quiet American, and the fifth section will apply the typological pattern thus

developed to a set of interpretive problems of history and literature surrounding these texts, as embodied in the historical person of Gen. Edward Lansdale. To examine

Lansdale, whose conscious and accidental connections to 7%e Quiet American are

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manifold, is to see at once the literary basis, historical direction, and lasting political efficacy of the ancient practice of typology.

7

America's Puritan Mission

In a sense, the very founding of America was an act of international intervention, not just an emigration but a proactive enlightenment of foreign territory, which would recur in later years with America's exportation of its democratic creed. The

internationalist future is certainly prefigured in the Puritan leader Samuel Danforth's

famous Election Day sermon of 1670. In "A Briefe Recognition of New Englands Errand into the Wilderness,Danforth gave the prototypical American jeremiad,

warning the flock that it had strayed from its original mission and exhorting them to recover their holy purpose. "To what purpose came we into this Wilderness?" Danforth asked his congregation. "Was it not the expectation of the Pure and Faithful

Dispensation of the Gospel and the Kingdom of God?"'° Their very presence in New England, in other words, was an errand of theological character. This concept of mission,

already drawing on the notion of fran-dado stud:: (the progressive westward movement of

enlightenment and empire), then expanded from mere arrival in New England to westward expansion within the territories, its first phase culminating in the notion of Manifest Destiny. By the end of the 19"* century, when Frederick Jackson Turner's "The

Closing of the American Frontier" offered a secular but similar account of the importance of movement and expansion as a basic feature of American identity and purpose, America was not closing its frontier but opening new ones, beginning an involvement in

9 As reprinted in A.W. Plumstead's Wad and tde Cardan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1968), 53-77. Spelling of the title of this sermon varies among versions, with "Briefe" sometimes spelled "Brief," and "New Englands" sometimes hyphenated. Danforth did not use an apostrophe. Living before spelling was standardized, the Puritans were condemned to be more consistent in their typology than in their typography. Danforth, 73. 8

the Philippines which prefigured later Asian projects: the mission's political content had

shifted from Puritanism to democracy, but the motion was the same. Remembering that "'by a prophet the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he preserved,"'

Danforth had proposed "errand" as the basic fact of the New England project, and though the purposes of its mission shifted over time from refuge to the salvation of others, the

principle of an "errand into the wilderness" operates even today, when American troops stand as evangels of democracy in the Middle East, deployed "into these wild woods and deserts where the Lord hath planted us.""

By the opening of the Cold War in the mid-twentieth century, Puritanism was a long-gone stage in American memory, even a willfully forgotten one as textbooks favored the term "Pilgrim" over "Puritan." (Quizzed as to who founded the nation and celebrated the first Thanksgiving, an American student is surely more likely to remember

the "Pilgrims" from elementary school.) Yet traces of a Puritan worldview never ceased to operate, not only in the way that war was conducted, but in how it was represented. The persistence of such Puritan influence in this period is most evident in its impact on

rhetorical form. A favorite example is that of 7%e f/g/y American, a 1958 allegorical

collection of vignettes about American incompetence among the Cold Warriors of Southeast Asia—a far more popular and influential book in its time than ?%e Qnie? American which is the main focus of this paper. Co-authored by a retired naval officer

and an academic, 7%e f/giy American was a warning to the anti-communist faithful that

without a change in course, American involvement abroad was doomed to failure. Set mostly in the invented country of Sarkhan but including episodes in Vietnam and

'* Danforth, 73. 9

elsewhere, the book offered examples of foolish, brash, and culturally ignorant American

officials whose behavior abroad alienated the countries they were trying to save from Communism, and whose mistakes frustrated the efforts of the few capable Americans in their midst. Its last chapter, "A Factual Epilogue," implored America to get its act

together, to eschew the distressing behavior exemplified fictionally in the text and to

emulate the progressive methods of the five or so decent characters presented allegorically as the American mission's only hope. This compounded

denunciatory/exhortatory approach echoes the rhetorical strategy of the American jeremiad, of which Danforth's sermon was typical.^ Albeit in a satirical form that the Puritans would have rejected, Lederer and Burdick followed the jeremiad's formula of

warning Americans how far they had strayed from the right path, intoning the ruin that

would inevitably follow from present behavior, and imploring them to embrace the right

solutions to save the mission. In a considerably altered but fundamentally like-minded 1963 film adaptation, the wise words of a heroic and beleaguered ambassador are cut off by an idle suburbanite switching off his television during the film's climactic monologue,

in an elegantly modernized echo of Danforth's lament that the flock was shutting out the

Lord whose counsel they could not afford to ignore: "Why hath the Lord smitten us with blasting and mildew now seven years together, super-adding sometimes severe drought, sometimes great tempests, floods, and sweeping rains that leave no food behind them? Is

'2 This characterization derives from that of Sacvan Bercovitch, who observed in 7%e Arngn'ca?! JgreTMMM? that the Puritans' denunciations from the pulpit were as implicitly positive in their urgings as they were explicitly negative. 10

it not because the Lord's house lyeth waste, temple-work in our hearts, families, churches

is shamefully neglected?"^ Critics including John Hellmann and Philip Melling have documented in detail the jeremiad character of 77ie Cgiy American, as well as the effects more generally of

what Melling calls "The Puritan Imprint" on the conduct and reading of America's war in

Vietnam.^ In Vietnam ami American Literature, Melling describes Vietnam as a return to the Puritan experience in New England in that it "harks back to the original errand; it

predates the return of a Tost frontier' and its literature is much more intense and enclosed than the literature of Western expansion." At the same time, he notes the absence of a "sustained analysis of the relationship between the Vietnam experience and the colonial

experience of New England."^ John Hellmann, sizing up the role of American myth,

points out the recurrence of notably Puritan concepts in Vietnam works like 77ie Cgiy American: "the Asian villagers are the American Indians or the Chinese, living in a terra pro/dna, to be converted to the Forces of Light; the Soviet agents the clever and ruthless

Forces of Darkness; the Viet Minh guerillas the 'savage' Indians manipulated by the Dark Forces; the British and French colonial officials the 'dead hand of the European past'; the 'ugly' Americans the Chosen who have fallen away from the errand..

*3 Danforth, 73-4. Interestingly, the years of the Vietnam conflict roughly bookend a uniquely active period in American scholarship on Puritanism in literature. Perry Miller's Errand into die tVi/demey? came out in 1956, Lowance's Lang Mage a/* Canaan was published in 1969, and it was in the early 1970's that Sacvan Bercovitch first formulated the essays which became 7Vie American Jeremiad. '3 Melling, Vietnam in American LiteratMre (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 15 and 203n. '6 Hellmann, American AJydi and die Legacy o/* Vietnam (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 22. This is an instance of how the metaphorical use of the term "ugly American" quickly changed to the opposite of its usage in the novel, in which "the ugly American" is actually a character to be emulated. Rather quickly, the term took its more intuitive 11

While studies like those of Melling and Hellmann include a broad survey of the

areas and patterns of influence linking the Puritans' "Errand" into the wilderness of New England to that of the Americans in Vietnam, research thus far on this question tends to

focus on elements of the Puritan outlook in Vietnam literature, rather than elements of Puritan /iterary frameworks in Vietnam literature. Such scholarship outlines the

influences of Puritanism on representations of Vietnam, but ignores the possibility that those influences are structured by a typological unconscious inherited from the Puritans.

A focused exposition of typology makes clear the need to consider that possibility.

meaning, as used by Gov. George W. Bush, who warned in a 2000 presidential debate that unwelcome internationalism would generate resentment and produce the unwanted result of the U.S. "being viewed as the ugly American" (Oct 11, 2000).

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Typological Exegesis and Hollywood s Puritan Moment The exegetical principle of typology traces back to medieval Christian

theologians' attention to allegory in Scripture, and the recognition that persons and events described in the Old Testament may be seen to prefigure persons and events in the New.'7

When exegesis retains the idea of figuralism but eschews allegory, the result is typology

as the Puritans practiced it. In his concise explanation of this kind of typology, Mason Lowance identifies "two kinds of Types' in literature."^ The first, a "simple

representative figure" or, to Perry Miller, a "trope," is allegorical or metaphorical in

character—this is the type of synecdoche which is familiar to all modem students of literature. But the second, and the more important for the Puritans, is a historical type that occurs in time as an "adumbration" and is fulfilled, or recapitulated later in time, by an antitype. (Counterintuitively, an antitype does not oppose the corresponding type but

fulfills it.) This sort of type animates the work of theologians "who attempted to give continuity to the canon of Holy Scripture by demonstrating how the Old Testament

prefigured the New through types and figures of which the New Testament personas and events were the antitype, or fulfillment."^

Early Puritan exegetes, such as Samuel Mather, held the conservative position that the scope of typology was confined to comparisons between the Testaments,^ but

'7 The Erst essay in Typoiagy an