Beschreibung:

GREENE, GRAHAM. Autograph manuscript of The Quiet American , his novel about Vietnam. [Various places] dated 8 March and 31 May 1952. 135 pages, folio (12 3/4 x 8in., 323 x 202mm.), and 2 pages, 8vo (on hotel blue stationery), plus folio title-page, the folio pages on lined paper, virtually all on both sides of a sheet, mostly two sheets still joined forming a biofolium , THE WORKING FIRST DRAFT WITH VERY HEAVY REVISIONS THROUGHOUT BY GREENE, written in a small hand in different colored inks (mainly blue), a few small marginal tears, some minor marginal fraying to a few leaves; green half morocco slipcase. Laid in: 3 pages, 12mo-8vo , of autograph notes by Greene on the novel; 8 pages, folio , of typescript, virtually clean, mainly clarifying the handwriting of parts of the manuscript, but including "A Memory of Indo-China" ( 3 pages, carbon, a few corrections/revisions ). THE ONLY AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF A MAJOR GRAHAM GREENE NOVEL STILL IN PRIVATE HANDS Greene's novel about "the dangers of innocence in a complex and difficult society like Vietnam" in the early 1950s is based more on his personal experiences than perhaps any other of his fictional works (Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene , New York, 1994, II, p. 372). Parts of the novel are built up from journal notes made during four long visits to Vietnam in 1951-1955, reporting on the war there (against the French) for European newspapers. As Greene recounts in Ways of Escape (New York, 1982, pp. 145-6): "...the subject of The Quiet American came to me during that talk [with an American attached to an economic aid mission] of a 'Third Force' [to stand between the French and the Vietminh] on the road through the delta back to Saigon, and my characters quickly followed...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 [the Englishman Fowler] as the 'I' seemed to me to justify the use of reportage ." Greene notes on the holograph title-page to the manuscript that he began the novel (originally termed "An Entertainment") on 8 March 1952, but that this was a "false start" and the work was "begun again" on 31 May 1952. With a typed draft (or two) following from this extensively revised autograph manuscript, the work was not finished until June 1955. The novel was first published in England in December 1955; the American edition followed in March 1956. No autograph manuscripts or typescripts for The Quiet American are recorded in the Greene archive at the University of Texas (in R.A. Wobbe, Graham Greene A Bibliography and Guide to Research , New York, 1979); he locates only (on p. 299) a set of corrected page proofs for the 1973 Collected Edition. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," is how the cynical correspondent Fowler describes the quiet American Alden Pyle, who had arrived in Vietnam on an unspecified mission. In the end, after Pyle's policies have blundered on into bloodshed, he is betrayed by Fowler to the Vietminh. "Speaking of Pyle, Fowler says: 'What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.' There is a fearful price to pay for Pyle's righteous innocence, an innocence linked with power, the power of America. In Greene's view, the innocent do harm to the innocent: 'Is there any solution here the West can offer?' he wrote in his Indo-China diary, and added, 'the bar tonight was loud with innocent American voices, and that was the worst disquiet.'" Provenance : The Property of a Lady (sale, Sotheby's London, 22 July 1980, lot 511).