Graham Greene’s Vietnam war novel The Quiet American celebrates its 70th birthday in 2025-2026: it was published in Britain in December 1955 and in America and elsewhere in early 1956.
But did you know that Greene’s tale of loyalty and betryal in Vietnam in the early 1950s during the fading French colonial period – including its thinly-veiled criticism of contemporary US Cold War policy in Asia and its prefiguring of the terrible US war to come in the 1960s – owed its origins to Greece and Mozart? Well, after a fashion.
In June 1951, a few months after the first of what would be four Greene research visits to Vietnam, he found himself at Epidaurus with Hollywood movie producer Alexander Korda. They sat together one night in the ancient Greek theatre enjoying a classical music concert. Afterwards, Greene wrote to his American lover, Catherine Walston:
‘Last night we spent in Epidaurus Bay & went up to the Greek theatre for the concert. It was awful getting there, but once there it was very lovely – the sun sinking, stars & moonlight & cigarettes going on & off like lightbulbs: about 12,000 people & the King & Queen sitting on pillows. First Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (which I liked perhaps because a faint idea for an Indo-China novel stirred) …’
Four years later, the faint idea had turned into The Quiet American. And the rest is history …
Below, Graham Greene to Catherine Walston, 19 June 1951 (credit: Walston-Greene collection, Georgetown University archives).
