Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 15: The Fall of Saigon
Spring 1985
Witty, bizarre, and verging on the lunatic – who in his right mind would gatecrash an embassy on the back of an invading army’s tank? – James Fenton’s account of the fall of Saigon is an extraordinary record of the collapse of a city at war. Plus: Nadine Gordimer, George Steiner, and Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Warsaw Diary’.
From this Issue
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The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
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On Harley-Davidson
Richard Ford
‘Jack Nicholson, I've heard, used to own one. And I understand why.’
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Grandma Norman and the Queen
Philip Norman
‘From the fifties to the seventies the Queen hadn't put a foot wrong.’
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Toothpaste
Frank Snepp
‘The Vietnam war was conceived in secrecy, and one of the saddest things to me is that such secrecy has only been increased in its wake.’
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Impotence
Norman Podhoretz
‘As a result of Vietnam, the Pentagon has grown extremely gun-shy. These days it is virtually pacifist: it buys a lot of weapons, but doesn't really like the idea of using them.’
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Dominoes
Noam Chomsky
‘Postwar US policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is sustained by maximising suffering and oppression in Indochina.’
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The Essential Gesture: Writers and Responsilbility
Nadine Gordimer
‘Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity.’
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What Were You Dreaming?
Nadine Gordimer
‘And I'm careful what I say, I tell them about the blacks, how too many people spoil it for us, they robbing and killing, you can't blame white people.’
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A Conversation Piece
George Steiner
‘No. Listen to me. God's confidence in Abraham was not total. Let me hammer out my meaning.’
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The Tin Drum In Retrospect
Günter Grass
‘With the baggage of stored-up material, vague plans and precise ambitions - I wanted to write my novel and Anna was looking for more rigorous ballet training - we left Berlin early in 1956 and, penniless but undaunted, went to Paris.’
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A Warsaw Diary
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘In Poland we read every text as allusive; every situation described - even the most remote in time and space - is immediately applied to Poland.’
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Reporting The Strike
Michael Crick
‘Striking miners accuse television of not showing police violence. We show any we manage to film - at Orgreave several horrific incidents of police beating pickets over the head with truncheons.’
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Revelations
Peter Greig
‘Two years earlier, as the rest of the world looked on, half-amused, half-impressed by this anachronistic twitch of the imperial lion's tail, a large British naval armada sailed south to recover the Falkland Islands by force of arms.’
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Writing in the Cold
Theodore Solotaroff
‘The first years on your own are a good time to let the imagination off the leash and let it sniff and paw into other fields of writing. From journal writing it's only a small Kierkegaardian leap into the personal essay.’
