Fooling ourselves with neutrality, in Graham Greene’s ‘The Quiet American’

Sooner or later we will take sides

At one point in The Quiet American (1955), the title character Alden Pyle, who is working for the CIA in Vietnam, follows Graham Greene’s narrator, the aging English journalist Thomas Fowler, up to a battle area in the north where he is embedded with French colonial forces: in order to tell Fowler, very politely, that he wants to take his Vietnamese lover Phuong and marry her.

Pyle, a much younger man who looks up at his grizzled counterpart, naively asks Fowler for advice about Phuoung.

Fowler says, ’I wouldn’t trust my advice if I were you. I’m biased. I want to keep her.’

‘Oh, but I know you’re straight, absolutely straight, and we both have her interests at heart.’

Then Fowler as narrator: “Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, ‘I don’t care that for her interests. You can have her interests. I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her, than . . . look after her damn interests.’”