The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble.

He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’

She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair.

Death takes away vanity—even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

I too took my eyes away; we didn’t want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came.

So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought.

I thought, ‘I hate war.’ The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing—perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves. We were all expendable.

Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour.

We make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man makes a cage for his religion in much the same way—with doubts left open to the weather and creeds opening on innumerable interpretations. My wife had found her cage with holes and sometimes I envied her. There is a conflict between sun and air: I lived too much in the sun.

‘They’ll be forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.’ ‘Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?’

‘Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourer—all right, I’m against him. He hasn’t been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France I expect he’d beat his wife. I’ve seen a priest, so poor he hasn’t a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup—a wooden platter. I don’t believe in God and yet I’m for that priest. Why don’t you call that colonialism?’ ‘It is colonialism. York says it’s often the good administrators who make it hard to change a bad system.’

I’ve reached the age when sex isn’t the problem so much as old age and death. I wake up with these in mind and not a woman’s body. I just don’t want to be alone in my last decade, that’s all. I wouldn’t know what to think about all day long. I’d sooner have a woman in the same room—even one I didn’t love.

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride—

‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love—they have always been compared.’ He

we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.’

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

one can own the dead as one owns a chair.

I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, ‘This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children—it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?’ He said weakly, ‘There was to have been a parade.’ ‘And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.’ ‘I didn’t know.’ ‘Didn’t know!’ I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. ‘You ought to be better informed.’

He said, ‘Thé wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists …’ He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.

A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?

‘Sooner or later,’ Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, ‘one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.’

Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. March 1952—June 1955