Graham Greene on American good intentions

“Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are… I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle.”
Fowler to Pyle, in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955)

Note: Like so many travelers to Southeast Asia, I first bought and read Greene’s The Quiet American in Saigon (a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh City). Street vendors sell pirated editions of the book everywhere you go in that city. Now that The Quiet American is a Michael Caine/Brendon Fraser movie, I’ve actually read news accounts claiming that all the books for sale on the streets of Saigon are a result of the movie — which is a naive conclusion at best. Not only were such books ubiquitous in 1999 (when I was there), but they were common trade during the Vietnam War era as well — which is a strange irony, considering Greene’s prophetic plot. In an issue of Granta some 15 years ago, James Fenton recalled this sales pitch from the streets of Saigon in the early 1970’s:

“Hey you! American! Change money, buy Time magazine, give me back Time magazine I sell you yesterday, buy Stars and Stripes, give me back Stars and Stripes, you number one, you number ten, you number ten thousand Yankee, you want number one fuck, you want Quiet American, you want Ugly American, you give me money I shine shoes, number one, no sweat…”

Anyone who’s been in Saigon in a tourist capacity in recent years knows that spiel hasn’t changed very much…