The Man Within My Head Read Online Free
Author: Pico Iyer
usually,like many a love, He is known only by His refusal to do what we most want.
In Greene’s archetypal novel,
The Quiet American
, a middle-aged Englishman, Fowler, lives in Saigon during the last days of French rule there, with a twenty-year-old Vietnamese woman, Phuong, whom he’s met at the Grand Monde dance hall. As soon as a young American, Pyle, appears on the scene, Fowler senses that he is going to be displaced by this fresh and dangerously innocent new power. As his country will be displaced by America. When the young arrival, a picture of his parents on his desk, turns his chivalrous attention on Phuong, Fowler finds new reason to resent him—especially because the quiet American is clearly a more gallant and unstained, a more openly tender suitor than any jaded Englishman can be.
After Pyle saves his life, Fowler feels more beholden (and therefore hostile) to him than ever. (Greene would always be shrewd enough to see that few of us can forgive a good deed done to us—God’s law and man’s seldom converge—and, as he puts it in the book, we can never be betrayed by an enemy, only by a friend.) Completed in 1955, the novel tells the story of Britain feeling its empire slipping away and trying to protect itself from hurt by claiming not to care. It tells the story (which is to say, the future) of young America coming to the older cultures of the world and determined to remake them with the latest ideas of Harvard Yard. And it tells the story of a supple and responsive Asia that, precisely by gauging the needs of every foreign visitor, and giving each back a reflection of his desires, will always remain on top of them, or at least outside their grasp.
Yet on a more intimate level, it pierces much more deeply.We can feel the barely suppressed romanticism of the Englishman, who cannot admit even to himself how much he’s lost himself to the foreign land that has softened him and to the young woman who offers what he hungers for most poignantly, peace. We are stung by the young American’s unpreparedness for a world he is determined to rescue, whether it’s in need of rescue or not. And we can see how the Vietnamese in the middle, drawing on centuries of silent tradition, manages her destiny by putting pragmatism before emotion; romance and reality change places with every scene.
“When I first came,” Fowler confesses of his time in Vietnam, “I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term.” Now he’s turned in the other direction and searches for ways of avoiding a return to anywhere he might think of as home. A schoolboy still, perhaps, in a decidedly complex version of Abroad, but alive so long as he’s surrounded by people, a culture, a faith he can’t get to the bottom of.
CHAPTER 2
W ho are these figures who take residence inside our heads, to the point where we can feel them shivering inside us even when we want to “be ourselves”? Who put them there, and why this man I’ve never met, and not that one? If I were to choose a secret companion, an unofficial alter ego, I would most likely fasten on someone more dashing, more decisive, less unsettled than Greene; if Providence were choosing one, it might alight on someone who lived in the same high-school building as I, attended the same university, traveled around the Far East, as I did when young, visited the university where my parents were teaching and then watched his house in the California hills burn down, as I had done—someone like Aldous Huxley. But our shadow associates are, like parents (or godparents), presences we’ve never chosen and, like many of our loves or compulsions, blur the lines inside us by living beyond our explanations.
They make as little sense as the gods we choose to believe in, or the devils. Graham Greene could never be a fantasy figure for me, like the smooth secret agents whose adventures wedevoured in our wood-creaking rooms at the Dragon School in Oxford, or the
In Greene’s archetypal novel,
The Quiet American
, a middle-aged Englishman, Fowler, lives in Saigon during the last days of French rule there, with a twenty-year-old Vietnamese woman, Phuong, whom he’s met at the Grand Monde dance hall. As soon as a young American, Pyle, appears on the scene, Fowler senses that he is going to be displaced by this fresh and dangerously innocent new power. As his country will be displaced by America. When the young arrival, a picture of his parents on his desk, turns his chivalrous attention on Phuong, Fowler finds new reason to resent him—especially because the quiet American is clearly a more gallant and unstained, a more openly tender suitor than any jaded Englishman can be.
After Pyle saves his life, Fowler feels more beholden (and therefore hostile) to him than ever. (Greene would always be shrewd enough to see that few of us can forgive a good deed done to us—God’s law and man’s seldom converge—and, as he puts it in the book, we can never be betrayed by an enemy, only by a friend.) Completed in 1955, the novel tells the story of Britain feeling its empire slipping away and trying to protect itself from hurt by claiming not to care. It tells the story (which is to say, the future) of young America coming to the older cultures of the world and determined to remake them with the latest ideas of Harvard Yard. And it tells the story of a supple and responsive Asia that, precisely by gauging the needs of every foreign visitor, and giving each back a reflection of his desires, will always remain on top of them, or at least outside their grasp.
Yet on a more intimate level, it pierces much more deeply.We can feel the barely suppressed romanticism of the Englishman, who cannot admit even to himself how much he’s lost himself to the foreign land that has softened him and to the young woman who offers what he hungers for most poignantly, peace. We are stung by the young American’s unpreparedness for a world he is determined to rescue, whether it’s in need of rescue or not. And we can see how the Vietnamese in the middle, drawing on centuries of silent tradition, manages her destiny by putting pragmatism before emotion; romance and reality change places with every scene.
“When I first came,” Fowler confesses of his time in Vietnam, “I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term.” Now he’s turned in the other direction and searches for ways of avoiding a return to anywhere he might think of as home. A schoolboy still, perhaps, in a decidedly complex version of Abroad, but alive so long as he’s surrounded by people, a culture, a faith he can’t get to the bottom of.
CHAPTER 2
W ho are these figures who take residence inside our heads, to the point where we can feel them shivering inside us even when we want to “be ourselves”? Who put them there, and why this man I’ve never met, and not that one? If I were to choose a secret companion, an unofficial alter ego, I would most likely fasten on someone more dashing, more decisive, less unsettled than Greene; if Providence were choosing one, it might alight on someone who lived in the same high-school building as I, attended the same university, traveled around the Far East, as I did when young, visited the university where my parents were teaching and then watched his house in the California hills burn down, as I had done—someone like Aldous Huxley. But our shadow associates are, like parents (or godparents), presences we’ve never chosen and, like many of our loves or compulsions, blur the lines inside us by living beyond our explanations.
They make as little sense as the gods we choose to believe in, or the devils. Graham Greene could never be a fantasy figure for me, like the smooth secret agents whose adventures wedevoured in our wood-creaking rooms at the Dragon School in Oxford, or the
Readers choose
Heather Boyd
John Creasey
Angela Castle
J. J. Salkeld
Jenika Snow
Laura Lee
Elaine Viets
Denise Chong
Killarney Sheffield
V. S. Pritchett