The
End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
It's hard to imagine a
more loathsome prick of a protagonist than Maurice Bendrix in Graham Greene's
popular early fifties novel, The End of
the Affair. It starts with Bendrix hating the married Sarah Miles, the
woman he's been sleeping with for the last two years, for breaking off the
affair without an explanation. It ends with Bendrix hating God for taking his
lover away after a short respiratory illness that could have easily been cured.
And in both cases, love is the direct cause of the senseless hate that has
poisoned Bendrix, who though a masterful writer of novels is a jealous,
heartless, ill-tempered and miserable son-of-a-bitch . If it wasn't for what
appears to be genuine concern and compassion for the man he has cuckolded,
Henry Miles, Bendrix might be too self-absorbed in his own jealousy to be
believable. So too might Sarah Miles professed love for the bastard – what does
she see in him? Even if such were the case, the premise of such a passionate
relationship breaking out against the backdrop of WWII London (which was
directly experienced by Greene and his mistress - Greene's house was destroyed
in an air raid) is such a powerful unwritten explanation for the behavior of
the characters - all of them - that Bendrix's mad jealousy and possessiveness
requires no justification.
The End of the Affair is thought
to be one of Greene’s “Catholic” novels (he converted to Catholicism in his
early twenties), though the only characteristic of the story that makes it
Catholic vs. just generally Christian is that Sarah Miles converts to
Catholicism just before her death. Either way, while it would appear that the
primary plot element is based on “the affair” that Maurice Bendrix has with
Sarah Miles, and more specifically how it ends, (which in and of itself is a
heartbreaking story) what the story is really “about” is faith, and not only
believing in God but professing love for God and the notion that God’s love is
the greatest love of all and can cure the sick and bring the dead back to life.
The profound beauty and impact of the novel is in the way Greene tells this
very simple love story (though Bendrix thinks he’s telling a “hate” story) and
packs this profound, thought-provoking message that, like the speech of Father
Zoysima in The Brothers Karamazov, can’t
help but cause the reader some serious pause.
From a writer’s
perspective there were a couple of things that caught my eye in The End of the Affair -- aside from the
beauty of Greene’s prose, his patient revealing of each character’s unique
quirks (from Bendrix POV), the spare yet realistic dialogue, the sense of solid physical location around a
Common, and his courageous humanity - all of the things I take for granted and
that I sought to employ in my own writing yet so easily forget - aside from all
that there are a couple of big capital “T” Techniques at play that I find
interesting.
The first technique is characterized
by the first paragraph of the novel:
“A story has
no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from
which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say “one chooses” with the
inaccurate pride of a professional writer who -- when he has been seriously
noted at all -- has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of
my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the
sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these
images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my
craft to begin just there. But if I had believed then in a God, I could also
have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, “Speak to him: he
hasn’t see you yet.’ “(p. 1)
Having not spent my career in
letters I can’t draw from rich mental databases of great first paragraphs to
compare with this, but it is certainly an opening paragraph that I will return
to again and again.
God’s suggestion is to go speak to
Henry Miles, the man he’s cuckolded for the last several years.
“For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term
to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry -- I hated his wife Sarah
too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me:
as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those
days we were lucky enough not to believe.” ( P. 1)
It’s easy to miss
phrases like “in those days” and let an important piece of foreshadowing slip
past. Same with “that other”. I didn’t
come to it until I actually read through these first paragraphs several dozen
times, knowing how the story turns out. There’s nothing to tell us that Bendrix
and Henry Mile’s wife Sarah were lovers, and he’s been jilted and can’t figure
out why and even when Sarah explains it to him - that she promised God that she
would end the affair if He would save Bendrix’s life - If He would bring him back to life - after he’s
crushed by a door during in a bombing raid, Bendrix refuses to believe it.
So in those first few paragraphs we
are dropped into this rainy night on the Common where the narrator is being
cajoled by God to go talk to a man he hates, and, that we learn a page or two
later, he cuckolded for 2 years, and that the narrator believes that both he
and “us”, meaning Henry and Sarah, were “lucky” in years past to have been
unbelievers. That’s a pretty meaty morsel to tee up, and if we didn’t know that
Greene was one of England’s most popular writers throughout the 20th century we
might wonder if all his work was religious. But all we have to do is read the
inside of the jacket to know that the spiritual theme took a back seat to other
straight-ahead stories throughout his career, and I’ll be interested to see how
his secular novels hold up.
“It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved,
when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to
love.” (p. 70)
Sarah’s diary, I read somewhere, is
said to be some of Greene’s most powerful prose. It reads like a spoken
monologue in the most dramatic sense, much of which is addressed directly to a
God:
“...anything
left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us...You were there, teaching
us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have
nothing left but this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You
for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace - he needs it
more.” (p71)
Diaries and journals are often key
components to novels and in The End of
the Affair it is the main ingredient. It is the chronicle of a conversion,
or a gradual awakening to the existence of a personal God that loves each
individual - not “mankind” or “humanity” - but Sarah, Maurice Bendrix, Henry
Miles and the injured characters: Richard Smythe and Lance Parkis, whom he
cures with good old-fashioned miracles. But even with all this evidence,
Bendrix at the end seems like he’s nothing more than pummeled into submission:
“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there
beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that
seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of
enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.” (P.
160)
When
I heard Colin Firth read those last lines I thought “oh for chrissakes throw
the broken bastard a bone, will you?” but I realized that, even though Maurice
Bendrix heart, his romance, his physical passion, all of that seems lost in
Sarah, we’ve seen this odd friendship grow - a fellowship of sorts, a lonely
hearts club - spring up between the husband and the lover, both of whom have
been abandoned for the love of God. They will share a few beers and more than a
few laughs, which seems a fair substitute for the time being while they think
about learning to love again.
About Graham Greene
This from WikiPedia:
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH, (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer, playwright and literary critic.[1] His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene was noted for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholicnovelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religiousthemes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels:Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.[2] Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man,The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.
Greene suffered from bipolar disorder,[3] which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".[4]William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." [5] Greene never received the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he finished runner-up to Ivo Andrić in 1961.[6]
