‘The End of the Affair’: A Brooding Story of Love and Faith
A review of ‘The End of the Affair’, by Graham Greene; Heinemann, 1951.
‘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.’ Thus begins Graham Greene’s End of the Affair. It is one of my favourite opening lines in all of English literature. And it sets the tone here beautifully for a dark, brooding story of love, hatred, jealousy and faith, set against the grim backdrop of war-torn London. Its hero is no hero, but a complex man named Maurice Bendrix (‘I might never have been christened for all the use my friends make of the rather affected Maurice my literary parents gave me,’ he says). And Bendrix is based on Greene himself. The affair that gives the book its name is based on a real affair that Greene carried on, and whose other participant is the ‘C.’ mentioned on the dedication page.
She, in the story, is Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant named Henry who is a man ‘whom one has an irresistible desire to tease’. In the opening scene, Bendrix by chance encounters Henry walking alone across Clapham Common in the rain, and begins to reflect on his affair with Sarah, which started up only because Bendrix wished to write a story about a senior civil servant and had the ‘cold-blooded intention’ of picking the brain of Henry’s wife. The story unfolds like a confession, told in a non-linear style. It is raw and, on account of the narrator’s ‘professional pride to prefer the near-truth’, unflinchingly honest. It is a story that throws light on the ugliness of love.
The story unfolds like a confession, told in a non-linear style.
But it is not a story that is exclusively or even chiefly about love. Certainly Bendrix is obsessed with Sarah, even though the affair has ended; and certainly he makes it his goal to track her down by nefarious means. The soul of the tale, if you like, is a study of meaning, of suffering, of faith. Bendrix is an atheist who cannot understand the pull God seems to have for Sarah, and his frustration with her faith becomes a stand-in for his own, broader struggle with the value of his existence and existence as such. Sarah’s love for Bendrix is fierce and consuming; but it is shadowed nonetheless by a different kind of love, one that she can barely understand, let alone explain to herself or to him.
Not for the first time Greene takes two things that do not sit together easily and attempts to reconcile them in narrative form. In Brighton Rock, what seems to be a thriller (what Greene called an ‘entertainment’) turns powerfully theological, as the sociopathic killer Pinkie Brown is pursued by a yet-more terrifying force like Francis Thompson’s ‘hound of heaven’: a power that is merciless and ceaseless in its desire to forgive and to save, and so appears in the novel not as a sort of soft, squishy angelic being, but as something frightening in its authority and intensity. For to come to terms with what one has done, which is the prerequisite for coming to terms with oneself and the world—for being saved, as it were—is horrifying. Honesty is tough and unsettling. Hence, it seems to me, why those who take psychedelics often find the experience so distressing, at least to start with: they must look at their lives clearly and accept their ‘fallenness’ if they to carry on and find catharsis.
To come to terms with what one has done, which is the prerequisite for coming to terms with oneself and the world — for being saved, as it were, for dying well — is horrifying.
Here, Greene juxtaposes the intimate and the theological. This is not a story about two people in love but one about God’s intrusion into the lives of flawed people. The spiritual questions seldom overwhelm the human drama in The End of the Affair, and his portrayal of jealousy is painfully, almost intolerably, well-drawn. But Greene is skilled, and we intimate that the strength of feeling springs from a yearning for something more than the possession of another: it is a kind of longing for certainty in an uncertain world, for the existential rootedness of faith.
The prose is crystalline, as it always is with Greene: spare, tightly controlled. The emotions, in contrast, are wild and unruly. Greene writes with a sense of inevitability, as though the story could not unfold in any other way. We move from past to present, from the affair to the aftermath. And this shifting timeline mirrors the emotional state of Bendrix: he is never fully in control of his memories, just as he is never in full control of his feelings. It is worth noting that this the only book Greene ever wrote in the first person, such was its poignancy to him; and each sentence, fittingly, seemed charged with a maximum of meaning.
We move from past to present, from the affair to the aftermath. And this shifting timeline mirrors the emotional state of Bendrix
And yet it is, for all its darkness, quietly hopeful, for it suggests that the path to romantic love, with all its messiness and potential for destruction, can be a path to something else, to love itself. So I contradict myself in a way. This is a story about love, just not the kind of love we might think. And it is that—that divine kind of love—God—who is the final, inscrutable presence that seems as we read by degrees to weigh down the pages. Faith, and the road to faith, Greene shows us, is messy. It is complex. It can be destructive. And, in the end, it can hardly be put into words. Here he seems to honour Augustine, echo Kierkegaard and prefigure Wittgenstein.
The End of the Affair is at once gripping and unsettling. It strips bare—flays—the illusions of romantic love and replaces them with something far more challenging: that grace can grow out of even the most broken things. It is not a comfortable or comforting book. But it is a moving one. And we are left, at the end, reflective, perhaps a little melancholy, with a lingering sense of awe and of the strange ways love and faith appear and intersect in the human heart.
