The End of an Affair

I stumbled across the book The End of an Affair by Graham Greene mostly by chance when I was in a desperate need to find a relaxing diversion. I began to read it thinking it is simply a book about romantic love. The advertisement on Amazon promotion page said it was the most heart moving love story of 20th century, greatly admired by all and even acted as an inspiration to García Márquez’s wildly passionate stories. Even though I was not a big fan of García Márque, his name ring a familiar bell to me for I am gravely lacking  knowledge in the field of literature. At first, I was skim reading, but afterwards, it drew me in more and more. As the title suggest, the story happened in the context of an extra-marital affair, or to be more precise, after the affair ended. The main character’s emotional ups and downs during the affair were mainly reflected in flashbacks and diaries. The whole book was written in the male main character’s point of view, except from the diary part.  The male protagonist Maurice Bendrix was far been recovered from his unexpected separation from his lover and his stubborn persistence of deliberately ending his passion for her altered his so-called love to an emotion akin to love-hate. The first meeting of Bendrix and his once lover Sarah after the end of their affair had taken place on one misty evening when Bendrix accidentally met Sarah’s husband Henry, a recently promoted civil servant, who was blank and stoic, caring about nothing but his own work, seemed at least, on the outside, completely oblivious to his wife’s adultery.  On the contrary, Henry took an immediate affinity to Bendrix, trusted him as a friend and took him home to meet his wife, the unlikely affection probably arised from their completely distinctive personalities. Bendrix was strict and obsessive about everything he do, as a writer, he writes a disciplined five hundred pages a day, mulls and thinks over every word he used in his own works. In his affair with Sarah, he was doubting and calculating, always jealous, feeling too insecure about their relationship, he even goes as far as to hasten the end of their affair to get over the pain.  When Bendrix and Henry were exchanging words, even the readers would be too embarrassed by the undisguised familiarity of Bendrix with Henry’s wife, but Henry seemed completely at ease with it. Then the story slowly revealed what happened years ago firstly on Bendrix ‘s perspective when the affair is still on the go. The affair, as with most relationships, was at first, mysteriously attractive, but inevitably, it slowly progressed to its end in the course of several years. The faults of human nature were laid bare and considered more intolerable to the parties involved in the relationship in the end. On Bendrix’s part, it is the severe lack of trust that often arise through this kind of circumstances, together with his addiction to perfect passion, being a stickler to the feeling of mysteriousness, anything that deviate from it will not be allowed by him. He facilitated the ending of their relationship by been extremely irritable and skeptical, initiating an argument at every chance.  However, despite Bendrix’s efforts at shaping the relationship to his own liking, when the affair drew to its end, he appeared to be more emotionally helpless than his partner Sarah. It lead the readers to think that although Bendrix always appeared to be disciplined and obsessively passionate, hiding his deep-seated distrust toward human natures in adulteries and his worldly-wise façade.  When stripped of his lover and together his own secluded world view when a bomb partially knocked him unconscious in warring time London, he is more inclined to adopt an more misanthropic view on human nature. Once he accredited himself for loving Sarah, then the love he claimed morphed into hatred after their separation.  The hatred on Bendrix’s part intensified after the arranged meeting several days after Bendrix reacquainted himself with Sarah’s family when he saw in the attitude of Sarah no chance of possible reunion. What emotions left in Bendrix: hatred and curiosity stirred him to hire a personal detective to keep track of Sarah’s activities. Finally, Bendrix was no longer involved in the affair after the end of it, and he can now stand on a third-person view to judge the moral implications of each of Sarah’s action. Stories are made of facts, but each person puzzled them together by his or her own intuitions. As the detective Parkis, who even clumsily but devotedly used his own son as an accomplice to act as a spy, delved deeper into the Sarah’s business. He and Bendrix is not longer an outsider, responsible only for detached observation, but more of an participant,  putting their own emotions into other people’s actions.

It is only when Parkis steal Sarah’s diary does both Bendrix and the readers could shed some light on the internal conflicts of Sarah. To her, the affair was a completely different story. She married Henry at a young age, coming to realization not long after the marriage that Henry and her were not very compatible with each other, she resorted to engage in various flirtatious activities with many other men. However, she claimed in her diary that Bendrix is one she truly loved. She had decided to abandon her previous life in order to be with him, but the air raid bomb that accidentally lit Bendrix’s apartment changed the prospect of their future. The turning point came when Bendrix was lying unconscious, half dead in his apartment floor. Sarah, being extremely worried and afraid at the time, made her first prayer to the Lord, admitting all her previous immoral behaviors, pleading God for Bendrix to be revived. Soon, Bendrix regained his consciousness and Sarah had made a quick end of their relationship. When Bendrix bombarded her with demands of explanation of her leaving him, she exclaimed, ‘I can still love you while not seeing you, people keep loving God without seeing him their whole life ’. The words carefully phrased on her part are interpreted as an excuse to Bendrix, turning whatever emotions he had for her into jealousy and hatred.

The novel ‘s extraordinary fascination is not its plot about adultery which was or still is as commonplace as a walk in the park, nor is it about the depth or the perception of romantic love, but Sarah’s journey in her pursuit of truth and love.  The moralistic force behind the prayer she had made forced her out of a relationship that was already devastating to her despite the emotional attachment.

All the characters in the novel, Sarah, Bendrix, Henry, even the detective Parkis, were in desperate need of a deeper security. Hard though it may be, only Sarah is brave enough to set on a quest to find it. She first searched for it in the form of men, but aside from mental and carnal satisfactions, she can find none. As D. H. Lawrence had described another couple so similar to their situation

 ’All the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all’. 

Her continued searching sent her into something completely different. Her declaration written on a scrap of paper saying 

‘Already I want to abandon everything, everybody, but you’ 

procured by detective Parkis to Bendrix sent him into a fit of love-hate rage. He does not know what he is jealous for, but soon with the reading of Sarah’s diary he realized that the untouchable and unseen God that his imaginary rival was.  Sarah was not instantly converted to Christianity through the bombing accident by keeping her vow to not see Bendrix again since she does not believe in God then. She was still a sinful woman trapped in adultery and guilt. But after years of searching and finding, after nights and nights of agonizing debate with her consciousnes or God himself of whether to see Bendrix again, she finally came to term with her life. Nevertheless, it was not without some major struggle. An atheistic who believed in materialism called Smythe promoting his doctrines and beliefs on a public square also attracted Sarah’s attention on her quest of finding love and truth. She learned from him doctrines created by others to lead people away from a creator, about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their own needs. In her searching, she thought maybe believing in God and believing in materialism are both not true,

 ‘It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle , nearer one extreme than another’.

 If the final desperate fight of logic still finds no answer, what can people believe?  Sarah, went into a Roman Catholic church, suddenly struck by the bare body of Christ, remembered his suffering as well as her own. Sarah, having no one to talk to besides God and no one to share her miseries after the bombing accident, is drawing nearer and nearer to him, as the novel had pointed out, When God had touched people’s hearts and emotions, everyone will only scurry to his side, no one will care if God is trinity or pentagonity, only the love will endure. Even Smyth’s instructions and teaching of materialism only further strengthened her belief in God. From Sarah ‘s diaries, the readers can see that her desperation and inadvertent closeness to God had turned her from complete unbelief to complete trust and joy. Readers of the novel would find that Sarah had finally completed her searching because her diaries are full of her declaration of love for God. She even loved others with the love she never knew how. A quote from Sarah’s diary said

 ‘Teach me to love. I don’t mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down form your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you. ’ 

She had acquired the things she always wanted, the peace, trust and love, through God alone, it is something that Bendrix does not seem to understand.

The novel, conveyed through Smyth , Bendrix, and Sarah, two approaches to life, through Smyth,  materialistic, through Bendrix and Sarah,  emotional. But however one denied it, everyone must have a relationship with God. Smyth held a grudge with God since he was born with a scar marring half of his face, but when he was wooing Sarah, he even gave up his belief for her to marry him.  Bendrix, with the complexity of his anguish, the strength of his conflicting emotions arising from his twisted logic was actually more similar to Sarah, whose sensitive emotions were more responsive to the calling of God. Christian revolutionist Martin Luther once said,

 ‘Theologians comes not from comprehension, knowledge or logic but from existence, death and curse’. 

Luther reinterpreted his words when his daughter was buried, as he said to her 

‘Sweet Dear, you will come to life again, and shine like the stars and the sun in the sky, but strangely, even though I know everything is so well for her, I can not stop my melancholy.’

Yes, it is often through pain and miseries that God talk to people and lead them his way. As Sarah wrote in her diary to God

‘I love you in your pain, I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought , how good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but you let us be with you in pain’. 

Bendrix’s frustration and internal conflicts are not resolved even at the end of the novel, his obsession about the ending and the start of love is not compromised either. He can only passively and helplessly face the progression of events harboring his hatred and jealousy to God that came with the ‘unthinkable’ prospect of the existence of God. All of Sarah’s prayers listed in her diaries were answered, leaving him together with the reader in even more bewilderness. Smythe’s scar was healed overnight, Parkis’s son is snatched from the grasp of death, even Bendrix’s own prayer is answered. Bendrix’s predicament came from the prospect of his God-entangled life which leaves him overtaken by forces that was completely out of his control. At this point of the story, the readers had to ask: were all the circumstances completely by chance or is it controlled by a higher being who was with us in our miseries and listened to our complaints and wishes? The novel left the question unanswered, perhaps propelling us readers to come up with our own answers.

The life of the author of the book Graham Green, did have an answer of his own. Graham Green, almost Bendrix’s alter ego, keeps the same writing styles and neat habits. He converted to Christianity shortly after he met his wife, Vivien, who was a Roman catholic. He said if he was to marry her, then the first thing he was to do was to get to know her religion.  He talked about his conversion experience, after tons of arguments and debates with priests 

‘I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed’. 

His rational words belied the internal emotional conflicts within him. He was also a soul struggling with faith same as Bendrix and Sarah because most of his novels and screenplays are filled with the eternal topic of salvation and condemnation. Most heart-moving and realistic were his narration of the torrential conflicts intrinsic to human nature when faced with choice of salvation and damnation. However, either of his two approaches to God shown by the opinions of his characters in the novel The End of an Affair did not lead him into a long-lasting intimacy with God. The End of an Affair could resonate with his own affair with Catherine Walston, which also came to an end. Later in life, he called himself a ‘Catholic Agnostic ’ or ‘ Caththolic Atheist’ and remained estranged from his wife and children until he died.  Greene in his religious notions was a mixture of Bendrix and Sarah , Godless, but also susceptible to the peace and comforts God provided. Like Bendrix, he decided to put God aside to pursue his own feelings. Like Sarah, He had a life-long battle with chronic depression, which was partly reflected in his detailed narration of the powerful struggle of sin and God within individual souls. This was probably why he prided miseries and pains as inspiring, as he stated in A Brunt-Out Case :

‘Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition. ’