By Graham Greene
All affairs die with time. Why then has the affair with Graham Greene's 1951 novel survived?
I love a good spy thriller, but most are cotton candy compared to Greene's observation, descriptive powers, and use of language. But there is more to The End of the Affairthan the sum of all three. This is not a book of chivalry, nor of biblical or even (in 1951) conventional morals. Maurice Bendrix, its protagonist is self-centered. He is given to fits of rage and self-loathing. In many respects he is a jerk, albeit a deep-thinking one. Sarah, the object of Maurice's affection is illusive, both cat and mouse.
I'll let the critics ponder the books depths; for me this is real life . . . delight matched by doubts, love squandered and pursued, art imitating life (Greene's), and how people understand God; more specifically how they act and react to their understandings of or relationship to him.
Michael Gorra's introduction to The End of the Affair is a great gift to the reader. He provides historical context regarding Greene, the times, the novel, as well as Greene's work in those times. As he notes, at the time the novel was published (1951, but the story spans the years 1939 to 1949), both the church and art failed to stand as bulwarks of society.
I want to use that insistence on the Church's ability to say, "thou shalt not" as a way to locate The End of the Affair within its particular moment in the history of the novel as a form: to leave the question of Greene's personal faith aside, and to ask instead about the usefulness of Catholicism for a novelist of his period. . . . About all one can say for sure is that the period's best books tended to be both short and suspicious of grandeur, the grandeur of art included(p. xv-xvi)
Gorra quotes R.W.B. Lewis "Art may provide a haven among ruins, but it cannot supply a basis for sheer existence." This is not a simple exercise of literary philosophizing. As Gorra notes, Greene and others were pushing back on art as "an antonymous realm" given what they had experienced in two world wars. Indeed, Graham's first-person protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, is a ship without ontological moorings. Reflecting on life without Sarah, his forbidden love, life is nihilistic, a mere existentialist shot in the dark at best. Maurice tells us:
When I began that novel about the the civil servant (a character in a novel he was writing) I was still interested, but when Sarah left me, I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellery? and if Sarah is right, how unimportant all the important art is. . . .
The End of the Affair shows us what most great novels do, the human condition:
Insecurity: Maurice's jealous rearing its head while reflecting on Sarah's actions: "Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust." (p. 43)
Augustinian insight: Sarah's journal reflecting on her affair with Maurice: "For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You. For either us. I might have take a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. . . . You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You." (p. 99)
Bitterness: When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness. . . . And there--in the phrase--the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love. . . ." (p. 6-7)
The End of the Affair is an intricately woven tapestry of human affairs and of mistaken notions of God. It gives us sinners and saints. Maurice is the recalcitrant sinner and Sarah, the almost-repentant "saint." She knows faith in the objective, but not faith in the personal. She bargains with a God who expects of her rather than rests in the God who has already sacrificed through Christ for her. While Maurice needs no justification (in his mind), Sarah is playing the age-old game of attempting to win God's favor.
The End of the Affair demonstrates in 150 pages what Augustin says in one line:
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
Whether he intended to or not, Graham Greene awakens the reader to the consequential damage caused by assumptions (about God and others) untethered to reality, and the necessity of pursuing that reality rather than hiding from the Truth or even "a truth" it might ultimately reveal.