The Books: “The End of the Affair” (Graham Greene)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

EndOfAffair.jpgThe End of the Affair – by Graham Greene.

Graham Greene was a big BLANK in my education – I never read him (same with Evelyn Waugh, and I suppose many others). It wasn’t on PURPOSE … and his name comes up all the time in my reading (especially when I’ve read Robert Kaplan’s stuff – Graham Greene, and his travelogues and journalism, is obviously a huge inspiration to Kaplan). Somehow over the last year, Eric found out that I had never read The End of the Affair. We talked about in a blog-post somewhere on my blog, can’t remember where. And he FREAKED. He begged me to read it! He hoped against hope that I hadn’t seen the movie! But I had. Wasn’t wacky about it either to tell you the truth, but that had more to do (I imagine) with Ralph Fiennes than Graham Greene’s story. I never ever ever buy Ralph Fiennes as a leading man. Nope. There’s something too soft in his eyes, something … I don’t know. He reeks of mama’s boy to me. And not that there’s anything wrong with that – when he plays that kind of part, an underdeveloped man (of which his monster in Schindler’s List is the best example) – then you really can’t imagine anyone else playing the part. But as a lover? A guy pursuing a woman? A leading man? Don’t even try, CHiPs.

So anyway – The End of the Affair is obviously one of Eric’s favorite books – he felt that strongly about it – was so excited for me to experience it for the first time, and was bummed that I already knew the plot (because – if you’ve read the book – you know that there’s a freakin’ sucker punch in the last 2 pages. Like a sucker punch you’ve never had before in your life). But for whatever reason, the movie left a kind of TEPID response in my head (thanks, Ralph!) – so the details of the story were not strong to me. A couple weeks passed – and finally Eric could stand it no longer, and a package arrived at my house one day – I opened it – and there was The End of the Affair, from my blog-friend Eric. I laughed out loud when I saw it. My friend Allison and I have this thing with books we love – we basically BEG the other person to read it. We plead, we beg, we shove copies of said book into each other’s hands … Because our tastes are so similar, we have really expanded our reading that way – and I love it.

So finally, I read The End of the Affair. It’s a slim little book, I read it in a weekend – and it’s also the type of book you cannot put down. I was nearly killed by yellow cabs because I was stepping off curbs into the street with my nose in that book. I guess it’s one of those books I took for granted. It’s like when I first read Jane Eyre – I came to that one late, too – I was an adult when I first read it, and you know, you hear about Jane Eyre, blah blah blah … great novel, etc. – but then you read it – and to be confronted head on with such greatness is a truly humbling and awe-inspiring experience. The End of the Affair was like that. I had a great time talking with my dad about it, too. It blew. me. away.

On its surface it is almost a detective story. You don’t get all the pieces until those last 2 pages … the narrative is not linear. We start at the end (and of course the book begins with this sentence: “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.”) Our narrator doesn’t know where to begin. He writes from the wreckage of the aftermath (literal and metaphorical – because let’s not forget that this is also one of the greatest war-time novels ever written.) Our narrator knows the end … and he struggles to discover how to tell his own story – and that struggle is in the writing. You can feel his anguish, you can feel his psychic torment – He is poisoned by hate, and yet he feels that it is only his hate that will help him survive the disaster of the end of the affair. Hate. Hard and clear. He will NOT succumb. God will not “get” him, boy. Nope. Fuck. YOU, God. I have never read such an angry book. It’s breathtaking.

Graham Greene was, of course, Catholic – and this is also one of the greatest Catholic books ever written. I’d put Ulysses on that list too, although that’s Irish Catholicism which is a horse of a different color entirely. I should know. Like Joyce said, “In Ireland, Catholicism is black magic.”

The Catholic themes of End of the Affair unfold slowly … horribly … irrevocably … and I wouldn’t dream of giving anything away. I had to put the book down a couple of times, just to catch my breath.

The book is also a searing unforgettable love story. And since our narrator writes after “the end of the affair”, everything is suffused with the misery of what came after. Even the joy, even the love they shared. He can’t look at any of it without feeling the loss. He can’t look at ANY of it without raging at God, a God he refuses to believe in. REFUSES. Out of spite. So there were times when I was reading about their trysts, and what they talked about, and how they worked as a couple (she, of course, is married already – so there’s quite a bit of danger of being found out – and if it weren’t for the fact that London was being bombed from above on a nightly basis, perhaps they would have been “found out” long before) … anyway, there were times when the sweetness of their love, the strength of it – was so powerfully rendered (and yet so simple – because isn’t love, at its purest, very very simple?) – when tears flooded my eyes. I cried because of how beautiful it was – but I also cried because I knew, in my reading of the book, that it was all over. And I didn’t know HOW it ended (because I couldn’t remember the movie very well), but the sadness of the loss trembles through his prose. He is a man left bereft. Forever. There will be no respite for him. No comfort. Greene, in his brilliant way, somehow suggests that the narrator is CHOOSING comfortlessness. Comfort does exist. But the narrator refuses it. Again, I hesitate to say more – if you haven’t read it.

The End of the Affair is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

EXCERPT FROM The End of the Affair – by Graham Greene.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihhilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like “the dark night” or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream … And yet there was this peace …

That is how I think of those first months of war – was it a phoney peace as well as a phoney war? It seems now to have stretched arms of comfort and reassurance all over those months of dubiety and waiting, but the peace must, I suppose, even at that time have been punctuated by misunderstanding and suspicion. Just as I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men – the favourite lover for the moment. This woman, whom I loved so obsessively that if I woke in the night I immediately found the thought of her in my brain and abandoned sleep, seemed to give up all her time to me. And yet I could feel not trust: in the act of love I could be arrogant, but alone I had only to look in the mirror to see doubt, in the shape of a lined face and a lame leg – why me? There were always occasions when we couldn’t meet – appointments with a dentist or a hairdresser, occasions when Henry entertained, when they were alone together. It was no good telling myself that in her own home she would have no opportunity to betray me (with the egotism of a lover I was already using that word with its suggestion of a non-existent duty) while Henry worked on the widows’ pensions or – for he was soon shifted from that job – on the distribution of gas-masks and the design of approved cardboard cases, for didn’t I know it was possible to make love in the most dangerous circumstances, if the desire were there? Distrust grows with a lover’s success. Why, the very next time we saw each other it happened in jut the way that I should have called impossible.

I woke with the sadness of her last cautious advice still resting on my mind, and within three minutes of waking her voice on the telephone dispelled it. I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

“Hello,” she said, “are you asleep?”

“No. When can I see you? This morning?”

“Henry’s got a cold. He’s staying at home.”

“If only you could come here …”

“I’ve got to stay in to answer the telephone.”

“Just because he’s got a cold?”

Last night I had felt friendship and sympathy for Henry, but already he had become an enemy, to be mocked and resented and covertly run down.

“He’s lost his voice completely.”

I felt a malicious delight at the absurdity of his sickness: a civil servant without a voice whispering hoarsely and ineffectively about widows’ pensions. I said, “Isn’t there any way to see you?”

“But of course.”

There was silence for a moment on the line and I thought we had been cut off. I said, “Hello. Hello.” But she had been thinking, that was all, carefully, collectedly, quickly, so that she could give me straightaway the correct answer. “I’m giving Henry a tray in bed at one. We could have sandwiches ourselves in the living room. I’ll tell him you want to talk over the film – or that story of yours”, and immediatley she rang off the sense of trust was disconnected and I thought, how many times before has she planned in just this way? When I went to her home and rang the bell, I felt like an enemy – or a detective, watching her words as Parkis and his son were to watch her movements a few years later. And then the door opened and trust came back.

There was never any quesiton in those days of who wanted whom – we were together in desire. Henry had his tray, sitting up against two pillows in his green woollen dressing-gown, and in the room below, on the hardwood floor, with a single cushion for support and the door ajar, we made love. When the moment came, I had to put my hand gently over her mouth to deaden that strange sad angry cry of abandonment, for fear Henry should hear it overhead.

To think I had intended to just pick her brain. I crouched on the floor beside her and watched and watched, as though I might never see this again – the brown indeterminate-coloured hair like a pool of liquor on the parquet, the sweat on her forehead, the heavy breathing as though she had run a race and now like a young athlete lay in the exhaustion of victory.

And then the stair squeaked. For a moment we neither of us moved. The sandwiches were stacked uneaten on the table, the glasses had not been filled. She said in a whisper, “He went downstairs.” She sat in a chair and put a plate in her lap and a glass beside her.

“Suppose he heard,” I said, “as he passed.”

“He wouldn’t have known what it was.”

I must have looked incredulous, for she explained with dreary tenderness, “Poor Henry. It’s never happened – not in the whole ten years,” but all the same we weren’t so sure of our safety: we sat there silently listening until the stair squeaked again. My voice sounded to myself cracked and false as I said rather too loudly, “I’m glad you like that scene with the onions,” and Henry pushed open the door and looked in. He was carrying a hot-water-bottle in a grey flannel cover. “Hello, Bendrix,” he whispered.

“You shouldn’t have fetched that yourself,” she said.

“Didn’t want to disturbe you.”

“We were talking about the film last night.”

“Hope you’ve got everything you want,” he whispered to me. He took a look at the claret Sarah had put out for me. “Sholud have given him the ’29,” he breathed in his undimensional voice and drifted out again, clasping the hot-water-bottle in its flannel cover, and again we were alone.

“Do you mind?” I asked her, and she shook her head. I didn’t really know what I meant – I think I had an idea that the sight of Henry might have roused remorse, but she had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act. She would have thought it unreasonable of Henry, if he had caught us, to be angry for more than a moment. Catholics are always said to be freed in the confessional from the mortmain of the past – certainly in that respect you could have called her a born Catholic, although she believed in God as little as I did. Or so I thought then and wonder now.

If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because i am lost in a strange region: I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true. I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, “I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.” It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement – we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter – all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

She wasn’t lying even when she said, “Nobody else. Ever again.” There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had – I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.

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20 Responses to The Books: “The End of the Affair” (Graham Greene)

  1. Another Sheila says:

    Yes, yes, YES: everything you said! I read it one night, all in one sitting, at my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s apartment while he watched tv, made dinner, ate it, cleaned up, did some work, etc. etc. Activity was all around me and it was as if I was in a soundproof bubble, oblivious. I COULD NOT put it down to do ANYTHING. I was so completely and totally absorbed. Like, STUNNED from the very first page all the way through to the end — truly, physically gripped by it; I felt clenched and tense the whole time I was reading. I remember just dissolving in tears when I finished, emotionally exhausted and devastated. Such an incredible book. I’m almost scared of it.

    The movie sucked. The whole Catholic/God/faith dimension of the novel, which is huge and fascinating and complex and the most important part of it, was totally simplified to make room for the love story, and what remained was changed in order to demonize the Catholic church in a very cliched, priests-are-bad-and-creepy sort of way, which … NOT what Greene was doing there. The things he grapples with in this novel are light years beyond that in terms of complexity and depth. (Plus, in the novel, if I remember correctly, the priest was actually the good guy.) Maybe they had to mess with the plot the way they did in order to make it appealing to the mainstream, I don’t know. But I can’t forgive it. There is SO MUCH going on in that novel. The movie was a crime. Plus, yeah, bad casting. I liked Julianne Moore. Geoffrey Rush as her husband? Didn’t get that. Ralph Fiennes as Bendrix? No. I nominate Daniel Craig for Bendrix in the remake!

  2. red says:

    Sheila – I was also scared of the book. And my fear just increased as I got near to the end … I didn’t really realize where it was going – but I had a sense of it – and I dreaded it.

    The priest is seen thru a cloud of suspicion and hatred in the book – as I recall – because Bendrix is like: WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THEM??? Who is this bastard trying to insinuate himself into my lover’s head? Right?

    Have you ever seen the movie Rapture? I think the movie The End of the Affair would have needed a touch like that – an absolutely literal interpretation of the Bible and the story being told. Rapture is terrifying – have you seen it?? It takes certain things at its word … and I think the film of End of the Affair would have benefited from that kind of cold almost scientific approach.

    Because (and again I don’t want to give too much away): everything is foreordained. You know? You realize that EVERYTHING was planned before Bendrix even arrived on the scene.

    THAT is the level of belief that the book has.

    And THAT is what Bendrix haaaaaaates.

    How a book can exude hatred to such a degree I don’t know. it’s amazing!!!

  3. red says:

    I like the Daniel Craig thought. Sizzle. Or Clive Owen maybe? Somebody who could actually play that passion and then also to play the corruption of his soul by hatred.

    shivers.

    Greene – a man of faith – looks into the heart of the issue – and doesn’t look away. AMAZING.

  4. Lisa says:

    I crave Ralph Fiennes.

    Blame it on The English Patient, but he flips my switch in every movie he’s in — even Quiz Show. (I’ve never desired a WASP more.)

  5. red says:

    Lisa – hahahahaha!!! You CRAVE him! I think we’ve talked about this before, right? I seem to recall covering the Ralph Fiennes Je Ne Sais Quoi before.

  6. Another Sheila says:

    Yes, you’re right, the hatred – the naked, unembroidered language of his hate – “I hated Henry – I hated his wife Sarah, too” right there on page one, and then at the end, when he tells God, “Leave me alone forever.” And of course, all the way through. It’s so stark and flat and bleak that it’s like it physically assaults you. My memory of reading that book is so viseral, like I’d been slapped across the face or shoved in the chest – those are the sensations that I recall feeling – and I think that’s what it is. The hatred making no apologies, not even trying to elevate itself by sounding poetic. Just … hate. He’s just completely spent. It’s all he’s got left. Wow.

    I remember that now about the priest – Bendrix’s consuming suspicions. And there was another religious figure, a streetcorner preacher type, who I think was truly sinister but the details are escaping me at the moment. I think the movie conflated those two characters into the one of the priest. It’s been a few years. I need to read this again.

    Ooooooooh, Clive Owen. Babe. Perfect choice. Bendrix does talk quite a bit about how “cruel” he was to Sarah, I remember. Like, his frustration that he couldn’t truly have her would make him turn abruptly mean to her in the middle of a loving moment, and he’d hurt her and callously let her walk away, and then agonize over it later, alone. I could see him playing that kind of torment really well.

    Never saw Rapture! I’ll check it out.

  7. red says:

    Sheila – yeah, it’s with Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny. Bizarre casting I know – but it’s terrifying in its LITERAL viewpoint. And Mimi is unbelievable. She’ll never get a role like that again. Really interesting.

    Clive Owen has a definite cruel streak!! He’s fascinating to watch when he feels betrayed.

  8. Kate says:

    Sheila,

    Have we never had the Ralph Fiennes conversation before? I feel the exact same way, and I’m always in the minority. Too soft or something. . .

  9. red says:

    Kate – I think we have discussed it! Yes, we are in a minority! I think he is quite a good actor – but not as a leading man.

  10. red says:

    So Lisa, basically what you’re saying is – Ralph Fiennes is on your bench??

  11. red says:

    Sheila – and yes, I had forgotten momentarily about the streetcorner preacher guy … and how Bendrix despises such people … but the details of why escapes me (except for the obvious reasons that they are charlatans).

    It’s almost, too – like in the excerpt I posted – he believed that Sarah did not really believe in God. Or if she did it was in a desultory casual agnostic way. To have his affair be ruined by God …

    No. It is unforgivable.

  12. Lisa says:

    Yes, yes, he is. Right next to Jason Isaacs.

  13. red says:

    aha. Okay. With the Jason Isaacs (hot) clue, I am getting to understand your type better now.

    On my bench?

    Ewan McGregor. Dean Stockwell, circa 1991. Dane Cook. Russell Crowe.

    Maybe more but those guys are the top 4 at the moment.

    My “bull” pen, if you will

  14. tracey says:

    Ralph Fiennes. Bleh. Is he a fuss-budget? He seems like a fuss-budget to me. Please man up, dude.

  15. Kerry says:

    Read this on the plane home from LA. Wow. Sat crying like an idiot in my seat. Ashford and Simpson were across the aisle. I kept hearing “Solid” in my head. . .what a weird way to read a Graham Greene novel. Totally engrossed and upset by the whole thing. . .thanks for recommending it. If only I could keep up with all your recommendations.

  16. red says:

    Ashford and Simpson? Really?? Ha!!

    I know – it’s really an upsetting book. It’s the only one of his I read – but dad told me lots of others he recommended – which (naturally) they all had to read when they were kids, due to the Catholic nature of everything.

  17. Another Sheila says:

    Wait! It wasn’t Geoffrey Rush as the husband, it was Stephen Rea! Sorry – I hereby correct my comment of 5 days ago.

    And I still disagree with that casting choice.

    And … I might be crazy.

  18. Erik says:

    Sheila, thank you so much for linking to this post because I’ve been such a bad blog reader lately and I totally missed this post and I had totally been wondering if you’d read the book and I love that you were so moved by it (I knew you would be but it just felt like there was something wrong with a world in which you hadn’t read this book and now the world is more right again) and it gave me little shivers reading what you said about the book.

    My copy of the book is almost falling apart (and I love that) (don’t you just love to hold a book that’s been so thoroughly read?) and I need to read it again now.

    I could recommend some other great Greene books, but this one really is his masterpiece.

    On a total side note, the men on my bench right now are:

    Daniel Craig, Eric Bana, Michael J. Fox (old crushes never die), and can Ewan Macgregor be on both of our benches?

  19. 2007 Books Read

    (in the order in which I finished them, understanding that very often I read many books at the same time). I count re-read books, by the way. I’ll include links to any posts or book excerpts I might have done…

  20. I’ve also loved this book, so much that like i’ve never loved a book before except ‘gone with the wind’ .. And both books left me with a sense its hard to read anything else because every book i seem to pick up at the store seems so small, light in feeling; in comparison .. Anything you’d recommend? I need a great love story to relive me of my misery – and preferably a sad, even tragic, one ..

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