Recollected Text: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Series note: There is a list of books to which I am likely to want to refer at parties and in or other social contexts in which I am likely to become conversationally animated (read: have been drinking). (Infer: I am a hit at parties.) These books are at various times tools, or crutches, or lodestones. In any case, they are packed with biographical significance — they mean something, or did, to someone I am, or once was.
Recollected Texts is an ongoing, occasional attempt to review these books as I now recall them, after having told their stories to countless cocktail-hour strangers. I will start with Greene’s The End Of The Affair because it is short, and because this week I went out into the desert and experimented on myself with homeopathic amounts of sleep.
Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair lies to you right from the beginning, because the narrator tells you that this is a story of hate, not of love. It is pretty clear, however, that the narrator knows that the relationship between love and hate is not simple. The horrible choice in the center of the book is this: can you reject love as an act of love? In the context of the story, though, Greene has played enough with our understandings of love and hate that we have to allow for the possibility that a rejection could be an act of love if it were sincere.
The book explores that relationship: love and hate keep coming up as subversions of one another. The two main characters — Bendrix and Sarah — are in a relationship; they cannot bring themselves to hate Sarah’s husband: he is too small-spirited to feel anything for except humor and pity. If they could take him seriously, then they could hate him, but There is an atheist “preacher” who keeps coming up, who rails against religion and against God on Speaker’s Corner in London; at one point, one of the characters confronts him: nobody spends his days railing against the tooth fairy or the square triangle. At another point, the atheist preacher explains how it was the priests that made him a theist, and a character asks whether it could ever work the other way.
The one character, Sarah, has to decide whether she loves Bendrix enough to leave him, to give a mundane end to their tragically romantical love. In return, Bendrix — who in typical Greeneland fashion will brook no suggestion of pathos but suffers a surfeit of it underneath — convinces himself that he needs to understand whether he hated Sarah by re-visiting — to our benefit — the story of their love.
I do not like to spoil the ending, but ultimately the question Greene is asking is this: how little is enough? What is the atomic particle of love, or of sincerity, or of belief — the smallest part beyond which you no longer have love or sincerity or belief at all. How thick can a place get and still be one of the thin places? How small of a mustard seed, exactly, are we talking about here?
gauche
23 Mar 10
