The End of the Affair
Some books are disconcertingly good. Why disconcertingly? It might be because, for the reader, they offer the kind of insights that don’t just seem very true, but it is as if they are revealing more than perhaps we want to know and yet can’t help but be fascinated. Graham Greene wrote several compelling stories, of which several were set overseas, the action taking place at those fascinating intersections between exotic locations, the intrigues of the spy business, and the vagaries of love, sex and passion. His stories aren’t always comfortable, which is part of what makes them so involving: it is as if we have been invited into a real set of lives, where confusions, jealousies, hopes, fear, rejections and deceits all swirl around, sometimes creating dramatic moments, yet more often just showing the reader the unpredictable outcomes of minor choices and chance decisions. However, it is his more domestic dramas that are possibly even more uncomfortable and unsettling.
The End of the Affair is centred around Maurice Bendrix, an author who is beginning to establish a reputation, with the first stages of his story set in the final years of the Second World War. Bendrix falls in love Sarah Miles, the wife of an impotent and apparently rather boring civil servant, Henry Miles. Before long, Bendrix begins to fear that his affair with Sarah will end as quickly as it began. We can see why this is likely, as their relationship suffers from his overt and admitted jealousy. In particular, he is frustrated by her refusal to divorce Henry.
Their affair seems to end when Bendrix and Sarah are in his flat. Somewhat nonchalantly, as was the case with their attitudes at many of the times they were together, they ignore the air raid sirens. However, when a V-2 rocket explodes near Bendrix’s building just as he is outside in the hallway. Bendrix falls down a staircase and awakes later, bloodied but not seriously hurt. He walks upstairs, where Sarah is shocked to see that he is alive. Bendrix accuses Sarah of being disappointed that he survived and she leaves, telling him, “Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other.
On a rainy London night in 1946, two years after the V-2 Rocket explosion, Maurice Bendrix has a chance meeting with Henry Miles. His obsession with Sarah is rekindled; he succumbs to his own jealousy and works his way back into her life. Henry tells Bendrix that he believes Sarah is having an affair. Increasingly alarmed that Sarah might have a new lover, Bendrix hires the bumbling but amiable private detective Mr. Parkis, who uses his young birthmarked son Lance to help him investigate. Despite their now rather cold relationship, Bendrix and Sarah continue to meet, and she tells him about Henry, and reveals her almost non-existent relationship with her husband.
The die is cast. Bendrix is still caught up with his largely unconfirmed jealousy, and when he sees Henry crossing the Common that separates their flats, it seems to him that Henry has finally started to suspect something. At one point, Parkis manages to steal Sarah’s diary and passes it on to Bendrix. It’s an uncomfortable revelation, showing their affair from her perspective. It reveals that while Bendrix was temporarily knocked unconscious by the bomb, Sarah had run downstairs to finds him still and not breathing. She had tried to revive him, then she ran back upstairs and began to pray for Bendrix’s life. Just as she says to God that she will stop seeing Bendrix if he is brought back, Bendrix comes into the room.
Now knowing why Sarah ended their affair, Bendrix tries to get Sarah to reconsider. She hesitates, and tells him she has felt dead without him, and can no longer keep her ‘promise’ to God. Meanwhile Henry, who has figured out that it is Bendrix who was Sarah’s lover, desperately asks Sarah not to leave him. He fails. Shortly after, Bendrix goes to meet Henry, from whom he learns Sarah has a terminal illness. Bendrix and Henry meet regularly, and Bendrix stays with Henry and Sarah over her final days. At her funeral, Parkis tells Bendrix that his son’s birthmark went away after Sarah kissed it during a chance encounter. Now living at Henry and Sarah’s house, Bendrix completes his most recent novel, which is essentially a diary of hate directed toward God. While Sarah doesn’t need to see God to love Him, Bendrix prays God will leave him alone, thereby finally acknowledging His existence. Despite this, by the last page of the novel, Bendrix comes to believe in a God as well.
There is ample evidence to suggest that Bendrix is drawn to some extent on Greene himself, and in the novel, he reflects often on the act of writing a novel. Sarah was probably based on Greene’s lover at the time, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated. The End of the Affair is often considered among Greene’s best novels. Evelyn Waugh commented that the story was “a singularly beautiful and moving one”. However, it was Alex Preston writing for The Independent in February 2012 who observed on Graham Greene: “The End of the Affair is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn’t live without but struggled to live with.”
Well, there it is. There is no reason to doubt that The End of the Affair was partly based on Greene’s life and his relationship to Catholicism. But it is far more than that: Graham Greene is an outstanding writer. He turns a searchlight on the small, often perverse and silly ways in which we examine our relationships. We reflect on things we have said, things we have done, regret actions and at the same time wish we had said more. What Greene does is to make this about individual foibles, the inability to step back from the immediate actions and choices we make and see them in a larger perspective.
It is one among several I’ve recently reread about the complexities and confusions of love. It is tempting to believe that the ever hasty Bendrix would have understood more if he had read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s second and wonderful novel. Published 1813, it portrays the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial and actual goodness.
Perhaps this was a simpler world than the UK in the middle of the 20th Century. In the early 19th century, the Bennet family live near the English village of Meryton. Mrs. Bennet’s greatest desire is to marry off her five daughters to secure their futures. Events begin with news about a Mr. Bingley, a rich bachelor who rents a neighbouring estate. His arrival gives Mrs Bennet hope that one of her daughters might marry him, especially because ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’, a view Mrs Bennet declares at the beginning of the novel. It’s a memorable line!
The family, five daughters, go to a ball, where they are introduced to Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, Caroline, who is unmarried, and Louisa, who is married to Mr. Hurst, and his closest friend Mr Darcy. Well the die is cast. While Mr. Bingley’s friendly and cheerful manner earns him popularity among the guests, Mr. Darcy, reputed to be twice as wealthy as Mr. Bingley, appears haughty and aloof. He declines to dance with the second-eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth, as she is ‘not handsome enough’. Although she jokes about it with her friends, Elizabeth is deeply offended. However, despite this first impression Mr. Darcy secretly begins to find himself drawn to Elizabeth as they continue to encounter each other at social events, appreciating her wit and frankness.
This isn’t the dark and bafflingly secret world of Bendrix and Sarah, but it is similarly complex and revealing about the factors that affect love. Jane Austen weaves a tangled web built around misunderstandings, confusions, deceit and disaster. After various obstacles and very antagonistic exchanges, we begin to understand Darcy’s true feelings for Elizabeth, while he works behind the scenes to sort out various misadventures involving her sisters. Throughout all these additional complications and despite the evidence, Lady Catherine De Bourgh begins to sense that rumours suggesting Elizabeth intends to marry Mr. Darcy. She visits her and demands she promise never to accept Mr. Darcy’s proposal, as she and Darcy’s late mother had already planned his marriage to her daughter Anne. Elizabeth refuses and asks the outraged Lady Catherine to leave. Darcy, heartened by his aunt’s indignant relaying of Elizabeth’s response, proposes to her (for a second time) and is accepted. This is a story of love conquering all, positive in its outcomes.
In picking this as the first of a series of novels dealing with love and its complexities, the next two novels take us, step by step, into deeper and more fateful misunderstandings between men and women. Austen’s complications are about the misperceptions of class and gender, sometimes infuriating, sometimes silly, but there is a sense that ‘sense and sensibility’ will prevail. Just thirty four years later, a couple of powerful novels, by the Bronte sisters, Charlotte and Emily, were to throw fire and acid into the gentler worlds of Austen’s stories. Pride and Prejudice was about adults. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are bildungsroman, charting the psychological growth of a young woman to adulthood.
Jane Eyre is by Charlotte Bronte. It was published under her pen name ‘Currer Bell’ on 19 October 1847. The first American edition was published the following year in New York. Jane Eyre follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine from child into adulthood, and centres on her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall. The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of Jane Eyre; its setting is somewhere in the north of England. In five sections it explores stages in Jane’s life, the focus psychological.
It begins with Jane Eyre, aged 10, living at Gateshead Hall with her maternal uncle’s family, where the nursemaid, Bessie, proves to be Jane’s only ally. Jane has an unhappy childhood. Mrs Reed gets the harsh Mr Brocklehurst, the director of Lowood Institution, a charity school for girls, to enrol Jane. Mrs Reed cautions Mr Brocklehurst that Jane has a “tendency to deceit”, which he interprets as Jane being a liar. Before Jane leaves, however, she tells everyone at Lowood how cruelly the Reeds treated her. Once at Lowood Institution, Jane soon finds that life is harsh. She attempts to fit in and befriends an older girl, Helen Burns. In due course Mr Brocklehurst visits the school. While Jane is trying to make herself inconspicuous, she accidentally drops her slate. She is then forced to stand on a stool and is branded a sinner and a liar. Many students fall ill when a typhus epidemic strikes; Helen dies of consumption in Jane’s arms. While benefactors ensure conditions at the school improve, this isn’t a Jane Austen saga. It is proving far more complex and internally revealing.
After 6 years as a pupil & 2 as a teacher at Lowood, Jane leaves in pursuit of a new life. She takes a position at Thornfield Hall, teaching Adèle Varens, a young French girl. One night, she meets Edward Rochester, master of the house. Jane saves Mr Rochester from a fire, but the next day he leaves, returning with party, including the beautiful Blanche Ingram. Jane starts to feel jealous. Despite this, Rochester proposes marriage. During the wedding ceremony a lawyer reveals he cannot marry because he is already married. Rochester admits this is true and asks Jane to go with him to the south of France and live with him as husband and wife. Jane is tempted but realises that she will lose herself and her integrity if she allows her passion for a married man to consume her. She must stay true to her Christian values and beliefs, and despite her love for Rochester, she leaves early the next morning.
Jane travels as far from Thornfield Hall as she can using the little money she had previously saved. Exhausted and starving, she eventually makes her way to the home of Diana and Mary Rivers but it is clergyman St John Rivers, Diana and Mary’s brother, who rescues her. After Jane regains her health, St John finds her a teaching position at a nearby village school. Jane becomes good friends with the sisters, but St John remains aloof. St John learns Jane’s true identity and discovers her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left her his entire fortune of 20,000 pounds. John Eyre is also his and his sisters’ uncle. Jane insists on sharing the money equally with her cousins. Eventually Jane reunites with a severely injured Rochester. Overjoyed at her return, he fears that she will be repulsed by his condition. Now financially independent Jane declares that she will never leave him. Rochester proposes again, and they are married.
Also first published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Bronte. It concerns two families, gentry living on the Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the turbulent relationships centred around the Earnshaw’s foster son, Heathcliff. The Earnshaws lived at Wuthering Heights with their two children, Hindley and Catherine. Returning from a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw brings home an orphan, Heathcliff. His origins are unclear but he appears to be ‘like a gipsy’. Hindley beats Heathcliff, who gradually becomes close friends with Catherine. After Hindley was away at university, his father died and three years later he returns as the new master of Wuthering Heights. He and his new wife Frances force Heathcliff to live as one of their servants. Following a fight Heathcliff is made to live in the manor’s unheated, dusty attic and swears that he will one day have his revenge.
The complexities mount, and events become bizarrely interwoven. We’re a long way from Jane Austen. Two years later, Catherine becomes engaged to Edgar, but admits she loves Heathcliff but cannot marry him because of his low social status. He flees the household. However, just three years later, Heathcliff returns, now a wealthy gentleman, and elopes with his neighbour’s sister, Isabella. However, when Heathcliff discovers that Catherine is dying, he visits her in secret. She dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy, and Heathcliff rages, calling on her ghost to haunt him for as long as he lives. Twelve years later, after Isabella’s death, her sickly son Linton is brought back to live with his uncle Edgar at the Grange, but Heathcliff insists that his son must live with him. He becomes increasingly wild and reveals that on the night Catherine died he dug up her grave, and ever since has been plagued by her ghost. When Linton unexpectedly dies, Cathy has no option but to remain at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff declines, eventually dying in Catherine’s old room. Confused?
In some respects, The End of the Affair is a culmination of this genre. Like the other three novels, it exposes the motivations and expectations of the key characters, and they all thrive on the expectation that we ‘know where this is going’. Elizabeth Bennet will marry, happily, if others in her family lead less charmed lives. Jane Eyre will survive disasters , eventually marry and have a child. Heathcliff and Catherine will both die, leaving behind a complex mess. Step by step the disastrous side of love becomes more dominant. By the 20th Century, even that’s not enough, and the fascinating but flawed Bendrix will fail in love, only to remain stuck and bitter. All four novels, in their own way, remind us that real life is messy, painful, and far from perfect, and by the time we’re in Greene’s world, life is truly bleak.
