“In pain we're all drapply individual"

The End of the Affair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Graham Greene

The End of the Affair serves as an introduction to a writer who intrigues me. Graham Greene is a Catholic, or was at some point in time during his life, who seems to struggle with a paradoxical faith in and anger towards God. As Ian Thompson puts it in his article Graham Greene, Uneasy Catholic,

“In his three subsequent theological novels – The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951) – his gift was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. By the time of his death in 1991, Greene had more than thirty novels to his name: he was a prolific chronicler of wretchedness and damaged faith.”

The novel, The End of the Affair, is, rather obviously, about an affair. More specifically, it is about two people who seem to love each other but the woman, Sarah Miles, converts to a more conscientious form of piety after a “miracle” saves her lover’s life during a Nazi air raid on London. She leaves him, despite loving him, having promised God in a classic foxhole prayer that she will give him up and go back to her loveless marriage if God will but spare his life. He, unfortunately does not know the cause of her “desertion” (Though when people dabble in affairs and in intentional neglect of spouses I suppose it becomes morally cloudy as to just who is being disserted where, by whom, and when).

In the final scene of the drama, Sarah dies and her love interest, Maurice, is faced with a dilemma. Sarah’s life has left Maurice with a mysterious conviction in the reality of God but at the same time an unmistakable resentment towards that God. Sarah serves as both the evidence that there is a God active in the affairs of human beings (no pun intended) and evidence that God cannot be trusted to supply us with what we want and sometimes even feel we need.

“I hate you, God.” Maurice writes at the end, “I hate you as though you existed.” Graham Greene appears to have struggled with very similar ambivalences towards God. As he once put it, “If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?” “They are always saying God loves us,” he once noted of people of faith that he knew, “If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.”

It is a painful novel really. And messy, as is life. People make poor choices and it complicates the choices they must make after. One poor decision piles up on another, making it so that later “correct choices” leave people in pain with their hearts broken in such a way that one might almost conclude that correct moral behavior leads to ruin. It is about the collisions that occur when divine love and human love coexist in the same people.

“Pain is easy to write” Greene’s character, Maurice says, “In pain we're all drapply individual. Now what can one write about happiness?”

A few of the quotes from the book stand out in my mind particularly starkly.

"...she had fallen asleep against my shoulder...the slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known."

“I wanted things I should never have again – there was no substitute." (114)

"...but when I tried to remember her voice saying 'don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous – just a woman's voice. The process of forgetting her had set in." (119)

Writing is a form of therapy;” Greene would write of his craft,

“sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

In many ways, I feel the same about blogging.

Question for Comment: Have you ever wished that God were more kind than loving? More willing to allow people to be happy short of their perfection than eventually blissful in a state of such, once refined?