The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

First published: 1951

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1939-1946

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Maurice Bendrix, the narrator, a novelist
• Sarah Miles, his mistress
• Henry Miles, Sarah’s husband, a high-ranking British civil servant
• Alfred Parkis, a private detective
• Lancelot Parkis, his son and apprentice
• Richard Smythe, a rationalist lecturer and counselor
• Father Crompton, a Roman Catholic priest

The Novel

Maurice Bendrix, the narrator of The End of the Affair, says that his account is “a record of hate far more than of love.” He claims to hate Henry Miles, his wife, Sarah, and a God in whom he does not believe. His narrative begins in January, 1946, when he encounters Henry crossing the street on a dark and rainy night that might correspond to the dark night of the soul. Worried about his wife, Henry asks Bendrix to come home with him; he confides that he fears Sarah is having an affair. Henry is tempted to hire a private investigator, and when he balks at doing so, Bendrix offers to do it for him. In fact, Bendrix and Sarah had been lovers for five years, from 1939 to 1944, when she abruptly and without giving reasons broke off the affair. Suspecting that she is seeing some other lover, both men are jealous, Bendrix intensely so. While he is visiting Henry, Sarah comes in drenched to her skin. None of them realizes it, but she has literally caught her death of cold.

Obsessed, Bendrix does in fact hire a detective, Alfred Parkis, who, with his son, begins a surveillance. After several reports to Bendrix about Sarah’s repeated meetings with a man named Richard Smythe, Parkis manages to steal Sarah’s journal. Reading it, Bendrix learns the reason for the end of their affair.

The affair began when Bendrix, a novelist, was doing research on a civil servant much like Henry Miles. In the course of using Sarah as a source, Bendrix casually seduced her, only for the two of them to find themselves overwhelmingly in love. Henry had been a devoted but dull husband with such a minimal sex drive that for years he and Sarah had slept apart. A sensual and frustrated woman, Sarah had a few brief affairs before the one with Bendrix, but they meant nothing to her except momentary gratification. Bendrix, however, she loves unreservedly, both physically and spiritually. Unable to believe in the depth of her love, jealous of her former lovers and imagining subsequent ones, Bendrix fears that the affair will end and so attempts to hasten it to that end by being bitter and quarrelsome. Though hurt, Sarah remains utterly committed to him. “Love doesn’t end,” she tells him. One day in 1944, after they have made love in his apartment, an air raid begins; Bendrix goes downstairs to see if everything is all right, and a V-1 bomb explodes in front of the house. When Sarah goes to look, she finds Bendrix pinned beneath the front door, seemingly lifeless. Convinced that he is dead, Sarah goes back to his room and prays to a God in whom she does not believe, asking that Bendrix be alive and promising, if he is, to give him up. Just then, he comes back into the room; she thinks that the pain will now begin and almost wishes him “safely back dead again under the door.”

Indeed, though Sarah has been an atheist, she keeps her vow, and the keeping of it helps bring her to belief, to fill the desert within which she has found herself, with divine love. In her suffering, she often hates God and seeks help from Richard Smythe, a rationalist preacher afflicted by a large strawberry birthmark that ruined his otherwise handsome face. Yet Smythe’s arguments against the existence of God are so intense that they help turn Sarah to belief, for how can one so hate a being that does not exist. She begins visiting a dark and ugly Catholic church with hideous statues whose very physical ugliness helps her believe in a God become incarnate; who, she asks, could love or hate a divinity as vague as a vapor. She buys a crucifix and begins to take instruction in Catholicism. Gradually, her hatred of God turns to love; a scrap of what seems like a love letter, which Parkis stole and gave to Bendrix, was actually a letter to God; He is the rival, the secret lover that Bendrix had feared.

Realizing belatedly the depth of Sarah’s love for him and believing that his presence can win her away from the God whose existence he does not accept, Bendrix phones Sarah to say he is coming for her. Ill and in bed, she tells him not to come, and when he insists, she flees into an even darker and wetter night. Bendrix pursues her to church, only to find her sick and suffering. His driving her out into the storm kills her, for the cold she caught the first night develops into pneumonia, and she dies before he can ever see her again.

Now Bendrix finds that he too can continue to love in the absence of the beloved. Yet he continues to fight Sarah’s God, refusing her the Catholic burial that she wanted and arguing bitterly with the God who now hounds him. When he is about to drift into a reluctant affair with a young woman, he prays to Sarah to stop him, and at that moment, Sarah’s mother intervenes. From her, he learns that as an infant, Sarah had been secretly baptized a Catholic. Sarah’s spirit seems able to perform miracles; it appears that she cured Parkis’ son of acute internal pain and caused Smythe’s hideous birth mark to vanish. Despite her adultery, Sarah has become a saint. Reluctantly, still hating God, Bendrix comes to believe in His existence, and though the book ends with his praying to God, “I’m too tired and old to learn to love. Leave me alone forever,” it may be that through his love for Sarah, whom he thought he hated, he may come to love her God, whom he has also thought he hated.

The Characters

Maurice Bendrix, the first-person protagonist, is sometimes an unreliable narrator, for he is so consumed by jealousy, self-pity, self-hatred, and bitterness, that he measures everyone else by himself. Accordingly, he often misjudges Sarah and Henry Miles, and he certainly misjudges God. Bendrix confesses that from time to time “a demon” takes possession of his brain. Though an atheist, Bendrix can believe in a personal devil, which is the enemy of love. On their first meeting, Sarah observes to him, “You do seem to dislike a lot of people.” A problem with the novel is how to make such a character sympathetic. Bendrix himself believes he is unlovable except to a parent or a god. He quarrels so frequently and pointlessly with Sarah that it is difficult to see what she loves in him. He does, however, have some redeeming features-an ironic sense of humor, the analytic intelligence of a novelist, his reluctant sympathy for Parkis and for Henry, with whom he becomes closer in their mutual grief for the woman they both loved, and at bottom his love for Sarah and his potential love for God. To Smythe, Bendrix says that he believes in nothing, “except now and then” he has “moments of hope.” He is redeemed also because Sarah cares for him; she writes in her journal that Maurice “thinks he hates, and loves, loves all the time-even his enemies.” Furthermore, he is aware of his faults, confesses them to the reader, and admits he is “lost in a strange region” without a map.

Sarah Miles, to whom Bendrix was initially attracted because of her beauty, her intelligence, “her way of touching people with her hands, as though she loved them,” is far more lovable, yet she writes, “I’m a bitch and a fake and I hate myself.” An adulteress and liar, she is an unlikely candidate for sainthood, but she has an immense capacity for love. She believes that she and Bendrix made love so intensely that they spent all they had, so that they might have nothing left except God. She feels no guilt or remorse for her affair, and despite the jealous quarrels that he provokes, her love for Bendrix is so complete, unreserved, and free from doubt that it foreshadows her coming love for God. Like Bendrix, she considers herself unlovable; unable to love herself, she wonders what God could love in her. The men in her life have been too weak; she writes that “I want somebody who’ll accept the truth about me and doesn’t need protection. If I’m a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?” Finally, through pain, she finds peace. After her death, Bendrix receives a letter from her in which she writes, “I believe there’s a God-I believe the whole bag of tricks.... I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.” Ultimately, she seems to have become a saint.

Henry Miles, her husband, is decent and dull. Bendrix says about him with bitterness that he has “the winning cards-the cards of gentleness, humility, and trust.” Though he lacks the passion of a lover, he is devoted to Sarah and is increasingly drawn to Bendrix, even after learning that he had been his wife’s lover. After Sarah’s death, he even has Bendrix move in with him to keep him company.

Parkis, the detective, a Dickensian character, provides some necessary comic relief and also humanizes Bendrix when the latter comes to sympathize with the troubles of Parkis and his son. Smythe, the rationalist preacher, is perhaps the novel’s least plausible character; he seems to have been inserted simply so that Sarah can rebut his arguments against God’s existence and so that she can perform a miracle by healing his ruined face.

Critical Context

Graham Greene’s is a bleak sort of Catholicism; Bendrix could be speaking for the author when he writes that “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.” A lifelong manic-depressive, Greene as a young man played Russian roulette as an antidote to a deadly ennui, and later he sought out all sorts of danger to combat it. Thus, though Greene says that The End of the Affair was not autobiographical and that he was happily in love at the time, there may be something of a self-portrait in Bendrix, his only protagonist who is, like himself, a novelist. After reading the novel, Pope Pius XII told Bishop Heenan, “I think this man is in trouble.” Yet in some ways, The End of the Affair is Greene’s most distinct statement of belief.

After reading Great Expectations (1860-1861), Greene was so fascinated by Charles Dickens’ use of the first person that he employed it in The End of the Affair. He found the first person difficult to sustain, however, particularly when trying to vary the tone. “I dreaded to see the whole book smoked dry like a fish with his hatred.... There were only two shades of the same color-obsessive love and obsessive hate.” Yet Greene managed to find variety through a complex series of flashbacks plus the use of Sarah’s journal and some letters.

In retrospect, Greene thought he hurried the book too much after Sarah’s death; “The coincidences should have continued over the years, battering the mind of Bendrix, forcing on him a reluctant doubt of his own atheism.” In a later edition, wanting every possible miracle to have a possibly natural explanation, Greene replaced Smythe’s strawberry birthmark with a skin disease that might have been purely psychosomatic.

Most of Greene’s novels are intellectual adventure stories with a fair amount of what he calls melodramatic violence. Here, there i no violence, and the adventure is purely psychological and emotional. Nevertheless, there is a mystery about the identity of Sarah’s unknown lover, who turns out to be God, and her pilgrimage to faith is as adventurous a journey as any of the more external ones made by other Greene protagonists.

Bibliography

Allain, Marie-Franioise. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham

Greene, 1983. Greene, Graham. Ways of Escape: An Autobiography, 1980.

Kelly, Richard. Graham Greene, 1984.

Lodge, David. Graham Greene, 1966.

Spurling, John. Graham Greene, 1983.