modernist reality | passing | sir galahad’s grail destiny | end of the affair
Freedom to Choose, But Chosen To Be Human:
An Affair That Never Ends
While The End of the Affair is arguably the most religiously centered novel written by Graham Green, it focuses on some of the most instinctual human desires – to define a purpose of life, to understand the self, love, and intimacy. Though the novel can be read as a story of conversion, it raises a more universal question of existence beyond the limits of human rationality. Is one ever truly alone? If so, life can be described as nothing more than empty and arbitrary habitualness, grounded in temporal materialism. Desire, then, lives and dies with the flesh. Yet, like Bendrix and Sarah, if one struggles to construct beliefs that both relate to and exceed the sensory-driven human experience, namely a belief in God, one can never be satisfied with the incomplete conceptions of life according to the self. At the same time however, one never reaches indubitable, logical proof as to whether existence transcends life. It is the choice between ignorant, animalistic complacency and insatiable, intellectual yearning.
Greene contextualizes Bendrix and Sarah’s affair within this dichotomy of temporal life and eternal transcendence. He depicts their struggle to find peace that comes only through belief in each other and God, a belief underpinned by love, not rational proof. The novel follows the progression of Bendrix and Sarah’s love from its manifestation in the self to its fruition in God. Through Bendrix and Sarah’s relationship, Greene analyzes human love and its emotional complexities – jealousy, fear, insecurity, doubt, and hatred. He juxtaposes its imperfect, complex nature with the ideal of a perfect love embodied by God. However, both lovers can conceive of the ideal only through its absence within imperfect, human cognizance. When at the end of the novel Bendrix declares, “I hate you God, I hate You as though You existed,” the hatred he harbors actually leads to belief in God and an understanding of love. The sole objective then of The End of The Affair is not necessarily to spark religious conversion in the reader; rather it explores the human capacity to love within finite existence, and subsequently, the paradox of the self as a limitation, but necessity to attain the ideal. Within the theme of religious conversion, it offers relief, irrational sanity, and a peace of mind that transcends corporeality.
Ostensibly, the notion of existence depends solely on the individual self and its subconscious conjecturing of perceived reality through sense. Given this, the self must be inextricably attached to human cognizance and free will. Yet, Bendrix alludes to the flesh as the source of imperfection, a confining burden that distorts reality and the pure, selfless freedom of love. For example, while speaking with Henry on the Common for the first time, he thinks to himself, “Are husband and wife so much one flesh that if one hates the wife one has to hate the husband too” (15-16). Bendrix’s scrutiny over matrimony, specifically the words “one flesh” used in the ceremony, suggests a deficiency of marriage as a social convention more dependent upon the existence of a tangible and mortal self than everlasting love. In contrast, when two selves realize the full potential of the love between them, the perfection of their love requires the total abandonment of the self. Bendrix relates the requisite abandonment of love with another self to a love of God. He describes the similarity of the two relationships:
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. (47)
Between two lovers, abandonment of the self happens only after each individual chooses to want the self to experience the intensity of love felt for the other self. To will the complete abandonment of the self however, implies a suicidal self-destruction, which contradicts not only the purpose of existence, but also the idea of choosing to love perfectly. Therefore, a self-abandonment of two humans, for the sake of perfecting their love, insists that love originates not within the will of the self, but from a God whose will transcends the self. Paradoxically, humans can conceive of love and God only through the self, the sole outlet of cognizance, and Bendrix observes this contradiction in visions of God expressed in the words of human love. From sensory experience, the self’s memory and intellect construct a God whose existence is defined by a non-existence of self or sense. In sum, one can attain ideal love only after the self experiences the sensation of love, realizes its incompleteness in context to the imperfect self, and then wills a self-abandonment, in accordance with a will that transcends the self. This complementary, non-destructive abandonment necessitates belief in a cognizance, and in turn an existence, independent from temporal reality, accessed through but prevented by the mortal self.
In the character of Sarah, and through Bendrix’s perception of her, Greene gives the closest interpretation of self-abandonment. For Bendrix, the most tangible manifestation of Sarah’s abandonment comes at the climax of the carnal act, the peak of corporeal pleasure and perhaps the most complete moment of human love within the self. In that moment, Sarah transcends the fleeting orgasmic pleasure of the body, and sheds its misconstruing filter of sensory perception. Bendrix explains how she can abandon herself so completely:
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. (51)
To exist without the dimensions of space and time in momentary eternity, as Bendrix perceives Sarah, defies the nature of the self and of life, but it also rests upon free will of the self. Sarah chooses not to doubt. She chooses to love Bendrix free of fear, insecurity, or jealousy born from her imperfect self. But while she chooses to want to abandon the self, the desire stems from self-loathing and disbelief rather than an understanding of human love and the temporal self in relation to the ideal.
Sarah must question her capacity to love beyond certainty, beyond reasonable expectations, beyond perceptive reality. She must understand the purpose of the self. For example, after her first session with Smythe, Sarah writes in her diary, “I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return” (109). She wants to escape the self because she sees her body as meaningless confinement, her flesh as an opaque cloak that conceals her fakeness. Although she hates the self, her hatred sparks an understanding. Sarah’s diary of her inner struggle goes to the heart of the human paradox. For her to love and believe in Bendrix, she needs the self. But as their love grows, so to do her feelings of self-loathing and confinement, which ultimately ends their relationship, but not their love. The only way then to act upon this love and advance it lies outside the self, requiring a belief that extends beyond its existence. The will to act and believe however, which comes with understanding provoked by hatred, resides within the self. Her image of God as a vapour, unrelated to humanity yet bound by some undefined promise, trivializes the self and justifies her ignorance.
In order for Sarah to believe in a God who embodies the likeness of humanity, and who also transcends the flesh, she cannot wish to escape the self. Instead, she must accept the inadequacies of temporal cognizance and its necessity to know love before perfecting and eternalizing it. Ironically, Sarah’s acceptance and belief take root in her sessions with the disbelieving Smythe. Their discussions guide her conversion from escape to acceptance, and she writes, “Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds” (110). After contemplating Bendrix’s scar, she begins to realize the necessity of the self to sense and love pain. She perceives Smythe’s arguments and evidence against faith and divinity as his pain, not logical disproof of God’s existence. As she recognizes pain and learns to love it, she begins to believe. When Sarah kisses Smythe’s deformity and the pain it symbolizes, she thinks, “I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain” (122). By the end of her time with Smythe, she sees pain as perfect love experienced by the sensory self within imperfect reality. Conversely, Sarah’s realization of pain in relation to love represents a realization of the self in relation to God. Love felt between two selves is spent until no more exists; just as the self is limited, so too is its capacity to love. In her penultimate diary entry, she writes:
You were there, teaching us to squander, like you taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace – he needs it more. (123)
Sarah reaches her self’s limit to love with Bendrix, which results in the pain of losing him. She hates herself for it. She hates God for it. But through hatred, her understanding grows. After she understands the purpose of the self to feel deprivation and pain, she finds peace, belief, and a fruition of love. Pain is that which contextualizes the human experience. It is the portal through which love is perfected and the self is abandoned.
Sarah immortalizes her pain on the pages of her diary. When Bendrix reads her words, he experiences her pain, provoking pangs of his own. The self-realization that follows transforms his “record of hate” from one of unchecked malice to a story of belief marked by hatred of the inferiority it entails (131). His story begins with seeing Henry on the Common. Their encounter revives Bendrix’s buried hatred of the past:
As I write of 1939 I feel all my hatred returning. Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ? (27)
Unlike Sarah, Bendrix’s struggle focuses more on the self’s perception of love and its emotional complexities. While both lovers seek a shared peace and harbor a similar hatred, Sarah must understand the role of the mortal self to know love, whereas Bendrix must first understand the human capacity to love and the way in which love acts upon the self. Like Judas’ love for Christ, his love for Sarah provokes a possessive jealousy because he lacks the qualities, which in Sarah he loves. He makes the irrelevant relevant, contorting his feelings for her to justify his jealousy. Like Peter, he denies his love for Sarah, paralyzed by fear of the way in which love affects the self. Bendrix measures his love not in relation to an ideal, but by the insecurities it produces, fixating upon them, fighting because of them. He describes the effect on their relationship:
I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed … I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted, I was happy … But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. (35)
Their love, however, is not condemned to die. Rather, Bendrix allows the imperfections of the self to pervert his conception of love to a point of no return. He chooses to define a beginning and end of their love, paralleling the inevitable birth and death of the self, in which he first felt love. Because he fixates on the inadequacy of his love, he cannot understand love outside the context of the finite self. Love, however, is not confined within mortality unless the self chooses to confine it. He, not their love, is caught in a trap, which the self chose to set and only the self can choose to release. Bendrix limits his love because he does not understand the capacity of the self to love, nor love’s transcendent nature. Only when Bendrix understands love within the self through belief in God can his love surpass the self to meet and complete Sarah’s.
Although the male psyche differs from the female psyche, the overarching human psyche conceptualizes love common to both genders, apparent in the self’s experience of emotions. In the novel, Bendrix and Sarah’s pattern of hatred mirror each other. Through hatred, their love is freed and truth is found. Driven by hatred, Sarah meets with Smythe to disprove God’s existence. Yet in Smythe’s hatred for religion, Sarah recognizes pain, and consequently, love and truth in God. Similarly motivated by hate, Bendrix obtains and reads Sarah’s diary. From her entries, his hatred for Sarah evolves into a hatred and belief in God who stole Sarah and her love from him.
These patterns of hatred, however, are underpinned by a love that produces belief. Bendrix’s hatred metamorphoses from an ignorance of the self’s capacity to love into an understanding of sentient imperfection in relation to an ideal God. For example, before reading Sarah’s diary, he asserts, “I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical” (25). Here, the sight of Sarah incites a feeling of inferiority within him, and he still falls in love with her. He falls in love with her precisely because she resembles to him a beauty he cannot attain; and it is this beauty that sparks love, but also foments hatred. He loves her because she is something that he is not; he hates her because she is something he will never be. It is not until after her death that Bendrix understands the paradoxical nature of his love for her, and subsequently, his belief in God. After his outburst toward Father Crompton, his hatred reaches a climax and he addresses Sarah:
You are dead. You have him. But I’m sick with life, I’m rotten with health. If I begin to love God, I can’t just die. I’ve got to do something about it. … Loving you I had no appetite for food, I felt no lust for any other woman, but loving him there’d be no pleasure in anything at all with him away. I’d even lose my work, I’d cease to be Bendrix. Sarah, I’m afraid. (182)
From his perspective, God offered a better deal to Sarah. She could love his perfection and He could love her perfectly, whereas the imperfect Bendrix could not. He no longer feels inferior to Sarah, but inferior to the ideal of God. With Sarah, he possessed her, touched her, made love to her. He drowned his insecurities in their carnal existence, thus preventing their imperfect love from advancing closer to perfection. When they separated, he began to hate, and through this hatred he questioned his ability to love, ultimately gaining an understanding of his love for Sarah. Through similar hatred and questioning, Bendrix conceptualizes God. Within his hatred exists belief. But unlike Sarah, God exceeds the self, giving Bendrix no way to hide his fears, insecurities and doubt. He cannot translate the effects of love for Sarah to a relationship with God. Bendrix chose to actualize his love for Sarah, but to choose to believe in God and actualize his love for Him represents to Bendrix choosing inexorable unhappiness for the rest of his life. By surrendering the self’s existence to the ostensible pain of loving God, however, one does not surrender existence as Bendrix fears. Rather, with loving belief comes peace that through the inferior existence of the self, the pain, hatred, and imperfections of temporal life give way to perfect, eternalized love – beyond the self, equal with God.
Bendrix ends his story asking to be left alone by God, “too tired and old to learn to love” (192). But his struggle, or affair, is not over. He does not need to learn to love. He knows pain, and therefore knows love. Although he has yet to find peace like Sarah, the final step must come from his willing it. He must choose to not be afraid. In similar fashion, the novel leaves the reader not with the indoctrination that peace is found only by the converted believer who loves himself and God; rather, its conclusion emphasizes the will of the reader. It offers understanding, love, peace, and God without an all-encompassing theory to life or existence. Just as the reader chose to read the book, he or she has the choice to do something about the impression it leaves.
joe marinelli 