The Love-Charm of Bombs (61 page)

By writing Harry into the novel, Greene seems to have given himself the opportunity for open hostility that he rarely had in actual life, where he had to keep up the pretence of feeling fond of Catherine's husband. After the relationship has been over for a year, Bendrix bumps into Henry and briefly believes him to be suspicious for the first time since they became acquainted. He realises that he would have been overjoyed to be confronted with his own guilt during the affair itself:

 

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception. I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.

 

He now sees that Henry, in his very pathos, has all along possessed the winning cards: ‘the cards of gentleness, humility and trust'. As a result, it comes as a huge relief when Henry finally learns about Sarah's infidelities and Bendrix can accuse him of being an ‘eternal pimp' who ‘pimped by being a bore and a fool'.

Graham Greene was a shy and private man, and in some respects it is odd that he chose to expose the actual details of an intimate love affair so publicly. But if he had never chosen to use his life carelessly in the service of his art before, then he did not do it carelessly now either. This is not life in the service of art, but art in the service of life. The novel is fundamentally a tribute to Catherine. In 1950, Harry could offer Catherine the position of chatelaine of Newton Hall. Graham was never going to win her through the promise of riches. She had fallen in love with him as a man of words, and words were ultimately going to be his best offering. In letters to Catherine, Graham talked about the need to invent a new language with which to describe his love; the old words and phrases were tired. His ‘Great Sex Novel' goes further than any letter could go in telling her how much, how specifically, and how multifariously she was loved. Just seeing a photograph of Sarah in
Tatler
, Bendrix is overwhelmed by desire:

 

Suddenly I wanted to put out my hand and touch her, the hair of her head and her secret hair, I wanted her lying beside me, I wanted to be able to turn my head on the pillow and speak to her, I wanted the almost imperceptible smell and taste of her skin.

 

She is adored walking into rooms, speaking on the telephone, ‘kissing in her own particular way', lying below him on the floor (her ‘brown indeterminate-coloured hair like a pool of liquor on the parquet' as they make love), and breathing heavily from an orgasm ‘as though she had run a race and now like a young athlete lay in the exhaustion of victory'.

But, like Elizabeth Bowen's message to Charles Ritchie in
The Heat of the Day
, Greene's message to Catherine in
The End of the Affair
is double-edged. The novel may be a tribute to her but it is also both an apology and a warning. Greene acknowledges his own role in jeopardising the relationship by endowing Bendrix with an extreme form of his own jealousy and capacity for self-destruction. Bendrix, like Greene, initiates quarrels, picking on Sarah ‘with nervous irritation', and becomes aware as a result that their love is doomed; that love has ‘turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end'. He forces the pace, ‘pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life'. If love has to die, he wants it to die quickly, as though their love ‘were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death'. He must shut his eyes and wring its neck. He is also excessively jealous. ‘I'd rather be dead or see you dead,' he tells Sarah, ‘than with another man.' As a result of his jealousy he squanders a rare afternoon in which to make love by quarrelling so that there is ‘no love to make'. The self-blame here is partly a form of exoneration. By blaming himself, Greene was asking Catherine to make allowances for him. He knew that he was destroying their relationship, and was asking for help in overcoming his own faults.

At the same time, he was reminding Catherine of how much she had to lose. In letters to Catherine, Graham insisted again and again how much she loved him and was going to love him. The novel is an extension of this, in that there is no doubt that Bendrix is the love of Sarah's life and that she will never be able to love anyone else this much again. Without love, there is only the self-abnegation of religion and then of death. And Sarah dies as a result of a disease which begins with a wrenching cough – an ailment which had already started to afflict Catherine, who would eventually die partly as a result of lung cancer. At mass in Paris in May 1950 she coughed so much that she had to leave the service. That October in Capri, Catherine's cough was keeping her awake at night. And in showing Sarah's extreme unhappiness away from Bendrix, Greene warns Catherine that she should not overestimate her ability to survive without him. Even religion is not enough to make her happy. Writing in her diary, Sarah admits that she is ‘not at peace any more. I just want him like I used to in the old days . . . I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love.'

By maintaining that Sarah can be made happier by Bendrix than she can be made by God, Greene vindicates human love. He endows Sarah with Catherine's ability to evade personal (if not religious) guilt. ‘She had a wonderful way', Bendrix recollects, ‘of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view, when a thing was done, it was done.' This, he finds, makes her ‘a born Catholic'. But although Sarah, like Catherine, is able not to feel guilt, she too doubts her own goodness. In her diaries, she castigates herself as ‘a bitch and a fake', much as Catherine chastised herself in her own diary.

In letters to Catherine, Graham wrote again and again that he was convinced of her ultimate goodness, urging her not to give credence to the people who told her she was corrupt. And he leaves us in no doubt of Sarah's goodness in the novel. She shares Catherine's intense gift for love. Bendrix finds that ‘she had so much more capacity for love than I had'. She also has an aptitude for monogamous fidelity that exceeds Catherine's. Sarah has had other affairs prior to meeting Bendrix. She is suspiciously good at deceiving her husband, knowing how to avoid discovery by listening out for Henry's step on the stairs, and how best to contact her lovers. But, contrary to Bendrix's suspicions, she has not in fact been unfaithful to him; she has no desire to have sex with anyone else, and even after she leaves Bendrix her attempt to go to bed with another man fails to make her happy. In this respect Sarah resembles the version of Catherine that Graham insisted on in his letters. Soon, you will only want me, he told her again and again. Sarah tries sex with Duncan but it does not work; she finds, like Graham himself, that substitutes are no good.

Greene presents Sarah and Bendrix as passionate lovers who will be faithful to each other until death. In this respect, her sacrifice of Bendrix and her death lead to a tragic waste of mutual love. ‘I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime,' Bendrix states in impassioned parentheses. The role of fate in this fateful novel elevates them to the status of operatically doomed tragic lovers. They can never be happy with anyone else and it is tragic that they have not had a chance to live out their relationship together. The novel is an offering of love. It is also a promise to Catherine of the heights they could soar to together if only she will let it happen, and a warning of how much they have to lose.

But if
The End of the Affair
was Graham Greene's final attempt to win Catherine, then it was ultimately a failure. The relationship continued into the 1950s, but by the time that the novel was published in September 1951 it was already becoming evident that they had no sustained future together. The previous March, Graham had sent Catherine the manuscript of the novel as a present, claiming that because the best part of it had been written beside her he was married to her through its pages. That August he sent advance copies to Catherine and her family and was told by Catherine's sister Binnie that he was jeopardising Catherine's marriage and should disappear. Harry was angry about the dedication of the novel to Catherine – ‘To C' in the English edition, ‘To Catherine with love' in the American edition – and after the publication of the novel he forbade Catherine and Graham to meet. She wrote to Graham suggesting that they could continue to see each other but no longer have sex. Graham replied that she would set up a situation where they would be too self-conscious to be happy together; aware always of the bodies they were denying. He refused to be with her and not be her lover; if anything, he was prepared to vanish altogether. It was not just Harry who was driving Graham and Catherine apart. That summer Graham had been consistently depressed and Catherine herself was losing faith in her ability to make him happy. At the end of July she had told Father Caraman that Graham was going through the worst melancholia he had experienced in years and that she was wondering if ‘this may possibly be the moment for my exit from the life of G.G.' She was sure that she was not the cause of Graham's depression but was ‘far from certain that I don't help to increase it a good deal'.

Despite Harry's protestations, Graham and Catherine were able to spend a few days together that September visiting Evelyn Waugh. ‘Greene behaved well and dressed for dinner every night,' Waugh reported to Nancy Mitford afterwards. ‘Mrs Walston had never seen him in a dinner jacket before and was enchanted and will make him wear one always.' Catherine enjoyed the trip, not least because Graham was cheerful in Waugh's company. But shortly afterwards they separated for six months. Graham was off to dream nightly about Catherine as he sought death once more in the Far East; Catherine was about to move into Newton Hall and wanted to try out life without him. On the aeroplane, Graham began a poem where he described his journey as a retreat into darkness. Flying between the clouds, suspended above the world, he was retracing his steps to a bleak grave he had once hoped to leave behind.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 21

22

‘Let us neither of us forget . . . what reality feels like and eternity is'

Elizabeth Bowen

 

Where Graham Greene began the 1950s still hopeful because he was fighting for Catherine, Elizabeth Bowen spent the years following Charles Ritchie's marriage feeling increasingly vulnerable. There were moments – weekends in Paris, weeks at Bowen's Court – when both were certain of each other's love. At these points, the time together made the pain of the time apart seem bearable. In September 1948, returning home after dropping Charles at Shannon Airport, Elizabeth felt happy in his absence, ‘as though you had left part of yourself behind and were in some way waiting here to greet me'. She was left with ‘something better than memory'; ‘a feeling of something still going on – don't you think?' Charles, arriving back in Paris, wrote in his diary that in Elizabeth he had for the first time in his life come to a full stop.

 

I can go no further. She bounds my horizon . . . She is the goal towards which part of my nature, the deepest laid and most personal part, has always been drawn. She is the meaning of my life.

 

And he wrote to tell her so. ‘Oh, I am missing you,' she replied, though ‘like you I am happy, too: I feel so built in to our love'.

However, between these visits, Elizabeth was finding it harder to sustain herself on the shared existence created by their letters. ‘Keep me in your mind,' she commanded in the spring of 1949; ‘that's where I feel my only real existence is.' She was envious of Sylvia, who was living in the same house as Charles, getting into the same car, driving to the same places. And she had not imagined it would have been possible to be so lonely. Apart from anything else, he was her ‘dearest friend'; so much so that he had become her only friend. As a result, every day without him seemed ‘meaningless and imperfect'. She had handed over to him her sense of self to such an extent that he often seemed more real than she did. Sometimes, she came close to collapsing under the strain of her longing. One morning in October 1949, in the middle of dressing, she stood still in the middle of her room and cried out ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!'

Charles, meanwhile, vacillated between a strong awareness of Elizabeth's centrality in his life and a detached indifference. There were times when he articulated both positions in the same diary entry. In October 1949, he lamented that if he stopped caring for Elizabeth, he should never care for anything – ‘Oh E, how can I live separated from you? What have I done to us?' – and then went on to express more restrained but also more physical longing for Sylvia. ‘I miss my wife. I want her. I am waiting for her.' Charles's marriage, like Elizabeth's own, was more than just a practical arrangement. His diary entries about his wife were often more ardent than his entries about Elizabeth. ‘I should like to write to Sylvia and tell her how much I wanted to be in bed with her, if we were on those terms,' he observed in November 1951. And then, a month later, he noted that ‘the most extraordinary phenomenon seems to be taking place in me. I seem to be falling in love with my own wife . . . I find her beautiful. I want to go to bed with her all the time, and I don't grudge her this hold over me.'