This year marks the 75th anniversary of what many consider Graham Greene’s greatest novel, The End of the Affair. His most recent biographer, Richard Greene (no relation) rejects that view, arguing that his best work was the series of novels written from the mid-50s on, such as The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out Case, and The Comedians, a view I believe most readers, if not scholars, would reject.
Greene today ranks as perhaps the most important English novelist of the middle years of the 20th century. Perhaps only his guilt-ridden fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh made a greater impact. But no one matched Greene for the breath of his literary undertakings: mysteries (or, as he called them, “entertainments”) such as Brighton Rock, The Ministry of Fear, The Confidential Agent, or plays like The Potting Shed, The Living Room, and even a great screen play, the script for The Third Man.
Malcolm Muggeridge once described Greene as a “saint trying to become a sinner or perhaps better, a sinner trying to be a saint.” Perhaps their mutual friend, Lady Diana Cooper, put it best: Green was a good man possessed of a devil while Waugh was a bad man for whom an angel is struggling. Green’s literary works are suffused with a sense of guilt. After the war, during which Greene served in British intelligence services, he returned to writing and in 1948 produced a critical and popular success, The Heart of the Matter, about a doomed British colonial officer in Sierra Leone. The novel, which won the James Tait Black prize, sold over 300,000 copies over the next few years and made Greene financially comfortable. It would be made five years later into a successful, if gloomy, film with the English actor Trevor Howard in the role of the doomed officer. George Orwell, with whom Greene became friendly after the war, took a dim view of the novel, thinking it self-absorbed and guilty of the snobbishness typical of Catholic novelists who believed it was better to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan, while believing that there was “something distinque in being damned.”
The inspiration for The End of the Affair, which appeared three years after The Heart of the Matter, was a love affair. Greene who was married to his wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning, with whom he had two children, met Catherine Walston in 1941 and immediately fell in love with her and began an affair that led to divorce and an eventual marriage. His first wife Vivian never recognized the divorce and lived into her 90s calling herself Mrs. Graham Greene.
Greene began writing The End of the Affair after he had separated from Vivian and following the success of The Heart of the Matter. Around the same time, he finished the script for The Third Man. All three revolve around the protagonist’s love for a woman he can’t have and are suffused with a sense of guilt and loss.
The End of the Affair, which appeared in 1951, has a roman a clef quality to it. The story is written in the first person, something unusual for Greene and perhaps revealing about its personal depth of feeling for Catherine. A writer shortly after World War II meets the husband of a woman he had an affair with. He tries to revive the affair, but she refuses, telling him that, when she thought him dead after a V-1 bombing attack, she prayed to God that, if he survived, she would give him up. Against this background, Greene explores the complexity of love — the love of the protagonist for his mistress and her love of God for saving him. The novel is a classic example of Greene’s ability to find a personal redemption in his mistress’s rejection of him. Its insights into character and motivation, even the protagonist’s survival, ring true, although some critics believe that his survival has a miraculous quality about it.
The novel was a great success, earning Greene a Time cover under the title “Adultery can lead to Sainthood.” There was even talk of a possible Noble Prize, something he desperately wanted. But that year, 1951, it went to Par Lagerkvist. One wonders how many of his books are read today compared to Greene’s.
In a review for the Catholic cultural journal Commonweal, Evelyn Waugh, with whom Greene was often linked as “the two great Catholic novelists in English,” wrote that The End of the Affair was “a singularly beautiful and moving” novel and showed that Catholic novelists can produce literature of profound significance, and not just what he called ‘an advertising brochure for Catholicism.’” After reading The End of the Affair, William Faulkner went even further, describing it as “one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time in anybody’s language.” But perhaps the most interesting take on the novel came from an unusual source, Pope Pius XII. Pope Pius had met Greene and told him as a Catholic not to worry about criticisms of his work. But after reading The End of the Affair — it is interesting to know that popes read contemporary literature — Pope Pius wrote to head of the Catholic Church in England, Cardinal John Heenan, that he was worried about Greene: “I think this man is in trouble. If he ever comes to you, you must help him.”
The End of the Affair remains popular today, finding a place on English lit reading lists and the literary canon. It has been turned into a film twice, first in 1956 with Deborah Kerr in a beautiful performance as the mistress and Van Johnson, a poorly cast American actor, as the protagonist. He was probably given the part to win an American audience. It was a flop. A second version in 1999 fared better with critics and the public, with the key roles played by Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes.
The End of the Affair ranks with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as among the most popular English novels of the 20th century, interestingly despite the two authors, by their religion, standing apart from the intellectual and spiritual drift of the 20th century.
John P. Rossi is professor emeritus of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia.