Word: affair
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Affair (the title is characteristically tricky) is-on the face of it-the story of an adulterous affair. The story succeeds in showing the fear and agony and hatred of a love affair. It fails when the author reports a miracle, and cannot prove...
...love affair between Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix began ordinarily enough. He was a coldblooded, middling English novelist, she the warm-blooded wife of a dull, preoccupied, middling civil servant. Thanks to husband Henry's preoccupations, the Miles marriage had come to a physical standstill. When Sarah met Bendrix at a London cocktail party, she thought him, by contrast to her husband, excitingly alive. The third time they met, they went to bed in a cheap hotel. Bendrix, who was writing a novel in which a civil servant figured, had merely intended to quiz Sarah for some facts about...
There his creator, Graham Greene, leaves him. The end of that affair, he implies, can only be the beginning of another. And this affair will have no end. Better to hate God, much better, says Greene, than not to know Him at all. For you can hate God only when you are in pain-and if you can stand the pain without drugs, it may turn into love...
...Affair, like all Graham Greene's novels, is loaded with buried questions, like mines. And the terms of his story are so studiedly, elaborately mundane that at first the unwary reader is hardly aware of the muffled explosions of the answers. (One of his buried questions : Must a woman who becomes a saint necessarily think of herself as "a bitch and a fake?" Greene's answer...
...this story, Greene apparently intended to show two things: 1) that saints are real human beings, who "happen" nowadays just as they always have and always will; 2) that no love affair, however sordid, can escape the terrible, endless implications of love. For some readers, he may have succeeded in demonstrating both; but for many his saint will seem as faraway and unreal as T. S. Eliot's Celia in The Cocktail Party...