Eros, Dios, And The End Of The Affair

I am a 19 year old freshman at Moody Bible institute in Chicago. I am studying communications with a video emphsis. This is my paper. The structure and form are pathetic, but the substance is quite significant.

Eros, Dios, and the End of the Affair

By

Luke Ewing

Research Writing

CPO 576

03.07.2006

"Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other..."

"Doesn't it?"

"...people go on loving God all their lives, don't they, without seeing Him?"

"That's not our kind of love."

"I sometimes don't believe there's any other kind." (Greene 5)

Graham Greene uses his novel The End of the Affair to show that erotic love is truly the strongest human expression of the innate desire for God. Greene uses the fictionalized tale of his own real life affair with the beautiful Catherine Walston to examine the relationship of hate to love, of physical to spiritual, of holy to tainted, and of erotic love to divine love.

A moderately popular novelist, Greene's central protagonist, Bendrix, tells the woeful tale of his ultimately doomed love affair with Sarah Miles, the beautiful wife of civil servant Henry Miles. In a series of flash backs, Greene reveals the unlikely birth, anemic but passionate life, and abrupt death of this fling. It's final demise arrives when Sarah finds her lover trapped beneath a door after a bomb lands nearby, and thinking Bendrix dead, she makes a pact with God that if God will spare Bendrix's life, she would walk away from him forever. Remarkably Bendrix is unharmed and their affair is abruptly over.

Bendrix then embarks on a journey of investigation, searching his lover out, even hiring a private detective to discover Sarah's secrets, to discover who it was that lured her away from him. Bendrix is certain that Sarah has a new lover, and that she is still playing around on her husband Henry. The thought of her in another's arms drives Bendrix mad. In his pursuit, Bendrix unearths the trail of a wild lover wooing Sarah, but it is no man. It is none other than the being whom Bendrix has spent his life hating and fearing and loving and denying the existence of: God.

Graham Greene's books have always been a reflection of his life. Greene himself stated with perfect irony, "novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction" (Escape 95). The truth in Greene's life that drove him to write The End of the Affair was his passionate affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of one of the wealthiest men in England, Henry Walston (Books). It is this love affair, or its termination, which evoked Catherine's love affair with God, which Greene saw as very similar to her affair with him, and in which Greene saw the truths expressed in his novel The End of the Affair.

It was from the Catholic Church that Greene first began to seek the truths that later appeared so prominently in his works. Greene had actually been a Roman Catholic since 1926. He explained his desire to convert by saying "'I had to find a religion...to measure my evil against'" (Books). However, in spite of his conversion, Greene despised the title "Catholic writer", one bestowed upon him by numerous literary critics (American Society). Greene did not see himself as one who wrote about religion, but rather as one who wrote about life, of which religion and spirituality were a large part.

In the following year, Greene also Married Vivien Dayrell-Browning (Wikipedia). He was an awful father and Husband however, and the marriage eventually dissolved, leading into Greene's long stretch of affairs with high class, prestigious women, and promiscuous relations with numerous prostitutes. Though still a confessing Catholic, Greene by no means agreed with the Catholic Church on many of it's doctrines and dogmas. He lived quite as he wished with little or no regard for moral boundaries. However this did not stop him from pondering humanity, spirituality, and ultimately God and His role in the lives of men and women (Books).

It was in 1946, after nineteen years of marriage to Vivien, that Greene left her and his two children of twelve and fifteen for Catherine Walston, though he remained legally married to Vivien. Walston herself remained married to Henry and the mother to six children in spite of conducting her affair with Greene in full knowledge of her family (American Society).

Walston was herself a Catholic convert, as well as a stunning beauty. She was a dozen years Greene's junior, as well as being Greene's goddaughter. They actually met when Walston, having just converted to Roman Catholicism, asked Greene to be her godfather. During the course of their affair, Greene attempted to rationalize the immorality, even going so far as to "get confirmation from some priests that it was all right to go to confession again, even knowing that he would immediately return to the illicit liaison" (American Society).

In spite of his longings for God and his pondering of the supernatural and divine, "Greene's earlier sense of the acute tension between earthly and heavenly impulses gradually slid into a more lax form of Catholicism better suited to his own personal lifestyle" (American Society).

But this story of longing and passion was much longer in the making than Greene's decade long affair with Walston. Greene was a very troubled youth who even attempted suicide as a teenager (American Society). Greene seemed quite preoccupied with, if not troubled by the concept of grace, and God pursuing sinners. This is evident in his novel The Heart of the Matter, penned in 1948. George Orwell attacked Greene's portrayal of the "sanctified sinner" in this novel by saying in a literary critique of the work, "'He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distinguй in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only'" (Books).

In