Re: Making Sense of Sarah

I am going to drop this response to Russ's excellent post here so that it doesn't get lost in the comments.

I think that Russ is right that Sarah is a kind of generic "woman" upon whom Greene is basing his apologia for his own adulterous behavior. Russ caught something I had missed, namely that Sarah is never given her own "form", but, rather is deliberately left a blank form upon which the reader can fill in whatever he finds most attractive in a woman.

I may have missed that point, but I certainly had the sense of Sarah being very vaguely sketched as an individual.

One of the feminist literary types can speak to this better than I, but I understand that feminists complain about the cultural trope that describes women as either "madonna" or "whore", i.e., sinner or saint. In Sarah we see the Madonna/Whore complex in spades. She is a slut of the first order, but then she works miracles, and when she works miracles, she is totally chaste. So, Greene seems to be saying that it's one or the other - either women are chaste "teases" or wanton sluts.

*Jeez*!

*Shudder*

Who says that kind of thing?

In my experience, immature, self-centered, narcissistic men say that kind of thing because that is how they see - or how they want to see - the world.

Knowing the history of Greene as we do, does "immature, self-centered, and narcissistic" seem like an apt description of a flagrant adulterer like Greene? Yup, could be.

There is also the treatment of Sarah as being, in my view, farely immature. To me, she seemed more like a breathy teenager than a mature woman.

Sarah in The End of the Affair reminded me of another purportedly self-creating female character - Catherine Barkley in Farewell to Arms. I found Catherine to be unreal, at times talking baby-talk to Captain Henry but always being sexually accessible to him and - dream of dreams - conveniently removing herself without complaint by dying in childbirth so that he could go on to his experience. This Wiki article describes Catherine:

Feminist thinkers will see in Catherine, Hemingway's perfect woman: wise and cynical in many ways, her wisdom cannot contain her desire. As Henry gives his health and youth to the war effort, Catherine's chief heroism is to ignore the dangers of unprotected sex and to accept the pain and death of childbirth stoically.

I mean, come-on now, if you were a self-centered, macho narcissist, how cool would it be to have a woman like that!

John Kasian told me that in light of the semi-autobiographical nature of "Farewell" it is fair to say that Catherine represented the kind of woman that Hemingway dreamed about when he was a teenager in Italy. From that perspective - the perspective of a teenager - Catherine seems more realistic than from the perspective of a middle-age burnout.

Similarly, given the autobiographical nature of The End of the Affair, I think it may be fair to say that Sarah represents an ideal for Greene, and that that says more about Greene than about "Sarah." I think it may be fair to say that Greene is looking to apologize for his adultery, and he may be saying that if only he had a lover who became a saint, then he might have been a better person.

The End of the Affair: Making Sense of Sarah

Our discussion last Saturday of Greene’s The End of the Affair (TEOTA) made clear that, for some of us, the character of Sarah does not ring true. This problem is at least accentuated by Greene’s use of Sarah’s diary and the miracles. Being great teachers, comments by Craig and Paul have prompted me to continue pondering on the question of why Greene would choose to present Sarah in that way.

INTENTIONAL

Given Greene’s demonstrated ability at writing more believable characters, the inescapable likelihood is that he must have intended to present the character of Sarah as a type, not a realistic person. She’s a caricature of extreme conversion: that of the sinner to saint.

Greene hints that he’s not going to give Sarah a realistic depiction. Although he’s rich in details about other characters (Henry’s near-sightedness, Savage’s tie, Smythe’s face), Bendrix claims to be unable to describe Sarah (p. 18):

I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold moth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is the indeterminate figure….

Other than telling us that she’s beautiful (p. 25), Greene’s physical description of Sarah is about as sketchy as anything this side of Beckett’s description of Godot.

So what was Greene up to?

One thing that I’m convinced he was not attempting in TEOTA was a defense of Christianity or, more specifically, Catholicism. If that were his purpose, he’d have used an approach closer to the tragically flawed but heroic whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory. Or even, perhaps, his Monsignor Quixote. (According to Wikipedia, MQ was made into a TV movie, starring Alec Guiness and Leo McKern. If you can think of a better pair of actors for Father Quixote and the communist mayor, Sancho, I’d love to hear of it.) An even more effective defense of the faith appears in A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom. (Greene could have done it better, but then it might not be so lovable a book.)

APOLOGIA

Rather than a defense of Christianity, I read TEOTA as Greene’s apologia for his behavior in the affair.

He has Bendrix describe his negatives at so many places throughout the book as to make a listing superfluous. The picture Greene paints of Bendrix is an insecure, self-centered bully. He bullies (teases, picks on, etc.) every major character: Sarah, Henry, Parkis – he even tries with God. (“I hate You, God. I hate You as though You existed.” P. 191), and bullies Sarah post mortem, persuading Henry to deny her the funeral she’d wanted. Mea culpa!

But the book is more than just Greene’s confession: it’s a personal apology and admission to his former lover that he was in the wrong, but that he’s grown through the experience. After all, Greene dedicated the book to “c”: that’s got to be his real-life Sarah, Lady Catherine Walston.

TWO-DIMENSIONAL TREATMENT

Given that the book is a personal apology, did Greene need to portray Sarah in such a limited, two-dimensional way? I think, largely, he did.

To paint Sarah in realistic terms, to really flesh her out as a person, Greene would have had to describe at least some warts. (By the early 20^th century, “realism” had come to be synonymous with gritty, dirty.) But, for a couple of reasons, that would not do for Greene’s purpose in a personal apology. First, it’s chiaroscuro, allowing Greene to highlight the contrast between the light of Sarah’s love and the darkness of Bendrix’s selfishness. Second, and more importantly, Greene simply could not make his apology in a form that appeared to be continuing an argument, which is how any negative description of the Sarah character would tend to appear. Accordingly (so far as I can recall), the only negatives about Sarah in the book are recounting of her lies and promiscuity, issues that could hardly be avoided in a book about her ending the affair.

DAMN DIARY AND SLIPSHOD SAINTHOOD

Buy why stoop to the diary, and did he have to go as far as to include the miracles to suggest sainthood?

As to the diary, we discussed the need for some device to communicate to Bendrix his misperception of Sarah’s feelings and motives. An intercepted letter, an overheard conversation, confession to a friend who repeated the statement to Bendrix all would have served as possible alternatives to the diary.

I suppose that the diary was about as good a way as any to introduce the facts of Sarah’s love, and her internal struggle with God. But why present it in such an annoyingly vapid and long-winded way? Again, I’m inclined to think that Greene had a purpose. Painting Sarah, through her diary, as emotionally simple (almost a teenager --one probably would find more emotional and intellectual depth in Miss Piggy’s diary!) introduces a vulnerability in Sarah. (“… is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?” p. 95).

Sarah’s vulnerability contrasts nicely with Bendrix’s sophistication (he may be immature, and in some ways emotionally stunted, but he’s sophisticated). This emphasizes again his responsibility for the sad end of the affair.

But the miracles and the sainthood? This I find the most difficult choice to explain. I think he went too far in contrasting Sarah with himself (and with each of the main characters).

On the other hand, Greene clearly wanted to make a point about sainthood, which is emphasized when he has Bendrix say, “… if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt … if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint.”

Perhaps the whole miracles/sainthood shtick was another stroke in Greene’s long-running love-hate relationship with the Catholic church. Sarah was not a very good Catholic, if she was one at all ( I’m not convinced that she’d accepted any recognizable church). Greene’s point here may have been that she could become a saint by accepting God, without fully adopting a church.

Admittedly, one might say to all this, “If the lawyer thinks that, the lawyer is a ass – a idiot!”

However, it helps reconcile me to the book, which I’d liked up until the diary.

That, anyway, is my explanation of Greene’s treatment of Sarah. I’d be interested in other views.

End of the Affair: Quotes

"It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love." (46)

"...the moment of absolute trust and absolute pleasure, the moment when it was impossible to quarrel because it was impossible to think." (55)

"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal devil." (59)

"It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love." (70)

"I'm tired and I don't want any more pain...I want ordinary corrupt human love." (99)

"...she had fallen asleep against my shoulder...the slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known." (105)

"It was as though by 'dying' she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs." (113)

"For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope...I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it. As long as one suffers one lives." (113)

"I imagined I could smell her scent. I wanted things I should never have again – there was no substitute." (114)

"Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too" (129)

End of the Affair: English Places

If Sarah had been Protestant, she and Bendrix might have met here.

During Saturday's discussion of The End of the Affair, some of the Bookies evinced rather impressive familiarity with London geography.

Let's see if any bells are struck by the list of British place names noted in a New York Times article from January (link below):

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worchestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with the efforts of residents to appear dignified when, for example, opening bank accounts.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatorial humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/world/europe/23crapstone.html?scp=1&sq=crapstone&st=cse