The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) by Norman Sherry

Author:Norman Sherry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473547001
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

The paradox of Greene’s characters lies in the fact that out of the sinner comes the saint. In The End of the Affair hate is a source of love; in The Heart of the Matter, sin is a necessary concomitant of salvation. In this poem Greene celebrated the ‘mattress … spread on a cottage floor’, the old world gone with its easy distinctions of ‘that virtue and this sin’, on the distinctive and contradictory grounds that he had never really loved God before he knew this place of adultery: ‘For this is love, and this I love. / And even my God is here.’

In moments of deep depression, Greene felt abandoned by God: ‘I’ve seen the mark of His footsteps going away,’12 and experienced not only a sense of hopelessness, but what Coleridge called ‘the dying away from him of all hope’. And in order to stand the strain he universalised his despair: ‘nobody who lives escapes a private agony’. He also suffered from the sense of being locked into his own egotism, a place of captivity and misery, where the only means of escape were the palliatives of drugs, drinking, sexual adventures, and dingy night clubs (the seedier the better) or else the active sectors of the line: war, that ‘ravaged and disputed territory between two eternities’.

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Throughout these years Greene felt an angry longing for Catherine. Her familial and social responsibilities at Thriplow and Newton Hall forced her to ration her time with him. He was troubled by his sense that Catherine’s feelings did not match his own. Again and again his obsessiveness and jealousy ruined his love.

There are references to his jealousy in his letters (or recalled in dreams) and diaries, but the point is put most succinctly in The End of the Affair.

[We] used to have long arguments on jealousy. I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up – the affairs that meant nothing at all … She was as loyal to her lovers as she was to [her husband], but what should have provided me with some comfort (for undoubtedly she would be loyal to me too) angered me. There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty …13

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