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A couple of years ago, at dinner with a couple I've known for year -- she is an academic, she a poet; he makes the money, she does not -- I fell into some aimless exchange about marriage, in the middle of which the husband had occasion to announce casually, "Of course, it's a given that the one who does the supporting holds the one being supported in contempt." The wife stared at him. He stared back. Then she gasped, "Henry! I can hardly believe you've said what you've just said." He looked at her, unperturbed. "What is it?'' he asked mildly. "Is this something we don't all know?" Silence fell on the company. She looked bleak, he remained impassive. A minute later she said the equivalent of Pass the salt. I remember thinking, If life was still a Cheever story this would have been the climactic moment, but as it is now 1995 it is only a break in the conversation.
In great novels we always feel that the writer, at the time of the writing, knows as much as anyone around can know, and is struggling to make sense of what is perceived somewhere in the nerve endings if not yet in clarified consciousness. When a novel gives us less than many of us know -- and is content with what is being given -- we have middlebrow writing. Such writing -- however intelligent its author, however excellent its prose -- is closer to the sentimental than to the real. The reader senses that the work is sentimental because the metaphors are inaccurate: approximate, not exact. To get to those nerve endings a metaphor must be exact, not approximate. The exact metaphor is writer's gold.
What the "subjective novel" lost, in Greene's polemical reading, was any sense of a necessary interplay between the character and the world around her: a world of moral judgment and evaluation, in which the "human act" has importance precisely to the degree to which one may be held accountable for it. The End of the Affair uses the injunctions of religious faith as a way to discipline the boundaries of social behavior, in a way that allows Greene an apparently old-fashioned novel of adultery in a world where such infidelity no longer seems a matter of overwhelming importance. [...]
oooh
While Henry fetched the drinks I went into the lavatory. The walls were scrawled with phrases: 'Damn you, landlord, and your breasty wife.' 'To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.' I went quickly out again to the cheery paper streamers and the clink of glass. Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
lmao
How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying, 'Yes, Henry?' and then 'You?' She had always called me 'you'. 'Is that you?' on the telephone, 'Can you? Will you? Do you?' so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one 'you' in the world and that was me.
I sat with the telephone receiver in my hand and I looked at hate like an ugly and foolish man whom one did not want to know. I dialled her number, I must have caught her before she had time to leave the telephone, and said, 'Sarah. Tomorrow's all right. I'd forgotten something. Same place. Same time,' and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.
I said, 'The tube's quicker.'
'I know, but I didn't want to be quick.'
She had often disconcerted me by the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her, to say more than the truth - that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn't have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude... I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, 'I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.' Well, she hadn't known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.
When young one builds up habits of work that one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning's work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure - 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed - so long as I slept in my own bed -I would read the morning's work over and sleep on it. Even the war hardly affected me. A lame leg kept me out of the Army, and as I was in Civil Defence, my fellow workers were only too glad that I never wanted the quiet morning turns of duty. I got, as a result, a quite false reputation for keenness, but I was keen only for my desk, my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen. It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline. The bombs between those first daylight raids and the V1s of 1944 kept their own convenient nocturnal habits, but so often it was only in the mornings that I could see Sarah, for in the afternoon she was never quite secure from friends, who, their shopping done, would want company and gossip before the evening siren. Sometimes she would come in between two queues, and we would make love between the greengrocer's and the butcher's.
damn
But it was quite easy to return to work even under those conditions. So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy - I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
[...] Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for once this was my dialogue, and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant. The lover had ordered steak and onions, the girl hesitated for a moment to take the onions because her husband didn't like the smell, the lover was hurt and angry because he realized what was behind her hesitation, which brought to his mind the inevitable embrace on her return home. The scene was a success: I had wanted to convey the sense of passion through some common simple episode without any rhetoric in words or action, and it worked. For a few seconds I was happy - this was writing: I wasn't interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new: I wished, how I wished, that I hadn't invited Sarah Miles to dinner.
haha this is relatable