End Of The Affair Poem by gershon hepner

End Of The Affair



With the end of the affair
you recognize the bitter truths
that can’t be recognized before
denouments. Lovers are not sleuths,
and do not search for hidden clues,
suggesting their interpretation
of events should disabuse
them of their deep infatuation.

Since lovers are evasive and
two-faced, they ought to face head on
the truths they cannot understand
until affairs become bygone,
but even then they often try
rewriting their whole past. The end
of the affair won’t edify.
It’s then each lover will pretend
he/she was always faithful to
the other and the truth, disin-
formation helping them to view
a past that spuriously they spin,
revising facts that had occurred,
so at the end of the affair
they’ll speak the words most often heard
at Customs: “Nothing to declare.”

“It is distingué to be damned, ”
said Orwell, quoting Baudelaire,
but no one’s willing to be slammed
at the end of the affair.

Inspired by an article on Graham Greene, author of The End of the Affair, by Paul Therous (“Damned Old Graham Greene, NYT, October,17,2004) :
This is funny but wide of the mark, for Greene was not a Casanova, not vain in his conquests, not a scorekeeper (though he kept a detailed list of his 47 favorite prostitutes - given here in an appendix) . Greene was insecure, needy, insatiable, interested in variation and always willing to have a go. He preferred his women to be waiflike, boyish, petite - he himself was well over six feet tall. The women in his novels tend to match that description, but of course they are based on women he had loved. ''He has a definite quirk for brothels, '' a woman friend remarked. Sherry straps on his brothel creepers to prove it. Way back in Volume 1, Otto Preminger is quoted: ''Though he gives a first impression of being controlled, correct and British, he is actually mad about women. Sex is on his mind all the time.'' You could say, So what? But this compulsive sexuality seemed to shape the pattern of his life, his travel, his fictional subjects and his faith. Obsessive and easily bored, he was incapable of being sexually faithful to any woman. He reveled in being a wanderer, an eavesdropper, a stranger. His sexuality both depressed him and relieved his gloom. It damned him in his own faith, made him a sinner and filled him with remorse, made him say things such as ''I've been a bloody fool'' and ''I've betrayed very many people in my life'' and ''I wish I didn't have so much to be remorseful about.'' He converted to Catholicism to win over Vivien, but it seemed as though he remained a Catholic in order to strengthen his control over his sexual appetite. All his faith did was to make him feel guiltier; he tied himself in knots to reconcile his belief with his sinning, but at least, as a believer, he could obtain absolution and sanctifying grace. In ''The Heart of the Matter, '' ''The Power and the Glory, '' ''The End of the Affair'' and many other books, he struggled to portray sinners as ultimately virtuous. Charles Peguy's observation, ''Le pecheur est au coeur meme de chretiente'' - the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity - is part of the epigraph of ''The Heart of the Matter.'' The conundrum went on tormenting him and made him a moralist. While there is something humdrum about being bad, and an irritating banality in the act of doing wrong, high drama can be achieved with the words ''sinning'' and ''evil.'' Greene indulged himself by casting his actions in these terms. Right and wrong did not much interest him, but good and evil did. He was a sucker for diablerie. Orwell remarked that Greene seemed to share the idea, ''which has been floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned.''


7/7/08

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success