Throughout The End of the Affair, the only thing that compares with the love Bendrix feels for Sarah is the hatred he also has for her. Constantly toeing the line between love and hatred, Bendrix is entirely consumed by his affair with Sarah even after it ends. Sarah, too, goes through periods in which she hates Bendrix and writes in her diary, “I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too?” In the middle of all this is Sarah’s husband, Henry, who doesn’t learn about the affair until nearly two years after it ends and, even then, is incapable of hating either of them, but insists that he loves his wife and eventually comes to love Bendrix after Sarah’s untimely death. And despite Bendrix’s assurances to the reader that he is “a man of hate,” it becomes clear that his feelings hatred are so intermingled with those of love that the one is indistinguishable from the other, and the question Sarah wrote in her diary becomes the ultimate question of Greene’s novel. Through the story of Bendrix and Sarah’s affair and its aftermath, Graham Greene illustrates that hatred can’t exist without love.
From the very beginning of the book, Bendrix (who notes that he is the one writing the story) insists that the whole narrative is about his hatred for Sarah and Henry Miles. Bendrix asserts that “This is a record of hate far more than of love,” which prepares the reader to encounter both feelings. This also illustrates Bendrix’s initial motive in writing the story: he wants to explore his hatred for Sarah and her husband—hatred that has been simmering ever since Sarah broke things off with Bendrix in order to stay with Henry. Throughout the story, even as Bendrix’s attitude towards the couple begins to soften, he actively fights to maintain his hatred. This is shown when a Catholic priest tries to write of Bendrix’s emotional outburst as “pain” over Sarah’s death and Bendrix insists, “I’m not in pain, I’m in hate.”
Despite Bendrix’s desire to keep the focus of this story on his hatred for Sarah and Henry, it rapidly becomes clear that there is a strong undercurrent of love that threatens to surface. Bendrix observes that “Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions.” This immediately implies that love could be motivating Bendrix just as much as hate, but he’s unwilling to admit this or perhaps doesn’t recognize it himself. Even Sarah doubts Bendrix’s ability to truly hate anyone, which is shown in her diary entry when she describes him as someone who “thinks he hates, but loves, loves all the time.” In other words, Sarah believes that Bendrix feels things very deeply, but has convinced himself that all of these deep emotions are forms of hatred rather than making himself vulnerable by admitting that they stem from love. Eventually, even Bendrix admits that his general feelings of hatred imply an equal (or even greater) amount of love: “hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself.” This shows an immense amount of personal growth in Bendrix, who begins to let go of his insistence that hatred has always reigned supreme over love.
Ultimately, Bendrix learns that not only are hatred and love not mutually exclusive, but that if he opens himself up to the positive experience of love, then he must necessarily open himself up to the negative experience of hatred. Bendrix writes, “I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid.” This is Bendrix’s way of acknowledging that he overestimated the power of his hatred when he began the story, although he remains unwilling to admit that his hatred for Sarah and Henry has entirely come to an end or the extent to which he continues to like and even love them. Bendrix uses his hatred as a shield to protect himself against love, the idea of which is closely tied to the overwhelming pain and despair he felt after losing Sarah—if he doesn’t experience love, then he won’t experience the pain of losing it either. However, a question that Sarah poses in her diary reveals the futility of this: “would I have hated [Maurice] if I hadn’t loved him too?” As Sarah discovered for herself, hatred and love are fluid, and one emotion can give way to the other almost imperceptibly. Therefore, it is useless for Bendrix to try and protect himself from love by hiding behind hate.
In exploring his hatred, Bendrix discovers how inextricably it was bound up in his love for Sarah. Sarah, too, notes that she would never have experienced moments of hatred for Bendrix if she hadn’t loved him first. Both hatred and love, then, have roots in each other: love can be born of hatred (such as Bendrix’s budding love for Henry) and hatred can be born out of love (such as what Sarah describes in her diary). In either case, one can’t exist without the other.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Hatred ThemeTracker
Love and Hatred Quotes in The End of the Affair
If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.
The fool, I thought, the fool to see nothing strange in a year and a half’s interval. Less than five hundred yards of flat grass separated our two ‘sides’. Had it never occurred to him to say to Sarah, ‘How’s Bendrix doing? What about asking Bendrix in?’ and hadn’t her replies ever seemed to him… odd, evasive, suspicious? I had fallen out of their sight as completely as a stone in a pond. I suppose the ripples may have disturbed Sarah for a week, a month, but Henry’s blinkers were firmly tied. I had hated his blinkers even when I had benefited from them, knowing that others could benefit too.
She had often disconcerted me with 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 […].
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. […] 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.
Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. […] But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love, and Henry I had reason to believe, from what Sarah once told me, had long ceased to feel any physical desire for her. And yet, I think, in those days he was as jealous as I was. His desire was simply for companionship: he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence: he was worried and despairing—he didn’t know what was going on or what was going to happen. He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek—I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much.
I am a jealous man—it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr. Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival—a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence, and success he always enjoys. Sometimes I think he wouldn’t even recognize me as part of the picture, and I feel an enormous desire to draw attention to myself, to shout in his ear, ‘You can’t ignore me. Here I am. Whatever happened later, Sarah loved me then.’
I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up—the affairs meant nothing at all (except possibly the unconscious desire to find that final spasm Henry had so woefully failed to evoke). […] 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, and I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? […] If there is a God who uses us and makes us his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.
He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.
But was it me he loved, or You? For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on Your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn’t anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more.
[…] turning as I left the church and seeing her huddled there at the edge of the candlelight, like a beggar come in for warmth, I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
I wanted her burnt up, I wanted to be able to say, Resurrect that body if you can. My jealousy had not finished, like Henry’s, with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me. How I wished I could send Parkis after her to interrupt their eternity.
I though, I’ve got to be careful. I mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her. This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. […] She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
Sarah had really believed that the end began when she saw my body. She would never have admitted that the end had started long before: the fewer telephone calls for this or that inadequate reason, the quarrels I began with her because I had realized the danger of love ending. We had begun to look beyond love, but it was only I who was aware of the way we were being driven. If the bomb had fallen a year earlier, she wouldn’t have made that promise. She would have torn her nails trying to release me. When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food. […] I thought, she wanted me to have a second chance and here it is: the empty life, odourless, antiseptic, the life of a prison, and I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change: what did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life?
I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now. I’m sure. I’ve never been sure before about anything. When you came in at the door with the blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.
There had been a time when I hated Henry. My hatred now seemed petty. Henry was a victim as much as I was a victim, and the victor was this grim man in the silly collar.
Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead. I had committed myself: without love I would have to go through the gestures of love. I felt the guilt before I had committed the crime, the crime of drawing the innocent into my own maze. The act of sex may be nothing, but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. I was safe, but who could tell to what neurosis in this child I might appeal? […] I implored Sarah, Get me out of this, get me out of it, for her sake, not mine.
It’s just a coincidence, I thought, a horrible coincidence that nearly brought her back at the end to You. You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and the blood. If I began to believe that, I could believe in the body and the blood. You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her. You won in the end, You don’t need to remind me of that, but she wasn’t deceiving me with You when she lay here with me, on this bed, with this pillow under her back. When she slept I was with her, not You. It was I who penetrated her, not You.
‘[…] I know when a man’s in pain.’
I couldn’t get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’
And I thought, hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself. […] Nothing—not even Sarah—is worth our hatred if You exist, except You. And, I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? O God, if I could really hate you…
I thought, you’ve failed there, Sarah. One of your prayers at least has not been answered. I have no peace and I have no love, except for you, you. I said to her, I’m a man of hate. But I didn’t feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and 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, but shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. […] I sat on my bed and said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. […] I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. […] With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
