23b
PARTISAN REVIEW
Edmund Wilson has violated the grave of Scott Fitzgerald).
The
Farmers' Hotel
has everything and does not take long to read: it has
hearts of gold, and hearts of poison, promiscuity, adultery (which is
suitably punished by death), murder (which is the agency by means of
which the adulterous couple are punished), maudlin affection and
truculent resentment. Anyone who wants to know what most · readers
want to read about ought to read
The Farmers' Hotel.
I hardly expected to like Graham Greene's
The End of the Affair
3
as much I did. So far as I can judge it is certainly the best of his books.
And it was also a surprising (even astonishing!) pleasure to find out
by reading the back of the jacket that for once I agreed entirely with
the literary opinions of Evelyn Waugh. Waugh says: "... The book
differs sharply from its predecessors in method and material . . . the
great change is in the method of the telling. For the first time there is
a narrator ... who is himself in the course of evolution ... (and)
there is humor ..." There is a great deal more, too; Greene has written
the first novel in years which can be felt as genuinely religious by
those who do not believe in God, or half-believe and half-doubt, as
well as those who have real conviction. And it is precisely the sympathy
and knowledge which Greene feels toward modern disbelief, indif–
ference and ignorance which makes the powerful center of his book.
It
is
only toward the end of the book, when Greene must show his
heroine as a saint, that the reader's religious disbelief, which the novelist
has been using as a means of persuasion, becomes a disbelief in what
is happening to the heroine.
Greene, like O'Hara, is fascinated by evil and by the evil of adultery
in particular. His novel is about an adulterous affair in which the
novelist who is the hero gets involved with a civil servant's wife chiefly
for the sake of getting accurate knowledge about civil servants and
their wives: he is writing a novel in which a civil servant is one of the
characters and an affair with a civil servant's wife seems to
him
a rapid
and intimate and reliable means of finding out about the husband's
habits (which does seem either a frightful or delightful way of being
a novelist, depending on one's point of view). Sex replaces literary en–
deavor, however, when the novelist falls completely in love with the
heroine. The year is 1944, the place is England, and when the hero
and heroine are interrupted by a bombing raid during which the
hero's body is pinned under a door which has been blown down, the
heroine prays to God for his life and vows that she will cease to sin
and renounce her true love, if God saves the novelist. He is saved and
3. Viking, $3.00.
