HEART OF THE MATTER
A second exchange with the mysterious Ed Stringer (see here for the first one) has proven productive. It began after I'd asked him for an example of Education Outlook that demonstrated that Peter Quennell was writing a piece about education in the lead up to Evelyn making use of him as Potts in Decline and Fall. Ed wrote: 'I’ve forwarded a Quennell issue cover of Education Outlook. It came to my attention when Greene reviewed an article by Quennell in the magazine, for an issue of the student magazine that he was editing at the time, ‘Oxford Outlook’. Greene always had a motive for his actions. Here he was both supporting his old school friend but also paving the way for himself to place articles (mainly reviews of educational history books) in ‘The Education Outlook’. He did this over the next few years. (I recently discovered a copy of a ‘lost’ poem by Greene in a 1928 issue of ‘The Education Outlook’ and presented this at last year's International Greene Festival.)
I didn't know it at the time, but this paragraph was to be the beginning of something. On 17 January, 2023, I wrote the following to Ed, more or less in passing: 'I wonder if you have anything else in your Waugh locker that we might explore together.'
Which elicited this: 'More Waugh - have a read or reread of GG’s ‘Heart of the Matter’. Waugh liked most of the book and gave it a positive review. You’ll be able to spot when he appears in it. (I don’t think this is reported elsewhere). Actually, there’s only half of him, so I’ll call him Evel Wa. When you find him, let me know and I’ll tell you who Yn Ugh was. Two real people from one character - I wonder where he learnt that! It might be a very clever thank-you from GG to EW, but it was also a gentle dig at him, and a big kick to the other. It might also explain some of GG’s comments after EW’s death.'
I got as far as finding my previously half-read copy of Heart of the Matter and placed it under my bed. But other things were demanding my attention for the next fortnight. When I forwarded Ed a link to the piece that I'd written about Waugh and Wodehouse, Ed gently reminded me: 'Have you found your friend Evelyn yet in Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’?'
I could have ignored this reminder. Instead, I wrote back honestly: 'Have had 'Heart of the Matter' by my bed for a week or two. Took a first dip into it last night, beginning of Part 2. Perrot looks promising with his bow legs, his combative attitude to life and his long-suffering wife. I’ll take another dip tonight.'
I was fishing. I didn't really want to spend time doing research that someone else had already completed. Anyway, I needn't have worried. Ed soon advised me: 'Take a look at a fellow called Fellowes. It’s fairly early in the book.'
So I did that. And replied: 'That’s interesting the little cameo role that Fellowes plays. It might be fun to follow that up, to see when Waugh read 'Heart of the Matter' and whether he made any note about it in his letters or diaries.'The Lancing tie references really stand out and there is no way Evelyn would have missed them, especially if he was reading the book with a view to publishing a review. And GG would have known that. When Fellowes crops up a second time in part two, there is an exchange with Scobie about Catholicism that, through the word ’they’ rather than ‘we’, implies that Fellowes was not a Catholic. GG pulling Evelyn’s leg? I will have to remind myself where their relationship had got to in 1947/48.'
Ed took this as his cue to spill the beans. With his permission, I will reproduce his next email in full: 'The story about Fellowes is more complicated. 'Fellowes' wasn't just a pen-portrait of Waugh, but far more than that. In 1936 Graham Greene went with his cousin Barbara to West Africa (Sierra Leone and Liberia) with a commission to write a travel book 'Journey Without Maps'. Whilst there he took a dislike to some of the expats who lived a very artificial 'club' life and treated the local population with disdain. One such man, a Government Employee, a Sanitary & Medical Inspector drank too much, but helped Greene find the men he would need for his trip. In the book that the author produced on his return this character was portrayed, probably as he truly was, in a not very flattering light. Greene gave him the name 'Pa Oakley'. Now the head of Sierra Leone Medical Service was indeed a character called Dr P.D. Oakley, and shortly after 'Journey without Maps' was issued this man threatened legal action. Greene, in a letter to his brother Hugh in late 1936 said that he was unaware of this person, but in my view, this was bluster, and the author was just careless in not disguising 'Oakley' a little better. The legal threat meant that the book had to be withdrawn six months after its publication.
'The irony is that Greene was almost certainly accurate and correct in his description of Oakley and his characteristics. A recent academic thesis published about the Medical Services in Sierra Leone before the Second World War notes that a Dr Oakley treated the locally trained Doctors with disdain and always favoured his European colleagues.
'Greene would have undoubtedly been upset that his travel book (which is really quite good) was left in limbo. So he went off to write a few thrillers and became one of the editors of a short lived magazine, 'Night and Day'. It was in this role that he contacted Evelyn Waugh to contribute reviews for the magazine and their more regular correspondence began.
[This was in 1937. Greene having contacted Waugh about something else in 1936. It would seem that Greene wanted to cultivate Waugh, to latch onto his literary experience and his burgeoning fame.]
'But Greene hadn't really learnt. He wrote the film reviews for 'Night & Day' and wrote a piece that basically said that the young Shirley Temple was being used by her film studios to titillate the more elderly audience. Whilst again there might have been some truth in what he said, it was something you couldn't say in public, so he faced legal action and fled the country to write another travel book about Mexico.
'Greene's thriller, 'Brighton Rock' which was issued around this time would undoubtedly have been noticed by Waugh because of its 'Catholic' content. On his return from Mexico, Greene wrote a much weaker travel book, 'The Lawless Roads' and an excellent novel 'The Power and the Glory', which again featured strongly Catholic themes. Waugh was certainly taking strong notice of Greene by this time.
'But the war happened. Waugh went off to fight and Greene returned to West Africa as 'Our Man in Sierra Leone.' In 1944, Waugh, disillusioned with the war and remembering with rose-tinted spectacles, his Oxford days, wrote 'Brideshead Revisited'. This was his first book to have an explicit Catholic content and no doubt he would have been encouraged to move this way by the success of Greene. One other point about Brideshead ; one of the unforgettable side characters is Anthony Blanche. Waugh conflated two of his friends. Some of the actions of Blanche (declamation through a loudspeaker, decoration of his room) came from Harold Acton, but the actual core of the person, his character, was a representation of the much less reliable Brian Howard.
[This is well accepted in the Waugh canon.]
'Let's move forward another couple of years. The war is over and Greene is still upset that 'Journey without Maps' has been virtually unread. So he does a brief rewrite of the offending section removing the name, Oakley, and it's published as an early Pan book. At the same time he returns to novel writing, and to writing with a Catholic theme and uses Sierra Leone as the setting. And now we come to the nub of the story.
'I'm fairly sure that the side character 'Fellowes' is primarily another snipe at 'Pa Oakley'. The character of a clubman with colonial views and prejudices and his role as a sanitary inspector confirms this. But Greene needed after his previous legal battle to be 'safe' from further threat of prosecution. So, taking a leaf out of Waugh's book (Brideshead) he wrote Fellowes, with the face (and tie) of Waugh himself but the character of Oakley. So Blanche, 2/3 Howard, 1/3 Acton here became Fellowes, 2/3 Oakley, 1/3 Waugh.
'Waugh would undoubtedly have recognised the pen picture painted of him, but would also have seen that it was a character that existed in a life and a role totally different from his, and would not have been too bothered. I wonder if he saw it as a back-handed compliment, in that Greene had used Waugh's exact technique in creating a composite character.
'From my memory, Waugh was broadly positive about 'The Heart of the Matter'. As you say, after this time, Waugh and Greene became closer friends but always with a competitive tinge. I particularly note the glee in one of Waugh's letters about an illness that Greene suffered whilst in the U.S.. Yet, I think from this time, they each respected the others works.
'Ironically, I think, Waugh evolved into a caricature character, not really a 'Fellowes' but certainly of the 'County' type. And then he died whilst on the 'thunderbox', this man once perhaps portrayed as a sanitary inspector!'
What to do with this valuable material? Well, the first thing was to acknowledge it and the second was to begin to do some research of my own. Heart of the Matter was published at the end of May, 1948. Waugh reviewed it at length in the journal Commonweal on 16 July, 1948. Let me quote from it:
'Mr Greene's latest book, 'The Heart of the Matter', should be read as the complement of 'Brighton Rock'. It poses a vastly more subtle problem…It is book which only a Catholic could write and only a Catholic can understand. I mean that only a Catholic can understand the nature of the problem…The style of writing is grim. It is not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and independent life.
That reminds me of something that Martin Amis said about Greene in Inside Story (2022). To begin with, as a novice himself, Amis had admired Greene as a writer, but in the end it became clear to him that: 'Greene could hardly hold a pen. His verbal surface is simply dull of ear (a briar patch of rhymes and chimes) and his plots, his narrative arrangements, tend to dissipate into the crassly tendentious (because they're determined by religion).'
This opinion is backed up by no less a peer of Waugh's and Greene's than Anthony Powell. Powell, would never say so when Greene was in full career flow, but stated in his private journal several times that he did not like Greene's books and found them more or less unreadable. He recognised that Greene was a complex character and would probably have succeeded in whatever career he'd chosen, but in Powell's opinion his writing was a lifeless joke. However, Greene was so well-respected as a writer, so universally praised, that Powell chose not to put his views into the public realm, to save himself the aggro, as it were, of swimming against the tide. Back to Evelyn who thought very differently:
'Mr Greene is a storyteller of genius. Born in another age, he would still be spinning yarns. His particular habits are accidental. The plot of 'The Heart of the Matter' might well have been used by M. Simenon or Mr Somerset Maugham.
'The scene is a west African port in wartime. The hero, Scobie, is deputy-commissioner of police; he has a compassionate liking for the place and the people. He is honest and unpopular and, when the story begins, he has been passed over for promotion. His wife is neurotic and pretentious. Their only child died at school in England. Both are Catholic. His failure to get promotion is the final humiliation. She whines and nags to escape to South Africa. Two hundred pounds are needed to send her… He gets the commissionership in the end, which was ostensibly all that Louise wanted. But behind that again lies the deeper cause of her melancholy, that Scobie no longer loves her in the way that would gratify her vanity.'
Sounds good, doesn't it? I mean, the way that Evelyn summarises the plot. But I tend to agree with Amis and Powell, and I find this book heavy-going. Another character washes up in the port. 'Scobie's affection for the waif cast up on the beach is at first compassionate and protective; it becomes carnal. Why? He is an elderly man long schooled in chastity.'
The fact that Scobie has to break the law to get the money for Louise's trip; that his illegal behaviour indirectly causes the death of his servant, Ali; that he can't put an end to having sex with Helen, thirty years his junior; that pitiful Louise forces sacrilegious communions on him; all builds up in his mind so that suicide seems like the best option.
Scobie does kill himself. As Evelyn writes: 'We are told that he is actuated throughout by the love of God. A love, it is true, that falls short of trust, but a love, we must suppose, which sanctifies his sins. That is the heart of the matter.'
Of course, that's where it all gets weird for some readers. Martin Amis memorably likens the experience of reading Greene to a train journey (you are going on a real journey, with real people) when suddenly you hear the tea trolley coming clanking along the corridor: religion is served!
Let's leave it there. But let's emphasise that in Evelyn's long review of several thousand words, the character Fellowes is not mentioned. Let's stress too that Evelyn couldn't possibly have read The Heart of the Matter as attentively as he did and not have spotted these lines: 'Fellowes, the sanitary inspector was talking fiercely to Reith, the Chief assistant Colonial Secretary. "After all this is a club," he was saying, "not a railway refreshment-room." The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin ginger hair, the small prickly moustache, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie.'
On the same page: 'Fellowes said hotly, "There are limits," fingering for confidence the Lancing tie.' Then later in the book '"I admit I was hasty. Bit boozed up, I wouldn't be surprised. He was at Downham: we used to play them when I was at Lancing.'" Closely followed by: 'Fellowes stroked his little ginger moustache, poured himself out some more gin and said, "He's scared of you, Mrs Rolt. All we married men are."'
So how has Greene got away with this accurate physical portrait of Evelyn Waugh? A few months before the book was published, on Sunday January 11, 1948, Waugh wrote the following in his diary: 'Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and as it happened quite penniless figure of Graham Greene. Took him to the Ritz for a cocktail and gave him 6d for his hat. He had suddenly been moved by love of Africa and emptied his pockets into the box for African missions.’
The 'sixpence for his hat' business means that Evelyn enabled Graham to check his hat with the doorman. The timing of the meeting is tantalising. Heart of the Matter came out in July 1948. So is it possible that EW and GG had a chat over this Ritz cocktail with EW agreeing to be mentioned in the book in this way, thus giving Greene a bit more cover? Though in the book Greene doesn’t seem to say anything negative about Fellowes, except that his machinations meant that he ended up taking over the house that Scobie had been living in. So I wouldn’t have thought such a cover was necessary. Well, I say that, but, like Anthony Powell, I find it very difficult to read Graham Greene on a line-by-line basis. Instead, I read him by flicking from page to page, taking in the occasional line and then opting out again. Let's assume that Greene does take the opportunity to insult Oakley a few times. Perhaps, in due course, Ed Stringer will help me out in this area by providing a few examples of insulting things said about the Oakley side of Fellowes.
I should say here that Norman Sherry, Greene's biographer, tells us that Heart of the Matter was finished a year earlier, July 1947. So either this would have been a late correction to the manuscript, or the conversation that I'm about to focus on would have taken place over the phone a year earlier. By the way, Anthony Powell's view of Norman Sherry was as follows: 'Sherry is industrious, naive, nowhere up to analysing Graham's devious character and personality. Indeed, what it boils down to, not sufficiently shrewd.' Powell thinks more highly of Sherry by the time he's read volume two of the biography.
Anyway, let's picture the scene in the Ritz in February of 1948. Evelyn is in a great mood because he's about to meet Diana Cooper for lunch. It's midday and he's drinking a cocktail with his Catholic author chum, Graham Greene, who is in a right old state of worry about libel, and feeling nostalgic for Africa.
Actually, he is in a right old state because he has just left his wife, Vivien, for the glamorous Catherine Walston, with whom he's been having an affair. It's the guilt about this domestic situation that drives Heart of the Matter from start to finish. Anthony Powell said about Vivien: 'Vivien Greene, a woman of considerable pretentiousness, middlebrow views… One is surprised Graham managed to stand living with her for as long as he did, which, indeed, was not long.'
The Ritz; February. 1948: Graham and Evelyn, head to head:
"So is that all right, Evelyn? I'll just describe you in my new book, maybe mention the Hertford tie and your moustache."
"Are you joking, Graham? This is a Lancing tie."
"Sure, my mistake. And under the cover of the tie and some description of you I'll be able to say what I like about Oakley."
"Of course, old man. Remember to make it a gin cocktail that I'm drinking." 
"Thank-you so much, Evelyn. You have saved my life."
"Look, take my tie so that you don't forget."
"No, I couldn't possibly."
"Well, at least shave when you get home."
"I think I am going to give you a moustache like the one you had during the war. Would you mind?"
"I don't care. But you must give yourself a shave as soon as you get home. Do you need to borrow a razor? Barman! Lend this man a razor. And another gin cocktail for me. Here she comes. Diana!"
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After Waugh’s deeply considered review of Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene's partner, Catherine Walston, wanted to meet Evelyn. Waugh wrote about it in his diary for Tuesday, 28 September:
To London by early train in order to be in time for luncheon. Graham Greene suggested the meeting and refused to come to my club. The idea was Catherine Walston's who was curious to meet me. Graham's flat is next to hers at 5 St James's Street.'
That's very close to the Ritz. Greene would have been able to walk home from his February meeting with Evelyn.
'The paralysed John Hayward was there, tenderly and candidly petted by Mrs W. Luncheon plainly had been brought from her flat for there was no salt. She sat on the floor and buttered my bread for me and made simple offers of friendship.'
A bit like Scobie falling for the innocence of Helen in The Heart of the Matter. Helen = Catherine; Louise = Vivien. That is the essential correspondence between art and life in this case.
'Twice a year she and her husband give a feast primarily for Hayward. I was asked to the next, in January.'
By which time Evelyn was no longer keeping a diary. But never mind, there is plenty here to be going on with.
'Finally, I was asked to to go with her to the country. I woke next day 29th September with a pleasant sense of having an interesting time ahead… Then Mrs Walston's car came but driven by a lout who did not know the way so that we were hours reaching Thriplow.'
Thriplow is in Cambridgeshire. Waugh could have got there by train easily enough. But clearly Catherine Walston wanted to make sure Evelyn turned up and didn't slip off for a mid-day cocktail at the Ritz instead.
'Her house has been confiscated by the socialists so she lives in a farm building, one storey, modern, wood. A living room with modern books and gramophones and wireless and modern pictures, a little dining room, two dressing rooms. No servants except a nurse named 'Twinkle' who dined with us very neatly dressed as a nurse and talked about masturbation, incest, etc.'
A nice contrast with Nurse Hawkins of Brideshead. Filed way in Evelyn's mind for possible use in a future novel?
'Three children out of five were at home. Mrs Walston barefooted mostly squatting on the floor. Fine big eyes and mouth, unaffected to the verge of insanity, unvain, no ostentation - simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity.'
I can see her going to work on Evelyn: 'How did the character of Sebastian come to you? Did you know he was going to become a lonely but saintly alcoholic from the start?'
'Two bottles of champagne before dinner in silver goblets. Usually they have a supper of shredded wheat and boiled eggs. Tonight for me there was bisque of lobster, partridges, cheese, fine claret, port, brandy.
Again, Catherine Walston trying to seduce Evelyn Waugh just as she'd seduced Graham Greene. Really, those middle-aged authors were a pushover.
'Not drunk but tongue pleasantly loose. We talked all the time of religion. She and Graham had been reading a treatise on prayer together that afternoon. Then she left the room at about 1 and presently telephoned she was in bed. We joined her. Her bedside littered with books of devotion.'
That description is neatly paralleled by a paragraph in a letter from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford:
'I went to such an extraordinary house on Wednesday. A side of life I never saw before - very rich, Cambridge, Jewish, socialist, highbrow, scientific, farming. There were Picassos on sliding panels and when you pushed them back - plate glass and a stable with a stallion looking at one. No servants. Lovely Carolean silver unpolished. Gourmet wines and cigars. The house a series of wooden bungalows, more bathrooms than bedrooms. The children's nanny dining with us called 'Twinkle' dressed with tremendous starched frills and celluloid collars, etc, and talking to her about lesbianism and masturbation. House telephone so that people don't bother to meet but just telephone from room to room. It made quite a change from Stinkers.'
Evelyn downplays Catherine's charms in this letter to Nancy. No mention of her buttering his roll, or of her fine big eyes looking up at him from the floor. He also plays up his metaphoric notion of Greene's character: 'So my friend Graham Greene whose books you won't read was sitting in a New York hotel feeling quite well when he felt very wet and sticky in the lap and hurried to the lavatory and found that his penis was pouring with blood. So he fainted and was taken to a hospital and the doctors said, "What have you been up to? Too much womanising?" "No, not for weeks since I left my home in England." "Ah," they said That's it. What a terrible warning. No wonder his books are sad.'
I think Greene must have told that story at the dining table. I like to think Twinkle might have laughed aloud at the denouement. That might explain Evelyn's repetition of the word 'masturbation' in connection with her character's conversation. Though it may just have been a gratuitous 'joke'.
I've read again the pages of The Heart of the Matter that deal with the development of a sexual relationship between Scobie and Helen, pages 137 to 171 of my copy. They are actually quite touching. Amis and Powell should be ashamed of their opinions on Greene's writing. This Helen had only been out of school a year. She had married young and her husband had been killed in the war. She had survived forty days on an open boat, so she was tough. She'd arrived clutching a stamp album that she'd managed to keep hold of. To begin with she wanted to talk about her time at school. Netball…gym-instructor…French mistress… Scobie just listened sympathetically. Their conversation ended in the evening with Scobie telling her he was going visit her again and bring her some stamps for her album.
"How do you know about my album?"
"That's my job. I'm a policeman."
"Goodnight."
He walked away, feeling an extraordinary happiness, but this he would not remember as happiness, as he would remember setting out in the darkness, in the rain, alone.
I wonder if that is an illustration of what Amis calls the briar patch of odd rhymes and chimes. An illustration of 'verbal surface that's dull of ear'. Because it doesn't quite hit the spot, that last paragraph.
Let's dip into the next meeting. Keep an ear open for odd chimes and rhymes. Keep an ear open for the clunk of the drinks trolley.
'A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats' tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed face. It seemed to him that he had not felt so much at ease with another human being for years - not since Louise was young. But this case was different, he told himself: they were safe with each other. He was more than thirty years older: his body in this climate had lost the sense of lust: he watched her with sadness and affection and enormous pity because time would come when he couldn't show her around in a world where she was at sea. When she turned and the light fell on her face she looked ugly, with the temporary ugliness of a child. The ugliness was like handcuffs on his wrists.
He said. "That stamp's spoilt. I'll get you another."
"Oh, no," she said, it goes in as it is. I'm not a real collector."
He had no sense of responsibility toward the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word "pity" is used as loosely as the word "love": the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.
She said, "You see, whenever I see that stain I'll see this room…
"Then it's like snapshot."
"You can pull a stamp out," she said with a terrible youthful clarity, "and you don't know that's it's ever been there." She turned suddenly to him and said, "It's so good to talk to you. I can say anything I like. I'm not afraid of hurting you. You don't want anything out of me. I'm safe."
At this point, Freddie Bagster interrupts them by knocking on her door. I can't quite understand why if she's so 'ugly' that Freddie wants to make love to her. In fact one doesn't get the impression that she's anything other than beautiful in the author's eyes. As Catherine Walston certainly was.
Still, I didn't hear the clunk of the tea trolley. The passage is fine from that perspective.
I've also tried to read the last sections of the novel fairly closely. Poor Scobie simply can't live with the idea of hurting either Helen, his new lover, or Louise, the wife who has returned from her trip to South Africa. There is much sensitivity on display, though it seems exaggerated. This is not a situation that should lead to suicide. I'm reminded that Graham Greene used to threaten his first wife, Vivien, with taking his own life. Indeed, Greene's letters are full of the kind of desperate unhappiness and of choosing between different women, competing loves, that is the churning guts of Heart of the Matter.
Let's turn to Anthony Powell again. Wise old Tony, friend of both Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. In fact. Let's visualise Tony in a pub in 1948, head to head with Evelyn after both had read The Heart of the Matter:
AP: "I have always got on reasonably well with Graham (who thrives on polemics) tho' never able to read his books. I remember one night after supper in your parents' house, you laughing with me about the publication of Graham's first novel on account of it being (if it was) about smugglers."
EW: "Ha-ha. Yes, I remember. Graham's first few novels were all tosh. Then he moved up a gear."
AP: "I think all Graham's books absurdly overrated. His novels unlike people one has ever come across, filled with self-pity, and a kind of pretentious emptiness when trying to be 'serious', so it seems to me, and enormously unfunny when intended to be funny. In spite of almost literally universal adulation, never somehow seeming to achieve the 'image' he himself wants, a side shown by ludicrous letters written to the papers, periodic rows, which he goes out of his way to publicise, always seeming to end in shadow boxing, all perhaps, necessary to him to get the adrenalin going. His characters, puppets constructed to appeal to his particular public, are shown in their process of thought, every cheap novelistic trick used in narration, to appeal to sentimentality."
EW: "As David Cecil said: 'Formula, plenty of religion, plenty of sex. Sex, sex and then suddenly Jesus overdoses.'"
AP: "Graham possesses an enormous vitality, allied to infinitely low spirits, a state quite different from melancholy. He is determined to impose this condition on his readers which obviously some people find sympathetic. Also, always present is Graham's chronic love of conflict."
EW: "But he got me down to a T, didn't he? Did you spot the character, Fellowes? Thin ginger hair, small prickly moustache, goosegog eyes, scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie."
I begin to realise what I've done here. I've written a prequel to the chapter I wrote a few years ago, when Graham Greene and Catherine Walston visited Evelyn Waugh at Piers Court for a few days. Yes, the meeting with Graham at the Ritz, pre-Heart of the Matter and the invite to Catherine's house post-HOM was a precursor for what was to be the main course in their relationship, built around another Greene book, The End of the Affair.
The Heart of the Affair? The End of the Matter? If you haven't read this yet, then you might give it a go.