Evan Zimroth on Adultery

Evan, you’re the author of a book called Gangsters in which adultery figures largely. Adultery’s also the subject you’ve chosen to talk about today, and of course it’s a provocative subject. But is that why you’re interested in it? Do you think of yourself as an iconoclast? What does adultery permit you to think about that other subjects might not?

(Laughs) Well that is a provocative question. This may come as a surprise, but I got into Gangsters, not because of the adultery, but because of the theology. So in other words, what I was doing before I began work on it was to join a study group of writers and biblical scholars who came together to talk about different parts of The Bible. And I had never done anything of the kind before. I’d never read The Bible, never considered it an interesting book. In some ways I still don’t. But I got drawn into it and spent about a year with this group, and realized at some point that I was extremely interested – and that the key to it was studying Hebrew. I joined a women’s Yeshiva and studied the Talmud. I became fascinated by the Rabbinical system of law – the ‘codes’ – and Gangsters came out of that study. The protagonist there, Nicole, knows all about that system, but she remains sceptical of it. She’s asking, ‘What are the loopholes? How do I get out of it?’.

Let’s talk about the first book on your list, which is Graham Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair.

The novel’s set in the Second World War during the Blitz. The protagonists are Morris Bendix, who is a very sarcastic, satiric, almost nasty kind of writer, and Sarah Miles, whom he falls in love with and who is married to a civil servant. It’s always interesting, the careers that writers give to their characters – he’s a paper-pusher, a bureaucrat, boring. But she’s full of passionate life. She doesn’t have a career, and her lover, Bendix, is a writer, so his career is just to be a lay-about and sort of watch other people. So you watch the two main characters have what St Paul would call a conversion experience. They’re both very sarcastic, but it’s pretty clear that he, Bendix, who tells the story, has had a conversion experience.

Because of her?

It’s hard to say if it’s exactly because of her. Religion works in strange ways. Of course it’s certainly partly because of her. But just to give a little more detail. A robot bomb falls on the house where they’re making love. He’s downstairs and when the bomb falls he’s pinned under a door. She runs down and finds him pinned there with his hands sticking out. She’s sure that he’s dead and she goes back to her room. She’s naked, presumably, because they’ve just been making love and she prays, and the prayer is, ‘Make him live! I love him so much. Make him live and I will give him up. I’ll know to believe.’ She makes that vow and then he turns up and he’s pretty much unscathed. So right away from her point of view she has to keep the terms of the vow. She must give him up because he’s been given the gift of life. He’s been restored to her but she must give him up.

And is she consoled by faith?

She doesn’t really have faith at that moment. It makes an inroad into her scepticism, but it takes a long time for her to believe. She has a really Christian struggle. In some ways she doesn’t want it. She’d rather not have it; disregard her vow and have her lover back. And she says at one point “What I want is ordinary corrupt human life”. Which is a wonderful thing to say.

You’ve put three books by James Salter as the next choice on your list. But while you talk about him I’d love it if you could expand on why you are so fascinated by parallels between faith in the divine and commitment to a worldly erotic passion.

My first James Salter novel is A Sport and a Pastime. It’s short and amazing. It’s not about adultery, it’s about a passionate love affair between a young, callow American guy and an even younger French woman. And the idea of the affair is that they just completely surrender themselves. And that is a religious idea. But what they surrender themselves to is what Salter calls "incandescent sexuality”. They are just illuminated by it. And the more transgressive the sex, the more incandescent. Salter, when talking about this novel, says he wanted to contrast or explore the elicit and the divine. To show that you could have purity within licentiousness. I don’t think Salter is necessarily a religious writer. I don’t think of myself as a religious writer either. But he’s obviously intrigued by the idea. He uses sexuality, completely unbridled sexuality, not so much as an affirmation of self but as a way for the two characters to completely expose themselves to one another. To give that gift of surrender. The man calls it “throwing away the oars”.

Total abandonment?

And it is a kind of religious idea. Even if you’re not religious. Salter and Greene are both interested in the way the lovers are catapulted into something beyond reason. But they retain that recognition – a sort of criminal recognition – of the other person.

A lights out, talking when nanny’s out of the room recognition?