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Feature [published May 2008]
Graham Greene/Evelyn Waugh: Literary & Political Catholicism
Ben Granger
Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism
in his writing, George Orwell could always be
relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With
the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in
his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemical
righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in
the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Protestant
art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were
thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively.
Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the
greatest English authors of the mid-century – Henry
Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh –
were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious
storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short
on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on
this one at least.
In many respects the authors could scarcely be
more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten
corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang,
the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading
Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants.
Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten,
his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not
so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the
southern counties and their intersection with the cold
elites of London high society. While his misanthropic
satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for
his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae
of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his
books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified
with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and
upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that
they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving
outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere contempt
to outright hatred.
While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted
round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of
the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with
gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and
sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is
central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a
direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dialogue,
and interaction with each other being secondary
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