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to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly
be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners,
black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius
stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices
on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital.
Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially
secondary, framing devices against which the characters
can ‘flourish’, were that not so inappropriate a word for
the languishing on display. These are characters whose
inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed
in shadow.
What they did have in common was an intense sense
of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it
was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied
this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of
the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience,
the lasting impression, the ‘aftertaste’, is a subtle yet
distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via
osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the
happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness,
evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares
Greene, with Waugh in full agreement.
In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an
outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant
nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged
in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These
atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little
to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before
then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like
that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with
official sanctions barring the ‘other’ from office, and
from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there
by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down.
In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds,
chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centuries.
A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly
over-represented in the industrial north of England,
and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch
on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied
to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle
purebred English southerners both. They were Catholics
by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by
choice too.
Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and
justified the constant sense of separation they had
always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to
want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to
identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted
to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely
and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide attempts.
Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder,
Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of behaviour,
not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence
and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic
as something to “measure his evil against”. In later
250
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