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years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for
the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was playing
with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama,
much like Dalí, whose use of the religion was a prop to
adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological
accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the
picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass
and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh
fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinchingly
Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty
of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen.
You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though,
Greene was not merely playing with some theological
dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity
of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was
central to his life.
In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor
advertisement for the familiar argument of religion being
a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two
of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial
administrator Scobie in The Heart Of The Matter, and
the nameless whiskey priest of The Power And The
Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of
men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual
as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the
knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adulterous,
are condemning them, with absolute certainty,
to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond
redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then
on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic
young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad
man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation
only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He
was damned already and there was nothing more to
fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for
a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of
the novels, a character in itself, more than that even.
Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene
himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both
prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their
works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to
remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether
his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds
of this torture is open to conjecture.
Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man
desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after
all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Conservative
Party is it has not turned back the clock one
second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith
in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men
trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking
solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there
is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence.
Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928
with Decline And Fall, two years before his conversion
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