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of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never
left him.
In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism
– in the wider world so very often the creed of the
oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the
persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre
and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances.
In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers
would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches,
at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco.
Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the
crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”.
There has never been a shortage of left-wing British
writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say
this has usually stemmed from their ‘outsider’ nature,
their working class and/or Irish background, rather than
the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life
a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of
the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss
Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing,
his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant.
The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith
of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for
reasons which became reactionary by default, even if
that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh
was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy
Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK
asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war,
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared
their support for the Falange. A minority view among
authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar
Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify
as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish
caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably
an extreme rather than a typical example however, and
by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline
into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a
writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum”
at the beginning of the latter’s career.
Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of
Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception.
Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene
started out on the Right. Along with many youths of
his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926
General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the
right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the
put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in
that country. His earlier novels contained numerous
mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at
his behest). In many ways therefore, he seemed destined
to trudge down a classic Conservative path.
But Greene was one of those converts, a minority
amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the message
of social justice ring louder than that of defence of
hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s
vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the
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