EVELYN WAUGH AND GRAHAM GREENE HAD one of the great modern literary friendships — comparable to Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Owen and Sassoon. Strikingly similar in many ways, they were close contemporaries and came from professional middle-class families. Waugh’s father was a publisher, Greene’s father a headmaster.
Both had successful brothers: the older Alec Waugh was a popular novelist, the younger Sir Hugh Greene was Director-General of the BBC. Waugh and Greene went from minor public schools, Lancing and Berkhamsted, to Oxford — Greene to Balliol, Waugh to the less distinguished Hertford College — where they were acquainted but not close since (as Waugh claimed) Greene “looked down on us as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.”
Both men had an unhappy marriage. Greene left his wife and children in 1939 but remained married, which allowed him the freedom to have many affairs without the risk of a permanent connection. (His long-time lovers, Catherine Walston and Yvonne Cloetta, were also married.) Betrayed by his first wife whom he divorced, Waugh had seven children with his second wife, and was a severe and distant père de famille. Both men ravelled widely and were temperamentally pugnacious.
Both men were Catholic converts in the late 1920s, but for different reasons. Greene converted in order to marry a devout Catholic. Waugh sought solace in the Church after being deeply wounded by his first wife’s adultery. A religious conservative and political reactionary, Waugh supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Greene, resolutely left-wing, befriended the revolutionary dictators Fidel Castro and Omar Torrijos of Panama.
There were other differences, too. Waugh was social, humorous, snobbish, arrogant and difficult to like; Greene was solitary, gloomy, kind, generous and likeable. Waugh lived in the country, courted aristocrats and loved luxury; Greene preferred cities, low life and opium dens. Waugh craved self-indulgent comfort, Greene thrived on self-punishing hardship.
Yet, as Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry concluded, Waugh “must be accounted Greene’s best male friend … equal in fame, equal in intellect, unequal in nature and personality”.
Greene recruited Waugh to write book reviews for the short-lived highbrow magazine . But Waugh lived in the country, Greene was often abroad and they often made imaginative plans for joint adventures that rarely came to fruition. In July 1936 Greene, always restless, suggested he and Waugh should imitate Jules Verne’s and “do a race around the world”. Waugh refined the plan by adding: “I think that it should be a race not in time but economy. Each to start with no luggage and a limited sum
