Waugh’s reputation has outlived the offence caused by the real-life charades in
which he acted the part of a Duke with gout, an act which got out out hand (see his
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold). George Orwell, who had the opposite snobbery to
Waugh’s, admired his courage and the clarity and discipline of his English. He was a
professional writer of unique vision, force and bite.
Graham Greene
Theology has a more explicit impact on the writings of Waugh’s ally,Graham
Greene(1904–1991). Writing in 1968 of the French novelist François Mauriac, and
his theme of the misery of man without God, Greene observed that ‘with the death
of Henry James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the reli-
gious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world
of fiction had lost a dimension ....’ For Greene, the characters of Woolf and Forster
drift ‘like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin’.
Greene’s first success was his fourth novel,Stamboul Train (1932), a thriller later
classified as an ‘entertainment’ as distinct from his more serious novels. Greene was
a journalist, a film critic, an Intelligence officer and a traveller, and usually set his
fictions in far-off theatres on political fault-lines: Vienna, Mexico, Liberia, Cuba,
Vietnam. All are written with chameleon skill, keeping to the rules of the genre and
taking on the colouring of the place, though the place is never a good place. The
mature Greene writes sparely with a firm narrative line.
Some prefer the untheological entertainments, such as The Honorary Consul,The
Quiet American andOur Man in Havana. But Greene’s distinctiveness rests on his
Catholic novels, from Brighton Rock(1938) to A Burnt-Out Case(1961), which turn
on an Augustinian theology of grace carried to unorthodox extremes. Greene’s para-
doxical salvation theology can recall James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner(1824),in which a sinful life is excused by an inner
assurance of election to salvation. In the kind of Calvinism with which Hogg is
concer ned, however, the Sinner is convinced that God has predestined his
Justification, while the Greene sinner has a miserable trust in the promise of divine
mercy. For Greene, good-and-evil is a more important axis than right-and-wrong
(for divine gra ce trumps human morality), and a Catholic sinner who sacrifices
himselfto redeem another may be saved. This ‘good’ Faustian bargain, related to
Greene’s suicidal despair before his 1926 conversion, is at its simplest in his feeble
play The Potting Shed(1958) and at its best in The Power and the Glory(1940),The
Heart of the Matter(1948), and The End of the Affair(1951). The enigmatic Greene
worked the media of his day with the mastery of an older raconteur, Daniel Defoe,
but a Defoe who had read Pascal. In Greene’s metaphysical fiction, Pascal’s challenge
(the choice to believe in a God who cannot be proved to exist) becomes something
more like a gamble.
Anthony Powell
A contemporary with whom Waugh and Greene are grouped, for reasons of super-
ficial similarity, is a novelist of a more artfully realist kind:Anthony Powell
(1905–2000), who wrote five drily satirical pre-war novels, notably Afternoon Men
and Venusberg. These were well reviewed by L. P. Hartley (1895–1972), author of the
stylishEustace and Hilda and the painful The Go-Between. Powell is now known,
however, as the author of the twelve-novel sequence called A Dance to the Music of
Time after a painting by Nicolas Poussin. He had discovered Proust while at Oxford,
NON-MODERNISM:THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES 371