The odd couple

Jeffrey Meyers says the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene may have been unlike in politics, religion and personality, but they remained the closest of friends for four decades

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.…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2024

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