In 1960 Evelyn Waugh declined a request to review Graham Greene’s new novel A Burnt-Out Case. They were friends but the book saddened him. Its theme was the vexation of a celebrated architect called Querry – “exposed against his wishes as a ‘Catholic’ artist who at the same time cuts himself off from divine grace by sexual sin”.
“It is the first time,” Waugh noted, “that Graham has come out as specifically faithless – pray God it is a mood, but it strikes deeper and colder.” Waugh was distressed: “I am not guiltless as one of those who put him in the odious position of ‘Catholic artist’.” He wrote to Greene to apologise for having done so.
