Greene & Waugh in Texas

...The exhibit is drawn from more than seventeen hundred of Waugh's manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia (plus his five-thousand-volume library) and some forty linear feet of Greene's writings...

...As the term "centennial" implies, Waugh and Greene must be seen in a particular historical context...

...For example, Waugh's correspondence with his agent, A. D. Peters, about Brideshead Revisited shows him in the process of deciding about the structure, explaining the function of particular incidents, and seeking encouragement as well as practical advice about publishing...

...The Greene materials, acquired gradually over the years, are largely unexplored-an ambiguous clause in Greene's will seemed to limit access until Norman Sherry completed the long-delayed authorized biography...

...THE LAST WORD GREENE & WAUGH IN TEXAS Robert Murray Davis When Graham Greene and his friend movie producer John Sutro founded the Anglo-Texan society in 1953 after meeting two charming Texas girls in London, they thought they were joking, but Sutro followed through on the joke and hosted fifteen hundred Texans at a barbecue at Denham Film Studios...

...Judging from Norman Sherry's biography, Greene seemed from fairly early on in his life to be a kind of cafeteria Catholic...

...Besides examples of the authors' writings, the exhibit includes posters and other materials from films of Greene novels (those of Waugh, except the television version of Brideshead, are mercifully ignored), and numerous drawings by Waugh, who turned to writing only when art failed him...

...Director Thomas M. Staley explains that the exhibition, mounted to commemorate the centenaries of the authors' births (October 28, 1903, for Waugh, October 2, 1904, for Greene), had two purposes...

...Second, the accumulation of various editions, manuscripts, notes, letters, marginalia, and other material can be used to indicate the sources of a writer's inspiration and the process of composing a particular work...

...First, the curators wished to show the interaction between two writers, friends and sometimes friendly combatants, whom they regard as "two of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century...

...Waugh's study is re-assembled in sketchy fashion, represented by his desk and the paintings by Rebecca Solomon, The Virtuous Undergraduate and The Dissolute Undergraduate, from Waugh's extensive collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century genre paintings...

...These and other Waugh materials have been mined by waves of scholars like Donat Gallagher of Australia and Waugh's most comprehensive (and least sympathetic) biographer, Martin Stannard...

...Waugh never sold his papers to the university, but his estate did, and now those pages are on display until March 20, 2005, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as "Writing among the Ruins: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh...

...The curators do not note that Waugh called the two pictures Reading for Honours and Reading for Pluck...

...Waugh and Greene in Texas...

...Waugh was more prescient, writing to his brother Alec in 1965 that he hoped to provide for his old age by selling his manuscripts and papers to the University of Texas...

...The pieces de resistance of the exhibit are Fe-liks Topolski's caricatures of the two men, one elongated and straining upward, the other rotund and bowlered...

...As Waugh said, when asked if his could be reproduced, he had no objection because he could not be identified from this image...

...They do indicate the provenance of the bust of Waugh, commissioned while he was in Yugoslavia in World War II as a means of providing a local sculptor with a way to survive...

...He did revise The End of the Affair to render one supposed miracle more equivocal, but his so-called Catholic novels, arguably his best, involve a view of sin and redemption that have to be explained to contemporary students in much the same painstaking fashion as one has to explain the gods in Homer...

...The two could not have foreseen that Texans would serve as permanent hosts to a huge body of material not only from Greene but from his friend Evelyn Waugh...

...That was in 1965...

...Also on display is the Classic Comic version of Crime and Punishment, given to Waugh by Greene's second long-term mistress Catherine Walston, which adds a suitable air of fantasy...

...Of course, some of Greene's "dream diaries" have been published, and the correspondence, much of it to his long-suffering and soon-abandoned wife Vivi-enne, has been quoted extensively...

...Robert Murray Davis is a Waugh scholar and the author of The Ornamental Hermit (Texas Tech University Press...

...Waugh, who lamented every aspect of the Second Vatican Council, seemed to be most clearly aware of this, noting in his preface to Sword of Honour that he "had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church...as it had existed for many centuries...

...Well, the Fates could have been cruder...