Greene & Waugh in Texas.

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. 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.

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. 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 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.

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. 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."

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. 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.

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. 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. 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 Vivienne, has been quoted extensively.

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. 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. The curators do not note that Waugh called the two pictures Reading for Honours and Reading for Pluck. 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. 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. The pieces de resistance of the exhibit are Feliks 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.

As the term "centennial" implies, Waugh and Greene must be seen in a particular historical context. 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." That was in 1965. Judging from Norman Sherry's biography, Greene seemed from fairly early on in his life to be a kind of cafeteria Catholic. 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.

Waugh and Greene in Texas? Well, the Fates could have been crueler.

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