Graham Greene’s personal background is strikingly similar to Evelyn Waugh. Both were born to parents of the hardy Edwardian stock. Greene, like Waugh, had an unhappy youth, and apparently attempted suicide early in life. In 1926, after graduating from Oxford, he began a career in journalism. In one of his film reviews he referred derogatorily to Catholic dogmas, and a young woman by the name of Vivian Dayrell-Browning wrote to correct him about the finer points of doctrine. 
As is often the case with young intellectuals, Greene was impressed by the wit and eagerness of the girl. They were soon engaged. This, naturally, posed a problem for the atheist Greene, and he thought it would be only fair of him “at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs” of his new fiancée. He began receiving instruction from a certain Father Trollope, “a very tall and very fat man with big smooth jowls which looked as though they had never needed a razor.” According to Greene, Trollope was everything his private caricature of the Church had taught him to hate. Yet, over time, Greene began to experience at least an intellectual sympathy to the Church’s teaching, if not an emotional one. He fought to defend his atheism as if it were “a fight for personal survival,” but after a few weeks gave up the struggle and “became convinced of the probably existence of something we call God."
Greene’s personal faith is a matter for later examination. Yet, at the outset of his literary career, he is very much in the same religious position as his counterpart, Evelyn Waugh. However, there is one marked difference. Waugh was both a Catholic and a conservative. Greene can hardly be said to share the latter attribute. Waugh’s conservatism can at times make Waugh seem a moralist or a curmudgeon. It might even be possible to view his attacks on modern life as stemming from a traditionalism rather than a true piety or religious conviction. Reviewers made much of his oblique language describing the sexual act. When Charles Ryder first makes adulterous love to Julia Flyte, Waugh how Ryder approached her “as her lover… made free of her narrow loins… while the waves still broke and thundered on the prow.” No lurid details ensue; but the point it taken. Waugh’s contemporary, Graham Greene, was not nearly so discreet—nor a traditionalist by any common definition.
Greene and Waugh maintained a long correspondence and friendship with each other. Both were Catholic converts in early adulthood; both were often preoccupied with theological concerns in their writings; both had a dark perspective on the modern world around them. Yet, at the same time, Greene had a very divergent perspective on the Catholic Church and its operations in the world. He also, by comparison, makes Waugh appear Puritanical regarding sex.
Critic Michael Gorra believes that Greene had Brideshead Revisited in mind (perhaps as an antitype) while writing his novel, The End of the Affair. In 1950, Greene wrote how some of his revisions to his forthcoming novel included “a few ‘narrow loins’ cuts,” in reference to Waugh’s obliqueness in describing the sexual act. In contrast, Gorra points out how “Greene’s writing own about sex would be far more direct,” with its vocal orgasms and allusions to oral sex. Still, despite Greene’s proclivity toward more lurid prose, both Brideshead Revisited and The End of the Affair contain many parallels. Most importantly, both tell the story of religious conviction within a modern world concerned only with momentary pleasure. The divergent ways in which Waugh and Greene tell this story is what must attract our interest.
