First edition. 8vo. Blue cloth, lettered in gilt, in pictorial dustwrapper. Author's presentation copy, inscribed to the front endpaper to his friend and fellow novelist, Graham Greene, "Graham a bad book for a good friend from Evelyn Sept 2nd 1952". Greene's library bookplate to the front pastedown.With an undated autograph postcard loosely laid in (presumably to Greene, apparently offering some tax advice), "Another thing you can do. If you want a lump sum. Borrow it from bank or publishers (free of tax) offering in return the yearly allowance from your US publishers. E" A near fine copy in a very good dustwrapper which shows a little chipping to the spine ends. Housed in chemise and quarter morocco slipcase.

An exceptional association copy between two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Waugh and Greene were contemporaries at Oxford though not friends at the time. They became acquainted around 1937 when Greene was editor of Night and Day and Waugh a contributor. Although of differing social and political outlooks, they became ardent admirers of one another's work. Of The Heart of The Matter, Waugh, normally a waspish reviewer wrote, "...of Mr Graham Greene alone among contemporary writers one can say without affectation that his breaking silence with a new serious novel is a literary event... [He] is a story-teller of genius."
Both were late converts to Catholicism and both viewed their faith from different standpoints. Eventually mutual admiration grew to mutual affection. Greene wrote, shortly after Waugh's death in 1966,
"But those who have built Evelyn up as a sort of sacred monster have left out the other side: they have ignored the man who have up from work which was essential to him to stay with the dying and no longer amusing Ronald Knox in the kind of hotel and the kind of resort he hated, who attended the deathbed of his friend Alfred Duggan and against all obstacles brought him the help he needed. When I come to die, I shall wish he [Waugh] were beside me, for he would give me no easy comfort. Our politics were a hundred miles apart and he regarded my Catholicism as heretical. What indeed had made us friends? He wrote to me in October 1952, 'I am just completing my forty-ninth year. You are just beginning yours. It is the grand climacteric which sets the course of the rest of one's life, I am told. It has been a year of lost friends for me. Not by death but by wear and tear. Our friendship started rather late. Pray God it lasts.' It did." (The Ways of Escape)
Men at Arms is the first of Waugh's acclaimed Sword of Honour Trilogy and, in spite of the reservations of Waugh's inscription, the Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952.

Stock ID: 35914