David Crystal goes 'careful' in "The Third Man"

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, Prof. David Crystal OBE (above) (University of Bangor) gave a lively and informative conference paper titled “Going Careful in The Third Man: a Linguistic Exploration”. His text was enriched by many dramatised readings and quotations delivered in lively and convincing style by his wife, Hilary (above left), and his son, Ben (above right).

David pointed out that, whenever Greene draws attention to a character’s language, we know that he will be a bad guy. If Greene points to a problem of communication, he is giving his characters a warning. Ambiguity is a linguistic clue. Telling lies about language is the ultimate sin in Greeneland. In all of Greene’s prose fiction there are very few language jokes, for language is no laughing matter.

In The Third Man there are over forty references to language, working like a leitmotif and stressing the theme of unintelligibility. Everywhere there are foreign accents, which work as ominous signs. Lack of understanding does not bode well, and Holly Martins’ lack of language is a problem for him --- and for others whom he meets. Style too leads to awkwardness. Names also provide a special sort of tension, and so too do mispronunciations, mis-namings and insults.

In the eighteen months or so since he had been engaged by the Festival director Dermot Gilvary to give this talk --- during which time David had been busy not only with writing but also with lectures and broadcasts all around the world, as we can see on his Blog --- he had read (or re-read) the complete novels and stories of Graham Greene. What a feat! And such dedication to research and scholarship was greatly appreciated by his large and enthusiastic audience.

At the Festival’s book stall the public was able to purchase copies of David’s latest book, other titles written by him. Not surprisingly, there was a cluster of devoted readers who queued to have their copies signed and to express their pleasure at hearing such a well researched and entertainingly delivered talk.

To open the batting on the Saturday afternoon at the Festival 2010 (i.e. 2nd October 2010), we will have Michael Brearley OBE, former England cricket captain, former President of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), and current President of the The British Psychoanalytical Society. His provisional title is “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”. More details will be published later.

"In Memoriam": Ken Sherwood (1935-2009)

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the Trustee former Festival director David Pearce gave a Tribute to Ken Sherwood, who died on Monday 6th April last.

Along with David, Ken was a co-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and with much regret David noted that this Festival, the twelfth, was the first one without Ken. David recalled that the Trust was Ken’s brainchild, that Ken had demonstrated an intuitive understanding of what works, and that he had helped to create an organisation which binds together the town of Berkhamsted, the School, Graham Greene the man and his family.

He explained that Ken’s energy had provided the essential momentum to the project, for example in establishing the charitable status of the Trust, in becoming the archivist and in founding the Friends. In these and in many other respects Ken enjoyed the unstinting help and support of his wife, Jenny.

The Guardian's Michael Billington looks at Graham Greene's plays

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Michael Billington (The Guardian's theatre critic) gave a conference paper titled “The Plays of Graham Greene”, in which he placed Greene's plays in their theatrical context.

He established that Greene began writing in the heyday of the well-made, West End play, and argued that, although The Living Room and The Complaisant Lover certainly deserve revival, Greene's predicament was his adherence to formal conventions which were being questioned by the work of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and the Royal Court school of playwrights. He suggested that Greene's plays are the work of a skilled craftsman, and he commented upon some of the differences in the ways that dramatists and novelists manage the problem of time.

Michael argued that in his fiction Greene also acknowledged the existence of rules, but in his novels he brilliantly extends the accepted conventions. Greene widened the map of modern British fiction and took it away from parochial concerns. He also raised questions about the novel’s inherent mendacity and the unreliability of the narrator.

Michael Billington is the author of State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (2007), Harold Pinter (2007) and other texts on plays and playwrights.

At the Festival 2010 on the evening of Friday 1st October at the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), Dr. Joe Spence (historian and Master of Dulwich College) will introduce a series of dramatised readings from Greene’s plays. More details will be announced later.

Chris Hull's New Research on "Our Man in Havana"

In an innovation at the Graham Greene International Festival the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust sponsored a conference paper on New Research on Graham Greene. In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK) on the morning of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Chris Hull (Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, Nottingham University) delivered the first talk in what the festival director Dermot Gilvary hopes will become a regular feature at the Festival.

In a paper titled “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s entertainment and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba” Chris told a large and fascinated audience that Our Man in Havana, which was published just four years before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, contained a fine example of Greene's renowned prescience of real events with its comic portrayal of an invented missile site based on designs for an Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner.

The novelist's research and writing of his satirical spy-fiction was simultaneous with the guerrilla campaign led by Fidel Castro in Cuba from 1956. In fact, Greene involved himself directly in real events, when he indirectly pressured the British government in late 1958 to curtail its sales of arms to the rebels' nemesis, the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista. Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution on 1st January 1959, in the press Greene castigated the Foreign Office for its “extraordinary ignorance of Cuban affairs”. Later, after the island's absorption into the Soviet orbit, British intelligence reports from Cuba read remarkably like excerpts from Greene's novel. Chris suggested that any ordinary visitor to that place might have provided more reliable information than the British government possessed, that newspapers were more informative and that diplomats in Havana were ineffective. He wondered if Greene’s prescience was “a sheer fluke” --- as the writer later claimed --- or if he did indeed possess a talent for prophecy.

The next talk in the New Research series will be given at the Festival 2010 by the Daily Telegraph journalist, BBC broadcaster and best-selling author Tim Butcher, who will focus on Greene’s time as a traveller in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1935 and as a spy in Sierra Leone in 1942-43. His provisional title is “Chasing the Devil: How Greene lost his heart to West Africa”. More details will be announced later.

Rebekah and Bill launch Creative Writing Awards at new workshops

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 a new and alternative event --- Creative Writing Workshops in prose and screenplay writing --- ran parallel with the main events of the Graham Greene International Festival. They were practical one-day courses for aspiring adult writers of all ages, and they appealed to those who had aspirations to write or to have some writing published or broadcast --- and also to those who were simply curious or who wanted a change from the mainstream of the Festival.

The leaders, Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (above, left) and Bill Ivory (above, right), are experienced and successful writers who willingly shared their experiences and offered tips and guidance. They asked their participants to write to particular purposes, and they helped them to look positively and critically at what they had written on the day. They also gave them valuable insights into the lives of professional writers.

Rebekah, who was educated at Oakham School and Cambridge, was awarded a Graham Greene Birthplace Trust grant in 2004 and was the co-founder and joint editor of Tales of the Decongested. She is a partner of Apis Books, and the published author of short stories and a novel.

Bill Ivory, who was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Nottingham in 2009, writes drama for BBC television, film and stage. He won The Edgar Allan Poe Award in New York presented by The Crime Writers Association of America for Best Television Drama Series.

The Festival director, Dermot Gilvary, commented, “I hope that the creative event has added a fresh, strong and permanent element to the Festival, and one would like to think that Greene himself would have approved of the enterprise.”

At the Workshops another exciting aspect was added to the work of the Trust and the Festival, when Rebekah and Bill launched the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust Creative Writing Awards 2010. Members of the public --- including equally those who attended the Festival and those who did not--- were invited to submit creative writing pieces under one or more of the following headings: fiction writer, thriller writer, travel writer, screenplay writer, writer under twenty-one years of age, Berkhamsted School writer and Old Berkhamstedian writer.

Each entry must be written mostly in the English language. The word limit for each prose piece is eight hundred words. The limit for screenplay writers is four pages of text in a normal font size on A4 paper. The deadline for submission of entries is 1st April 2010. Entries must be typed, and sent on pdf files to the Awards’ Secretary: RGuy@berkhamstedschool.org

Prose writers must begin with the following line, and continue from there:
“A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….”

Screenplay writers must embed this line somewhere in their texts:
“A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….”

Full details of the Awards are also available on the website. Click here for a pdf version of the rules and practices.

Good luck to all you writers!

Vincent D'Onofrio stars in "Five Minutes, Mr. Welles"

At the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival the audience saw a remarkable thirty-minute film titled Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (Brooklyn Hazelhurst, USA, 2005).

This short film was directed by Vincent D’Onofrio (above, top) who acts the part of Orson Welles for the second time in his career. The actor is imagined struggling to learn his lines during filming of The Third Man. The only other character in the piece is Welles’ female assistant (played by Janine Thériault). She tries to help the actor, but, though the two appear to have been intimate, he suspects her of spying upon him on behalf of David O. Selznick. He doubts the quality of the lines which have been written for him for the scene on the Great Wheel at the Prater, but she reminds him that he has accepted his fee, so that he can work on Othello. The action is given urgency, as an off-set voice is heard to call “Five Minutes, Mr. Welles”, summoning him to his day’s work on the set.

The piece is filmed in black and white and located entirely within one claustrophobic room. With back lighting, silhouettes and tilted camera angles, the style of filming pays tribute to Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography for The Third Man and also to the techniques of Citizen Kane.

In addition to offering an interesting, if fictional, interpretation of Welles’ character, the film (which has only been screened previously at the Venice Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival) also speaks to us about artistic inspiration and creativity. Vincent D’Onofrio may be seen every week on television on Channel Five’s “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”.

The film was introduced by Dr. Brigitte Timmermann (above) who wrote insightfully about Orson Welles in her splendidly illustrated book The Third Man's Vienna (Shippen Rock, 2005).

The Festival director Dermot Gilvary acknowledged the great help which he received from Philip Farah (General Entertainment Company Inc., New York and Hollywood) in the arrangements for the screening of Five Minutes, Mr. Welles.

Cornelia Mayer plays Karas

At the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the celebrated Viennese zither teacher and player Cornelia Mayer entertained a large and appreciative audience, as she played a selection of compositions and arrangements by Anton Karas and other famous composers of zither music.

In the Hemel Hempstead Gazette the journalist Rita Knowles reviewed Cornelia’s performance with these words: “Throw away the impression that the zither is the instrument of choice for wine bars and parties. Cornelia showed us undreamed of nuances of sound, as she gave her recital of classical pieces, proving the zither truly an instrument of the salon or soirée.”

Peter Gieler, general secretary of the Anglo-Austrian Society, introduced the classical section of Cornelia’s concert. When the virtuoso musician progressed to the score of The Third Man, the historian and author, Dr. Brigitte Timmermann, (Vienna Walks and Talks) explained the development and variations of leitmotifs such as "The Harry Lime Theme" and "Anna Schmidt’s Music".

Though Anton Karas composed his film score without the aid of written music, playing as he watched the rushes of film, Cornelia has meticulously transcribed the notes to paper, and she hopes at some stage to record and to publish a complete musical score.

The Festival director Dermot Gilvary thanked the Anglo-Austrian Society for its generous sponsorship of Cornelia’s appearances.

Prof. François Gallix examines "The Empty Chair"

In a late addition to the programme on the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (UK), Professor François Gallix (left) (University of the Sorbonne, Paris) gave a short talk on his fascinating discovery of Greene’s previously unknown, unfinished and unpublished manuscript, “The Empty Chair”.

Prof. Gallix informed the Festival that he had found fifty-six hand-written pages in Box 12, Folder 2 at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Austin, Texas (USA). After he had transcribed the 22,000 words to computer (creating seventy pages of typescript), he approached the author’s children, Francis Greene (who looks after his father’s literary estate) and Caroline Bourget for permission to publish.

In a literary game the first chapter was published anonymously on 12th December 2008, as readers of The Times (London, UK) were given the full chapter and this invitation: “An undisputed great of British literature wrote this newly discovered gem. Can you play literary detective, and work out who the author is?”

The game proved to be difficult, even for the experts, as “The Empty Chair” was written in the style of --- and as a tribute to --- Agatha Christie. There were only three readers who gave correct answers, and each was rewarded with a bottle of champagne!

Prof. Gallix revealed that the final sentence is unfinished, and that there are various possibilities about how the story might end. He also considered that readers can see how Greene’s writing strategy might develop with respect to his sense of dialogue, the gestures of his characters, the audacity of his comparisons, the many allusions to theatre and the references to the actor who played Macbeth. He noted that “The Empty Chair” was the title of the first chapter, that the novella itself has no title of its own, that there were some inconsistencies in the names or spellings of names of characters, and that Greene himself was only twenty-two when he wrote this story.

In mid-July 2009 the first chapter of “The Empty Chair” was published by Strand magazine, which will publish the other four chapters in successive quarterly editions.

The local journalist Louisa Felton (above, right) of the Hemel Hempstead Gazette, who contacted Prof. Gallix for some advance news in August, also recorded an interview with the French scholar, while he was in town during the Festival, and her text was published with photographs in her newspaper.

Fr. Mark Bosco SJ on "The End of the Affair" and Catholic Literary Modernism

On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J., gave a most thoughtful conference paper on “Greene: Catholic Literary Modernist”, and drew stimulating questions from his attentive audience.

He argued that Catholicism had been a minority tradition in England until Cardinal John Newman and the re-establishment, which provided opportunities --- though they had enemies to the left and right --- for English intellectuals and converts, such as Chesterton, Knox and Sitwell, and such as Greene and Waugh, for Catholicism offered a way to be Modern. In The End of the Affair Greene offered a vision of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God in his most persistently theological novel.

Fr. Bosco teaches in the Departments of English and Theology and is Director of Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. He is reputed to be the most eminent scholar of Greene in the USA, and he is the author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005).

Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. Greene's early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels", for he not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but he also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In his book Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. In his review of Mark's text Albert Gelpi, Emeritus Professor of English, Stanford University (California), commented that his argument became "utterly convincing" because of "his richly nuanced reading of the novels".

Mark Bosco also wrote the introduction to the edition of The Honorary Consul for the Penguin Classics series in 2008.

Tom Aitken on Greene and Rolfe, Two Spoiled Priests

On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Town Hall (Berkhamsted, UK) Tom Aitken gave a fascinating talk to the Graham Greene International Festival on the title “Eccentric Catholics; Graham Greene and Frederick Rolfe as Spoiled Priests”.

Beginning with definitions of "Spoiled Priests", Tom enlightened and entertaining in a witty and erudite paper, in which he mingled analysis and narration, argument and quotation, fact and anecdote concerning sin, guilt, faith, doubt, depair and hope.

Tom’s research led him to the mid-1930s, when Greene reviewed a biography of a man who styled himself, according to circumstances as either Frederick, Baron Corvo or Fr. Rolfe. In 1904, the year of Greene’s birth. Corvo/Rolfe had published his best-known novel, Hadrian the Seventh. This text took the outline of his own life, and turned it into possibly the most outrageous, but possibly the best, egocentric paranoid fantasy ever written. In it, a twice-rejected candidate for the priesthood is plucked from a life of embittered, anonymous poverty and becomes, in rapid succession, a priest, then Pope. In Rolfe Greene had found a man whose Catholicism was even more eccentric than his own. His faith lay in liturgy rather than doctrine. Given the smallest excuse, he would explain at length the significance of a button on a priest’s cassock, the shape of the traditional mitre, the use of a certain dye for the cardinal’s red robe and other details of which most Catholics are ignorant. He was also capable of borrowing and never repaying large sums of money and of abusing in vile terms anyone foolish enough to help him. During the final period of his life he became virtually a squatter in Venice, conducting graphically described homosexual affairs with young "gondolieri".

Greene was transfixed: “These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the starving pander on the Lido and a man born for the church”. Between these bounds, between Paradise and the Inferno, he turned back and forth, victim of his own “devilish pride which would not accept even Heaven, except on his own terms”. Greene’s fascination with Rolfe’s mixture of piety and sheer nastiness is thought by some to have given Greene the germ of Pinkie in Brighton Rock --- along with other echoes and resonances throughout the fiction.

Tom, who is a favourite speaker at the Festival, became a freelance writer in the early Eighties, and has published articles, reviews and obituaries for various newspapers and magazines, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Charleston Magazine.

Rod Mengham reads Five Short Stories by Graham Greene

Dr. Rod Mengham (Fellow and Director of Studies in English, Jesus College, Cambridge), who specialises in the study of nineteenth and twentieth century English Literature, has published on Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry Green and others. He has a particular affinity for the literature of the 1930s and '40s, and in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK), on Friday 2nd October 2009 he delivered a conference paper to the Graham Greene International Festival on five short stories by Greene. Four were written in the 30s, and one in 1940.

In “I Spy” Rod found an abiding interest in espionage --- surveillance and observation --- as a child’s mind resolves questions of loyalty and betrayal. He saw emulation and mimicry in “A Day Saved”, which combines the mundane and the menacing, and he identified confused identity along with loyalty and betrayal in “Brother” and “The Basement Room”. He found that at the beginning of the war Greene returned to these preoccupations in “The Lieutenant Died Last”, as he imagined Nazi uniforms in an English pub and a battle in an English country house.

Rod’s talk was distinguished by the closeness of his reading of the chosen texts, the meticulous quality of his argument, and the mellifluousness of his delivery.

Jeremy Lewis on "The Other Greenes"

On Friday 2nd October 2009 in the Town Hall (top right) Berkhamsted (UK), Jeremy Lewis (right) opened the first day of informal talks and conference papers at the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival. A writer, editor and historian, Jeremy is currently writing a book (to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2010) on the Greene family. He revealed some of his fascinating research in a highly informative talk, as he declaimed urbanely without notes, demonstrating encyclopaedic knowledge of his field coupled with wise and sympathetic understanding of his characters on both sides of the family tree --- “The Intellectual Greenes” and “The Hall Greenes”.

Before he introduced Jeremy Lewis to his avid listeners, the audience cheered, as festival director, Dermot Gilvary, reminisced that in Berkhamsted School on the morning of this same date in October Graham Greene was born --- one hundred and five years earlier --- in the year 1904.

Greene Festival celebrates The Third Man's Sixtieth Anniversary at The Rex

On Thursday 1st October 2009 in front of a full house in the beautiful art deco environment of The Rex Cinema, Berkhamsted (UK), the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival began its celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the release of The Third Man in the UK by screening the classic thriller, which was written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed. The film was introduced by Peter Mikl (above), the director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, and preceded by the gorgeous harmonies of Cornelia Mayer (above centre), the celebrated Viennese zither player, as she gave a short selection of popular film scores composed by Austrians.

Creative Writing Award for Berkhamstedians

At the opening event of the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (top right) launched the competition for the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust's Creative Writing Award 2010 for any writer from Berkhamsted School. In a dynamic and interactive workshop organised by Rachael Guy, the School Librarian, and supported by the School's English Department, Rebekah was assisted by Creina Mansfield (University of Manchester) and David Strickland (University of East Anglia), as each gave advice on creative writing and tips on how to prepare entries for the competition. Writers may offer a prose text or a screenplay. For prose writers the prescribed first words of the story must be: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….” For screenwriters the same words must be embedded somewhere in the text. The closing date for receipt of entries is 1st April 2010. The complete rules of the competition are posted on the Trust's website, and writers may discuss their work on the Facebook page named Creative Writers and Graham Greene.

Festival 2009: Amendments to the Programme

On Thursday 1st October at The Rex Cinema Peter Mikl (Austrian Cultural Forum) will introduce the screening of The Third Man, in place of the Austrian Ambassador.

On Friday 2nd October at 4.50pm at the Town Hall Prof. François Gallix will talk about his recent discovery of Greene's unfinished, unpublished manuscript "The Empty Chair".

On Friday 2nd October at the Civic Centre at 9.00pm Dr. Brigitte Timmermann will introduce the screening of Five Minutes, Mr. Welles with some thoughts on the actor Orson Welles, who played Harry Lime so memorably.

"The Empty Chair" at Graham Greene International Festival 2009

At the 2009 Festival, Prof. François Gallix (Sorbonne, Paris) will give a twenty-minute introduction to his discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript “The Empty Chair” at 4.50pm on Friday 2nd October in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK).

Prof. Gallix’s words will follow the published afternoon programme, which includes talks by Tom Aitken (St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, UK) and Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J. (Loyola University, Chicago, USA).

Following last month's publication of the first chapter of five in the monthly serialization of "The Empty Chair" in Strand magazine, Prof. Gallix was recently interviewed by Marijke Peters on Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Click here to read Miss Peters’ article and to listen to her interview.

Click here to listen again to the interview on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme (broadcast on 27th July 2009), when Andrew Gulli (managing editor, Strand) and Prof. Cedric Watts (Sussex Univerity) were interviewed.

Prof. Gallix will speak at greater length upon Greene's unpublished work in a full talk at the Festival in 2010, by which time each of the five chapters of "The Empty Chair" will have been published.

Click here to read Alison Flood's article on "The Empty Chair" in "The Guardian" newspaper.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide investigates "The Empty Chair"

Greene’s avid readers will be well aware that Prof. François Gallix’s discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript "The Empty Chair" (1926) is being issued in five monthly episodes by Strand magazine.

Recently Prof. Gallix was interviewed by Marijke Peters on Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW), and subsequently she wrote about Greene and Gallix for RNW's website.

Click here to read Miss Peters’ article and to listen to her interview, which lasts for 3 minutes and 7 seconds.

BBC's Humphrey Hawksley's Journey Without Maps

Graham Greene has been much in the news recently, and, if you have missed anything by Humphrey Hawksley (BBC World Affairs Correspondent) about West Africa, here is your chance to catch up.

Greene's Journey without Maps (1935) follows the writer’s journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia. He ran into drunken politicians, war lords, Christian missionaries, secret societies and chiefs with total power over their villages. The book questions the intentions of the West in Africa, and asks overarching questions. What were the whites --- as Greene then called the West --- actually doing there? Were they destined to failure? And would Africa always have the last “say”? In the last ten years --- with Britain taking the lead --- the West has intervened in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Humphrey Hawksley has retraced Greene's journey and reported on whether eighty years later the West's presence in Africa has changed, and to see what has changed and what has not.

Click here to listen again to Humphrey Hawksley’s report which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday 30th July 2009. The recording is timed at 8.45am, and lasts for 3 minutes 46 seconds.

Click here to watch Humphrey Hawksley’s film “Dancing with the Devil” in the series “Our World”. The film has been televised at various times this weekend on BBC News 24 and previously on BBC America.

Click here to read the report on the BBC news website.

Click here to view the website of Humphrey Hawksley, who may be able to visit the Graham Greene International Festival in October 2010, if his schedule permits.

"Empty Chair": Greene's incomplete "whodunit"

The first chapter of an unfinished Graham Greene novel Empty Chair has been published by Strand magazine. Andrew Gulli (Managing Editor of Strand) and Professor Cedric Watts (Sussex University) discussed the recently discovered novella this morning on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme.

The manuscript, which was written in 1926 when the writer was aged 22, was recently found in the vaults of a university in Texas, and the 22,000 words of its five chapters have been transcribed by Prof. François Gallix (University of the Sorbonne, Paris).

To hear the broadcast again, just click the link here.

Cedric Watts adds that "Empty Chair is remarkably interesting with all sorts of anticipations of later Greene, including not only a theologically-sophisticated Roman Catholic priest but also a fishy and chubby character called Chub". Readers will remember that 1926 was the year in which Greene was converted to Catholicism after a period of instruction from a priest.

Humphrey Hawksley's Journey Without Maps

On Thursday 30th July 2009 from 11.00am to 11.30am BBC Radio 4 will broadcast “A Journey Without Maps” the third of nine programmes in its series “Crossing Continents”, as Humphrey Hawksley retraces the extraordinary journey undertaken on foot by Graham Greene from Sierra Leone across Liberia in 1935. He feasts on sardines and luncheon meat, meets the lightning makers and devil dancers and is involved in a near-fatal car crash. The reporter asks, “How has West Africa changed? Is it better or worse than it was seventy years ago?”

Humphrey Hawksley is a leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs. For more than twenty years he has reported on key trends, events and conflicts from all over the world, including Kosovo, Iraq, and Sri Lanka, from where he was expelled while covering the civil war. From 1990 he was based in Hong Kong, and in 1994 moved to Beijing to open the BBC's first television bureau in China.

He has written various novels, including Red Spirit (2001), The Third World War (2003) and Security Breach (which was first published as The History Book, and reprinted in 2008).

The photograph shows Humphrey at Pendembu Station in Sierra Leone with his copy of Greene’s novel Journey without Maps (1936), and you can learn more about his work and travels on his Blog:
http://www.humphreyhawksley.com/blog/

Dr. Chris Hull: Our Man in Havana

Dr. Chris Hull will speak to the Festival at 9.30am on Saturday 3rd October 2009 on the topic of "Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the Reality of British Diplomacy in Cuba". He is based at the University of Nottingham (UK), and his research, which focuses on the history of Anglo-Cuban relations from 1898 to 1964, offers an alternative to the plethora of historical studies undertaken along the Washington-Havana axis. Chris studied in Cuba for five months in 1997-98, where he witnessed both Che Guevara’s funeral (after the revolutionary’s remains were discovered and repatriated from Bolivia) and the visit of Pope John Paul II. His academic research has taken him to Cuba and the United States, but predominantly to the National Archives at Kew Gardens.

Chris’ talk marks the launch of what we hope will become an annual event, namely a talk on New Research on Graham Greene sponsored by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust.

"Five Minutes, Mr. Welles"

At the Graham Greene International Festival on Friday 2nd October 2009 in the Civic Centre (Berkhamsted, UK), you can see a remarkable thirty-minute film titled Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (Brooklyn Hazelhurst, USA, 2005), starring Vincent D'Onofrio (above, seated on set) (who also directed the piece) and Janine Thériault (below).

Brigitte Timmermann on BBC Radio 4

This morning on BBC Radio 4 in a thirty-minute programme titled "Vienna and the Shadow of The Third Man" Dr. Brigitte Timmermann uncovered Graham Greene's Vienna, and took us in the footsteps of the classic thriller sixty years on from its release.

Walking through the city, she tells stories which have fascinated generations of film buffs, from the role of Soviet master spy Kim Philby to tales of Sir Carol Reed's and Graham Greene's late night visits to Vienna's seediest bars.

With the help of the directors of The Third Man Museum in Vienna (seen on the left in the photograph), Brigitte explores Vienna's hidden history and examines why The Third Man was initially unpopular in the city which inspired it.

Brigitte (seen in the centre of the photograph above) is well known in Berkhamsted as a Friend of the Festival and also as a historian and tour guide in Vienna.

The programme is available to listen to again on BBC iPlayer until 12:02pm Tuesday 9th June 2009. You may see and read more about The Third Man Museum at its website.

Kate Adie, OBE

Kate Adie, OBE, former Chief News Correspondent to the BBC, will speak to the Festival at 3.30pm on Saturday 3rd October 2009. Like Graham Greene who began his working life as a journalist and who visited war zones as a reporter, Kate is famous for her willingness to take personal risks in the interests of telling the truth about a story. The title of her talk will be Into Danger, which picks up the first two words of the title of her autobiographical book Into Danger: Risking Your Life for Work which was published last year. Kate's talk may allude to the similarities between her own life and the situations in which Greene found himself, but it will focus upon her own work.

Comments

If you wish to post a comment on this Blog, you need to register and to create a Google account for yourself.

The web address below should lead you to the right place:

http://www.blogger.com/signup.g

Prof. David Crystal, OBE

The renowned linguist and author of more than a hundred published books including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (second edition, 2003), Prof. David Crystal, OBE, will talk to the Graham Greene International Festival at 2.00pm on Saturday 3rd October 2009. David is a very witty and entertaining speaker, and in addition to lecturing all over the world he has made many radio and television appearances. As a great fan of The Third Man, he has chosen to speak on the title "Going Careful in The Third Man: a linguistic exploration".

Festival 2009

At the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (England, UK) from 1st to 4th October 2009 we shall celebrate once again the life and work of the writer during a four-day festival of talks, lectures, films, exhibitions and social events.

In particular, we will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the UK release of the classic "film noir" The Third Man (starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, photography by Robert Krasker, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed). The film won the "Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival, and Robert Krasker received an Academy Award for Best Cinematographer. Many people consider it to be the best British film ever made.

The film will be screened at 7.30pm on Thursday 1st October 2009 at The Rex, which is an extremely popular and very beautiful art deco cinema in the centre of Berkhamsted.

Full details of the Festival 2009 are now available on our website:

http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/

Ken Sherwood

Ken Sherwood, who was a co-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust and the annual Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (England, UK), died in the early hours of Monday 6th April 2009.

His Funeral Service will be held at 1.30pm on Friday 17th April 2009 at Sunnyside Church, Ivy House Lane, Berkhamsted, HP4 2PP.

Ken Sherwood

Friends of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust will be saddened to hear that Ken Sherwood, a co-founder of the Trust and the International Festival, died this morning. He had been ill for some time. R.I.P.

Festival, Website, Facebook & Blog

The Graham Greene International Festival takes place at the author's home town, Berkhamsted (England, UK). The dates usually include the 2nd October which was the date of the writer's birth. Many of the events take place in Berkhamsted School, where his father was the Headmaster, and where he studied as a schoolboy.

The Festival is an ideal opportunity to meet other enthusiastic readers of Greene, and to speak to distinguished writers and academics in the field of Greene scholarship.

The 2009 programme may be seen online at: http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/

The printed Handbook will soon be available.

You are welcome to contact other friends of the Festival through our Facebook page, and to speak to other Greene fans by posting a message on this Blog.