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.