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.