Dr. Charles Drazin on "The Oklahoma Kid"

After the Birthday Toast at the Graham Greene International Festival on the evening of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Charles Drazin spoke on "The Oklahoma Kid", or Holly Martins in the film of The Third Man (directed by Carol Reed, UK, 1949). He offered a sympathetic portrait of Holly Martins, the writer of "Westerns" and amateur investigator.

Harry Lime, Dr. Drazin argued, has stolen the show for sixty years. He enters the film two-thirds the way through and takes part in only one big dialogue, yet everyone talks about him. Like Harry, the city of Vienna is beautiful and seductive, and both take the audience’s attention away from Holly Martins. Holly is not the brightest pin in the box, and not a very efficient detective. He is painfully lacking in confidence, and anyone whose closest friend is Harry Lime is not well-off for friends. At the end of the film he is not lucky in love either. Sophisticated people do not recognise him. Some cannot remember his name, or call him by the wrong name. While Kurtz tries his hand at flattery, Sergeant Paine’s good opinion of Holly’s books is not enough to feed his low self-esteem. Holly says of himself: “I’m just a hack writer who drinks too much, and falls in love with girls.” He belongs to a gallery of losers, and does everything in the wrong way, yet he stands up for all of us in the best way. Vienna has an air of moral abdication, and the only people who take moral stands are those who are paid to do so. Others do not want to become involved. Anna Schmidt thinks that Harry is dead, and the question of whether he was murdered or not does not matter to her. However, Holly’s moral antenna is still intact, as his scenes with Crabbin (at the Hotel Sacher) and Lime (on the Great Wheel) show. So he is a very important character in the story. He thinks about right and wrong, and he makes moral choices. His faith in humanity is paradoxically justified by Anna’s rejection of him.

Dr. Drazin lectures in Film Studies at Queen Mary College in the University of London. His publications include In Search of the Third Man (1999), Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (2002), The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998) and The Man Who Outshone the Sun King: Ambition, Triumph and Treachery in the Reign of Louis XIV (2008).

Kate Adie praises the soldiers and remembers the foundlings

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the writer and journalist Kate Adie gave a highly professional and witty talk titled “Into Danger”, in which she spoke about her life and work as a reporter who, like Greene, ventured into difficult places often during a time of war.

Kate informed her attentive audience that journalists were assigned to their work on the same principle as a taxi driver finds his next fare. An event happens, and the first journalist in the queue is assigned to cover the story, whether it is the outbreak of war or the beginning of Crufts’ dog show.

She explained that being a journalist in a conflict zone was less dangerous than one might suppose. A journalist’s responsibility was to stay clear of trouble, and to return with her story on behalf of the public. She emphasised the outstanding courage which is demonstrated, for example, by the soldier whose task is to approach a bomb or mine and to defuse it.

She recalled that, as a journalist, she had looked at the lives of the foundlings of The Coram Foundation based in Berkhamsted on the site now occupied by Ashlyns School. These children were kept separate from the town, and in line with eighteenth century thinking they were taught to do simple work which was likely to be useful in service. She offers a brief history of foundlings in her book Nobody’s Child (2006).

Kate Adie is a former Chief News Correspondent to the BBC, and the author of Into Danger: Risking Your Life for Work (2008), Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War (Imperial War Museum, 2004) and The Kindness of Strangers: The Autobiography (2003). She was awarded the OBE in 1993, and won BAFTA’s Richard Dimbleby Award in 1990. She has honorary degrees from ten universities, is an Honorary Professor of Journalism at the University of Sunderland, and has three Honorary Fellowships.

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!