23rd Graham Greene International Festival

from The Old Berkhamstedian 2023

OB Contacts

23rd Graham Greene International Festival

The 23rd annual Festival was held at the School during Graham’s birthday of 2nd October. The Festival is a feast for those interested in the colourful life and times of Graham Greene.

People from home and abroad soak up the atmosphere where the future writer was born and where he went to school till “going up” to Balliol one hundred years ago this autumn of 2022.

The Festival covered Graham’s prodigious output spanning drama, films, lost stories, espionage and psychopaths. Festival speakers provided new insights, sometimes controversial or speculative.

Philip Hormbrey presented arguments and evidence that Greene’s earliest publication was ‘The Mill’ printed anonymously in The Old Berkhamstedian in December 1919 when Greene was fifteen years old. It is a Christmas ghost story, confidently well written. Hombrey pointed out that Greene’s elder brother Raymond took over editorship of the School Magazine in 1919. Greene would have known about Raymond’s attraction to ghost stories and could have written this story to appeal to his editor (as he was known to have done later in his life).

‘It is as if the Amish had taken over Las Vegas.’ Kenneth Tynan’s description of the effect on Havana nightlife of the Cuban Revolution was quoted by Festival Director Christopher Hull (Chester University) in his fascinating account of the making of the film Our Man in Havana. So little time had elapsed between the novel’s publication in October 1958 and the arrival of Carol Reed, Graham Greene and cast to film on location just four months following Fidel Castro’s overturning of the Batista regime on 1 January 1959. Graham Greene’s letter, published that month criticising the British government’s selling of weapons to Batista might have been in order to remind the new authorities of his part in preventing further sales to the dictator. Nevertheless, the filming was monitored by the new authorities and changes in the script were required. They were sensitive to the depiction of Cuban life. Ordinary Cubans should not be shown as exclusively harassing tourists (‘selling maracas and dancing the rhumba’) and that the viciousness of the Batista regime be conveyed. This latter requirement was difficult as the film was intended as a comedy.

Lucas Townsend, studying for a PhD at Roehampton University, identified the remarkable similarities between the character types, plot directions, and recurrent symbols across the works

of Ian Fleming and Greene. There are parallels between these two famous 20th Century writers: similar in age, although less so in educational achievement; both worked during World War II for different branches of British Intelligence. Their social circles interlinked rather than merged.

Townsend claimed that Fleming’s thriller Casino Royale could be construed as a reconstruction of Brighton Rock which, of course, Greene originally intended to be in the same genre. Could links really be drawn between the worlds of Pinkie Brown and James Bond? There are close similarities between the closing sentences of the two books which does lend weight to the argument that Casino Royale is, in effect, a homage to Greene’s pre-war novel.

Conversely, Townsend argued that there is a connection between Greene’s 1955 novella Loser Takes All, set in the casinos of Monte Carlo, and Fleming’s debut novel which had been a phenomenal best seller two years earlier. Was this somewhat lightweight novella, a timely acknowledgement of Fleming’s contribution to popular fiction. There is the gentle parodying of James Bond’s ingredients for the perfect dry martini in Loser Takes All. This kind of subtle joke seems entirely in keeping with Graham Greene’s character.

Professor David Wilson (leading criminologist and TV presenter) discussed the Buckinghamshire murder in 2015 of teacher Peter Farquhar by his former student Ben Field through the lens of Pinkie Brown, a seventeen-year-old psychopath in Brighton Rock. The relationship of Pinkie to Rose sums up that of Field to Peter Farquhar. Like Rose, Farquhar, who was desperate to give his love to someone, gave his love to a psychopath. Unlike Field who had multiple sexual partners, Pinkie is a virgin. However, he seduces Rose in order to ensure her silence. Just as Field used religion as a means to place himself at the heart of a community and to win Farquhar’s love, so too Pinkie uses religion to achieve Rose’s silence. Like Field to Farquhar, Pinkie is betrothed to Rose

in a civil ceremony, which they both know is a sin against the Holy Ghost. As a character who is prepared to kill repeatedly, Pinkie also possesses the trait of a serial killer. Literary psychopaths can act as a template both to understand the actions of murderers and to be used by them.

Professor Villar Flor delivered his lecture in Deans’ Hall via video link from Rioja, due to the tragic and unexpected death of his wife just prior to the Festival. His forthcoming book raises the intriguing possibility that Greene’s espionage work might have been behind his 15 trips around Spain with his old friend Father Durán: ‘my whisky priest’, the model for a literary character in what would become Monsignor Quixote

Other talks were given by Svetlana Dimcovic on Graham Greene’s plays; Mike Hill and Jon Wise on their three-volume Greene bibliography; Ian Williams on imagining Greene in the cyber age; and Richard Greene on his research on Greene. The films shown were Across the Bridge (1957), Monsignor Quixote (1985) and The Graham Greene Trilogy – Part 1: England Made Me (BBC Arena, 1993). Guided tours on Greene’s haunts in central London,

on escaping the School to Berkhamsted Common and growing up in the School were popular.

The Festival was presented by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust and, as always, receives the active support of the Greene family, several of whom attended this year’s events. It was sponsored by Greene King and supported by Berkhamsted School and Berkhamsted Town Council.

Giles Clark (Be ’72) Chair, Graham Greene Birthplace Trust