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A publisher writes: Hmm, I should perhaps say something in defence of our ignoble profession. From our side of the desk, we are overladen with submissions, most of which are of too poor quality to pursue, but each one still needing a reply. The ones that are worth pursuing often come without any thought to marketing, and we never use the word ‘publishing’ without it being followed by ‘and marketing’. Once in a while we will come across a submission that is worth pursuing on all fronts and then find it is unfundable. And funding these days is the big issue. With the book trade buying at 50% discount on the one hand and using the best colour reproduction possibilities on the other, there are simply losses to be made publishing and marketing illustrated non-fiction. Going down the digital route as Patrick is doing is a valid alternative, but one needs to be awfully careful not to end up with a garage full of unsold and unsellable books. If one plays one’s cards right one can have one’s cake and eat it, if that’s not moxing mitaphors, by ‘self-publishing’ with a proper publisher, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Good luck to all authors and artists out there; and good luck to all publishers and marketers too!

This all sounds depressingly familiar, Patrick, not that I have such a wide and long experience of the commercial publishing racket as yourself. My encounter with it came as a shock after years of working for a small friendly firm which published translations from Russian largely as a labour of love. Apart from downright crooks (and there are some of those), for a large number of those involved the power they wield seems to have gone to their head. Best to think of such self-proclaimed ‘gatekeepers’ perhaps as jobsworths in peaked caps who get a kick from turning people away. There are exceptions of course, and I hope you do succeed in finding the odd jewel or two among the dross. Re ‘marketing storm’ (should you go for self-publishing), a fruitful approach I found was emails targeted at university and other specialist libraries, as well as selected university staff in relevant fields (in your case, Russian depts., Theatre Studies, WW1 studies, etc.) identified from their online academic profiles. All time-consuming, but at least that way one can guarantee sales to libraries. The American academic market is particularly vast, of course. Anyway, the best of luck whichever route you take.

Dear Duke, it’s great to hear from you again, and thank you so much for your good luck, which we shall certainly need! The cost of good digital publishing has greatly fallen over here (and our printers seem to be the best in the business), but I’m afraid at the moment the ‘limited edition’ (hardback) will not be less than £30… We think we can afford the two marketing storms, because (a) I don’t have to cost my time, (b) we already have a Web presence and can develop that, (c) Armistice 2018 is a last opportunity for a long time. In a way, the financial problem is going to be if we sell out the hardback edition by December 2018 (unlikely) and demand for it is such that have to reprint before going to Kindle/paperback. All best as ever, Patrick

Hi Patrick,
At the end of your piece, you mention self-publishing and creating a “marketing storm,” but can you afford one such storm, much less two? I believe most self-publishers simply deliver a supply of books to your house. Anyway, good luck. Cheers, Duke

I love it! You have given me an idea for the Christmas post, Jenny! Best, Patrick

Hello Patrick
Have you discussed with publishers a subtitle for your book?
Under “A writer goes to the war’ , you could have “Puppy left behind!” in Comic Sans size 36 -?

I’m looking forward to publication.
Best regards

I found this a very interesting piece. Congratulations. I think the memory of WWI as part of Britain’s whole ambivalent attitude towards Europe is a point well made. The roots of that attitude can undoubtedly be traced back long before WWI, but surely those feelings have been strengthened by that holocaust, as David Reynolds aptly describes it.

I am also fascinated by the parallels with American attitudes, especially the view that “We saved you twice”. Americans, of course, would include Britain in that statement. One wonders about the effect of a water barrier in helping create that separatist viewpoint in both countries, even though the bodies of water are vastly different. Incidentally, I am always struck by the power of the WWI memory in Britain, especially compared with the way the memory has faded in the US. I understand, of course, the huge difference in suffering and sacrifice between the two countries in that war, but still it is interesting, when in Britain, to remember what a God-awful thing WWI was.

Oh Harold!

Very many thanks Damian for answering my question so promptly and fully. I just went online to see where Wilfred Owen’s letters ended up – the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Library at the University of Texas. Their webpage says, ‘many of the letters to the Owen family have the deletions made by Harold Owen and noted in the Collected Letters.’ Thrown on the fire then, most likely… and yet…. and yet… what a holy grail those missing sheets would be!

I don’t suppose Harold Owen ever regretted his instinctive protection of his elder brother’s reputation. But like you, I have regrets… A regular guest at our family table as I grew up was an elderly and lonely neighbour called George. His 80th birthday coincided with my father’s 50th, so he must have turned 18 in August 1916. “George fought on the Somme you know,” said my mother regularly, “you ought to ask him about it.” But I never did.

And hello to you Clare; I’m delighted to reply to your question–as far as I’m able. The information about the ‘half sheet missing’ from this letter comes from Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters (ed. Julian Bell, Oxford, 1985), p. 283. This letter to his mother (one of 600 he wrote her) is dated Tuesday ?16 October 1917. Bell’s selection is drawn from the Collected Letters, edited by Harold Owen, Owen’s younger brother, and Julian Bell in 1967 (which I have not consulted).

The regrettable fact about omissions from Owen’s letters is that Harold Owen was himself responsible for many of the excisions; made one understands to protect Owen’s reputation–from what one can only guess. Biographers Jon Stallworthy and Dominic Hibberd take him to task for this (Hibberd more severely). Whether this ‘missing’ half page comes into this category, I really don’t know; though a real Owen scholar might.

For an edition of the poems, the most current is Stallworthy’s The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto, 1985), now in its 25th impression! Stallworthy’s Note to ‘Dulce…’ here (pp 117-8) includes the quotation from the letter to his mother, but makes no reference to the missing half page.

An autobiographical note to conclude. I very much regret the fact, now, that when I came to Manchester as a junior lecturer in the 1960s, early Owen critic Dennis Welland, who knew Harold Owen well, was then Professor of American Studies, and a very approachable character. But my own enthusiasm for Owen had not yet caught (though I remember well enough marking A level papers in the late 60s where ‘Dulce…’ was the text set for commentary), and so I missed out on a golden opportunity…to answer your question with more authority!

Hello Damian, may I ask a specific question about your tremendously interesting first comment on this post? I was fascinated to learn that Wilfred Owen wrote a letter to his mother, commenting on ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’… Rather, I was brought up short by the information that “half a page is missing after he repeats the words ‘Sweet! And decorous!’”

Surely this cannot be a coincidence! I believe officers censored their own letters. But did Mrs Owen find her son’s views about or details of the satanic evil of war simply too shocking to risk them being read by anyone else? Or did he express himself so beautifully that the rest of the page was given away as a keepsake to some careless family member? (If the answer is, as is likely, ‘I don’t know’, then do you have a hunch?)

Meanwhile Christmas is coming…. Is there an edition of Wilfred Owen’s poetry and letters that you would particularly recommend?

PM asks, ‘can emoji dissemble?’
The very idea makes one tremble;
The sulk and the smile
Are as plain as a dial,
But what would a Janus resemble?

Interesting comments, Patrick, on how coverage of WW1 commemoration has differed in Britain and continental Europe. I started to wonder why British coverage has not given much visibility to other nations’ commemorations of this globally significant event.

That in itself talks to the Brexit story! (Here we are, isolated and protecting our culture, including our reverence for the world wars…)

I do think you are onto something regarding attitude to the war and Brexit. In Britain we think of ourselves as “on the right side” and “winners”. Other EU countries have long and more recent experience of shifting borders, and are surely more careful to respect each other’s perhaps blotchy histories.

I remember the conversation I had with a German on 8 November 1989. I was working in Berlin that week – I’m not going to make any pretence of being a Brexiteer, by the way. As you can imagine, the city was buzzing with expectation, though no-one knew that the Berlin Wall would be torn down the next day, and I also remember a Dutch person saying that the Germans were very excited but nothing would happen for a few weeks. The German’s view surprised me: he said that the rest of Europe was surely very worried about German reunification and he understood why; Germany would need to work with European neighbours to be able to reassure them.

It’s unfair to contrast the German’s careful (whilst still German-centric) attitude, with British attitudes to possible conflict. But I’m going to do that. It makes the Brexit vote more believable. No need to point out that I have only mixed with German academics and Europhiles, or that there are alternative newspapers to The Sun! Here goes with a description of how a widely read newspaper covered continental reluctance to join the 2003 Iraq war, provided by the BBC’s “’Le Soleil’ condemns ‘Chirac the worm’” from 20 February 2003:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2782393.stm
Enjoy. Whilst praying for an end to conflicts.

Patrick: I am not Latinist enough to follow in the furrow you cut, very neatly, between the perfect infinitive and imperfect infinitive constructions on Horace’s ‘mori’; but the way you use this to prise open the contradictory/complementary readings of this celebrated and oversimplified poem is I find admirable. (And it’s surely surprising that Heaney, who had to tread his own stepping stones carefully, couldn’t better negotiate the poem.) It seems to me that you manage to demonstrate how Owen succeeds in taking the quotation from Horace both ways: literally, in praise of one’s duty to fight for one’s country–‘I have my duty to perform towards War’ (18 Feb 1918)– and ironically, in the hallucinatory awareness of the dying this duty may exact. Defying those who trivialize and mechanize this duty, this difficult moral choice, Owen has his quote and eats it.

It is no doubt a matter of some frustration that in the letter to his mother of 17 October 1917, where he comments on this poem, half a page is missing after he repeats the words ‘Sweet! And decorous!’ with exclamation marks; but we owe the poem our own best (and unassisted) understanding. As Owen once concluded a letter to his mother which contains some harsh recollections, ‘I had meant this to be a consoling kind of letter; and if you read it rightly, it will prove so.’ (22 Feb 1918). Reading poems rightly is even more difficult (if not for Jesse Pope’s “Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times”, 1916); but an awareness, such as you demonstrate in your Post, of moral balance, ambiguity, and paradox, is an essential part of it. This habit of thought is evidenced, and supported, in another letter, from February 1918: ‘There is a point where prayer is indistinguishable from blasphemy. There is also a point where blasphemy is indistinguishable from prayer.’

It is also interesting, I think, that another letter which contains more of Owen’s self-contradiction (‘I hate washy pacifists as much as I hate whiskied prussianists’) ends with this observation: ‘The figure of Caliban at Somerset Place affects my imagination even more than the dainty Ariel.’ (2 October 1917) Don’t we hear behind this Keats’s famous declaration about the poetical character, which ‘has no character – it enjoys light and shade…It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation.’ (But not speculation in armaments, needless to say.)

Fair is foul, and foul is fair. For Owen, as for many (poets and others), war brought out almost inevitably what was best and worst in human beings. If Owen had a duty towards the War, he also had a duty towards poetry; which was to ensure that his witness was not blinkered like a war horse, but looked courageously both ways.

Thank you, Patrick, for your very helpful analysis of Owen’s poem. Thank you, Jim, for your reminder about J. M. Barrie. (And for introducing the emoji to Calderonia!) I find myself not so much comparing as contrasting. There is a world of difference between the noble self-sacrifice that may result from believing ‘the soil of Britain was worth dying for because certain values grew in it,’ and the careless self-centredness of embarking on a solo adventure from which nobody ever reports back. I followed the links to the related blog posts of September 1914 and March 1916 with interest. Patrick, I hope you won’t mind my observing that in the latter you would seem to have been mistaken when you wondered if George was suffering from ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’. According to Wikipedia, this refers to individuals who do not want to grow up, rather than those who think that ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure.’ (Although of course it is a characteristic of children that they cannot grasp the permanence of death.) There should though be a name for the alternative syndrome that George was surely suffering from – that seemingly ubiquitous Edwardian delusion that ‘to go to War [would] be an awfully big adventure’.

I’d be interested to know more about the Roman view of pro patria mori. But when I looked online it quickly became apparent that Horace’s famous line is now almost entirely owned by Owen. (Take note, anyone who believes that WW1 poets will forever maintain their present prominence in British culture and education. So they thought about Virgil & Co, a century ago.)

Googling J. M. Barrie was more fruitful. Although if I knew how to attach an emoji to a comment on WordPress, mine would be looking both startled and disapproving. I was curious as to whether Barrie conceived the screwed up eponymous hero of his most famous work before or after the First World War – and was engulfed by disturbing speculation about the playwright’s private life. Anyhow, Peter Pan was first performed on 27 December 1904. Did Kittie and George ever go to see it – perhaps with some friends’ children in tow? Did George and James ever meet? Did George have an opinion about Barrie’s 1913 knighthood? And Patrick, while you have been carrying out your exhaustive exploration of modern biography, have you encountered Piers Dudgeon’s Captivated?

That “To die for one’s country is a sweet and fitting thing”, presented in various forms in the above entry, is somewhat reminiscent of the J. M. Barrie “to die will be an awfully big adventure”, mentioned previously on Calderonia here and here.

Great to hear from you again, John! Thank you. It’s really encouraging that you are looking forward to reading the book; I’m intending to discuss your, G. Orwell’s, and my views on the orthodoxy of British publishers after December 15th, when the final decision’s been taken about how to get the book out in 2018. Of course, you are absolutely right about the Russian dream of ‘recapturing’ Constantinople as a result of the Gallipoli campaign. Alas, as we know the chances were thrown away long before the landings. But George, for instance, on his way to Gallipoli in May 1915, still believed that the British-French expeditionary force would join up with the Russians in Constantinople. That is one reason why he took with him a copy of Tolstoi’s Sebastopol Stories — ‘to brush up the lingo’, as he wrote Kittie…

Fascinating! I’m really looking forward to reading the book, Patrick. If Russia had been more successful militarily in WW1, is it not possible that the outcome feared by George in his letter of 1914 would have come about much earlier than it did? I seem to recall for instance reading somewhere that the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign was launched at least in part to help our ally achieve the Panslavist dream of recapturing Constantinople. And what an irony of history that – as indicated by that Russian in 1989 – the dream of a vast empire in the east of mainly ‘brother Slav’ nations was finally realised by none other than Stalin!

Thank you very much, Damian, for correcting the Christocentrism of my post. Yes, of course, the Egyptians had their cat-acombs! Although I see from the Web that eight million mummified dogs have also been found in Egyptian catacombs. But these were around the temple of the dog-headed God of death, Anubis. What I don’t know, of course, is whether the ‘value’ was projected onto the cats and dogs from their respective cat-goddess and dog-headed god, or the other way round. My impression from the subtlety of Egyptian cat-sculpture, though, is that the Egyptians were cat-people — they really understood the Cat. Whereas in Greek and Roman literature all I can think of is dogs…

I find the interplay between your father’s pedagogical disciplinarianism (the mind boggles Dotheboyswards!) and his failure with Nero completely hilarious. This relationship and the Life of Nero are surely begging to be immortalised in a 3000-word essay for, say, London Magazine?

Patrick: I hope you and your readers will forgive me for coming in rather late with a further comment on your cats and dogs (it has been raining comment, one might say, in a curious reversal of the metaphor).

My first thought, in response to your question as to why there are no cats’ cemeteries, was that of course there are–in Egypt, where the cat was revered as a symbol (even a goddess) of fruitfulness and maternity. Not only were cats therefore ritually mummified, and buried in special cemeteries (Herodotus records the existence of one such), but the Egyptians took things to a logical conclusion and mummified mice as well to accompany them on their journey into the afterlife. (I do not venture into the theological implications of all this).

Less of a dog person, I do however keep a special place for the dog Bendico from Lampedusa’s The Leopard. (The author insisted that ‘the dog Bendico is a very important character and is almost the key to the novel.’) Not only is the dog described with great affection and attention throughout the book–his energy, intelligence, and fidelity–but after the Prince’s death, his (deceased) dog is not exactly mummified but made into a rug by one of his sisters; and the novel is only allowed to reach its bleak and moving conclusion when, finally, this moth-eaten rug is thrown out of the window, and disintegrates in the air. Plenty of work for theologians as well as taxidermists here.

In the spirit of Greek theatre, where exhausting tragedy was followed by inspiriting farce, I cannot resist descending from an account of this most literary canine to the story of a demotic dog once owned by our family, in pre-Pinteresque Sidcup. My father ran a small private school in our large house, for close on thirty years, the accumulated anecdotes of which I have intended for years to put together (you better than most, Patrick, understand the delays and diversions). He was one has to say an old-fashioned disciplinarian; but the one living thing which escaped his discipline altogether was the dog–aptly named Nero–which, though amiable enough to those who respected his anarchic spirit, knew neither master nor limitation. On one of his explorations, he discovered Sidcup station, and thereafter took (so alarmed porters told us) to chasing trains; coming back on one occasion–like a Roman general showing his scars–with his coat singed by the live rail. But his career ended with less dignity than Bendico’s. One of our neighbours complained (justly) about his invasion of a chicken-run, and when the police arrived to check on this allegation the honest dog vomited feathers all over the mat. I cannot construct much of an afterlife here…

Having begun with an apology, I should end with another, hoping that this anecdote has not caused distress to any of your readers.

This is very interesting, Jenny. I agree, it’s so encouraging that the young have ‘ample levels of doubt’ about the Webo-sphere. Tempered in this area myself by Soviet media lies and disinformation, I confess my immediate reaction to the Pope-and-doggies story was ‘fake news!’. But does the story still tantalise by its suggestion that two very recent Popes could hold differing ‘truths’ about something that you would have thought had been decided doctrinally years ago? It is a bit worrying if one’s instant reaction to such a doctrinal difference is ‘it must be fake news’… Is that actually what the whole story was trying to provoke — doubt about papal infallibility?! ‘I think we should be told.’ Many many thanks. Patrick

Ah, I do like a ‘well-attested story’! Such stories need no investigation. It is a matter of personal choice as to which of them can become your personal baggage, shoring up your value system, or maybe illustrating your thoughts and feelings to others.

I guess it’s important to keep dates & exact names & locations out of the ‘well attested story’. Otherwise, you end up with FAKE NEWS! …which is how my daughters immediately labelled the Pope & Dog & Boy story, once debunked.

I doubt if any of my daughters will study Theology but it is good that they have ample levels of doubt about the petabytes of data swirling around them and their phones.

Ginger the Cat remains a pure story, of course. It perfectly illustrates lifelong loyalty, and the tolerance of friends to those who are different S:)

Give us today our daily dog meat.

I’m afraid this comment isn’t about dogs and cats, or even about George and Kittie; it is a question for John Polkinghorne. Your juxtaposition of theology and pet dogs throws up some unsettling parallels between those two reciprocally-loving relationships – God and Human – and Human and Dog.

• Faithful adoration on one side; all-powerful benevolence on the other.
• Simple rules. The Ten Commandments; Sit! Beg! Heel!
• Fawning; prayer.

The Bible teaches that humans are made ‘in the image’ of God. If John Polkinghorne could tell us why God needs humans, might that go some way to answer your question, why do dog owners need dogs?

Patrick – after chuckling aloud as I read your blog post, I got into an interesting discussion with savvy teen daughter Xan on Pope Francis’s recent pronouncement (so we both believed) that dogs can go to Heaven. We’d heard that he’d comforted a boy whose dog had died, but how specific was his remark to dogs as opposed to the rest of creation?

We did not get anywhere near the insightful analysis in your discussion with JP, but turned immediately to google.

Here is the boy and dog story: “Pope Francis says dogs can go to heaven” USA Today, 12th December 2014:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/12/12/pope-francis-dogs-can-go-to-heaven/20296955/
Awww. The main body of the article tells us: ‘During a recent public appearance, Francis comforted a boy whose dog had died, noting, “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”’

***BUT** at the top of the page is an addendum:
“Corrections & Clarifications: New information refutes reports Pope Francis said animals go to heaven. Those remarks were once made by Pope Paul VI. Reports also call into question whether John Paul II made remarks that animals have souls.”
Check out “Sorry, Fido. Pope Francis didn’t say pets go to heaven” USA Today, 13th December 2014:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/12/13/pope-francis-animals-heaven-debunked/20352275/
Apparently there was no boy bereaved of dog. This retraction examines the “trail of digital bread crumbs” that led to the “journalistic train wreck”, involving Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the British press, and The New York Times. It concludes that “There should have been warnings signs: Francis has frowned at the modern tendency to favor pets over people, and he has criticized the vast amounts of money spent by wealthy societies on animals even as children go hungry.”

Back on Patrick’s “why are there no cats’ cemeteries” theme, it was interesting to read “It’s a dog’s afterlife: Pope Francis hints that animals go to heaven” The Guardian, 27th November 2014:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/pope-francis-hints-animals-heaven
I have to say this article is blameless regarding the build-up of the boy and dog story, as it doesn’t mention it. It does state that Corriere della Sera, in their write-up of the pope’s public audience, is “in no doubt about [the pope’s] meaning”, quoting “the hope of salvation and eschatological beatitude to animals and the whole of creation”. But it says that “Others were not convinced”. It concludes: “it is unclear whether it will decide for once and all whether those who get to meet St Peter can expect to find a dog nearby lifting its leg on the pearly gates” thereby choosing to have both doggy title and conclusion.

Not too doggy is the official Catholic voice: “Pope Francis ‘did not say pets go to heaven” Catholic Herald, 15-Dec-2014:
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/12/15/pope-francis-did-not-say-pets-go-to-heaven/
Vatican commentators say, “There is no evidence that Francis repeated the words [of Pope Paul VI] during his public audience on November 26, as has been widely reported, nor was there was a boy mourning his dead dog.”

Xan was surprised that the dog and boy story is untrue. Of course, it lives on anyway. I can’t post a pic in this comment, but check out the featured image of blog entry “A heaven for all – Pope Francis has finally laid to rest the debate over whether or not animals can go to heaven” U.S.Catholic, 11-Feb-2016 ( http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201602/heaven-all-30553 ) to really feel the dogginess of the pets in Heaven idea.
Here’s a quote from the blog article: “This is a hugely important step for Fido and for those who love him. Thanks for Pope Francis and his love for animals (which is reflected in the name he chose to bear as pope) I can finally confidently say, with a comforted smile one my face, ‘all dogs go to heaven.’” And there is a lot of agreement in the many comments (as well as some regrettable hate for fellow humans, that Pope Francis would surely lament).

Well, Patrick has excellently summed up the difference in dogs and cats from ownership perspective : “It is difficult to deny, I think, that dogs want to dedicate their whole existence to their owners — they want to live and die inside their owners’ lives — whereas cats are only interested in manipulating their owners’ deluded belief that they, cats, wish to do the same.” So, perhaps not surprising that dogs win a cemetery spot more often than cats.

I’ll admit that I’m in a loyal and caring relationship with a dog myself. That doesn’t mean I enjoy sitting in a café with my canine family member while she barks enthusiastically at every other person and dog in the café. I quite see how Patrick has managed to keep a sense of perspective on dog-love, as presumably family activities were compromised quite a bit by a large dog who was even allowed to attend his birth. (Yes, that was the laugh-out-loud bit of the blog! Along with Ginger the Cat/Dog!)

I enjoyed your piece about cats and dogs, and share your view that the slavish dependence of dogs on their owners is not very appealing. We didn’t have pets at home, but we did once take in a Siamese cat inappropriately called Billy. It terrorised the local cats and it terrorised us. It settled on your lap quite companionably but if you tried to move, it stuck its claws into your shoulders. As cats go, it soon went.

Thank you. My original caption was perhaps an example of ‘biographer’s tunnel vision’, because I’d forgotten that most people would not know that ‘Kay’s Crib’ was the name of Kittie’s house (she renamed it thus in 1922; it had previously been ‘Hurst Cottage’). I would think Bunty is in an egg basket, or some sort of shopping basket, in which perhaps she was carried around when still a young dog. Obviously, she’s also got ‘her’ blanket there and ‘her’ brush. In most of the other shots, she is not posing so perfectly. We don’t know who took the photo.

When I came to post the tweet about this entry I was going to mention the dog is in a “basket” but I wasn’t sure, especially as the caption says “Kay’s Crib”. What is Bunty sitting in, here?

That’s the spirit! ‘Excelsior!’

Excellent post!

It gets me fired up about the book’s imminent publishing!

Wonderful, Damian, wonderful! Thank you very much. Your Comment vibrates with many deeply commiserative, even panicked, emails I have received following this post. I was, in fact, going to begin the post with that priceless French phrase Il ne faut pas exagérer, and perhaps I should have: for there are still those nine chances left… I confidently expect that ‘something will turn up’!

Patrick: exhausted all over again just by reading the summary you provide of your trial by publisher, I can’t surely be the only one to feel that this experience, and your alternately optimistic and disabused commentary on its unfolding, represents in itself something worth making into a book. Of course, you would have to find a publisher…

Further: with all the book prizes around, it’s time there was a prize for the best book not to find a publisher. Here, the only problem would be finding a suitably well informed panel of judges…

All the best with Plan B!

What a splendid post this is! Shimmering with enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of archives (well done that visitors’ book) – and reverberating with the satisfying clunk of puzzle pieces falling into place.

I have to admit that there have been times during the past three years when I have felt distinctly cross with Kittie Calderon. Somehow, your consistent presentation of her and George’s relationship as ‘symbiotic’ never quite rang true. Typing ‘symbio-’ into the Calderonia search-bar in order to check the veracity of this impression led me quickly and usefully to your post of 6 October 2016 – ‘Kittie Hamilton’ – where you enumerate the ‘issues’ that ‘the modern woman’ might have with Kittie. That woman does indeed sound remarkably like me, except, more than anything, I just wanted Kittie to be a bit more selfish [which word should be in italics, if not bold and capitals as well]. Your defence – that to ‘get her own life’ was impossible for her ‘kenotic personality’ – was unarguable, though depressing, and at the time I reluctantly accepted that Kittie was happy to be ‘like a doormat’ waiting for her husband and others to need her services. My frustration extended to Kittie’s relationship with Nina, which you described in that post as ‘entirely complement[ing]’ her marriage. To me it sometimes seemed sadly one-sided, with little evidence of Nina doing anything to reciprocate Kittie’s generous support with childcare.

But now… Hip Hip Hoo-bloody-ray!! The realisation that Kittie was bisexual does not feel like a tweak; it feels like a sea-change. SHE COULD BE SELFISH. For Archie to have protested like that, Kittie must have intimated that she would prefer to share the marital bed with Nina when the opportunity arose; similarly she must have made it clear to George that there would be times – whole weeks on end – when she’d like him not to be around. I am delighted to learn that Nina hurried to provide intimate physical comfort when Kittie was depressed. Even the childcare feels different. Might you now reconsider your statement (6 May 2015), that ‘Lesbia was not the child [Kittie] wished she and Nina had had’?

Incidentally, I recently followed the link you provided to your very first post on paradoxes (8 October 2016). Both then and a fortnight ago I was perplexed by George’s report of lunching with Kittie’s mother in 1899:

“Dear dear Kit, I led Mammy Ham on at lunch for the pure delight of paradoxes; I could not help talking of you. She thinks you will never marry. Women marry twice, but they never love deeply twice. You have loved so well, that you cannot love much again; and without loving (we were both agreed) you could never marry again. Dear darling woman. Do you know your own value?”

Perplexed, because I couldn’t see why such a clearly expressed opinion was a paradox at all. But now, I would be very interested to read your analysis of that conversation in the light of the subjects discussed in this post. Was Mrs Hamilton warning George that her daughter loved another? Or had Kittie and George been discussing as paradoxical the fact that one person could be in two exclusive relationships at once?

Is George’s ‘temperance mission entirely supported by brewery shares’ actually a paradox at all? The mission board can sell the shares whenever they wish – so their failure to put their money where their mouth is is surely nothing more than a case of out and out hypocrisy.

Indeed, is hypocrisy (from the point of view of a century later) just one more thing that puts us off the Edwardians? Those educated and liberal men who praised the abilities of women – but denied them the vote. And the wealthy and privileged women who campaigned for birth control – as a means of controlling the working classes. Or the military leaders who recruited men – and sent them off to die like cattle. All clichés of course, but…

Pondering on the relationship between the paradoxical and the hypocritical has given me a headache. Perhaps pure paradoxes can by definition never really exist in real life. Do they always have to be something else as well? We could say that George’s own life ended paradoxically – he wanted to write about the War, so off he went to fight, lost his life, and therefore couldn’t write about it. It may be a paradox, but more than anything, it is a tragedy.

P.S. I’m getting on so well with the Edwardian novel (now on chapter 4 of my second) that I’m starting to feel I could tackle anything. Is The Fountain ever performed? You have made me really want to go and see it!

Something I omitted is the much more accurate version that considers what happens when an object moves at close to the speed of light. Randall Munroe wrote a good article about this regarding a baseball.

The short version is that everything/everyone within a mile or so is destroyed, akin to a bomb detonation, and the destruction beyond that tails off a little, to the upset of those living within at least a 10 mile radius.

His model is for a baseball at 0.9c. For a cricket at 1.1c we have to assume an infinite quantity of energy and presumably the destruction of the entire universe – a big bang level of paradigm shift to sheer nothingness. I don’t know what happens. No-one does.

I believe “thought experiments” have always been a tool of science and understanding, and I don’t think they are particularly more “all the rage in science today” than they have been in the past. I have heard the phrase used extensively with no bias towards the modern day.

As an example, it has often been pointed out that humans understood the world was spherical long before “Christopher Columbus proved it” (as has occasionally been ignorantly taught in schools) and one reason is that ships “disappear downwards” as they are observed sailing to the horizon.

This is – in my opinion – a simple form of thought experiment. “What if the world were a ball? Would we observe ships disappearing downwards as they sailed to the horizon?” … “What if the world were flat? Wouldn’t ships just get smaller and smaller rather than disappearing downwards?”

If that seems a little weak and more like just plain reasoning than a true thought experiment, how about Plato’s The Republic? Outlining the effects and implications of his proposed hypothetical city-state Kallipolis is thought experiment on a grand scale!

As for the cricket in the matchbox, if everything is taken at face value (and we – with great reluctance – try not to get into a discussion about whether the cricket – or indeed anything – can jump at 1.1 times the speed of light) then the matchbox opens, we see a little bit of cricket, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and then, at the exact moment the box is open enough, the cricket leaps away at 1.1 times the speed of light and to us the box is now empty. We don’t perceive the cricket to have jumped; to us it looks like it has simply disappeared. While photons from that leap unquestionably will have reached our eyes, that’s simply not enough for our visual system to work with. This effect would be the same for the cricket moving more slowly than the speed of light. Our eyesight is good, and it’s fascinating to read deeper into it (e.g. we can perceive “flashes” certainly as brief as one 500th of a frame per second), but it’s nowhere near good enough to perceive anything moving close to (or indeed grumble grumble beyond) the speed of light.

Now, if you meant that the cricket doesn’t leap away, but returns to its exact same position (all magically at 1.1c – I think I see where you were going with the “earth’s gravity” part but if the cricket leaps at superlightspeed then that doesn’t mean it returns at superlightspeed, earth’s gravity or no, we do need to fudge it a bit in true thought experiment fashion), then I believe for certain that we would perceive it to be just chilling still in the matchbox. For justification, the screen you are reading this on is refreshing at somewhere between 50Hz and 120Hz – yet to you (at least looking straight on) it appears to be a flat picture rather than a flickering one. The lightspeed cricket trounces that “refresh rate” and will look similarly motionless.

Dear Patrick, I feel ready to report back on the challenge that I set myself a fortnight ago: I have now read 60% of an Edwardian novel, ahem! It has been a very thought-provoking experiment, and, against all expectations, I find that I have rather enjoyed it. I anticipate reading to the end with some pleasure. The novel that I chose was Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Mayor of Troy. It was published in 1906, so falls bang in the middle of the period, and it is set in his native county of Cornwall. There is much interest these days in Q the professional Cornishman.

So what have I learned? You were absolutely right that reading an Edwardian novel in a modern format would make it more palatable. On the Kindle there were no distractions from the thickness, fragility or smell of the paper, nor from the size, spacing or serifs of the font. The characters are all much larger than life; strongly drawn, with detailed descriptions of their foibles and of various notable incidents in their lives. The plot turns around their typical plans and activities. The background and setting of the story are discrete and specific – Troy (based on Q’s home of Fowey) is a small town where the residents have smuggling in their blood, but are living in fear of a Napoleonic invasion. What the whole scenario most reminds me of, I realise, is situation comedy. Indeed, the book could almost be a forerunner of ‘Dad’s Army’! (Those poor Edwardians, with no telly to watch in the evenings…) It hasn’t yet made me laugh out loud – as Wodehouse might, pace your experiences – but yes, I have found it surprisingly entertaining.

I have also found myself comparing it to the only other Edwardian novel that I have read (so far) – George Calderon’s Downy V. Green. The characters are similarly exaggerated; the action (I hesitate to call it a plot) is episodic and dependent on their idiosyncrasies; and there is a distinct ‘situation’ in the self-contained Oxford college community. I can’t help wondering if George really intended it as satire at all – or just good old crowd-pleasing ROFL comedy.

Your point about telling not showing also holds good. The narrative of The Mayor of Troy has a very strong authorial voice – with frequent first-person asides addressed to the reader. I don’t recall that George does this. As I click through the pages, I can almost sense Q twinkling at me. It occurs to me to wonder if he knew George. They didn’t overlap at Trinity College, although they only missed each other by a year. Both were the first of their family to be ‘up’ at Oxford, and both had won academic awards but failed to take First Class Honours. Both lived extravagantly as undergraduates, and both went on to forge profitable careers as writers. Allegedly, Q wrote his first novel to pay off his student debts. Might he have inspired George in some way? The dons and older scholars must surely have talked about his success. Then again, the two men had very different views on the big stuff like religion, and there are no letters from George in Q’s archive. Have you encountered him at all in your research?

I particularly like how the rose looks like a figure with a head and two arms, one raised. I thought I’d seen a drawing or painting exactly like it, but the closest I could find is the Pokémon Roselia.

Thank you, Patrick, for such detailed answers to my questions. I really am not qualified to engage in anything so grand as a dialogue on this, but here goes with a very tentative response.

Edwardian novels then. Your unappealing fonts theory sounds very plausible. The kindle store denied all knowledge of poor old Daisy Woods, but I have now downloaded ‘the Major Works of Arthur Quiller-Couch’ and will see how I get on absorbing his language in different sizes. The difference between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ is also interesting, and I will try to keep an eye out for instances of this along the way.

I am shocked to learn that I was so memorably rude about George Calderon’s writing when you first visited the Trinity archive! But I am proud to say I have since read Downy V. Green not once but twice. Realising that the story was set in a barely-disguised Trinity College of circa 1890 was undoubtedly what made it readable for me. It is also very short. As I recall, there were two things in particular that I initially found off-putting. The misleading title was the first – it sounds like a sporting fixture, but V. is in fact the initial of the eponymous hero’s middle name. I still find it surprising that George engaged in this irritating verbal trickery – or at least, why did he not then develop the joke in the text? (To digress, was there ever a less engaging book title than John Buchan’s ‘thriller’ The Island of Sheep? I once yawned my way through that in a holiday cottage.) My second difficulty with Downy was his painful American accent. Am I alone in finding the phonetic spelling out of regional speech deeply tiresome and very little help at normal reading speed?

So, Swallows and Amazons. My experience of this is very different from yours. I’m afraid my opinion was entirely based on a distant memory of reading the series as a child. Unlike you, I didn’t love Ransome once upon a time; I read his stories because I read anything that I could get my hands on. There seemed to be never enough books in the world then. Swallows and Amazons is the only Ransome title I can remember in any detail – though not the illustrations as it turns out. Looking (online) at his drawings now, I don’t agree with you there – I think they are rather sweet! But you are dead right about the name Titty. That was embarrassing – and I wonder if this whole ‘weirdness’, or ‘creepiness’ thing is actually nothing more than that: embarrassment for the characters. These were children old enough to sail boats with remarkable skill and competence – so why were they still playing babyish make-believe games? They had real boats, tents and islands – but they chose to waste their long hours of freedom pretending to be pirates. (At least poor, damaged, friendless Christopher Robin had the excuse of being trapped in his nursery!)

You say that the world of Swallows and Amazons is ‘genuinely childlike’ – but this seems to contradict your earlier remark that your ‘whole experience of the playground and classroom world was the opposite.’ I wonder if my struggle to ‘get it’ was somehow tied in with the asexuality that you identify. Was I sensing the unreality of idealised children playing nicely (‘nicely’ being a synonym for ‘unnaturally’) in a late and subtle manifestation of that Victorian notion of childhood innocence and ‘purity’?

Then again, it may simply be that I was just not sufficiently interested in sailing. Oh dear. Sincerest apologies to all you enthusiasts at the other end of the Ransome spectrum. Do tell – which were the books that you didn’t much like as kids….?

Like autism, like Asperger’s, like everything perhaps – is not enthusiasm for the works of P.G. Wodehouse on a spectrum? I wouldn’t go out of my way to read a Blandings novel, but if it was the only available book in a holiday cottage, say, I would find it acceptable enough. Despite being a woman!

Confronted by a choice of two, I would definitely pick Wodehouse over Ransome. (And not because the latter wrote for children. One of the guilty pleasures of holiday cottages, surely, is reading Enid Blyton.) The main defect of Wodehouse, I have always thought, is simply that all his novels are essentially the same. Whereas Swallows and Amazon – yes, you are exactly right that it feels creepy. But why? Could you elaborate on this? It can’t just be the lack of realism or the self-contained world; and I hope you don’t mean that, conversely, it is the class system that makes me able to empathise with the Famous Five!

This is as good a moment as any to bring out another deep literary question from the back of my mind – but with apologies if you have answered it somewhere on your blog already. What is it about Edwardian novels that makes them so very difficult to read? I don’t think I am alone in finding this to be true. I have had some professional engagement with Arthur Quiller-Couch and Margaret L. Woods, for example. Both were hugely popular in their day, but – dear me, what a struggle. Do you have any top tips – things to bear in mind perhaps, or allowances to be made – to make fiction of the period more palatable?

Thank you indeed. A Comment of this brilliance, however, demands a reply from master rhetoricians of the order of D. Grant. I hope Damian and others are watching!

Being archaic myself, I used the word as the present participle of the verb ‘swinge’. I don’t understand why Sophie Elmhirst doesn’t tell her readers what that ‘very archaic verb’ means. It means to tear strips of flesh off, lacerate, excoriate. Personally, I think it’s an all too visual verb: the torturers ‘swing’ the lash, then it bites deep with the addition of the ‘e’…ghastly.

I totally agree with you, and David Foster Wallace, about the use of footnotes. My trouble before writing this biography of George was that in practically every piece of non-fiction (‘academic’) prose I’d written I had HAD to employ footnotes and was fed up with the disease. George’s biography was a heaven-sent opportunity not to use them, as it is basically a narrative of his, Kittie’s, their friends’, Edwardian Britain’s lives, hence should be read more ‘fictively’. I’ve justified this in the swingèd Introduction thus: ‘Every fact presented has its material source. Letters quoted are held by the collections named in my Acknowledgements. Books and authors quoted are to be found in the Bibliography.’

There are some sparing, but hilarious ‘authorial’ footnotes in Chekhov’s early short stories.

For those – like myself – unfamiliar, Sophie Elmhirst’s New Statesman piece conveniently explains the term “swingeing” (…or does it?).

As usual, Google provides a shorter route to understanding: {adjective} [BRITISH] (severe or extreme in size, amount, or effect).

“It’s a real word; deal with it” …I tell myself, before making a record of the preceding in the ol’ cranial wax tablet.

Regarding footnotes, I don’t wish to suggest that they ought to feature in this book, but David Foster Wallace did believe them useful as a general tool, and employed footnotes liberally [even – indeed especially – in his fiction]. A trademark was his “nested” footnote, wherein the reader is taken on a [wild goose] chase delving further away from narrative and more closely to the direct authorial voice¹.

¹ Or, perhaps, further from it and closer to a second, meta-voice².

² Or not, depending on your point of view, of course³.

³ Obligatory nested nested footnote.

A word of advice: publishing is only half the story, in many ways the easy half, marketing being the other half. Good marketing starts with good design. It looks like you have made a good start with the Calderonia blog, but I’d be doubtful about your aim of publishing in 2017; at least not if you want to publish and market, as the latter takes at least six months. I can recommend a good publisher who markets worldwide if you want one.

Thank you very indeed much for this recommendation, Clare. I have heard some snippets and entirely agree. And I daresay that, as author of the first play about Thomas Cromwell, George would too…

May I alert everyone who is following Patrick’s ongoing exploration of the interface between history and fiction to Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, broadcast this week on BBC Radio 4? I have just listened to her first – ‘The Day is for the Living’ – and (I’m afraid only a cliché will do here) it was a fantastic tour de force.

“As soon as we die, we enter into fiction…”

“You become a novelist to tell the truth…”

I don’t think she actually used the ‘B word’… but it was so good I am going to listen to it twice.

As soon as I read this entry your descriptions rang alarm bells that the book itself was fiction, presented as fact. A fashionable modern technique – or, perhaps, always a fashionable literary technique? (Is that, then, “fashionable”?)

But…the way you clarify the fictionality of the book at the end of this entry still leaves some uncertainty in my mind. It is fiction? Isn’t? Surely, it must be?

Does Masters ever clarify, himself, in the book at some point after meeting “Laura”, as to the reason the diaries were in a skip in the first place? For me this is such a killer McGuffin that it gives away the conceit. Then again, some things have to be true because if they were made up then no-one would believe them.

I suppose I will have to read the book for myself!

Ah Patrick… Do I recognise that nugget of advice – that you should make ‘all reasonable efforts’ to identify the owners of obscure unpublished letters and then, by implication, just give up – from an email of mine? I am shocked that despite these protestations about your strict adherence to the Law of Copyright, you quote my words of wisdom with neither acknowledgement nor permission! But perhaps you thought I would get into some kind of trouble with the Archive Police for suggesting something so legally dubious… And doubtless dozens of your other correspondents have taken an equally common-sensical view.

Of course you have my permission, if needed. And my deepest sympathy. Your final push to the publication line sounds utterly exhausting. But I do feel a bit of sympathy too for the staff in those institutions that have as yet failed to reply to your enquiries. Rather than striking a blow against the tyranny of the Copyright Act, more than likely they are simply failing to meet their speed-of-response targets as they struggle against budget cuts, redundancies, crumbling buildings, conservation emergencies, inadequate IT systems, and the unrealistic expectations and demands of readers – to name but a few of the problems that beset many twenty-first century archives. And I also feel rather sorry for those well-meaning legislators who sought to give small, insignificant individuals the same protection as the famous and the important – only to be blamed for the resultant morass of impossible requirements.

I idly wondered whether the difficulty of hunting down the ‘collateral descendants of Kittie’s gardener’ counts as a First World Problem. See, for example

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10262207/First-world-problems-revealed-in-study.html

But no. The annoyances on this list are much, much worse!

I wanted to thank you for this good read!! I definitely enjoyed every bit of it. I have you saved as a favorite to check out new things you post…

I hadn’t heard of Janina Ramirez until I saw the first of her and Alastair Sooke’s ‘Art Lovers’ Guide’ series, currently on BBC4. This dealt with Amsterdam and was very impressive. Unlike many ‘cultural tour guides’ on TV she clearly knows her subject inside out. Her enthusiasm for Renaissance era books was particularly infectious. Now I’m looking forward to viewing the second programme, on Barcelona, recorded on Monday. Next week the series closes with St Petersburg, which I’m guessing should be a treat for both of us.

It could have been worse – she might have exclaimed “Scatology?” or “Holy Crap!”

More seriously, it does sound very interesting – and an example of where a bookshop and a good dose of curiosity can take you. Keep going and good luck with it all.

How interesting! I used a quotation from John Polkinghorne only last week, in a lecture in Venice (in a stunning lecture room on the Grand Canal – it can be hard being an academic!). The idea is that in linguistics we need baselines to measure from, just as normally we measure, say, length from zero. If you set up several such measures, which is the Canonical Typology enterprise, there may be no actual attested example that meets them all. That troubles some people, but it shouldn’t. … after all, this is part of a much more general issue:
“… there are so many more ways of being disorderly than there are of being orderly, so that disarray wins hands down.”
John Polkinghorne. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction

I have to confess that until a few months ago I did not know what prosopography is. But following Laurence Brockliss’s guest post I am a total convert!

Prosopographical studies like the one carried out by Professor Brockliss and his team should be invaluable to biographers. A study of a good sample of a profession can contextualise a biographical exponent of that profession, put his/her activity in proper perspective, and should be consulted by the biographer asap. I daresay many biographers do not ask themselves what the reality and status of their subject’s profession was at all, and others only grope towards discovering that. Prosopographical studies like Professor Brockliss’s will prevent biographers from having to ‘discover America’.

I greatly regret having fallen into the latter category myself. When I started research on the chapter about George in Russia (1895-97) I was mildly surprised that, with no experience of student journalism at Oxford (as far as we know), and no publications but plenty of rejections between graduation and 1895, he was able to slip into being a special correspondent in Russia for the Pall Mall Gazette and Standard, and even cover the coronation of Nicholas II for them. I put it down to his eminent Victorian father’s networking with editors — for which there is enough documentary evidence. But Laurence Brockliss’s post indicates that the decisive features were just as likely George’s having attended Oxford and Rugby. These gave him the cachet and the entrée (he had edited a magazine at Rugby, incidentally).

Equally, Brockliss’s marvellously informative post has belatedly led me to distinguish an elephant in the room. I remember reading an American Slavist’s description of George as ‘the English journalist’ and guffawing… For ‘us’, English Calderonians, George is, of course, the man who put Chekhov on the British stage, the witty and deeply satirical author of Downy V. Green, Dwala and The Fountain, the prescient dramatist of Revolt, the so light-penned author of Tahiti, the political activist, the self-sacrificing war hero… But between 1895 and 1903 he contributed on average three articles a year to the newspaper and periodical press, between 1907 and 1910 he published 51 reviews in the TLS, and there wasn’t a year between 1911 and 1914 when he did not write something for the press, usually The Times. He was a journalist, a journalist!

Since the 1930s, at least, the problem with George’s reputation has been that he is viewed as ‘too versatile’, too ‘polymathic’, not ‘focussed’ enough, too ‘maverick’, possibly ‘amateur’, possibly (horreurs!) ‘dilettante’… I assume that is what Clare Hopkins means by ‘multifarious (and perhaps unstable)’ in her very fine Comment on Professor Brockliss’s post. As followers over the past nearly three years will have gathered, my own thesis is that he was not a dilettante, but an ‘Edwardian genius’, which is someone who passionately believed in excellence, freedom of development, versatility, and fulfilling the whole person. I can no longer deny, however, that the ONE ‘stability’ of George’s creative career was his journalism. Well, I might rephrase that as ‘writing’ — whatever else he was, he was always a born writer — but if you look at his writing career biographically, the single most continuous thread is his writing for the press, which Professor Brockliss’s post demonstrates he had exceptional access to amongst Edwardian ‘journalists’ because of his education. Whether George actually ever met W.T. Stead, the ‘greatest journalist of the age’, there is no doubt that their paths crossed; in particular, they were both the object of attentions from the extremely influential London Tsarist agent Olga Novikoff. George’s supreme contribution in The Times to appreciation of Ballets Russes’ values when Diaghilev’s company came to London in 1911 is testimony to his relatively high status in Edwardian ‘journalism’.

I am slightly tweaking my final chapter, ‘Who George Calderon Was’, in the light of this superb guest post.