Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was not derogatory in that period. Nevertheless, since the 1920s George has been increasingly disparaged as an amateur and even a dilettante. If you want to know how I resolve this issue in the concept of ‘Edwardian genius’, you will have to read the Afterword of my biography! I think it is a complex subject.
When I wrote in my post about the gender pay gap that a senior figure in an oil company confessed to me in about 1998 that he could not take women seriously in the workplace, I implied that he described them as ‘dilettantes’. On second thoughts, he may have used the softer word ‘amateur’. The words are not interchangeable, but I would claim that their semantic content today is identical (‘unprofessional’) and ‘dilettante’ merely intensifies it to the extreme of pejorativeness — contempt.
It was not always so. Deriving from Italian for ‘delight’, a dilettante was originally someone who took real and sustained pleasure in the fine arts as a consumer. S/he may not have progressed beyond a pretty superficial enjoyment of them, but they did love them (this was the original sense of ‘amateur’ too). An amateur not only loved them as a consumer, but practised them, and seriously; hence originally an amateur was no amateur in the modern sense (i.e. dabbler), let alone a dilettante in the modern sense (i.e. botcher). As far as I can see, in the eighteenth century dilettante and amateur were neutral words describing different types of people, but with an area of overlap in the concept of taking pleasure in or loving.
By the Edwardian period, the vital point was that s/he practised the given art not for filthy lucre, not for a livelihood, not as a ‘profession’. Practising the art (e.g. cricket, painting, war) for pure love of it was regarded as superior and the amateur was expected to be every bit as good at their art as the ‘professional’, if not inherently better. Where sport was concerned, George certainly subscribed to this notion of amateur. Where his writing was concerned, contemporaries may have regarded him as an amateur because he appeared to have a private income (Kittie’s!), but actually that was not so: he earned a living wage from his journalism, fiction, plays and translations.
Where the literature and theatre of the Edwardian period were concerned, George preferred to think of himself as an amateur because he wanted to stay outside a literary establishment of ‘professionals’ that he saw as stuck in a Victorian rut. Thus in a TLS review he praised to the skies two ‘amateur’ humorous writers (without knowing that they were women) because they were fresh, creative and writing outside the ‘professional’ (his word) box. Conversely, for a long time the Edwardian/Georgian literary establishment regarded those whom we now call the War Poets as amateurs.
For George, amateur in the arts meant innovative, anti-establishment, genuinely creative, serious. Authentic art of that kind we would be tempted today to call ‘professional’. We all know, for instance, that fringe theatre can be professional in the sense of trained skill, and produce more significant dramatic art than some commercial theatre. On the other hand, the worst feature of fringe theatre is when you have directors and actors who are doing it only for themselves. Unfortunately, this self-gratification amongst fringers and amateurs is quite common. Such people do not understand, as real professionals would, that their skills should be selflessly focussed on the work and their audience.
A writer whom I respect referred to ‘the dreaded D-word’ in a discussion about George Calderon. He was right: despite the fact that in 2018 we ‘multi-task’ and have ‘portfolio’ careers, we dread being thought of as dilettantes or amateurs. The phrase ‘it’s what I do’ is used to dismiss all one’s other paid/unpaid activities and stress that ‘really’ one’s vocation, one’s serious and inalienable role in life, is X. People are not at ease with being thought to ‘spread themselves too thinly’ in a perceived dilettante fashion.
I am experiencing this unease myself over publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I can assure followers and potential readers that Sam&Sam are tackling the task of producing a quality book with all the professionalism of which we are capable. However, as I have said, one can’t get round the fact that designing, typesetting and printing a long and complex hardback like this, for which one is going to ask £30, is extremely challenging. We are not ‘professional’ (i.e. commercial) book-publishers. I know that I am not ‘really’ a publisher, what I ‘do’ is writing. I fear the dreaded D and A words…
On the other hand, I have had this amateur role thrust upon me. Were I the bitter type, I would holler that the British publishing establishment has let me down and I would excoriate the politics of publishing. But bitterness is toxic. We must just keep buggering on, as Churchill put it. Is that the spirit of the dilettante, the amateur, or the professional?
Related
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon, 1912
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
DnA
Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was not derogatory in that period. Nevertheless, since the 1920s George has been increasingly disparaged as an amateur and even a dilettante. If you want to know how I resolve this issue in the concept of ‘Edwardian genius’, you will have to read the Afterword of my biography! I think it is a complex subject.
When I wrote in my post about the gender pay gap that a senior figure in an oil company confessed to me in about 1998 that he could not take women seriously in the workplace, I implied that he described them as ‘dilettantes’. On second thoughts, he may have used the softer word ‘amateur’. The words are not interchangeable, but I would claim that their semantic content today is identical (‘unprofessional’) and ‘dilettante’ merely intensifies it to the extreme of pejorativeness — contempt.
It was not always so. Deriving from Italian for ‘delight’, a dilettante was originally someone who took real and sustained pleasure in the fine arts as a consumer. S/he may not have progressed beyond a pretty superficial enjoyment of them, but they did love them (this was the original sense of ‘amateur’ too). An amateur not only loved them as a consumer, but practised them, and seriously; hence originally an amateur was no amateur in the modern sense (i.e. dabbler), let alone a dilettante in the modern sense (i.e. botcher). As far as I can see, in the eighteenth century dilettante and amateur were neutral words describing different types of people, but with an area of overlap in the concept of taking pleasure in or loving.
By the Edwardian period, the vital point was that s/he practised the given art not for filthy lucre, not for a livelihood, not as a ‘profession’. Practising the art (e.g. cricket, painting, war) for pure love of it was regarded as superior and the amateur was expected to be every bit as good at their art as the ‘professional’, if not inherently better. Where sport was concerned, George certainly subscribed to this notion of amateur. Where his writing was concerned, contemporaries may have regarded him as an amateur because he appeared to have a private income (Kittie’s!), but actually that was not so: he earned a living wage from his journalism, fiction, plays and translations.
Where the literature and theatre of the Edwardian period were concerned, George preferred to think of himself as an amateur because he wanted to stay outside a literary establishment of ‘professionals’ that he saw as stuck in a Victorian rut. Thus in a TLS review he praised to the skies two ‘amateur’ humorous writers (without knowing that they were women) because they were fresh, creative and writing outside the ‘professional’ (his word) box. Conversely, for a long time the Edwardian/Georgian literary establishment regarded those whom we now call the War Poets as amateurs.
For George, amateur in the arts meant innovative, anti-establishment, genuinely creative, serious. Authentic art of that kind we would be tempted today to call ‘professional’. We all know, for instance, that fringe theatre can be professional in the sense of trained skill, and produce more significant dramatic art than some commercial theatre. On the other hand, the worst feature of fringe theatre is when you have directors and actors who are doing it only for themselves. Unfortunately, this self-gratification amongst fringers and amateurs is quite common. Such people do not understand, as real professionals would, that their skills should be selflessly focussed on the work and their audience.
A writer whom I respect referred to ‘the dreaded D-word’ in a discussion about George Calderon. He was right: despite the fact that in 2018 we ‘multi-task’ and have ‘portfolio’ careers, we dread being thought of as dilettantes or amateurs. The phrase ‘it’s what I do’ is used to dismiss all one’s other paid/unpaid activities and stress that ‘really’ one’s vocation, one’s serious and inalienable role in life, is X. People are not at ease with being thought to ‘spread themselves too thinly’ in a perceived dilettante fashion.
I am experiencing this unease myself over publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I can assure followers and potential readers that Sam&Sam are tackling the task of producing a quality book with all the professionalism of which we are capable. However, as I have said, one can’t get round the fact that designing, typesetting and printing a long and complex hardback like this, for which one is going to ask £30, is extremely challenging. We are not ‘professional’ (i.e. commercial) book-publishers. I know that I am not ‘really’ a publisher, what I ‘do’ is writing. I fear the dreaded D and A words…
On the other hand, I have had this amateur role thrust upon me. Were I the bitter type, I would holler that the British publishing establishment has let me down and I would excoriate the politics of publishing. But bitterness is toxic. We must just keep buggering on, as Churchill put it. Is that the spirit of the dilettante, the amateur, or the professional?
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