This book, the first full-length biography of the significant Edwardian literary and political figure George Calderon, who lived in Russia 1895-97, was an expert on Russian folklore and literature, premiered Chekhov in Britain, wrote the best seller Tahiti, and was killed at Gallipoli, has just been published by Sam&Sam, Cambridge, in a fine limited edition printed by Clays of Bungay.
It is available online at the Sam&Sam site priced £30 plus postage. Alternatively, if you prefer to buy it by cheque, or wish to discuss discounts for multiple purchases, please contact the author at mail@patrickmiles.co.uk .
SOME RESPONSES RECEIVED SO FAR
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘You have, I believe, architected and written a monumental and original biography.’ John Pym, film critic
‘This is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to this entry.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears here on Amazon UK.
Hooray!
A COMMENT-REVIEW
With George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Patrick Miles has written a remarkable work which takes biography into the sphere of critical archaeology. Piece by piece, this book patiently discovers a man, and delivers him to us in all his productivity and complexity. Years of diligent searching and sifting (the Acknowledgements take up nine pages, telling their own story) — motivated by the courageous conviction that here was an exemplary ‘life and works’ to be assembled from very disparate materials — and a deeply considered method of presentation, have resulted in this illuminating biography, which establishes George Calderon at the centre of Edwardian literary (and political) life.
Not the least of its virtues is the recognition and insistence that this Edwardian age, far from treading water between high Victorianism and modernism, was actually swimming vigorously against the Victorian tide, and preparing many of the attitudes and materials that would issue in modernism after the hiatus of the war — a war which cost Calderon his life, at Gallipoli, at the age of 45.
A theme that runs through the book is that of Calderon’s versatility as a writer; a versatility which, Miles insists, is also characteristic of the Edwardian age. George Calderon was a true polymath: accomplished linguist (he even set to work on a new universal language), translator, travel writer, novelist, essayist, and — best of all — dramatist, in the genre which brought together these complementary but centrifugal talents. One is struck by an anonymous critique published after his death (and retrieved with typical thoroughness by Miles from a provincial newspaper), which proposes that George’s plays were ‘not great plays. But they suggest, somehow, that their writer was a great man, whose talents were dissipated by the strength of his critical faculties’. This pertinent observation brings to mind Coleridge, who famously lamented in his ‘Dejection: An Ode’ what he saw as a negative tension in himself between ‘abstruse research’ (of which Calderon did plenty) and his ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’.
Patrick Miles argues at one point , apropos of Calderon’s short plays from 1910-13, that rather than treat them as ‘hybrids’, mixing cultures, ‘we should see them as examples of an expanded form of something that he had done all his life, namely translation’. This of course requires us to understand translation in the broadest and most creative sense; as does the author, describing the one-act play The Little Stone House as ‘a masterly translation not from one national language to another, but of one literary genre to another’. It is as if another universal language is at work here, drawing on energies that underlie all human self-representation: turning like a mobile through time.
This metamorphic quality applied not only to Calderon’s work, but to his life as well — which provides something of a headache for his biographer, struggling as he must to establish some kind of coherence. Calderon could appear a different person to different people; even his close friends felt they could not claim to know him ‘in the round’. Miles quotes Laurence Binyon’s observation: ‘I seemed always to be discovering something new in him.’ And this reflects his wife Kittie’s own opinion: ‘Did one human body ever hold quite so simple and quite so complex a soul?’ Patrick Miles has worked out a method which seems to me to cope admirably with this dilemma; a method which far from simplifying his subject, allows him to appear in all his energy and volatility. This consists in what one might call a ‘layering’ technique, whereby we are introduced to several George Calderons, from different perspectives, in different chapters (and we have to wait until page 95 to be told he ‘was born George Leslie Calderon at 9 Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood, London on the morning of 2 December 1868’; Sterne himself could not have managed it better). The colours are juxtaposed, but do not leak into each other; nowhere does Miles try to reduce Calderon by ‘understanding’ him; he does not pluck out the heart of his mystery, which is left for the reader to ponder. Because there are many mysteries in this life, full as it is of contradictions and sudden departures; not least the last, why Calderon found it incumbent on him to enlist at the age of 45, submit himself to rigorous training (including the indignities of learning to ride a horse), and venture unafraid into the killing fields of Gallipoli.
This monumental, 500-page biography is an act of homage, and a labour of love. Patrick Miles seems as reluctant as was his wife Kittie to accept the finality of George’s death, as is suggested by the last chapter, ‘White Raven’, which follows Kittie’s saddening story through her middle and declining years, from 1915 until her death thirty-five years later in 1950. The author is to be congratulated not only for the belief and perseverance which have brought this work to fruition, but for the further labour required for the expertly managed self-publication of such an impressive and attractive volume.