Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
I don’t think I have read a new biography — or any biography — since Helen Smith’s The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, which I wrote about on 1 June 2018. Given that I was constantly reading biographies as they came out whilst I was writing my own between 2011 and 2017, and must have discussed about a dozen on Calderonia, this grinding halt may strike followers as odd. There are at least two reasons for it.
First, I was mainly reading these new biographies in order to keep up with what was going on in the ‘genre’. I was myself attempting to be innovative and there were plenty of original developments at the time that I found inspiring. After my biography of George came out, that need fell away. Second, the last six months seem to have produced mainly biographies of already very famous people, of whom I have read at least one biography before, and I had great difficulty in believing they had much new to say. (Of course, this is not the only reason for writing a biography, as I’ll discuss in a couple of weeks time, but for me at least it’s a major one for reading it.)
Meanwhile, the fertility of modern biography/autobiography, and what exactly it does and amounts to, continues to exercise theoretical minds like Ruth Scurr’s all over the world, as the pages of the TLS testify. So the subject of biography and biographies is what I want to broach again on Calderonia. As I have said before, my posts about specific biographies are not meant as critical reviews of them, rather I am taking them as examples, even perhaps exemplars, of the genre.
Alessandro Falcetta’s 676-page biography of Rendel Harris, published at the same time as mine of George Calderon, has come into my hands quite by chance. My wife is a great-great-niece of Rendel Harris, Falcetta had to approach her for copyright permission, and in return he sent her a copy of the book, which she has read and lent to me before it sets off round the family. In Waterstones I would probably not have been tempted to buy the biography of a ‘Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter’, but I am extremely glad that I have now read it.
Falcetta’s biography is what I call a ‘real’ biography, by which I mean it’s prototypical in the best possible sense: it superlatively does what most people, I think, want and expect from a biography. Let me explain.
Unlike George Calderon, Rendel Harris is not unknown. Yet he is not so well known that anyone will have read a biography of him before (there wasn’t one). Therefore Falcetta’s biography is new; it is not one of those biographies I have referred to above, of Churchill or Mary Queen of Scots, say, that are recycling well known material. And it is long, promising comprehensiveness, which readers also want. Where this is concerned, the biography comes with a guarantee: Falcetta spent twenty-three years researching it!
His book is also a cradle-to-grave account, i.e. it starts with Rendel Harris’s Nonconformist commercial family background in Plymouth and moves from his birth to his death. This too, I think, is what most readers want — not an ‘innovative’ shuffling of the time cards, which they may find difficult to follow. But this chronological approach is not drily factual either: already on page 11 Falcetta is speculating and interpreting, which the prototypical biography must also do:
Rendel grew up a slender and tall young man. Piercing blue eyes left no doubts about his earnestness and the radical views he could express in matters of life. At the same time they were merciless assistants to his irresistible drive to make jokes in all situations, a drive that not all his acquaintances appreciated.
Most important of all for the prototypical biography, Rendel Harris’s life was packed with change, travel and action. He scored a top First in maths at Cambridge, was awarded a fellowship at Clare College and taught the subject, but soon became more interested in palaeography, which in his case meant scriptural and early Christian texts. The textual veracity of the New Testament was, of course, a subject of enormous popular interest and religious importance in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Harris organised and led three arduous expeditions to the monks at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, with whom he got on extremely well unlike most European scholars. He photographed and handcopied Greek and Syriac texts he found there, discovering ‘one of the first and most beautiful specimens of ancient Christian poetry’, The Odes of Solomon (p. 1) and becoming ‘the first Western scholar to read the Apology of Aristides in its entirety’ (p. 92), this being a highly important second-century defence of Christianity that Harris pieced together at St Catherine’s. The hundreds of fragments and codices that he turned up in the Middle East included lines of Homer, Sappho, Plato, Herodotus, and fifty previously unknown verses from Euripedes’s Medea. He was then chosen to direct Woodbrooke, the first Quaker college in Europe, which he ‘tried to make a Free Church rather than a Quaker institution’ (p. 234). He and his wife helped raise about three million pounds at today’s prices for the relief of victims of the Armenian genocides and themselves travelled to the areas of the massacres, managing and personally distributing aid three times between 1895 and 1915. During the First World War he was twice torpedoed crossing the Mediterranean, on the second occasion only just escaping with his life as the lifeboat drifted towards Corsica and people died around him…
Then there is the intense psychological interest that a prototypical biography must arouse. In the words of William Littleboy, the warden of Woodbrooke, Rendel Harris was ‘the most curious psychological puzzle I have come across. The man who had actually preached the “highest” lecture of any one I know, is the only man I ever met who inspires me with something akin to real fear’. Harris was capable of utterly childlike humility and simplicity, yet in Littleboy’s view his directorship was ‘a dictatorship in the most absolute form’ (p. 233). The reason Littleboy ‘feared’ him, though, was simply that he never knew what Rendel was going to say or do next. Rendel could wear tennis shoes to chair an august meeting and answer ‘Brer Rabbit’ when asked ‘Who is there?’ on the phone. According to close friends, the reason he was never given a chair at Cambridge was not his Nonconformism but that he was ‘prone to putting people’s backs up and to making rather harsh comments about them’; he was ‘not an easy man to understand and get along with: he had a rather whimsical sense of humour and liked to say things to shock people’, as well as ‘enjoying praise and being a centre of admiration’ (p. 140). Well, it is quite clear from this book how stultified British academic, Nonconformist and social life was then, and I think Rendel just wanted to shake it up. He was a wonderful mover and shaker, with the energy of ten of us today. He rocked the boat because he thought the best way to test and improve boats is by rocking them. His disarming humour was in the first instance a ploy to break down po-facedness in the pursuit of truth (the only thing he was interested in), but it is clear throughout this biography that he also used laughter as a means to empathy:
One day, he was travelling with Wood on a train from London to Birmingham across fields where cows were pastured. The only other passenger in the compartment was a lady sitting opposite, looking preoccupied and sad. Suddenly, Rendel leaned towards her and opened the conversation by asking: ‘Don’t you sometimes wish you were a cow?’ This unexpected and discourteous question led to a talk in which he was able to comfort this new acquaintance suffering from some personal trouble. (p. 243)
Finally, a ‘real’ biography always makes you think. It puts you in touch with someone from the past who leaps time and says something relevant to you in the present. Falcetta convinces me that Rendel Harris was a very modern Christian in his lifetime — and still is! Of course, he was a mathematician and scientist, as well as a Darwinist:
For him, every theory had to be tested in an experimental fashion. This principle he applies to Jesus. His faith did not centre on intellectual and unverifiable tenets, as the [Quakerian] inner light might have been, but on an event, the sending of Christ, that is, on a person who had actually lived, about whom historical records exist, and whose influence in one’s own life could be practically felt in a sense of increased power, of joy and fulfilment. (p. 308)
He left behind the guilt-ridden Congregationalism of his upbringing through having an epiphanic experience of being freed of sin by God, then experiencing ‘holiness’ and a union with the personality of Christ. He became a Quaker, but the humour, conversation and singing that he introduced to Meeting did not go down well with some. Another difference was his ‘mysticism’. ‘This was an important feature of his devotional books and many of his contemporaries agreed in considering him a mystic’, writes Carole Spencer:
Rendel’s mysticism placed him in continuity with historical Quakerism but against liberal Quakerism, which was turning into a reasonable, non-mystical faith, precisely the kind of Quakerism that was championed by Littleboy, the author of The Appeal of Quakerism to the Non-Mystic. […] Rendel’s mysticism, Spencer observes, was a warm-hearted relationship with Christ, something that modern, rationalist Quakers discarded as pure sentimentality. (p. 259)
Thus, although Rendel Harris was himself a rationalist and empiricist, Falcetta stresses that the ‘absoluteness of the religion of Jesus’ rested for him ‘on spiritual grounds and is proved experientially’ (p. 37). Personally, I would go further and say that Rendel was a modern existential Christian in the way that post-Kierkegaard, post-totalitarian, post-Holocaust, post-WW2 Christians have been all over Europe and Russia. His faith led him always to confront the ethical demands of the present: to challenge the official prejudice against Nonconformists in British universities, to protest against gratuitous vivisection, to preach and practise gender equality, to organise and deliver humanitarian aid irrespective of creed, to be alive to political deceit everwhere.
Of course, there are many more aspects to Alessandro Falcetta’s book than I have discussed here as ingredients of a ‘real’ biography. For instance, within the thirty-four chapters the text is divided into about three hundred manageable, titled sections that greatly facilitate reading, and within those Falcetta does, in fact, ‘mix it’ with chronological time. Further, he has to devote considerable space to informing the reader of the facts surrounding palaeographical, theological and religious controversies.
The latter, I confess, I found rather heavy-going, but it does not matter. This is a massive, pluralistic masterpiece that deserves to be read rather like a Bible: buy a copy, put it on a home lectern, and read twenty pages a day! You won’t regret it.
P.S. Rendel Harris and George Calderon could well have met at the Third International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford in 1908, which they both attended. They shared a deep interest in early religions and folklore. Obviously, Rendel was Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian; he was born sixteen years before George and outlived him by twenty-six. Both were polymaths and…maverick geniuses?
SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY 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
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It 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 Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
A real biography
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
I don’t think I have read a new biography — or any biography — since Helen Smith’s The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, which I wrote about on 1 June 2018. Given that I was constantly reading biographies as they came out whilst I was writing my own between 2011 and 2017, and must have discussed about a dozen on Calderonia, this grinding halt may strike followers as odd. There are at least two reasons for it.
First, I was mainly reading these new biographies in order to keep up with what was going on in the ‘genre’. I was myself attempting to be innovative and there were plenty of original developments at the time that I found inspiring. After my biography of George came out, that need fell away. Second, the last six months seem to have produced mainly biographies of already very famous people, of whom I have read at least one biography before, and I had great difficulty in believing they had much new to say. (Of course, this is not the only reason for writing a biography, as I’ll discuss in a couple of weeks time, but for me at least it’s a major one for reading it.)
Meanwhile, the fertility of modern biography/autobiography, and what exactly it does and amounts to, continues to exercise theoretical minds like Ruth Scurr’s all over the world, as the pages of the TLS testify. So the subject of biography and biographies is what I want to broach again on Calderonia. As I have said before, my posts about specific biographies are not meant as critical reviews of them, rather I am taking them as examples, even perhaps exemplars, of the genre.
Alessandro Falcetta’s 676-page biography of Rendel Harris, published at the same time as mine of George Calderon, has come into my hands quite by chance. My wife is a great-great-niece of Rendel Harris, Falcetta had to approach her for copyright permission, and in return he sent her a copy of the book, which she has read and lent to me before it sets off round the family. In Waterstones I would probably not have been tempted to buy the biography of a ‘Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter’, but I am extremely glad that I have now read it.
Falcetta’s biography is what I call a ‘real’ biography, by which I mean it’s prototypical in the best possible sense: it superlatively does what most people, I think, want and expect from a biography. Let me explain.
Unlike George Calderon, Rendel Harris is not unknown. Yet he is not so well known that anyone will have read a biography of him before (there wasn’t one). Therefore Falcetta’s biography is new; it is not one of those biographies I have referred to above, of Churchill or Mary Queen of Scots, say, that are recycling well known material. And it is long, promising comprehensiveness, which readers also want. Where this is concerned, the biography comes with a guarantee: Falcetta spent twenty-three years researching it!
His book is also a cradle-to-grave account, i.e. it starts with Rendel Harris’s Nonconformist commercial family background in Plymouth and moves from his birth to his death. This too, I think, is what most readers want — not an ‘innovative’ shuffling of the time cards, which they may find difficult to follow. But this chronological approach is not drily factual either: already on page 11 Falcetta is speculating and interpreting, which the prototypical biography must also do:
Most important of all for the prototypical biography, Rendel Harris’s life was packed with change, travel and action. He scored a top First in maths at Cambridge, was awarded a fellowship at Clare College and taught the subject, but soon became more interested in palaeography, which in his case meant scriptural and early Christian texts. The textual veracity of the New Testament was, of course, a subject of enormous popular interest and religious importance in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Harris organised and led three arduous expeditions to the monks at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, with whom he got on extremely well unlike most European scholars. He photographed and handcopied Greek and Syriac texts he found there, discovering ‘one of the first and most beautiful specimens of ancient Christian poetry’, The Odes of Solomon (p. 1) and becoming ‘the first Western scholar to read the Apology of Aristides in its entirety’ (p. 92), this being a highly important second-century defence of Christianity that Harris pieced together at St Catherine’s. The hundreds of fragments and codices that he turned up in the Middle East included lines of Homer, Sappho, Plato, Herodotus, and fifty previously unknown verses from Euripedes’s Medea. He was then chosen to direct Woodbrooke, the first Quaker college in Europe, which he ‘tried to make a Free Church rather than a Quaker institution’ (p. 234). He and his wife helped raise about three million pounds at today’s prices for the relief of victims of the Armenian genocides and themselves travelled to the areas of the massacres, managing and personally distributing aid three times between 1895 and 1915. During the First World War he was twice torpedoed crossing the Mediterranean, on the second occasion only just escaping with his life as the lifeboat drifted towards Corsica and people died around him…
Then there is the intense psychological interest that a prototypical biography must arouse. In the words of William Littleboy, the warden of Woodbrooke, Rendel Harris was ‘the most curious psychological puzzle I have come across. The man who had actually preached the “highest” lecture of any one I know, is the only man I ever met who inspires me with something akin to real fear’. Harris was capable of utterly childlike humility and simplicity, yet in Littleboy’s view his directorship was ‘a dictatorship in the most absolute form’ (p. 233). The reason Littleboy ‘feared’ him, though, was simply that he never knew what Rendel was going to say or do next. Rendel could wear tennis shoes to chair an august meeting and answer ‘Brer Rabbit’ when asked ‘Who is there?’ on the phone. According to close friends, the reason he was never given a chair at Cambridge was not his Nonconformism but that he was ‘prone to putting people’s backs up and to making rather harsh comments about them’; he was ‘not an easy man to understand and get along with: he had a rather whimsical sense of humour and liked to say things to shock people’, as well as ‘enjoying praise and being a centre of admiration’ (p. 140). Well, it is quite clear from this book how stultified British academic, Nonconformist and social life was then, and I think Rendel just wanted to shake it up. He was a wonderful mover and shaker, with the energy of ten of us today. He rocked the boat because he thought the best way to test and improve boats is by rocking them. His disarming humour was in the first instance a ploy to break down po-facedness in the pursuit of truth (the only thing he was interested in), but it is clear throughout this biography that he also used laughter as a means to empathy:
Finally, a ‘real’ biography always makes you think. It puts you in touch with someone from the past who leaps time and says something relevant to you in the present. Falcetta convinces me that Rendel Harris was a very modern Christian in his lifetime — and still is! Of course, he was a mathematician and scientist, as well as a Darwinist:
He left behind the guilt-ridden Congregationalism of his upbringing through having an epiphanic experience of being freed of sin by God, then experiencing ‘holiness’ and a union with the personality of Christ. He became a Quaker, but the humour, conversation and singing that he introduced to Meeting did not go down well with some. Another difference was his ‘mysticism’. ‘This was an important feature of his devotional books and many of his contemporaries agreed in considering him a mystic’, writes Carole Spencer:
Thus, although Rendel Harris was himself a rationalist and empiricist, Falcetta stresses that the ‘absoluteness of the religion of Jesus’ rested for him ‘on spiritual grounds and is proved experientially’ (p. 37). Personally, I would go further and say that Rendel was a modern existential Christian in the way that post-Kierkegaard, post-totalitarian, post-Holocaust, post-WW2 Christians have been all over Europe and Russia. His faith led him always to confront the ethical demands of the present: to challenge the official prejudice against Nonconformists in British universities, to protest against gratuitous vivisection, to preach and practise gender equality, to organise and deliver humanitarian aid irrespective of creed, to be alive to political deceit everwhere.
Of course, there are many more aspects to Alessandro Falcetta’s book than I have discussed here as ingredients of a ‘real’ biography. For instance, within the thirty-four chapters the text is divided into about three hundred manageable, titled sections that greatly facilitate reading, and within those Falcetta does, in fact, ‘mix it’ with chronological time. Further, he has to devote considerable space to informing the reader of the facts surrounding palaeographical, theological and religious controversies.
The latter, I confess, I found rather heavy-going, but it does not matter. This is a massive, pluralistic masterpiece that deserves to be read rather like a Bible: buy a copy, put it on a home lectern, and read twenty pages a day! You won’t regret it.
P.S. Rendel Harris and George Calderon could well have met at the Third International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford in 1908, which they both attended. They shared a deep interest in early religions and folklore. Obviously, Rendel was Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian; he was born sixteen years before George and outlived him by twenty-six. Both were polymaths and…maverick geniuses?
SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY 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
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It 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 Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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