18 April
The shortlist for this year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize (biography) has been announced. Strong contenders are hip-hop artist Akala’s debut Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire and Susannah Walker’s The Life of Stuff: A Memoir about the Mess We Leave Behind. A friend writes: ‘It’s a relief to see that the judges are fully woke in the prize’s centenary year. It would have been unforgivable if, in the twenty-first century, they had chosen the biography of a white male upper-class Edwardian anti-suffragist.’
23 April
An impeccable letter from the Spanish Ambassador thanking me for the copy that I sent the embassy library. George Calderon, he writes, was ‘indeed a very remarkable and generous individual who accomplished great achievements during his, sadly, short life. I hope I will have the opportunity to meet you in the future’. It may only mean Tinker, but the name Calderón still carries weight in the Spanish world…
Athenian door-wedge
3 May
To my stupefaction, Calderonia had a record 243 views today. They are focussed on the period 4 August – 12 December 1914, and between one and five people appear to have viewed each post. I am profoundly sceptical of the figure. I suspect a WordPress glitch or some wheeze played on us by a robot. But Sam2 believes otherwise. He thinks they may all come from an institution that has discovered Calderonia is a useful resource.
Thank goodness I took Andrew Tatham’s vehement advice to continue the blog beyond 2015. I had thought of it only as a way of raising George’s profile before the book came out, but it is now a key element in marketing and in our efforts to sell the edition out. So it will continue at least until then, hopefully collecting viewer-customers along the way.
10 May
Another magisterial email, with paralegal appendices, from the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries, which is situated in Edinburgh. About three months after publication they wrote telling me to send them six copies of my book for the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. I had already, off my own bat, sent copies to the British Library, Bodleian and Cambridge, as those were the only legal deposit libraries when I last published a book. No-one told me to do that back in the 1980s; like thousands of other publishers I just did it.
I am now expected to part with £180 of income plus postage to a quango in Scotland that will redistribute the six copies, sending three back to England whence they came. The Quango’s voice is imperious. But there is no basis to the beast’s bluster. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act (2003) only the British Library has a statutory right to receive a copy (and they graciously acknowledged receipt). The other libraries are only ‘entitled to request a free copy within one year of publication coordinated through the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries’. Presumably, then, I am entitled to refuse.
If these libraries wrote to me requesting a copy, I would not refuse them — though one of them is not even in the United Kingdom! But it is the Agency that is requesting them. London, Cambridge and Oxford have always been copyright libraries and I don’t believe the other three remotely want or need copies (given the existence of Inter-Library Loan). What has happened is that the Agency, like all merely process-driven quangos and bureaucracies, is hell bent on perpetuating itself by arrogating powers. Actually, I don’t believe this Agency achieves any more virtue than the voluntary system that preceded it. It is a waste of taxpayer’s money and should be abolished.
Clearly I am just a hopeless Meldrew attempting to hold back Progress… But I see myself more as an owl trying to wedge open a door so that life can flow freely through it.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘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
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
I’m sure your tongue-in-cheek friend is right about the James Tait judges’ motives for not shortlisting your book. Such self-censorship has long been endemic in the world of publishing, as witnessed by Orwell’s (ironically still largely unpublished) preface to Animal Farm. Incidentally, how Orwell would have loved that adjective “woke”. It’s straight out of Newspeak, isn’t it?
Dear John, I am sorry not to have responded to your Comments earlier, but I have been away for ten days. I really appreciate your crafting Comments on the blog rather than just emailing me as many do. (I don’t object, of course, to the emails, and often quote them, but they bypass the purpose of the blog, which I take it is to encourage multilateral conversation.) And thank you for both of your pieces of advice in your first Comment, which I shall take. Where the James Tait Black shortlist is concerned, I am going to return to the subject in my next ‘diary’. Suffice it to say, I agree with both of your points. Whilst I was away, I read the superb Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, edited by Philip Hensher. On page xiii he says that he ‘wasted’ quite a lot of time ‘looking at short stories that had been shortlisted for, or had even won, some very well-funded prizes’; ‘I quickly came to the conclusion that the judges had no means of assessing literary merit other than the gravity of the subject and what they knew about an author, usually his or her sex’! I take it that these judges too were academics.