From the diary of a writer-publisher: 4

16 August
Walked from King’s Cross arriving at Foyles in Charing Cross Road 10.00 a.m. to pick up unsold copies of George. Was intending to walk with them from there to the National Theatre, but by now it was raining so took a taxi. Although affable, the person staffing the NT bookshop seemed to be completely uninterested in books. George and the fact that I had worked at the NT as recently as 2015 were received blankly. However, she did give me the email address of the manager who decides these things. Thence walked to the British Library, where it was all re-enacted with a bloke. You would think that the people at the desks in these shops might at least be trained to show interest in an author’s book. Judging by their eye contact their job was simply guarding the books from theft.

A three-hour lunch followed with Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss from Oxford, whom I have been trying to meet for years. The conversation touched at one point on an award-winning book that he co-authored (2005) about the naval surgeon William Beatty:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

I pricked up my ears when Brockliss told me that Beatty’s account of Nelson’s death played a vital part in the creation of the ‘Nelson myth’. Having written about national heroes a while back, in the context of whether George Calderon was a war hero, and even touched on our Horatio there, I couldn’t resist inviting Professor Brockliss to do a guest post on the ‘Nelson myth’ in the autumn, and I am delighted to say he accepted.

26 August
Rosemary from down the street is worried. Her neighbour Bill has taken down the Che Guevara poster he has had up in his front room for thirty years, which we could see every time we passed. She fears some major upheaval in his life and speculates to me about what it might be. ‘What could have changed?’ she asks.

9 September
Not a word from the managers of the National Theatre and British Library bookshops in reply to my crafted email (NT) and letter with free copy (BL). Of course, it is bad enough that one can never talk face to face with these managers in their shops and show them one’s not unimpressive book. But their total uncommunicativeness suggests that either they think none of their customers would be interested in a book about the man who introduced Chekhov to the British Stage/was a Slavist at the BL who became Britain’s first modern Russianist, or they are too lazy to advertise these facts on a pile of books, even on the cards I had calligraphically created for them.

At this point I decided to call it a day with British bookshops. But suddenly I receive an impeccably courteous email and equally politely phrased order for two copies from the manager of this wonderful bookshop in London:

John Sandoe Books.

I think the word here is ‘old-fashioned’: old-fashioned manners, an old-fashioned shop front, and a form of customer service from another age. John Sandoe Books actually know their customers, who stay with them for years; they know their tastes and buy in books that they know will interest them. Incredible! Well, long may these customers continue to be the ‘kind of people’ who enjoy a book about the Edwardian era. John Sandoe deserved the best brown-paper-old-string-and-sealing-wax-parcel that I could make up for them.

Another ‘real bookshop’ is Heywood Hill in Mayfair, who also understand the importance of matching the right book with the right person. I shall approach them — especially as a key player in my book, Lesbia Corbet, worked in the shop during the War.

10 September
Aaargh! I opened an innocuous-looking manila envelope and it contained the latest issue of HQ Poetry Magazine. This is one of the most original and entertaining British poetry zines, but you never know when it is coming out. To my amazement, this issue contains three of my own haiku. But one of them has only just been published in another haiku magazine, Blithe Spirit. To submit poems simultaneously to magazines is the gravest offence against literary etiquette — let alone to allow them to be published almost simultaneously. The explanation is that I hadn’t made a note of what I had submitted last November to HQ, which I should have, plus the fact that if  you haven’t heard from the editor of HQ since submission it doesn’t mean that your poems have been rejected.

It’s an emergency. I drop everything and email the editor of Blithe Spirit to apologise. She is very understanding and assures me I won’t be blackballed. The editor of another haiku magazine, Presence, used to send first contributors a photo of a dungeon into which the authors of double-submissions would be cast.

On reflection, this blunder of mine raises an interesting point. The version of this haiku published by Blithe Spirit reads:

‘That’s it!’ mother says…
tweaking dry honesty pods
in her Meiji vase.

What I submitted was:

‘That’s it!’ mother says.
Tweaking dry honesty pods
in her Meiji vase.

Blithe Spirit doesn’t like capital letters or punctuation in haiku, so the editor suggested dropping the full stop in the first line. But as I wrote the haiku I saw me doing the tweaking, whilst my mother, the victim of a stroke, supervised me from her chair. Understandably, the editor had thought it was my mother doing the tweaking, so wanted to drop punctuation from the first line altogether. Accepting my explanation, though, she felt the three dots would be enough of a pause/break to clarify the issue. I accepted that version, but now I don’t think it does unambiguously clarify it. Does that…matter?

In the version I sent HQ, I changed the second line to ‘Arranging honesty pods’, because it was one of a series of seven haikus entitled ‘Japan’ and ‘arranging’ suggests ikebana. That’s the version published in HQ, then, but of course it’s a quite different poem and more or less insists that the arranger is my mother. Does that…matter?

Yet another version appeared in Sam2’s blog Annotranslate, with the full punctuation, ‘tweaking’, and ‘a Meiji vase’, not ‘her Meiji vase’. Probably I felt that ‘a’ distanced my mother from the vase and was appropriate to a tweaker who did not own it. But now I don’t think that works, because it could simply distance me observing her doing the tweaking. I wanted to produce a picture of an unskilled male tweaking dry honesty pods under the direction of his disabled mother who was a skilled flower-arranger and daughter of a florist, but it seems verbally impossible.

The poem has liberated itself from pedestrian realism into timeless ambivalence! Unfortunately, though, if a haiku produces confusion it fails. The best one can say, I think, is that this is a poem now left for other people to improve/perfect as they can.

The actual vase in the haiku.

13 September
The annual attempt to catch tench at my favourite spot miles up the river. They are definitely there, because I’ve failed to land them two years running. It was a perfect day for them, as it became close and thundery in the afternoon. The bubbling seemed to suggest they were there, but the lily pad cover was unusually poor and they prefer good cover (on both previous occasions it helped them slip off the hook).

The disappointment was compensated, however, by insect life. As I cycled along, some six-legger or other fell off a tree into the top of my helmet and stung me hard on the pate (titter ye not). Red Admirals and Painted Ladies were plentiful, and a passing walker remarked on the exceptional profusion of dragonflies. For me, though, the star was this:

Image credit: Butterfly-Conservation.org

I had often wondered whether the exposed gouged flutes in the old willow trees were the product of Goat Moth caterpillars, but never seen one in fifty years of knowing this river. Suddenly, there were three of the monsters ambling across the towpath from the willows to the riverbank, presumably to pupate. One could hardly call them beautiful, but they made my day. In order to save them from being squashed by cyclists and runners, I went to pick the first one up in the middle. It promptly arched its head with fearsome jaws round at my finger, but I suppose I was lucky it didn’t also exude the odour which gives the moth its name. The solution was to grab them with my eel cloth. I could feel that they were solid bars of protein. In another country, they would doubtless make a decent meal.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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.