From the diary of a writer-publisher: 5

Front left, with blue door: 79 North Street, St Andrews

2 October
I arrived in St Andrews as the guest of the best owner of a private archive in Britain, who had unfailingly facilitated and nurtured my work on George’s biography over a period of twenty years, and without whom this ‘monumental’, ‘meticulous’, ‘definitive’ etc book could never have been written… She is the daughter of Lesbia Corbet (1905-1990), Kittie’s god-daughter, to whom Kittie left all her and George’s papers in 1950.

The following morning, in very fine and clear weather, I paid my respects at Lesbia’s grave and laid some chrysanthemums that I’d grown myself. As I left the family plot, a huge raven flapped slowly from left to right in the sky, mobbed by crows. I don’t know if ravens are very common in this part of Scotland, but I was startled for another reason: ‘Corbet’ means crow or raven, and I had just read the family motto on Lesbia’s gravestone: ‘Deus Pascit Corvos’ (God feeds the ravens).

That afternoon, I gave a talk to the Department of Russian entitled ‘George Calderon: Chekhov and the St Andrews Connection’. The connection is that after the British premiere of The Seagull that George had directed in his own translation at Glasgow in November 1909, he and Kittie went to stay in St Andrews, where Kittie still had a lot of friends and where George finished his play Cromwell: Mall o’ Monks (probably in the King James Library). Before reporting for the lecture, then, we could not resist looking up 79 North Street, where Kittie had lived as a teenager and where her father died on 13 June 1884. It now houses the School of Art History.

On 23 December 1909 George and Kittie left St Andrews to spend Christmas with Sir Walter Corbet, his wife Nina, their son Jim and four-year-old Lesbia herself at Acton Reynald in Shropshire.

10 October

Photograph of Samuel Hynes from The Daily Princetonian obituary

Samuel Hynes has died, aged 95, at his home in Princeton. Even after a decade working on /with the Edwardians, I still think his The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968) is the best book on them, from the very first paragraph:

It was a brief stretch of history, but a troubled and dramatic one — like the English Channel, a narrow place made turbulent by the thrust and tumble of two powerful opposing tides. That turbulent meeting of old and new makes the Edwardian period both interesting and important, for out of the turmoil contemporary England was made.

If you have enjoyed reading George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, you absolutely must read Hynes’s masterpiece. And if you haven’t read my biography of George, I would go so far as to say: read The Edwardian Turn of Mind first!

22 October

A drained Cambridge Chekhov Company after performing The Cherry Orchard for a week at the Cambridge Festival, 9 August 1975

By today, all twelve remaining members of my old theatre company should have received a cheque, written out in sepia copperplate with a dip-pen, for their share in the company’s residual liquid assets. The company was set up in 1974 as The Cambridge Young Chekhov Company because that year we staged only plays written by Chekhov in his twenties. The following year the big production was The Cherry Orchard, which played a week in Cambridge and a fortnight at the Edinburgh Fringe, and for those purposes the company was renamed The Cambridge Chekhov Company. We have helped finance many London Fringe productions since 1975, but we felt it was time to call it a day. Recently we could find no theatre companies who needed such small amounts of money (actually, we always gave a guarantee against loss rather than a straight subsidy).

The complexities of the shareout were compared by many of the Company to negotiating Brexit. However, we were greatly helped by the fact that one member had recently set up an extremely needed, effective and well run charity to help people with Parkinson’s, stroke, MS and depression by singing and music making. Her own training and experience as a professional actress have played a vital part. So we decided to give this Singing for Wellbeing Club nearly half of the assets and split the rest equally. Our former stage manager quipped: ‘Well at least our exit was orderly!’

It was a terrific ensemble and theatre company, fuelled of course by the unmatchable high octane of Youth, and I have never directed a full-length play since. I’m not sure why. I certainly recognise now that directing The Cherry Orchard at the age of twenty-seven was an act of hubris that it would be disastrous to repeat with, say, King Lear… 

12 November
Following Susan de Guardiola’s sensational Comment of 4 November about a previously unknown story of George’s in the Pall Mall Gazette of 11 November 1897 that she had found through its reprint in the New-York Tribune, I went to the University Library to search the newspaper from George’s last identifiable contribution there, on 11 May 1897, to the end of that year. (I had searched all the literary magazines of the time from 1890 to 1915, but no-one had known that George submitted stories to newspapers.)

It  involved standing for two hours as I very carefully turned the vast, crumbling pages of three massive tomes and scanned every page. I found no further stories by George in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1897, but the exercise contributed something to the vexed question of when in 1897 George left St Petersburg.

The story Susan found, ‘Gone with a Basilisk’, is set entirely in Britain, and specifically in London. It was obviously written for the English market and therefore, presumably, in Britain. Assuming it took a month to be accepted, as these things tend to, it could have been written in early October, say. As I explained on p. 92 of my biography, it’s not verifiable whether George did celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with Manya Ross and her brothers on 20 June 1897. Given that I thought his last publication in the Pall Mall Gazette as a Russian correspondent was on 11 May 1897, I was inclined to think he had left by 20 June. However, today I took another look at a feature entitled ‘St Petersburg and Environs’ that appeared in the newspaper on 25 May 1897 and I’m more inclined to think it is by George, suggesting that he was still lingering. On the other hand, a review of an English-language biography of Peter the Great that appeared on 10 August, but which I had previously missed as I thought George stopped being published by the PMG once he’d left Russia, looks even more as though it might be by him. So perhaps he left Russia between the end of June and the beginning of August 1897. Doubtless, some day independent documentary verification will pop up.

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.