From the diary of a writer-publisher: 11

1 August
It is now seven weeks since I submitted to The Spectator my 1500-word piece Save it for the (American) nation! How British archives fail us, so I fear they have missed an historic opportunity… It’s been delightful corresponding with Clare Asquith, Mary Wakefield, Leaf Arbuthnot and Thomasina Dalrymple, but in an earlier age I would have known instinctively that they are ‘out of my class’. Good night, sweet ladies, good night!

On the other hand, my posts on Calderonia about the state of British archives received a stack of personal feedback (emails and phone calls) from four emeritus professors, a former chairman of the National Council for Archives, a retired senior archival manager at the British Library, a top current curator, a leading consultant in archival acquisitions, the Archivist of a Cambridge college, and six other interested and qualified persons. I had hoped, of course, for a lively discussion through the Comment columns of Calderonia, but I fully understand their reluctance.

In any case, there might not have been much discussion to have, because all but one of these people agreed enthusiastically, even ‘absolutely’, with my analysis. I really was not expecting this. The consultant, for example, wrote that she used to have ‘a good relationship with the British Library, directing smaller and not expensive collections to them, but now I don’t even bother’.

I can’t pursue this subject, as I have other fish to fry, but it seems to me clearer than ever that the egregious failings of our archives will one day have to be tackled by someone. I thank my lucky stars it is unlikely I shall ever have to work in them again.

10 August
I wrote to Simon Heffer today asking him if, even two years on, there is any chance of him prominently reviewing my biography of George. The context to this is that although sales were up at the beginning of lockdown, they now seem to have gone dead and need something in the media, whether positive or negative, to kickstart them. (‘There is no such thing as bad publicity.’) Heffer offered to review it back in 2018, but the organ he would have been writing for declined to pay him, and I agreed it wasn’t on.

The thing is, Heffer really knows about the Edwardian period. The Spectator has just published one of the best written and most judicious book reviews I’ve ever read there — by Simon Heffer of John Campbell’s new book Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman Who Shaped Modern Britain. And there are clear parallels between the public ignorance about Richard Burdon Haldane and about George Leslie Calderon.

Richard Burdon Haldane, Viscount Haldane
by Philip Alexius de László
oil on millboard, 1928
NPG 2364
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Haldane’s achievements are staggering. He deeply reformed the British Army after the Boer War débâcle,  in particular establishing a British Expeditionary Force, which turned out in 1914 to be the finest army Britain has ever had. Heffer writes: ‘It was widely believed that by this act of planning he had saved the country.’ As well as being Lord Chancellor in both Liberal and Labour governments, he improved and extended secondary education, helped found LSE and Imperial College, and grew new universities throughout Britain.

Why, then, is Haldane in Heffer’s words ‘a great man who has had a rough deal from history’? Lord Northcliffe’s relentless campaign against Haldane, which led to his resignation with Churchill in 1915, has not helped: this slander stuck to him just as the accusation of causing disaster at Gallipoli has stuck to Churchill. But I think the basic reason for Haldane’s lack of recognition is the same as with George: they were too clever by half for those around them, they were suspiciously at home in foreign languages and cultures, and they are perceived to have been…mavericks!

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
by William Rothenstein
lithograph, 1903
NPG D39039
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Another unjustly neglected Edwardian, in Heffer’s view, is Haldane’s friend John Morley, ‘one of the most brilliant men ever to sit in a cabinet’. A Gladstonian who is often thought of as the last of the great nineteenth century Liberals, Morley resigned from the cabinet in 1914 over Britain’s entry into the war as an ally of Tsarist Russia. He was a political hero of Kittie’s, probably because of his support for Irish Home Rule, and Kittie in fact owned the original of the lithograph above in the National Portrait Gallery. It was presented to her by William Rothenstein on her thirty-seventh birthday in 1904.

The other biography of a relatively unknown Edwardian to have come out in the past two years is that of the Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927). It was published at the same time as mine, has been reviewed with roughly the same enthusiasm in the same organs as mine, and I would love to know how many copies it has sold… Perhaps, indeed, Sam&Sam could do a marketing/discount deal with its publisher, our old friend Lord Strathcarron, and Hurst Publishers who have brought out Haldane?

20 August
One of several reasons why I gave up ‘teaching’ Russian literature over twenty-five years ago is that I found some of the works I had to ‘teach’ young people specious, pernicious, and bad art. One was Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Twelve.

I would place it as a work of modernist poetry on a par with The Wasteland (1922); or at least its revolutionary technique, which resembles some of the method of Eliot’s poem. But in the last stanza of Blok’s poem a pearly (sic) Jesus Christ wearing a crown of white roses (sic), waves a red flag (sic) as he leads the homicidal twelve Red Guards through the Petrograd snowstorm ‘forward’ into the Future. I can just about accept that for Blok’s own purposes such a saccharine Christ might have to be put at the head of the marauding, murdering twelve Guards and keep the red flag flying there, but what I can’t forgive Blok is rhyming pyos — cur, mongrel, tyke — with the last two words of the poem, Isus Khristos. Some, of course, would say it’s blasphemous. For me it is just so gratuitously offensive and ‘in your face’ as to be both puerile and seriously barmy.

Well, thirty years ago I could never have imagined that I would one day write a 408-line poem about making an icon of Christ…and now I have done something in it that alarmingly reminds me of Blok.

In stanza 29 I finally tackle the painting of Christ’s face by the icon-maker — the longest, most painstaking and difficult part of the creation of this icon. Even this close-up doesn’t show the fineness of some of the lines around the eyes; they are a few brush hairs thick.

The icon painter deliberates for days, perhaps weeks, over these lines, agonising over their appropriateness and what expression his own spirituality drives him to convey. He wants, of course, to express Christ’s person in these eyes. How is the writer to express that in words? Is it empathy, compassion, humanity, suffering, humility…what? I felt that in the case of this (unfinished) icon it was a sense of complete, alert understanding. I found myself writing, then, that the eyes were ‘awake’. But that is feeble, as it could be read as merely ‘not asleep’. So I changed it to the more archaic adjective, ‘wake’ — and didn’t mind the dissonantal rhyme ‘yoke/wake’, in fact I relish that kind of rhyme when it’s appropriate. But then, automatically, I changed it to… ‘woke’. WOKE?! I was shocked myself, tried every way to get round it, but each time concluded it was right.

29

Phaseless, but nourish it needs with yolk
and water… He fans out his finest sables.
So thinly, so thinly he works
up knuckle and nail with light into taper-
ing fingers that bless…builds entabla-
ture of sepias on sternum and neck.
The basket of hair is burnt browns layered…
Nose he tholes to nobility… Opaque-
st the line between lips with little yoke
of sorrow… And last the eyes for days
he tends with fittest fila, till woke.
He stands, breathes; has written the face.

(The making of an icon is a single continuous process, but if the painted surface is left for a day or two at any point, the egg tempera needs refreshing with yolk solution. This stanza contains more split rhymes than any other in the whole poem, for a reason.)

28 August
Hurray! Our favourite setting for important Sam&Sam meetings has reopened:

Club membership and business cards

Their menu today was slightly reduced (to the horror of the clientele, there were none of their famous herrings!), but our three-and-a-quarter-hour meal was a great ‘unlockdown’ occasion. Key decisions made were: to concentrate on reorganising the Sam&Sam website in time for an already booked advertisement in the Russian issue of the TLS on 20 November, but NOT to close Calderonia and start blogging on the Sam&Sam website.

Sam2 and Sam1 at Polonia, 28 August 2020

In the next post, Andrew Tatham will write about his superb forthcoming sequel to A Group Photograph: Before, Now & In-Between. On 15 September Laurence Brockliss will discuss the deep historical context to a question I am often asked: ‘Why did George and Kittie have no children?’

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.